In Their Domain

Chapter 4

The three of them moved cautiously as they ventured farther out into the oppressive dark, but it was difficult to get their bearings. It was even harder still to make sense of where the mysterious ringing bells were actually emanating from.

"I can't make out shit," Dean mumbled before stopping to rub his eyes. The dull ache in his head had also grown into a full-blown, throbbing headache, and staring at the camera's bright screen certainly wasn't helping. He could only imagine how the other two were feeling. They'd eaten even less than him at breakfast, and Arlo was the high metabolism type.

"What are you doing?" Arlo whispered when Dean suddenly lowered the camera and started messing with the settings.

"Switching to thermal," Dean replied. "Higher contrast, which should help us see through some of this fog a little better." He took a few more steps before stopping so abruptly that Arlo and Chris nearly collided with him.

"What? Why'd we stop?" Chris said, leaning to the side to try to see over Dean's shoulder.

"Something emitting heat on the ground... just that way," Arlo said from his better vantage point on Dean's left.

Chris tensed. "An animal?"

"It's staying awfully still if it is," Dean muttered.

As they cautiously approached it, they quickly realized that the hot spot was actually two. Once the smear of yellow and orange on the screen was right in front of them, Arlo focused his flashlight on the muddy, soft ground in front of them. He immediately wished he hadn't.

Someone's footprints were imprinted in the mud... pointed right at them.

Dean was the one to notice and point out a trail of far fainter prints that apparently led right up to the one they'd found. As if someone had walked towards them from the darkness up ahead and just stopped.

Chris's skin crawled. "Noooooope," he shook his head rapidly. "This can't be right. This isn't happening right now. We're all just tired. Maybe hit our heads on something. Ran into some psychedelic moss or some shit. I don't like this."

Arlo knew if they were to tell any one of their friends about this, they'd laugh at the idea of being scared of some damned footprints. But fact that they weren't the imprint of boots, or sneakers was upsetting in a way he hadn't expected. Bare feet... Someone was walking around in the woods... at night... without shoes.

"You think it's those girls?" Chris asked, panning his flashlight around them again.

Arlo almost couldn't stand to look every time Chris did. At this point, he was more afraid of actually seeing someone among the silent, twisted trees. "I didn't think to look for shoes. I just saw their clothes."

Dean shushed both of them harshly as the bells chimed again. Soft, but clearer this time. "If they are out here just fucking with us, I wanna know," Dean said.

Chris swallowed thickly. "And if they aren't fucking with us?"

"Then I wanna know what happened to them."

Then, as if on cue, the rain just suddenly stopped. Well, maybe it hadn't stopped completely, but it had slowed enough that everything sounded even more still in its absence. Almost as if the weather itself was trying to encourage Dean's bizarre curiosity.

Dean took a few more tentative steps, using the camera to try to follow the trail that was getting harder and harder for the thermal to detect as the ground cooled. Arlo was just behind him, with Chris at his back.

The boys' flashlights sifted through the thick fog that moved in clouds all around them, illuminated like plumes of dust by the beams of light, which seemed to be growing weaker... That, or it was getting even darker now.