The figure did not move.
Snow whipped across the highway in violent bursts, blurring its outline beneath my headlights. At first I thought it might be someone stranded — a hitchhiker, maybe, or a farmer caught in the storm.
Then the thing tilted its head.
There was no face.
No eyes.
No mouth.
Just smooth pale skin stretched across a human-shaped head like wet cloth pulled over a mannequin.
I hit the brakes hard. My truck fishtailed on the icy pavement before sliding sideways to a stop only twenty feet away.
The radio crackled louder.
Soft jazz continued playing.
Then the announcer spoke again.
“You shouldn’t stop here.”
My hands trembled violently on the steering wheel.
The faceless figure stood perfectly still in the centre of the highway. Snow collected on its shoulders but it never blinked, never shivered, never breathed.
I grabbed my phone.
No signal.
Of course.
The heater suddenly died. Cold air poured into the cab instantly, sharp enough to sting my lungs. Frost began spreading across the inside of the windshield in twisting fern-like patterns.
The radio volume rose by itself.
“…mile marker forty-nine…” the announcer whispered.
Static hissed.
“…they buried them too shallow…”
Then came the sound again.
Chewing.
Wet. Slow. Deliberate.
I nearly threw up.
The figure took one step toward the truck.
That single movement snapped me out of whatever frozen panic had taken hold of me. I slammed the transmission into reverse and backed away fast enough to nearly spin into the ditch.
The thing kept walking.
Not running.
Walking.
But somehow it stayed the same distance from me no matter how fast I reversed.
Twenty feet away.
Always twenty feet.
The radio emitted a sudden burst of screaming static so loud I covered my ears. Through the noise I heard dozens of overlapping whispers.
“He can see us.”
“Open the door.”
“Hungry.”
Then the headlights flickered.
For less than a second everything went dark.
When the lights returned, the figure was gone.
I threw the truck into drive and sped north through the storm.
My pulse hammered so hard it hurt.
After several kilometres I noticed another light ahead through the blowing snow — an old gas station sitting alone beside the highway.
Its OPEN sign glowed dim red.
I almost cried from relief.
The building looked ancient. One gas pump. Rusted ice freezer outside. Snow piled halfway up the windows. A flickering fluorescent light buzzed above the entrance.
I hurried inside.
Warm air and stale coffee hit me immediately.
The clerk behind the counter looked about seventy years old. Thin grey hair. Sunken eyes. He stared at me with an expression that wasn’t surprise.
It was recognition.
“You heard it,” he said quietly.
I froze.
“The radio,” he continued.
I nodded slowly.
The old man looked toward the windows nervously before locking the front door.
“You need to leave this road.”
“What the hell was that thing?” I asked.
He ignored the question.
Instead, he walked behind the counter and pulled out an old cassette tape.
My stomach dropped instantly.
A handwritten label read:
CKL-13 ARCHIVE 4
“No,” I whispered.
“I worked at the station,” he said.
Every muscle in my body tightened.
The old man’s hands shook as he placed the tape player onto the counter.
“We thought it was just interference at first,” he murmured. “Then people started hearing things that weren’t being broadcast.”
Outside, the storm intensified.
Snow hammered against the windows.
The old man pressed PLAY.
Static filled the store.
Then jazz music.
Then breathing.
My skin crawled instantly.
And then I heard the announcer’s voice.
Clearer than ever before.
“If this tape is playing,” he said calmly, “the field has opened again.”
The old man shut the player off immediately.
His face had gone pale.
“He said that the night everyone died,” he whispered.
A long silence followed.
Then, from somewhere outside the gas station…
Three slow knocks echoed against the front door.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
The old man looked toward the entrance in terror.
Because standing outside beneath the buzzing fluorescent light…
…was the faceless figure again.
Only this time there were three of them.
The Long Mile North - Chapter 3 — The Long Mile North
By the time Elias Mercer crossed into northern Saskatchewan, the rumours had already begun to harden into something more than superstition.
Truckers on the Trans-Canada spoke of a man who appeared in their rearview mirrors even when no vehicle followed. A hitchhiker seen standing too still on the shoulder, not reacting to headlights or wind. A name started circulating on CB radio channels like a curse you didn’t want to repeat: Mercer.
Elias himself never confirmed whether he heard it. If he did, he didn’t show it.
He travelled light—too light for someone supposedly moving across a country on foot. No visible backpack, no luggage. Just a long dark coat that never seemed to sit quite right on his shoulders, as though it had been tailored for someone slightly different.
At a small rest stop outside Prince Albert, a clerk later described him in a police statement that was never filed formally. She said he stood at the counter for nearly five minutes before speaking, staring at the fluorescent light above as though listening to it hum.
“Where’s the long road north?” he asked.
She laughed nervously, thinking it was a joke. There is no such road officially, just highways, gravel cuts, and logging detours. But Elias didn’t laugh back. He simply waited, patient in a way that made her palms sweat.
When she finally pointed vaguely toward Highway 2, he nodded once and left without buying anything.
That night, something changed in the town’s outskirts.
Not immediately, not dramatically. It began as small inconsistencies. A dog that refused to bark at dawn. A set of tire tracks that appeared in fresh snow leading into the forest and returning without a visible path in between. A power flicker that lasted exactly thirteen seconds across three separate blocks, despite no reported grid failure.
And then the first disappearance.
A hunter named Darren Kells went out to check his trapline and never came back. His snowmobile was found idling near a frozen creek, engine still warm, helmet placed neatly on the seat as though set down by careful hands.
No signs of struggle. No footprints leaving the machine. Just absence, sharp and deliberate.
The RCMP chalked it up to hypothermia or accident, but locals knew better. They started locking doors earlier. They stopped answering knocks after dark.
Two nights later, Elias Mercer was seen again—this time by a teenage girl looking out her bedroom window.
He was standing at the edge of the frozen field behind her house, facing the treeline. Not moving. Not reacting to the cold.
She watched him for almost a full minute before realizing something unsettling: he wasn’t looking at the trees.
He was looking just past them, as if something deeper in the darkness was looking back.
When she blinked, he was gone.
But the impression of him remained, like a stain on the glass she couldn’t wipe away.
By morning, the girl’s father found a set of footprints in the snow leading from the field to their barn—and then stopping abruptly at the door, as if whoever made them had stepped inside without ever opening it.
And somewhere far north, beyond mapped roads and settled land, something that should not have been reachable by ordinary travel began to register a presence.
As if the country itself had noticed Elias Mercer was getting closer.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
