The Eye of Glass

The mountain was tall and malformed. It jutted out of the earth as a singular monolith, unbothered and undisturbed in its growth from any other rock formations budding up against it and contorting its growth or shape. For millions of years, it was left as a black sheep in the vastness, just barely far enough not to fall into the fold of the Appalachian Mountains that eclipsed its height and size. Mount Ostium, as it was known to us outsiders who came to it for study, was a nexus of mystery and old urban legend all across southern Georgia, where it resided long before people had a name for where it lay. In pre-colonial times, it had been the site of legends and several historical events, giving it a sinister reputation worth avoiding.
The first known instance was an outbreak of an unknown illness, as the primary sources were precontact cave paintings likely made by the survivors who sought to quarantine themselves. These paintings supposedly depicted scenes of mass death from what has been suspected to be smallpox, though the actual cause will remain unknown. Years later, the villages of the Creek tribe that populated the valley would be replaced with homesteads and eventually small settlements that blossomed into modern American towns. One town that lay a few miles from the foot of the mountain, Buford, would be the home of 40 families and a team of early geologists and cartographers who would explore the natural curiosity and give Ostium its name, which in Latin meant door. The second great tragedy would occur in 1836 following the discovery of the aforementioned cave paintings by a local hunter who later died in a mudslide. Being the first of their kind to be located in the area, a crude party of intellectuals from all across Georgia would venture into the now-discovered caverns to learn more about Ostium. It would be 8 months after the party set out from their base in Savannah, nearly 100 miles away, they would be declared lost. Anyone could reach where they had stated their base camp would be. Contact was still lost.
The relief force meant to check on them and would not only find that the team was not missing, as all of Buford somehow vanished at that time. While the financial backers of the first group had the resources and supposedly considered sending in more men to find out what happened, the infant government of Georgia would bar any such attempts as they were worried it would cause social disruption. To dissuade public unrest, a superstitious governor trying to establish control over a fledgling state ordered the destruction of any records regarding the disappearance and even the mere existence of anyone associated with the team lost in Mount Ostium or Buford, Georgia, became a hushed topic.
Over the years, new settlements would spring up in the land surrounding Ostium, with numerous homesteads becoming large-scale farms, but no towns would thrive in the shadow of Ostium. The old trading posts evolved into towns and cities, filling up the vast space that once held scattered trading towns and tribes of Native Americans, all of whom knew about what happened to Buford despite the government’s best attempts at a cover-up. It was well known that farmers always made a point to avoid speaking of or grazing their livestock anywhere near the mountain, and the few families that settled there often became seen as outsiders. As time passed, the legends around Ostium evolved into tales that ranged from stories of the mountain housing monsters like Sasquatch and Thunderbirds to the mountain itself being a beacon for aliens or a gateway to hell itself. Despite this, Mount Ostium was perfectly normal regardless of its appearance and all the legends surrounding it over the past 2 centuries. The rocks were a sedimentary build similar to that of the Appalachian range that defined much of the landscape of Northern Georgia. It likely sprang from the ground due to a tectonic anomaly commonly seen in large mountain ranges in other parts of the world. But it wasn’t the rocks that drove us to go there, it was the sounds coming from them.
On September 8th, 2018, everything changed when a construction team in the area reported hearing sounds from somewhere. The first witnesses would claim they noticed a faint moan from what initially seemed like the woods near the mountain’s basin as they worked on a bridge a few miles away. After a through sweep of the area by police in the subsequent days, only one conclusion had been drawn: the sounds were coming from the rocks in the mountain itself, and the closer one got to the hill, the louder the moan got, to the point a team of firefighters sent to investigate stated that facing the mountains foot caused the pathetic moan to become a horrible scream that had a disorienting effect after a while. It had been made clear where the sounds came from, but no one knew why.
The news of the strange sounds in Georgia had caused a resurgence of academic interest in the mountain. Astronomers, topographers, geologists, biologists, anthropologists, and a whole host of other scientific disciplines had begun petitioning the state, which had designated the mountain and some 200 acres of surrounding land as a national monument decades earlier but had done little to open the area up to the public, for permits to send in researchers to learn more about the anomaly. Eventually, the state reluctantly agreed and even granted personal permits to a nearby college anthropology department that desired to resume researching the cave paintings written about in the notes found at the Buford team base camp. The two other geologists were among the researchers sent to explore the ancient mounds and formations. As the youngest and most inexperienced research team member, I felt honored to be selected and uneasy about my ability to come to any conclusive evidence about why the mountain glowed. Before we got there, I didn’t even understand what they meant by a hill that made noise.
Nevertheless, I intended to make myself as helpful as possible to my supervisor, Dr. Hamil. He was our department head at the university where I finished up and was even my teacher for a semester before being hired in the research lab. He was as determined to get results from others as he was himself and never took issue with being candid about it. While not a tyrant, he was blunt and often had a flair for the dramatic, especially when things weren’t going his way. The other team member was Jonathan, an adjunct who had half the experience of Dr. Damil and still twice as much as me. As an amateur mountaineer and cartography enthusiast, he was our department’s choice for a guide in addition to being another researcher. Both men were highly qualified for this task, but I couldn’t help but wonder why I was picked for our journey from Atlanta down to the sticks surrounding the mountain. I had thrown my name in and interviewed just as everyone else had, but I never thought I had a shot and did it more as a joke than anything else. What was I doing here?
Because of the high volume of research permit requests, the government devised a strategy to maximize the efficiency of research; a group of researchers would be allowed into the mountain only if they were paired with researchers in other subjects from other institutions. This would keep people together during the two weeks we would be exploring the mountain, and it also gave us a wider pool of connections should something go wrong. We exchanged contact info with the group before our departure. The three of us would be paired up with a team of archeologists and a journalist from National Geographic. What would they discover? I wondered…
I quickly realized that upon getting to our base of operations, I would have little time to think about my questions. As soon as we could put our bags down, Dr. Hamil caught my and Jonathan’s attention with his iconic thunderous teacher voice.
“Gentlemen, don’t get too comfortable or familiar! We are to begin great work tomorrow! The greatest of our lives!” His excitement was unlike a man of his age and build, but it was palpable.
“Jonathan, as soon as you can, we must organize map-making equipment and draw up a map as best we can to get around there. No one has been in there for decades, but I trust we can figure out a way to maneuver best and hopefully find the source of this problem. We will have to take great care in documenting everything we come across,”
He turned to look at me before Jonathan could respond,

“Martin w-. That is your name, right ?” he raised a sizable gray eyebrow at me, and I responded, “ Yes, sir. What is it ?,” he continued.

“You will be responsible for maintaining all our research equipment. Maintain the cameras and flashlights, research tools, and so on. I’m sure this was discussed in your interview for this position. I must strongly emphasize to you how important it will be to keep a detailed note of your experience throughout this trip. We must return with accurate notes detailing everything we see. This could be a defining moment for all of our careers.”

“Yes, professor, of course. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
I leered for a moment while the professor adjusted his glasses in preparation for giving a haggard response. “What is it, young man?”

“Well, sir, if this cave has never been fully excavated, how will Johnathan be able to navigate us around properly?”

I waited anxiously for his response. And we had hardly spoken to each other outside of briefings and staff meetings, so this felt like my first proper conversation with him.

“Johnathan’s purpose will be to make notes and map outlines for the cave for OUR publication. We will be with a guide whose family has resided near the mountain for quite some time. Our department and many others have hired her as she claims to be the best person alive to navigate through the mountain. The state signed off on her, too; they’ve appointed her as some kind of official state park consultant, so her credentials seem to check out. That being said, it’s a public space, which means we’re welcome to publish our findings on how the mountain looks, sounds, and any of its other operations.”

I nodded in understanding. However, in truth, I didn’t understand how college departments were sinking thousands of dollars into this, and could rely on the instinct of some locals to show us around. The reputation of the settlers who had set themselves up near the mountain was also far from stellar; there had been a series of witch trials in the communities that popped up after Buford, often due to either mass crop failures or the loss of children in the woods. In modern times, so-called paranormal investigators have explored the area to no avail, searching for the spirits of those who had made the area their home. I had no idea how much my co-workers knew about the reputation of where we were investigating for the first time. Still, I knew better than to discuss the paranormal with people who spent so much time using science to rationalize the world around them. They were both award-winning and well-respected in their field, and I was the guy with the stupid questions who would keep the equipment clean. It didn’t feel right to make small talk out of something so out there.
The evening wasn’t much to speak of. We all took our time writing down notes at the doctor’s insistence, which is where I was able to relay the first half of this writing to you. Jonathan and I set out the equipment and took account of the dazzling supplies we would be taking with us: audio recorders, GoPro’s strapped to our helmets, we would need to navigate safely, rock calibrators, GPS trackers, soil sample testers, first aid kits, etc. We felt confident we had more than enough supplies to get us in and out of a cavern that was reported to be less than a mile of traversable space.
Ultimately, we expected to spend 4 days between the mountain and the base camp. I’m unsure if we can gather why the hill is making its strange moaning sounds, but we would quickly become intimately acquainted with its sounds. One of the most bizarre aspects of the moaning mountain anomaly was how it seemed to react to the change between day and night. The moaning seemed to grow during the darkest periods of the night and moon cycles throughout the month. The limited research conducted in the area has shown a consistent correlation between the moaning being stronger during 1:00 am-3:00 am and all but disappearing by the time the sun is fully up. Similarly, during the new moon, when the nights were darkest, the moaning was almost 10 decibels louder during the time surveyed than when the moon was full. Though this research was the first of its kind, it wasn’t definitive, but it was the most anyone had been able to read in the weeks since its discovery. Despite being made aware of this before our departure, it’s impossible to prepare oneself for hearing the sounds of disembodied human anguish emanating in the black of night.
When the sun began to set, the sounds came like a faint noise from wind running through something like a pipe or other obstruction. They hardly sounded human, and I could distract myself from them by worrying about the equipment inventory I had to take, knowing Dr. Hamil would want the perfect organization to make the next day’s work smoother. Jonathan was likewise readying the survival equipment and various tools and papers he would need to draw a crude map estimation when we got to the cavern. It was about 8:00 when the sun would set, and the cries began to get angrier and more desperate. Jonathan was the first to say something:

“What do you think it is, Martins? You’re the local here. You must have some idea.”

I put down the flashlight I had been testing. “I don’t know. This place is always associated with bad stuff, I don’t believe in it. But this is so weird, and it couldn’t have happened in a freakier place. Either way, we can’t figure out what’s going on either. You know?”

He looked at me with the same blank expression he had been carrying since I first met him a year after graduation when I started work at the lab. He was a hard man to read, and his expression left me worried that I had said too much.

“What do you think it could be?” I asked him, trying to look as nonchalant as possible while doing it. “Whatever it is, it’ll put our names on the map if we can figure out some tiny part of the puzzle around this place.”
He looked down, and his voice got quieter, more reflective.
“Can you imagine how big this will be when someone figures it out? It’s like a modern fairy tale. And we can be the ones who bring it to light, like an archeologist discovering a lost civilization. We can be legends, Martins. We can explain the unexplainable; it’s what we are meant to do as scientists.”
he was wide-eyed and stared at me with an utterly stoic face. It would have been inspiring if he hadn’t had a look on his face that looked like he wanted to kill me. I realized this was a high-profile field research opportunity, but others treated it like a religious pilgrimage. Not that they would have wanted you to call it that to their face. The first day has otherwise been uneventful. I hope the noise doesn’t get too lousy tonight; we’ll need as much rest as possible for tomorrow’s first day. I’ll update you all as soon as I can write it down.
I will not get used to the nights around this mountain soon. We had set up some fans in an attempt to drown out the moaning we were expecting with the white noise they produced in addition to keeping us cool in the Summer heat of Georgia. I fell asleep on the couch while finishing up my notes for the evening. It was around 11:30 when I was awoken by what I could only liken to a death rattle. It was faint at first but quickly swelled in my head to a begging plea for death. It’s like the sound you get from blowing an Aztec death whistle, but somehow worse and more human. Cupping my ears between my hands, I stood outside to find that it was no better than being inside the cabin we were given.
What was stranger, however, was the variation in pitch. As soon as I stepped outside and had some sense of what was going on, the screams became multiple, sounding like both a man and woman crying out in a crazed, pain-fueled haze. Standing on the front porch, I felt helpless to the mad cries in the wind; all I could do was yell for my colleague’s name. I quickly heard movement on the backside of the house and then saw a small ray of light emanating from somewhere. I moved around to the other side of the house to meet with Dr. Hamil, standing in his robe and pajamas in the dark and flashing with the flashlight from his cell phone. By the look on his face, I could tell he was out here for a similar reason. He reached into his ear and removed two bright orange earplugs, placing them in his robe’s front right pocket, taking plenty of care before he spoke.
“They didn’t mention that whatever this was would know our names. You hear it, too?”

I was far past confused, and whatever face I made to Hamil clarified my confusion.

“It was calling my name when it started; it was calling me out here; it felt like I could’ve found who was calling. Shit must be getting to us already. Whatever it is, they sent us out here to look for-” “They never said it knew my fucking name!” I was in awe of the horror I saw on Hamilton’s face when my response resonated with him.

I let out the only response I could think up:

“It didn’t call my name; it was just screaming. Screaming bloody murder, too.”
Before I could continue the conversation with him, only one thing came to my mind:
“ Dr. Hamil, where’s Johnathan?”
We rushed back to the house, the howls and screams in the night echoing like gusts of wind. Hamil kept pace as I burst into the room Jonathan and I had meant to be sharing. He was standing in the corner of the room facing away from us, still in his underwear and wife-beater he had worn to bed. Hamil hung back by the door, but I approached him hastily without thinking.
“Jonathan… everything okay?”
I said hesitantly as my walk slowed to a more thoughtful pace. Before I could get any closer, his head dramatically jerked to the right, and he began to turn to face me. Jonathan’s face was uncanny, unlike the strange jerked motion someone makes before they go into a stroke or seizure. The more concerning detail was that his eyes had become glazed over in a milky white haze as if he had suddenly gone blind. Drool ran down his lip. I was afraid he was about to collapse. Suddenly, his face cleared, and now he was staring at us, but point blank with that same serious face he always had. Finally, he broke the silence and tension in the room and spoke, but not in a voice that sounded like his own. It was more shrill but had a gravelly aspect to it too. He spoke with his head to the ground;

“The mountain feeds to make stone move, and heaven sees its children. We are the next verse in its song, but only one of us will see the chorus.”
Before Dr. Hamil or I could say anything, I saw the color rush back to Jonathan’s eyes, and a slight look of confusion on his face before the seizure had him on the floor shaking.

He hit his head badly when he landed on the wood floor, and blood came rushing out of his head quicker than anything I had seen before, leaving a small dent in the floor from how hard he came down. Luckily, Dr. Hamil and I were able to get him stable and stop the bleeding before he could punch his ticket. After a lot of bandages and antiseptic wipes, Jonathan was stable and breathing in bed, albeit unresponsive. We had a radio that allowed us to contact the small force of park rangers meant to keep the few visitors to the forest around the mountain safe. Unfortunately, nobody came. We got very little sleep that night as Hamil and I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Jonathan if anything happened or if he decided to say anything, but he was out cold for the rest of the night.
The morning came with little rest, and the moaning subsided after hours of groans that stayed with us through the night, only compounding our exhaustion and fear. I felt stupid walking into a place like this now, searching for external recognition by going to a haunted mountain surrounded by woods for miles. But that didn’t matter now; it only got us out alive and in one piece. After about 9 hours of waiting, Jonathan’s eyes opened, and he rose slowly, groaning and rubbing the side of his head, which took the brunt of his fall. He seemed normal, and I announced his change to Dr. Hamil, who responded with an abrupt snore from the chair he had been sitting in. I asked Jonathan a barrage of questions, probably freaking him out in the process based on the wide-eyed look and silence he showed during my rant about everything that had happened to him the night before. When I finished, he gasped briefly before simplifying, replying,
“ I was asleep, but someone came into my dreams and wouldn’t let me out. I could hear the groans from the mountain louder than before when I was awake. They wouldn’t let me out until I went back to dreaming.”
Dr. Hamil had risen from his seat before I could say anything. “ Jonathan, who was in your dreams, boy?” The doctor looked almost as haggard as I felt, but it was a good question, and I could tell it stumped Jonathan.
After taking a moment, he responded,
“I’m not sure who it was, David. All I know is they wanted me to hear what the moans had to say; it said they had something to sing to me, like a song. I have no idea what that means, but I know I spent all night listening to the moans. They are different from the ones coming from out here, though.”
Dr. Hamil replied. “If something got a hold of you, Jonathan, and it has some connection with this place, we should get out of here. Now. Our guide is coming for us in about an hour and a half. We can get her to take us out of here; hopefully, we can inform the anthropologists we’re also supposed to work with, but we must prioritize our lives. Especially yours, Johnathan!”
I nodded in silent agreement. If nothing else, we had to ensure Johnathan got back safely and figured out what was causing these problems, from the lab’s safety to at least civilization. My reasoning felt sound, but Jonathan chimed in in protest coupled with an uncharacteristically aggressive tone before I could say more.
“ NO! We have to stay and investigate this. Even if there is personal risk, we are on the precipice of something far greater than we may have initially anticipated. Besides, we’ve taken up too much of the university resources to come back empty-handed and not be committing career suicide. We have to stay!”

I was shocked to hear such a protest, and Hamil quickly revealed his feelings.

“ What are you saying?! You may not realize it, but you were not yourself, Jonathan. I really can’t even begin to assess what caused you to float, lose all color in your eyes, and then slam yourself to the ground. I’m a fucking Geolog- We are all Geologists! We have to get you to someone who can evaluate you. Furthermore, as the department head, I have executive powers over our budget and oversee most of the hiring and promotions; you will not get in trouble if we go back now. Please see the reason, Jonathan.”
I finally spoke up, “ Guys, what the FUCK! We need to leave and reassess the situation. We just need to wait for the guide to get us, and we’ll be able to leave and potentially return. Right, Dr. Hamil ?”
I looked him dead in the eyes to indicate he agreed with me in an attempt to placate Johnathan and what seemed like trauma-induced delusions. Before anyone could respond, we heard the movement of a car pulling up to the cabin from outside. I looked from the kitchen window to see a rundown blue Honda Odyssey. The vehicle was honking before it had stopped, and a wave of relief overtook me. It felt like someone had answered my pleas. We finally could get home
. We all anxiously watched from the window as she exited the car. She was a woman of short stature, no more than 5 feet, if that. She looked to be in her early thirties and dressed in the clothes one would typically wear for this excavation. That’s to say, plain. All except for one detail about her, her teeth were an awful color. The front two of her top row of teeth looked caramel brown where it should’ve been white or at least a lighter shade of color other than the brown plaque and other bacteria that had rotted out her mouth. It was so bad when her lip curled back for a moment and showed the rot of a few of the other teeth, which resembled a few studs of nubbed down teeth, that it was hard to look at her in the eyes just from the revolution I felt thinking about how her breath must smell. She was wearing sunglasses and carried with her some kind of book. I’m not sure what it was, but something about her appearance made her seem like she belonged here, teeth and all. I remained in the kitchen as Dr. Hamil opened the door to let her in. She removed her hat and sunglasses to reveal a big pile of red wavy hair and intensely green eyes resembling jade. Our haggard appearances must have been evident because her first instinct was to crack a joke: “You guys look you’ve seen a ghost. Or was it just the mountain that’s been moaning at night for weeks now?” She cracked a laugh at her remark but quickly realized none of us found her words funny. She continued, “I’m Sandy, your guy’s guide to and through the mountain. I’ve lived around here a long time. It’s got its quirks for sure, but this stuff going on lately has taken the cake for strangeness in the area; it’s got charm. It has a certain way of reeling you in with nature.” We continued staring at her silently, and I could tell she was starting to understand that something had happened. “ Is everything okay, you guys?” Jonathan said,” We’re just a little weirded out by the area. We have the equipment ready to go. Dr. Hamil and Martins and I got it through” I couldn’t believe him, after all this ad he still wanted to go back up on that goddamn mountain? I was so mad and I let it be known quickly” what the fuck is wrong with you people? We experienced a supernatural event and of all of us Jonathan you should understand that if whatever took hold of you last night wants you on that mountain then you have no goddamn business up there.” I puffed with the aggression that was saying those lines leaving me without air in my chest, it was like going light-headed for a brief moment in time while everyone looked at me as if my little outburst had caused two heads to sprout out from my body. Sandy, who seemed very rightfully confused, took a deep breath and spoke up, cutting Jonathan off by a mere few seconds while David Hamil was biting his tongue for the first time on this trip. “Listen, if something about this place has you all rubbed the wrong way, we can leave. I mean, it’s not the first batch of scientists I’ve had to take out of here who couldn’t handle the weirdness of this situation. I mean, shit, it’s downright lovecraftian to have a mountain howling in pain at you night after night. If you wanna hop on the bus, I can take you out of here, and since your campus has exclusive rights to this cabin for a little while longer, I’m happy to reschedule you, assuming I get paid for my work here today. After all, I gain nothing by you staying here” the wink she passed by at me was quick and subtle but not nearly slick enough for me not to realize everything she was saying was bullshit. Even so, she held the key to the only way out of being stuck here any longer, so I figured I would have to trust her to get us to the entrance and not make any funny moves. Hamil seemed fully bought in when he snapped his fingers and grabbed his bag to indicate enthusiasm over the suggestion of Sandy, the total stranger. I knew this was as close as we could get home if she were serious, but putting our lives in the hands of someone who immediately gave off bad vibes to me was not the way to go either. I compromised as we were grabbing our things to leave with Sandy: I’d leave behind a gps tracker in a bag wedged in the back of the cabin next to the fans that fed air into the house from the outside. If something did go south, I could get back here and at least have something resembling a plan B. I had a sneaking suspicion all the rumours I had heard about this place may have some truth to them. If Sandy was descended from early settlers in this area, I didn’t wanna see if the stereotypes about her kind had any truth.
After planting the GPS, I gathered the rest of my items. My intended room with Jonathan, where I had left my supplies, was next to the big fans behind the house, so plating was easy enough. After that, we all silently packed the rest of our items and entered Sandy’s car. If you’ve ever been in a minivan, you still haven’t been in anything like Sandy’s ride. The Ode’s she drove was old. It was so old that I wondered if it was the first of its kind in 1994, before I was born. The first thing you noticed about it, other than its age, was the strange decoration that adorned the trunk, which had the typical minivan back seats folded down to give us four more storage spaces. Green crosses made of tin foil, stars made from gum wrappers and other junk materials, and effigies I couldn’t even begin to tell you about adorned the whole back area of the vehicle.
Despite how weird it was seeing religious icons made of junk like this, the sad part was I didn’t realize these were the bad omen I thought I was so wary of. Our last bag of supplies had been carefully placed among the many symbols in the back of the car, and as soon as I had loaded the last bag into the car, I turned to see Sandy and Jonathan, the ladders eyes were white as milk like the night before. I yelled out a command for them to stop, but there was nothing I could do as they cracked Hamil over the head with a large tripod. He hit the ground and grappled in extreme pain with his head bleeding before passing out. Sandy whispered something in his ear I couldn’t hear. The fear of seeing him sent me back into the vehicle in an ill-fated attempt to find something to defend myself with. I tried to grab a camera or something heavy to protect myself, but it was useless.
Before I could fully get something in my hand, he twirled his body with the grace of a professional hammer thrower to chuck the same tripod right into my forehead. The costly equipment had one of the three long plastic legs break on my nose. Sending careening streaks of blood down my face and completely disorientating me. It was all I did to look in my dazed state in horror as Jonathan approached me with a large log he had found in the wood pile that had been left near the house. The last thing I remember before the log made contact with me was looking into Jonathan’s eyes and seeing that it wasn’t him. Same as before. I wish I had thought back harder but part of me knew it would be futile. For some reason, we were meant to be here for more than work. The log landed hard and firmly on my head as his empty face met mine. It was a flash of blinding pain, my skin felt hot and then I felt the coarse dirt of the road landing on my face. I saw Sandy placing a hand approvingly on Jonathan’s shoulder as I drifted asleep.
I awoke to the sounds of muffled moans of agony and the rhythm of a moving vehicle. Instead of feeling the terror this would typically carry, I could tell from how non-human like they were it was the mountain. The darkness of the outside only confirmed my suspicion; It had taken one night for the mountain to make me accustomed to whatever was happening there that was causing this. I was in the back seat of the Odyssey, I looked to see an awake Hamil sitting in the seat next to me. His hands had been ziptied but he was not gagged, his facial movements indicated he was happy to see me awake but hiding his fear was impossible. I took note of my surroundings despite the pronounced sharp tinge of pain that echoed in my head from where Jonathan had hit me.
The whole situation was so confusing. Where had we been all day? It was early afternoon when Sandy arrived, and now it was nighttime. Without looking behind her, Sandy spoke from the driver’s seat, which I was behind.

“ Don’t worry. I won’t kill you, I need you all working extra hard. My sisters and I have plans for you, we hope you’ll go along.”
She finally turned to look at me and flashed an awful toothy grin, the malformed digits in her mouth had a terrible silhouette in the dark. I focused on total silence. I tried to remain calm, keep an air of civility if I was going to say anything to keep them from going off and hurting me or any other guys. I figured Jonathan was under some kind of influence from Sandy, and he could be snapped out of it. Right now, I just need to get more information and not lose it. That was the key: keeping my sanity in the odds of whatever was about to happen.
We drove for what felt like hours. The ride was long and silent, any attempt to open my mouth like I was going to try to talk to Hamil resulted in the semi-lucid but still dangerous Jonathan staring back with his glassy white eyes in a stare I knew meant to shut up or get shut up. The lack of conversation gave me time to ponder the numerous questions swirling around my mind: who were these sisters? What happened to the other groups of researchers with whom we were meant to do this? Why was Jonathan in this state of mind?. Unfortunately, the silence was broken when Hamil seemingly couldn’t hold it any longer and began to weep. It was tiny, pitiful cries, but the only sound to counter the existential weight of hearing unnatural wailing from the mountain. He was looking away from me so I couldn’t see his face, just the bruised mark on the back of his mostly bald head where he had been hit. It hurt to see someone I had seen as a mentor in this state.
The car finally reached a small camp at the mountain’s base. I was finally able to look up and see the mountain in its full might as we approached the fire that gave away the location of what I had to assume as Sandy’s ‘sisters’. The muffled moans of the car gave way to shrill, higher pitch wails that had a distinctly more human tone. The sound filled me with a sense of sonic despair that was the emotional distress discussed in the initial report by first responders that all later reported mental anguish due to their encounter. I looked up to the mountain. Only moonlight and the faint glow of the fire showed me its strange shape. It was a peculiar, rugged thing that stood alone, jutting out of the ground as if in defiance of the world itself. The jagged edges of the stone formations that made up its cliffs were blanketed by plant life and trees that gave way to the rich forest below.
Its highest peak is dipped to form a similar shape to that of the lowercase r. I thought how beautiful I would find it if I were here under other circumstances. Seeing it almost distracted me from the zipties applied to my hands by the stony and silent Jonathan as I hung in the open car seat’s back seat. Hamil and I were led to the fire where I was able to make out the other figures; 2 women, dressed similarly to Sandy with an even more disheveled look to them, had tied up three other women to what looked to be like small upside down crosses. The thin vertical wooden pillar supported their backs while their feet were bound to the bottom crosspiece. Their arms were tied to the back of the cross but were tied upwards so their hands jutted out from the very top of the cross in a strange position that gave the illusion that they were praising something. They were blindfolded, but as I was led closer to the fire, I quickly realized this as the other team of researchers, with whom we had been meant to share the site. I could tell they had been beaten quite badly as they were crying just like Hamil, but the copious bruises on their bodies explained why they were crying so quietly. They were dressed in what looked like sleeping clothes, meaning they were likely taken in their sleep. While shocked by this revelation, it quickly became irrelevant as I saw the two other empty crosses for us on the opposite end of the fire from the others. In the center of the campfire was an old machete and a rock.
Hamil must have put everything I had realized together too. He began crying again, or at least made it more known as I was trying to avoid looking at him out of sadness. Some of me knew that going there could have had risks, but Hamil was only trying to better the world of science, and now we would both pay the price for it. Through all of this, the cries of the mountain had been unyielding. Even when Sandy approached the two unbound women, her ‘sisters’, they spoke openly and loudly to each other not far from us and yet, I couldn’t hear a word they were saying as the moans drowned it out. It was unlike anything, an ill-fated impression of a person’s death rattled mixed with the high-pitched annoyance of a toddler’s wail. Jonathan appeared from behind us, leading Hamil and then myself to our crosses and binding us and applying a gag to the crying Hamil, who he quickly kicked in the gut to shut him up. I tried to remain as calm as possible, trying to think of ways to get out of this, but the chaos of our predicament gave way to hopelessness and confusion. I had felt the whole time since I woke up in the car, there was some way to escape this, but with our hands and feet bound and no way of getting out of these woods other than stealing Sandy’s car, there was no escape. But I couldn’t lose hope.
The three women gathered around the circle after speaking to themselves for a bit longer. They returned from their conversation, each sporting a wooden necklace that, when they finally did face us, made up a triple moon symbol with Sandy wearing the circle. The other two, whose faces I could see now, were a disgusting mix of dried old skin and bright red pustules protruding from the palest of faces with the most minor eyes and the most hooked, crooked noses. They began to recite something in a language I had never heard, and I could not find anything that sounded similar to it even after my encounter. Jonathan and I had our arms trussed up to resemble the women and I felt the tightening of thick, itchy rope around my hand, and the tightening of the veins in my arms as he secured me and did the same for Hamil.
The women moved around the fire in sync, repeating their cries and singing to the same monotone hum the mountain gave off. Their voice only enhanced it, and we could hear the hill getting louder and louder. Our captors’ voices only got more aggressive and I could see the team of anthropologists were deeply disturbed as they all began to start crying. I didn’t see when they all broke, but by the time Jonathan had assumed his place in it all, kneeling before the fire in front of the machete and rock, they were just as loud in their cries for mercy.
Suddenly, the singing stopped, and the sound of the women crying pleas of mercy, as all that could be heard was that the coven had finished their dance with a one-legged bow to the fire, Jonathan behind them in what looked to be quiet contemplation. I could only see the back of his head as Sandy spoke finally:
“ It has lived here for years, and now it wakes within its vessel. We are its guardians, its mothers. We must do the unthinkable to keep it away once more. We offer this thrall and their compatriots. One to offer a soul, Five to offer blood.”
As her word echoed across the night, her sisters repeated each line of her proclamation back while all of us struggled harder and harder at our bindings. All except for Hamil, who I noticed was moving his foot around at the bottom of his post. I couldn’t tell what he was doing but it seemed to be working by the half smile he began to crack. I started to replicate his motions, hoping my desperate situation could take a turn for the better. My calm demeanor had gone out the window as I saw Jonathan take off his shirt and ripple patterns across his body as if lightning struck him. He picked up the machete in his left hand and the rock in his right. I was mesmerized by what I was seeing but didn’t take my focus off the rope. It seemed futile for me because of how tight I was bound, but the professor was making progress based on the look he had. It was the intense focus I had seen on his face before only during grading term papers or our performance reviews where he critiqued every little thing we did. I was now beyond thankful for that laser focus he was showing as he somehow managed to get the rope off his right foot. His hands were still tied and I was still fastly secured to the cross as Jonathan stayed crouched on his knees.
I had spent so long focusing on my old colleague that I didn’t see the first sister take out a knife and cut the throat of the woman on the cross adjacent to me on the other side of the fire. The muffled screams of the other two followed and made dull sounds of fear ring through the otherwise silent night. There were no other words as the other sister, cloaked in a black hood and darkness, began to draw a pentagram using the flowing blood to draw a symbol on her stomach. I could only watch in horror, the hope I had going from my survival to just hoping Hamil could get out of here, ideally with the other two surviving anthropologists. The twigs and leaves next to me cracked, breaking me from my shocked gaze, and I saw that both of the doctor’s feet had been freed. He stood around and began frantically tearing at his hand restraint, which proved more resilient.
I noticed the deep red marks in his hand as he motioned towards me. We had more darkness and were probably 50 feet back from Jonathan, trying to take advantage of whatever state he was in to get ourselves out. David Hamil was no spring chicken, but he was surprisingly nimble and could release both of my feet first, taking great care as he untied my hands next. I kept a close eye on what the witches were doing, forcing myself to watch them use the dead woman’s blood to paint more symbols around her lifeless body. I hated that I couldn’t remember any of their names.
We spoke in hushed whispers after giving it some time. The muffled screams of the others and the cracks of the fire mixed with the ever-growing howls of the mountain gave us enough of a cover for a whisper; “What do we do, Doctor? We can’t leave these people, we can’t let them do this to those people. We need to try to get them out of here!” I kept my voice quiet, but I understood my distress. If it weren’t for Jonathan being with them, or whatever he is now, we could try to take them. Maybe get the other girls down to give us better odds. But the best we can do now is to get out of here. This place is prominent, but I watched our path from the cabin and saw several exit signs while you were knocked out. Suppose we can get to one of them. We have a shot to find the police and the park Rangers. To find something.” I shuddered at the thought of being chased in the dark of a completely unfamiliar place. But he was right, we had no other way.
Something shifted in the air as soon as he finished tying my final hand, something shifted in the air. The wind picked up, causing the fire’s light to dance with the darkness around it. All the while, the mountain’s voice shifted to something far more emotional and complete than before. What was an off-putting, monotonal, with a predictable cycle to grow in volume became higher pitched. Worst of all, its candor was different now, more human-like. Its howls were accented by something that sounded like moans of despair. Despite how hard it may seem to believe, it sounded like pure pain.
It didn’t take long before our captors noticed. The shift in the night gave me just enough time to turn my back and begin to move with Dr. Hamil. We only got a few feet before I heard something make a SHUNK noise near me. I turned and saw the handle of a machete protruding from Hamil’s back. The blood was pooling slowly around his blue button-up shirt, giving an almost black appearance in the dark. He made no eye contact and said more than a few sputters of blood exiting his mouth before he collapsed on the ground. My heart sank in the bottomless pit of my soul for a brief moment, just enough to take in the sight of the whole blade, from the tip down to where it met the handle needed in him. Jonathan stood in front of us, breathing heavily and his eyes now gon form a foggy light complexion hiding his brown eyes to being so black they resembled an eight ball without the label.
He still held the large stone in his hand, no doubt saving it for me. Without a thought I darted into the woods. The night and the screams of the mountain greatly hindered my ability to know. Where I was going, the only solution I could think of in my panicked state was that instead of running I could hide. The one thing Hamil hadn’t thought of. I ran into the woods for god knows how long, not sure if stopping would save me or be my death. Eventually, I came across a silhouette of a tree tall enough to climb and covered enough that I may have a chance of hiding in.
I stayed up there for who knows how long, my heart destroyed from the loss of my colleagues, and the knowledge I was likely next, keeping my heart moments away from jumping out of my chest, it felt like. The screams of the mountain were still distinct enough I could hear when the leaves and twigs of something bigger came around the tree. I couldn’t tell where I was, how far I was off the round, or what was potentially waiting for me down there. So I stayed hugged to the limb I felt confident enough to hang onto and waited. Time passed, and I found myself drawn to the mountain noises, desperate to think of anything other than my current predicament. When observed more closely, it almost had a musical quality to it that after a while, made the noises less unpleasant than they had been. They were practically enticing. That was what drove these women to do what they were doing.
Though they still weigh heavy on my mind, the questions were broken up at that moment by the sound of a whistle, and then a thudding sound against the tree. I had a hard time seeing what it was., I could piece enough together to realize it was Jonathan, still clinging to what I assumed was his rock. He had found me and as I had hoped, he couldn’t climb up the tree. After a few more thuds, Jonathan stormed off further into the woods, stabbing something into the tree with a hard thudding sound. He was marking his spot so he could come back for me later.
Before I could even begin to try to climb down or do anything other than sit on my branch frozen, the howls of the mountain began to intensify even more than before, becoming an inhuman high pitched and rapidly increasing in their pitch before the consonant sounds went completely silent. There was so much beauty in that moment of utter silence , the first of its kind in 3 or 4 days for me. It was the type of bliss I could’ve died in. But instead, it was broken by a blast of light coming from where there had once been the fire of our captors. This was followed quickly by the sound of multiple older women screaming. The screams were sustained and they began to take on a quality like gravel. Horribly distorting until they were so low pitched they didn’t sound human. Man or woman. In a matter of seconds, the massive blast of light has subsided and the screams died out and the silence retired. I waited a while longer, curious to see what would happen next. It was ten and I heard the shouts of other people. Other women. They were feverish appeals for help and for someone to come free them. It was the anthropologists. They were alive!.
Without thinking, I jumped down from the branch to the beat of my ability, stumbling and nearly falling in the messiness of the dark. I made my way in the dark hoping I wasn’t too late. The sight before me was a grim one. In addition to the previously slaughtered woman, whose lifeless body laid now covered in dried red and brown runes of a language I had never seen, laid Three dried out corpses wearing the quirky outfits of our captors. Their bodies laid around the fire. All their eyes had seemingly melted away in their skulls due to the oozing white liquid in their otherwise empty sockets. Their skin was brown like leather and seemingly lost all blood. They looked like they had been partially melted due to the loose wet kin that barely held on to the bones. Next to one of these half liquid half solid piles was the knife the unnamed sister had used before in their ritual. There was no sign of either Jonathan or the Doctor, but Sandys car keys lay sticking out of her pants pocket. I rushed so quickly to get the knife and cut the two pleading women down from their custom made crucifixes that I almost cut myself as I feverishly sawed attheir restraints. Only one of them had managed to get her duct tape off somehow while the other had remained muted this whole time and spoke through desperate cries of absolute fear
“Thank you… I-I don’t know- I don’t know how any of this could happen!”
she continued to sob in between her understandably hysteric state.
“You and those other two ran off into the woods and she was going to kill me. Oh my god she was coming at me with the knife like she did Nancy. It was horrible. The mountain screamed at us and the fire got so big! It got so big I thought we’d all burn”

I could tell just how much this scared her as the mere mention of what happened next caused her to pause briefly and vomit nearly all over me as I cut her final restraint down and moved onto the other one. I removed her duct tape and she joined in the sobbing while her associate continued.

“The Fire. It got so big I mean It got so tall. So tall. They began to scream and melt and then just like that they were dead. Oh my god! Nancy is still dead!” she looked over at the lifeless body sobbed as she went for Sandy’s keys. We all froze whenever we heard rattling coming from the woods.
I immediately held the knife, positioning myself for a fight and standing my ground as I saw Jonathan come running dead ahead of meat to speed from the forest. I was ready to die, if it meant putting whatever evil had transpired here tonight to bed I would do it. I had expected the other two to run but instead they stood up, intending to join me in standing our ground. Much to our surprise, the still white eyed, shirtless, and bloodied body of Jonathan appeared walking through the fire and passed me with mere inches of space between us. Nothing deterred him and he continued running until he reached the wall of rock that marked the foot of the mountain. After pausing briefly, Jonathan, who had once been the quiet guy of the lab and had always been held with a passable amount of respect from people at work began to scale the first few rocks on the mountain. Much to my shock, he didn’t stop. The fire was the only source of light as I saw him silently crawl and crawl and crawl up to as far as my eyes could see before disappearing into the black of the night and the cold stone of the mountain.
To this day no one has seen Jonathan O’Neal and he is considered dead within the park. I would depart as quickly as could with the two other survivors, whose names I would come to learn were Norma and Danielle. As for me, I was the only one to make it back and continue to work. The cover story had been that we had been kidnapped by eco-terrorists who had gone missing in the mountain and Jonathan had gone missing in the woods. They had wanted to be one with the mountain, so they went up into it and killed Nancy to send a message. According to our somewhat loosely agreed upon story, we had managed to free ourselves and make it back except for Jonathan and Hamil, who was declared deceased soon after our rescue. In response, the park would become shut off to the public as a private nature sanctuary administered by a government task force who said they would handle all future research on Mount Ostium.
Despite how many questions I was left with, it was good to be alive and to be able to work again. I even got a promotion at work for my trouble. While we were never able to go into the mountain and see what was causing its anomaly, the noises would reportedly stop soon after our recovery, not that I care to involve myself in any way with that place again. The ending of the sound brought myself and the state of Georgia much needed relief and yet, nothing was answered. The problems seemed to subside at the cost of our knowledge of something far bigger than ourselves and, maybe that’s the way it was meant to be. Peace and closure are things taken for granted by anyone who has access to them, even someone who’d seen as much as me. They are fleeting feelings, and my peace expired about a week ago when it was reported by a local government watchdog group that the closed off mountain had begun its incessant noise yet again. However, the sounds of doom coming from that cavernous piece of hell on earth began to blare its song day and night now. This Isn’t all, it seems as though whatever we were used for at Sandys ritual wasn’t meant to keep something from coming out of the mountain, but to keep it in.
The areas of the country and the suburbs and towns tens of miles in every direction have begun seeing strange lights and odd glows coming from the exclusive zone, and some even say they see a man running in the night with white eyes and black hair. No one knows what he and the score of female silhouettes that follow him are doing, but I intend to be nowhere near to see what they do. Something came out of the mountain that night in the woods, and whatever business it has is not yet concluded with this world. If you’re ever thinking about visiting the area around the Mount Ostium State Forest in Georgia, I’d suggest elsewhere.

Credit: Mathew Sawyers