It was an early morning in the backwater country of Montana. The sun had cracked up in the air and swallowed the whole of the sky in a warm, springtime hue. Among the rolling land of conifers, dead grasses and forest litter, a car bumped along. The gravel road was stubborn and ancient, probably not used for many decades, but that didn’t stop the Stellin family from continuing deeper into the wilderness.
Later that afternoon, as the May heat was crept at its highest, fighting and jabbing at the lifeless bodies of winter’s victims, the Stellins set up camp. Jason, a bearish 42-year-old man with a notable, very unsponsored passion for wilderness survival, slowly hacked away at firewood and sticks. His daughter, Hazel, a 7-year-old girl with a keen eye for all things princess, boredly sat and watched. Her younger sister Birdy and older brother Greg helped Amber (mom) put up the tents. It was blissful, for all of one sunny day.
On the first night of the camping trip, Jason got up around 2:30 AM to go to the bathroom. He walked outside, brushing the sleepy drops out of his eyes, and peed. He stared into the distance over a slight hill that looked out across a rhythmic sea of moonlit pines. They seemed to wave and dance with the muted tune of the stars above; stars that pulsated and spun in a hallucinating cycle that could only come to form in the deepest of uninhabited wildernesses. Jason stood there for a few moments, admiring the dark sky and the whiteness of the moon. Until he glanced further into the trees and saw a figure.
It was no human figure, though, no animal common to these woods. What Jason saw was a silhouette between the blue trees, a floating oval with a few points coming off of its sides and top. It hung there, in the air, hovering like a ghost. The lunar luminescence dripped down onto its back like the gentle echoes of a watery surface above; like a fish still and hungry. Its face was shadowed, but the slight tinge of a reflection bounced off its eyes in the dark.
Jason rubbed his face, unsure of what he saw. As he looked back, the thing was gone.
Years passed and the campsite remained. Torn by the march of time and rain, ripped to pieces and caught under layers of leaf litter, but remained still.
A few hikers who were exploring the nearby rivers found themselves tripping over what used to be the Stellin’s tent. They wondered what a tent was doing so deep in the wilds, so far from civilization. They wondered that until they saw the Stellins’ truck sunken in the ground and rusty as all hell. When the hikers investigated that, however, they discovered a far more sinister story.
The bones and rotted, shredded flesh of Jason, Amber, Birdy, Greg and young Hazel.
It is said that evil things never sleep, or maybe they only hunt at night.