The trail grew faint under my boots, the map a useless scrap in my pocket. Dusk bled into the deep green of the Appalachian woods, and with it came the silence—a thick, watchful quiet that made the hairs on my neck stand up. I’d heard the campfire stories, of course. The Red Indians. Not the historical people, but something else—pale, spectral figures said to guard these ancient hills, their skin stained the deep, bloody crimson of the mountain clay.
A twig snapped. I spun, my flashlight beam cutting a frantic path through the gathering dark. Nothing. Just the sigh of the wind through the pines. I told myself it was an animal, my own tired mind playing tricks.
Then I saw the first handprint.
It was on the smooth bark of a beech tree, a perfect, five-fingered mark in what looked like wet, red ochre. My breath hitched. Another was on a mossy rock a few feet ahead. And another. A trail. Not made for me to follow, but to show me I was being followed.
The air grew cold, carrying a faint, metallic scent, like old pennies and damp earth. Whispers threaded through the trees, not in any language I knew, but in sounds—the scrape of stone on stone, the drip of water in a deep cave.
I ran. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drum in the oppressive silence. I burst into a small clearing and skidded to a halt.
They stood in a semi-circle at the tree line. Seven of them. Tall, impossibly thin, their features blurred and indistinct, but their skin… it glowed with a dull, rust-red luminescence in the twilight. They