I'm not looking for advice. I just want someone, anyone, to tell me I'm not the first that I didn't imagine it. Something else is knocked on that hatch before. When I took the job, it felt like a blessing. Two weeks alone on a firewatch tower off grid, paid in cash, so that was part of a remote reactivation program. Some of the towers hadn't been used in years. This one needed a body to make it active again. For funding fine by me. No service, no roads, just a
drop off by helicopter and a daily check in by radio. Notebooks, coffee and way too much instant ramen, and I thought I'd be bored. That was the plan. The tower itself was old than I expected, steel frame, probably World War II era, forty feet tall, with a vertical ladder that groaned when I climbed it. At the top was a single room cabin with wide windows on all four sides, a trapdoor entry, and a thick metal latch locked from within. The moment I stepped inside, I knew something was off,
not wrong, exactly, just off. The room felt colder than outside, even in the afternoon sun. The air was still musty, stale, just still kind of still that feels intentional. The first few days passed like I hoped, slow, uneventful. The red wrote watched clouds, no fire, activity, no animals, barely any wind. But the silence didn't feel peaceful, felt held. Then the
scratching started. He was faint, inconsistent, always at night. At first I thought maybe it was a bird or a squirrel, testing the supports, but it always came from the same spot, beneath the northeast corner of the floorboards. I crouched there with a flashlight more than once, checked the bolts, the framing. Nothing, no gaps, no nests. The sounds kept coming, like fingernails, dragging the slow spirals into the wood. By the fourth night,
I couldn't sleep. I kept imagining it something under the floorboard, tracing circles. Then I found the first message. It wasn't written. It was carved, shallow but deliberate, into the underside of the desk, barely visible unless you were lying on the floor like I was. Five lines don't leave after dark, don't answer the latter, don't look at its hands, don't speak your name, and whatever you do, don't open the trap door. My stomach turned. I hadn't carved that, I
hadn't even touched the desk. I stared at it for a long time, then radioed it in HQ. Told me I was probably reading old graffiti, said a guy station here a decade ago used to write creepy poems. Laughed it off and reminded myself that I was one hundred miles from the nearest person. But that didn't explain the sixth line that I found the next night, or how it was fresh. It doesn't like being watched. That was
carved into the window frame, same jagged strokes. I started leaving lights on after that all night, every bulb, even the flashlight. But around midnight the power flickered, and then I heard it knocking, four slow knocks from beneath the trap door, not from the ladder, not from below, from inside the room, under the floorboards. I didn't move, I just I just stared at the hatch. The bolt was rattling gently, not forced, just tested the way someone might
turn a doorknob to see if it's locked. Her voice whispered my name, not shouted, just whispered, like someone who was lying just beneath the wood, mouth pressed to the grain, and it sounded. It sounded like me. I stayed frozen until the first light of dawn pushed through the windows. When I finally moved, I found something by my cot in the dust. Footprints, bare, human shaped but wrong, the
toes the room backwards. The next day I tried to convince myself I was They opened all the windows, let the wind in, took a cold sponge bath, anything to break the spell. And that's when I noticed the trees. They were closer.
I don't mean they felt closer, I mean they were. There used to be a clearing around the tower, fifty sixty feet at least. Now the pines pressed just below the window. Ledge needles brushed the glass. And that's when I found the photo, folded and wedged between two floorboards near the cot. It was black and white, faded, curled with age. They showed the tower taken from a distance, maybe the edge of the tree line. But something was wrong.
There was a figure standing at the top of the tower, just beneath the hatch, tall, thin, too thin, arms.
Long enough to bend at the knees, fingers that trailed below the rungs. The face wasn't cleared. It was just a smudge like the film had been warped. But in the window above someone was watching, pressed to the glass, wearing my jacket, same hat, same patched shoulder, same expression I'd seen in the mirror that morning. I turned the photo over. A single line was written in blocky uneven pen.
You let it out. I locked the trap door, blocked it with the desk there. I locked the windows, turn on every light in there.
I waited. It didn't knock that night. Instead it whispered, not my name. This time it had said, come back down, like it knew that I remembered something. And that's when the final carving appeared. I thought it yesterday, beneath the cot, carved into the metal support frame. You opened it in your sleep. I checked the hatch, still bolted. I checked the desk, still wedged. But my nails were cracked, my hands ached, My shirt was dirty, staying with pine needles
and something darker. I haven't radioed in since I don't think they're listening anymore. Clearing's gone. I'm surrounded by trees. I don't know if the chopper will ever see me. And across the canopy there's another tower. Was it there before?
It's taller, it's thinner, built of darker metal, windows blacked out, no movement, he said last night when I saw a light inside it just a second, a flicker like a flashlight or a match, and then something at the window pressed against the glass watching me, and it.
Looked like me only smiling.
Either.
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