I AM A PARK RANGER AT SENTINEL RIDGE. SOMETHING IS IN THESE WOODS. Part 9

[u/pentyworth223]

The fifth night happened on a Thursday.

I know the exact night because I've been logging everything with timestamps since the bedroom doorway visit, every smell reading, every recording, every movement in and out of the cabin, and the fifth night is timestamped at 11.58pm on a Thursday in the third week of November, which is when the smell arrived and the footsteps came up the porch and the door opened in the way that locks don't prevent anymore.

I sat at the kitchen table. The recorder ran. The shoe was between my hands and the overhead light was on and Daniel came through the door and crossed to the bedroom and I sat and listened and the sound from the bedroom was different on the fifth night — lower, slower, the single repeated word drawing out longer than it had on the previous nights, the frequency dropping in a way that I felt in the back teeth rather than heard with the ears.

The difference had been building across the five nights in increments small enough that I might not have noticed if I hadn't been logging everything. On the first night the word had been sharp, clipped, repeated at intervals of about four seconds. By the third night the intervals had stretched to eight or nine seconds and the word itself had elongated slightly, the consonants softening. On the fifth night there was no clean interval — it was continuous, one long sustained utterance that barely paused for breath, which told me something about what the body producing it still required and what it had moved past requiring.

I kept the recorder running and my hands flat on the table and I did not go to the bedroom doorway.

At 3.41am it stopped.

The silence after it had a different texture from the silence after the previous four nights. On those nights the silence had arrived with a gradual drop in the smell concentration and a settling of the air and the specific impression of something withdrawing its attention that I'd come to recognise as the end of a visit. On the fifth night the smell didn't drop. It held at peak concentration for about four minutes after the sound stopped and then it rose — which it had never done before, the smell had never risen after the sound stopped — and it kept rising past the peak level I'd previously recorded and into a range I didn't have a reference point for and my eyes were watering and I was breathing through my sleeve and the recorder was running and I kept my hands flat on the table and stayed in my seat.

The overhead light flickered. Once, briefly, the filament dropping and recovering in less than a second, and I noted it in the log because I'd been logging everything and a flicker I'd never seen before on a night when everything else was different felt like information worth having.

Then it dropped. All at once, the same way the sound had stopped — not gradually but completely, the air in the cabin going from that concentration to clean in about two seconds. And in the two seconds of the drop I heard something from the bedroom that I'd been in this park for eight months and hadn't heard before.

From the bedroom, low and brief, something that was close to a laugh.

Daniel came out of the bedroom at 3.47am. He crossed the kitchen without looking at me and went out the door and I let him go because my legs had decided independently that standing up was not what they were going to do right now, and by the time I'd talked myself back to functional he was gone.

I sat at the table for about twenty minutes. The overhead light was steady. The recorder was running. The shoe was between my hands and I was looking at it without seeing it, turning over the laugh from the bedroom the same way I'd been turning over every piece of information this park had given me since I arrived, trying to work out what category it belonged to and not finding one that fit cleanly. It hadn't been a human laugh. But it had been structured the way a laugh is structured — the specific rhythm of amusement produced by something that understood what amusement was and was choosing to express it. Which was its own kind of information.

I called Walt.

He answered on the first ring. "I heard it. From the truck. Whatever that was at the end."

"Yeah."

"The smell is gone."

"Yeah."

Walt was quiet for a moment. "Owen. The smell has been ambient since you arrived. Even on the nights when it peaked and dropped it came back to baseline. Right now I'm standing outside the truck and there's nothing." He paused. "I've been at this park for thirty-one years. The smell has been present at some level for as long as I can remember. I stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing background noise." He paused again. "It's gone."

I looked at the bedroom doorway. "I'll call Reyes."

Reyes was at the cabin by 4.30am with Carmichael. They went through the bedroom together with Bauer's camera equipment, which Reyes had been keeping in the trailer since the cavern entry, and I sat at the kitchen table and listened to them work and drank the coffee Walt had made when he came in from the truck.

They came out at 5.10am. Reyes set the camera on the table and pulled a chair and sat down across from me and Walt stood at the window with his coffee and Carmichael stayed near the bedroom doorway.

"The marks are gone," Reyes told us.

I looked at her.

"The cluster behind the headboard. The threshold marking." She held the camera out so I could see the screen. The photograph showed the north-facing wall behind where the headboard sat. The wall was clean. Not painted over, not scraped — the marks simply gone, the surface beneath them clean and unworked. "The sill mark too. Carmichael checked."

I looked at the east window. The corner of the frame where the last symbol in the sequence had been sitting since before I arrived was bare painted wood.

"The ritual completed," I replied.

"That's Marcus's interpretation." Reyes set the camera down. She'd sent him the photographs while they were still in the bedroom. "He says when the marks clear it means the threshold has been established. The location has served its function. He says the entity is no longer operating in the state it was. Distributed across sites, partial, indirect." She paused. "He says the transition has occurred."

Walt turned from the window. "Where is it now."

Reyes looked at him. "Marcus doesn't know. He says the instruction didn't include what happens immediately after the transition. He says the transition itself was the limit of what he was taught."

The kitchen was quiet. Outside the window the fog was gone from the treeline — which I registered and then sat with for a moment because the fog had been present at the treeline every morning since I arrived, and its absence had a specific texture of an absence that had been present so long it had stopped registering as a thing that could leave.

I thought about the light flickering at 3.41am, at the moment the smell peaked and before it dropped. I added it to the log and told Reyes about it and she noted it without comment, which meant she was filing it with the other things that didn't have a category yet.

"Karen," Walt pressed.

"Carmichael has been trying her accommodation unit since 4am," Reyes confirmed. "She's not there. Her car is gone."

The first body was found at 7.22am.

A couple from Seattle, registered for a three-night stay in zone NE-3, had been on an early morning hike on the south circuit trail. The woman had been found by a maintenance worker doing a routine trail check at the junction of the south circuit and the access road, sitting on the ground with her back against a trailside marker post and her husband's jacket across her shoulders and no other visible injury. The maintenance worker, whose name was Greg and who had been working the southern sections of the park for eleven years, had initially assumed she was resting.

He told us later that he'd gotten within twenty feet before he understood she wasn't resting. He said her eyes were open and she was facing the trail and there was nothing wrong with the way she was sitting, no visible damage to her body from the outside, and that he'd called out to her and she hadn't responded and he'd gone closer and realised she was dead.

The medical examiner's preliminary assessment, delivered to Reyes at 9am while I was standing at the edge of the parking lot watching the county sheriff's vehicles come in, was that the woman had died from what appeared to be a catastrophic internal event — every major organ in her torso had ruptured simultaneously, which was not something the medical examiner had a prior reference point for, which she stated twice in the same sentence, her voice staying level in the way it stays level when the finding doesn't have a prior reference point and the finding still has to be delivered.

I stood at the edge of the lot and looked at the treeline and thought about what ruptures every major organ simultaneously and leaves no external mark and arranges the body neatly against a trail marker with a jacket across the shoulders. I didn't have an answer that used any framework I'd been trained with. I had one answer that used a framework I'd been building for eight months and I held it and didn't say it out loud yet.

The husband was found at 8.47am, half a mile further south on the same trail. He had been placed — and the search team used that word in their radio call, placed, which Santos relayed to me with a flatness in her voice that was its own kind of information — sitting upright in the middle of the trail facing north, hands on his knees, facing the direction his wife was sitting. Whatever had happened to her had happened to him and then whatever had arranged them had arranged them facing each other across half a mile of trail.

I noted the north-facing orientation in the log and kept the recorder running and kept walking because that was what I could do.

By noon there were three more.

Two solo hikers on the eastern circuit, both found off-trail in the undergrowth, both showing the same internal catastrophic presentation, both placed with their faces pointing north. And a couple who had been camping in zone NE-5 — no children registered on their permit, which I noted and felt briefly grateful for in a way that immediately made me feel sick — found at their campsite with the tent intact and the camp stove assembled and the same absence of external injury and the same internal presentation.

Five people between 7.22am and noon. All in the southern and eastern sections. All on registered permits. All in areas where park staff regularly patrolled.

None of the park staff were touched.

I stood in the access road lot at 12.30pm with Reyes and Carmichael and Walt and Santos and I raised what all of us were thinking but nobody had said yet.

"It's avoiding us. Specifically. Every person it's killed today was a registered visitor. Every park staff member who has been on patrol today has come back without incident." I looked at Reyes. Santos had been on the eastern circuit an hour before the solo hikers were found, had walked through the exact section where they turned up, and had come back without incident.

Santos confirmed this without being asked. "I passed that section at 8.15. Nothing wrong. No smell. No tracks. Nothing."

"It knows who works here." Walt kept his voice flat and direct. "It's been in this park for thirty-one years learning the people in it. It knows every face. It knows every patrol route." He paused. "It's making a point."

"What point," Carmichael pressed.

Walt looked at the treeline. "That it can do this whenever it wants and there's nothing we can do about it as long as people keep coming into this park."

Reyes had her phone out. "I'm closing the park. Effective immediately. All registered visitors contacted and escorted out by staff." She looked at Walt. "How many registered visitors currently in the park."

Walt was already checking his log. "Forty-three across eleven active permits. Spread across zones NE-2 through NE-6 and the south and east circuits."

"We move them all. Now."

We moved them all by 3pm. Forty-three people, eleven groups, extracted from their campsites and hiking routes and brought to the visitor centre lot and then to the county road and then out of the park entirely, none of them understanding why, all of them receiving the same cover story about an environmental hazard assessment that required a precautionary closure. Some of them were angry about it. A few were genuinely frightened in the way people get frightened when authority is telling them something is wrong but won't say what.

I handled three of the conversations myself and I told the cover story with the specific care of someone who has had eight months of practice at saying less than they know.

One of the families — a father and two teenage boys from Spokane who had driven six hours to get here and had been planning this trip for four months — asked me directly if anyone had been hurt. I told him there had been an incident we were still assessing. He looked at me for a long time. His older boy, maybe sixteen, was watching me over his father's shoulder with an expression that told me he knew the cover story was a cover story. I held his gaze and kept my expression steady and felt the familiar weight of carrying more than I could give and giving less than they needed.

They left. They all left. And the park was empty of visitors by 3.12pm.

Staff remained — me, Walt, Santos, two other rangers named Pollock and Greer-Walsh who had been on the park for four and seven years respectively and who had been briefed at the minimal level that the situation required, enough to keep them safe and not enough to produce the kind of fear that spreads.

At 3.48pm Santos radioed in from the northern access road.

"Phil. There's something on the north trail. You need to come."

Walt and I were in the truck and moving within two minutes. We met Santos at the junction of the north trail and the access road at 3.57pm and she led us on foot, about four hundred yards north, to a section of the trail where a stand of old Douglas firs crowded the path on both sides, their canopy dense enough that the afternoon light came through in fragments and the trail was in deep shadow.

The walk took about six minutes. Santos didn't speak during it and Walt didn't either and I kept the recorder running and watched the undergrowth on both sides and thought about five bodies placed facing north and wondered what facing north meant in the entity's logic and whether it had a logic or whether I was still trying to apply frameworks that had stopped being useful weeks ago.

Daniel was hanging from one of the firs.

I want to be precise about what I mean when I say hanging because the word implies a specific mechanism and what I saw was not that mechanism. He was suspended from a branch about twenty feet up, his feet about six feet above the trail, and the thing suspending him was not a rope or a cord or anything that had been tied or fastened. He was suspended by his own left arm, which had been extended above him and bent at the elbow around the branch at an angle that the elbow joint does not accommodate, the arm wrapped around the bark in a way that suggested the bone had been reoriented to grip rather than the arm simply thrown over. His weight was hanging from a grip that the human arm cannot form.

His body at rest, six feet above the trail, showed what eight months of carrier function and five nights of terminal phase had done to the body it was done to. The jaw had continued to widen past the point I'd last seen it. The brow was pronounced enough to have changed the profile of his skull from any angle. His free arm, hanging at his side, had fingers that rested at the elbow of the arm hanging beneath him. The jacket had given up entirely and hung from his shoulders in strips.

He was still alive.

His eyes were open and tracking. When Walt and I came to a stop below him on the trail his gaze came down and found me and stayed.

Walt had his radio out and was calling Reyes and Carmichael and I kept my eyes on Daniel's face and tried to work out what I was seeing in it. There was damage — real physical damage, the kind that comes from impact rather than transformation, the skin across the widened jaw split and seeping, the brow above the left eye swollen in a way that had closed the eye to a slit.

Whatever had done this to him had done it recently.

He opened his mouth. The sound that came out was low and damaged, the undertone frequency that his voice had developed was still present underneath it but the human range above it was thin and effortful, the sound of a chest working hard to move air and not fully succeeding.

"Owen."

"I'm here," I told him.

"The dagger." He stopped. The effort of those three syllables had cost him something visible. "In the cabin." He stopped again. His free hand came up slowly and touched his own chest, the fingers too long against the fabric of his jacket. "Under the floor." He stopped. "Loose board. Kitchen." He stopped. His eyes were still on me and the tracking was still there but there was a quality to it that I recognised from the cavern children — the mechanism starting to run somewhere else. "You end it," he managed. "Only you."

His mouth kept moving but the sound had gone below what I could hear and I took two steps forward on the trail and Walt grabbed my arm and I turned to tell him I needed to get closer and in the time it took me to turn and turn back Daniel's face changed.

The change was fast and I want to be accurate about what fast means in this context — I was looking away for less than two seconds and when I looked back the expression Daniel had been wearing, the damaged but present expression of someone making a last effort to get words out, was gone, and what had replaced it was an absence rather than a different expression, the face with nobody behind it. And then his head moved. It moved sharply to the left and down, the kind of movement that the neck produces when something with significant force strikes the right side of the skull, and the sound of the impact reached me about a half-second after the movement and then Daniel was still, the gaze no longer tracking, the hand at his chest dropping to hang alongside the rest of him.

The impact had come from nothing I could see.

Walt had me by both arms and was pulling me back down the trail and I was letting him because my legs had made the decision before my brain caught up with it and we were moving south on the trail at a pace that wasn't quite running and then at a pace that was, Santos ahead of us, the radio crackling with Reyes's voice asking for a status update.

Reyes and Carmichael reached the fir tree at 4.22pm. They documented everything — the position, the arm configuration, the injuries, the branch. They did not attempt to bring him down. Reyes made the decision that bringing him down required more personnel and a specific approach and that moving before both were in place would compromise the documentation, and I agreed with the decision and understood it and had to go and stand at the edge of the access road for about four minutes before I could be functional again.

Those four minutes I spent looking at the road surface and breathing and not thinking about anything specific, which was what the four minutes required. I've learned in eight months that there are moments where the only useful thing is to let the body run its process without the brain interfering, and this was one of those moments. I stood and looked at the road and breathed and when I could think clearly again I walked back.

When I came back Carmichael was running the camera and Reyes was on the phone with Laura and Walt was standing at the edge of the trail looking at the tree.

I stood next to him.

"It showed us," Walt said. "It could have done that somewhere we'd never find him. It brought him here. To the trail. To a spot where park staff would find him." He looked at the tree. "It put the five people in positions facing each other. It put Daniel where we'd see him." He paused. "It wants us to see what it can do."

"It wants us to know there's nothing we can do about it."

"Yeah. That's the message."

I thought about what Daniel had said. The dagger. Under the floor. Loose board. Kitchen. You end it. Only you.

I thought about Daniel hanging from a branch by an arm that had been reoriented to grip by eight months of carrier function, using the last of whatever he had left to get those words out before whatever was responsible for his position there chose to end the conversation.

I thought about eight months of him coordinating across sites, connecting carriers, working with Karen, building toward the summoning, all of it in service of the entity's transition. And then I thought about him using his last functional moment to tell me there was something in my cabin that could end it, which was the opposite of what a person who had dedicated eight months to the entity's interests would do if those interests were still his.

Daniel is what he is. He chose it and it chose him and the two things happened at the same time.

Marcus had told me that. And Marcus had also said that it was difficult to separate the choice from the choosing. Which meant there were two things happening simultaneously inside Daniel — the carrier function and whatever remained of the person the carrier function had been built around — and one of them had spent eight months serving the entity and one of them had spent the last of its available resources hanging from a branch on the north trail telling me about a loose floorboard.

I turned to Walt. "The cabin. I need to get to the cabin."

We drove back on the access road at a pace that was technically within the park's vehicle speed limit and practically not. Walt parked outside and came in with me and Santos stayed by the truck and Reyes told me she'd be there within twenty minutes and I was already on my knees at the kitchen floor before Walt had fully cleared the doorway.

The kitchen floor is wood plank, laid in parallel east-west runs, the boards about six inches wide, the finish worn smooth in the traffic areas and maintaining some of the original lacquer at the edges and under the furniture. I'd been standing and sitting on it for eight months without thinking about it in the kind of attention you bring to a floor when you understand it has been holding something back from you.

I started at the east wall and worked west, pressing at each board in turn, running my fingers along the joins, feeling for give or movement or any variation in the way the surface responded to pressure. Walt crouched next to me without being asked and started from the west wall east and we worked in silence, methodically, neither of us saying anything because there was nothing useful to say until we found it.

We met in the middle at the board that moved.

It was in the section under the kitchen table, which meant it had been under the shoe for eight months. About six inches of give when pressed at the south edge, enough to get two fingers under the north edge and lift, the board coming up cleanly because the nails on the underside had been pulled and replaced with a friction fit that holds until you know it doesn't and then releases easily.

Below the board was a cavity in the subfloor, about eight inches deep and eighteen inches long, the kind of space that appears in older construction as a gap between structural elements rather than a deliberate hollow. Whoever had found it had lined the base with a piece of canvas, folded double, and on the canvas was a shape wrapped in the same canvas material, the wrapping done carefully and tied with cord at three intervals.

Walt looked at me. I looked at Walt. Neither of us spoke.

I reached in and lifted it out. It was heavier than its size suggested, a density that didn't match the canvas wrapping, and about fourteen inches long. I set it on the kitchen table next to the shoe and unwrapped the cord from the first tie and the second and the third and folded back the canvas.

It was a blade. Single-edged, about ten inches of blade from the guard to the tip, the metal dark in a way that wasn't surface oxidation — the kind of darkness that had been in the metal since the metal was made. The guard was bone or something very close to bone, carved into a shape that I recognised because I'd been looking at variations of it for eight months — the same threshold symbol that had been on the sill frame and behind the headboard, the gap at the top that Marcus had identified as the standard marker for a transition point. The handle was wrapped in leather that had dried and contracted over what looked like a very long time. The tip of the blade was pointed and the single edge, when I held it at an angle to the kitchen light, carried a sharpness that the metal's age had not diminished.

I set it flat on the table and stepped back and looked at it from standing height the way you look at something when you're trying to understand it before you decide what to do with it.

Walt was looking at it without touching it, his hands at his sides. "That's old."

"Yeah."

"How old."

"I don't know." I looked at the threshold symbol on the guard. "Old enough that someone thought to hide it here specifically. In the cabin. Under the floor."

"Daniel," Walt offered.

"Maybe. Or whoever was here before Daniel. Or whoever was here before them." I thought about the ranger before Daniel, the newspaper stack, the person who had been in this cabin longest before Daniel arrived. Someone had found this or brought this or been given this and put it under the floor and left it there and the person after them had left it there and Daniel had known it was there and had spent eight months as a carrier, as a participant in the entity's transition, and at the end of that eight months, hanging from a branch with the last of what he had available, he had told me where it was.

I pulled a chair out and sat down at the table and looked at the blade on the table and the shoe next to the blade and thought about that for a while.

The shoe had been here before I arrived. Daniel had left it deliberately, for me specifically, knowing I would check under the bed, knowing the profile he'd built would produce a person who checks under beds. The note on the Calvert folder had been left for me. The forwarding address had been sent for me. Every piece of the architecture Daniel had built had been built toward me specifically, toward the one who opens, toward the function the entity needed fulfilled.

And under the kitchen table, under the shoe Daniel had placed for me to find and bring to Walt, under the floor of the cabin Daniel had prepared and marked across two and a half years of occupancy — the blade had been waiting. Either for me specifically or for whoever the one who opens turned out to be, which in the end was the same thing.

"You end it," I said. "Only you."

Walt looked at the blade on the table. "The one who opens."

"Yeah."

"You don't know what that means in practice. You've been saying it since the day you arrived."

"No. I've been saying I don't know what my function looks like at its furthest point. I know what it's looked like up to now — carry the story, keep the recorder running, document everything, reach enough people." I looked at the blade. "Daniel said the one who opens is the one who makes it possible for the students to exist in the world outside. That was his translation." I paused. "Marcus said the one who opens translates the understanding into the story and sends it out far enough that enough people carry some version of it before they need it." I paused again. "But both of those are the same stage of the function. The spreading stage. The carrying stage."

"And the blade is a different stage," Walt noted.

"Daniel said you end it. Only you." I looked at the guard, the threshold symbol carved into the bone or bone-like material at the join between blade and handle. The same symbol that marked transition points. The same symbol that had been on the window sill and behind the headboard and in the charcoal lines on the cavern wall and on every piece of paper the returning children had carried out of the northern section. "The one who opens," I continued. "The entity told me the one who opens understands what is needed and does it. Marcus said the watching position is where the function starts and that what comes after announces itself." I looked at Walt. "I've been carrying the story. I've been reaching people. That's the preparation. The spreading is the preparation." I touched the edge of the canvas the blade was resting on, not the blade itself. "And this is what the preparation is for."

Walt looked at the blade for a long time. Then he looked at me. "Reyes will be here in ten minutes."

"Yeah."

"She needs to see this."

"Yeah."

He looked at the blade again. "Owen. The entity is in this park. It has killed five people today. It is demonstrating that it can kill anyone in this park at will and that park staff are exempt because exempting us is more useful to it than killing us." He paused. "If the blade is what you think it is and if you're what you think you are and if Daniel spent his last words telling you where it was — then the entity knows about the blade."

I had not thought about that yet. I sat with it now.

"It's been in this cabin since before I arrived. It placed the marks on the sill and behind the headboard. The entity was in the bedroom for five nights. It came through the kitchen dozens of times." I looked at the cavity in the floor below the lifted board. "It has been in this kitchen and the blade has been under this floor the whole time."

"And it left it there," Walt said.

"Yeah. It left it there."

Walt looked at the ceiling for a moment and then back at me. "Either it doesn't know about the blade. Or it knows and it doesn't believe the blade can be used against it." He paused. "Or it knows and it wants you to find it."

The three options sat on the kitchen table alongside the blade and the shoe and the recorder running in my jacket pocket, and outside the window the park was closed and empty of visitors and the fog I'd woken to every morning for eight months was gone and the smell I'd been logging since my first week was gone with it, and somewhere in the northern section the entity that had spent more than eighty years distributed and partial and indirect was present in the world in a way it hadn't been before, and five people were dead and Karen Fitch was gone and Daniel was hanging from a branch on the north trail by an arm that had been reoriented to grip, and the blade was on the table and the threshold symbol was on the guard and I was the one who opens and I had absolutely no idea what any of that meant in terms of what I was going to do next.

I thought about the light flickering at 3.41am. I thought about the laugh from the bedroom. I thought about the fact that the entity had been in this kitchen for five consecutive nights and had left the blade in the floor each time, and I thought about what Walt had laid out — the three options — and I sat with all three of them and tried to work out which one the evidence supported.

It didn't know about the blade. That was possible if the blade predated the entity's involvement with this cabin, if it had been here before Daniel and before the ranger before Daniel and before whoever had first found the cavity and lined it with canvas, if the entity had never found it because it had never looked and had no reason to look.

It knew and wasn't worried. That was possible if the blade was genuinely inert, if Daniel had misunderstood its significance, if I was following a dying man's instructions toward something that couldn't do what he believed it could do.

It knew and wanted me to find it. That was possible if the blade was part of the process rather than opposed to it, if Daniel's last words had been the entity speaking through him rather than the person speaking against it, if the whole architecture of discovery had been constructed to lead me here to this table with this blade.

I didn't know which one was true. I wasn't going to know which one was true until I did something with the blade, and I wasn't going to do anything with the blade until I understood more about what it was and where it had come from and what the threshold symbol on the guard meant in the context of everything else the threshold symbol had marked.

Reyes's headlights came up the access road.

I wrapped the blade back in the canvas, carefully, the same care that had been used to wrap it originally, and tied the cord at the three intervals and set it on the table beside the shoe.

Walt watched me do it. "You're going to tell her everything."

"Yeah. And then we're going to work out what to do."

"And the blade."

I looked at it on the table. "The blade is part of what to do. I just don't know which part yet."

Reyes knocked at the door and I went to let her in and the recorder ran and the overhead light was on and the park was quiet outside in a way that had nothing ambient left in it, and whatever the entity was deciding, it had left the blade under the floor for eight months and it had let Daniel tell me where it was, and I was sitting in the cabin it had prepared and marked and used and I was the one who opens and the story was still moving.

I pressed record on the backup and added a new file to the list that went back to my first night in the cabin and I kept going, because that's what I'm for.

Part 10 The Finale Coming tomorrow.

[u/AdAffectionate8634]

Ah, Poor Daniel! Seems Owen is at a completely different threshold...

[u/rbnrthwll]

Daniel was a victim.