Pt.1: I hadn’t seen another car for over an hour before I turned onto the narrow dirt road, the kind that forced branches to scrape along the sides of my truck as if warning me to turn back. The deeper I drove, the more the trees swallowed the light behind me, headlights shining and the hum of my engine. When I finally found a relatively empty clearing, it felt like a neat spot to set up camp open enough to see in every direction, quiet enough to believe I was alone. Near sunset, as I hammered the last tent stake into the ground, I noticed a faint column of smoke rising in the distance beyond the trees. It was thin and gray, barely visible against the fading sky, and it disappeared as quickly as I focused on it. I stood there longer than I meant to, squinting through the branches, telling myself it was good to know someone else was out there far enough away not to bother me, close enough to know where another person was in case of emergency. Sometime passed as I got my bearings, stacking firewood and arranging my gear, the rhythm of small tasks settling my nerves. As darkness drifted over the sky, the forest noise slowly settled in, crickets tuning up, leaves shifting, the distant crack of cooling wood in my fire. It didn’t take long for my hearing to adjust, each sound separating itself into something recognizable and harmless. That’s when I noticed something different. Beneath the layer of natural noise was a second rhythm faint movement pacing somewhere beyond the reach of my firelight. The steps were steady and heavy footed, too deliberate to be random, and every time I shifted in my chair to look in that direction, they stopped completely. The silence that followed wasn’t empty, it felt expectant, like whoever or whatever was out there had paused to see what I would do next… #fyp #creepy #analoghorror #scarystories #horror - @youloing.juice