Crack of the Crow

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I am so grateful for all the support that you've given us over the years. So, let's continue to return the favor. First up, a troubled young woman discovers that the violence she's felt her entire life is more complicated than having some issues with impulse control. For me to see us orchid, creepy presence, crack of the crow.

Michaela was 13 years old when she killed that crow. She'd been waiting so patiently for the bus, watching the Ebony Bird's dance and traffic, all looking for the slightest meal. Michaela regarded them as stupid creatures.

“Why risk your life for something so readily available?”

It was not a wall with a Michaela could understand. She'd been eating a peanut butter and jelly sand which with her eyes locked with one of the crows. She put a middle finger in the air. Her sandy blonde hair covering half her face and makes her friendship bracelet making itself known. Its golden green yarn intertwined horrendously since Michaela was a terrible craftsman.

She also had no friends. So it's existence was a rose. It speculated that the crow understood the vulgar message being displayed towards it. Or perhaps it was just a starving bird. Either way, the obsidian thing attacked Michaela.

It pecked at her hand with its own violent attempt to acquire food. Michaela screamed and battered at the thing in desperation. Unfortunately from Michaela, gold street was vacant except for her and the school boss this early. She would have no assistance for six more minutes. She screeched and cried, but the crow did not relent.

It pierced her youthful skin like a pin through a cushion. The left bloody lacerations all up and down her arm. As a crow continued its assault, something strange occurred. A very slight buzzing began to grow in her mind. A low static, the cloud at her reality is she felt the sharp misery of the crow's beak.

It would still knock you up on its attempted theft of her sandwich. Enough! Michaela lashed out one more time to the crow and to her own surprise, she gripped the foot of the bird. With a motion akin to the crack of a whip, the middle schoolers smashed the crow's head into the sidewalk. The bird was swiftly altered from a beautiful black, to a contorted red.

Nearly a splattered mouse of feather and gore. It shocked Michaela how much force she had wrecked upon the much smaller beast.

It's beak completely obliterated and body flattened as if it had been hit by a cement truck.

“After she annihilated the poor thing, the buzzing in her head changed.”

The vial chaotic sound was no high, pleasant drone. An angelic hum that caused peace since let you for you throughout her mind. Soon enough, all her fear and concern shifted to happiness. The acted relieved her of her anger and desire to antagonize. And she still had her PB and Jay.

A lone crow in the tree above her locked eyes with her intently. Michaela blew it a kiss. The crow's gaze then shifted past Michaela. Not far past. Just behind her is if there was something standing above Michaela.

Two years later, Michaela would attend high school. She would have gone through all four years of it without thinking much about the incident.

“No one then had even ever known it occurred.”

Not even the bus driver that day cared enough to barely turn his head to the right and see the ominous bird splattered across the pavement. He would have figured it had been run over anyway. That strange buzzing in her head did follow her however. If she got older, it got louder.

It was demanding and it's volume sometimes.

At first it was difficult for Michaela to comprehend, but as time passed, it became clear to her.

The noise seemed to respond well to destruction. So, Michaela destroyed. Her antics would not go unnoticed this time around. Michaela would be caught by several peers in various suspicious acts. Friends she had made abandoned her once they caught her throwing rocks at random ducks in the pond.

Her boyfriend would leave after she fired a flare gun into his car. To her, it was but a way to quiet the storm in her mind. But to all around her, she was sick. The word "cycle path" often followed her name. Authorities would have several conversations with Michaela in the short four years that she did these things.

She would have a record of violent misconduct at age 16. This meant the Michaela had to get secretive about her atrocities. She could not let anyone see the things that she saw as been all. She even tried to stop doing anything of the sort for a long while. To be normal, and try to live the life of a normal teenager.

This seemed to have horrible repercussions. The static did not only get louder as the years went on, but with her willful choice to evade the problem. Whenever she tried to ignore the sound, it also increased in volume. Except it was different from the previous uptick in the sound. This was quicker and shorter.

Something was shooting more static into her woeful mind. Michaela was at a loss. She had to destroy, to kill for the sound to dissipate.

“Because the only way she was allowed a life of normalcy,”

if you could call her life normal, to begin with. Her parents were quite wealthy. Their wealth was something they considered much more important than their only god. To keep up appearances and maintain their statuses within the circles they've cultivated. Michaela was disallowed from being a part of this.

Really, Michaela didn't mind. At some point, her parents reached an agreement of apathy. They did not look at the things she did, so long as she did the same for them. It was cordial and wildly unhealthy. Michaela did all she could to evade her problems through means of chaos.

And none were the wiser. She did not have parents or any friends. But she got used to it. That is, at least, what she told herself. It was a life that could be lived.

Michaela was 17 years old when she killed that beer. She'd taken up smoking since all the folks in those local metal shows did it.

Aggressive music would occasionally defen the static, but never for great lengths at a time.

She lay a little limmer to her into someone who would silence itself for a decent amount of time.

“It was a controlled chaos she had come to adore.”

She drove from others' car home from one of these shows. Well, one of her cars. There were a few of them Michaela wasn't allowed to touch after the sedans she torched. She had plenty of padding for the noise, so Michaela only planned on returning to a room to rest her very sore arms and legs. She held a cigarette out the window as she smoked.

She'd been scolded by her mother more times than she could count about it.

But it was always for the safety of the car.

Her mom didn't care what Michaela did to herself. The wind was stronger than anticipated that night, and her chariot-American spirit flew from her hands and into the nature surrounding her. God dammit!

“Michaela blared while looking behind at the lost twig of nicotine.”

Her eyes left the road for just long enough to miss the dull popping out on to the road directly in her path. Being a smaller deer, it pretty easily rolled over the top of her car. Michaela still found herself buried in an airbag that had emerged once the windshield shattered. Her head had been mostly protected since it launched before the glass had a chance to pop the airbag.

The buzzing in her head returned with a vengeance.

A mixture of a dreadful tune and a throbbing headache was driving Michaela to those violent tendencies once more. Her splintered windshield covered her and deadly glitter, broken glass falling from her hair as she exited the vehicle. Being on a back road, Michaela was lucky to have so many hefty rocks laying around. She hoisted one of them up with a trembling hand. One would expect her to have been shaken by the car crash.

The truth was that not much shook Michaela anymore. All that followed these types of incidents was a seething, blinding rage. These were not the trembles of a scared little girl, but of someone intending to kill.

“How dare this animal bring back that horrid noise after such a wonderful evening?”

Michaela didn't have many friends, and she could count the good days she remembered on one hand. She did not take this affront lightly. The creature was broken, begging for relief from the agony that experienced. Brain loudly was clearly without function of its legs. Michaela obliged its pleas and brought the rock down hard on its skull.

Over and over again, the echo of a crushed skull would be heard by all the trees and whatever made its home in them. She made no noise herself beyond that, focusing solely on the devastation she created. Michaela didn't even hear the sounds of death. Peace rushed through her mind once more.

The bliss that always followed close behind her malicious actions.

She had no answers. She only knew that this was how she found her solace. Michaela was now old enough to consider her position as a human being. From all she'd experienced so far, she was known to be somewhat of a freak. Many peers had told her that to her face.

As far as she knew, kids her age were going to parties or prepping for college. Yet, here she was, drenched in the gore of a deer after having been its executioner. People told her that being mean to animals led to being a serial killer. They just didn't understand. If they'd had that awful static in their heads, they would understand.

A flapping of wings broke her from the thought. She looked up to see a crow on a nearby branch. It looked familiar to her. It peered at her through the splatter guts of the doe that she was not wearing as a coat. It seemed to be either beckoning her or challenging her with its proximity.

Little to Michaela know that crows are capable of remembering faces for a great while. Who was indeed the same crawl. The one she blew a mocking kiss towards. Michaela had no way of knowing this, of course. She was blind to the familial inner workings of any animal kingdom.

We made moments like this much easier.

She didn't have to consider those family or their dreams or their ideas.

“Do you or did not even think of these things?”

Did they? Besides, the poor thing had been hit by her car. It was suffering. So, Michaela spun it in her head as a mercy. And if you ignored painful brain and terrified eyes,

then you may make the same mental leaps. Wouldn't you? When it came to the crow she killed when she was 13 or however. It was just a hungry beast.

Michaela could never spin its slaughter as a mercy.

The crow caught her, Michaela.

“More of a war cry than any normal noise an animal was capable of.”

A declaration of vengeance shouted forth from the throat of a bird scorn. It frightened Michaela. She was so used to being the apex that any form of rebellion from her prey was a mortifying surprise. All tyrants fear their subjects recognizing their combined power. This crow even hopped to a lower branch, closing the distance between it and the poor drenched Michaela.

The teenage girl had no clue how to react. Never before had she seen such defiance in the eyes of a creature she considered to be of a lower intelligence. It looked determined to defy her, perhaps even combat her. Michaela backed away from the creature. The buzzing was beginning to take place once more. In the time it felt different, it was targeted, manipulated.

She could make all words in the static.

“Kill, crow. It was no request. The static demanded that Michaela obliterate the being that stood steadfast in her wake.”

She couldn't make sense of this. That's when she realized it. That the crow was not looking at her. It hadn't been back then either. It was looking at something behind Michaela. Suddenly she wasn't afraid of the crow.

She was terrified of the knowledge she just unraveled. It should have been driven to these actions by someone else.

It had her decisions never been her own.

An existential supernova burst in Michaela's head. The static was never a mental illness or some oddity she was born with. It was a living thing. An entity stalking her every move to ensure her downfall. Michaela couldn't bring herself to look behind her.

Even as the presence of the creature dropped its facade, she didn't want to know what it looked like. A physical vision of the thing that demanded destruction from her would make it too real. Through her it had tormented and brutalized. All while having her believe it was her purpose towards peace.

The sound was all she'd ever reached for. It had driven her to madness with the static and rewarded her with the peace of times. A narrow, grey hand landed in her periphery as it settled upon her shoulder. Nails tinted with yellow and drenched in black. The length of knives tappedlessly down her arm.

All of the sudden, Michaela had visions of alternate futures. Visions and what she saw more time with her boyfriend. She had made friends. Real friends who shared her interests and desires. A family that paid attention and offered her emotional and loving support. These visions showed her what could have been.

Could even be. She was never like this.

Now, knowing that she ben manipulated into these actions that it was all for nothing. None of this had to happen. She had done monstrous things to keep this being stated. And for the first time in ages, a Kayla felt like a child. She was but a young girl having been turned into an avatar of death from a single reaction.

She, as a person, was wrong to exist.

“The stench and sight of the battered, eviscerated, don't now hit her in a wave of violence.”

She let spill the contents of her lunch. Her tears and bile, conjoining with a noxious amalgamation. She cursed herself for having devoted her formative life to acts of chaos. She wanted to reverse her fate. The Crow Cod once more.

This time much softer. A pitiful noise. She looked to her feathered assailant who looked greatly more altruistic than aggressive now. Its black hole eyes looked warmer now and fixated on her. A solemn understanding in its gaze.

Don't avoid a flight. Michaela saw hope in those eyes.

“She breathed heavy, sobbed heavy, and begged.”

Help me. But Michaela did not fully understand the whole of what was happening. The buzzing grew roaring impossibly loud for being inside her head. This entity did not appreciate the intervention of the Crow. It knew what it attempted in its obnoxious squawking.

What had evaded Michaela was that the Crow meant not to a cosster. But the thing that he eased her mind. The Crow knew it had seen at that bed. The gray fanged monstrosity that attached itself to it dejected child. It disproportional limbs that felt more akin to ors than appendages.

The ratty matted hair that fell from its head and patches.

“Giving the appearance of disdointed seaweed.”

Things like that of a seabirdooth in eyes like the buttons of a jacket.

The Crow never hated Michaela.

As she was much of victim as its partner had been that faithful that. It's just that it knows a puppeteer can do nothing. If its puppet is done. The ringing in Michaela's head had reached a breaking point. There were no thoughts left in the poor girl's hand.

All she could hear was the call of this abomination. Michaela was 21 years old when she was killed by those Crow's. Her mind had been dominated. Eight years in the making she became an infamous criminal.

Michaela never returned home from the excursion in the woods.

She was declared missing three days post the attack on the doll. And three days post the attack on the doll. Other people started going missing. Families stripped from their homes. Their shredded carcasses found in pieces.

The nameless grey thing up gets level of violence. Using Michaela as its vessel for calamity. If forfeited rewarding her with a blessing song. Now that the veil was down, it needn't convince her of the worse. The static had done its job.

Michaela was driven to madness from the sound. It was no great task to decimate other human beings. They were guardless when they saw the disheveled young woman. It was so easy for Michaela and Thak. By the time she was 21, she had a body count around 20. Her eyes had sunk in into her skull. Her sandy hair faded to an earthy yellow.

She looked like her own phantom wandering from place to place and hopes to find her next victims. The tragedy of it all was that these are gorgeous killings of a common instinct. She killed more people than ounces of water she drank. Michaela was a walking slaughterhouse. A vessel for a demon to inflict its will on the unsuspecting.

All the while the creature gone to great lengths to avoid the attention of the crow that had meant to take its tool from it. Michaela, in her mind, prayed that the crow would return again. Without the knowledge of why it hadn't killed her that faithful day when she was a teenager. All she could do with her power was the hope of wood.

Nearly driving herself to schizophrenia in order to try and thwart the monstrosity that had blackened her nails and bloodied her soul.

“It was a little hope in that matter as she continued to pray upon the unaware by the will of the great thing and some more and more died by her hand.”

She hoped that the cops would find them and gun her down. She hoped a lot of things would change. The day would come where Michaela found herself within a ranch style home on the outskirts of the city. She'd be thinking about how her mother and father barely even noticed her vanishing and wondered if her deduction due to their relationship was part of why the thing had chosen her.

These were answers she would never receive, of course.

But the pondering helped her cover up the fact that she had gaked and bound a family of three in their living room. The three were crying loudly, the child being the loudest, but she barely heard it. The father of this family had gone to exceptional lengths to defend his child, though he was simply no match for Michaela. She'd wanted him to succeed, but the might of the entity was far too great for a simple day-to-day man to handle. As she raised the axe she'd plundered from their shed, repairing the strike to child first,

a noise came from the sliding glass door. It sounded like the tapping of a finger. Her eyes wandered to the closed door and widened when she saw what they'd be on it. A crow was tapping its beak against the door. The noise even drew the attention of three hostages who looked at it in confusion through their tears stained eyes.

Michaela was paused by the intrusion.

For a second, there was recognition in her eyes.

This must be the same crow that had been following her.

“Once she'd seen when she was 17, but how is that possible?”

Was it even possible? It grows live that long, but then what other crow could it be to appear in a moment like this? Her grip on the axe handle loosens slightly, her focus now pulled from the basket hand. The entity noticed and took swift action. A horrible buzz shot back in the Michaela's mind.

The brainwashing forcing its way through the distraction. The tapping of the crow was not enough to drown out the sound of the monster emanated. Michaela was recalibrated to what she'd been doing. Hearing only the static, she turned to swim the axe on the child's head once more. Quick.

Another sound.

This time powerful enough to pierce him to the wall of noise in her head,

caused her to snap her gaze back to the sliding glass door. The crow was still tapping away relentlessly, and it not shifted whatsoever.

“Michaela did not understand how did it make such a ferocious cell before?”

That's when a crow slammed itself hard into the door. Crack. She watched, horrified as the crow's body fell limp against the door and beside another, beside the first crow that aborted its own death upon itself. The first crow that threw itself into the door full speed.

Still, the original one was tapping rhythmically. Not two seconds later, there was another crashed into the door, snapping its neck and offering the loud crack the other two had. Michaela was astonished and stunned at what she was witnessing despite the haze of the monstrosity. She could hear the buzzing growing heavy and angry as the entity grew frustrated with her lack of obedience.

More crow's continued to calm as their one-kin tap its repetitive song. Now they were coming in groups of two or more. Before she could start counting them, dozens had arrived and given themselves willingly to the end with this as their final task. Murders upon murders of the things slammed into the glass, which was finally starting to give way.

The glass began to splinter much to the amazement of the manipulated Michaela. Once it splintered, the original crow simply stopped tapping. The waves of crow's died down, and all she could hear was the entity at its most irate. So irate, in fact, that it made itself visible for the first time in four years. A mangled, pigmelous creature bellowed loudly at the rows and rows of dead crow's and triumph.

It owned this girl, and it fed off her slaughter.

They could do nothing about it.

“Except, the original crow began to squawk back and repost a mocking sound, not dissimilar to laughter at the creatures from medieval hubris.”

Then, it tapped again. Not in rhythm and not with grace. Now it tapped with anger and fervor. Anger at the best summation its ancestor had suffered at the hand of the monster by way of Michaela so long ago. Anger at the creature encroaching into its world and thinking itself so much higher than those who live upon it.

It happened with ceaceless and ferocious, a rapid sound warp of fitting a woodpecker, yet it borrowed the evolutionary trait to silence this same once and for all. The sky blotted black in the backyard of this ranch style home is a tidal wave of crows appeared, and innumerable and impossible amount of its brethren swallowing the sun. The family began to scream and tear at the sight. The entity standing with its hand upon Michaela had no words. She, however, watched in fascination and intrepidation's welcome, is appeared.

“The static was now relegated to background noise as it was overwhelmed by the sound of a thousand crows bellowing their hatred for the monster.”

Michaela found her voice again. The same way she had four years ago and called upon them with all her might. Help me! She cried, tears now flowing from her face in a waterfall of anguish. This time, they heated her call.

This monster would know the crack of the crawl. The glass shredded like paper is engulfed the house. Windows and wooden doors fracturing at their descent. The crows swarmed the house like locusts, and began their calamitous vengeance upon the creature.

The cried and screeched, but ultimately was pecked and torn to little more than rags of its own skin.

The gray flesh being devoured by the Corvids. The family was spared this awful death. Michaela was not. They plucked her eyes from her head and swallowed them like grapes. They drilled holes into her flash and tell her she looked like a trip before the nightmare.

The whole way, as she was gouged and tortured, she smiled. She smiled, knowing full well that the thing had lost. Michaela was free. Shnick snuck fast through the chair, and for a bit, for a bit, for 20 euros. It's time to play with us from 27 to 27 to 29.

It's time to go to the Dieneme chair, a real house. It's time to play, and for a bit, for 20 euros. As you can see, Dieneme can be found at 100 euros in advance. Snaps, dear.

“Do you know these moments from True Crime Podcasts?”

An Augenblick, an Enchider, and nothing more to do with it.

With the German fluke-sicherung, we said that for this moment we always have a happy end.

If you like this video, click on the right button and click on the left button. Then we will look forward to it. And next, during a brutal winter storm, a stranded Montana lawyer discovers that the wilderness surrounding him is home to something enormous, intelligent, and very interested in him.

From right or Natalie, Lichery Donnie, a narrative by own McEwn, creepy presence, the closing argument. The North Fork Road had shifted from a scenic corridor where the winding dirt road followed the flowing river, into a death trap in the blink of an eye. This wasn't uncommon for March 2, 1996, one of the worst winters on record. The weather was chaotic and beautiful all at the same time.

Here, the wilderness didn't just sit and wait. It swallowed any signs of civilization, where cell service was a future myth, and human contact was miles and miles away. It was just the way the people liked it. A 10-17 pm, John eased off the accelerator,

It was rear-wheel drive, basically a large city car that belonged nowhere in the mountains,

especially on a winter road.

“Every time the tires hit a patch of black ice,”

the steering went light, the car drifting toward the river's edge, daring to plunge into total darkness down the icy embankment. Help would beep hours away. But John's confidence was impenetrable. He drove this road more times than he could count.

A little snowfall wasn't going to scare a man like him. One hand on the wheel, the other holding a cigarette, a plume of smoke obstructing his much-needed vision at the moment. He left the smell of nicotine swell in his nose before crushing the cigarette out and tossing it away.

But as the drive ticked along, the snowfall became much more than a soft spring storm. It had turned into a white-out of a large flakes impossible to see through. If one thing stood, it was that the north fork had no room for forgiveness for those less prepared.

And John finally conceded that he needed to find a pullout,

and he needed it before the car and the road decided his destination for him. He scans the tree line,

“his halogen headlights struggling to cut through the blinding snow,”

gleaming at him through the beam in horrific reflection. A plow might make it up this far by morning, but out here morning felt like a lifetime. He was alone, stuck in the middle of the woods, and he had seen no cars for the last hour.

Inching along where the gravel ended and the ditch began, blurred into a single white backdrop, the trees seemingly vanished behind a white dust. John finally eased into a small opening between the road and the trees. He was dressed for a courtroom,

not a snow rescue. His leather tassel loafers were pathetic defense against the Montana snow, but the pullout was safer than the road, safer than driving with no visibility. John took a moment to look at his surroundings,

nothing to see, and felt acceptance in his decision to stop. He placed the vehicle in park and pushed his seat back, ready to wait out the storm,

“the heaters drive breath still rattling through the vents.”

He crossed his arms, closing his eyes to the peaceful, muffle tick of heavy flakes striking the roof and windshield. The snow acted as a silencer, muffling a world that was usually too loud,

and far too demanding of him. Here, with no service and no one calling his name, he felt a rare sense of peace. A smile crept upon his face, as he slowed his breathing and accepted this as the world saying,

John, take a break, you deserve it. Before he could get too comfortable, a blinding light pierced his eyelids, lighting up the entire cabin of the Lincoln. John felt the flicker of resentment.

The plow was here to drag him back to civilization, back to the golf course,

and the people who never stopped wanting something.

He didn't need to leave, though. He had all the right to stay exactly where he was. But when he opened his eyes, the road was still buried under a foot of snow that was rapidly increasing towards two feet.

The headlights weren't there in either direction, and the light had all but vanished, leaving behind a stillness so dense, John felt a shiver run down his spine. What the hell?

John looked around, back behind him in front, nothing. His instincts became primal and sudden, screaming at him to go dark. He reached out and snapped the light switch to off.

The sudden change in atmosphere took him by surprise. John eased the seat back until it clicked at its limit, just passed a 45 degree angle. His eye line dropping until it was nearly level with the window sill. He stilled his breath,

letting a cold threat of unease weave through his chest. He was a man of instinct, intelligent, calculated, and not easily disturbed. His gut was what made him a feared, but highly respected presence in the courtroom.

And right now, his gut was shouting that something was wrong. Thump. Thump. The sound was heavy enough to drown out the snow, an intentional weight that caused the frame of the Lincoln to creak and sway with each step,

like the ground was a viscous thing instead of a solid frozen piece of earth. John stared into the pitch black glass, his pupils blown wide. Suddenly the driver sighed window blurred. A hot wet bloom of condensation spread across the glass.

Breath hitting the cool air. The opaque grey patch grew, then faded,

Something was inches away. Watching him. He didn't move.

“He didn't even dare to reach for the locks,”

terrified that the mechanical click would be an invitation for whatever was outside to try to make its way inside. But footsteps circled a car with a heavy, bone-deep thought he couldn't even understand. The mass of them shuddering through the chassis

as if the thing outside were analyzing the vehicle's structural limits or meticulously identifying a weak point in the glass. Then with a sudden vacuum-like silence that was more jarring than the noise, the presence simply evaporated into the nighttime.

John nearly soiled himself. He waited. The harsh silence inside the cabin stretching for several agonizing minutes, solid enough to feel like an elephant was sitting on its chest

before he finally dared to move.

He was a man born for high-stakes litigation, a veteran of courtroom battles where nerves were a liability. Yet this wasn't a tactical threat

“he could not argue against or outmaneuver.”

This was something primal. Like a harsh injustice that bypasses intellect and spoke directly to his soul. He had met his match. He reached into the glove box

his fingers fumbling for a flashlight. Waiting with his hand on the latch, he finally stepped out into the biting air. Brave or stupid, he did not know. And shivered as he flooded the ground with a pathetic yellow beam.

There, carved deep into the dirt beneath the fresh snow where several pairs of tracks. They were hooves, large and impossible circling the Lincoln and a perfect predatory ring. By pedal, more than one.

That was the worst case scenario for John and he knew it. John bent down a traced one track with his hand. The ground around the tracks that somehow charred the earth. Still feeling the heat in the dirt

“he shook his head and disagreed with the findings.”

Nope, absolutely not. He hushed himself after the outburst. Scrambleing back into the Lincoln, the heavy door slamming with a foot that felt dangerously loud in the dead air. He had spent his career dismantling monsters in the courtroom,

men with sinister motives and hidden intense, but he could read those monsters. He understood their greed, their rage, and their humanity, and he knew how to beat them at their own game. Whatever had just circled his car

was not something in his understanding.

For the first time in his life,

the intelligence was not going to help him out of this situation. He felt the heater's breath on his face. It was dry and stagnant and increasingly suffocating. Logic was gone. If those things came back to finish whatever job they had started,

he was sitting duck in a tin can. He jammed the shifter into gear and gently hit the gas. The back tires wind spinning ineffectively against the ice. He tried to reverse desperate for momentum, but the Lincoln only settled deeper into the frozen muck off the gravel road.

Shit, shit, shit, shit! John hammered the steering wheel with his palms, then let his forehead rest against the plastic. Breathe, he told himself. Maybe you're overreacting.

Maybe they're gone. The silence outside was deep, as the snowfall began to settle like the world had reset. He tried to build a case for his own safety. They had come, they had studied him, and they had moved on.

As simple as that. They were not interested. The best outcome he could have hoped for, finally.

He would just wait for the sun, find a toe, and never speak of this.

No one wanted a lawyer who believed in monsters. Reputation in the court room was a fragile thing, and once broken, he couldn't simply glue it back together. But what John didn't know was that his luck had been spent. The moment he'd pointed the Lincoln's nose back towards town,

he'd been marked. On this stretch of road where the silence was honest, and the isolation greater than most ever experience, he wasn't a traveler anymore. He was prey.

John tried to settle back into the seat, his eyes starting to the fuel gauge. A standard 18 gallon tank, and a third of it was already gone. With the heater fighting the 17 degree mountain air, he was gambling with his life,

something he did not like to do. If the engine sputtered out before dawn, the cold would finish what the wilderness started.

or even a spare jacket, water, or blanket.

“If he survived this, he was going to change.”

He clicked the headlights off, plunging the cabin back into that intense, suffocating blackness. They knew where he was. Maybe light was his savior instead, but John kept the darkness around like an old friend.

He tried to force his mind toward sleep, to let the hours dissolve, and for a moment, he actually felt himself slipping. The oversized seat was soft, and the rattling heater sang a lullaby

that helped calm his nerves. What he really needed was a shot of whiskey. The warmth would cause his eyes to heavy, his mind to relax. Then the world tilted.

The back end of the Lincoln surged upward, lifted two feet off the frozen ground by a force that made the frame cry.

For a second, John was waitless,

suspended in the night, his arms stretched out in full panic. Then came the crash. The car slammed back into the muck,

“the suspension bottoming out with a bone shaking jar”

that the snow did nothing to soften. John let out an uneven scream, a sound so thin and unlike him, it didn't even feel like his own voice. His hands flew to the locks,

the mechanical clock clock echoing in the cabin, though he knew it was a worthless gesture. If they wanted in, they were coming in. The locks were nothing more than a placebo for a dying man grasping,

pleading to be spared. A cold dread filled his chest. This was likely the final page of his story. He had the brains to dismantle a federal case, outman over the sharpest legal minds in the country,

but he had no closing argument for this. Logic was a useless tool against a predator that didn't play by human rules. John was smart enough to realize that. Aliens?

The thought was no longer a conspiracy. It was a coherent, hard fact.

“To believe the vastness of the universe was empty,”

was an ignorance John had never possessed.

But he never dreamed in a million years

that he would be the target of their experiments. He scrambled into the backseat, wedging his frame into the cramped footwell, trying to disappear into the floorboards. John began to wonder if maybe this was payback

for some of the cases he knew he should never have taken. Being at defense attorney meant standing beside people he knew Dan well were guilty, and it fractured his morals in ways that kept him up at night. John needed to breathe.

Even though he believed in karma, it wasn't really out to get him. Then came the screech. It was a sound that set his teeth on edge, made them physically hurt. It was the shriek of metal on metal,

like a massive meat hook being dragged across the roof with the grounding force. They were toying with him. They wanted him, they could have peeled the doors back like foil or carried the entire Lincoln into the sky.

This wasn't an abduction for other worldly experiments. It acted more like a study in fear. How to break even the smartest of men and drive them crazy. For a brief moment, John felt honored. Then he came back down to reality.

As the cabs interior is stilled, the silence grew so heavy that the sound of the snowflakes fat against the windshield became audible again. A soft ticking against the glass. John didn't like that sound anymore.

He pulled himself upward, scrambling into the cramped back seat while his head flung back against the headrest in a momentary burst of relief. His breathing was loud in the small space. Fumbling with the switch,

he clicked the heavy flashlight back on, aiming the beam out the rear window in a dire bid to understand what had just lifted a 4,000-pound vehicle without so much as a grunt. The light cut through the falling snow,

illuminating a stand of massive large pole pines 50 feet away. And there, frozen in the periphery of the beam, stood four of them. They stood by Peter, shoulder to shoulder, their massive muscled stature's casting large shadows

across the snow pack. They weren't charging nor were they retreating. They simply observed, their chests rising and falling with slow, synchronized breaths that sent faint plumes of steam

into the frozen air. There was a terrifying patience to their stillness. They knew the terrain. They knew the vehicle was hopelessly high-centered and they knew he had absolutely nowhere to run.

John stared back, his knuckles turning a white against the flashlight. Every desperate attempt to rock the car free had only caused the tires to wind, digging the chassis deeper into the unforgiving mountain earth.

He wasn't just stranded anymore. He was cornered in a metal cage, and the beasts were waiting for the light to die. In a surge of pure adrenaline, John caught the unmistakable yellow glow of approaching headlights

and lunged for the door.

“His fingers clawing at the handle before he'd remember he'd locked himself in.”

He slapped the release, the mechanical click sounding like a gun and threw himself out of the passenger side, barely making it to his feet. The headlights were crawling toward him, twin beacons of his only true safety were piercing the gloom.

A plow truck making its first grueling northbound pass of the night.

The spinning green strobes cut through the oppressive shadows like a strobe light in a nightmare, and John prayed with a sudden, desperate fervor that the artificial glare was enough to scatter whatever primeval thing was haunting the woods of the north fork.

He kept his gaze fixed originally forward, his neck muscles stiff with the effort. He refused to look back at the dark silhouette of the Lincoln or into the shifting shadows of the tree line. Those were dead to him now.

He didn't want the images burned into his memory. He couldn't afford the lifelong nightmares that seeing them would inevitably bring. He just needed to reach the road. Help! Please, please help!

John's voice was raspy, and not a single chance they were heard

“by anything other than the woods themselves.”

He waved his arms in frantic arcs, now screaming until his throat was raw, but the deep roar of the engine and the deafening metallic screech grind of the plow blade against the frozen gravel swallowed his voice this time around.

A driver at this hour, battling a historic storm, wasn't looking for survivors. He was squinting through the large snowflakes, looking only for the edge of the road

and the end of his shift, ensuring his own safety first.

John scrambled into the center of the lane, his expensive leather loafers now packed and sawden with icy slush. The truck was barely 150 feet away, a wall of steel and light that he prayed

with stop and time. The glare was blinding, a beautiful searing white. He had made it. He allowed himself a single triumph and smile, a momentary lapse in his terror

“as he finally glanced back at his abandoned Lincoln,”

looking at the car with sense of defiant, rearing pride. Then, the grip took him. The force was terrifyingly sudden. The whole absolute, as thick, impossibly long digits wrapped around

the entire circumference of his bicep, overlapping in structure, making John feel so insignificant. The skin of the hand shimmered under the orange glow of the approaching headlights,

slick and alien-like, radiating a deep cold that instantly nund his arm to the bone. His feet left the asphalt before he could even understand the situation, gravity releasing its grip in a single heartbeat. He was jerked violently upward,

his legs dangling uselessly as he was hauled toward a different cost of lights, just above the tree line. An array so blindingly beautiful and serene it shook his panic so completely.

But ground fell away beneath him and north-fork road disappearing into a distant grid as he was sucked into the overhead blackness, gone from the world in a breath. At 7.30 a.m.,

the Montana sky began to lighten. The Lincoln sat alone just off the edge of the road, its engine sputtering as it sucked to the last vapor of fuel from the tank, one final breath for an empty car

before the cold claimed it for good. The world indifferent, unchanged. The sky snuck fast to the chair and a bit of the film was what I saw in the movie. The film was made from 7.20 to 9.20

and the August in the Dine McKee, a huge success. The show was made from the film and the film was made of the right by Dine in the 1.500 euros

in the 1.1 hour of the event. The film was made from the snow.

And finally, a group of campers learned about the mysterious people living deep in the woods

in the unsettling tradition of leaving food for them, along with the grim consequences of disturbing their territory.

creepy presence, Pixie Gifts.

I hope you kids liked your turkey tail mushroom soup. Great work, Junior forgers.

“The wild ramps and fiddle heads are pretty good, right?”

Like green beans and garlic bread. Bomber you couldn't find any berries. Turns out they go pretty quick out here. I know we told you that all we were having for dinner was what we were able to forge from the forest.

Surprise! We brought cans of beef stew and lasagna and tamales. But before we choose our food and heat it up, I need three of you to go put some cans in the fairy circle. And what is it?

Oh, I thought everybody already knew about them.

It's the circle of stones just outside the campground. Of course it's not for real fairies. I guess you could call them Pixie Gifts. The food is for the people of the woods. We all know somebody who said they can't handle modern life anymore

and they were going to live in the forest. I don't mind telling you about my family. The hospital sued my nephew Johnny over medical debt. Just like they did to so many other people in our town. Johnny actually showed up in court to try to defend himself.

Most people don't even bother. Anyway, it didn't work. Johnny had to catch a bus to the courthouse because the car he'd been living in had broken down. But when he lost his case, he walked out.

And just kept walking into the woods. Here. I know we all know somebody like Johnny.

People who are looking at debts that they'll never be able to pay off.

People who can't use their devices or live at peace in their own house because, thanks to the newish law, debt collectors are allowed to call them and email them at all hours and to show up at their homes and workplace. If they even have a workplace,

there are people like Johnny who applied to hundreds of jobs without getting any response at all. People who've been evicted and have run out of couches to crash on. There are also all the old fashioned bail jumpers and runaways who had to retreat back here. Ever since doorbell cameras and facial recognition software

made it so easy for the bounty hunters to scoop them up if they stick around town. Hey, I don't want to sound like a anti-technology. It's not all bad.

“Maria Diaz, the woman who invented the peepod, for example?”

I think she's great. When I was your age, nobody would have dreamed of making a waterproof weatherproof sleeping bag. Let alone one with a head chamber that keeps you warm in the winter and safe from bugs in the summer.

Not to mention that the cushioning is so comfortable that some people, namely me, who have a spouse that snores, namely Mr. Dylan, will sometimes leave their perfectly good beds and spend the night in a peepod on the living room floor. It's interesting, isn't it?

That Maria Diaz made a product that let you sleep comfortably in the winter in the mountains and comes and camouflage patterns and that makes people outside the peepod invisible to thermal imaging. It was a real inflection point when the peepods came out. It made it much easier to survive outdoors.

Still, it's hard out here. One thing I hope you've learned from today's foraging trip, it's really difficult to find food.

“Why do you think you couldn't find any wild berries?”

So, the berry circles came to be. A newest tradition, where people who come out here camping, leave food for people of the woods. We won't see them, but they'll come tonight after we're asleep and collect our offerings. What happens if you don't leave anything?

Yeah, I can answer that one. Because I was young and stupid once. Very funny gen C. That was a while ago. Before I was married to Mr. Dylan, back when the berry circles were relatively new,

I had a bad, bad breakup with my boyfriend at the time, and I decided to go camping all alone. And I decided I wasn't going to leave any stupid food in a circle of stupid rocks for probably imaginary people. Despite my bravado, deep down, I was pretty nervous.

So nervous that I couldn't sleep. At least, that's what I thought. After a miserable night I headed home, and I decided to go through the photos on my phone and delete pictures of my ex-boyfriend.

But the camera app still worked.

And I saw pictures of myself sleeping, taken from inside my tent. At one am, two am, then three, then four. Very close to my face.

Not because of Zoom, but because of where the phone was, and the person holding it. It must have been right around 5 am

“that I finally gave up on camping and started packing up to go.”

I was back here again with some friends this time, just a couple of months later. I figured I'd gotten off with a warning, and I certainly wasn't going to mess up again.

I dumped a huge arm load of cans

into the very circle that time, and my shoulders ached for days from the extra weight on the way up. Good question. I'll tell you why we keep coming. Because look around you.

It's beautiful up here. And I don't know about you guys, but this is one of the few places I feel completely free. You're absolutely right, Jenar. It is dangerous.

A person could slip and fall while climbing. And the Peepods will protect you from rain and cold, but not from a tree branch falling on you.

“But I think you're probably talking about the wolf.”

Like I said, there are plenty of normal people living in the woods. People just a little down on their luck. And there are also plenty of criminals. Some of them violent. One of the most violent,

or at least the most attention seeking, was a serial killer who called himself the wolf. That guy gets absolutely zero points for creativity. The story goes that he started by murdering a trio of other woods people, and putting their bodies on display,

hoisting their corpses up into the branches of a tree. But then he descended on two families of civilians out camping, slicing their tents to ribbons and slaughtering every one of them, before kicking apart the stones of the fairy circle, and pissing all over the food offerings.

Well, obviously, having a murderer at large meant the whole forest was in trouble. It wasn't just the risk presented by the man himself. Nobody was going to come up here,

“and nobody was going to leave any food while there was a killer on the loose.”

And if the murders were reported to the authorities, they might actually bestier themselves to come into the woods for once, and everybody thought that would end very, very badly. So, a group of forest dwellers went after him, and they decided his end had to be as graphic,

and as public as his crimes had been. They had to make an example out of him. Since he called himself the wolf, they took a page from the fairy tale. Now, I don't know if he was conscious of all of it or part of it,

or if he just woke up like that. But they sliced him open and put stones inside. And then they sewed him back up. He survived the procedure, long enough to get to his feet and stagger along,

begging and crying and bleeding, trying to support his distended belly with his hands, but it wasn't long before the weight was too much for him, and he tipped over and fell face forward and died. And that was the last time anybody laid a finger on campers like us.

So, yeah, I'm sure we're safe out here. Sure enough to bring all you kids out here. Now, I have another surprise. Who's ready for some spores? Before we get started,

YouTube take these boxes of spores flavored pop tarts and put them in the fairy circle too. They don't get a lot of treats out here.

So I always like to bring them something sweet.

Oh honey, no. We don't have to worry about bears coming across our stash. The bears? They've all been eaten. For more information on this podcast,

including how to submit your own story of our consideration. Please visit CreepyPard.com. You can also follow us at CreepyPard on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so through creative comments share a light licensing,

or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent or the creepy podcast production team and the story rotser.

An Augenblick, an Entscheidung.

And nothing is more to say.

By the German fluke-sicherung,

“we will be able to see this moment in a happy end.”

If you're interested in your job,

check out the right mix from Action, and learn from your country. Then we will be able to see you again. www.flucloseverden.de. Hintergründe stattvoreparteile.

Pertrein in the podcast that's between in Eura Lieblings podcast app or on the tech.fm/datswischen.