The Whistlers | Creep Cast

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Hey guys, just real quick, I got a nice little short horror film that you can watch right here.

Speaker 1 It's on my main channel at Meat Canyon. Just wanted to plug that and make sure you guys saw it.
It might be hidden. It might be demonetized or something.
So.

Speaker 1 We worked really hard on it. It's a lot of fun.
So if you want to check out a little short horror horror film, be sure to check out right here. Click it.
Go to it. Me Canyon.
Go, go, go.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to Creepcast. Today we are reading a two-part story called The Whistlers.
And it starts off with Ruth's account, and then it goes into Bill's account. So it's two different stories.

Speaker 1 Very excited.

Speaker 1 I like these stories whenever you get one perspective, and then it goes to another. What was another story? We read another story that was like that, right?

Speaker 1 The biggest one we read like that was My Husband's Taking Our Roleblade 2. That's where it is.
It's from the

Speaker 1 I think that was a lot of fun. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that story kills. Well, that was a

Speaker 1 Christian Wallace story. And that guy just like fingers every time we talk about him.

Speaker 1 Right? That wasn't Christian wallace or was it imperial incentive

Speaker 1 are those the same people

Speaker 1 there's so many authors

Speaker 1 hold on

Speaker 1 is taking

Speaker 1 role play

Speaker 1 too far

Speaker 1 yes i'm over 18. it was written by yeah christian wallace

Speaker 1 all right yeah I was right. Thank God.

Speaker 1 So that was one example. The Whistlers, I feel like, is written under a pseudonym because, for one, the story is very highly rated.
Part one,

Speaker 1 Ruth's account, has 382 votes and an 8.95 out of 10,

Speaker 1 which for old stories is pretty typical. Like everyone goes and gives Jeff the Killer 10 stars for the meme.

Speaker 1 But more modern stories, this one was in 2019, to have high up votes on creepypasta.com is pretty good.

Speaker 1 I say up votes because we're so Reddit poisoned. To have high ratings, to have 10-star ratings.

Speaker 1 This one, however, it's people seem to like it a lot, but the author is Amity Argo,

Speaker 1 which sounds like a pen name for a horror author. It does.
And this is the only thing they have written, at least that I can find online or on creepypasta.com.

Speaker 1 So this is probably someone who writes other stuff elsewhere, which adds some mystique to like, you know, the story itself. But we'll have it linked in the description.

Speaker 1 If they ever, you know, post anything else on here, be sure to go

Speaker 1 upvote, upvote.

Speaker 1 Upvote 10-star the original story.

Speaker 1 But yeah, it's been highly recommended. The whistler sounds like a cool premise, like you said, switching between a couple of people.
It sounds neat. So we're going to check it out.

Speaker 1 We're going to see what all the fuss is about.

Speaker 1 If you're listening to this on YouTube as well, consider checking us out on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And if you're listening there right now, be sure to give us a good rating.

Speaker 1 It does help us out a lot. Also, for our patrons, thank you so much for the support.
But then we also just

Speaker 1 got done doing an interview with Neon Tempo, the author of Left, Right Game. Super fun.
Great conversation.

Speaker 1 Man, that's been my new favorite thing with the Patreon content is just going to do author interviews. Been really, really fun.
So if you're interested in that, please go check it out.

Speaker 1 See if it, see if it's something you might like, right? Support the show. Otherwise, Isaiah, let's start whistling.

Speaker 1 Let's get to whistling.

Speaker 1 Let's get to singing. All right.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 the whistlers, Roofs account.

Speaker 1 I bought a camping backpack from an estate cell and found the following pages inside.

Speaker 1 There was a bundle of papers watted in a deep pocket of the backpack, but I didn't notice until after I got it home.

Speaker 1 I went back to the house where the estate cell was held, and a young woman answered the door. She couldn't say who the backpack belonged to and had no interest in the papers.

Speaker 1 Her grandmother was the one who died of old age, natural causes. Apparently, she was a bit of a hoarder, so I don't know if I'll ever be able to track down the source.

Speaker 1 The handwriting is tiny, and the pages are damaged. I'll transcribe as faithfully as I can.

Speaker 1 How do you feel about those intros to stories where it's like, I found an old journal, I found an old notebook, or

Speaker 1 I like when people find lost media. That's why it's so captivating with like found footage.
I think that's why I'm such a sucker for it.

Speaker 1 All right, so the series of entries from the backpack begins with September 5th. The man on the trail is dead and will need to be moved.
Well, that's a way to start it.

Speaker 1 That's quite an opener, alright. The man on the trail is dead and will need to be moved.

Speaker 1 It is a more difficult task than I would have guessed and nearly impossible for a 5'4 woman with no help and no gurney.

Speaker 1 I tried to drag him towards camp right after I found him this morning, but only succeeded in pivoting him and twisting his legs around each other horribly.

Speaker 1 Bodies look so wrong once they stop feeling pain. I never thought I would have so much experience with death, but I haven't cried over the loss of someone since the lighthouse.

Speaker 1 This man shit his pants before he died, and moving him made the smell worse. It'll bring the animals in.
Still no sign of Ira or Bill. September 6th.

Speaker 1 I used Ira's foam sleepy mat like a sled to move the dead man. Still, it took me an hour to drag him 30 yards, and now the mat is so torn up that I'm questioning whether it was worth the effort.

Speaker 1 Gary Law. His driver's license is in his wallet.
He's from Utah. I took the sight of him as a good sign at first.

Speaker 1 Another human on the trail might have meant we were close to civilization, but now I'm not sure what he was doing out here or what it means. I can't tell what killed him.

Speaker 1 No claw marks, no wounds on his hands. He's stoutly built, but with a bagginess about his physique that makes me think he was starving.
He died with his mouth open.

Speaker 1 Every mucous membrane turned ash gray. I don't think he was attacked.
It's a relief. If he had been missing pieces, the logical thing to do would have been to move camp.

Speaker 1 But then Ira and Bill would have come back to nothing. I'm more afraid of being separated from them than I am anything else.
Still waiting on them both. September 8th.

Speaker 1 I spent all day yesterday stripping and burying Gary Law. He was shorter in stature, but his clothes should fit Bill well enough.
His feet were small, so I'm keeping the socks for myself.

Speaker 1 They're almost brand new, thick, blue wool. I can tell he wasn't an outdoorsman.
Everything else was new too.

Speaker 1 New shoelaces, new cross trainers, new windbreaker, none of it quite right for someone trekking this far out. And the pants are from Banana Republic, pleated with a neat sheen.

Speaker 1 These aren't pristine like everything else and were hemped by a tailor. I washed them in the creek, but they still smell like shit and death.

Speaker 1 Everything does, actually, to the point that I think the smell might be on me. In me.
I waded the pants down on a stone near the ridge that gets full sun. I missed bleach.
bleach.

Speaker 1 I put green bows on the signal fire today, but there was no answering smoke. I'm more worried about Ira than I am about Bill.
It was Bill who found this trail to begin with. He always finds his way.

Speaker 1 I like this setup so far of like somebody lost in the woods. Also, this is just a point out too.
There's nothing paranormal about this. People can just get absolutely lost

Speaker 1 in nature like that, which to me is so fucking horrifying. I think it's kind of rapping on the door of paranormal because it's like

Speaker 1 there's somewhere where there's no civilization so it's like a woods they don't know but they're there somehow

Speaker 1 and then they're like she mentions the state of the driver's license is utah as if like that shouldn't be right and the guy had new clothes as if he wasn't trying to go this far out so maybe it's like

Speaker 1 I don't know. I mean, obviously I'm reaching here.
It could be like a portal thing. They walk in the woods and then they wind up in like this deeper woods.
It's kind of like an in-between space.

Speaker 1 It could be they were like, you you know, drawn to keep walking into the woods or something like that.

Speaker 1 I'm, I, I, I was picturing it like it's people who are like, oh yeah, I found this trail or whatever.

Speaker 1 We should go walk it. And then they, they walk it.
And then

Speaker 1 obviously it's like, maybe it's unmapped or something. Kind of like in the movie The Descent, where it's like, oh, it's an unspent here before.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I didn't know if it was something like that to where it's like, oh, well, we can go and come back real quick, but then you actually just get lost in the fucking woods or the thing that's like no one else has been out there and then something else that's obviously that no one else has been in contact with that's what they come in contact with just something freaky like that you just gave me the weirdest deja vu there was really

Speaker 1 there was this super early creepypasta it was either one of the first

Speaker 1 or like one of the first ones that got big that was just about

Speaker 1 a trail

Speaker 1 like the whole creepypasta

Speaker 1 No, no, it was one of the first SCP. Hold on, hold on.
I swear, I'm not, I'm not losing my mind. Okay, it's saying it's an 01 proposal.
I'm not thinking of the 01 proposal. I'm not crazy.

Speaker 1 Okay, there was either an SCP or an early creepy posse or something. The comments will help me.
That was a trail through the woods that always goes up.

Speaker 1 Like, regardless of how far you walk, it keeps going up to a point that should be like an impossible. And the other way, it goes back down.
You can always walk out. It's just like a

Speaker 1 a spatial anomaly the way it works, but it just looks like an unassuming nature trail.

Speaker 1 this is a thing i know it i'm not crazy someone will help me out here but yeah this this idea of like just a weird trail in the woods is like early internet whore yeah bill came back today he took his time coming through the trees and i got so scared i almost fired the gun but he clapped and i clapped back and he called out to say he was injured oh they've got they've got running passwords that's cool it was the loose shell on the hill between camp and the cave where lilliam was killed he got caught in a slide and wound up buried to his hips, and one foot wedged between boulders.

Speaker 1 Couldn't get free until the rocks shifted again, which they did that night when a whistler came by. He sure didn't see him.

Speaker 1 He had to spend two days convalescing with inside of Lillian's cave before he was well enough to hike back. Two nights alone out there.

Speaker 1 I boiled water while I listened to his story and gave Phil some aspirin from the dead man's backpack. His foot needed to be wrapped, but I don't think it's broken.
We should stop splitting up.

Speaker 1 He nodded and pushed his pack towards me. There was salmon and berries and some mushrooms I didn't really trust.
We should think about hiking out. Pick a direction and go.

Speaker 1 It's been four weeks and we'll only get weaker. When Ira comes back? I agreed, but Bill pursed his lips like there was something he couldn't say.
What? But he only shook his head.

Speaker 1 It's been ten days now since Ira left. Hmm.

Speaker 1 September 11th. Oh well, you know, rest in peace, you know.
Amazing grace. Okay.
What happened?

Speaker 1 I woke up this morning to a sound I thought was a whistler, but it was actually Bill on his knees crying at Gary Law's grave. I yelled at him about it, about waking me up and making so much noise.

Speaker 1 He looked hurt. I felt bad.
I'm just worried about Ira, I think, but afraid. I don't know what we'll do when the weather starts getting colder.

Speaker 1 If we wait too much longer, hiking out won't be an option. There hasn't been any sign of rescue.
No planes or helicopters, no No smoke. No sounds but wolf howls and the distant whistling.

Speaker 1 Like elk mating calls almost. If Ira were here, he'd tell us a story to get our minds off things.
He's a registered nurse. He doesn't panic.
September 12th. I apologized to Bill last night.

Speaker 1 He shook his head like it was nothing, so I put my hands on his shoulders and apologized again, because I needed him to really hear it. Will.
I'm sorry you were alone.

Speaker 1 We should have never left you alone. He was looking into my eyes so sadly, and I imagined he was remembering all the awful things of the past weeks and feeling the same guilt I felt.

Speaker 1 It was our research that brought everyone here, our recklessness and curiosity to blame. Then he kissed me, kept kissing me.
Finally, I kissed him back because I was feeling something for once.

Speaker 1 Not even lust, really. More like homesickness.
A little breakthrough of pain and wondering after all the bitterness and hardening and cold. We undressed each other and had sex in the tent.

Speaker 1 I don't know why. I've never cheated on Ira before.
Never even thought about it. This didn't seem wrong in the moment, but now it's difficult to write down.
It just felt like something we both needed.

Speaker 1 We didn't say anything at all. Afterward, he went outside to sleep by the fire, like he couldn't stand to be so close.
He spent this morning hauling water and wood, barely pausing to acknowledge me.

Speaker 1 I don't think it'll happen again. I don't think either of us will tell Ira.
September 15th. It's late.
We hear whistlers just north of us. Chorus of them.

Speaker 1 Bill says he hears eight distinct tones, but I don't know. Could be dozens.

Speaker 1 Put the fires out and now crouched in the tent with the knives and the gun. Bill reaches for me, puts himself between me and the sound when it crescendos.
I don't think he knows why it does it.

Speaker 1 I don't think it would make a difference. We won't sleep tonight.
The story,

Speaker 1 it uses the kind of journal format to its strength to kind of just give you like, this happened this day, this happened this day, but there's like musings on it where it feels like in depth, like the detail that they have sex, but then he won't sleep in the tent with her.

Speaker 1 So it was kind of like, he doesn't really have feelings for it. He just needed to feel something in that moment.

Speaker 1 And like, it just hard cuts to, there's a bunch of whistlers outside, and he puts himself between me. I don't think he knows why he does it.
Just details like that are good. They work well.

Speaker 1 Not a fully realized picture yet, but definitely people that are traumatized. I mean, first off, they've been out there a month, which is pretty crazy.

Speaker 1 Lost for a month. Yeah, I think Ira's not coming back.
I don't know. I got a feeling.
I don't know. We'll see.
He may come back as not Ira. Something that looks like it may come back.
So we'll see.

Speaker 1 September 21st. Ira's back.
Okay, well.

Speaker 1 There you go. Well, there it is.
I don't think she's coming, man. She's back.

Speaker 1 He's back right now. His coat is in tatters.
His hat is gone. Isn't speaking.
I'd call it shock, but he's the only one with medical training, and I don't really know what to make of him.

Speaker 1 He walks and moves fine. He doesn't look at me, doesn't seem to see me.
Okay, I'm right. Something that looks like Ira came back.
Yeah, I'm wondering. Wearing his old clothes.

Speaker 1 It's like something that looks like Ira standing there, but that, like, the shirt, it has a perfect imprint of like its heart getting ripped out. Yeah.
There's blood all over him. I'm fine.

Speaker 1 Blood all over. He's okay.
Yeah, like where the chest is, the shirt is completely ripped out and like claw marks and blood everywhere. Couldn't be better.
I just need to sleep.

Speaker 1 Not a scratch on him. Just like, what? Oh, this? Yeah, yeah, that was weird, isn't it? Yeah, my clothes just did that.
It's crazy. I feel so guilty.
I'm the reason he's out here.

Speaker 1 Now, every time I look up, I find Bill staring at me. Tries to communicate with looks, but all I ever make out is the fear and shame.
Ira won't eat.

Speaker 1 We zipped him into the dead man's jacket and left him to sleep. But he's been shaking and mumbling all afternoon.
He seems exhausted, but he hardly closes his eyes. It's my fault.
September 26th.

Speaker 1 Ira hasn't improved much, although he is sleeping now and eating some. I've only seen him sick once before, food poisoning on our honeymoon.
He was so stoic about it, I didn't want my help.

Speaker 1 Now he hasn't gone much choice. I walked about a mile north and shot a porcupine, and Bill is setting up an alder smoker so we can save the meat.

Speaker 1 It's getting serious about us hiking out, but I'm not sure how we'll manage with Ira so sick. He made it back here, didn't he? He'll snap out of it.
Maybe so.

Speaker 1 Neither of us had speculated about what Ira saw. All we know is he was on the south side of the mountain.
Bill's proposed we go west as far as the river and follow it south.

Speaker 1 If he's right about where he thinks we are, we'll hit Red Hill before it starts to snow. There's a lodge there and a few permanent residents, or so the helicopter pilot said.

Speaker 1 If anyone's looking for us, they've certainly asked around in Red Hill. I'm glad we have meat now.
I've been feeling weak. Okay, so now we know they were married.

Speaker 1 Hunter, what is the appropriate time that Allison can thank you're dead before she hooks up with someone in the woods in a life or death scenario? A day.

Speaker 1 I say one full day. I would count me out after a day.

Speaker 1 If I was gone in the woods for one full day, isaiah i'm dead like there's no way

Speaker 1 you don't want her to have any like not a crumb of like oh well i'm i miss him or i'm heartbroken or i have a feeling that she would miss me but at the same time i'm gone you know i'm i'm i'm i'm uh i'm bug fodder at this time at this point like the worms are eating me like i'm i'm like you get you is what i would say because i uh i'm gone 100

Speaker 1 i would even say 10 hours hours alone in the woods if you haven't seen me. I'm gone.
10 hours. I mean,

Speaker 1 not even a full half of a day. I would be comfortable being like, I think I'm dead.
So after half a day,

Speaker 1 she's free from the shackles of marriage.

Speaker 1 I would literally be fine if she's like, I thought you were dead. I'd be like, I thought I was too.

Speaker 1 Like 10 hours is like, oh, I got lost on the GPS.

Speaker 1 No, no, no.

Speaker 1 There's no reason for me to be in those woods alone. So let alone me.
Yeah, I'm gone. 100%.

Speaker 1 Okay, that's fair.

Speaker 1 I would say,

Speaker 1 I'd say a week.

Speaker 1 One week in a time. Go ahead.

Speaker 1 I'd say because I'm asking like the level that you're not like, oh, you cheated on me. Where it's like, no, you like, I understand you thought I was dead and you thought you were going to die.

Speaker 1 So you blah, blah, blah. Two weeks, maybe.

Speaker 1 Because I think I could skimp by in the woods for a week. I feel like two weeks is a reasonable time to assume I'm dead, probably.
That's fair.

Speaker 1 I mean, that seems like a that seems like a good time table. Yeah.

Speaker 1 In a forest where there's like whistlers or whatever they are, there's like stuff that can kill you actively, and there's not like a food source. I think two weeks is fine.

Speaker 1 I think I'm at the stage where it's like, it's okay. I don't have to do that.
I'm going to change mine. I'm going to change mine.

Speaker 1 I think I'm going to drop mine to like a solid 45 minutes.

Speaker 1 just shut up

Speaker 1 not even the time it takes to like

Speaker 1 make a meal she's already closed off having sex with somebody else yeah i thought i was dead too babe did you miss lately she's like no okay i love you baby

Speaker 1 you're my own

Speaker 1 hunter's like i gotta go to the bathroom

Speaker 1 it's like well

Speaker 1 too long

Speaker 1 i would assume for actually four to five minutes i don't think it's it's it's not crazy I feel like

Speaker 1 that's an appropriate response.

Speaker 1 45 minutes is like,

Speaker 1 I went to dig a cat hole and, oh, look, there's a river. I'm going to get some water while I'm at it.
That's 45 minutes. Okay.
I mean, I see where you're coming out, but you still...

Speaker 1 Very easy to assume that Hunter can be dead at this time. Right, right, okay.
If I'm alone for any period of time, assume death. Okay.

Speaker 1 If you're out of sight, it's like a toddler in a grocery store if he's out of sight for a second it's a problem yeah exactly where's my child that's what allison does for me as soon as i'm gone she runs hysterically through places and where's my husband i mean like i wear that i'm hiding in the coat section at a jc penny don't ever do that again you scared me to death i'm like

Speaker 1 i was about i was about uh to go on a date with this handsome gentleman over here sorry to have sex with a guy i thought you were dead i'm like no i i'm not dead i love you

Speaker 1 Just say that JCP.

Speaker 1 All right.

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Speaker 1 We are now back to the episode.

Speaker 1 September 30th. Ira's recovering, not a moment too soon.
I woke this morning with his arms around me, and the look in his eyes said he knew where he was, who I was.

Speaker 1 I was bursting with something he wanted to say, but couldn't. It's okay.
Be patient with yourself. We had a cold snap last night that left frost on the ground.

Speaker 1 All three of us cuddled together to sleep. Ira between Bill and I.
At one point, Bill reached over to grab my shoulder. I think we're done with the awkwardness.

Speaker 1 I think we both know we were just scared. We don't have anywhere near enough food for the journey.
We're leaving tomorrow anyway. Bill has a cold.

Speaker 1 All right, so that was all the initial post that was made on.

Speaker 1 I don't think we get time for the first one, but there was an update that was added on.

Speaker 1 Okay, so maybe this all got maybe this is a really old story and i'm just wrong because it was uploaded here to creepypasta.com july 8th 2019.

Speaker 1 i wonder if it was this update i wonder if it was just all compiled at the same time

Speaker 1 it might

Speaker 1 yeah because this update says it was from uh

Speaker 1 march the 5th 2015. so maybe this was like posted over a long period of time and then the whole thing was just put on creepypasta.com 2019 that might be what it is so

Speaker 1 so update March 5th, 2015. Hi all.
I'm glad so many of you shared my enthusiasm about the first entries, though my enthusiasm has since twisted into something else.

Speaker 1 Yesterday in the comments, I mentioned that I felt lucky for finding these pages at the estate cell.

Speaker 1 I don't feel lucky anymore. I feel guilty.
This is going to sound crazy, but the more I read and transcribe, the more anxious I feel about the pages and the woman who wrote them. Her name is Ruth.

Speaker 1 That comes out in tonight's excerpt. I still don't know know much about her.
I have no leads to share about the young woman at the estate sale or her grandmother. Yet, I feel like Ruth is close.

Speaker 1 Like, she's aware of what I've done. Like, she's angry.
I can't explain it. It's as if I can hear her.
Whispers of disappointment rising along with my own pulse.

Speaker 1 I'm certain now that she never meant her words to be used this way. She posted online with so little context, offered up as entertainment.
I didn't sleep well last night.

Speaker 1 Still, I feel like we've started something now that needs to be finished. A few of you expressed interest in seeing Ruth's original pages, but I think that's where I should draw the line.

Speaker 1 It's where I can redeem myself.

Speaker 1 I'm uncomfortable with the idea of photographing the original documents, or original words, and turning them into just another memento mori for the internet to have its way with.

Speaker 1 At this point, it makes no difference to me if you believe me or not. I guess that might seem selfish, but you can't hear like I can.

Speaker 1 Anyway, here's the rest of what I've transcribed so far. October 3rd, third day of walking.
I wish I could talk to Lillian about what happened with Bill. She was young, ambitious, and so funny.

Speaker 1 Plus, she had a whole horde of birth control pills. She and Jeff were dating.

Speaker 1 I forget how many you take in emergencies and how soon after it has to be, but the pills are in her pack, and her pack is in the cave with the Whistlers and whatever's left of her. She had the maps.

Speaker 1 She had everything that mattered. Cave is miles behind us now.
We built a big corn by the stream. At some point, we'll have to lead rangers out here, sure.

Speaker 1 I want to collect Lillian and Jeff and the helicopter pilot. I can't remember his name.
I hope one of us makes it out so his family can hear that it wasn't his fault.

Speaker 1 He had three daughters and was expecting a fourth. I can't imagine what his wife is doing now.
If anyone finds this, it was an electrical malfunction. He got us to the ground safe and sound.

Speaker 1 He was perfect. He even fixed the problem.
Then the weather closed in and we couldn't take off. Lillian knew the way, so we hiked to the lighthouse.
And then the whistlers came.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the way information is being divulged is a lot of fun. Yeah, like it's just little bits of pieces just kind of adding to this larger puzzle is really cool.

Speaker 1 Like, okay, well, there was a weird helicopter. That's why they must have stopped somewhere that they weren't really originally intending to, all all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 Yep. And then like she mentions again, right after they landed, Lillian took them all to the lighthouse as a safety.

Speaker 1 And in the beginning, it says, I never thought I would have so much conspiracy with death, but I haven't cried over the loss of someone since the lighthouse. So one of them dies in the lighthouse.

Speaker 1 We're given that bit of information there.

Speaker 1 And we hear that there's a helicopter pilot. We know that Jeff and Lillian have died.

Speaker 1 And then the Whistlers have now taken stuff back to the cave, the cave that Ira had to hide out nearby for a couple of nights.

Speaker 1 It's just like we're given drops of stuff, but they all connect back to clues we've been given beforehand in like a puzzle piece way almost. And it's fun, too.

Speaker 1 There's this group of people that went in the woods. They

Speaker 1 weather forced the helicopters, say that they went to a lighthouse, and then the whistlers came.

Speaker 1 That's really cool.

Speaker 1 Creates a mystery around the whole piece. And also, there's our framing device of this person who's uploading these pictures online or these like transcriptions of the pictures online.
and

Speaker 1 they're saying that whatever happens at the end of the story, they feel Ruth's presence. They feel like she's nearby, uh, or that she's like speaking to them in a way.
So, it's like, why is that?

Speaker 1 What happens at the end of Ruth's narrative that would cause that to be? It's just a cool, cool way to tell a story. Yeah, October 10th.
It hasn't rained for two days.

Speaker 1 The dead man's jacket is nowhere near warm enough for Ira. Too big, but we don't have anything else.
At least it's waterproof.

Speaker 1 We hear whistlers every night now, just after sunset, three or four of them calling back and forth. Bill's convinced they're tracking us.
We stack rocks around the fire.

Speaker 1 Well, it's not hard to track you if you're building a fire every night.

Speaker 1 Well, that's why I think... Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess that's true.

Speaker 1 I guess the implication is they're freezing and like Ira would like die at night because he needs the jacket and at least it's waterproof. But it's like Bill's convinced they're tracking us.

Speaker 1 It's just that we walk a way and then light a giant flame in the middle of the night. How do they keep people?

Speaker 1 These guys are too good. Is there around a glowing fire?

Speaker 1 We're following a new game trail now instead of the river. The walking's easier.
I didn't think twice about it until last night.

Speaker 1 Bill leaned forward on his elbows at the fireside while the whistlers seemed to be circling us. What if this isn't a game trail?

Speaker 1 What if they made this? I don't have the energy to think about that.

Speaker 1 simple we're walking a trail they made if their nightly whooping is urging us into a trap we're screwed ira curls up in a ball when the whistlers start calling he rides like someone is ticking him with pins all he said so far is let's go

Speaker 1 interesting i guess i mean i think the truth is at the point that they're they're tracking him because i feel like in my opinion or if i had to have a bearer trap moment i think that he i don't think that Bill is a whistler, but I do feel like he's marked somehow or something

Speaker 1 or Ira or Ira. Ira, my bad.
Ira, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, I think definitely Ira is for sure.

Speaker 1 Uh, he's dead weight, and they should probably cut him loose, I would say. Um,

Speaker 1 but of course, that's her husband, so she's not going to do that, you know, to the dire straits. I don't know, though, she's getting good dicking from somebody else named Bill.

Speaker 1 That's you curled up in the tent, like you're dying

Speaker 1 about your wife.

Speaker 1 Ruth.

Speaker 1 Ruth. What?

Speaker 1 Should we be doing this? She's like, shut up. Like, okay, baby.

Speaker 1 It's actually just me talking to my wife. Allison,

Speaker 1 can I kiss you again?

Speaker 1 She's like, no, we're divorced. I'm like,

Speaker 1 sure.

Speaker 1 Whatever you say.

Speaker 1 Such a fun cat and mouse game we play, baby.

Speaker 1 With your wife. Yeah, dear wife.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's just, well, they won't, they think, huh?

Speaker 1 October 14th. It's hell today.
Hard.

Speaker 1 We had to take shelter under a tree, and when dark fell, there was no whistles for the first time in a week. The silence was somehow more eerie than the threat of the whistlers.
Ira felt it too.

Speaker 1 As about 15 minutes after dark, he stood up and started whooping and whistling out into the rain. Don't like that.
Calling and screaming in a tone that didn't sound like him.

Speaker 1 Nope.

Speaker 1 Okay, nope.

Speaker 1 I think you need

Speaker 1 to shoot Ira.

Speaker 1 I think you need to get rid of that. You need to

Speaker 1 pull a little fucking mice of men on him or whatever the fucker is, or grapes of wrath, whichever one it is where they shoot the guy at the end. Mice of men.
Mice of men. Give him one of those.

Speaker 1 Give him a rabbit and pull the trigger. That's all I got to say.

Speaker 1 The thing of the rabbits, Lenny, I think

Speaker 1 I like her explanation for it. It's like, huh, the dark's kind of eerie.
I guess Ira feels kind of eerie too. Yeah.
Considering he's

Speaker 1 wow, he sure is scared. Poor kid.

Speaker 1 I would kill him. I'd kill him.
Who doesn't speak anymore, just mumbles to himself. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You want to bark, boy? You want to go out out there and start barking?

Speaker 1 Rose?

Speaker 1 Ira, what is it? Whatever you do,

Speaker 1 don't fuck Bill or I'll go crazy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know problems.

Speaker 1 Say that with a lot of certainty.

Speaker 1 Ira, please stop it.

Speaker 1 Bill's like, oh, did he hear about us fucking? Yeah, Bill, no! And that's when he gets up and like works out of the tent and just dead sprints off of the woods. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Bill yelled at him to be quiet, but he acted as if possessed, calling out to them at the top of his lungs with his eyes rolling back in his head. Oof.

Speaker 1 Bill tackled him to the ground and beat him to shut him up. Stop it!

Speaker 1 I said at first, but when Ira didn't stop making noise, Bill looked at me and I closed my eyes and nodded.

Speaker 1 He had to knock Ira cold to get him to be quiet, and he was sobbing while he did it, pleading with Ira to settle down. The wind was sharp, and I think it saved us.

Speaker 1 Every tree was vibrating and creaking and howling. The whistlers had likely all retreated to their caves.
Maybe they hibernate. Maybe they'll leave us alone soon.

Speaker 1 That's such a fucking scary visual of your friend crying and beating you because he's so scared. Yeah.
So they're going to fucking kill us. You know what I mean? Yeah, you got to shut up.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You have to.

Speaker 1 There's some story

Speaker 1 right about that. It was World War II,

Speaker 1 I think,

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 1 it was like this kid was freaking out in a gunfight and was going to scream and let the others know. So his buddies had to like cover his mouth and ended up suffocating him to keep him from yelling.

Speaker 1 I can't remember where that's from.

Speaker 1 But yeah, that's a horrified visual. Be like, sorry, sorry, bud.
Gotta.

Speaker 1 We have to be safe. Have to keep everyone alive.
October 17th. Ira was his old self this morning, as completely as if we had gone backward in time.
He was up before either of us, heating water.

Speaker 1 He said he took so long to recon the south side of the mountain because the whistlers caught him in a trap. There was a hole, clearly dug with tools.
They only came out at night.

Speaker 1 And I didn't get a good look at them. I could hear them.
And see silhouettes. But nothing definite.
It was too dark. I don't know what they wanted with me.
I got out, I climbed out, and I ran.

Speaker 1 We're well away from there now, finally reaching the end of the ridges and the start of a valley where everything is very green. I hope the change in biome means a decrease in the Whistler population.

Speaker 1 Part of me wants to take steps to document as much. It's true, but all of our field notes were lost with Olian's gear.
plus the night vision goggles and the cameras.

Speaker 1 My biggest fear is that we'll all be killed, and our disappearance will inspire some other young researchers to come up there, solve the mystery for themselves.

Speaker 1 We'll become just another line in the sick folklore that draws people to this cursed place. I would hate to be part of that cycle, knowing what I know now.

Speaker 1 The Whistlers are very real, and they don't want us here.

Speaker 1 I like how obviously there's still a trap at play, but the idea that all it took to fix Ira was to just beat him unconscious. And he wakes up like, oh, guys, it's good to see you actually.

Speaker 1 We're even a little

Speaker 1 you know what you know what guys my bad maybe is it because they're getting farther and farther away that it's like maybe losing its grip on them maybe could be could be

Speaker 1 that or it's all part of the plan november 1st

Speaker 1 i dreamed last night that i was pregnant with gary law's baby nothing else happened in the dream I was hiking endlessly with Ira and Bill, and all three of us knew that I had been with the dead man, and it bothered us, but we wouldn't talk about it.

Speaker 1 I woke up with my period, thank God. I've ever been so happy doing laundry.
We've made camp by a small lake in the low point of the valley.

Speaker 1 It's uphill from here to a distant saddle, Ira thinks he remembers seeing from the air. It's only about two miles away.

Speaker 1 Red Hill should be just beyond that, Ira says, but we don't have the energy to push that far yet.

Speaker 1 We'll rest today and tomorrow we'll move, and hopefully, we'll be drinking beer at the Red Hill Lodge before dark.

Speaker 1 Where? I assume they're getting water from the river. Where on earth are they getting enough food for three people? Like, what? Well,

Speaker 1 they've established that they keep that she at least has been hunting or whatever. Yeah, they shot a porcupine.

Speaker 1 I'm just saying, like, at least they've established that she, like, you know, she has

Speaker 1 some food happening at some point. Yeah, yeah.
Ira's the best shot. So he took the gun to look for rock petar Migan.
Tarmigan? How far that is? I've never seen it. I'll just say squirrel.

Speaker 1 Is that what a ptarmigan is? I have no idea.

Speaker 1 Yeah, oh, it's a bird. It's like a pigeon-looking thing.
Okay, can you just say, can you just say a pigeon?

Speaker 1 Say goose. Hold on.

Speaker 1 Tarmigan to look for goose. It is pronounced ptarmigan.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Whatever.

Speaker 1 He took the gun to look for the bald eagle,

Speaker 1 to look for the endangered species.

Speaker 1 We're eating eagle tonight.

Speaker 1 Hira, please. Just any other bird will do.
No, it's got to be eagle. It's got to be a bald eagle.

Speaker 1 If I don't commit, it's a felony to own these things. Feathers, watch this.
I don't want to talk about how that motherfucker's going to be bald by the end of the night. Let me tell you that.

Speaker 1 I'm going to pluck that thing dry. I'm going to pluck that motherfucker dry.

Speaker 1 It's going to be delicious.

Speaker 1 We lit two fires and agreed he's not to go beyond shouting distance, but I still worry. The Whistlers don't seem willing to attack when we're in a group.

Speaker 1 Lillian and Jeff were both alone when they were killed. Besides, I'm not convinced Ira's fully recovered yet.
He says nonsensical things in his sleep, cries out in scratches. That's new.

Speaker 1 I don't care if Ira's the best shot. You should not give that dude a gun.
No.

Speaker 1 That seems like a horrible idea. Bill and I went fishing after the laundry was done.
It was stupid doing it in that order. All we caught were minnows, and even that took hours.

Speaker 1 He was staring at me while we sat. The cold was seeping into my bones, making me irritable.
I haven't been warm in weeks. What?

Speaker 1 He's not himself. You know it.
He's better than he was. He's okay.

Speaker 1 We'll find him at Doctor in Red Hill. What if Red Hill isn't on the other side of that saddle? What if we get up there and we're facing another week's worth of empty forest? What then?

Speaker 1 I realized my eyes were closed. I opened them, and the lake seemed oddly bright.
Bill's fingers were pressed against his brow. We'll worry about that that when we have to.

Speaker 1 I'm saying I don't trust him like this, Ruth. He does remember the other night? After the hail, he can't control himself.
He could kill us. He's my husband.
He's my brother. Oh,

Speaker 1 mm. The drama of the

Speaker 1 drama unfolds. Interesting.
Wait, who was it that was leading them down this path? I thought it said Bill knew about the saddle at the top of the hill. No, no, no, I think it's uh, I think it's Ira.

Speaker 1 Ira, yeah, it says it's uphill. Ira thinks thinks he remembers seeing from the air yeah okay so they're definitely going straight into the whistlers

Speaker 1 i have a feeling that's what it might be i have a feeling there is no i have a feeling there ain't no camp red hill anywhere i think they're going straight into a cave i nodded but that was all i could do i've known bill longer than i've known ira and spend more time with him most days back at home since we work in the same department He introduced me to Ira at a Christmas party six years ago now.

Speaker 1 What should we do? I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think we may need to open the idea of cutting the rope at some point. If it gets any worse, it may come to that.
Bill started rock climbing on the weekends in college. Cutting the rope.

Speaker 1 It's a metaphor for letting Ira die so we can live. November 2nd.

Speaker 1 Yesterday, while Ira was still out hunting, we heard three shots in the woods. Too too many to take down a rock ptarmigan.

Speaker 1 And Bill and I stood staring, tense, for just a moment before we hurried to put out the fires and pack what we could into our bags.

Speaker 1 Ira came running into camp, breathing so hard he couldn't say what was wrong.

Speaker 1 He had no gun and no bag, and he grabbed my arm as soon as he was close enough and pulled me through the grass up the valley towards the saddle.

Speaker 1 Bill looked alarmed, caught up to us and pried us apart. He yelled at Ira and handed me my haphazardly stuffed pack.
All our clothes were still wet, torn from the line, and Ira's eyes were wild.

Speaker 1 He stared off behind us. Where's the woods he'd run from? It's a warning.

Speaker 1 I understand it now. It's a warning.
Bill tried to talk him down, but then we heard the whistlers' eerily musical voices. I've never heard it during daylight, and never so close as this.

Speaker 1 Followed Ira's gaze into the trees and stared and listened. Couldn't move my legs.
I couldn't even draw breath.

Speaker 1 I held onto my pack straps with a stony grip, like it was attached to a balloon that might whisk me out of harm's way any moment.

Speaker 1 Ira took my arm again, and now Bill was helping him, pushing me along the trail until I could run, until we all were running as fast as we could.

Speaker 1 The trail led straight into the open, and we all reacted differently, ducking through alders or sweeping wide from the trail to be closer to the cover of the hemlock.

Speaker 1 Ira took the shortest path, straight through the matted grass of the game trail, and soon he was far ahead of me, and it was all I could do to keep my eyes on him and my legs moving as fast as they would go.

Speaker 1 He was the first to reach the hill covered in scrub, the saddle between two jagged peaks. He ducked low as he ran, and I lost sight of him.

Speaker 1 Bill's bad foot and pack slowed him down, and I saw him stop and crouch, wide-eyed, beneath the trees. After we'd been fleeing for ten minutes, it felt like fleeting seconds.

Speaker 1 Ira's vanishing sent panic straight to my toes. It took me no time to decide not to wait with Bill.
I had to catch Ira.

Speaker 1 I kept running until I reached the ridge, my lungs burning, but once I arrived, there was no sign of him, no trail to follow.

Speaker 1 I lumbered to the crest of the saddle, clapping frantically, looking back over my shoulder for Bill, who was also gone.

Speaker 1 From so high up, I could see the forest beyond and the river and the flat brown bay at low tide.

Speaker 1 No town,

Speaker 1 no red hill. I clapped, but neither of them clapped back.
I was so exposed, but the whistling was distant now. In fact, I couldn't pick it apart from the wind with any certainty.

Speaker 1 I walked closer to the trees and built two fires with my fire steel and and shaking hands. The second in the open of the hilltop, big and smoky.
The hemlock makes for thick cover.

Speaker 1 There was plenty of dry tender.

Speaker 1 We left the tent behind and the sleeping pads. Bill had the stove and the cooking pots.
Ira had the gun. I have the hatchet, firesteel, the wet laundry.
I made a lean to with a small roof of bows.

Speaker 1 and sat through the evening with my back tense against a thick tree and waited, slept fitfully. I did the same today, kept the fires alive, and now it's getting dark.

Speaker 1 I should walk back down into the valley to collect the tent, but the sound of the daytime whistle is stuck in me like a splinter.

Speaker 1 I can't face the creature that made that sound, even after years of looking for it. I never believed the stories, not really.

Speaker 1 We came here to research the folklore, to listen to elderly trappers and hunters tell the outlandish stories they grew up with, to record them for posterity. We should never have come here.

Speaker 1 No sign of Ira.

Speaker 1 Bill.

Speaker 1 Interesting. So now she's alone up there.
Yeah, fuck. It seems that wherever Ira went and Bill gone too, man.

Speaker 1 This is like the tension they're playing is pretty good. Like the

Speaker 1 escalation and the action of moments and stuff. Probably would have chilled it.
It's very

Speaker 1 good. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I probably would have ran after Ira, if I'm being honest. Let the motherfucker run off to the woods again.

Speaker 1 I would stick with Bill. He's your better bet, yeah.
But it is her husband.

Speaker 1 So yeah well november 3rd the rain came through my pine shelter last night but at least i can say it broke me out of my trance i tied in the hip belt on my pack added a few hours of wood to both fires unsheathed my knife and taped it to my hand bill told me to do this a long time ago if i knew i might have to run and fight at the same time

Speaker 1 i'm walking back north towards the place where i saw him fall towards the place where the whistlers surprised us. Whistlers aren't the only things to worry about in these woods.

Speaker 1 There are bears, wolves, coyotes, fearless predators that encircle our warm camp at night. Conventional wisdom is to make noise when passing through denser growth, avoid surprising a carnivore.

Speaker 1 Yet, I have long suspected that noise lures the whistlers. Prey species don't announce themselves.
They pass in stealth.

Speaker 1 After what happened to Lillian and Jeff and recently Ira, I have no doubt that we are prey. I resolved to go quietly along the margin of the hemlock, keeping the game trail to my right.

Speaker 1 The signal fire smoked squarely at my back. I walked carefully, keeping low, whispering for Bill whenever the wind slowed, pausing sometimes to listen hard.

Speaker 1 After nearly an hour of creeping and murmuring fruitlessly through the trees, I lost my caution. God damn it, Bill! I shrieked, and seconds later, his clap came.
Two shocks of sound.

Speaker 1 I clapped back, needed two, and I found him, damp and chilled to the bone, slumped against the base of a tall spruce tree not 30 feet from where I'd yelled.

Speaker 1 The needles where he sat were soft and dry, and I sat down right beside him, overcome. I tore the tape off my hand and held his face in my palms.
His eyes were alert, despite everything.

Speaker 1 Where are you hurt? He lifted his ankle. It was still wrapped, but swollen now, rising like bread dough.
Must have been fractured all along, and our sprint across the valley was the final straw.

Speaker 1 He was quiet, but grimaced as I wrestled off his sock and the inadequate wrappings. I held his foot against my thigh, feeling the mess of swollen tissue.

Speaker 1 There was deep blue bruising all across the top of his foot. Took my hands before I could do anything more.
Where's Ira? I smelled the smoke from your camp. I shook my head.
I couldn't catch him.

Speaker 1 He didn't have a pack to weigh him down, and he's such a fast runner to begin with. He was over the ridge before me, and once I got up there, he was gone.
If he saw my smoke, he hasn't let on.

Speaker 1 He left you? He had no gear?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I wonder why that is. I wonder why that is.
He's probably like a mutant freak that lives in a cave now.

Speaker 1 Well, I did see him one night, but he was jumping from the treetops and kept hissing at me. But he does that sometimes.
He had skin underneath his arms that let him fly, and he was whistling.

Speaker 1 So it was just, it was kind of pretty, but weird. It reminded me of our two-year anniversary.

Speaker 1 Bill's like, get

Speaker 1 me out of here.

Speaker 1 He's He's like, Ruth, Ruth, I need you to shoot me in the head. Take the gun.

Speaker 1 Point it at my temple and pull the drive.

Speaker 1 I need you to blow me smooth off. I need you to blow me.
He's like, what?

Speaker 1 Hey, kill. Sorry.
You came out weird.

Speaker 1 Yeah, sorry. Freudian slip there, but just kill me, please.
Right now.

Speaker 1 Oopsie doopsie.

Speaker 1 I focused on the foot, knowing I would need something tight and sturdy to wrap it in if I had any hope of moving Bill up to my camp. Took the dead man's blue wool socks from my feet.

Speaker 1 They were small for Bill and worked like a compression bandage. I rolled both of them onto the one foot, and there were tears coming down his face before I was done.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, but you're lucky I don't think it's broken all the way through. Just badly fractured.

Speaker 1 Ira would know. He stared at me after I said this, but I avoided his gaze.
I cast about until I found a dry branch straight enough to make into a crutch.

Speaker 1 Bill is just over six feet tall, so it was awkward walking a mile uphill with half his body weight on my shoulder.

Speaker 1 I could see he was in tremendous pain, but we made the trek without stopping, and it wasn't until he had collapsed beneath my pine shelter that I paused to let myself wonder if I'd pushed him too hard.

Speaker 1 Didn't matter now, I reasoned. We were as safe as we could hope to be.

Speaker 1 I fed him the last of the dead man's aspirin and elevated his foot.

Speaker 1 There's nothing else. No food, nothing to catch food with.
I'll worry about that tomorrow. Tonight, it's all I can do to keep the roof intact and the fire burning.

Speaker 1 Ira will see the smoke and come to us before Bill is ready to walk again.

Speaker 1 He will.

Speaker 1 He has to.

Speaker 1 November 6th.

Speaker 1 The swelling has gone down on Bill's ankle. I killed a bird, a grouse, by throwing rocks.
Seems like a new low.

Speaker 1 Rock throwing is part of a deeper tier of human desperation we should never have had to access

Speaker 1 while sitting immobile bill has made a bow we'll use the birds

Speaker 1 god damn seems kind of complex exactly

Speaker 1 what we didn't realize is that bill was an elf and he actually made an amazing bow also too i just want to say she killed a bird with a rock i mean like geez i mean what that's pretty into i mean pretty impressive i mean it's not impossible it's not as impossible as building possible i'm just saying it's impressive yeah yeah now what is impossible I like to think

Speaker 1 a recurve bow.

Speaker 1 I do think that it'd be funny. She's like, he made a crossbow.
It's like, what, what?

Speaker 1 It's like made of steel and everything. Yeah.
This should do the trick.

Speaker 1 He's constructed a,

Speaker 1 I forget the name of it. The scorpions, the giant like Roman crossbows, like, or artillery pieces.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's thankfully, he's constructed a catapult that should throw us to Red River. It should launch us the whole way there.

Speaker 1 Bill, while sitting idle, made a Nissan Ultima, a 2006 Nissan Ultima. He plans to drive out of the forest soon.

Speaker 1 Thankfully, he built one with off-road tires, so that should get us at least down the mountain.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the whistling is getting closer.

Speaker 1 Bill has made a bow. He'll use the bird's feathers for arrow fletching and maybe for fishing flies.
He saved the longest tail feather out for me to use as a quill, he said, in case my pen dies.

Speaker 1 Where are you going to get ink? I guess you would dip it inside of the pen.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I want you to use my blood for that notebook of yours.

Speaker 1 We need to scout the area before we move again. I could hike to the top of one of the peaks, but I can't justify leaving Bill alone that long.

Speaker 1 Not that he's helpless, but the awful truth is we're both down to the last of our endurance. We get separated.
If I wind up alone again, I don't think I'll have it in me to keep going.

Speaker 1 It's bothering Bill, not knowing what happened to Ira. Their whistlers

Speaker 1 At night, we hear them in nearly every direction, but they keep their distance.

Speaker 1 If we sleep, we sleep in shifts. What is what was that thing Ira said? I get it now.
It's a warning. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's like, I get it now. It's a warning, whatever.
Which I'm wondering if he was trying to allude that, like, they keep following him. They're like, hey, you guys are going in a bad direction or what?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. That the whistlers are giving them a warning.
Yeah. Yeah.
November 10th. No news.
The weather's dry, but much colder than last week.

Speaker 1 Winter is late, and I worry that when the snow finally comes, it will fall all at once. burying us in any points of reference.
I built a windbreak and improved our shelter. Caught a rabbit.

Speaker 1 Helped Bill bathe. I keep catching him putting weight on his foot, rushing things.
No signs of Ira, not much sleep. November 12th.
Snowed overnight at last, just as I predicted. Came in a big rush.

Speaker 1 A great dumping of powder and then a sunny morning. The signal fire on the hill was smothered, but Bill wouldn't let me go out and relight it.
He would have seen it by now, he said, meaning Ira.

Speaker 1 Save the drywood.

Speaker 1 He made a second crutch and uses both to humor me, but he says he can't be idle anymore it seems such a risk to move on this weather with you hurt if we stay here we'll die he's talking about building a sled once the snow is thick enough i can't listen i'll take the bow to the top of the hill scout our path look for game they a hundred percent because it keeps talking about how they don't have proper cold weather gear if they woke up under snow they're dead

Speaker 1 They have hypothermia.

Speaker 1 All their clothes are soaked. So like they're not going to get dry.
They're going to die. They're 100% done.
At the very least, they're catatonic and can't move.

Speaker 1 Ain't no building a sled and like taking your homemade bow with you. We'll be like Santa Claus.
Not to mention, they've been out here for like two months. Three.
Three months.

Speaker 1 When the story started, it said we've been out for four weeks.

Speaker 1 They have spent a season out here.

Speaker 1 Ain't no way.

Speaker 1 November 13th.

Speaker 1 Nothing much to see from the high ridge yesterday. No snow has fallen yet around the bay, and it occurred to me that we might just follow the coastline south.

Speaker 1 We could set a new fire every day on the beach, leave it smoking. Maybe a plane will pass.
Maybe Ira will see us from wherever he's hiding. Maybe the whistlers don't swim.

Speaker 1 Bill says we'll leave tomorrow.

Speaker 1 What about Ira?

Speaker 1 He shrugged, looking exhausted.

Speaker 1 Don't know which way he went. Don't know where to look.

Speaker 1 Don't know how he is. If we leave, we will never see him again.

Speaker 1 I started to cry, and Bill walked away to the shelter and curled up like he was going to sleep. Turned his back to me, looked out across the saddle in the valley and tried to keep my tears quiet.

Speaker 1 It was just dusk, no distant fires, no smoke. If he's nearby, he's cold, he's dying, and I'm helpless.
It's full dark now. For the first time in weeks, whistlers haven't made a sound.
November 14th.

Speaker 1 Bill woke me up at dawn. He had hot water and a scrap of rabbit for me.
I'm saving the bones and feet in a plastic bag. Don't know if they'll be any good for soup, but soon they may be all we have.

Speaker 1 Lifted my pack for me to put on, then put his hands on my shoulders. I'm sorry.
I don't know what else to do.

Speaker 1 I looked back at him, watched while he got into his own pack and kicked snow and dirt over the fire's embers.

Speaker 1 Thought of leaving a note for Ira to follow, or some kind of sign, but the snow is falling again in pellets. Every trace of us will be obliterated soon.

Speaker 1 Like these jumps in time are insane. Another like four days out here in between the journal entries.
Like, my gosh, they have got to die soon. I'm dead.
They're dead.

Speaker 1 They should have been dead months ago. They should have been dead months ago if it was like a happy forest with nothing but like singing birds and the rabbits, not with the whistlers praying around.

Speaker 1 November 18th.

Speaker 1 The hiking has been easier since we got below the snow line, but the weather's following us. The coast is icing over.
We're making good time, and I think we're both relieved to be off the game trail.

Speaker 1 Aside from mud and rough gravel, the terrain is much easier here along the beaches than it was up in the trees. It's been five nights now since we heard the whistlers.
Five nights of Freddy's.

Speaker 1 Since we heard the whistlers.

Speaker 1 Maybe they don't like the cold, or maybe we finally left their natural range. Even the smallest hope is agony.
We had some luck with fishing yesterday.

Speaker 1 An enormous trout was stuck in a low pond after the tide went out. Probably sick, probably already dying.
We spent the whole day gorging on it, cutting strips to smoke.

Speaker 1 I found Ira's gold watch in my pack. I gave it to him for our second anniversary.
We had habits of taking it off whenever he worked with his hands, and must have stashed it in my bag to keep it safe.

Speaker 1 I asked Bill if he wanted to wear it, but he said no. There's no point looking at the time, I guess.
I buried it near the fire, built a carn over top, said some words, like a funeral.

Speaker 1 Bill didn't say anything. I had to do something in order to keep moving.
I don't feel certain Ira is dead, but I can't fathom what it means if he's out there and we're leaving him behind.

Speaker 1 Most horrible thought is that he's the reason the Whistlers are gone. Maybe he's leading them on a chase away from us, or maybe they were hunting and they caught him.
Their hunger's satisfied for now.

Speaker 1 Don't think like that, Bill says, but I know Ira is in his thoughts too. Bill's a folklorist, like me, but that's not what drew him here.

Speaker 1 He wanted to see the Whistlers with his own eyes, like Lillian did. He wanted to document them, their habits, describe them as a species, science.

Speaker 1 Everything that's happened so far fits the stories. Don't, Ruth.
But I don't stop, because he knows the stories even better than I do.

Speaker 1 He knows we're just like all the other characters now: hunted, doomed.

Speaker 1 They pick the groups apart. They separate people.

Speaker 1 They take their prey one at a time.

Speaker 1 You don't believe the stories. You never believe them.

Speaker 1 I opened my mouth, but the words were delayed. I believe we'll never see Ira again.

Speaker 1 Sleep a little bit apart, despite the bitter cold. He's always up before I wake.

Speaker 1 Bill says he recognizes this coastline. There's a pinnacle to the east he calls Fanphone Point.

Speaker 1 I'd say we're eight days north of Red Hill if we stick to the coast. I'm not getting my hopes up.

Speaker 1 Eight days north? Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 It's going to be Christmas by the time he gets the fucking Red Point, dude. My word.
Give it up. You're dead.
You're dead. Don't worry.
We only have to walk another 10 days.

Speaker 1 Is that an actual place? Red Hill

Speaker 1 Forest. Coastline? Because it sounds like it's like far north Canada, right?

Speaker 1 Like maybe west. I was going to say California or something like that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I mean, maybe. There are places in California, I guess, you could be that far out in like the redwoods or something.
But

Speaker 1 they're on the coastline, right? Like, even north, California coastlines pretty well

Speaker 1 things, right? Yeah, okay. The only red hills I see is Colorado, and Colorado does not have a coastline.
So this has got to be like fictional, way, way up west, western Canada, I would think.

Speaker 1 November 28th, 10 days since I wrote. It all blends together.
This bit of shoreline looks just the same as what we saw days ago. Water just as flat and gray.

Speaker 1 If it weren't for Bill and the compass, I would assume we were skirting a large lake, not an inlet of the Pacific Ocean. Okay.

Speaker 1 You know what?

Speaker 1 Not really a bear trap, but I'll take it. I'll take it.
Same.

Speaker 1 I'll take it. That's me.

Speaker 1 I would assume we were going in circles. We do have fan foam point to navigate by and the stars.
The weather has cleared. Winter is hesitating again.

Speaker 1 I worry I'll never see leaves on trees again, flowers opening up in a field of grass. I worked all the time.
I and I didn't take a vacation last summer. I squandered so much.

Speaker 1 Some days, Bill and I don't speak a word to each other. We stop walking.
He assembles the shelter. I build the fire.
He unpacks the food. I hang our damp clothes.

Speaker 1 We eat, we sleep, and in the morning, we walk. December 1st.
I saw Red Hill first.

Speaker 1 Our trip of shoreline was getting rocky, so we went up into a stand of cedar and found a steep bear trail.

Speaker 1 We haven't heard whistlers in weeks, so we beat pots and shouted every few steps, and something about us using our voices made us giddy.

Speaker 1 Bill started singing a camp song I never heard, something from when he was a child, I guessed, full of rhymed bodily functions. He laughed while I sang it, laughed until tears rolled down his face.

Speaker 1 He had to stop to catch his breath, and I walked a short ways onward because it seemed he needed a moment alone.

Speaker 1 It seemed he was finally realizing what I realized when we left our camp near the saddle, that we had abandoned Ira to an unknown fate.

Speaker 1 That he might have died a preventable death because we were too scared and broken to search for him.

Speaker 1 I walked toward a break in the trees with Bill hyperventilating at my back and saw a straight line far away and a clearing where lighter green grass vibrated amongst dark evergreen.

Speaker 1 We were on a bit of a ridge and could look down into the distant orderliness of a minuscule town, just a lump of weedy brush and granite rising out of the marshy lowlands. Now I was crying.

Speaker 1 There was a water tower, a long split rail fence. Distantly, some low buildings and power lines were visible against a curtain of trees.
I called to Bill, who ran up beside me and stopped and stared.

Speaker 1 He wrapped his arms around me in his relief, squeezing me hard against his chest.

Speaker 1 I kissed him without thinking first, and he jerked his head away, sailing shakily into my hair, but not releasing me from his arms.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry. I don't know how to.

Speaker 1 He began, but didn't finish. I eased myself out of his embrace and gestured for him to follow me down the hill.
It started snowing. Darkness fell when we were still about a mile outside of Red Hill.

Speaker 1 The terrain was difficult, thorny and muddy. I struggled with my dimming flashlight, focusing intently on my feet and the ground ahead.
Bill grabbed my arm as the moon was rising. He stopped me.
Look.

Speaker 1 I looked ahead to Red Hill. I could see the water tower clearly still, an armored dome high above everything, silhouetted against the sky.
What?

Speaker 1 There are no lights. I blinked, searched, but of course he was right.
As night fell, nothing had come to life in Red Hill.

Speaker 1 There were no porch lamps, no glowing windows, no blinking red beacon atop the water tower. The place looked abandoned, as still and dark as death.
We can't stop here in the open.

Speaker 1 Can you make it without your light on? My flashlight was nearly dead, and the moon was rising anyway. I switched it off and we continued, not struggling as urgently as before.

Speaker 1 I was aware of the sound my boots made in the soggy ground. Bill's voice dropped to a whisper, thick with caution.
We'll knock on the first door we come to.

Speaker 1 Would lead them to the fact that our chopper went down. What do you think is wrong?

Speaker 1 What are you afraid of? I was terrified, but I wasn't sure why. I don't know.
The moon was directly overhead by the time we reached the split rail fence we'd seen from the ridge.

Speaker 1 Caution and fatigue had made that final stretch of our journey seem endless. There were sounds in the woods nearby.
Not whistlers. Maybe wolves? But I was more concerned about people.

Speaker 1 Lillian had warned us about the residents this far out in these isolated stretches of forest. The lighthousekeeper had held a rifle to her forehead once when she surprised him after a few weeks away.

Speaker 1 We passed through the split rail fence and walked across a flat expanse of dirt stuck with poles, tetherball poles. It was a schoolyard.
There were no children to be seen, no people, no signs of life.

Speaker 1 I turned my light back on, and Bill did the same.

Speaker 1 He had a headlamp, brighter and wider than my little incandescent torch, and walked ahead of me through the yard, up toward a chain swing set in a few low buildings that looked like houses.

Speaker 1 The street between them was hard dirt scattered with rough quartz gravel that glittered in the light. He was bold.

Speaker 1 We walked up to the low porch of the first house we leveled with and rapped sharply on the front door. Anyone home? Our helicopter went down.
We need help. All was silent.

Speaker 1 I looked around while he stared at the door, hoping the noise might draw movement elsewhere in Red Hill. No luck.
We went house to house, knocking and calling at eight buildings on that lonely street.

Speaker 1 We ended at the lodge, a sort of multi-purpose building that contained rooms for rent, a post office, and a meeting hall. It was deserted like the rest.

Speaker 1 My flashlight flickered and died while we stood on the front porch. Bill tested the the handle and found the lodge unlocked.
I can't see how anyone would object.

Speaker 1 He said, tapping his headlamp beam downward and looking at my face. We were both shivering.
The pilot said people lived here year-round. He must have been mistaken.

Speaker 1 This is such an interesting, like, plot device to use because the story was already creepy. It's like, you know, the monsters in the woods and them being stuck out there.

Speaker 1 But now it's like, why is this town empty? That doesn't feel right. Why, you know, no one's answering.
The schoolyard's empty.

Speaker 1 It's like, it's switched to a completely different setting that ties into the same kind of creepiness that we've seen before. It's pretty.

Speaker 1 Inside, Bill felt along the lodge's wall for a light switch, but there was no power.

Speaker 1 I found a full kerosene lamp on a bookshelf and a book of matches and an ashtray on a table in the lodge's dining area. I lit the lamp and breathed a little easier.

Speaker 1 Bill walked around the lodge's rooms with his headlamp. getting his bearings but i sat at a table with the lamp holding my head and trying to feel grateful for the shelter.

Speaker 1 He came back, wiping his hands on his pants. The breaker didn't do anything.
There's a generator back in the utility room.

Speaker 1 Looks like it's got a little fuel left, but I'll wait until morning to try it. When I didn't respond, he came to sit across from me at the table.
Abandoned or not,

Speaker 1 we're going to have to winter here. I nodded.
We'll get our hands on a radio. As much food and fuel as we can find.
We'll hold up and wait it out. Someone will come for us.

Speaker 1 I nodded again, but couldn't look at him. All you need is rest, he said, softer now.
He led me toward the bedrooms and opened a creaking door for me.

Speaker 1 The room had a double bed with a pretty cream-colored quilt, a closet with accordion doors, and a wide window that looked out on blackness. Is there a room without a window?

Speaker 1 I looked at my reflection in the dark glass and looked to the real me. I carried the kerosene lamp, and my unsteady grip cast eerie shadows.
Of course.

Speaker 1 He ushered me into the room directly across the hall. It was adjacent adjacent to a doorway that led away towards a lounge full of deer trophies and enormous television screens.

Speaker 1 It had skylights and the moon was showing through.

Speaker 1 The bedroom was nearly identical to the first, except the bedspread was blue patchwork and the window was replaced with a hanging tapestry of sweet pea blossoms.

Speaker 1 I nodded, set my backpack down, and placed the lamp on top of the dresser so it cast light on each of the four walls. I unzipped my jacket, but Bill stayed in the doorway.

Speaker 1 I could take the room across the way. Don't Don't be silly.
He gave me a serious look, put his pack down beside mine, and came to get in bed with me.

Speaker 1 Suppose it's too cold to sleep apart, he said, taking off his boots and settling rigidly under the covers.

Speaker 1 Why is it different from sharing a tent?

Speaker 1 It just is. I thought I'd fall away into the deepest sleep of my life.
The wind picked up and the lodge creaked and shuddered around us and thought every other sound was a footstep or a human whimper.

Speaker 1 At one point, I woke Bill up. Dead certain.
I heard a baby crying. He stroked my hair and listened for a full minute and pressed me against the mattress by my shoulder before lying back down himself.

Speaker 1 Back to sleep. But I didn't sleep.
Instead, I took the kerosene lamp to the chair in the corner and wrote down the strange day.

Speaker 1 Bill is motionless in his sleep, one arm slung beside him in the place I left. It is different, just the two of us sharing a domestic space.
What will become of us during months of isolation?

Speaker 1 What will we look like to whoever finds us?

Speaker 1 I hear it again now a wailing that is certainly not the wind the doors are locked but that's hardly any consolation if the whistlers are real what else could be living in this place a banshee a wendigo

Speaker 1 something even stranger

Speaker 1 bill sleeps through the sound he won't believe me in the morning this I okay

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you get onto me sometimes for being like, I'm bought in. Well, I'm here to tell you I'm bought in.
Like, I've been bought in for a while, but the story keeps buying me, it keeps upping the price.

Speaker 1 That, like,

Speaker 1 the little character dynamic between Ruth and Bill, and like,

Speaker 1 it's weird to share a bed, it's weird to have a domestic space, and it's like they both feel that they're betraying Ira, but there's no way Ira's alive, and they're, and they've got to settle here for a while, but it's still uncanny because there's no one there, but it provides warmth, and like, what else could be out there?

Speaker 1 It's just everything the story, every development the story's taken so far works for me. I think it builds on itself very well.
December 2nd.

Speaker 1 I woke up in the chair where I fell asleep writing. The lamp's wick was low and had burned down far too much of the kerosene before snuffing itself out.
There's a spare can, but it won't last long.

Speaker 1 I'll have to be more careful. Bill was gone when I awoke.
He had covered me with the quilt from the bed. I found him in the lounge inspecting the mounted moose heads and elk skulls.

Speaker 1 There were books, field guides, and old almanacs scattered on a coffee table. The wood stove was blazing, tickling with heat.
Bill wasn't relaxed.

Speaker 1 He greeted me in a whisper and moved tentatively through the room. I had nearly forgotten about his injury.
Let me have another look at your foot.

Speaker 1 You should rest in bed for a few days, now that we're safe. He shook his head.
We're not safe. Come look.
He led me through the lounge and onto the porch at the front of the lodge.

Speaker 1 There's no snow or ice on the ground outside. The road's muddy, ground soft enough to hold indentations.

Speaker 1 From the porch steps, we saw the street and its quartz gravel, the small ruts we made walking from house to house in the dark last night. But now our steps are not the only marks in the road.

Speaker 1 There are other prints, too, evidence of pacing steps and sliding gashes where the gravel has been scraped completely away.

Speaker 1 Could be the tracks of dozens of pairs of feet or just a few going around and around the lodge while we slept. Footprints form an unbroken circle around us.

Speaker 1 Evidence of the stalking, pacing, night watch of the Whistlers. They've retreated now, apparently.
But how far? Man. That's freaky.
Waking up the next day and there's a perfect circle around

Speaker 1 the lodge, like over and over again.

Speaker 1 I don't like that at all.

Speaker 1 In the moment, I could scarcely breathe. I staggered back against the lodge's front door, my body crumpling down and heaving.
In the stories, the whistlers don't have tracks.

Speaker 1 Bill shrugged shrugged and kept a stoic face.

Speaker 1 They look human to me, like a grown man dragging his feet.

Speaker 1 His voice was low, tired. What's wrong with you? He shook his head.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Doesn't matter if this is a game the Whistlers are playing or that the people of Red Hill disappear, reappeared last night to make these marks to mess with us.

Speaker 1 Doesn't matter if it's aliens or mold people or fucking Lillian and Jeff back from the dead. We can't stay here now.
He opened the front door and nodded me back inside.

Speaker 1 We'll gather what we can and keep going south until we find another town. There's a closet.
There's a closet with some gear, a good tent, tarps, lanterns, and a stove.

Speaker 1 You start getting things together, and I'll see if I can find a vehicle that runs. I stopped in the doorway.
I was breathing so hard I could taste blood. No, we can't split up.

Speaker 1 We're no safer during the day than we are at night. We can't make that mistake a second time.
She is so right.

Speaker 1 She is so so rude. She's such a queen for that.
Because as soon as he said that, I'm like, that's the worst idea I've ever had.

Speaker 1 What are you thinking, bro? How about you stay here and I'll go on the other side of the town where you can't see or hear me? He paused. Fine.

Speaker 1 I'll take what we need from the closet. You have a look for food in the kitchen.
Then we'll pack up and scout out a vehicle together. Agreed?

Speaker 1 I would assume that the moment they hit that lodge, they would just be scrounging for food, right? Like surely. Also, I would just, I would not want to leave for you've been walking for four months.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Four months is an insane amount of time. You literally have shelter now.
I'm like, why don't you just hang out for a bit?

Speaker 1 Like, I understand that, like,

Speaker 1 they're around the lodge and that. It's around you this whole time though.
And yes, it is. It is.
But

Speaker 1 how are the woods any safer? Exactly. How were you any safer anywhere else you were? Yeah, they were walking around out there too, obviously.
So

Speaker 1 I nodded, but was not completely reconciled with Bill's plan. How long can we run before hunger stops us, or the cold, or the harsh unknowns of the landscape?

Speaker 1 We saw this region from the air, saw the dead-end logging roads and ghost towns surrounded by miles of wilderness. We both know Red Hill has no outlet.

Speaker 1 A single road leads west to an airstrip and a dock that freezes over every January. Mail comes by boat, only in the summer.
Bill knows there's actually nowhere we can run.

Speaker 1 Maybe the Whistlers know it too. One task at a time.
Food. I walked into the dining area, back beyond a buffet table waiting for chafing dishes, into the kitchen.

Speaker 1 It is thoroughly modern, with wood veneer cabinets and a walk-in freezer with a gleaming door. Someone put a lot of care into this kitchen.
Perhaps they photographed it for brochures.

Speaker 1 Fair tours have become popular among the wealthy and well-armed. The cupboards are nearly bare, as one would would expect them to be at the close of the season.

Speaker 1 There's a bin with a few cups of stale flour inside, a bottle of rancid oil, a gallon-sized can of fruit cocktail, a box of crumbled tea bags, a canister of powdered milk, a stuck-together brick of sugar cubes.

Speaker 1 I opened the refrigerator, but the stagnant air behind the door poured over me, making me reel and gag before I forced it shut.

Speaker 1 I glimpse molding vegetables, rancid meat, obscure plastic wrappings dotted with black mold.

Speaker 1 I must have gagged audibly because soon Bill was at the kitchen door, eyes wild and shining like he'd been sprinting. What's wrong? The fridge is full of spoiled food.
He frowned.

Speaker 1 That doesn't make sense. They would have cleaned everything out before closing the place up for the season.

Speaker 1 But if it wasn't closed up, I said, my voice was shaking. The front door was unlocked.
The tables and chairs still out. The TV cabinet and the lounge is wide open.

Speaker 1 The curtains weren't drawn in the bedrooms. Gas in the generator.
Nothing winterized. But they left in a hurry.
Back of my throat had gone dry.

Speaker 1 I walked to the freezer and yanked against the long steel handle, preparing myself for another wave of pungent odor, but deciding that spoilage in the freezer could be the final piece of evidence that proves the emerging theory.

Speaker 1 Something had gone very wrong for the residents of Red Hill. Bill stood at my shoulder, watching with a weary hand over his nose and mouth as the door's hinge creaked.

Speaker 1 The food on the shelves at the walk-in was actually better contained than what had been in the fridge. There was spoiled spoiled meat wrapped in paper, looking sunken and gory.

Speaker 1 The ice and ice cream had all melted within confined containers as if power outages were routine.

Speaker 1 Besides a deeply musty, almost rubbery smell, first I thought the freezer, though abandoned, was benign.

Speaker 1 Ruth, Bill said behind me, his hand creeping shakily along my shoulder, trying to turn me back toward him.

Speaker 1 Don't look, Ruth. What?

Speaker 1 Now I looked squarely to the back of the freezer, where a pair of rounded shoes was visible behind a pallet stacked with sunken bags of frozen vegetables.

Speaker 1 The steel floor beneath the pallet was shiny with dried fluids that had leaked from the bags. Maybe days ago, maybe weeks.

Speaker 1 Don't! He repeated, but I kept looking, following the shoes to a scrawny pair of legs, bent knees, the pleated black pants and white coat of the lodge's chef.

Speaker 1 Middle-aged woman with wiry white hair and a shriveled gray face. I took a step toward the dead woman, felt my bare feet sticking in the mess on the freezer's floor.

Speaker 1 Bill's grip tightened on my shoulders.

Speaker 1 Look at me. Look away.

Speaker 1 What happened here?

Speaker 1 Pulled me away, out of the kitchen, through the lounge, all the way back to the bedroom, where he gently shut the door and put me to bed. grabbing me tightly with the quilt.

Speaker 1 Just as sleeping beside Bill is different out in the wilderness, so death is freshly strange within the confines of the lodge. The dead chef makes less sense to me than Gary Law, the lighthousekeeper.

Speaker 1 She died indoors, in a place where the beds were still made, where the refrigerator was filled with food. She would have been safe.
Why would they ever leave her here?

Speaker 1 He knelt at my feet with a bottle of water and a washcloth, scrubbing the freezer sickness off of them. I left my shoes at the front door ages ago, it seemed.
When he spoke, his voice shook.

Speaker 1 What exactly did you hear

Speaker 1 I was dazed and couldn't speak, so Bill kept talking. I imagine they were already here in Red Hill before we arrived.

Speaker 1 Spooked the residents. The power must have failed already.
Before she went in there, there was a park on the hook outside. She didn't take it.
Must have been in a panic.

Speaker 1 She went there to keep herself safe. Maybe people started leaving and she couldn't get out.
It was all an accident.

Speaker 1 He said, rubbing my leg reassuringly. They didn't realize she was trapped.
There's a bell.

Speaker 1 An emergency alarm. Her fingers, Bill.
Her fingernails.

Speaker 1 They were scraped bloody on the door handle. Torn up.
So maybe there was no one left to hear the bell.

Speaker 1 Maybe everyone else. But I sat upright on the bed.
Couldn't calm down. That night, when it hailed, we would have done anything to make Ira quiet down.
They got inside Ira's head, didn't they?

Speaker 1 Maybe they got inside hers, too. You think her own people locked her in there? I tried to speak reasonably.
Tried for academic composure.

Speaker 1 Who succumbs to a kind of madness. Tearing at their own flesh, losing their minds, killing their companions.
Lillian thought it was kind of a Stockholm syndrome. Bill nodded.

Speaker 1 Told me the story of the family who lived in the outpost north of the lighthouse. It was years and years ago.
Mother, father, three children.

Speaker 1 The father sent a dispatch one day to say he had killed his wife and his kids, strangled them. He had received a warning, he said.
So he killed them all.

Speaker 1 When the Rangers arrived, the residence was empty. There was no sign of any of them.
No sign of a struggle. As if they had vanished over the rocks and into the sea.
Okay,

Speaker 1 so that whole vignette was stellar. I got a chill when she's in the freezer and Bill says, don't look.
And then she says, I see a pair of shoes at the end. That got me.

Speaker 1 That made me like I was, I, once again, I became conscious of where the door in my room is. Like,

Speaker 1 started looking at my own reflection.

Speaker 1 That was great. But also, that mention at the end about the father that called the dispatch and said there was a warning is the same thing Ira said before he ran off.

Speaker 1 So maybe it's like it's a warning and you have to kill the people you're with to save them or whatever. I don't know.
Um, but that's the same thing Ira said before we ran off.

Speaker 1 It's gonna be crazy if it's Ira walking around the house. That's what I think it might be because she said the whistlers don't leave footprints, right? Yeah, there's gotta be so-and-so.

Speaker 1 It could be Ira.

Speaker 1 It is very Wendigo in the sense of it's like it is a physical thing, but there is a spirit that is trying to like draw you out and there's like a supernatural element to it. Um,

Speaker 1 yeah, it's pretty cool. This is like I said, I am hook line and sinker currently and and scared.
I'm now scared. Bill told me to lie down for the rest of the afternoon, but I couldn't.

Speaker 1 I'm ready to go. I said, and we wasted no time.
We packed our bags in a mournful silence.

Speaker 1 I was greedy and overstuffed my pack, taking the quilt from the bed, spare batteries, candles, matches, mouthwash from the bathroom, and then the remaining kerosene. That ain't greedy.

Speaker 1 I would be ripping the nails out of the walls if I thought it could help me.

Speaker 1 What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 And there's other buildings there you can search too, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I wonder if they're talking about weight, like trying to conserve their energy. Yeah, yeah, I understand she's concerned for that.

Speaker 1 But I would be like, there could be a funny baked ham in one of those houses. You don't know what you're passing for.
It's true. Bill found a handgun in a locked drawer, plus ammunition.

Speaker 1 He had braved the freezer a second time, discovered the drawer keys in the pocket of the chef's coat. She wrote something, he said when he returned.

Speaker 1 There's a clipboard mounted on the inside of the freezer, an inventory log and pin. Chef had scrawled a desperate message on the blank backside of the page.

Speaker 1 They've been protecting us all these years, keeping it at bay. Whatever it is, they were warning us all this time.
And now it's too late.

Speaker 1 Too late by far.

Speaker 1 It's come to Red Hill at last.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 1 Hmm.

Speaker 1 That must mean by it was a warning. So what are the Whistlers keeping back? The Whistlers must have not been the ones that killed Lillian and Jeff then.
Something else did.

Speaker 1 Whistlers are like harbingers.

Speaker 1 I've copied it verbatim. I can't stop thinking about it.
You're right. Bill said, shaking his head once he was finished reading.
He crumpled the page and left it on the table. Stockholm syndrome.

Speaker 1 I was wrapping the end of a fireplace poker with duct tape, but Slowdown looked at Bill now, considering the chef's words. They caught Ira in a trap.
Yes. They didn't kill him.
Didn't hurt him.

Speaker 1 He was well enough to find his way back to us. He escaped them.
But I don't want to hear it, Ruth. I nodded and practiced swinging the poker against fire logs.

Speaker 1 Even now, all we have to go on are other people's words. We came all this way to conduct our own research, and the only thing we've learned is fear.
We hear the whistlers, but have not seen them.

Speaker 1 We fear the unseen, but what if that's a failure of imagination? Perhaps there's something else to be afraid of. Some reason the stories are so few and scattered.

Speaker 1 Some reason there are so rarely any survivors. Some reason Bill and I have made it all this far.
Some unknown.

Speaker 1 We wrote a note that we left on a side table near the front door, our names and the date, contact numbers for our families back home, an apology that we didn't do more for the woman in the freezer.

Speaker 1 We couldn't spare the time and energy it would take to bury her. I put the kitchen parka on over my jacket and pants.
Bill layered his clothes under Gary Laws.

Speaker 1 We took gentle steps away from the lodge, across the barrier line of whistler tracks, listening hard. In the light of day, it was clear that Red Hill had been evacuated in a rush.

Speaker 1 There were split logs stockpiled beside every structure, potted plants drying out on porches, a garage door left open, its contents in disarray. Not many vehicles.

Speaker 1 Bill said as we walked to the far side of Red Hill, out toward the skinny dirt road that led out of town. So this road must lead somewhere.
They got in their cars and took this road out of town.

Speaker 1 Bill didn't seem to encourage. To a dock, to an airstrip, maybe.
I'm sure a town this size has emergency evac procedures. We could follow this road and end up in a dead end.

Speaker 1 Still, it's better than not knowing. It's better than planting our feet here and waiting to starve.
Or worse. Tugged on his coat and squinted against the bright white sky.

Speaker 1 We looked into the houses along the main street. Okay, good.
I'm like, surely they're going to look right.

Speaker 1 Most front doors were left unlocked. One had key stuck in the knob, dangling.
We found a loaded revolver stashed under a mattress and a dog trapped inside a bare kitchen pantry. It was a mutt.

Speaker 1 Shaggy, pissed off. We opened the door and it shot away into the woods.
Didn't look back. Even that brief scouting wore me out.

Speaker 1 Bill kept looking over his shoulder, tightening his grip on the gun and staring around at every sound. My shoulders were aching under the pull of my pack straps.

Speaker 1 At last, we found two worthy vehicles, each with slightly less than half a tank of gas. One, a smallish van and the other a jeep with studded tires and the keys sitting on the dash.

Speaker 1 Bill leaned his hand on the jeep as if it meant we were saved, but I stood apart, unable to shake a sick feeling and the conundrum of the chef's final words. What if we don't leave? What?

Speaker 1 You said yourself there's nothing certain at the end of the road. We could drive to the coast and get stranded.
We could end up on foot again, in the woods, exposed.

Speaker 1 We're exposed here. Did you not see those tracks? I did.

Speaker 1 They surrounded us last night. They were everywhere.
And yet, here we are. Standing in the street, alive.

Speaker 1 For months, the Worcesters have been on top of us. But we're still breathing.
Tell that to Lillian and Jeff. Tell it to Ira.

Speaker 1 She was yelling now, panting. Her face is red.
Close.

Speaker 1 I was blinking away tears, but I wasn't upset, just overwhelmed. One One more night indoors.
Let me wash and be warm. Just one more time.

Speaker 1 I'm so tired, Bill. So tired.
He didn't agree, not explicitly. While we stood with the Jeep, it started snowing.
Just the lightest veil falling between us.

Speaker 1 We returned to the lodge. He moved around with a sort of quiet, powerless violence, locking and barricading the doors, drawing curtains, checking and rechecking the guns.

Speaker 1 He parked the the Jeep in front of the lodge and loaded the backseat with gear and tools, as if to remind me that our present comfort was necessarily temporary.

Speaker 1 We dragged the bed into the lounge, close to the stove.

Speaker 1 We moved the lounge's couches and tables towards the windows, then made the bed almost reflexively, shaking the quilt out between us and draping it over the kneaded sheets. Night was falling by then.

Speaker 1 We're getting out of here first light. I'm gonna boil a kettle and take a bath.
He softened just a little.

Speaker 1 I saw towels in the closet. Okay.
Once again, I really like their dynamic. They both feel realistic.
Neither feels stupid. They both have realistic reasons for what they want.

Speaker 1 And that little moment of he softened a little and said, I saw towels in the closet. That feels very real.
Feels very lived in. I want to ask your opinion, Hunter.
What do you do in this scenario?

Speaker 1 Like, do I stay or do I go? Is that what you mean? Yeah, yeah. You cannot kill yourself.
Hmm. Well,

Speaker 1 you know me too well.

Speaker 1 I would stay.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think with the kind of the nuance of like, maybe the Whistlers could have killed us by now if they wanted to.

Speaker 1 That's my thought is like we're way safer here than we were in our tent and they didn't kill us then. Also, we could try to barricade the door.

Speaker 1 We're safe from the elements and we can like look through the all the other houses and get food. Like,

Speaker 1 to me, I'm like, it just makes the most sense. That's your best, especially where it's cold.

Speaker 1 Maybe if it was the summer, it would be a little different, but where it's cold and you can just die in your sleep from hypothermia, I feel like you've got to stay there, especially because this town has to have some kind of radio thing somewhere, right?

Speaker 1 Good thing, but there's no power. Well, they sat that generator with half the gas, right?

Speaker 1 They could just move equipment over there and try to get word out. I would, I would, I would completely exhaust that town before I decided the woods were a good idea again.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I also understand his idea of like those things are close. I don't want to be here anymore.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but, but, like, he's not dumb. It's a realistic idea, but I would also say stay in town where you at least have a roof from the snow.

Speaker 1 If we were walking a couple days, I'd maybe be more inclined, but we've been walking for four months. Four months.
Four months.

Speaker 1 Once again, four months is an absurd amount of time to be walking through the woods. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Everyone's skin and bones. Like, no body fat at this point.
Everyone's just starved. Yeah, no way.
The water pressure is low, but the faucets still work, drawing from the water tower, I assume.

Speaker 1 Only needed a few inches of cold water anyway. I didn't want to dilute the heat.
I was eager to be cleaned of the dead chef and Gary Law, and even Ira.

Speaker 1 Eager to get the smell of the forest off my skin and start forgetting the things we'd done to stay alive. I took my hair down while the water dribbled into the tub.

Speaker 1 It had grown long and had coalesced into oily tendrils since the last time I washed it. There were split ends and strands of gray.
I always liked it long.

Speaker 1 I thought about cutting it off with my pocket knife. Thought of how light and unencumbered I would feel once the oily heft of it was gone.

Speaker 1 I think about getting clean the way I think about eating and drinking. It's a need I can't imagine anyone taking for granted.
Feels like it may never be completely satisfied.

Speaker 1 I hadn't added the hot water yet when I was interrupted by the sound of Bill barreling through the hallway.

Speaker 1 He opened the bathroom door, saw me halfway undressed with my hair down, and closed it abruptly. He broke through the door in a rush.
It's them.

Speaker 1 We're away from the windows, the front hallway, listening to them. The howl, high-pitched, nasally, throaty.
So hard to define.

Speaker 1 The terror is not just something I remember and have learned to feel, but innate. I experienced the fear of the sound on some deep, unconscious level.

Speaker 1 It is a warning, leaked into the deepest part of my mammalian brain. Danger.
bill had my fire poker and both guns gave it how's he holding all three

Speaker 1 gave me my choice i took the revolver only four bullets left in the cylinder and took the handgun and its full clip he rested the poker and the hatchet against the wall and stood behind me near the doorway pressing his body against my back his mouth to my ear at least four of them close enough i could hear footsteps Sound came from every direction.

Speaker 1 The whistles were like car horn blast, so loud the tendons in our necks tensed. The porch steps creaked, but our angle was awkward.

Speaker 1 I could barely see the front windows from where we cowered, and the low light from the stove and the electric lanterns barely reached the door.

Speaker 1 We can go out through the kitchen exit, he whispered between hard breaths. To the furthest cabin.
No lights. Run for it.
She's okay. The next line is, it was a fine plan.

Speaker 1 That doesn't sound like a fine plan to me.

Speaker 1 I think sprinting in the darkness to another house is the worst thing you could do right now. They obviously know you're in there.
They could break through the door if they wanted to.

Speaker 1 They clearly don't want to. So maybe just sit there and chill out.
It was a fine plan.

Speaker 1 The Whistlers might be attracted to the light and heated the stove and the lanterns, but not notice us slipping away. Yet at that moment, I didn't have it in me to flee again.

Speaker 1 They drove us from the lodge. Who was to say they wouldn't drive us from a cabin back into the woods? Couldn't survive being out there again, not in the looming snow, not just the two of us.

Speaker 1 Thought of the wash line and tents we abandoned the day we lost Ira, and how our flight across the valley had cost us.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 not again. I charged away from Bill, straight towards the front door where the whistlers murmured.
I threw open the door despite Bill's warning cry and saw only one figure beyond it.

Speaker 1 A dark, lanky shape on the bottom step, swaying listlessly, skeletal shoulders hunched beneath a head of shaggy hair. I was blinded by fear and I raised the gun as I stepped out onto the front porch.

Speaker 1 I fired. I saw his face in the flash, a swollen lower lip, empty eyes, hair clinging wetly to a fevered forehead.

Speaker 1 He fell like the wind had blown him down, instantly dead, and a moment later I was with him, laying my body on top of his, crying against his face and asking for forgiveness. I couldn't hear anything.

Speaker 1 Bill told me later that there were no whistles, no sign of them. Just Ira.

Speaker 1 Oh gosh.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 oh, okay. Clearly, it's the whistler setting this up, right? Or some entity setting this up.
That's why he was, but it was him just making the footprints. And she just domed her husband.

Speaker 1 Walked out of there and just blew him away. Gosh, dude.
Just his blood and footprints on the walkway and the steps. Bill carried us inside, first me, then his brother.

Speaker 1 He lay Ira on the floor, and I lay down with him, pressing my face to his stone, quiet chest while its warmth ebbed away, asking him weeks' worth of questions whose answers we can never know now.

Speaker 1 So clearly, Ira this whole time has been like under the influence of the Whistlers or possessed, maybe dead, and this was just like his body being puppeted by them.

Speaker 1 But regardless, her just stepping out there and shooting him. Oh, dude.
December 5th, I love this story. This is great.

Speaker 1 This is classic, like campfire, horror, woods, creepy, lost out there kind of thing. I like.
This is great.

Speaker 1 December 5th. Bill left me there with Ira that night.
He shut the doors of the lounge and slept in the bed alone. I've kept Ira's body for three days, trying to comprehend it.

Speaker 1 His right arm is missing, torn away, wound crudely cauterized somehow, but deeply infected. He was barefoot, feet frostbitten.

Speaker 1 His eyes riddled with broken vessels, hair missing in patches, the nails of his left hand grown and worn like claws. He wouldn't have survived the night.
Don't blame yourself.

Speaker 1 Since they lost Ira, they walked like another

Speaker 1 two or three weeks, right? Yeah, a long time. So, in this state with a missing arm and an infection, he supposedly managed to walk that far.
I don't mind.

Speaker 1 I think the whistlers carried his rotting body and set him up on that front porch. There ain't no way

Speaker 1 that he walked all that way. I shaved Ira's face, but it didn't help.
Didn't make him look any more human. I could hardly see him anyway, through the tears.
The moment you opened the door, it stopped.

Speaker 1 I'm so sorry. Are you listening? The whistling.
It stopped all at once. I didn't see any of them out there.
I didn't see anything but you and him. I saw his face.

Speaker 1 It's all I saw. The prince circled the cabin, and Ira walked among them.
We know that much.

Speaker 1 Since that night, we haven't heard the whistlers. Not once.

Speaker 1 So that's almost saying that there isn't a whistler, it's just like the noise you hear when the spirits, you know, it's some kind of supernatural thing that gets closer.

Speaker 1 Or it's like in a metaphor for the insanity that sets in when you're out here, you know, all the fork, all the folklore pressed onto you.

Speaker 1 That would also

Speaker 1 be 100% a you scenario, Hunter. You're like, oh, I'm missing an arm and I've died of infection, but I've made it back to my loving wife.

Speaker 1 Hey,

Speaker 1 oh, honey, I'm home.

Speaker 1 December 7th. Bill dug Ira's grave today.
It snowed hard that night before, and the topmost crust of soil was frozen. Digging was punishing work.
Took hours.

Speaker 1 I thought we were desensitized to death, but I found him sitting on the edge of the hole when it was done. His legs dangling down, sobbing into his hand.
I didn't know what to do, so I sat beside him.

Speaker 1 Ira was inside the lodge, still. rolled in a pale yellow sheet, wrapped up so we couldn't see his face.

Speaker 1 We sat there together for a long time, both of us pretending we were safe and he was alive and the hole was anything other than a grave. I felt the cold in my joints like shards of glass.

Speaker 1 Why don't we lie down with him? Bill said, meaning down in the hole. Stroked the back of his head.
I couldn't think of a good answer.

Speaker 1 It seemed to me we'd been offered plenty of chances to die and declined them until now. Looked into the dark of the hole whose bottom was settling with tiny snowflakes that didn't last.

Speaker 1 Snow would fill the grave over us, eventually. Preserve our bodies from the whistlers until the residents of Red Hill came back at the start of the dry season.

Speaker 1 I've heard freezing is a gentle death, like falling asleep.

Speaker 1 Bill left my side, carried Ira's body to the grave, hefted him down, and then came up again, standing and pulling me up beside him, taking me away.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, he said, though I still hadn't spoken a word. Don't listen to me.

Speaker 1 That's rough.

Speaker 1 Uh,

Speaker 1 see, I've got, have I told you about my buddy that almost froze froze to death? No,

Speaker 1 I've got um, this friend of mine, his name's Ian,

Speaker 1 uh, he was in Nashville and he was kayaking one day, uh, on he decided to take his

Speaker 1 kayak out to the middle of the lake like a genius.

Speaker 1 Uh, and he got way out there, and then like a record-breaking blizzard came down on him while it was in his kayak with like super high winds, flipped his kayak, he had to swim to shore, and he was in the middle of nowhere he was in the middle of like a park that was several miles away and he didn't know which way his bearing was he was parked several miles up the lake and he's running through the woods and as he's running for like an hour uh he starts to get slower and slower and it gets harder to move and he gets the sudden urge that like his jacket is um

Speaker 1 like too cold so he takes it off and as he's walking he's like man i'm really tired i am so so tired and he's like i bet if I sleep, I'll feel better.

Speaker 1 Like his brain just gets overwhelmed with the idea of if I lay down, he found a little spot behind a log and he lays down. And he was like, if I take a quick nap, I'll wake up energized.

Speaker 1 And that will help.

Speaker 1 And he was almost asleep. And he was like, oh, wait, that's what the cold wants me to think.
That's how I die. So he gets this burst of adrenaline and runs through the woods.

Speaker 1 And eventually finds someone's house. He comes up to the door and he's slamming on the door.
They call the police on him because they think it's someone trying to break into his their house.

Speaker 1 And he's he's like outside the window. They're like, I'm calling 911.
And he's like, yes, please.

Speaker 1 Decking you call 911. And the cops show up.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, but he almost died. But he attested to that, that he was running.
And then all of a sudden, he's like, I should take a nap. A nap will help me a lot.

Speaker 1 So yeah, that's terrifying. The idea of that you just, all of your motor function turns off and you're like, I'm kind of sleepy.

Speaker 1 yeah i'm feeling a little tired i feel a little sleepy i feel a little sleepy this will take this will take a nice little rest mean while they find a grown man frozen to death in the woods of nashville tennessee

Speaker 1 the funny the funniest thing was so he had his wife i think he had gotten that kayak for his birthday or something like that and then

Speaker 1 his wife hears about it and then she drives to where he's at or he calls her and he's in the back of the ambulance like getting warmed warmed up with a blanket.

Speaker 1 And the first thing she says to him is she turns the corner of the ambulance and goes, so you lost the kayak. God.

Speaker 1 Yeah, hon. Yeah, I lost the kayak.

Speaker 1 The kayak's gone, babe. Sorry.

Speaker 1 Oops.

Speaker 1 My bad.

Speaker 1 December 9th. We had a baby, Ira and I, five years ago today.
She was born with a heart defect and didn't live long. Didn't ever leave the hospital.
I have scars. Her name was Catherine.

Speaker 1 Ira left town before the funeral, went to a medical conference two states away. But Bill was there.
He got drunk and cornered me in his mother's living room. She should have been mine.

Speaker 1 He said, so close I could smell the whiskey. Oh, well, this recontextualizes some of the uh

Speaker 1 some of the earlier stuff. Yeah.
It's why Bill doesn't believe me when I say I hear an infant's cries on the wind. He knows it's Catherine's birthday.
He thinks about her, too.

Speaker 1 I hear her wailing in the early evening, often just before the whistlers start to howl.

Speaker 1 An overture. Prelude.
We're out of food. Each night we build a fire in the stove and set before it with shaking hands, with cups of tea.

Speaker 1 There's snow on the ground, snow to reveal that the whistlers haven't circled close since Ira died. There are no tracks but our own.
I started asking myself the question in practical terms.

Speaker 1 If I have some choice in the matter, how would I like to die?

Speaker 1 I choose to go as Catherine did, swaddled and sedated in my mother's arms. There's a time when I thought I wanted to die fighting, my knife in my hand, knuckles red from the cold.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure anymore. I'm not sure I have the patience for that.
Everything is different since we buried Ira.

Speaker 1 Difference is between us, yes, and in the atmosphere of Red Hill.

Speaker 1 Bill doesn't bustle around the way he used to. Doesn't set visual at the windows and watch the distant trees.
There's something we've discovered beyond fear. A separate emotion, a detachment.

Speaker 1 All that matters is the heat of the fire, the weight of the blankets. We hardly speak anymore.
It's interesting that Bill previously had like this weird brush with her.

Speaker 1 It's also real messed up for Ira to leave his wife for a medical conference after their child dies. That's insane.

Speaker 1 That's kind of not great. It is a little creepy, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's a little, don't do that. Hey, guys, fellas, relationship advice, don't do that.
Your kid dies, stick around. Probably good advice.
December 13th.

Speaker 1 Bill leaves the lodge every afternoon now to look for food. He says he wants to go alone, and I don't argue.
Made a good few finds.

Speaker 1 Popcorn, instant coffee, noodles, dried parsley, half a bottle of bad gin.

Speaker 1 Each day he circles a little further out, stays away a little later.

Speaker 1 Last night he didn't come back until an hour after dark, till I'd already heard the mournful chorus of two whistlers far away in the woods. I thought of walking out to them, my desolation.

Speaker 1 I want to see their faces. I want to know my tormentors.
When I try to envision them now, all I see is Ira.

Speaker 1 Ira at the end, his gaunt face and yellowed eyes. Did they suffer as he suffered? Did I recognize their faces.

Speaker 1 When Bill came back, he pressed a pack of chewing gum into my palm and went straight to bed. He was limping on his bad foot.
He had walked too far. Why were you out so long?

Speaker 1 He rolled over against his pillow, pretended not to hear. December 15th.

Speaker 1 There are about six inches of snow on the ground. I spent the day stacking firewood on the porch.
Bill stayed close at my insistence. Wandered through town like a tiger in a small cage.

Speaker 1 There's nothing left to eat in Red Hill. No game nearby.
Nothing but coyotes and wolves.

Speaker 1 In the early evening, he walked across the road with a gas can, siphoned fuel from the van, which is parked outside a gray house just up the street. I watched him from the porch.

Speaker 1 He looked up from his work to look back at me, to meet my gaze through the falling snow. We might go to the coast after all.
For all we know, there's a radio out there.

Speaker 1 Phone, some other means of contact we've overlooked. Maybe the Coast Guard will send a patrol.
Maybe someone's been looking for us all this time. Bill stopped staring.

Speaker 1 His head turned suddenly towards the woods behind the house, like he'd heard something. Snapping of twigs.
What is it? I called, but he didn't answer.

Speaker 1 He walked a few steps towards the woods, craned his head, but then a streak of brown and black emerged through the trees. Went straight for him.

Speaker 1 There was a deep growl, a scuffle of motion, and Bill's strangled cry. A dog.
The dog we released from the pantry days before.

Speaker 1 I sprang from the porch with a stick of firewood in my hand, but was too late. Bill had slipped in the ice, fallen hard against the edge of the van's bumper.

Speaker 1 The dog tore into his leg, but released it as Bill fell, lunged for his face. I swung the splittered edge of the firewood against the poor beast's skull.

Speaker 1 He was like us starving, skittish mutt made savage by the cold. Bill was dazed, scrapping for purchase in the snow behind me, trying in vain to stand.

Speaker 1 The dog cowered away from me, and it seemed cruel to swing a second time, so I screamed instead. At the top of my lungs, shouted at the dog to run, and he did.

Speaker 1 He turned, he lowered his body, and went slowly towards the woods close by, cowering deeper like he didn't want to go back into the trees.

Speaker 1 But I was full of adrenaline now and yelled a second time, so loud that my voice echoed off the houses. Something answered me.

Speaker 1 It was a strange roar, a rumble like a rock slide mixed with an animal scream, like a panther.

Speaker 1 came from the woods where I had driven the dog, and now I heard the mutt whimpering, the screaming and the whimpering and Bill's muddled murmuring behind me, and I found myself backing toward him through the snow almost senselessly until a new sound erupted and overcame the others.

Speaker 1 The whistlers. Their voices rose, familiar now, surrounded us until I couldn't hear the shrieking roar, the whimpering dog, couldn't hear Bill's exhausted breathing or my own beating heart.

Speaker 1 I turned, suddenly focused, and grabbed his hand. He had been holding his pistol, aiming it unsteadily towards the woods.
I took it now and heaved him upright.

Speaker 1 He was woozy, bleeding freely in the snow. Gary Law's khaki pantle was soaked red.
There was blood on his head too, scraped from a bolt on the van's bumper, not deep. His eyes were half closed.

Speaker 1 Stay awake, I said, grabbing Bill's chin more roughly than I meant to, yanking him toward the lodge. The whistler's cries were harrowing but helpful now.

Speaker 1 They seemed to propel us onward, made us focus on the fear, the imperative of flight. The dog had bitten Bill's bad leg, the one already weakened by his twisted ankle.

Speaker 1 He could walk, but he was shaking. I helped him across the street, helped him up the porch and into the lodge's dining area.
He collapsed into a chair, leaned his body against a table.

Speaker 1 He was grimacing horribly, and we were losing daylight fast. I cut away his pant leg with my knife.
You're gonna need stitches.

Speaker 1 The dog bite was an arc of puncture wounds with a deep gash torn near his shin. The wound on his head was bloody, but not horribly deep, not as bad as it looked, a scrape only, a shock.

Speaker 1 And now the blood was seeping slower. I set an electric electric lantern on the table.
It still wasn't enough light. Headlamps in the lounge.
When I went for it, I remembered the bottle of cheap gin.

Speaker 1 Find it? Bull called to me. There was pain in his voice.
I made myself hurry. There was alcohol, hand sanitizer in my pack, and a spool of surgical silk and still needles.

Speaker 1 Ira had put the first aid kit together with his own skill set in mind. I poured water on the wounds, washed the blood away, and watched more take its place.
Are you okay? I don't know what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 Wiped sanitizer on a needle and then doused the gash on his leg with it. He reeled where he sat as the alcohol burned.
I'm sorry. He shook his head.

Speaker 1 I handed him the gin bottle before I started stitching. It was half full and Bill took grateful swigs before nodding at me to get on with it.

Speaker 1 The skin was harder to pierce than I expected, but Bill seemed able to center himself amid the pain. He closed his eyes and only grunted a little each time I pulled the thread through.

Speaker 1 He kept saying it was okay, that I was doing fine. Finally, I tied off the thread and taped a square of gauze over my work.

Speaker 1 I sat at the table afterward, sweating inexplicably exhausted, feeling there was more I should do, replaying the noises in my head, the sequence of events, the whistlers and the thing that had answered my shouts.

Speaker 1 Bill walking towards the woods, the sound, the dog. What came first? It was jumbled already, the memory.
I've recorded it here the way that makes the most sense.

Speaker 1 The moon was rising and we leaned into each other, both of us looking away at the deepening shadows, looking through through the windows for signs of life, finding the night remarkably, horribly quiet.

Speaker 1 He drank from the gym bottle again and then handed it to me. It was harsh and cheap, but took more than one burning gulp.
Suppose the dog was running from it? Bill asked.

Speaker 1 I shrugged, but something dreadful was welling up inside of me.

Speaker 1 I stood up and turned in a useless circle and felt hot tears falling, felt the desperation and spoiled hopes of the past weeks rolling over me.

Speaker 1 I was collapsing and leaned towards the table to steady myself, but Bill caught me before I could. He stood and held me against his chest, one easy movement, one hand against the back of my head.

Speaker 1 He was breathing in the same uncontrolled gasp that had overtaken him on the trail before he saw Red Hill.

Speaker 1 When he was balancing between despair and a kind of jovial release, he pulled my hair down, smoothing it between his hands so my head tipped back. So I had no choice but to look up at him.

Speaker 1 My vision cleared, tears stopped, and then we were breathing together, our eyes locked and bodies reacting like two leaves tugged down by the same current, deciding what came next.

Speaker 1 I shook while I lifted my shirt over my head.

Speaker 1 He kissed me then so I couldn't speak, and he was right too. There was nothing whatsoever to say.
I followed him to the lounge, to the bed.

Speaker 1 He sat back and pulled me on top of him, wincing as he leaned against the cushions. but still holding me with a tense grip, still saying yes.

Speaker 1 It didn't seem the stove was pumping out much heat, heat, but I took everything off.

Speaker 1 Wanting him to see me and the body so much walking in hunger and fear had made, wanting to feel tangible and whole on this night when our existence was impossible to take for granted.

Speaker 1 Kissed my neck while he made love to me, whispered that he would make it, make it through the winter, make it to the coast, make it home.

Speaker 1 I had to believe him.

Speaker 1 So it sounds like that's the end of that entry.

Speaker 1 It sounds like the dog attacked and then her yelling attracted the deep growl, the real monster out there, and then the whistlers come in for defense, right?

Speaker 1 Or that's warning of something. Yeah, I mean, still vague, but yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's something, whatever makes the deep roar is the thing the whistlers are protecting them from, I think. Right.
December 17th.

Speaker 1 Bill was pale the next morning, weak, but he wouldn't stay in bed when I asked him to.

Speaker 1 He hobbled around the lodge, gathering more gear, hauling it out to the Jeep, dragging the gas can up from where we had had abandoned it into the road. I made him some broth, but he wouldn't eat.

Speaker 1 And in the afternoon, he walked away towards the woods, towards the place where the dog ran and the roar sounded.

Speaker 1 He walked toward the trees and stopped and stared when I hollered from the porch and looked back at me.

Speaker 1 I tried to follow, to fetch him, but it seemed even limping, he took two steps onward for every one of mine. He went on until he was in the trees.

Speaker 1 I decided as much as I wanted to, I couldn't make myself follow. I stood in the frozen road and shouted for him.
I didn't have it in me to enter the woods.

Speaker 1 I lay in bed through the night with open eyes, hearing the whistlers soft, far away, like a lullaby.

Speaker 1 I heard Catherine on the wind. The tears come much easier when I'm alone.
I found him this morning, sitting on the porch steps, facing out, dice in his beard. I touched his neck and he held my arm.

Speaker 1 He seemed alert. He looked into my eyes.
What happened to you? I was nearly crying, but he didn't respond. Just rubbed my arm and let me lead him inside, watched me through saddened eyes.

Speaker 1 Later, once he was warm, he said he had gone to the woods to listen to the whistlers. He said he could understand them now.
Don't say that, Bill.

Speaker 1 Cried into his shoulder, pressed my fingers to his lips, but he was calm. It's okay, Ruth.
We'll go to the coast tomorrow. You'll be safe.
Will be safe. He nodded and held me tighter.
December 18th.

Speaker 1 It was sad, pulling out of Red Red Hill, watching it shrink behind us until it was closed off by a ridge of granite and a curtain of trees.

Speaker 1 It felt momentous, almost like this was the beginning of our journey again, like we were grad students. Me with my love of reading and him with his lust for the outdoors.

Speaker 1 I had married his brother, and he always wanted to get closer. And one late night in the office, grading papers, we had a crazy idea.
I wrote the grant application. He planned logistics.

Speaker 1 Ira took a sabbatical, volunteered, met Lillian at a conference. All we saw was how our interests aligned.
We went out for drinks. The whole group all together talked about how much fun it would be.

Speaker 1 We were barely in the Jeep 40 minutes before we ran out of road. Our path terminated in a wide lot.
I love it. Gosh, that was cool.

Speaker 1 I love how quickly it transitions from them getting ready for the trip to them right now driving in the Jeep.

Speaker 1 Our path terminated in a wide lot of pale brown gravel.

Speaker 1 There was no airstrip, just a rutted lot with puddles that had turned to slush, a floating dock slicked with ice, and a boathouse with two broken canoes inside and a rusted hole in its roof.

Speaker 1 I was driving because Bill was ill, leaning against the window. His leg hurts him.
It's badly bruised, and the scrape on his head isn't healing. He stared straight ahead.

Speaker 1 Once we were parked, he stared through the windshield with tears forming in his eyes. I don't know what he was expecting.
It was hard to see that we were at the edge of the earth now.

Speaker 1 Out of options. You know, in the olden days, people would

Speaker 1 walk into the sea to kill themselves. There's something poetic about it.
Not in real life. I don't suppose.
I've never seen anything poetic in a dead body.

Speaker 1 He reached for my hand across the gear shift. I'm not going back to Red Hill Ruth.

Speaker 1 I can't. Not now.
I can't look at Ira's grave again. I can't walk through the kitchen and pretend there isn't a corpse in the freezer.
I can't. What else is there? He shook his head.
There's the rub.

Speaker 1 I pulled my hand away and got out of the Jeep. It was impossible holding my thoughts together.
I wanted to stop struggling, but not to die. I wanted Bill to stop feeling pain, but not to be alone.

Speaker 1 I wanted to end both our suffering. Wished I had said yes days ago.
Bill laid Ira in his grave when he asked if we should lie down too. It was windy at the coast, so cold my cheeks burned.

Speaker 1 I walked down toward the dock, but couldn't go far without risking my footing on the ice. Bill was watching me from inside the jeep, waiting, I suppose, to hear me say I was ready to give up too,

Speaker 1 but I wasn't ready. I closed my eyes, felt the embrace of the wind, and deep within the hush of it, I heard the cry again.

Speaker 1 My little Catherine's cry, and a voice, a man's voice, Hyra's, singing to her. Bill got out of the Jeep and looked towards the sound.
Whistlers, is that what you hear? I walked toward it.

Speaker 1 Where are you going? I waved that I was okay and walked around the useless boathouse, up a low hill of sliding gravel.

Speaker 1 At the top, the wind was stronger, swirling with tiny snowflakes, and I could see more gray water up the coast.

Speaker 1 I could see distant glimpses of shoreline segmented by trees and low surf, and a bobbing shape, white and blue, lodged against a split of dark sand.

Speaker 1 I rushed back down the hill towards the Jeep, sliding in the gravel, panting hard.

Speaker 1 What is it? There's a boat. Get your pack.

Speaker 1 Man. Oh, God.

Speaker 1 So good. It feels like the gray water and like them walking in the desolation almost feels like the road.
Like the end chapters of that, where the father and son are walking down the dark coast.

Speaker 1 And it's all gray. But I love how so many horror stories come back to there's a boat on the coast.
Like we can get out that way, you know?

Speaker 1 This feels like a classic. I don't know why I I haven't heard of this before.
It was impossible to take the Jeep directly up the beach.

Speaker 1 There's too much loose gravel, too many jutting black rocks in our path. We had to wind in and out of patches of forest, had to boost each other over boulders, had to trudge around coarse sand.

Speaker 1 I was relentless, forcing myself onward, climbing every dune to confirm the boat was still in sight. Still a small blue and white catch with bare mast and an enclosed cabin.

Speaker 1 The sound led me onward all the while. The sound of Ira and Catherine.
The sound Bill kept pausing to warn me of. the sound he said was whistlers luring us into a trap.
It looks abandoned.

Speaker 1 Bill said once we were near, he was clutching his leg, holding the place where I was sure his bite wound had opened. I never offered to stop, to slow down, to do anything but press onward.

Speaker 1 I felt certain about the boat, that it was waiting for us, destined for us, our salvation. We slid down a final scree slope and reached the gray pebbled beach where the boat was moored.

Speaker 1 Or not moored exactly, but stuck. It was surrounded with driftwood and other debris.

Speaker 1 Bill looked exhausted, unimpressed.

Speaker 1 It's a death trap, Ruth. The tide's coming in.
Come on, help me get inside. The tide will take us out, and the Coast Guard will find us.
The Coast Guard will not find us.

Speaker 1 This area will be iced over in a month. It's suicidal.
Do you know anything about sailing? My dad owned a kench. We didn't go out much, I wish.

Speaker 1 As I spoke, Bill turned away from the boat and stared into the trees he was flexing his hands trembling do you hear that i did hear it snapping twigs the moaning bend of a branch then the whistling deep in the trees coming closer bill was breathing hard backing toward the boat keeping me behind him as the whistling rose in front of us so the wailing rose behind crying the singing summoning me backward summoning me into the boat The tide was already rising, the boat bobbing in water that was almost deep enough to whisk it away.

Speaker 1 I hear Ira. What? Bill gave me a bewildered, almost angry look.
I hear him singing. I hear Catherine.

Speaker 1 He looked sad for me and reached for me, but I backed away into the water, froze over my shoes and soaked my socks, icy cold. Don't, Ruth.
I'm getting on the boat, Bill.

Speaker 1 There's a ladder down one side of the hole. I could wade to it and pull myself inside.
I didn't need his help. You said you wouldn't go back to Red Hill.
This is what's left.

Speaker 1 This is the other other choice. Whistling in the trees grew louder, and every second the beach felt smaller, more like a trap.
His face changed, and the wind rustled his hair. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're right. Get on the boat, Ruth.
He's pushing her off for sure. Yeah, yeah, he's pushing her off.
He's gonna stay behind. Yep.

Speaker 1 I turned and waded toward the ladder, telling myself he would follow, telling myself all would be well. Why can't you hear it, Bill?

Speaker 1 I said as I reached the ladder, as I pulled myself up onto the weather deck.

Speaker 1 Why can't you hear ira singing but when i turned around bill was halfway up the beach looking small facing away from me his skin white his arms rigid bill the boat was creaking in the deepening tide and the wind was rushing across the sand the boat jolted beneath me something dark appeared beyond the tree trunk something i could barely see It was a moving shadow, independent of the shifting needles and swaying branches, a shape, a being taller than a man and deliberate in its movements.

Speaker 1 I raised my revolver and shaking hands. I fired more than once.
There was no reaction. The sound was lost among all the others, the screaming and gnashing, the howl of the whistlers.

Speaker 1 Bill was close to the woods now. He had to see it, but he was paralyzed, as straight and immovable as the trees.
I screamed for him, wishing he would look at me, but he didn't move.

Speaker 1 Beneath me, the boat shifted again. I fell, hit my head on the icy railing.
Once I had scrambled upright again, Bill had fallen.

Speaker 1 He was collapsed on the sand, and the creature was looming closer to him, coming through the trees, crouching down.

Speaker 1 Whistling hushed, suddenly, almost completely. Even the wind seemed to ease.

Speaker 1 It takes its prey one at a time. I couldn't hear Catherine anymore, or Ira,

Speaker 1 but I could hear the whistlers. The softest warning tone, intelligible now, almost like words, telling me to close my eyes.
There's always one survivor. Always someone spared.

Speaker 1 The wind pushed the catch away from the shore and the darkness closed over Bill. I don't remember anything else.
Oh.

Speaker 1 Oh, dude, that end part. There's always one survivor.

Speaker 1 There's always one to tell the story. Oh, gosh.
December 22nd. My name is Ruth Gadager.
Please bring my body back to Oregon if you can. My driver's license is in my wallet.

Speaker 1 This account of events is for the families of the deceased, for the helicopter pilot and Lillian and Jeff, for Bill and Ira's mother and the chef we found in Red Hill. I don't want it published.

Speaker 1 I don't want to be one more link in the chain of juvenile curiosity, another mystery in the big book of stories that sends people like us to places like this to die.

Speaker 1 We had so many opportunities over the years to drop the question, to live with the unknown.

Speaker 1 We called ourselves folklorists, but we imagined we were adventurers, righteous explorers, exposing a mystery. We imagined we had the right.
I never thought the Whistlers were real before coming here.

Speaker 1 I thought they were a dark side of the human psyche, just one of many predictable byproducts of human life in cold, isolated, untenable conditions.

Speaker 1 I wanted to sit around a fire with shifty-eyed fur trappers and remote homesteaders and listen to their spooky stories like a tourist.

Speaker 1 We didn't satisfy our curiosity coming here, didn't pick apart the tangled lore. We only satisfied the hunger of the thing that stalks this place.

Speaker 1 It's been here a long time, the chef thought, at war with the Whistlers. How long have they kept it at bay? Doesn't even have a name.

Speaker 1 At this late hour, I find I can't put a description into words, and I don't want to, because I realize now there's some things we don't deserve to know.

Speaker 1 There are stories we shouldn't tell, unknowns that should remain unknown. I should have done this in the Jeep with Bill.
Would have been better, but not necessarily easier.

Speaker 1 Die in the backseat and his arms warm, staring out at the ocean. The boat ran aground on a sandbar not far from where I lost Bill.
I've been wandering down the coast. I made it back to the Jeep.

Speaker 1 There are no whistles to follow me now. Nothing watching from beyond the trees.
The snow is deep, and the land has gone quiet. For how long? I don't know.
I don't know if I was spared.

Speaker 1 or if the evil that lives here is merely biting its time again. If you found this, the backpack, thank you, whoever you are.

Speaker 1 I'm out of gas, out of food, and at night, no matter where I look, there are no lights in any direction. It's cold.
I'll close my eyes for a little while. There's still one round in the revolver.

Speaker 1 I haven't made up my mind. End of Ruth's account.

Speaker 1 God damn.

Speaker 1 I feel like this can be taken in a bunch of different ways.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know how literal everything is supposed to be versus, like, the way the story unfolds, it almost feels like this is, this whole story is, like,

Speaker 1 almost like a,

Speaker 1 it kind of reminds me of, like,

Speaker 1 I don't know. Like, the ending kind of had that, the same vibe.
I don't know why I got the same vibe as, like, the ending of the left-right game with the road and stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the right kind of drifting. It's just going on and on and on.
Yeah. It feels like you could interpret the story in a lot of different ways.

Speaker 1 Like I was saying, like, I feel like you could probably even do like,

Speaker 1 I don't know, like it's just it feels so much like someone processing grief like all these kinds of different things like guilt grief and like the way that uh relationships kind of fade and contort and twist and like i don't i i just don't know i mean like in my mind it's all here obviously there's a whole town that was supposed to be there but i i mean i don't know to me it just feels like uh all from the perspective of ruth and then her like almost like leading up to a suicide or even like someone dying like it just feels very uh

Speaker 1 it all felt so uh surreal. I think you could even get rid of the, like, the thing, too, is we never really ever see the Whistlers.

Speaker 1 We don't know what they are, but even it's just a story of someone who is lost and trying to, like, find civilization again. Very captivating.

Speaker 1 But the, but the Whistlers' angle to it, that's what brought it into this like almost surrealist interpretation of somebody like dealing with the loss of a child, dealing with a failing marriage, like with a potential

Speaker 1 love triangle kind of thing as well that led to uh that led to their death at least that's kind of like on the on the first gut reaction that's what i'm feeling

Speaker 1 yeah um i agree i think it's interesting how the whistlers are the monster at the beginning of the story but as you read it's like they're just the harbinger they're just the thing that tries to warn people of the monsters i think that's fascinating um

Speaker 1 this gosh this has been such a good story so far also i'm looking so i looked it up um

Speaker 1 i'm looking at the website so sorry i found the original story. It was posted to r/slash no sleep before it went to creepypasta.com.

Speaker 1 Okay, the username is just the whistlers, and this is all it's posted-just this account, Ruth's account, and Bill's account.

Speaker 1 Uh, and yes, it was posted 11 years ago, so early 2015 or 2014, the first part. So, one of the um, it's been a while since characters have really grabbed me this way, though.

Speaker 1 I don't know, like, just a lot of uh

Speaker 1 I just really like the dynamic

Speaker 1 between Bill and Ruth.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and just I don't know, it it doesn't dwell on like the kind of like very tropey horror stuff to make it scary a lot of the horror like i said i mean i really just to to me it just feels so much like uh

Speaker 1 god yeah just like just a fucking

Speaker 1 it felt like the personification of like

Speaker 1 guilt and grief just i don't know it just because you never

Speaker 1 all of their interactions feel so natural too yeah

Speaker 1 the whistlers i mean and like what are they protecting this Where are they protecting you from besides like potentially these things?

Speaker 1 Like even like the one she was shooting out and she saw, thought that she saw like the monster. At first I thought it was just going to be she shot Bill too or something.

Speaker 1 You know, are they really seeing these things? Is the, is the madness of the whistlers and stuff, is that just like repressed shit coming up and manifesting itself to you? I don't know.

Speaker 1 You know, like everybody kind of has their own versions of what it is. It's just very interesting.
Bill's account. The person who brought Bill's journal to my attention is asked not to be identified.

Speaker 1 He insisted on giving me transcripts, not originals. So in this case, what I'm showing you is exactly what I received.

Speaker 1 As before, neither I nor my source makes any claims about the veracity of these documents.

Speaker 1 I'm sure many of you will want to know more about the documents themselves, but unfortunately, my source was not forthcoming. When I asked him how he acquired Bill's accounts, I did so many times.

Speaker 1 His only response was, I didn't. I wish I had more insight to offer you.
I'm afraid these new passages raise at least as many questions as they answer. First entry, December 7th.

Speaker 1 I've got calluses on my hands from burying my brother. If we're rescued today, I'll have to explain that to someone.

Speaker 1 Some search and rescue trooper, some forest ranger, will hold my palm to the light of a chopper window and want to know how I managed to rub the heel of my hand raw.

Speaker 1 I practice, sometimes. I practice what I'll say to people when we get back home.
Dr.

Speaker 1 Harmon, the department head, will need to know how I got Jeff and Lillian Kill doing what was supposed to be straightforward field research.

Speaker 1 They were both his students, handpicked for great things, led astray by the man who wrote his dissertation on the Russian Yeti, who taught a cryptozoology class disguised as a folklore survey.

Speaker 1 I got bumped off the tenure track for that. Harmon talked over me in meetings like I wasn't there.
Ruth was on the floor with Ira for days after he died. Wouldn't speak.

Speaker 1 She was holding his dead fingers and fussing to wash all the blood away, crying soundlessly with her mouth open, more like a wheeze.

Speaker 1 I had to do something, so I picked up her journal, looked through all the way back to that night in the dark, full moon rising and Ira down in a hole. She isn't documenting the Whistlers anymore.

Speaker 1 I'll see her in the corner by the stove sometimes with her notebook open and the pen just hovering over a page, not actually making words. She's thin as a scarecrow now and her lips are cracking.

Speaker 1 I wonder about the things that she doesn't write down. There are entire days she didn't see fit to take note of.
And there are other things, little details, that I don't remember at all.

Speaker 1 Things I don't remember saying.

Speaker 1 This is a whole problem with the work we do. Incompleteness, hearsay.
Two tonight, to the north, for about an hour after sunset.

Speaker 1 They separated, seemed to be approaching the lodge from either end of town, then abruptly moved further away. Nothing concrete but the tracks outside and the marks on Ira.

Speaker 1 They don't seem willing to bother us inside, but we know that's temporary.

Speaker 1 I took Sam, the helicopter pilot, right out of the lighthouse kitchen something broke the window above the sink it was pitch black and he yowled like a cat ira had the rifle ready it was dark and rainy and he aimed for the pilot in the back of the head

Speaker 1 still no reception we listened to static long enough and it starts to sound like something so we keep the lounge radio off food running low So that gives, again, I like how we get little bits to what happened at the lighthouse.

Speaker 1 The idea of the pilot just got ripped through the window. Yeah.
December 8th. Mom will be at the airport when we're rescued.
She'll ask about Ira before she asks about me.

Speaker 1 I have that hanging over me for the rest of my life. That the wrong brother made it out of the wilderness.
Cain and Abel.

Speaker 1 He was the marked one. I can already see the disappointment in her eyes.
Hear the weepy sign.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry he's dead. Not as sorry as I should be.
He didn't scream the way Jeff did. He didn't scratch and bite like Lillian.

Speaker 1 He just stared up at me through the blue darkness, stared as if to conceive that the order of things didn't matter, that it could be either of us in the hole, and the outcome would stay the same.

Speaker 1 The day we're rescued, I'll have to find some way to keep the truth under wraps. Those eyes.

Speaker 1 Ruth isn't on her feet yet. When I got back from scavenging today, she was at the freezer door again, crying.
There's a woman in there, a chef, dead.

Speaker 1 She's all the evidence we have about what happened at Red Hill. Not enough.
We should dig a second grave, but the ground is even harder now. Our bodies are broken.

Speaker 1 Little wounds, cuts, and scrapes, twisted joints and tight muscles. Nothing gets a chance to heal.
Just pain on top of pain and hunger beneath it all.

Speaker 1 I went back through the houses today, looking for anything we can use. Pointless writing inventory down.
Nobody had supplies to overwinter in Red Hill.

Speaker 1 Seems even the chef was planning to head south once the weather came in. Three, maybe four whistlers around tonight.
Very distant north of us.

Speaker 1 We've got every lantern gathered in the lounge, all of them hanging from the antler chandelier around the tendrils of dust. It's bright enough to read by, almost enough to feel truly safe.

Speaker 1 They'll pick their night soon, I imagine. Only heard them briefly, but clear as a bell, so it was disturbing when I commented on it and Ruth said she didn't hear them.

Speaker 1 Lillian's research centered on self-delusion. No two descriptions of the whistlers are exactly alike.
There's similarities between accounts, sure, but she thought every victim was complicit somehow.

Speaker 1 That you would go so long fearing something you can't see, and eventually you decide what it looks like. You decide what you believe, and then you see what you want to see.

Speaker 1 Ruth woke me up later to say she heard the baby. She kept saying my name and begging me to listen, her nails digging into my arm, her face not an inch away from mine.
Catherine's birthday's tomorrow.

Speaker 1 I didn't say anything. I was afraid of making her cry.
Instead, I held her like she was mine, my lips to her forehead. She went back to sleep.
Not sure how much more of this we can take.

Speaker 1 Think of the survivor theory all the time, the different permutations of it. If I shoot myself, will they leave Ruth alone?

Speaker 1 I remember Kirker Farley, the first trapper I ever interviewed, said the whistling stopped altogether once his last companion was dead. Said he walked out of the woods unmolested and found help.

Speaker 1 I'd want to walk for at least a day first. Make sure she wasn't hassled with burying me.
That's how Ira said he would do it. Take the gun and go for a walk.

Speaker 1 What did he tell her?

Speaker 1 Rock ptarmigan.

Speaker 1 He was never supposed to come back that day, as he never really did. No, I could see the logic, say the words, but can't do it.
Ira wasn't the only coward in these woods. So that's interesting.

Speaker 1 So Ira,

Speaker 1 according to

Speaker 1 Bill here, was going to kill himself in the woods, right?

Speaker 1 And then, but that's when he came to the revelation that it's a warning and he decided to come back to tell them.

Speaker 1 That's the only thing that kept him from killing himself. Interesting.

Speaker 1 It's interesting too, getting another person's, it's interesting to get another person's perspective, too, of how the other person's, not necessarily acting crazy, but like how from Bill's perspective, he's like the more rational one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. December 9th.

Speaker 1 Ephraim defoe was the first whistler scholar to describe the survivor theory wrote a paper about it the idea that the whistlers are in some way dependent on humans and so will always leave one alive living human begets more humans survivor tells a story excites curiosity leads to more expeditions more idiots in the woods and implies long-term thinking on the part of the whistlers planning cycle of sowing and harvest Ruth doesn't believe this part of the mythology.

Speaker 1 Obviously, every story has a survivor. The incidents without without survivors don't become the stories.
They don't make it into the record. But I think about Kirker Farley.

Speaker 1 Gray mutton chops and a crumpled Stetson, knuckles like oak bark. He was a Korea vet who retired to the wilderness once he got home.
To come out of poverty.

Speaker 1 Spent a winter stranded and snowbound with six other people, all ex-military, all skilled, and tough as nails. The Whistlers picked the group apart one man at a time over the space of a month.

Speaker 1 Finally, Kirker was left alone with his best friend, and that man started to lose his mind. Started howling at the moon.
Kirker killed him, his best friend. Knife while he slept.
Gentle as can be.

Speaker 1 Everyone I've ever told the story to said that that's the answer right there. Kirker's just a murderer with the story to cover up his own wrongdoing.
Maybe his case really is that simple.

Speaker 1 At the beginning, Ruse suspected all cases were that simple. I asked Kirker though when we sat down together.

Speaker 1 Knowing they only take one at a time, why would they kill your partner and isolate yourself? Why not just stay together? Why wouldn't the whole group stay together? Arms locked. One impenetrable unit.

Speaker 1 He smiled the strangest smile and he said, Whistler ain't ain't a hound chasing a fox. He's an angler waiting for a shark.
Patient. Patient.
Patient. Oh.

Speaker 1 This gives a different idea of the Whistlers. It's not necessarily protecting the humans, it's using the humans as bait.
Maybe.

Speaker 1 Interesting. We've been out here for months now, and I still don't know what he meant.
I do know I didn't have the nerve to follow my own logic.

Speaker 1 I couldn't sit idle and let the Whistlers dictate terms. No Whistlers tonight.
When they come back, they'll come in force. They'll be insistent.

Speaker 1 Made my brother a promise, and I'll keep that promise, but not today. Not yet.
There's still the coast.

Speaker 1 So him and Bill had a conversation that

Speaker 1 Ira needs to kill himself. Right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So we should both kill ourselves so that she can get out of here. It's like a pact they made.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because there's always one survivor. Yep.
That's interesting. That explains so much more about Bill's decision at the end to not get on the boat, to walk away.
December 10th.

Speaker 1 Today we found Gary Law's luggage in a cabin behind the lodge. It's nice knowing this is where he came from.
It helps to put a date on whatever scattered the population of Red Hill.

Speaker 1 The man brought enough pleated slacks out here to start a catering company. Navy and khaki, cufflinks, and polo shirts.
He got bare torch brochures and a receipt for a a seaplane charter.

Speaker 1 It's as if this was his first time outside an office. He got the look of someone they'd send search and rescue for, but we haven't heard anyone flying over.

Speaker 1 I've heard that's something the whistlers can do. They can change what you hear when.

Speaker 1 Ask what's true and plant what isn't. Lillian tried to record the whistles one night, but didn't pick anything up.
All we get is static on the radio. I wonder.

Speaker 1 No idea how Gary Law made it so far north by himself on foot. Why on earth he picked that direction to begin with.
Ruth gathered up his plane tickets and put it with his ID.

Speaker 1 It's documents, worthless documents. We don't have anything of Ira's, but we've got a whole damn library on Gary Law.

Speaker 1 I never actually saw the man's body. Strange timing.
I came back to Ruth burying a man hours after I'd left Ira to die. But he didn't die.
Didn't speak except to say that we were wrong.

Speaker 1 It was a warning. Just a warning, he said.
Whistlers didn't kill anybody.

Speaker 1 Neither did I, I guess. December 11th.
There's a book in the lounge on traps and snares. I know exactly two traps from scouts.

Speaker 1 The one where you make something heavy fall on your prey, a dead fall, and the one where you funnel your prey down into a hole. They've each got their drawbacks.

Speaker 1 There are knots and nooses in this book. diagrams for cornering bigger game.
Iroh was the damned eagle scout. Ruth likes to remind us of the things he knew that were both useless for.

Speaker 1 Today, I left her washing the bedsheets and water so hot it turned her arms red. She saw a tick on the carpet, she said.
I probably brought it in on my socks.

Speaker 1 I would help, but I get the feeling she doesn't want me around the lodge. There's a good rope in the Jeep.
I made three different leg snares and one neck snare that I don't have high hopes for.

Speaker 1 The book's got instructions for small elk, boar, bear, and porcupine.

Speaker 1 I'd be glad to have any of these for dinner, but what I'm more interested in is what might happen if a whistler stumbles across a trap. What they might do to a tethered animal in distress.

Speaker 1 The academic part of me hasn't frozen to death yet. Unlike Ruth, I haven't forgotten why we're here.
I found a pair of pole climbers in the forest.

Speaker 1 I stopped halfway up a mossy spruce and watched the forest for a good long time once the snares were set. I picked a little clearing where the ground is spongy.

Speaker 1 Not a quarter mile behind the houses across from the lodge, but well hidden. Half the noises of the woods come from the trees themselves, creaking and swaying and whispering like they do.

Speaker 1 From my perch, I could see the roofline of the lodge, smoke from the stove, and endless green in every direction. There are hills between here and the coast.

Speaker 1 I heard something just as I was returning to the lodge. A low rumble, growl.

Speaker 1 I looked back and saw what looked like a dog streaking away from behind the houses and disappearing into the woods. We freed a brindlemutt from one of the houses.

Speaker 1 He's been following me in and out of the woods. Doesn't like me getting too close to his house.
The gray shack right on the edge at the opening and the trees where I usually hike in.

Speaker 1 He runs with low shoulders and a mean little snarl. I'm sure he's starving.
If he finds himself in one of my traps, I may put him down. If I brought him home, Ruth would want to feed him.
Name him.

Speaker 1 Can't afford that. After dark, there had to be 20 whistlers around the lodge.
It was deafening the sound of them. All in the direction of that gap between the houses.

Speaker 1 the place where the forest opens up, where I set my snares. I didn't tell Ruth this.
Maybe it occurred to her anyway that their activity might have something to do with my time alone out there.

Speaker 1 I piled wood into the stove and made her put on a pair of socks. She's been biting her nails down to nothing and talking in her sleep.
I listened to her through the night. I don't sleep much myself.

Speaker 1 I love having this different perspective. So it's like,

Speaker 1 while Ruth seemed the same one and Bill was crazy in the first account, now Bill seems the same one and Ruth is crazy in this account. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 It's just everybody thinks that they're, you know, of a right mind, you know, not the other person's crazier acting strange or

Speaker 1 like the basic person writing has to be brave for both of them. You know, it's just kind of, it's, I always like these back and forths.
Yeah, the second perspective adds a lot. I like it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 December 12th. Ruth isn't eating.
She thinks I don't know how little food there is, thinks I don't notice her pretending to chew an empty spoonful of that yellowish fruit cocktail.

Speaker 1 When she's rescued, people at work will make a fuss over how thin she is, how hard her arms and legs are now. Sickens me, the way we take our bodies for granted.

Speaker 1 Way we would sit at desks and count calories and deny ourselves a beer after work.

Speaker 1 Damn, I'd like a beer tonight. I said it to Ruth just now.
She's between me and the stove, braiding her damp hair. She laughed a little.

Speaker 1 She's pitying my lack of imagination, maybe, or maybe she's hoping I won't ask her for the other thing I want. Checked the snares today.
Caught some kind of fox, dispatched it with Ruth's hatchet.

Speaker 1 It was gamey and tough as shoe leather, but we ate it anyway. Chewed like jackals till our jaws were sore.
There's plenty of salt and pepper, which didn't help as much as you'd think.

Speaker 1 Nothing in the other traps. The next snare looked disturbed, but the wind might have pulled it off the branches.
Hard to tell. Ruth keeps telling me to take it easy, rest in bed, get off my bad leg.

Speaker 1 I can't bring myself to tell her that keeping still sounds like a death sentence to me. If she had her way, we'd curl up under the blankets together and wait for spring.

Speaker 1 Spring would come, but we wouldn't see it. The only way any of this matters is if Ruth makes it out alive.

Speaker 1 When she sees me going to the front door, she asks me to stay where she can see me, stay within shouting distance, cross the lounge to give her a kiss before I go, but there's no give, no return.

Speaker 1 She's my sister when she chooses to be. When they come to rescue her, that's what she'll say.
That I was her brother-in-law. That I looked after her, that I was a decent help to her in Ira's absence.

Speaker 1 That I tried. There's almost like a bitterness to him too, you know.
She's my sister when she chooses to be, you know, kind of making her out to be ungrateful. December 13th.

Speaker 1 It's hours after dark. I just made it back.
Ruth saw me limping and chewed me out, saying I'm walking too far, putting too much weight on my bad leg too soon. She doesn't know what I do all day.

Speaker 1 She assumes I'm still going through houses, finding matchbooks and hard candies lost behind sofa cushions. I'm trying to finish it, but I didn't even get the damn noose around my neck.
Oh,

Speaker 1 oh, that's what he was doing. Possible to reach a good branch on these evergreens.
It had to be high up so they could see me. So she could see me, so she knew it was over.

Speaker 1 It's how we did Jeff, Ira, and I.

Speaker 1 Took him hunting, tied him to a tree, waited until we heard them closing in, until the screams were drowned out by the whistling, and the other thing, screeching and deep growling and the snapping of bones.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 that's all right. Well, that is

Speaker 1 a revelation

Speaker 1 that all the way back then they killed Jeff. That's what happened to him.
So do you think they went insane or they just so quickly decided that there has to be a sole survivor?

Speaker 1 I'm just wondering if that was the plan all along. They brought people that they maybe not really didn't care for, but newer.
I don't know. Like, I'm wondering if it was always a part of the plan.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 he says that's how we did Jeff Ira and I.

Speaker 1 Uh,

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 it almost Benny is losing his mind downstairs, and it is not helping my current state. I'm, I've, I've already knew where the door was, I was already aware that I'm home alone right now.

Speaker 1 Dog freaking out does not help that. Um, Benny just runs inside and just mauls my leg.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 But it sounds like Jeff wasn't willing. It sounds like they tied him up and he was screaming and all that against his will.

Speaker 1 So it sounds like Ira and Bill made a pact that she would be the sole survivor and decide to kill everyone else off, or at least Jeff and themselves.

Speaker 1 I had every intention of watching them take him, but in the end, I didn't have the nerve.

Speaker 1 I was sprinting away at Ira's side, deciding the horrific din meant only that we'd done our jobs well, that the the Whistlers deemed the transaction acceptable, that they would leave us alone for a few more nights.

Speaker 1 Got back to camp and told Lillian we saw the Whistlers attack him. She believed us because they were silent for a long time after that, almost two weeks.

Speaker 1 Ira didn't know the stories well, but he was convinced I did the right thing.

Speaker 1 The lighthouse keeper was certifiable, but he pointed out, rightly, that the only way to survive the Whistlers is to play by their rules. They take one at a time.

Speaker 1 He said the night the chopper crashed. We were all around his hearth with him, nodding.
We all knew it was true. They take one at a time, and they leave one alive.
That one alive was going to be Ruth.

Speaker 1 We agreed, Ira and I, whispered the plan together. It had been years since we agreed about anything, but our decision about Ruth was mutual and urgent.
He didn't hate me for loving her then.

Speaker 1 He needed my help. Whistlers make the rules, but we decide the order.
Interesting. Man, this bill account does make this

Speaker 1 go. It's time to change all the context.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 We heard them closing in that night and drag the lighthouse keeper from his bed. He was an old man, no trouble.
We didn't wake the others.

Speaker 1 In the morning, we told them we saw him walking off on his own, babbling about sparing the rest of us. We all remember the pilot screaming about his wife and kids.

Speaker 1 We were all spooked by then, all willing to believe anything. Jeff marked an empty grave with a broomstick and Lillian cried and called the man a hero.
Camped in the woods the next night.

Speaker 1 Thought we might might hike out of Whistler territory before anybody else had to die. But we gave them Jeff next, then Lillian,

Speaker 1 and then we were down to just us three. Just us three.
And suddenly, all I had in common with my brother was that I wanted to live. Wanted Ruth to live.

Speaker 1 Fell out of the damn tree before I even found a branch. Banged my leg up good.
Patient, patient, patient. That's what I keep hearing.
Kept hearing.

Speaker 1 As I scraped away the soil and deepened the hole, as I grabbed roots and hauled away stones, it was already there, a collapsed burrow of some kind, so convenient, a receptacle for my darkest instincts.

Speaker 1 Ira had poor night vision, war contacts. It was easy in the dark to get him where I wanted him, to scare him into the trap.
My hands were freezing. He was a sacrifice, but unaccepted.

Speaker 1 He was mute when he came back to camp. And even when he could accuse me, he didn't.
Why? Why did they march him back to our door? He opened his mouth to say something before Ruth fired.

Speaker 1 In my dreams, I give him words, an accusation, a condemnation, a warning. Interesting.

Speaker 1 Man,

Speaker 1 so the trap that he fell into, like I was already there, Collapseborough, so convenient receptacle for my instincts. It wasn't the Whistlers that hauled him into a trap.

Speaker 1 It was Ira falling into Bill's trap, the one he had set up. Man.
And then he comes back, but he doesn't snitch on him. Like, perhaps he understands it's part of it.

Speaker 1 And he was going to kill himself with the rifle before he decided to tell them it was a warning. Ended up dying anyway.
Man. Hi again.
This will be my last update for a while.

Speaker 1 And to clarify for audio listeners, this isn't Bill talking. This is the person posting these stories again.

Speaker 1 I think I owe you all a recap of what's been happening for me in real time since I began posting these journals. When I first met the man who gave me Bill's entries, let's call him Mr.
H,

Speaker 1 I was struck by his stoic, resigned way of sharing them.

Speaker 1 Even though he was a bit territorial about the originals, to date, I have not seen them, he was determined about the idea of sharing the story with a broader audience.

Speaker 1 I felt silly for the way I'd personalized the narrative earlier on. Talking to him, I stopped feeling like I had harmed anyone by posting Ruth's journal.

Speaker 1 I didn't feel as conflicted about it as I did at the beginning. I had one last meeting with Mr.
H before posting the first transcript of Bill's journal online. Yes, the man lived near me.

Speaker 1 He was grizzled, older, but not elderly. Used a wheelchair, but could walk short distances.
I found his company a little frightening at first. He wasn't a creepypasta reader, as you might guessed.

Speaker 1 The backpack I bought from the estate sale actually belonged to him. He was a family friend of the grandmother who died, and she had been keeping a handful of his old things in storage.

Speaker 1 The granddaughter sold his belongings without realizing what she was doing.

Speaker 1 I returned the backpack and Roose pages to him, though he wouldn't tell me how he came by them or why he'd given them to the grandmother for safekeeping.

Speaker 1 This was on Sunday before I posted the first half of the transcripts. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Yesterday, I went back to Mr. H's house.

Speaker 1 I went to ask if I could have some final pictures, both of the journals together and the backpack.

Speaker 1 I know I told you I wasn't interested in proving anything, but it seemed the final record would be more complete if I could offer at least one photo that encapsulated all of the material.

Speaker 1 Even comparing the age and color of the paper would be edifying. When I arrived, there's no answer at the door.
It was unlocked, though. We lived in a small town.

Speaker 1 I knocked loudly before letting myself in. I found him in his living room, hanging from a beam, toppled stepladder on the floor.
I'm in tears as I write this. I'd never seen a dead body before.

Speaker 1 Reading about the horrors Ruth and Bill faced, I think none of it was real to me until now.

Speaker 1 I don't know what he did with the two journals in the backpack. I didn't see them in his house while I waited for the police to arrive.
Do I suspect that Mr. H is Bill?

Speaker 1 Few of you have implied as much. I'm afraid I can't answer the question now.
I never asked him point blank. All I can do is leave you with Bill's version of events.

Speaker 1 It began on the 14th of December, the morning after Bill attempted suicide in the woods beyond the lodge. December 14th, final set of entries.

Speaker 1 I've talked to a few eyewitnesses over the years who swear whistlers look just like people. A little paler, maybe.
and behind the eyes.

Speaker 1 I spoke to an old woman, Wilma Darren, a goat herder, who said they can look however they want to look, like a goose or a sheep or a human being.

Speaker 1 It's when they open their mouths that you hear the truth. And when they change back to their natural form, do you want to describe what that was?

Speaker 1 So this is, again, very Wendy Go, but it's also very rake. And that's like your little humanoid figure scampering around.

Speaker 1 You think maybe the dog was a whistler then?

Speaker 1 I think so, right?

Speaker 1 Like right before they leave, it runs out of the woods and cripples him before running back into the woods, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 She was convinced because it because as that one guy said the trapper it's not that the whistlers want people it's that they need the people around to catch something else for something bigger she was convinced she'd seen one walking across her field one night all alone looking like a young man with torn clothes she brought him inside fed him dinner and he didn't speak a word to her she turned away from him for a moment when she was clearing plates And when she looked again, he had gone from the table, sprinted silently through the front door.

Speaker 1 That night, the Whistlers came. I trampled her fences in the dark, and she lost half her herd.
Found a doe torn to pieces by something. The Rangers dismissed her story out of hand.

Speaker 1 Game warden had some explanation for her about bears. There's no sign of a bear, though.
No prints. Nothing interesting about the dead doe.
I wonder now if they weren't half right.

Speaker 1 Bruth has said she thinks the Whistlers could be protecting us.

Speaker 1 That we're not sharks, but more like sheep. Sheep at the the mercy of wolves.
And the whistlers are shepherds.

Speaker 1 I don't know now. I don't know what to believe.
The dog's house was the best angle on the woods. I went in through the kitchen door and looked through the back windows.

Speaker 1 I wonder if they're out there now, having a laugh about my abandoned noose.

Speaker 1 I'm brave inside my own head, brave on paper, but I haven't checked the snares today and likely won't. I'm thinking, actually,

Speaker 1 that it's about time we made our way to the coast. It's our last option now, and I'm sick over it.
Dead if we do, dead if we don't. The leg is killing me.
I'm eating Tylenol and aspirin like candy.

Speaker 1 We have more medicine than food left, but nothing helps much. The worst pain doesn't come from the leg anyway.

Speaker 1 It comes from the ticking clock, the whistlers at night, Ruth's face, from knowing I'm a coward and a failure. Knowing she knows.

Speaker 1 Tonight she drew me a bath and sat on the tub's edge to wash my hair, her legs against my back, her feet in the hot water.

Speaker 1 We didn't talk, but I rested my head against her thigh and she sort of stroked the back of my ear. It's enough for now.
December 15th.

Speaker 1 Damn dog came for me today while I was siphoning fuel from the van. Out of nowhere, but luckily Ruth saw and came running.

Speaker 1 She tried to scare the little bastard back into the woods, but he wouldn't go. Just stood whining at the trees, backing away from the swing of her stick.
whimpering but refusing to flee.

Speaker 1 Jeff had a theory. He called it the symbiosis hypothesis.
He didn't study whistlers much, but he was big on cryptids in general.

Speaker 1 People always ask, given that ecosystems only function because every organism plays a cooperative role, how is it possible that a tertiary predator could go unnoticed?

Speaker 1 Population of any sustainable size has a measurable appetite. His answer was that there must be larger blind spots to account for elusive species.

Speaker 1 He thought cryptids must exist in pairs, like a clownfish and an anemone. The anemone shields the clownfish from the outside world, protects it with poison that the clownfish is immune to.

Speaker 1 The clownfish helps the anemone by maintaining it, giving nitrogen, managing parasites, luring in prey. In this way, they operate at a remove from the rest of the ecosystem.

Speaker 1 They cooperate and might survive when logic says they shouldn't. Ruth was, man, God, stuff like that.
Ah. Normally when we read a sequel to a story, it's like, well, you could have done without this.

Speaker 1 It didn't really add a ton, but this is a case where it's like, it changes so much, gives so much more insight to the Whistlers themselves.

Speaker 1 But, like, putting you in Bill's mindset that he was thinking of all of this, and there were so many different options, and he kept seeing the only option as like taking himself out. Man,

Speaker 1 Ruth was shouting at the dog, shouting towards the woods, back up to me to shield me. We heard something out there as her voice echoed.
Something called back to her. A scream.

Speaker 1 I heard it before. I thought it was a different part of the Whistlers' repertoire, a screech, a new inflection that comes over them when they go from stalking to attacking.

Speaker 1 So we heard the night chef died. Same gnashing, shrieking.
It echoed out of the cave where we left Lillian.

Speaker 1 Okay, so in his series of events, she's shouting as her voice echoed, something called back to her scream.

Speaker 1 And he had heard it the night before. A different part of the whistler's repertoire.

Speaker 1 Okay, so same order of events, she says, that she saw the dog, she screamed, the loud roar happened then the whistle started right

Speaker 1 yeah the same like outcome basically lillian lily with long red hair and adoring eyes for jeff

Speaker 1 she almost got away from us she felt oh man so menacing uh

Speaker 1 she fought ira shot her in the leg jesus we told ruth we were firing on the whistlers when she asked about the sound Said we could see them like hard shadows moving in the depths of the cave.

Speaker 1 Lillian wore the night vision goggles. I imagine she saw them more clearly than anyone ever has before.

Speaker 1 We didn't see anything, only heard them.

Speaker 1 We did hear this sound. A shriek like a wildcat, like a deranged woman.
The whistling came after, came second, came from a different part of the woods and closed in.

Speaker 1 Now the dog was whining, and it cowered out of sight, and Ruth turned to raise me to my feet. Man, this back and forth is so good.
Oh, gosh. We were urgent to move, but we weren't pursued.

Speaker 1 I can't explain the shift, like a drop in temperature, a slackening of the wind. The whistlers were not there for us, but there for it.

Speaker 1 The whistling overtook the shrieking, and then everything hushed at once. It left us alone.
Ira said it, said it in a clear voice in the days after I thought he'd lost his mind. It's a warning.

Speaker 1 The whistlers didn't kill anyone. What did he see from down in the hole? He said he saw tool marks.
He said it to Ruth, but looked at me. Wanted to make sure I knew knew it wasn't forgiven.

Speaker 1 I used a folding spade. I thought we were a day's walk from Red Hill then, maybe two.
You have to give them something if you want to get away. It's what the lighthousekeeper said.

Speaker 1 It's what the stories say. Play by their rules, you live.
Or you have a chance. I gave them Ira.

Speaker 1 I would do it again. I kept thinking I should have told Ruth everything.
Here she was standing in the street with a stick of firewood and no idea what's out there. I hit my head.

Speaker 1 It wasn't much use, but I heard it again. A shrieking sound and a rumble beneath it.
Atmospheric, eerie like thunder. And the whistling.

Speaker 1 The dog was gone by then, but I can't help thinking he's part of it too. Hair was spiked on his neck.
Eyes wide.

Speaker 1 We humans, we've got a way of personalizing things, of assigning motives, emotions, help or harm. Patient, patient, patient.
Ruth took me inside and cleaned my wounds, stitched up my leg.

Speaker 1 I bruised everywhere from my fall from the tree. She didn't ask about that.
Maybe she assumed it was old bruising still, or just more evidence that I've been pushing myself where I shouldn't.

Speaker 1 We shared the last of the gin. It's battery acid, but somehow I couldn't get enough.
I could see it getting to her as the evening got dark. Not the gin, but the fear.

Speaker 1 The screech we heard, the anxiety in the dog's eyes. The feeling that the longer we're out here, the less we know.
A very final sort of despair. Like she might collapse and never get back up again.

Speaker 1 Even after everything we've done, I couldn't have that. So I rose and took her in my arms, held her.
When I realized there was no way to tell her it would be all right, I kissed her. And she let me.

Speaker 1 I heard her sighing. I felt the weight of her against me, letting go.
There was something tight in her face, more like desperate resignation than love. Maybe that was my own pain getting in the way.

Speaker 1 My need.

Speaker 1 I brought her to the lounge and pulled her down with me on the bed, hurting everywhere and not caring. She undressed us both.
I wondered now that she's asleep. She's dreaming of me or him.
It's funny.

Speaker 1 I'm not afraid of death tonight.

Speaker 1 There's a bitterness in all these, like from Bill's perspective of all these sexual altercations, right?

Speaker 1 Where it's like she owes him or like some, she gets to be my sister when she wants to be instead of like, you know, uh, the object of romance.

Speaker 1 And like, she not so much to say that he feels like she's using her, but he feels like if he's gonna die for her, he's owed something, you know, yeah. Um, I think

Speaker 1 it was a giant jealousy as well with his brother, which is also why I think that he was so willing to sacrifice him. And it seems like he's always been into her because she said

Speaker 1 when the baby was born, and or when the baby died, should have been he was like, That should have been mine.

Speaker 1 And then, like, earlier, he said, when they made the decision that uh Ruth needs to live, um, Ira said, you know, Ira didn't care that I loved her this time.

Speaker 1 Like, he's known for a while, but now he needs to use that to keep Ruth alive, right?

Speaker 1 And he's almost bitter about the whole thing, bitter he couldn't have her before, bitter he has to die for her now instead of back then. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a very interesting character dynamic that he's determined to die for her, but he's like upset with her, upset that she didn't get to be his and like the real world, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, in a different life. Yeah, yeah.
It's a fascinating character setup. It's very, it's not one-dimensional.

Speaker 1 It's very layered Because he's also killing people, but he sees it as being the right thing because it's for her.

Speaker 1 December 16th. I'm going to get Ruth to the coast.
I decided this morning. Red Hill's a death trap.
Slow or fast. We'll die here if we stay.
And we have the Jeep.

Speaker 1 Maybe we'll go fast enough that the screech thing won't follow us. Maybe the Whistlers will close in on it once we're gone.
They'll kill it. That's what Ruth thinks.

Speaker 1 She thinks it's a monster, something old and unspeakable. Something that the people of this region have have been inflating with the Whistler since time immemorial.

Speaker 1 She thinks the Whistlers are on our side and that they're keeping it at bay. Time's a factor.
My leg's in bad shape. The bite needs antibiotics.
We don't have them.

Speaker 1 She tried to get me to stay in bed, but I won't. There's too much work to do.
I got the fuel and gear loaded into the Jeep. In the mid-afternoon, I decided to walk back out towards the snares.

Speaker 1 I heard her yelling for me not to go too far, but she doesn't understand. I can hear the whistlers all the time now.
It isn't just at night, and it isn't just when they're putting on a show.

Speaker 1 I can hear them talking through the day, hear their conversations out under the trees. Get clearer and clearer every minute.

Speaker 1 Soon, I think the whistle tones might turn into words, something I can parse. It's a relief to be inside my brother's mind like this.
Ira wasn't afraid of them that night it held.

Speaker 1 I have nightmares about that night. They marked him out for understanding and how they've marked me.
And I'm grateful to leave Ruth alone.

Speaker 1 I went back out to the snares because I was ready at last to give them their opportunity. I'm limping.
Easy pickings if I'm wrong. I went as far as the hanging tree and got the pistol ready.

Speaker 1 Hope feels like madness. I want to see them.
The whistlers, the shrieking thing. I want to see them for myself before I die.
It's not too much to ask, is it?

Speaker 1 The murmurs become chatter, came whistling.

Speaker 1 They were calling me out of the clearing where I'd set my snares, away into the trees. I followed them with measured, trusting steps.
Somehow I knew they wouldn't leave me behind.

Speaker 1 They were leading, not fleeing. The snow had an icy crust, and soon I wasn't just following the sound and emptiness.
I was following tracks, dog prints.

Speaker 1 I looked ahead and I saw the dog, the same one, standing in a treeless space where the woods ended. It was the the edge of a cliff, snow and granite and scraggly trees.

Speaker 1 I could hear moving water, and the dog was staring at me, into my eyes like he was possessed of a human mind. Are you one of them?

Speaker 1 I said.

Speaker 1 And the dog turned his back to me, wagged his tail once and ran straight ahead, ran straight off the face of the cliff.

Speaker 1 And the whistlers, who were closer than I knew, their voices erupting behind me and ahead, down in the gully and right at my back.

Speaker 1 And what I don't know, what I can't know, is whether he jumped for me or for them.

Speaker 1 Whether they were making noise over his death or my witnessing it, whether Ruth and I matter any more or less to the whistlers and the hares and foxes and birds we've hunted along the way.

Speaker 1 I walked to the cliff's edge as a matter of reflex. It was a very long way down.

Speaker 1 A sheer granite face with icy lines runoff.

Speaker 1 I didn't see the dog. I saw cars.

Speaker 1 A dozen? Maybe fewer? Cars and trucks driven clear off this cliff face, crashed and mangled, blackened where they'd burned. It happened before we reached Red Hill, but not long before.

Speaker 1 It was a graveyard, fresh one.

Speaker 1 Here lies the whole population of Red Hill, a sign might say. It's one thing to be backed against an edge.
It's another thing to drive clear off it.

Speaker 1 There weren't many bodies in view, but the ones I could see were removed from the vehicles, thrown, dragged. It's hard to say.
That is cool.

Speaker 1 The whole town was compelled by

Speaker 1 the same inclination that now Ira and

Speaker 1 Bill have. Like they have to, they have to take their own life so that someone else can be saved, perhaps.
Or like the woman in the meatlocker was.

Speaker 1 It's like maybe there isn't even a greater thing that growls. Maybe the whistlers just compel you to take your own life, to give in to the woods, like it did to the dog, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there's just they're like everyone got in their cars and drove off this cliff that is so sick yeah i'm i'm really am wondering if it's just manifestations in your mind and it represents something different to each person yeah

Speaker 1 like like her like ruth hearing catherine right like hearing the baby yeah it's just like it puts things in your mind to drive you mad uh man the whole town drive everything every reveal in this story makes it more in-depth makes it cooler that's such a neat revelation ruth got a paper published in a good journal a few years ago on the subject of mass hysteria.

Speaker 1 When a group of people panics all at once, they become like a single organism. They might see things that were never there, remember events that never occurred.

Speaker 1 Everybody defers to the loudest voice and suddenly the whole herd is spiraling to some terrible end at once. There's a Whistler story that takes place after a shipwreck.

Speaker 1 Oh, gosh, this is so good. Oh, oh.
20 people get stuck together on the same beach. It was a fishing boat, so they're orderly people.
They've They've got a hierarchy. Everyone's got a job.

Speaker 1 But they realize there are Whistlers near. The captain starts telling them stories from when he was a boy.

Speaker 1 Stories of how the Whistlers will take the group down one at a time, how their minds will be compromised. They'll turn against each other.

Speaker 1 So they draw straws and choose an order, and with great efficiency every night, they send one man out in the woods with a torch and nothing else.

Speaker 1 They assume they'll be rescued in a matter of days, and each sacrifice is for the greater good, buying the group just a little more time. Chose a man never comes back.

Speaker 1 The group never gets attacked by the whistlers. Confirmation bias, Ruth said.

Speaker 1 Rescue boat never comes. They continue in this way until the captain is the only man standing.
Having like clockwork, each man thinking his sacrifice was keeping the other safe.

Speaker 1 It was all a matter of practicality and fairness, and maybe that their own strengths would keep them alive when it was their turn in the wild. Who knows what they saw in the darkness?

Speaker 1 Maybe the Whistlers called them onward, showed them paradise. Maybe the people who drove off this cliff saw a road.
A neat suspension bridge. Something happens in the mind.

Speaker 1 Ruth hears her baby at night. Captain did the talk show circuit for a few years and killed himself.
Ruth says this is the most damning part. The captain knew it was just a story.

Speaker 1 He knew the whistlers weren't real. A little sleight of hand.
He picked the order. I picked the order.
I think it was a message. The dog, the whistling.
There's no shrieking sound. No sign of danger.

Speaker 1 Just me and the fallen bodies in the cliff's edge. The whistlers were daring me to take matters into my own hands.
Keep my promise. Gosh.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 this one for me, like just how cool the setting is and this revelation from Bill is quickly working its way up the ranks of stories we've read.

Speaker 1 I'm like, just from the folklore elements to the cryptid elements, to how well the tension's been built so far and now seen like the other side of the coin. I am

Speaker 1 I am about it.

Speaker 1 The two stories merge beautifully. It's very

Speaker 1 compelling. Yeah, it does such a good job at mirroring what was in the first part.
December 18th. Ruth's driving us to the coast.

Speaker 1 Things changed for me this morning when I realized we were really going.

Speaker 1 Weather was good. Foggy, but not snowing.
When we get there, it's over. Coast is the last place we can go where we might get help, where we find someone living who can get us out of here.

Speaker 1 She looks tired. Her hands are tied on the wheel, which she'll wipe her squeaking as they clear the condensing mist.
I've thought so much over the years about what she deserves.

Speaker 1 Not me. Not this.

Speaker 1 She knows how I feel. She knows since the night Catherine died.
It was just mom and me in the hospital waiting room, late, drinking scorched coffee and pretending to read magazines.

Speaker 1 Doctor came to say the baby had passed away, and then they wouldn't let me into the room with Ruth. Only the father's allowed.
Wait until visiting hours, the nurse said.

Speaker 1 I raged at the woman with her pin-backed hair and sickly pink scrubs. Mom kept asking what had gotten into me.
I told the truth, broke down crying and said I was in love with Ira's wife.

Speaker 1 Didn't realize until that moment that I was jealous of him. Jealous and angry.
He was the only person allowed in that room with her, and he wasn't there.

Speaker 1 He vanished to Tuscaloosa or somewhere to listen to drug reps lecture about catheters. Too chicken shit to be a man when it mattered.
Right up until the end. I told that nurse I was the father.

Speaker 1 Ira Douglas Gadiger, I said, poking my finger into her clipboard. We all knew I was lying, but Ruth said to let me in.

Speaker 1 So late at night, and I held her in the hospital bed with all the tape and gauze and an IV in her arm. Catherine came by emergency C-section, so it was a double trauma.

Speaker 1 She was stuck in a recovery bed for Catherine's entire week of life. There was so little I could do.
Maybe I was taking advantage. I don't know.
My mom looked in on us that night, saw us.

Speaker 1 She'll have her own ideas about this once Ruth is rescued. She'll be fascinated to know why I let my brother die.

Speaker 1 Gosh. Man, just, it goes from painting Bill as like this heroic guy who was like, yeah, maybe he wanted to feel something, but she did too in the last moments.

Speaker 1 And it was her idea as much as it was his for the two of them to embrace. And like, he's just making the hero play to save her.
But then like all of this plotting on his end, man.

Speaker 1 Yeah, selfish dude, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 The drive was short. I closed my eyes against the window and opened them.
We'd arrived. Gray sand and the pale sun in the sky.
An icy dock.

Speaker 1 There's a boathouse, a shack, and enough trash in the bushes to say people have been here, but not recently. Not since the corruption came to Red Hill.

Speaker 1 The corruption. That's what Kirker called it as he told me the story.
It was a separate thing. Something the Whistlers brought with them.
The corruption in the hearts of men.

Speaker 1 Was he talking about fear?

Speaker 1 The ordinary fear of the unknown and what it does to a person. Ruth saw me crying and walked out to the dock.
She can't look at me. I think she knows how badly I've failed.

Speaker 1 She knows this could be over for her if I was man enough to be steady with the noose.

Speaker 1 No, she doesn't know. Doesn't expect me to be the one who dies.
Doesn't know what I've done to keep us safe this long.

Speaker 1 She's a good woman, virtuous like the long-suffering mother in a fairy tale.

Speaker 1 If I told her the truth, we'd have an argument about whether it was necessary, whether I'm not just as bad as whatever lurks under the trees. I might be.

Speaker 1 I have my reasons, but now she's run out of hope. She doesn't think either of us will make it out alive.
She turned her face into the wind, sharp, started walking up the beach. Do you hear that?

Speaker 1 She said. I listened.
It was faint, but there.

Speaker 1 Whistlers. Whistlers coming for me.
The man who picks the prey.

Speaker 1 But they didn't want Ira. Didn't take him.

Speaker 1 Or they took his mind, but on his body. What about Lillian? What about Jeff? What was really happening beneath all this screaming? Don't go, Ruth, I said.

Speaker 1 She was walking up the sand, going to where she could see across the beach. But she wasn't hearing whistlers.
She was hearing the baby again. I don't remember Catherine crying.

Speaker 1 She was too small, too weak. There's a boat, Ruth said, looking winded, maybe happy.
It was something to do, an option to try. I told her I couldn't go back to Red Hill.

Speaker 1 I intended that she should go back, keep warm, wait for rescue. She could make it once I was gone.
Any of the stories, she would make it.

Speaker 1 But we dragged ourselves towards the boat on the unforgiving coastline. The sand became craggy, basalt, became forest, weedy and thorny and near-impenetrable.

Speaker 1 She clampered onward almost like an animal, on all fours up boulders, always moving forward, always towards the boat. Every step brought us closer to the whistlers.

Speaker 1 I could hear them growing louder, hiding in the trees. Dozens, at least.
Hollow howling, everything else too. Clicking of teeth, the shifting of weight.
Yes, there are bodies beneath the voices.

Speaker 1 A strange corporeal reality. Something I may never succeed in defining.
She stood at the edge of the shallow, gently laughing water. Suddenly, she was an expert on boats and tides.

Speaker 1 It was a mistake coming so far. The boat was a weathered shell of itself, flimsy and with tattered sails and frayed lines.
It wouldn't take her as far as she needed to go. But she insisted.

Speaker 1 She She said she didn't hear the whistlers. She heard the baby and Ira.

Speaker 1 Ira singing. A phrase so foreign I couldn't even imagine it.
She heard them behind her on the boat calling her to the false safety of the water. All I could hear was ahead of us in the woods.

Speaker 1 I heard whistlers and their waiting jaws. I heard the danger that they were protecting her from.
And it occurred to me that maybe the whistlers were offering another bargain. Put Ruth on the boat.

Speaker 1 Let her go. They were offering me a chance to die on my feet, pistol in hand.
Yes, I was willing. I was willing if it meant, somehow, that Ruth would be safe.

Speaker 1 I told her to get on the boat, move like it was right behind her, stopped, turned. I walked up the beach, towards the Whistlers, towards the edge of the trees where they hid, where they called for me.

Speaker 1 Soon Ruth saw what I'd done. She saw I didn't follow her onto the sailboat, that I was away and the tide was rising, that I was facing the Whistlers, facing the end.

Speaker 1 She was screaming over the whistlers, so she could hear them now. She was screaming behind me, screaming about something I should see.
Run, Bill! Can't you see it? Bill!

Speaker 1 I saw it. The dog.
Gray and brown, sharp forward ears, dappled dark on the sides. I fell to my knees, thinking, like a fool, that I had them figured out.
I was supposed to follow the dog, I thought.

Speaker 1 Supposed to give myself up. So I did.
My legs weren't working, and I crawled. I crawled over sharp stone and weedy gravel.
I stared the dog in the eye. It was silent, like Oma Derman's young man.

Speaker 1 A whistler, I decided. Shade of the woods, they're called further north.
Whistler in the shape of a dog. It was coming toward me, tentatively.

Speaker 1 I heard Ruth's voice, a complaint high in her throat, harsh, my name, screaming my name. But the whistlers drowned her out.

Speaker 1 Their voices rose to screeching to a din, and they descended on the dog right in front of my eyes. The dog, that was not a dog, not a whistler.
Something else.

Speaker 1 Something that died with a moan like an earthquake. They tore it apart.
The effort went on for many long minutes, long enough for me to realize the dying thing looked nothing like a dog.

Speaker 1 Not in the least. It had long, black limbs, sharp, angular, with joints protruding, short, coarse hair that shone.

Speaker 1 It bled the same deep red of any mammal, long toes curled with black claws, flickering nerve impulses. Part of my mind says it was a bear.

Speaker 1 Black fur, enormous stature, and that low growl, dark and strong in a way that grips your heart. Could have been a bear.
It could have been any number of completely familiar things.

Speaker 1 There's another part of me that knows it wasn't a bear. Knows it isn't something I've ever seen before.
Isn't something I can describe. And the whistlers took it down.
Okay, fascinating.

Speaker 1 So he sees the dog, a real dog at some point.

Speaker 1 And then the thing comes, it's, it's,

Speaker 1 that explains why when she hit it, it runs into the woods and then makes a growl and then the whistlers appear around it. This is some other entity.

Speaker 1 This is the symbiosis, something else in the woods that hunts people, that the whistlers hunt it. So it needs people to be around so that they can find it wherever it goes.

Speaker 1 And it takes the form of things that have died, like the dog that he saw run off the cliff. Interesting.
What a cool idea for a monster.

Speaker 1 And like she, while she was on the boat, she saw it for what it was, a giant thing taller than a man crawling on all fours. But to him, it gives the perception that it is a dog, right?

Speaker 1 So, this thing gives people illusions. Probably, like he said, maybe the people that drove off the cliff thought they were driving on a suspension bridge.
Who knows?

Speaker 1 It gives people illusions so it can lure them away, and then it tears their bodies from the car to devour them. And the whistlers hunt that.

Speaker 1 That's such a cool idea for a monster. And what did he call it? The shade of the woods? That's such a cool name.
Okay.

Speaker 1 I got back on my feet, swayed once before falling again. The last thing I heard was the snapping of bones, and in my fevered mind, they were Jeff's bones and Lillian's and Ira's and Ruth's.

Speaker 1 They were Catherine's tiny bones, and the whole misadventure was my fault. It is, isn't it? I picked the order.
All false to me. I didn't wake up until the following morning.

Speaker 1 And by then, the woods were silent. Ruth and the boat were gone.
Man. Gosh, that's so neat.
Okay, so

Speaker 1 he's saying that, like the boat captain, he picked the order because it was always going to be him that survives.

Speaker 1 Because from the letter we see at the end of Ruth's account, it seems Ruth dies, and this guy's probably the sole survivor.

Speaker 1 If he's the old man who had Ruth's letter and then like invites the boy who's posting this online over and then ends up hanging himself, right?

Speaker 1 So if that's all him, it was always going to be, he was always going to be the sole survivor. He just picked the order.
All this was, even if he didn't know it, his own design. December 19th.

Speaker 1 When did the dog stop being a dog? I don't know. The wound on my leg refuses to heal.
I can feel the pain of it in my entire body. An aching time with my heartbeat.

Speaker 1 Wilma wouldn't tell me what the whistlers really look like.

Speaker 1 There's a reason for that. Good reason.
They were drawing curtains in our minds, letting Ruth hear her daughter again.

Speaker 1 Showing me another pitiful creature alone in the woods. I don't know, but I have my suspicions.
I think we personalize this story when we shouldn't. They're not protecting us.

Speaker 1 That much is obvious now. Should have been obvious a long time ago.
Anglers waiting for sharks. Ruth and I were not sharks.
Patient, patient, patient. We're bait.

Speaker 1 I see that now. We're bait for something bigger.
Is that what they were doing with Ira?

Speaker 1 Keeping him on the hook? Something took his arm, but the whistlers kept him on his feet. Kept him walking, marked him.
Now they've marked me. Put my sin on the wind.

Speaker 1 I couldn't walk back to the Jeep tonight. I got halfway, was hobbling.
It's like it's close to useless. I imagine Ruth's hands on it, telling me to stay awake, to stare down the pain.

Speaker 1 When I find her, I won't let us be separated again. We'll fight our way out of this back-to-back, keep moving down the coast.

Speaker 1 They want one of us, they'll have to take us both. That was her mindset.
The right mindset. We're not the prey.
I see that now. Human beings are collateral damage.
No, I'm not certain.

Speaker 1 There are too many stories. Memories told by people with polluted minds.
Corrupted.

Speaker 1 I don't see the boat. No lights or fires.
I had to move further inland than I'd like to find a trail.

Speaker 1 She's safe. She has to be safe.
Safe in the boat and the water.

Speaker 1 Safe because she's a terrific shot and the toughest person I know. But is her mind safe? Is she safe when she closes her eyes? The whistlers were getting to her, planning lies.

Speaker 1 Couldn't make a fire, but there's no snow out here under the dense trees. Not yet.
December 21st.

Speaker 1 It's been a few days, I think three nights, since I saw Ruth. I reached the boathouse, but the Jeep's gone.
There are tire tracks to follow down the beach, through the mud.

Speaker 1 I slept half the day yesterday. Pain is blinding.
I was lost in the woods, turned around.

Speaker 1 It was further than I thought, and the trees all look the same once you're off, of course.

Speaker 1 When every step costs so much.

Speaker 1 Excuses, excuses, excuses. What will I do if she doesn't make it? What have I done? I froze overnight, buried myself with moss.
This morning I realized I could just stay down.

Speaker 1 I regretted ever leaving Red Hill.

Speaker 1 Stove and blankets. We were going to die anyway.
Why not die together? I was so sure she'd have a chance at the coast.

Speaker 1 when i find her she'll tell me what an idiot i was she'll tell me she loves me she said it that night after the dog pit me she was falling asleep her cheek on my shoulder my hand in her hair i love you bill she said and she closed her eyes i just smiled figured she already knew how i felt i wish i'd said it back I wish in the darkness I had more of that moment to remember.

Speaker 1 I love you, Ruth Gadiger. It's the greatest pain in my life, but I do.
December 24th. I made it to the Jeep.
It's parked skew in a marshy area where the mud would be deadly if it wasn't freezing over.

Speaker 1 Out of gas. She didn't get far.
I wonder if she was running the engine for heat. Couldn't blame her.
It's raining a little. Freezing mist.

Speaker 1 I'm inside the Jeep and she isn't here. Her backpack is slumped in the back seat.
Her pens and journal stuffed inside a plastic bag right right at the top of the pack. The revolver's here.
Empty.

Speaker 1 Found it a good five yards from the Jeep on the ice. But no roofs.

Speaker 1 I've got three in the pistol.

Speaker 1 So does that mean she killed herself? Yeah. Now her body's been drugged off.
Yeah. Yeah.
So now I think Bill's going to live. So I think he is, Mr.
H.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think so. He was the sole survivor.
Yeah. Her last journal entry is a suicide, no, or that's how it seems.
She figured I was dead and tried to drive south and ran out of fuel.

Speaker 1 If she killed herself, she'd be here beside me. I suppose an animal might have dragged her away if she wasn't in the vehicle.
It says here, take my body back to Oregon.

Speaker 1 She wouldn't have been so careless as to do it out in the open. Not when she had the option.
Not when she knew what was lurking close by. It's too dark to go looking now.

Speaker 1 I'm exhausted in a way that feels almost soft. Welcome.
That's a cold getting into me. It's deep now, the chill setting into my bones.
Maybe I'll see Ruth tonight. Maybe I won't wake up.

Speaker 1 December 25th, Christmas Day. Her body was dragged.
It was easy to see in the light of morning. I stuffed her pack into mine and went looking.

Speaker 1 There are footsteps in the mud, hers, leading towards where I found the revolver. No blood on the ice.

Speaker 1 A disturbance where she might have fallen, and then a smear in the mud where she was taken away up across the the ice and through gravel through sand inland into the woods again i followed the path without weighing the idea first it seemed we're worth more to them alive

Speaker 1 ira

Speaker 1 they kept ira going for more than a month he had a rifle the day he saw their true faces the day the corruption got a hold of him if i hadn't finished it sooner ruth would be safe now she'd be walking south wouldn't she free to go we're worth too much to them the whistlers too useful that's why they never finish us off.

Speaker 1 A survivor with a good story keeps the cycle going, keeps the humans coming. Ruth understood that.
Mystery is a hunting tactic. Our curiosity is what kills us in the end, that and our companions.

Speaker 1 December 26th. Twice I thought I'd lost the trail, but I didn't.
Trail changed. Crossed the road from Red Hill and led through a brushy field through snow.
Almost turned to walk to the lodge.

Speaker 1 Pros and cons. Another day or two of this, and I might drop, but turning away can mean losing the trail.
Here in the field, the drag marks turned into footsteps. Uneven, like she's dragging her feet.

Speaker 1 Bare feet. Her shoes come off along the way.
I found them, tied them to my pack. If she's walking, maybe she got away.
So I'll follow. I won't stop.
The tracks are obvious now in the snow.

Speaker 1 As long as I can keep ahead of the weather, this will all be over soon. South.
She's leading me south. So it sounds to me like she did kill herself, and then she was dragged by the creatures.

Speaker 1 And then, similar to maybe the dog, the like, or maybe whatever. That happened to Ira.

Speaker 1 Ira was. Yeah, yeah.
He like they become one or they keep them going or makes them to some in-between, some possessed state. That's probably what happened to her.

Speaker 1 And now she is leading him to safely so he can tell the story. September 29th.

Speaker 1 The trail, the tracks, they ended today.

Speaker 1 I was walking in Ruth's bare footsteps, dragging strides, and suddenly they weren't just hers. There was a second set of the same steps and a third, all dragging and running together.

Speaker 1 I was so fixed on my feet, on the tracks, on picking Ruth's tracks apart from the others, I didn't realize I was walking in a circle.

Speaker 1 A circle high on a ridge, exposed, and the tracks leading me around and around a boulder, big and gray, marked with a vein of white quartz.

Speaker 1 There's no path away from here, just a continuous loop of footprints.

Speaker 1 So many of the snow has cleared, leaving mud and dead plant matter, leaving a ring like the one we found encircling the lodge on our first morning in Red Hill. Then, my instinct was to flee.

Speaker 1 To get Ruth the hell out of that ring if I could manage it. Or feed myself to the Whistlers.
Give them what I thought they wanted. How the circle didn't mean as much to me.
I had no energy for fear.

Speaker 1 Ruth is walking among the Whistlers. For how long?

Speaker 1 For however long she can stay on her feet. It's not symbiosis.
Whatever it is, it starts in the mind, in in the head. Maybe they were all like us once, like Ira and Ruth.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's why they always let one person go. Teller Rixon, a folklorist.
That was his theory. He thought there was no cryptid in the woods, no separate predator species.

Speaker 1 That the Whistlers themselves were just people, corrupted, pushed so far by the harshness of the wilderness that they transformed into something else to survive. Pure need and fear, hunting in a pack.

Speaker 1 Maybe deep down they have human hearts. Maybe part of them wants to see us survive.
I climbed up onto the boulder, stayed inside the rink. It was late evening, and I figured they'd come for me.

Speaker 1 Maybe I'd see Ruth among them. That'd be worth it.
That and the stars. I sat on the boulder and could see across the valley.

Speaker 1 The snow and the distant gray ridges, the sky turning purple and the opening eyes of the stars. The whispers never spoke up around me.

Speaker 1 They never came. The longer I looked, the more I saw across that valley.
I saw a hard, unnatural line, a road.

Speaker 1 Before long, there was a light on it. A moving light.
Headlights winding up a neighboring ridge. And there were other lights.
Christmas lights. Window lights.
The spangled glow of a small town.

Speaker 1 Another red hill, but this one populated, this one alive. Ruth left me her flint and steel.
Paper. I started a fire, and they came for me the next morning.

Speaker 1 They came for me the way they would have come for Ruth if I hadn't failed in a chopper, blankets, with ointment for my cuts, and a splint for my leg. I might lose it, someone said.

Speaker 1 They might take it off at the knee. What happened?

Speaker 1 Ranger hollered over the chopper blades. The whistlers, I said, garnering myself a look of mixed pity and disbelief.
What are the whistlers? There's no explaining what's actually out there.

Speaker 1 And I see that this is by design. The ineffability is the trap.
I shook my head the way Wilma Darren shook her head at me all those years ago and said the only thing that made sense at the time.

Speaker 1 Patient, patient, patient.

Speaker 1 And that's the end.

Speaker 1 Wow, dude.

Speaker 1 It's fun having a multi-part series that like cohesively comes together in a great way.

Speaker 1 I like at the end of part one where you expect Bill to die, that kind of thing, only to have this be like almost a

Speaker 1 Dante's Inferno kind of experience for Bill, who is just kind of a selfish, very petty, bitter man, full of jealousy, and this is kind of his own hell. I really don't know.

Speaker 1 I still kind of feel the same way after I read, after we read Ruth's...

Speaker 1 journal entry to where I don't know how realistic it is or as much as it's like just a complete descent into madness. Yeah.
Yeah, you've heard the story. So once you're out there and you get stuck,

Speaker 1 I guess there had to be some initial thing because they were at the lighthouse and something ripped the guy out of the window and that seems to be the catalyst for everything that went wrong.

Speaker 1 But how much of it's them actually doing stuff and how much of it's just in your head? You know,

Speaker 1 I also love like the story, it told so much and like, oh, well, Bill met this and Ruth met this and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 But it was also so restrained and like it didn't tell us too much about the Whistlers or the other thing they're hunting. They don't even have a name.

Speaker 1 It just looks like a dog to him at least. Like it leaves so much up to the imagination,

Speaker 1 but also gives you so many pieces to play with.

Speaker 1 It's like it sets, just like the story does, right on that border of folklore where it's like, we know enough about it to speculate, but we don't know everything about it.

Speaker 1 And there's so many stories like the boat captain and people getting the trapper and stuff. There's so much extra lore added to it in such a casual way.
Such a juggernaut of creativity and

Speaker 1 mystique that was built around this. It's just a lot of fun and I think it works the best because it's just an amazing character piece.
You know, like we never, we don't ever

Speaker 1 ever see the Whistlers ever. You barely even hear what they sound like.
I mean, you hear the, you know, oh, there's the Whistlers again, but it's just so much about.

Speaker 1 these characters and like the very unconventional storytelling of like how the narrative narrative isn't just straight ahead.

Speaker 1 You kind of get pieces from the past as we push forward through the story and you just get to reveal more and more of these people and intentions and plans and everything else. It's just

Speaker 1 extremely strong read, man.

Speaker 1 This was a sick one. And also

Speaker 1 like hardly any jokes just because I was just locked in, honestly. It was great.
It was so good. It was just written so well.
It's one of the best things.

Speaker 1 It's one of the best things we've read in a while, I think. Yeah.
I think so. Man, gosh, that went hard.
And it's a shame that, again, the Amity Argo, this is the only thing I can find by them.

Speaker 1 I would love to find more of their stuff, but I'm not seeing it anywhere. There's

Speaker 1 hold on. So there was a no-sleep podcast episode about it.

Speaker 1 Interestingly, Amity Argo has not put out any other stories. At one point, it's rumored.
It was a pin name throwaway account for one of the more popular no-sleep authors.

Speaker 1 So I could, I mean, that would make sense to me.

Speaker 1 But there was an audio thing they did,

Speaker 1 uh, and it says by Amity Argo, and then it's got like a bunch of voice actor stuff, but now I'm still not seeing any names.

Speaker 1 It's starring like Jessica McInvoy and David Cummings, but there's nothing specifically about who wrote it. And man, I wish I could find out more stuff from this author because it was so well done.

Speaker 1 Um, please go upvote. Like, we'll leave the Reddit link and the Creepypaza story.
Please go upvote it, give it high ratings. It deserves it.
Man, I want to know more from this author.

Speaker 1 This was so good. It was amazing.

Speaker 1 Guys, thanks for listening. This is a nice, big old fat episode this week.
So I hope you liked it. And we will catch you in the next one.
Bye-bye. We'll catch you in the next one.

Speaker 1 Amity, if you're out there, please

Speaker 1 give me your name. I would like to give you money and

Speaker 1 my wife. She's not going to watch the episode this far, but if you, if you reach out, you can have her.

Speaker 1 That should do it.

Speaker 1 Bye.