"The Whispering Woods"

They found the first body at dawn a hiker, face frozen in an expression that suggested he'd died of fright long before the cold could finish him. His companion was never recovered. The only clue: footprints that led in circles, round and round the same clearing, as if he'd spent his final hours chasing his own shadow.

Or being chased by something that was a shadow.

Abigail Fleming had been in Nowhere for two weeks now, long enough to learn the rhythms of a town that existed outside normal time. Long enough to start feeling like she belonged. But the morning Sheriff Reyes called her to the forest's edge, she realized she'd been fooling herself. Nowhere would never feel safe. That was the point.

Reyes explained that GPS didn't work out here because of the Quiet Zone regulations. But this guy had carried a compass old-school, military grade. Abigail studied the body without touching it. The compass was still clutched in his hand, its needle spinning lazily, pointing toward nothing. She noted that compasses work on magnetic fields, and if something disrupted the field badly enough to do this, they weren't dealing with a normal predator.

No. They weren't.

Satoshi Nakamura hadn't slept in three days.

His wife Keiko had been walking into the woods at night, returning with mud on her feet and no memory of where she'd been. At first, he'd dismissed it as sleepwalking stress from the move, perhaps, or some delayed reaction to their daughter Willow's increasingly strange behavior.

But Satoshi knew better. He knew because the woods called to him, too. Because every night, just before he managed to drift off, he heard whispers in a language he almost understood. Because his secrets the ones he'd buried in another country, in another life were pushing against the inside of his skull like something trying to escape.

He found Abigail at the diner, buried in Benji's collection of local folklore. Without preamble or small talk, he told her he needed her help. Something was happening to his wife, to him, and he believed it was connected to what Abigail could do. He'd heard from Benji about how she'd stopped the frequency broadcast. He sat across from her, hands trembling, and explained that whatever was in those woods seemed to know things he hadn't told anyone things he hadn't even told himself.

Benji called it the Hidebehind.

He spread yellowed papers across the video store counter and explained the old lumberjack legend. Workers in logging camps kept disappearing. Their friends would say they heard footsteps behind them, but when they turned around nothing there. Always hiding. Always watching. Always just out of sight.

Abigail asked how you fight something you can't see. According to the legends, Benji told her, you don't. He pointed to a crude sketch of something impossibly thin, its proportions suggesting it could hide behind a sapling. But he'd been thinking about the pattern. The Hidebehind doesn't just take anyone. It follows people, studies them, and only strikes when they're hiding something when they have secrets they're afraid of. The Hidebehind feeds on the fear of being discovered, drawn to people keeping things buried.

Abigail thought of Satoshi's haunted eyes. Of Keiko walking into the woods in a trance. Of all the residents of Nowhere who'd chosen to live in a place cut off from the world.

Everyone here was hiding something.

That's why they'd come to Nowhere in the first place.

They staked out the woods that night Abigail and Satoshi, sitting in silence as the trees grew darker and the temperature dropped.

Satoshi began to talk, his voice flat and disconnected, like he was reading from a report. He explained that he'd been a military contractor stationed overseas. Intelligence gathering, they called it. What it actually was he gave orders, coordinates, told them where to strike. And sometimes the intelligence was wrong. Sometimes the targets weren't combatants.

His hands clenched in his lap as he continued. He'd told himself he was just following orders. He'd been telling himself that every night for twenty years. But the truth was, he knew. He knew the intelligence was questionable. And he gave the orders anyway because refusing would have ended his career. Keiko didn't know. They came here for a fresh start, a place where his past couldn't follow.

Abigail didn't interrupt. She'd learned that silence was sometimes the only kindness you could offer. A branch cracked somewhere in the darkness, too close, too deliberate. She quietly told him she didn't think it works that way. She didn't think Nowhere lets you hide. She believed it was designed to make you confront exactly what you're running from.

Keiko appeared at midnight, walking through the trees like a woman in a dream. Her eyes were open but empty, her feet moving through underbrush without hesitation, as if she'd walked this path a thousand times.

They followed her to a clearing where the moonlight fell wrong, filtered through branches that shouldn't exist. And there, standing in the silver light, were the others.

Dozens of townspeople, all in the same trance. All gathered around something at the center of the clearing something that was always in the corner of Abigail's vision, no matter which way she turned. It existed in the spaces between perception, a presence defined by absence.

The Hidebehind.

It didn't speak with words. It didn't need to. Its presence was a question, asked directly to the darkest parts of the mind:

What are you hiding?

What would happen if they knew?

How much longer can you pretend?

Abigail felt her own secrets rising her questions about her parentage, her fears about what her abilities might mean, her growing suspicion that she wasn't entirely human. The Hidebehind catalogued them, filed them away, grew stronger.

But it wasn't focused on her. Not tonight. Tonight, it had found a feast in Satoshi Nakamura's twenty years of guilt.

Keiko turned toward her husband. Still in a trance, but speaking now, her voice layered with something old and hungry, commanding him to tell them what he did, what he was.

Satoshi fell to his knees. Around him, the gathered townspeople watched with empty eyes, waiting for the confession that would feed the creature among them.

And then Abigail spoke softly. She told him it wasn't about what he did it was about who he was trying to protect. He hadn't come here to hide from his past. He came because he was afraid of what his past would do to Keiko if she found out. He wasn't protecting himself. He never was.

She knelt beside him and explained that the Hidebehind feeds on secrets, on shame, on the fear of being seen. But there's something it can't digest: truth given freely. Confession without coercion. She took his hand and urged him to tell Keiko not because the monster was forcing him, but because she deserved to know who she married.

Satoshi stood. Faced his wife. And spoke the words he'd carried for two decades, not to the creature that demanded them, but to the woman who'd loved him anyway. He told her he'd given orders that killed innocent people. He'd spent twenty years trying to outrun that. He never could. And he understood if she couldn't forgive him. But he needed her to know.

The clearing went silent. The Hidebehind flickered, uncertain.

And then Keiko blinked. The trance shattered. She looked at her husband not with horror, not with judgment, but with something like relief. She told him she already knew. She'd always known. That's not why she married him.

The Hidebehind screamed a sound that existed only in the mind, the cry of something starving. And then it was gone, retreating into the darkest parts of the forest, deprived of the shame it had come to consume.

Around them, the townspeople woke, confused but unharmed. Whatever hold the creature had maintained, it was broken now.

The next morning, Abigail asked Benji why now the Hidebehind had been in these woods forever. Why was it suddenly attacking people?

Benji showed her the tracks they'd found near the Big Ear. Something massive. Something that had passed through recently, stirring up energies that had lain dormant for centuries. He told her something was waking everything up the cryptids, the legends, all of it. Something that feeds on fear.

The Wendigo. It was using the other creatures as instruments of terror, conducting a symphony of nightmares.

Abigail looked toward the trees, where the Hidebehind still lurked, wounded but not destroyed. Everyone here was hiding something. That's why they came to Nowhere. The question, as Keiko had observed the night before, was what happens when Nowhere stops letting them hide.

Across town, in the shadows of the Nakamura restaurant, Asher Drake closed his notebook. He'd witnessed everything. Recorded everything. Satoshi's confession, Keiko's forgiveness, Abigail's unexpected power to break the creature's hold.

His employers would be very interested in what he'd learned.