North of Brookstone, a malignant air seeped into the atmosphere, unleashing an unnatural feeling on all it hemmed in. Animals were the first to sense the unwelcoming presence, desolating an area thick with forests and marshes. The mountain's mythology and unmatched beauty draws many visitors, but there is no way to determine who can pass through without incident.
*****
Minor cuts and bruises covered the survivor, having torn through the trees and brush to flee her tormentor. She couldn’t even see what she was running from when she stumbled onto the road, stopping only when her eyes met the headlights of an oncoming truck. A local huntsman swerved to the other side to avoid her. Anywhere else it would have been a deer. He pulled over to ensure she was ok and found a distraught woman desperate to get her spouse help.
With a tremulous voice, she recounted escaping on foot from some unseen force. “I had to leave him behind.” The huntsman had 911 on the phone, trying to relay what the shaken young woman was saying. She made little to no sense, but enough strange happenings had taken place in these mountains to give him reason to believe her. First responders took the woman to a local hospital to recuperate and allow investigators some time to discover who she was and where she came from.
Another group of emergency responders found her husband behind the wheel of the couple’s Jeep, not far off the road, an ax planted in the right side of his head. His startled wide eyes appeared to be looking out the passenger’s open door. Dried blood covered the ax and the inside of the windshield. The rescue mission ended and an evaluation of the crime scene began. He didn’t have a chance. They pronounced him dead at the scene. She said there was a presence in the Jeep with them. Looked more like the work of a person than a presence.
Sheila Jenkins was vacationing with her spouse, Rick, when their holiday became a nightmare. They started up the off-road trail in the late afternoon and followed it into the night. There was never a map so vague as their off-road map of the area. They had gone with a short trail that appeared to exit on the other side, even with no sign of where the other side was.
The pass offered some striking landscape but was not as short as it appeared on the map. They kept going just up around the next bend, expecting pavement with distance signs informing of the mileage back to camp. They didn’t see either. Instead, after traveling 30 to 40 miles on a dirt road, they found mile markers with no clue what they counting down to.
The worst day of her life played over and over in her mind. About midway through their excursion, they arrived at a “You are here” map, which gave them no indication of where they were. It showed them alongside a large reservoir with a road that ran from one side of the map to the other. There were no clear names on the map for the road or the body of water to help them decipher their location. Any living people or animals were last seen prior to them starting up the off-road pass. They were alone in unfamiliar territory. Sheila’s phone was dead and Rick’s did nothing but flicker and flash. Electronic issues were a repercussion of the negative energy, comparable to the Bermuda Triangle only in the sense they were lost and their navigation devices were useless. By the time darkness fell, both grew agitated, but they continued on.
When awake, Sheila was the accused for still being alive. Whispers of her stability surrounded the suspicions of Rick’s death. Detective Hudson was the first on the scene when the local huntsman called 911, and he determined Sheila’s guilt the minute they pulled Rick’s body from the Jeep. During their interviews he reminded her of the life insurance policy she stood to benefit from, then laid out different scenarios and various motives. “Tell me, were you fighting when you struck Rick with the ax?” When she didn’t respond as planned, he tried a different angle. “Was it self-defense, Sheila? Is that why you did it?” He continued with how all the evidence pointed to her. “Your prints are all over the ax.” Of course, she and Rick both handled the ax. If only she hadn’t moved it to under the front passenger’s seat.
Sheila wanted to sleep to help her forget, but when her eyes closed, she was back on the road with Rick. The first car they came across, some Subaru crossover, sat empty on the side of the road. The occupants were nowhere in sight. Maybe they got out to hike. There was no sign of camping. There were no tents or personal items nearby.
Mile markers continued to count down to somewhere. As they traveled down the deserted road, her thoughts filled with the illusion of an ax severing the limbs of strangers. Sheila shivered, not knowing what her mind watched. She wished he didn’t leave the ax in the back of the Jeep. The only reason it was in the Jeep at all was Rick saw a free ax that someone left behind. He could never walk away from free stuff.
It was ponderous when she first became frightened at Rick finding an ax after learning the history of the mountains. A man she spoke to at the campground had warned her about how often people left on a day trip to never return. Nobody spoke much about how they just vanished, but the locals always knew when another was gone. Eventually, a service would come and haul their RV or trailer out. She never shared this with Rick.
After several hours alone on the road, they pulled over to collect their thoughts. Rick opened up the back to grab some waters from the cooler and Sheila picked up the ax. Rick didn’t question it when Sheila slid the ax under the passenger’s seat. It gave her a sense of security against whatever was lurking with them that had chased off all forms of life. They continued without realizing an opportunity to turn back could soon cease.
During a series of questions from the detective, Sheila reflected on a strangeness that overcame her right before she bailed from the Jeep. A warm breeze encompassed her, while a deep whisper sent chills through her. There was nothing physical about it, but she felt its presence. The detective’s response to this was that she was in the right place. They would not allow Sheila to leave the hospital until the police finished their investigation. She didn't want to leave, anyway. She couldn't face their loved ones or the questions awaiting her when she returned home.
The detective looked every bit of his fifty years as he squinted at the photographs of the scene before he shared them and several details with Sheila. He told her how they found the ax buried in Rick’s skull. Then pushed her to confess or implicate herself in the murder. No matter how many details he shared, Sheila didn’t remember hitting Rick with the ax, just that she fled to get him help. Sheila stared at the detective in silence as she imagined Rick’s last thought when he saw the ax about to make contact. She had lots of time to think these days and few friends to relate to. She could only speculate what became of the occupants of the Subaru.
During the investigation, police scoured the area for the driver and any passengers of the abandoned Subaru. More than a week passed before they suspended their search. With such dense forests, they knew the possibilities of finding the lost were unlikely. Besides, they could have found their way out with another motorist. The tags on the crossover were two years expired.
Not long after they stopped searching, officers stumbled upon the remains of two bodies in proximity to each other. The skull of the female had clear trauma resembling that of an ax. Her skull split apart directly above her left eye. Unlike the recent discovery of Rick Jenkins, someone or something had removed the ax.
The second body was male. The position he was in almost looked as if he was running from something and eaten alive while in motion. They had never found remains arranged in such a way. It opened up the possibility that something supernatural could have taken hold of Sheila’s body at the time of the Rick’s murder.
The bodies were in the elements for some time. Their clothing had disintegrated, and the bones weathered, but detectives could not have been more certain the remains were those of the missing motorists. Their deaths must have occurred a couple years prior to the newest murder.
The Subaru didn’t have any documents to identify the two, but that didn’t stop investigators from learning the names of the lost. They identified Dee and Terrell Jackson through the National Crime Information Center database. It’s never easy notifying surviving family members they found the missing deceased. Detectives hoped this wasn’t just the beginning of the deceased notifications.
They recovered more bones and found more victims with an ax related trauma. About half of the remains were the presumed suspects, and whatever devoured them was likely the same thing that first consumed their mind. It must have needed one to kill before it took the other for itself. It controlled the one it used to kill and then killed the one it controlled like it was some game. Maybe it didn’t have the power to kill those it couldn’t control.
Detective Hudson didn’t want to believe a supernatural force could be the reason for the remains they were finding strewn throughout the mountains. He would rather search for a natural serial killer. No connection existed between the couples who fell victim, aside from them being out-of-state visitors on a mountain getaway. He shuddered to think how many more there may be and whether Sheila Jenkins was the only one to escape.
It grew apparent this maleficent presence had been living off visitors for years. Investigators saw the only logical way to get rid of it was to starve it. Authorities worried it might just move on to another territory where it could feed off the visitors again, but it would no longer be their concern. They blocked all access to the mountain’s hiking, camping, and off-road trails to the public. Yellow police tape sectioned off areas where they discovered remains. They could not say when the backcountry would be safe again.
When Sheila wasn’t sleeping, or answering the detective’s questions, she found herself with therapists trying to recover her memory. They took her on many guided imagery trips, and not once did she recover the memory of planting an ax in Rick’s skull. They talked of returning to the scene to help her recover her memory, but she couldn’t see how that would lead to anything positive. If they were looking for a confession, she wouldn’t appease them.
What she remembered was pausing briefly at the top of the off-road pass to take a photograph. It was the last time things felt normal. They discussed turning around at that point, but when looking at the pass before they saw beautiful scenery without the rocky terrain they had just gone over. Their tires weren’t in the best shape to go out the way they came in.
Their awareness of the lacking wildlife peaked when they passed over the top and started down the backside. The desertion of human and animal life in the area was just one peculiarity of the back-mountain road. Most of the secluded mountain areas they crossed in their lifetime had wildlife scattered throughout, and even though they retreated to the mountains to escape humankind, they had never had such success in finding solitude. There wasn’t so much as a bird in the sky from the time they started up the trail. It was just unnatural.
It was hard to conceive how all walks of life could abandon such a beautiful green area until she felt the unwelcoming presence of the unseen. Sheila wondered how many it slaughtered and whether any other before her escaped the atrocity. She thought about Rick and their love that continued until death parted them. Sheila remembered the first time they met, their first date, and their first trip together. She reminisced of the day he proposed, their wedding, and their vows. She recalled the fights. Whether good times or bad times, she couldn’t imagine going on without him.
She tried to remember what brought them to the area. She thought of all the other trails they explored through the years and how different this one was from the rest. From the start, they didn't like it, but they continued on despite it. Now nothing will ever be the same. Like many others who were lost, they would still have each other if they had just turned back.
With the number of bodies they pulled from the area, detective Hudson had to reconsider his opinions of Sheila. None were locals, except for an emergency responder from the crime scene of Rick Jenkins. As for the visitors who never made it out, their families and friends must have been searching for them. Maybe they just didn’t know where they visited last before they were lost. Others who encountered the vile presence had not survived what Sheila survived. He didn’t want to see Sheila imprisoned if there was something else in control of the ax. He had bluffed his way through the interrogations with her. They never checked the ax for fingerprints.
They never brought charges against Sheila. Investigators determined there wasn’t enough evidence to prove intention or even that she was the one to take the fatal swing. With the number of skulls recovered indicative of an ax related trauma, they only found one ax and that was the one left in Rick Jenkins head. The ax never made it into evidence because it never made it out of the mountains. The paramedic who removed the ax from Rick’s skull met his own untimely death by asphyxiation. He didn’t take a swing at anyone when he picked it up. It was like some freak occurrence, maybe he couldn’t handle the toxicity of ax and it just sucked the breath right out of him. No one else attempted to pick it up after that. After they cleaned the rest of the scene up, the ax remained on the road. Two months passed, and she had never set foot outside of the hospital. Sheila was ready to leave behind the small rooms with solid white walls, but she wasn’t ready to go home.
*****
Once they released Sheila from the hospital, she returned to the scene. She went alone, with an inclination the ax could not be used to kill if there was no one else there. The ax was easy to spot on the dirt road. She had enough anger in her to break the blade away from the handle when she swung it against a boulder just off the trail. She had to destroy the ax to ensure it could no one could use it to murder again. She built a fire and watched the broken handle and blade burn. A stench strong enough to induce vomiting filled the smoke and air. Once the handle was ashes, she dug the deepest hole she could manage and buried the blade. That was the last effect the ax would have on her or anyone else.
A change in the air took place at once. There was a peacefulness that came with getting away from everything but nature. The fresh mountain air carried the scent of pines and flowers. The only sound was the fast-flowing water of the river nearby. She knew the destruction of the ax cleared out the evil when an eagle took the sky above her.
*****
Minor cuts and bruises covered the survivor, having torn through the trees and brush to flee her tormentor. She couldn’t even see what she was running from when she stumbled onto the road, stopping only when her eyes met the headlights of an oncoming truck. A local huntsman swerved to the other side to avoid her. Anywhere else it would have been a deer. He pulled over to ensure she was ok and found a distraught woman desperate to get her spouse help.
With a tremulous voice, she recounted escaping on foot from some unseen force. “I had to leave him behind.” The huntsman had 911 on the phone, trying to relay what the shaken young woman was saying. She made little to no sense, but enough strange happenings had taken place in these mountains to give him reason to believe her. First responders took the woman to a local hospital to recuperate and allow investigators some time to discover who she was and where she came from.
Another group of emergency responders found her husband behind the wheel of the couple’s Jeep, not far off the road, an ax planted in the right side of his head. His startled wide eyes appeared to be looking out the passenger’s open door. Dried blood covered the ax and the inside of the windshield. The rescue mission ended and an evaluation of the crime scene began. He didn’t have a chance. They pronounced him dead at the scene. She said there was a presence in the Jeep with them. Looked more like the work of a person than a presence.
Sheila Jenkins was vacationing with her spouse, Rick, when their holiday became a nightmare. They started up the off-road trail in the late afternoon and followed it into the night. There was never a map so vague as their off-road map of the area. They had gone with a short trail that appeared to exit on the other side, even with no sign of where the other side was.
The pass offered some striking landscape but was not as short as it appeared on the map. They kept going just up around the next bend, expecting pavement with distance signs informing of the mileage back to camp. They didn’t see either. Instead, after traveling 30 to 40 miles on a dirt road, they found mile markers with no clue what they counting down to.
The worst day of her life played over and over in her mind. About midway through their excursion, they arrived at a “You are here” map, which gave them no indication of where they were. It showed them alongside a large reservoir with a road that ran from one side of the map to the other. There were no clear names on the map for the road or the body of water to help them decipher their location. Any living people or animals were last seen prior to them starting up the off-road pass. They were alone in unfamiliar territory. Sheila’s phone was dead and Rick’s did nothing but flicker and flash. Electronic issues were a repercussion of the negative energy, comparable to the Bermuda Triangle only in the sense they were lost and their navigation devices were useless. By the time darkness fell, both grew agitated, but they continued on.
When awake, Sheila was the accused for still being alive. Whispers of her stability surrounded the suspicions of Rick’s death. Detective Hudson was the first on the scene when the local huntsman called 911, and he determined Sheila’s guilt the minute they pulled Rick’s body from the Jeep. During their interviews he reminded her of the life insurance policy she stood to benefit from, then laid out different scenarios and various motives. “Tell me, were you fighting when you struck Rick with the ax?” When she didn’t respond as planned, he tried a different angle. “Was it self-defense, Sheila? Is that why you did it?” He continued with how all the evidence pointed to her. “Your prints are all over the ax.” Of course, she and Rick both handled the ax. If only she hadn’t moved it to under the front passenger’s seat.
Sheila wanted to sleep to help her forget, but when her eyes closed, she was back on the road with Rick. The first car they came across, some Subaru crossover, sat empty on the side of the road. The occupants were nowhere in sight. Maybe they got out to hike. There was no sign of camping. There were no tents or personal items nearby.
Mile markers continued to count down to somewhere. As they traveled down the deserted road, her thoughts filled with the illusion of an ax severing the limbs of strangers. Sheila shivered, not knowing what her mind watched. She wished he didn’t leave the ax in the back of the Jeep. The only reason it was in the Jeep at all was Rick saw a free ax that someone left behind. He could never walk away from free stuff.
It was ponderous when she first became frightened at Rick finding an ax after learning the history of the mountains. A man she spoke to at the campground had warned her about how often people left on a day trip to never return. Nobody spoke much about how they just vanished, but the locals always knew when another was gone. Eventually, a service would come and haul their RV or trailer out. She never shared this with Rick.
After several hours alone on the road, they pulled over to collect their thoughts. Rick opened up the back to grab some waters from the cooler and Sheila picked up the ax. Rick didn’t question it when Sheila slid the ax under the passenger’s seat. It gave her a sense of security against whatever was lurking with them that had chased off all forms of life. They continued without realizing an opportunity to turn back could soon cease.
During a series of questions from the detective, Sheila reflected on a strangeness that overcame her right before she bailed from the Jeep. A warm breeze encompassed her, while a deep whisper sent chills through her. There was nothing physical about it, but she felt its presence. The detective’s response to this was that she was in the right place. They would not allow Sheila to leave the hospital until the police finished their investigation. She didn't want to leave, anyway. She couldn't face their loved ones or the questions awaiting her when she returned home.
The detective looked every bit of his fifty years as he squinted at the photographs of the scene before he shared them and several details with Sheila. He told her how they found the ax buried in Rick’s skull. Then pushed her to confess or implicate herself in the murder. No matter how many details he shared, Sheila didn’t remember hitting Rick with the ax, just that she fled to get him help. Sheila stared at the detective in silence as she imagined Rick’s last thought when he saw the ax about to make contact. She had lots of time to think these days and few friends to relate to. She could only speculate what became of the occupants of the Subaru.
During the investigation, police scoured the area for the driver and any passengers of the abandoned Subaru. More than a week passed before they suspended their search. With such dense forests, they knew the possibilities of finding the lost were unlikely. Besides, they could have found their way out with another motorist. The tags on the crossover were two years expired.
Not long after they stopped searching, officers stumbled upon the remains of two bodies in proximity to each other. The skull of the female had clear trauma resembling that of an ax. Her skull split apart directly above her left eye. Unlike the recent discovery of Rick Jenkins, someone or something had removed the ax.
The second body was male. The position he was in almost looked as if he was running from something and eaten alive while in motion. They had never found remains arranged in such a way. It opened up the possibility that something supernatural could have taken hold of Sheila’s body at the time of the Rick’s murder.
The bodies were in the elements for some time. Their clothing had disintegrated, and the bones weathered, but detectives could not have been more certain the remains were those of the missing motorists. Their deaths must have occurred a couple years prior to the newest murder.
The Subaru didn’t have any documents to identify the two, but that didn’t stop investigators from learning the names of the lost. They identified Dee and Terrell Jackson through the National Crime Information Center database. It’s never easy notifying surviving family members they found the missing deceased. Detectives hoped this wasn’t just the beginning of the deceased notifications.
They recovered more bones and found more victims with an ax related trauma. About half of the remains were the presumed suspects, and whatever devoured them was likely the same thing that first consumed their mind. It must have needed one to kill before it took the other for itself. It controlled the one it used to kill and then killed the one it controlled like it was some game. Maybe it didn’t have the power to kill those it couldn’t control.
Detective Hudson didn’t want to believe a supernatural force could be the reason for the remains they were finding strewn throughout the mountains. He would rather search for a natural serial killer. No connection existed between the couples who fell victim, aside from them being out-of-state visitors on a mountain getaway. He shuddered to think how many more there may be and whether Sheila Jenkins was the only one to escape.
It grew apparent this maleficent presence had been living off visitors for years. Investigators saw the only logical way to get rid of it was to starve it. Authorities worried it might just move on to another territory where it could feed off the visitors again, but it would no longer be their concern. They blocked all access to the mountain’s hiking, camping, and off-road trails to the public. Yellow police tape sectioned off areas where they discovered remains. They could not say when the backcountry would be safe again.
When Sheila wasn’t sleeping, or answering the detective’s questions, she found herself with therapists trying to recover her memory. They took her on many guided imagery trips, and not once did she recover the memory of planting an ax in Rick’s skull. They talked of returning to the scene to help her recover her memory, but she couldn’t see how that would lead to anything positive. If they were looking for a confession, she wouldn’t appease them.
What she remembered was pausing briefly at the top of the off-road pass to take a photograph. It was the last time things felt normal. They discussed turning around at that point, but when looking at the pass before they saw beautiful scenery without the rocky terrain they had just gone over. Their tires weren’t in the best shape to go out the way they came in.
Their awareness of the lacking wildlife peaked when they passed over the top and started down the backside. The desertion of human and animal life in the area was just one peculiarity of the back-mountain road. Most of the secluded mountain areas they crossed in their lifetime had wildlife scattered throughout, and even though they retreated to the mountains to escape humankind, they had never had such success in finding solitude. There wasn’t so much as a bird in the sky from the time they started up the trail. It was just unnatural.
It was hard to conceive how all walks of life could abandon such a beautiful green area until she felt the unwelcoming presence of the unseen. Sheila wondered how many it slaughtered and whether any other before her escaped the atrocity. She thought about Rick and their love that continued until death parted them. Sheila remembered the first time they met, their first date, and their first trip together. She reminisced of the day he proposed, their wedding, and their vows. She recalled the fights. Whether good times or bad times, she couldn’t imagine going on without him.
She tried to remember what brought them to the area. She thought of all the other trails they explored through the years and how different this one was from the rest. From the start, they didn't like it, but they continued on despite it. Now nothing will ever be the same. Like many others who were lost, they would still have each other if they had just turned back.
With the number of bodies they pulled from the area, detective Hudson had to reconsider his opinions of Sheila. None were locals, except for an emergency responder from the crime scene of Rick Jenkins. As for the visitors who never made it out, their families and friends must have been searching for them. Maybe they just didn’t know where they visited last before they were lost. Others who encountered the vile presence had not survived what Sheila survived. He didn’t want to see Sheila imprisoned if there was something else in control of the ax. He had bluffed his way through the interrogations with her. They never checked the ax for fingerprints.
They never brought charges against Sheila. Investigators determined there wasn’t enough evidence to prove intention or even that she was the one to take the fatal swing. With the number of skulls recovered indicative of an ax related trauma, they only found one ax and that was the one left in Rick Jenkins head. The ax never made it into evidence because it never made it out of the mountains. The paramedic who removed the ax from Rick’s skull met his own untimely death by asphyxiation. He didn’t take a swing at anyone when he picked it up. It was like some freak occurrence, maybe he couldn’t handle the toxicity of ax and it just sucked the breath right out of him. No one else attempted to pick it up after that. After they cleaned the rest of the scene up, the ax remained on the road. Two months passed, and she had never set foot outside of the hospital. Sheila was ready to leave behind the small rooms with solid white walls, but she wasn’t ready to go home.
*****
Once they released Sheila from the hospital, she returned to the scene. She went alone, with an inclination the ax could not be used to kill if there was no one else there. The ax was easy to spot on the dirt road. She had enough anger in her to break the blade away from the handle when she swung it against a boulder just off the trail. She had to destroy the ax to ensure it could no one could use it to murder again. She built a fire and watched the broken handle and blade burn. A stench strong enough to induce vomiting filled the smoke and air. Once the handle was ashes, she dug the deepest hole she could manage and buried the blade. That was the last effect the ax would have on her or anyone else.
A change in the air took place at once. There was a peacefulness that came with getting away from everything but nature. The fresh mountain air carried the scent of pines and flowers. The only sound was the fast-flowing water of the river nearby. She knew the destruction of the ax cleared out the evil when an eagle took the sky above her.