Day 3 - Knocking Geoff & The Lake That Doesn’t Reflect the Same Sky

When she was found, she was uncovered alive in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus.

What happened to Katie? From the studio that brought you weapons and producers James Wahn and Blumhouse comes a terrifying new vision on April 17. We discovered the true Lee Cronins, The Mummy, some things are meant to stay buried. Only in theaters, in IMAX, April 17, rated R under 17, not admitted without parent. No.

This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened, or about simply fabrications, is for you to decide. These stories made in teen graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. This no discretion is advised. Hey, John. Can I ask you something? Of course, Alicia.

I don't want us to sound ungrateful.

Great. I appreciate that.

It's not really a question, but that wasn't my question. I just wanted to... Check to see if I'm okay.

“How do you know that that's what I was going to ask?”

It was due. Usually around this time, someone asks me if I'm okay. I mean, I can tell you the real answer, but given that on for Minnesota, it's beyond us. No one really wants to hear that. Right?

So, how would I just say the horrors persist and so do I? Okay, but... I like in camping. What? How are you like in camping?

The mattresses and the cabins comfy? Yeah. They're pretty good. Really wish I had a mattress sponsor to show it out right now. Missed opportunity. How about dinner last night?

Did you enjoy the smash burgers? Well, yeah, but...

“Do like how I was able to get a signal booster so you all could call and text while we're out here?”

I figured it would help with feelings of isolation. Yes. Thank you for that. Cool. I'm sorry.

I feel like I cut you off a couple of times back there. Did you have something else to ask me? No. No. Never mind.

Done and done. So, I want to head over to the campfire and tell a story. Sure. I can tell you all about knocking Jeff. Alright, yeah.

I've got a story. You guys have all been talking about shadows in the corners of your eyes or odd sounds in the woods that are all probably just animals or the wind. I swear, it's like you've all forgotten that the mountains are full of life, especially when there's no other people around. It's pretty obvious some of you are making up your own takes to popular creepypasta's on the spot, too. But something happened to me personally.

Something so messed up that I still can't make sense of it. Some of you might have heard versions of this one before, but those are all just rumors. I was the only one witness to what actually happened that night. So you'll be getting the real deal from me. There's a few years back before I became a forest ranger.

Geez, was it really eight years ago? What is time anymore? Anyway, I was fresh out of college with a degree in environmental science and I was adrift. It didn't matter how many jobs I applied to, the only emails in my inbox were rejections. The local coffee shop wouldn't even hire me.

13 months had gone by without a single interview. Years later, I was still getting the occasional fresh rejection email from all those applications I submitted back then. Wanted joke. After a full year of unemployment, I went back to my university's beachside town for an alumni dinner my old beach volleyball club organized.

“Can you all imagine me diving for spikes in a bikini?”

Actually wait, please don't. So yeah, I didn't plan on drinking that night. But the whole group went bar hopping afterward and I was in a place mentally where I couldn't say no to a good time. They were just so scarce, you know? I told myself one beer would be enough for the night, but after listening to my friend's gosh about their new jobs,

new engagements, plans for moving, or even their first vacations using pay time off.

I'm sure some of you have been there.

“I remember another two beers, then ordering a vodka red bull in who knows how many shots of who knows what after that.”

I woke up the next morning in my cheap motel room with a blurry memory and barely enough time to pack up by checkout. I scrolled through all the text and miss calls while I sat hung over in a Starbucks, drowning in a vintage ice americano. I'd done or said something unforgivable and lost all of the friends I considered my real adult friends in one fell swoop. To this day, I still don't have the full picture of what I did that was so bad, but I guess knowing doesn't change much. I don't mean to be, oh poor me, but I really wasn't doing well.

I was scrambling more than my morning eggs. I felt just as mixed up inside, too, to be honest. Many of you have probably felt that way at some point. We all do dumb things when we're young, so just look at me to know it gets better.

“But yeah, that's where my head was when I met Jeff.”

It's probably how he came to mean so much to me so quickly. Meeting him was like finding a raft in open water. It was what made his disappearance all the more disturbing, and why it still eats me up inside. Jeff Revanderberg was old enough to be my grandpa. He was a lot nicer than my real grandpa, though.

They were both Marines and sent to the same Vietnam, so I never understood how they could be so different.

Now I've come to know that people handle horrible things in their own ways. Jeff's hair was all salt and peppery, like a fox's coat and winter. And he had a mustache fit for a share of straight out of a spaghetti western. He always wore these round, wierry glasses with thick lenses, too. It made me nervous to think of a day where he might lose or break those glasses,

alone in miles deep in the wilderness. I met him when I started working in the gift shop at the King's Canyon National Park Visitor Center, the fall following the alumni incident, as I came to call it. I was so sick of myself in a run out of appealing distractions back home, so I took the plunge. I couldn't run away from myself, so I ran away from everything I knew instead.

And ended up out here in the Sierra Nevada's while I tried dipping my toes into sobriety. Jeff was the kind of guy who went out of his way to be kind. There wasn't anything pervy about it, so don't give me that look. He was part mentor, part concern father figure, part comedic relief. He was my friend.

That was something I really needed back then. Somebody to genuinely care and not look at me like I already failed out of life and should just quit already.

“I think he could smell all that despair, whafting off of me and latched on.”

He'd seek me out whenever I clocked into my shift and it was slow enough for him to leave his post at the information desk. He'd switch between asking me what was "hip with the kids," lately and telling crazy stories of survival in the wilderness. Some hairling tales of his time working in search and rescue, and he'd even throw in a few ghost stories every now and then. Although, after what happened, I think that those ones might have been true too. Jeff was the reason why I ended up in a fire lookout tower the next summer.

I was worried about going crazy out there all alone on the top of the mountain all summer long. But he said he could be in the next closest lookout and that we could radio each other in chat just like we'd done every day at the visitor center. So I agreed. He pulled some strings. And after some training, I found myself unpacking a backpack on a cot in my own fire lookout on Sawtooth Peak. The lookout was a rickety wood and glass box atop a toothpick scaffolding.

Stairs led up from the ground to a hatch that opened up to a wood plank deck that encircled my little house above the world. Inside was a cot, a bedside table that doubled as a bookshelf, and a counter that wrapped around the interior with windows above, and covered stuff with supplies below. In the center was an island counter with a fire finder, a circular map of the area surrounding the lookout used in pinpointing smoke signals. I kept my binoculars in pair of ultra-high frequency handheld radios on the shelf below the fire finder at the ready to make reports or check-ins.

My worries of going mad would bored him melt it away my first night.

I had my friends, Jack Kerroak, Joan Didian, Shirley Jackson, and John Steinbeck to keep me company while surveying the mountainous wilderness in every direction beneath bright blue skies and fluffy whipped cream clouds.

Almost two sweet.

“Then of course, there was Jeff, just as he promised.”

Sometimes he'd radio me randomly to check in, touch base, make sure things were still swell over there.

We'd always radio each other around dinner time to talk about how the day went, and chat about anything and everything that came to mind.

Jeff would usually bust out one of his countless stories. I felt like a child again, getting a bedtime story before drifting off to sleep whenever he did. That night finally came around halfway through the season. Life hasn't been the same since. Jeff and I were chatting over the radio on our unofficial frequency, like we always did.

I'd finished dinner and was sipping some peppermint tea and peeking out the windows at all the stars, while Jeff chattered on about the time he narrowly avoided an avalanche. He'd been hiking alone somewhere in the John Mirror Wilderness one winter when it happened, and was sure to tell me how dangerous it was to be out there alone. Especially when weather can turn so quickly and it's well below freezing.

“He was mid-sint and explaining to me what I should do if I find myself conscious but buried in snow.”

When I heard a banging outside, "Why am?

Bam! Bam! Bam!" I'd seen a handful of hikers during my short time on the mountain, but they usually showed up around mid-days so they had enough time before sundown to hike onto the next permitted camping area. My lookout was along a backpacking loop that connected a few of the other lookouts in the area, and the camps were strategically placed between each lookout by the forest service. I was grateful since it meant I could have my peace and quiet at night, which was what made the interruption that night so jarring.

It was dark out, hours past nightfall, and the knocking sounded desperate. I called out to the knocker asking who they were and what they needed. It sounded like whatever it was, it was urgent, but I was also a woman alone in a tower in the middle of nowhere. I had the hatch to the stairs outside, perpetually latch shut and padlocked out of paranoia, as well as the door to the main entrance of my little box. Double locked, double safe.

Even when no one was around, or rather, when nobody was supposed to be around.

It was that hatch, my first line of defense, that the knocker had pounded.

I couldn't get a look at their face because of that, but that meant that they couldn't see me either. The knocking paused, and the voice that shouted back to me sent chills down my spine, and percled my skin with goosebumps. It was Jeff. He said he had been attacked at the lookout and escapes into the mountains on foot. He managed to navigate his way through nearly 20 miles of wilderness, as the crow flies,

to my lookout on Sawtooth Peak. He had no food, no water, no shelter, no extra layers of clothing. He begged me to let him in, but his story didn't sound quite right. That journey would have taken him over a day to make, but I'd been talking to Jeff as often as I usually did during that time. And he hadn't mentioned anything about an attack, or a treacherous journey through the wilderness.

It didn't make any sense. I had just been talking to him over the radio and the knocking began, too, and he was as calm and cheerful as ever. It was an absurd fever dream.

“How could the same person be in two places at once?”

If one of them was a fake, which Jeff was real, why did they sound so alike? I'd held on to the push to talk button during my interaction with the Jeff from outside, but released it while confusion skated through my thoughts and figurates. Just voice came in over the radio then, telling me whatever you do. Don't let that thing in.

It isn't me. I was so conflicted. I had noticed anything different in the voice over the radio. I was convinced that I knew Jeff, that if it hadn't been him chatting and telling his usual stories, I would have noticed. But I didn't.

So it had to be him. It had to be. That was what I decided, but it still twisted me up inside to not unlock the padlock on the hatch and let the other Jeff in. Especially since those desperate cries sounded so much like him. I struggled to hold myself from reaching out to a person crying out for help.

A person who helped me to find new meaning in a life that I was about to give up on. But I convinced myself that it must have been a rose.

I don't know.

Fear logic isn't always real logic.

“I felt like a kid barely hanging on by a thread, but that thread had grown, slithered up my arm, and had wrapped around my neck.”

I stayed on the radio with Jeff until the man at the hatch quieted. It was so strange. An hour in and he was still hammering with the same vigor he started with. But then he suddenly went quiet. Silent.

I put my ear to the door, thinking he would be clunking down the stairs to crunch on the dusty gravelly earth below. Or maybe he'd be banging, clambering around, up and over the steel scaffolding to the plank floor before the door. Instead of either of those options, I heard nothing. Nothing but the night when blowing through the gaps around the door in its frame. It was like the other Jeff had disappeared mid-knock, mid-shout, mid-breath, mid-thought.

Like he had spontaneously ceased to exist, cut straight from a word document, control X.

“I said good night to Jeff over the radio, then stayed on guard in a wake all night.”

I sat on the floor with my back against the door, so I'd hear any kind of movement up the stairs the moment it happened. But nothing stirred. It wasn't until the sun's rays were poking in through the windows of the lookout the next morning that I realized Jeff hadn't said anything back in response over the radio when I wished him a good night. Jeff was the kind of guy to rise with the sun, starting his days with stretches on a side of coffee. I'd have no way of knowing, but I had the feeling back then that he was the kind of guy who made his bed every day too, just like my grandpa.

I snapped a standing then, and went over to the radio. He'd definitely be awake and alert to hear me on his end, and let me know I was being silly for worrying so much. I was just being paranoid.

Of course he would respond. He always did.

Except for that day. I tried to reach him all through the morning with no luck.

“After downing a can, chilly for lunch, I tried again.”

That time I got a response. Although it wasn't the one I was hoping for. Adam from certain rescue spoke to me over the pseudo private frequency Jeff and I used. It might be more accurate to say that it was our favorite frequency, since we always had it to ourselves. Adam said that he was at Jeff's lookout, and wanted to know about the last time I talked with him.

I hesitated then, thinking of the strange night I had, and asked what was going on. Until then I'd convinced myself that I'd been talking to Jeff over the radio the night before. But Adam's presence shook that foundation.

It took a while after that first chat over the radio with Adam, but I eventually learned all there was to know.

It was infuriating just how little detail there was. The day before Jeff hadn't called in over the radio for his daily check-in with headquarters. At first they thought it was just late, no big deal. When they still hadn't gone response from him by that next morning, Search and rescue was sent to investigate. What they found stumps them to this day.

The lookout was quiet and tidy. Jeff kept a tight ship. There was nothing to suggest that there had been a struggle or violence of any kind. Besides Jeff's absence, there were only a few odd items of note. There were two mugs of cold peppermint tea sitting out on the counter. One was half drunk, the other was completely full.

It was like Jeff had a guest over who didn't tell him they were allergic to drinking tea. Another odd thing was that all of his bedding on the cot was missing. They searched the surrounding area but didn't find the bedding or Jeff anywhere. Nobody has seen or heard from Jeff's sense I talked to him over the radio the summer that I worked in the fire lookout. At least, not officially.

Jeff's disappearance was so strange that of course, word of it spread like a wildfire through the park service. I accidentally let my story slip around a campfire. Much like this one, in the months after that night after one too many beers. Old habits die hard.

Rumors of knocking Jeff made it as far north as last in volcanic wilderness. There were tales of frantic midnight knocks at the doors of fire lookouts and cabins. Even the occasional tent up and down the Sierra Nevada's.

I felt so guilty that my shortcoming led to his legacy being diluted down to such a superstition.

After a week thinking about it while I tossed and turned, I remembered what kind of guy Jeff was. Jeff was the kind of guy to crack jokes and ask what the kids ran to. He was the kind of guy who loved telling tales or survival in the wilderness, and he loved to tell a good ghost story.

Taking what I knew about Jeff into account,

“I think he'd actually be happy to live on a such a legend.”

That was the only summer I worked in a fire lookout. I couldn't bring myself to go back to that tiny box atop that toothpick scaffolding. Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I had made a different decision, and went out there to unlock the hatch. Would Jeff still be with us?

Or would I be gone too?

I think I'm part of Jeff's legacy too.

He's the reason I joined the Forest Service. I go back home sometimes for the holidays, but I don't talk to any of my friends from back then. Instead, I hurry back here to the people who took me under their wings. I have juniors, just like you guys, under my own wings now.

Sometimes on campouts like this one, I'll tell them about knocking Jeff. When I do, I talk about the real Jeff.

“Every year on the anniversary of his disappearance,”

I go back packing alone along the loop that connects the lookouts in that area. Hiking out in the open doesn't give me the same sense of hopelessness as being trapped inside the lookout. I bring a handheld radio clip to my straps, perpetually turn to our frequency. Walking along the trail, I sometimes hear whispers I can't quite make out.

I tell myself that that's because I walk in and out of different ranges, or that the radio is picking up stray signals. Every night, when I sit down to boil water from my dinner, usually a dehydrated curry or pad tie. I turn the radio back on and tell Jeff about my day,

just like old times. And sometimes he tells me about his. Hey, where John go? John? John? Sorry.

Sorry, over here. Hold on, one sec. Oh, sorry about that. Where do you keep disappearing off to? What do you mean?

I was just over there. What's over there? The bio. The same thing that's over there. And over there.

And over there. Silly question. It looked like you were just staring into this swamp. I was. Why?

Just had to be sure something. Just had to be sure that the bio wasn't like the lake that doesn't reflect the same sky.

I didn't notice reflection at first because the heat made everything feel unreal.

Like viewing the world through a pane of warped glass. I wasn't even a win. We can air feel that much thicker and stale, even after the sun is set. I was sweating everywhere. I'm sure I could have made a funny real show on the time lapse and my shirt going from light grey to dark grey as the hours ticked by. We decided to go camping because none of us had air conditioning and the heatwave had turned our apartments into ovens.

The woods promised shade and the lake, the promise of relief, at least in theory.

“By the time night settled in, the water had become the only thing anyone cared about.”

A black mirror tucked between the trees. It was so hot that we didn't even want to go there while the sun was up. I felt like we got an instant sunburn as soon as we left our shelter. Drinking as much as we did the night before didn't help. I followed the others down to the shore without much thought.

My brain gold by heat and fatigue and the last remains of whiskey. The lake looks smooth and dark, barely rippling as our bodies slipped into it one by one. The surface swallowed sound in a way that made everything feel distant, like we'd stepped out of the world and into something else. It's such a strange feeling. Being so hot, you want to just lay down.

Then the moment you touch the water, something that should feel like a relief, and it's so hard that it feels too cold, even with the water probably being about 80 degrees, it felt like it might as well have been 40 at that moment. Still, after not long, it felt like a gift.

While the others splashed and ran around near the shore, I floated on my back a ways out,

“staring up at the sky and letting my body go slack.”

There are so many stars. You forget what light pollution does in the city. There are so many stars that look like someone had tossed salt into darkness. Eventually, I turned over and did the dead man's float for a moment before breaking the surface again and looking at the water around me. That's when I started to feel something was wrong.

The reflection of the sky and the water was too clear. Clear than reflection's ever are, as if the lake wasn't reflecting sky at all, but like there were stars under the surface of the water. And the stars in the reflection were brighter, even sharper, but there was in a single moment where I recognized any of the constellations I'd just been staring at.

At first I assumed it was just my eyes playing tricks on me, strained from the heat in the sudden cold, clouded by the remains of a hangover. I'd blinked in white water from my face, then leaned closer, letting my chin hover just above the surface. The sky above me stayed the same, but the one below me shifted suddenly.

“Stars seemingly sliding into new positions.”

I tried to match them, looking up and down, trying to get them to line up, but they never did.

There were extra stars in the water. Fainted first, and then impossible to ignore, clustered in places where the real sky was empty. It only got worse when I noticed that the reflection didn't move with the water. The ripples pass through the lake as someone kicked me or bibe,

but the stars made the surface barely wavered. They held their position. Steady. Patient. I told myself as an optical illusion.

There's a lot of heat exhaustion or the way light bends through water, whatever other science answers a smarter person would have. I looked around, watching the other splash and swim. Their movement sending silver flashes across the lake. None of them seemed to notice anything strange.

It made me feel so alone, even as I stared at my friends just the arts away. I forced myself to look back up at the real sky, grounding myself in something solid. The stars there seemed dimmer. And when I look back down again,

the reflected sky felt closer somehow, as if it had risen to meet me. That's when an intrusive thought forced its way in. What if I wasn't looking at our reflection at all?

“What if I was looking at something below the surface of the water?”

I tried to laugh it off, even come up with another possible answer. Because the idea was strange instead of inherently scary, I wasn't so much afraid as curious. I told myself that a quick dive would clear my head, that the cold and the pressure would snap me back into reality,

and I'd see if there wasn't actually anything to see under the surface. I took a breath and dipped my face under the water, pointing my eyes despite the sting. The world blurred in dark shapes and drifting light, bubbles sliding past my cheeks as I exhale.

The surface above me shimmering, the real sky breaking apart into fractured stars that scattered with every movement. Below me, the other sky waited. It didn't blur her or scatter the way reflections should. The stars beneath the surface really were there,

and there were steady points of light.

For the first time I felt a strange sense of depth of the water.

Deeper than I'd ever could or should be. But still, it was curiosity that drove me. I kicked gently letting myself sink, watching the boundary between reflection and depth pass over me like a curtain. The water grew darker, and colder, pressing in on my ears,

and through my jaws I worked equal as the pressure the way I'd learned from snorkeling on a vacation of Mexico. With each foot I descended, through a flustered sky grew larger, filling my vision until I was all I could see. There was no bottom in sight, no hint of silt or rocks, or the soft slope I knew should be there, without I could see it or not.

This was my first time in this pond. My friends and I had been here three or four times over the years. I knew I should have been able to touch the bottom by now, even without being able to see it.

Stars arranged it on familiar constellations that seemed to watch me in return.

“The feeling of being watched settled over me, heavy and intimate,”

like standing too close to someone in the dark. Panic flickered at the edges of my mind. I told myself that the lake wasn't really deeper than I remembered, that night played tricks on depth perception. I'd touch the bottom before, just keep going,

proved to myself that I was being irrational. Touch the soft sand, then go back to the surface and laugh about it later. My lungs burned softly, a reminder of limits I chose to ignore for a few seconds longer. The pressure increased as I descended, squeezing my chest. Stars below seemed to brighten.

Their light sharpening, allowing me to see in the darkness,

“regardless of how blurred my vision should have been under water.”

And what's more, shapes begin to emerge between the points of light. Fast and slow, like impossible clowns. But they weren't clouds, they had edges and contours, forms that suggested mass and intention.

The realization sent a jolt of fear through me strong enough to finally break curiosity's hold.

I kicked upward, hard, turning away from the depths. This guy beneath me didn't receive the way it should have. For a moment up and down felt reversed, the surface no more real than the stars below both equally distant. I started to panic. This was known to happen even professional divers,

losing track of which way it was up and ending up swimming down to their dots instead of up to the air.

“My lungs screamed as I thrashed, bubbles tearing free and frantic bursts.”

The water around me seemed to thicken, resisting my movements as if the lake itself was reluctant to let me go. In the corner of my vision, one of the shapes shifted, a slow, deliberate motion that set ripples through the star filled dark. And then, as if I'm miracle, I broke the surface with a gas that seemed to tear its way out of my throne. I met her how much I tried to take in the air felt and sufficient as I coughed and choked when my body shook. Someone in the distance, I heard my friends shouting from the shore, but it wasn't for me.

They didn't even notice that I'd gone underwater, they were just playing some game. I started to swim through the shore as fast as I could. I barely noticed that the sky and reflection were back to looking how they should. Halfway back, something brushed my leg. The contact was light, almost gentle, but it sent tear crashing through me in a way nothing else had.

I kicked wildly, breaking in when I even rhythm that wasted energy, but felt necessary to stay alive. Whenever touched me, it didn't return. But the sense of being follow I didn't fade, I could feel it beneath me. A pressure and presence demeared my movement still breaking the surface. The water seemed to hum faintly around my ears, of vibration that I felt more than heard.

When my hands finally scraped against the muddy bottom near the shore,

relief hit me so hard my vision blurred and I thought I was going to pass out. I stumbled out of the lake, water streaming off me, my legs trembling as if they were about to give out. I didn't look back to lake right away, I focused on the ground beneath my feet. The solid certainty of dirt and roots and scattered stones. My heart took a long time to slow, each beat echoing into my head like a drum.

My friends around me asking questions I didn't have answers to. None of them were nearly as worried as they should be. Eventually, against my better judgment, I glanced over my shoulder. The lake lay still and quiet. The surface moved this glass.

Reflection of the stars looked ordinary from a distance. I could have all been in my head. When I edgeed closer and looked down again, the wrong sky waited patiently,

just as I'd seen at the first time.

The extra stars burned a little brighter, and one of the shapes drifted closer to the surface. It's outline just visible enough to suggest the scale that made my stomach twist. I'd backed away every instinct screaming at me to put distance between myself and the water. In the days since, I've tried to convince myself that what I saw was a trick of light and exhaustion. The heat-wave ended.

Still, when I looked at a clear night sky, I find myself wondering how real it is.

I never went back to that lake.

“And at this day, I still don't like swimming in anything other than a pool where I can see the bottom.”

Somewhere beneath that quiet surface, another sky waits. And I'm afraid of the day that it decides to look back up at us. Well, does it? Does what who now? The by you.

Does it reflect the same sky?

What should I know?

“Okay, I'm going to walk off into the dark.”

You're all free to remain silently sitting around the campfire. Or talk? You all can talk when you're not telling a story. You know that, right? You all make me smile.

Tutals, don't follow me.

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Catholicism, confession is anonymous, versus voodoo.

“I think I've then made a deal with the devil.”

What's you call life? And what I call death? It's a mysterious crossroads where the denizens of this world and others. It is a trickster and I'm sure whatever he brought back from the world of the dead was a one-way trip. Good night, Daily.

And for the detective Frank Dupro. We'll see you in there. And Nicky Goodlock. This will be a dark ride. Welcome to New Orleans, babies.

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