Evan Mallory
speaker
161 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Evan Mallory’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Seven days, I had promised Jules, ten miles a day and back with a clearer head, but some journeys once lit burn far longer than planned, and some trails once followed never truly let you leave their smoke behind. I caught the first glint of sunrise off the Wolf Creek trailhead sign and felt my nerves twitch. Someone had hammered a splintered board across the kiosk. Keep quiet after dark.
Then half ripped it away, as if they changed their mind mid-warning. I pried it loose and slipped it into my pack, telling Jenna I wanted it as a souvenir. Truth was, I hated leaving omens behind me. The air smelled of wet stones and cold pine sap. Fog lay so thick across the switchbacks that each exhale bounced back against my cheeks.
Jenna's trekking poles clicked a steady rhythm beside me, but everything else—wind, birds, distant road noise—had been muffled to nothing. We climbed in silence until the damp reached through my shirt and tightened across my shoulders. Just past the first saddle, the fog thinned enough to show the trail's dirt spine, and that was when I noticed the boot prints.
One set, deep and alone in the mud, size 13 at least. They stretched maybe 50 yards, veered to the left, then vanished where the path cut across bare rock. I searched for the next print in the leaf litter beyond, but the earth there looked untouched. No crushed twigs, no skid marks, nothing. My stomach knotted.
Whoever made those tracks walked off trail into brush so dense even deer left obvious tunnels. Yet he, or it, left no trace. I told myself a hunter in lightweight boots might manage that, but I kept glancing over my shoulder for the next half mile. By early afternoon the sun punched holes through the whiteout, and we stopped by an unnamed seep the guidebook promised was year-round.
Water trickled out of moss-cloaked limestone, clear as glass. But when Jenna knelt to fill the filter bag, she froze. Alex, look! A latticework of sharpened twigs lay wedged beneath the surface, each stick shaved to twin points, crisscrossed like an amateur catcher's trap. They stank of sweetness gone rotten, fermented fruit and wet mulch. I lifted one with my knife tip.
The bark sloughed off slick as eel skin, exposing pale wood riddled with pinholes the size of sewing needles. I dropped it and tasted copper in my mouth. We camped a little uphill where the ground leveled off, a narrow bench just wide enough for the two-person tent. I forced a laugh while tying the last guy line. Bear cans 30 yards that way, exits over here, no problem.
Jenna nodded and squeezed my hand, but I felt the pulse in her fingers racing faster than mine. Night sealed the forest by nine. Fog drifted back in thicker than before, and moonlight flickered like a dying bulb behind the clouds. I woke with a start to a sound that did not belong. Crunch. Pause. Crunch. Not leaves rustling. Footfalls. Deliberate and measured. Circling.
My watch read 2.03 in the morning. Jenna's eyes shone in the dim as I unzipped the tent halfway and slid the headlamp strap around my wrist. The beam pierced maybe twenty feet before the vapor swallowed it, but in that cone of light three shapes crouched among the laurels, scarecrow thin, limbs wrapped in what looked like burlap ribbon clotted with moss.
Their heads turned flatly, no bobbing like people adjusting balance, just a single fluid pivot toward me. Eye sockets reflected nothing, matte and dull, as if someone had sculpted faces from river stones. I stepped forward, instincts screamed to drive them off. Hey! My voice cracked and the figures flinched.
One uncoiled to its full height, at least seven feet, and raised two dead branches in each hand. Click, click. The sticks met, perfectly mimicking Jenna's laugh from dinner, brittle and bright in the stillness. My skin crawled so hard it almost tore. "'Leave!' I shouted, taking another step, but the headlamp trembled in my fist and the beam jittered across tree trunks.
In that strobe the figures scattered, no stumbling, no snapping brush, only a blur of gray limbs melting upslope, then absolute silence. Even the creak we'd heard all evening had gone mute." I backed inside, zipped the flap, and pressed my shoulder against Jenna's. We sat like that until dawn turned the fog a dingy silver. Outside, the dew-heavy ground around the tent was pocked with prints.
Bare, narrow, each foot six toes wide, and ending in tiny claw points. They formed a perfect circle. Toes aimed inward, as though the three had stood equidistant all night simply watching the nylon walls breathe. Jenna whispered, "'We're leaving now.' I nodded, unable to answer. As I shouldered my pack, the souvenir board shifted against my spine."
I almost hurled it into the woods, but I couldn't bring myself to let it go. We hiked out without breakfast. The forest gave nothing but the hollow echo of our own footsteps, and every so often I swore I heard sticks tapping together, click-click, deep in the fog behind us. The fog never quite lifted, only stretched itself thinner as we hustled south.
By what I guessed was late morning, my watch kept skipping minutes. We had chewed through nearly 20 miles of switchbacks. The pack straps sawed at my collarbones, but I refused to slow. Every birdsong perched above us in the canopy, as if the warblers were escorting our flight but wouldn't dare land on the trail itself.
Whenever I stopped to sip water, the woods went pin drop still, then resumed the moment I moved again, like a show restarting after the critic leaves the room. We gained the spine below Chestnut Knob just before noon. Gray clouds stacked like stone blocks overhead, and the forest floor bled a sour metallic scent. Wet pennies baked in sun that never reached the ground.
Along a mossy cut bank, we found pine trunks, skinned of bark. The strips had been trimmed into human shapes and nailed head high, all of them facing the cliff wall, as if some deranged sculptor wanted the effigies to watch the rock instead of the trail. Rust streaked under every nail, but when I touched the streaks, my fingers came away clean.
The red was embedded in the wood grain itself, dark as dried liver. Jenna's breath started a quick cadence between her teeth. I tucked an arm around her pack and guided her forward, promising that two more ridges would drop us onto the service road. I no longer believed my own words. By deep afternoon we found a sliver of level ground pressed tight against a shale cliff.
No approach possible from behind, and only a five-foot mouth for entry. We pitched the tent there, doors out, rainfly cinched low. I loaded both pistols and placed them within an easy reach. Jenna threaded our last length of paracord across the only entrance, hitching it to her titanium stakes and dangling my titanium mug so it would clang if anything brushed the line. Sunset never brightened.
The clouds merely thickened until day and night became the same dark slate. some time passed midnight i know because my phone pinged once then died we both jerked awake to the faintest tink of metal my mug shivering against itself i rolled onto one elbow pistol in hand listening Something crouched just outside the fly, breathing slow as a diver conserving air.
Showing 121–140 of 161 · page 7 of 9
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