22 Feb The Imitation Game

Part I

The camera feed stuttered, a brief flicker of digital noise before stabilizing on the face of Wayne Carter, illuminated by the stark glow of his headlamp. He adjusted the angle, flashing an amused grin at the audience.

“Alright, folks,” he said, voice carrying through the quiet forest. “We’re about four miles into Blackwood National Forest, and Wes is already convinced we’re being watched.”

The camera shifted to Wesley Hanlon, his face half-lit, casting deep shadows across the sharp lines of his features. He let out a dramatic sigh and leaned closer to the lens.

“I don’t think we’re being watched,” Wes corrected, voice laced with mock severity. “I know we are.”

The live chat at the bottom of the screen filled with scrolling text. A mix of skeptics and believers flooded the feed, some urging them forward, others taunting their nerves.

Wayne snorted, shaking his head. “Classic Wes. You hear some leaves rustling, and suddenly Bigfoot himself is breathing down your neck.”

“Not Bigfoot,” Wes corrected. “The Imitator.”

Wayne rolled his eyes, but he didn’t interrupt as Wes turned the camera toward the skeletal trees stretching into the pitch-black expanse ahead.

“Local legend,” Wes continued, his voice taking on the same theatrical cadence he used whenever recounting cryptid lore. “People say there’s something in these woods that learns you. Studies you. And then, when it’s ready—” He snapped his fingers. “It becomes you.”

The chat erupted in response, some laughing, others expressing discomfort. One user, S3ance42, typed:

That’s why no one ever finds the missing people. They do, but they don’t know it.

Wayne scoffed. “That’s some real comforting stuff. Thanks, buddy.”

Wes ignored him, continuing his tale as they walked. “Hunters, campers—hell, even some cops—have reported weird sounds out here. Voices calling from the trees, but no one’s there. Sometimes, the voices repeat things they just said, but all… off.”

Wayne grinned at the camera. “So, what you’re saying is, if I call your name—”

“Don’t,” Wes cut in, shoving him lightly.

Wayne chuckled but let it drop. The forest swallowed the sound. Even with their flashlights, the darkness pressed against them, damp and cloying. Leaves rustled in the breeze, and branches groaned overhead, but no birds called. No crickets chirped. Even the distant hum of nocturnal life had quieted, leaving only the steady crunch of their boots against the underbrush.

Wes slowed, eyes darting toward the trees.

“Okay,” Wayne muttered, lowering the camera slightly. “What?”

Wes didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he raised a hand, motioning for silence. He tilted his head, listening. The chat swarmed with speculation.

Did you hear that?
There was a whisper.
Guys, what’s wrong?

Then, from somewhere ahead, a voice cut through the night. “Okay… what?”

Wayne’s blood ran cold. The voice’s tone was flat and toneless—but it was unmistakably his. He swung the camera forward, scanning the tree line. Nothing but gnarled branches and skeletal trunks, swaying slightly in the wind.

“Tell me you heard that,” Wes whispered.

Wayne swallowed hard. “It’s an echo.”

“An echo from what?”

Wayne didn’t have an answer.

The chat filled with alarmed messages, frantic and confused.

PLAY IT BACK!
There was something behind you!
Dude, it sounded JUST like Wayne!

Wayne forced a laugh, the sound brittle. “Okay, okay. Let’s not freak out over a weird sound.”

Then, from behind them, something spoke. “Okay… okay. Let’s not freak out.”

Every muscle in Wayne’s body seized. The words had been repeated, but twisted, like someone struggling to recall how a sentence should be structured. Like a machine attempting to mimic speech but failing just enough to make it wrong. Wes let out a strangled breath. Wayne gripped his flashlight tighter, angling it toward the undergrowth. The beam stretched deep into the trees, illuminating nothing but more endless dark.

Then, a figure, barely visible between the trunks, shifted. Wayne whipped the camera toward it, catching only a glimpse before it moved—fast, impossibly fast—vanishing into the shadows.

The chat exploded.

RUN!
WTF WAS THAT???
OH HELL NO
BEHIND YOU

Wes swore under his breath while Wayne forced himself to keep the camera steady. He wanted to believe it was an animal, a trick of the light—but his gut screamed otherwise.

“We keep moving,” he said quietly.

Wes hesitated, then nodded. They pressed forward, moving faster now, the tension thick between them. The chat continued its frantic warnings, but Wayne ignored them, too focused on keeping his nerves steady. The night pressed in.

Somewhere, just beyond the reach of their lights, something was listening.

Part II

The forest had changed. Wayne felt it before he could put words to it, the sensation creeping in like a slow infection. The trees pressed closer, their branches gnarled and reaching, as if they had grown denser in the last few minutes. It was impossible, but so was the voice that had spoken behind them, warping his own words into something wrong.

The chat scrolled in frantic bursts at the bottom of the screen. The feed was still running, thousands watching, waiting, urging them to leave.

Wes didn’t need convincing. He kept close, his movements clipped and tense, headlamp casting erratic beams of light across the forest floor. His breathing had gone shallow, barely audible over the crunch of their boots.

Wayne’s fingers felt stiff around the camera, his grip tightening with each step. “Let’s just—”

A voice cut through the dark. “Let’s just—”

Wayne whipped around, the camera swinging wildly. Nothing but trees, gaping dark between them. His breath hitched as the realization set in. It had come from ahead of them this time. Wes locked eyes with him, and though neither of them spoke, the understanding was instant. It wasn’t behind them anymore. It had circled.

Wayne forced his voice to remain even. “We keep moving.”

Wes nodded. “We get back to the truck.”

The chat erupted in agreement.

Wayne adjusted the camera strap over his shoulder and picked up the pace, his pulse hammering beneath his ribs. They had made it out of worse. The human mind played tricks in the dark—how many times had they gone hunting for ghosts, cryptids, urban legends, only to walk away with nothing but eerie stories and high engagement rates?

That had to be what this was—except, it wasn’t. The sensation of being watched had sharpened, a needle-like pressure against the back of his neck. No matter where he turned, it felt like something had already moved, just out of sight.

Then, they heard a whisper, coming from the left, curling through the trees like mist.

“Wayne.”

His steps faltered. It had spoken his name. He turned sharply, the camera catching only the trembling leaves where something had just been.

The sound of movement rippled ahead of them, a low rustling, the barest scrape of something brushing tree bark. Not quite footsteps, but close.

Wayne caught up to Wes, speaking low. “I don’t care what kind of viral gold this is—we end the stream when we hit the clearing.”

“No argument here.”

They moved quickly, the path twisting in unfamiliar ways. The trail should have been straightforward, but every turn seemed wrong. Had they come from that direction? No—hadn’t that tree been on the left before?

The chat had turned to full-blown panic.

WHERE ARE YOU??
THE TREES MOVED. GO BACK. GO BACK!
WAYNE WTF? CHECK UR 6

The static came first—a low crackling hum, rising over the ambient noise of the forest. Wayne glanced down at the equipment, adjusting the mic. The sound didn’t stop. It grew. His stomach turned. That wasn’t coming from the gear—it was coming from somewhere else.

Then came the sound of laughter, a dry, broken sound that took a second for Wayne to register. It was thin and warped, but there was no doubt about it. It was Wes’s laugh. But there was just one problem: Wes hadn’t opened his mouth.

His stomach lurched. “Did you—”

Wes shook his head violently. “No!”

Wayne breathed heavily. His grip on the camera strap turned painful, nails pressing into his palm. They weren’t alone. Something else had joined the conversation.

The laughter tapered off, melting into the static and the wind, into something that hadn’t been there before.

And then it spoke. “Did you—”

Wayne’s voice.

He staggered back a step, the ground suddenly unsteady beneath his feet. The camera slipped in his hands, the lens shaking as he swung it toward the sound.

A figure stood between the trees, vaguely humanoid, the light catching it in brief flashes. Its arms were slightly too long, its fingers moving in strange, hesitant jerks. Its face, obscured by shadow, tilted curiously, observing them. Wayne could see the outline of a mouth, a suggestion of lips curling in an unnatural, half-formed grin.

It took a step forward.

No—that wasn’t right. It hadn’t taken a step, not exactly. It had skipped like the frames in a lagging video, its movement fractured into something wrong.

“Move!” Wes whispered.

Wayne couldn’t. He knew better. Knew that if something wasn’t right, if something felt wrong in the woods, that you didn’t stare, engage, or try to understand it. And yet, he was frozen.

The figure twitched again. It glitched again, closer still.  And then, it spoke:

“Move.”

The voice was the same—his voice.

Wes grabbed his arm, yanking him back so hard his shoulder wrenched. The moment shattered, Wayne stumbling as Wes pulled him into a full sprint. The camera swung wildly, catching nothing but streaks of black and gold as they ran.

The chat was chaos. Messages blurred, thousands of people screaming through text, all of them reduced to meaningless symbols. Wayne’s breath heaved. He forced himself forward, his brain catching up to his body in disjointed bursts. His shoulder ached where Wes had grabbed him. His legs burned. He had lost his bearings entirely. The only thing keeping him moving was the sound—the laughter—following them.

Wayne glanced back, the camera bouncing in his grip, blurring everything into streaks of color and motion. But for a second, a single, shattering second, he saw it again—the figure standing still among the trees. And beside it, there was another. Wes. No—not Wes. Something imitating Wes.

The camera jerked as Wayne ran harder, muscles protesting. They burst through the underbrush, hitting open ground. The clearing. The truck had to be close.

The chat still scrolled. The stream was still live. He had to—

The camera slipped from his hands.

The world tilted as it tumbled, the feed capturing a final, dizzying blur. And then, it landed, upside down, screen flickering.

The last thing the audience saw was Wayne and Wes—silhouettes against the distant headlights—before the screen cut to black.

The chat went dead.

The livestream terminated.

Part III

The bodies were found three days later.

A pair of hikers stumbled across them near a firebreak, a mile and a half from the main road. They called it in immediately, voices unsteady as they described what they had seen—two men, slumped against separate trees, eyes wide open, limbs awkwardly arranged as though they had been posed. Their heads rested at unnatural angles.

Detective Paul Riggins arrived at the scene just after dawn, the rising sun barely cutting through the heavy mist curling low across the ground. He had worked enough missing persons cases in the area to recognize the inevitability of grim discoveries, but this one felt different. The men hadn’t just collapsed there. They had been placed. Positioned. Their expressions were not contorted in pain but frozen in a dull, absent stare.

No obvious injuries. No blood. Just the wrongness of their stillness.

Riggins crouched beside the nearest body, studying the way the arms were folded across the chest, fingers half-curled, like a marionette left to rest mid-motion. He didn’t like the way the head sat on the shoulders—tilted too far, the skin at the throat stretched tight. A fracture, maybe. A snapped spine.

The second man—positioned across from him, propped against another tree—was in the same condition. The exact same position.

Riggins exhaled sharply through his nose. “Jesus.”

A uniformed officer, young and visibly unsettled, hovered nearby. “No signs of a struggle. No drag marks.” He hesitated. “It’s like they just… sat down and died.”

Riggins didn’t respond right away. He shifted his focus to the ground, looking for any hint of what had brought them here. Boot prints led up to the trees, matching the victims’ shoes, but there were no signs of pursuit. No blood. No broken branches indicating a desperate escape.

The young officer cleared his throat. “You know who they are?”

Riggins nodded, standing. “Yeah. I know.”

It had been impossible to miss. The case had already spread beyond their jurisdiction, even before the bodies turned up. Wayne Carter and Wesley Hanlon—cryptid hunters, social media personalities, paranormal thrill-seekers—had gone missing after broadcasting a livestream from these very woods. Their last known moments had played out in real-time to an audience of thousands.

And now they were dead.

Riggins had watched the footage himself. It had been difficult to follow—shaky camera work, panicked movements, the night swallowing most of the details—but the audio had been worse than the visuals. The moment when the voices started repeating, the distorted mimicry creeping into the dialogue like a parasite left an impression that Riggins hadn’t been able to shake.

The stream had ended in chaos, with the camera tumbling and the feed cutting out. That had been the last trace of them.

Until now.

A forensic tech approached, lowering her camera. “No immediate cause of death,” she said, her voice tight. “No external trauma aside from the way their heads are positioned. We’ll have to confirm back at the lab, but—” she hesitated, glancing at the bodies before looking back at Riggins. “It doesn’t look like they fought back.”

Riggins met her gaze. “Meaning?”

“Meaning if someone—or something—did this, they didn’t resist.”

He frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

She shook her head. “No. It doesn’t.”

The crime scene was documented, and the bodies transported, but the unease remained. As the team packed up, Riggins stood at the edge of the tree line, staring at the spot where they had been found. Something gnawed at him, an unanswered question buried in the quiet.

The victims had been discovered near a firebreak. A clearing. The last place they had been seen running toward in the livestream.

But there was a problem: their truck was still there. And they hadn’t been anywhere near it.

* * * * * *

Holly Tran sat at her desk, fingers poised above the keyboard, staring at the livestream archive without pressing play. She had already watched it once. That had been enough.

Wayne and Wes had been her friends. She had been moderating their streams for nearly two years, filtering through chat, banning trolls, and keeping things organized. She had never believed in the cryptid nonsense they chased, but that had never mattered. The show had been fun. A game. Until now.

The official cause of death was still unknown, but the authorities weren’t treating it as a homicide. No defensive wounds. No clear injuries beyond the unnatural tilt of their necks. Holly had studied every moment of the footage, analyzing the timestamps and reading the chat logs. The viewers had seen something—a figure in the trees, something shifting at the edges of the frame. At one point, someone had typed, THERE ARE TWO WESLEYS.

She had paused the video and rewound it, frame by frame. It had taken her three attempts before she saw it. It occupied a fraction of a second. A glitch in the movement. Wayne had turned toward Wes—only Wes had already been standing next to him. The second Wes hadn’t been there a moment before.

Holly’s stomach twisted as she replayed the moment again, her mind rejecting the impossible. The shape had been almost right, but the shoulders were slightly too high, the posture subtly wrong, the way the head moved—not like a person turning, but like a puppet being adjusted on unseen strings. It was impossible.

But Wayne and Wes were dead, and their bodies had been arranged like dolls. The thought made her feel sick.

The chat logs were still open. She scrolled through the final minutes, reading the frantic reactions.

GET OUT!
DID U SEE THAT???
BRO WTF TWO WESLEYS!

And then, the final comment before the feed cut:

THE OTHER ONE ISN’T LEAVING.

Holly closed the window, pushing away from the desk. She needed air. She wasn’t superstitious. She didn’t believe in ghosts or demons or whatever the hell people thought they had seen in that livestream. But she believed in something being wrong.

The footage hadn’t been altered. There were no signs of tampering. And the worst part? Wayne had seen it, too. She could tell, now that she was looking for it. The moment his face had gone pale, his expression shifting from confusion to terror. He had realized what he was looking at. And then, he had run.

* * * * * *

The first call came just after midnight. Holly was still awake, staring blankly at the ceiling, willing herself to stop thinking about it. Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.

She picked up without checking the number. At first, there was only silence. And then, she heard a low, crackling distortion.

Her grip tightened. “Who is this?”

In response, there was yet more static, followed by a rustling noise, like wind through trees. And then, a voice. “Who is this?”

Her stomach clenched. It was her voice.

A moment later, the call disconnected.

She stared at the screen. The number was unfamiliar, and the call was unidentified. She lowered the phone slowly, bile rising in her throat. Just then, a notification popped up: Cryptid Pursuit is LIVE.

She gasped. That wasn’t possible. The channel had been inactive since their deaths.

Her fingers hovered over the screen, reluctant, but she had to see. She tapped the notification—and the stream opened.

At first, the screen was entirely dark, save for a faint, shifting glow, like weak flashlight beams moving through the trees. And then, over the faint rustling of leaves, she heard a slow, shuddering, inhuman breath.

The chat was already filling with messages.

WHAT IS THIS???
GUYS THIS ISN’T RIGHT
WAYNE?

And then, a voice broke through the silence.

“Holly.”

It was Wayne’s voice. But something was wrong. It dragged and stretched as if the speaker was remembering the shape of the word in real time.

The camera tilted slightly, adjusting, and the breath came again, slow and shuddering. And then, the screen cut to black.

The chat froze, and a final message appeared:

“We’re not done playing.”

Part IV

Holly didn’t remember getting out of bed. One moment she was staring at her phone, the words Cryptid Pursuit is LIVE burning into her retinas, and the next she was in her living room, laptop open, fingers trembling against the keyboard.

The video feed was still up. The chat had slowed, uncertainty settling in as viewers tried to make sense of what they had just seen. Wayne’s voice—if it had been his—still echoed in her head. She replayed it, forcing herself to listen:

“Holly.”

Her throat tightened. It wasn’t right. The tone, the cadence—it was close, but the edges were wrong, stretched in ways that a voice shouldn’t be. It lingered too long on the consonants, like something unfamiliar with the mechanics of speech was trying to wear the name.

A new message appeared in the chat:

You hearing this?

More followed:

That wasn’t Wayne.
Who’s running the account?
Check the VOD—it’s already gone.

Holly switched to the archive tab, but the livestream wasn’t there. It hadn’t been saved. Her stomach twisted. That wasn’t how the platform worked. Even if the account owner deleted a video, there was usually a delay. But this—this had vanished instantly, as though it had never been uploaded at all.

Another message scrolled by, standing out from the rest:

Rewind.

She frowned. “Rewind?”

She clicked back to the live feed. The screen was black. There was no audio.

But the timestamp—

It was still running.

The stream was still on.

Holly hesitated, then dragged the playback bar backward. The darkness gave way to grainy movement. Her breath caught—the camera had shifted. It no longer pointed at the empty trees. Instead, it had turned—angled slightly upward, aimed toward a break in the branches. Through the gaps, the night sky was barely visible, the stars obscured by drifting mist.

For a moment, nothing happened—and then the lighting changed. The shadows deepened and stretched, distorting into unfamiliar shapes.

The chat exploded.

Did that just move??
Rewind, look at the tree on the left
Something’s standing there

Holly’s fingers went numb. She squinted at the frame, forcing her eyes to focus. The movement had been subtle, but it was there. Something had stepped into view.

She rewound a few seconds, watching again. At first, the trees were empty. Then, in a single, unnatural motion, a shape appeared, seemingly out of thin air. It stood at the edge of the frame, barely distinguishable from the darkness, its form human but wrong. The proportions were just slightly off. Its limbs were held too stiff, and its head was tilted too far, with the suggestion of a mouth set in an expression that didn’t belong.

The longer Holly stared, the more certain she became.

It was facing the camera. It knew they were watching it.

Another whisper rose from the speakers:

“Hello.”

Holly jerked back. It wasn’t Wayne’s voice this time, or hers. She reached for the laptop instinctively, as if she could shove it away and shut it off, but the video feed froze. The audio cut out mid-whisper, and the screen went black.

The chat continued for another few seconds before stopping entirely. And then, with no warning, a final message appeared in the center of the screen:

“We are only getting started.”

* * * * * *

Holly didn’t sleep. She sat curled in her desk chair, staring at the dark monitor long after the stream ended, long after the chat had fallen silent.

Her mind refused to settle. She had been so certain that it was a hoax. That someone had hacked the account, tampered with old footage, or manipulated the broadcast. But deep down, something clawed at the edge of that certainty, a whisper of doubt threading through her thoughts. Because she had seen it—the thing standing in the trees.

She pulled up her phone, fingers unsteady. Her first instinct was to text someone—anyone—but she hesitated over the keyboard, unsure of what to say. Instead, she scrolled back to the last messages she had sent to Wayne, just over a week ago:

U guys alive? The chat’s losing their minds. Seriously, text back.

The messages had never been opened.

She swallowed hard and exited the thread, switching instead to her call log. Wayne’s number was still there. She hovered over it.

Don’t be stupid, she told herself. It won’t connect. It’s just a number.

Her thumb moved before she could stop herself. The call rang twice, then picked up. She heard nothing but silence. Holly froze.

“…Wayne?”

The static was faint, but it was there. And then, something whispered.

“Hello.”

It was the same voice from the stream.

She ended the call immediately, her hands shaking. Before she could process what had just happened, a notification popped up: Cryptid Pursuit is LIVE. Holly’s stomach lurched.

She didn’t open it. She didn’t want to see.

Her phone buzzed again. A text—with no name attached. It was just a single message:

“See you soon.”

* * * * * *

Detective Riggins stared at the transcript, his lips pressed into a tight line. He had never cared for the cryptid nonsense. He had spent too much of his career dealing with actual cases—missing persons, unsolved deaths, things that had explanations, even if they weren’t good ones.

But this—this was something different. The stream had ended, but the account was still active. The logs were still populating, filling with messages from viewers who didn’t know whether they had witnessed a prank or something else entirely.

And Holly Tran had gone silent. Her last known activity was an outgoing call to a disconnected number. Her apartment was empty. There were no signs of forced entry or of a struggle. The only thing even remotely out of place was her laptop, left open on her desk. The screen was black, and the cursor blinked over an unfinished message in the chat:

“It’s not him.”

Part V

Detective Riggins wasn’t a man easily rattled. Years of law enforcement had dulled his nerves to most things—gruesome crime scenes, grieving families, cases that went cold before they had the chance to thaw. He had seen bodies in worse conditions than the ones they had pulled from Blackwood National Forest. He had even handled cases involving missing persons who had turned up later, so altered by whatever they had experienced that they barely resembled who they had been before.

But this was different. The transcript of the final Cryptid Pursuit stream sat on his desk, printed out in its entirety. He had read through it twice already, trying to convince himself that the hysteria of an online audience had blurred the truth. Yet the details remained the same.

Wayne and Wes had been running. From what, no one could say. The footage was too chaotic to pinpoint a single threat, but the chat had noticed something. Glimpses of an extra figure. Overlapping voices that shouldn’t have been there. The final moments, where Wayne had turned to Wes, only for the chat to explode with messages screaming, “That’s not Wes!”

Riggins exhaled slowly, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Holly Tran had been his best chance at figuring out what had happened that night. She had known Wayne and Wes better than anyone. She had spent years moderating their content, keeping things organized. If there had been a hoax, she would have been the one to uncover it.

But now she was missing.

Her apartment had shown no signs of forced entry. Her phone was still there, resting neatly on her nightstand. No calls had been placed from it in the past twelve hours—at least, none that made sense. Except for one, a call placed to a disconnected number—Wayne Carter’s number.

Riggins stared at the record, then back at the transcript. Something didn’t fit. He leaned back in his chair, letting the pieces rearrange themselves in his mind. Wayne and Wes had fled something in the forest. They had been terrified, their voices raw with panic. But their bodies had been found sitting against trees, their heads tilted and their limbs arranged. There were no signs of a struggle, and no defensive wounds.

Riggins had been a cop for over two decades. He knew what it looked like when someone was posed after death. Wayne and Wes hadn’t been posed.

They had sat down.

* * * * * *

The internet had already moved on. At least, that was how it looked on the surface. A few channels had covered the story—YouTubers speculating about The Imitator, debating whether the deaths were a hoax or something darker. Some claimed the whole thing had been an elaborate stunt, while others swore they had seen something in the trees.

Holly wasn’t sure why she kept scrolling through the comments. She wasn’t even sure why she was still awake. She had packed a bag an hour ago, turned her phone off, shut her laptop, and convinced herself that she would leave town before morning. But she hadn’t left. Instead, she had been staring at the black screen of her laptop, fingers frozen above the keyboard, waiting for something she couldn’t name.

She hadn’t told anyone what had happened—not about the call, not about the voice. Not about how, after the Cryptid Pursuit account went live again, she had started noticing things in her apartment—a delay in her reflection when she passed a mirror, a half-heard whisper when she closed her eyes for too long.

She had tried to ignore it, but she’d failed. Now, sitting in the dark, she felt the weight of something unseen pressing against her skin, like a static charge building in the air before a storm.

Her fingers moved without thinking. She opened the chat logs again and scrolled to the last message she had typed: “It’s not him.” She didn’t remember typing it. She had never hit send. And yet, there it was, frozen on the screen.

She swallowed hard—and the screen flickered. For a fraction of a second, her reflection in the laptop monitor didn’t match her movement.

She slammed the screen shut.

She was done waiting.

* * * * * *

The forest was wrong. Holly had expected the unease—she had spent years watching footage of these trees, listening to Wayne and Wes talk about the legends, the disappearances. But nothing had prepared her for standing at the edge of them, staring into the void beyond the trailhead.

She gripped the flashlight tighter, forcing herself forward. She had to see the clearing for herself, the place where they had last been seen. She had already found their truck, still parked where they had left it. The doors were locked and the keys were gone—but there were footprints leading away from it. Two sets going in, and none coming out.

The trail stretched ahead of her, winding through the trees. The deeper she went, the quieter everything became.

Her flashlight flickered, and Holly stopped. Ahead of her, just beyond the reach of the beam, the trees shifted. Amidst them, she caught a glimpse of a shadow, taller than the others.

She forced herself to take a step closer. The light wavered again, and for a moment, she could have sworn she saw a half-formed face—just barely visible, like a blurred reflection on water.

“Holly,” a voice said, interrupting the silence.

She turned and ran. Her own name followed her, repeated in broken whispers, voices overlapping in a chorus of mimicry. She pushed herself forward, legs burning, branches clawing at her arms. The trail twisted in directions she didn’t recognize, the path warping beneath her feet.

Then she spotted a light, a break in the trees. She stumbled into the clearing, chest heaving, and stopped. There, at the center, stood two trees, and against them, there were two figures.

Wayne and Wes.

Holly’s breath escaped her in a strangled gasp.

They were sitting just as they had been found, but their eyes weren’t open, and their heads weren’t tilted. They weren’t dead. They were waiting.

Wayne moved first, his hands uncurling slowly. Then Wes’s head lifted, and his mouth opened. Together, they repeated, “We’re not done playing.”

* * * * * *

Riggins stared at the laptop, jaw clenched. The new Cryptid Pursuit stream had ended hours ago. The footage was already gone.

To make matters worse, Holly Tran was now missing, and something was still using their voices.

He reached for his phone. He didn’t know who he was calling, but he had a feeling that whoever answered wouldn’t sound quite right.

Part VI

Detective Riggins sat in his car outside Holly Tran’s apartment, listening to the faint hum of the radio beneath the quiet of the early morning. He had gone over the details a hundred times, turning them over in his mind like puzzle pieces that refused to fit. Three people were missing. Two had been found dead. And yet, they were still talking.

Riggins wasn’t the type to get caught up in ghost stories. He had spent his life dealing with real horrors—murders, kidnappings, cases where the human mind twisted in ways it wasn’t supposed to. But this wasn’t human.

He stared at the phone in his hand. The last number dialed was Holly’s. The call had gone through. There was no voicemail or automated message telling him the line was disconnected. Someone had picked up. And for nearly ten seconds, there had been nothing but breathing.

Then, finally, a voice came through the line, saying just one word:

“Paul.”

It wasn’t distorted or unnatural, as Riggins had expected. It was surprisingly familiar, as if Holly herself had whispered his name through the receiver, waiting for him to respond. Still, Riggins had heard something layered beneath the word, like a second voice trying to produce the same tone. He had hung up immediately, gripping the wheel hard enough for his knuckles to turn white. He had wanted to tell himself it was just a trick of the mind, a bad connection, an echo through the speaker.

But then the notification came through: Cryptid Pursuit is LIVE. 

* * * * * *

The chat had been hesitant at first. A handful of viewers had tuned in, expecting another glitch, another broadcast that would disappear the second it ended. But when the stream stabilized and the screen flickered from black to grainy night vision, the numbers started climbing. People wanted answers.

The first few messages Riggins scrolled through were cautious:

What is this?
Who’s running the account?
Is that… the forest?

The camera was moving, unsteady but controlled, as though someone was walking through the trees, filming the way forward. The angle was wrong—held too low, tilted slightly—but the forest was unmistakable. A thin mist coiled along the ground, swallowing the space between the trees.

Then, a slow, shuddering breath interrupted the stillness, and the chat erupted.

Oh, hell no!
NOPE NOPE NOPE
Someone say something!

The breathing continued, deep and measured, filling the silence.

And then, someone whispered.

“Hello.”

The word came softly, stretched slightly at the edges, like a voice pulled from memory. The cadence was off, just enough to unsettle anyone that heard it.

More messages scrolled in:

That sounded like Wayne.
No, it sounded like Wes.
Why does it sound like BOTH?

The camera paused, and the breathing continued. And then, in a voice that was almost Holly’s, something spoke:

“Come find me.”

* * * * * *

Riggins wasn’t sure why he was watching. He had told himself he wouldn’t. He had seen the last one, had read through the logs, had listened to the recordings of whatever had spoken through Wayne and Wes’s voices before the stream cut. But this was different.

Holly was still missing, and now something was pretending to be her.

The stream flickered as the camera moved again, tracking through the trees. The image was unsteady, but the path was familiar.

Riggins leaned forward. He had seen this place before—it was where they had found the bodies. The two trees stood just ahead, the ground untouched since the day the forensic team had packed up and left. The scene was the same—the stillness, the eerie sense that something had been left unfinished.

But something was different. There were footprints in the dirt, leading away from the trees.

The camera tilted upward and, standing just beyond the clearing, there was a figure.

The viewers lost their collective minds:

SAY SOMETHING!
WHO THE HELL IS THAT?!
IT’S HOLLY, RIGHT?

Riggins tensed. The figure was standing too still, too straight. Then, it took a step forward.

The chat exploded.

IT’S HER!
HOLLY SAY SOMETHING
WHY IS SHE MOVING LIKE THAT???

Riggins didn’t blink.

The figure’s movement was agonizingly slow, as though it was testing the mechanics of motion itself.

And then, a voice spoke:

“Paul.”

The screen of Riggins’s phone went black, but the call remained active. He inhaled sharply, jerking back.

The voice whispered again.

“Come find me.”

The same words from the stream.

Riggins tightened his hand around the phone. “Where are you?”

The voice on the other end hesitated, but then spoke.

“I don’t know.”

He stood so quickly that his chair scraped against the floor. The video feed was still running, and the camera was still aimed at the figure. The chat was unraveling, some users crying hoax, others swearing they had heard something in the background—another voice, layered beneath the first.

But Riggins wasn’t looking at the screen anymore. He was looking at the window behind his desk—at the reflection staring back at him. At a macabre facsimile of himself, and the way its head tilted a fraction too far. The breath stalled in his throat. Then, in a voice that was almost his own, something spoke.

“That was fun. Let’s play again.”

The Cryptid Pursuit stream went offline at 3:17 AM.

The chat froze, the video disappeared, and the account was gone.

For a few minutes, the internet panicked. Then, the first emails came in. Anonymous uploads. Fragments of footage. The same clip, sent to hundreds of users.

The video was barely twenty seconds long. It was a shot of a window, with a reflection in the glass. The shape of a man stood behind it, watching from the other side. And over the final frame, everyone heard a voice, one last time, whispering a single word, over and over again, each utterance a sickening mockery of the voices of everyone who had disappeared.

“Hello.”

None of the victims were ever heard from again.

Detective Riggins abruptly resigned a month later, and he, too, disappeared.

From the outside, everyone assumed the pressure and the guilt had gotten to him. But those who had viewed the Cryptid Pursuit livestreams knew better.

They knew the reason why no one ever found the people gone missing in Blackwood National Forest.

They knew there was something in the woods that studied Riggins and that, when it was ready—

It became him.