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Gather ‘round…

It had been a stupid little end-of-summer trip. Five teenagers from the same town, three tents pitched in a rough semicircle, and a foldout table buried under chips and cheap liquor.

They came up to the clearing because it was where everybody went at least once before they left for college. The old ridge road led to it if you knew where to turn off and didn’t mind scraping your truck against low branches. It sat far enough out—past the cabins and hiking paths—to give them the exact kind of freedom eighteen-year-olds liked to romanticize.

No parents, no teachers, and no cell service unless the wind felt generous. Just woods, alcohol, and the illusion that nothing bad ever really happened to people who were young enough to laugh at danger.

The fire burned down from a bonfire to something lower by the time the stories started turning ugly. The Bluetooth speaker died an hour ago, and the silence after the music left too much room for the woods pressing in around them. Beyond the ring of light, the trees stood black and endless; old trunks crowded tightly together, their branches knitted so densely overhead they turned the sky into jagged slices of stars.

They were around the fire, all pretending they weren’t keeping one eye on the darkness between one laugh and the next.

Jonah sat with his elbows on his knees and a half-empty can hanging from his fingers, trying too hard to look relaxed. His girlfriend, Ava, sat cross-legged on an old camp blanket beside him, wrapped in his flannel over her tank top because she had started shivering twenty minutes ago and refused to admit it.

On the other side of the fire, Becca propped her boots near the stones and needled Marcus about some ghost story from middle school. Devon, quiet for too long, tipped the neck of his bottle toward the dark tree line and said they were all telling the wrong kind of stories for this part of the woods.

That got their attention. Marcus snorted and told him to spare them the serial killer routine, but Devon only leaned forward, orange light dragging over his face and catching the edge of his grin.

“I’m serious,” he said, his voice pitched lower than the crackle of the fire, so everybody had to lean in a little to hear him. “My granddad used to hunt around here before the park service blocked off half these trails, and he swore there were parts of these mountains nobody should walk after dark. Said the old people had a name for what lived out there before they started calling everything a bear or a cat to make tourists feel better.”

Becca rolled her eyes, but she pulled her boots back from the fire and tucked her feet under herself. “Here we go,” she said, though it had less bite than she probably meant.

“Locals call them Lantern Stalkers,” Devon went on, and everyone groaned because they already knew the legend. “Not because they carry lanterns every night, or because somebody saw a guy in the woods once. They called them that because sometimes people would see a light moving through the trees where no trail should be, too high off the ground to be a person holding it normally, too steady to be some camper. If you saw it once and stayed put, maybe you were fine. If you saw it twice, it had noticed you. If it started moving away and stopping, moving away and stopping, waiting for you to follow…” He paused just long enough for the wind to shift across the clearing. “Then you were already gone.”

Marcus laughed, but the sound came out thin. “That’s not even a story. That’s camp counselor crap.”

Devon looked at him and shrugged. “You want the story part? Fine. My granddad said people disappeared up here long before anybody kept proper records. Hunters, hikers, and one logger back when they were still cutting near the north ridge. Then, later, a couple from out of town, some drunk college kid, a guy with a rifle who swore he’d track whatever was taking deer off his property. They sometimes found things left behind, but my granddad always said the real bad part wasn’t the bodies. It was the ones who lived long enough to come back and talk. They all said they saw a light in the trees and knew they should run, but it felt rude to turn away. Felt wrong. Like the woods wanted them to be polite.”

“That’s creepy as hell,” Becca muttered despite herself.

Jonah gave a short laugh and tipped his head back. “You’re all gone. Three beers in and suddenly manners are what kills you.”

Ava smiled because Jonah always joked when things got too tense, but her smile never fully settled. She had grown up with enough small-town stories to know these woods had their own reputation.

People talked about disappearances around here with that careful, half-skeptical tone that still left room for fear. Even now, with the fire hot against her shins and Jonah warm at her side, she had the strange feeling that something beyond the clearing was listening to Devon speak. And waiting.

Devon sat back and drank, but then he glanced past them toward the tents pitched near the tree line. “Laugh all you want,” he said. “Just don’t go wandering if you need to pee tonight. My granddad said that’s when it gets you. Half asleep, half drunk, stepping out into the dark, thinking you’ll only be a minute.”

Becca told Devon to shut up because she actually knew she’d need to pee later, and now she was going to think about forest demons all night. Everybody laughed, and the tension loosened just enough for the group to dissipate by degrees after midnight.

Marcus and Becca drifted to their tent, still bickering. Devon wandered off to spit into the bushes and came back whistling badly, trying to undo the mood he had made. Jonah and Ava ducked into their tent, a flashlight in hand, the smell of smoke trapped in their clothes.

Inside, the tent was warmer than Ava expected, close with body heat and the stale scent of nylon, dirt, and beer. Jonah crawled into his sleeping bag with a groan and pulled her against his chest, mumbling something about Devon being an asshole.

She laughed softly and told him he had still listened to every word. “Only because Marcus looked ready to piss himself,” Jonah said, his voice already blurred by sleep. He then kissed her temple, lazy and automatic. “If you see any glowing murder lanterns, wake me up first.”

She meant to tell him she would. She meant to stay there tucked against him until morning.

Instead, she lay awake listening to the sounds outside change as the hours dragged on. The fire snapped lower. Somebody coughed in another tent. Wind moved through the trees in long, dry breaths. Jonah was out cold, one arm heavy over her waist, his mouth parted against the top of her head.

Ava stared into the dark and told herself that the unease crawling under her skin came from too much alcohol sitting strangely in her stomach. After a while, she eased Jonah’s arm from around her waist and slipped out because she actually did need to pee, and because she was not about to wake him for that after he had joked about it.

The cold outside hit fast, as did the herbal smell of damp leaves. She zipped the tent behind her and stood still for a second, letting her eyes adjust. The campsite looked stripped down and unfamiliar without a proper fire. The coals glowed under a shell of ash. The shadowed tents in the clearing gave an illusion of hunched, dark animals.

Beyond them, the forest waited with that same patient stillness that had been needling at her all night. Ava wrapped Jonah’s flannel tighter around herself and walked a short distance toward the trees—far enough to feel private but not far enough to be stupid. At least that was what she told herself.

She stepped behind a broad pine and saw the light.

At first, she thought it was one of the guys coming to scare her, but no beam cut across the ground. The glow hung at about eye level between the trees, soft and blue, and too warm to be electric. She froze, one hand at her throat, watching the light move once, sliding deeper into the woods. Then it stopped.