The three of them moved cautiously as they ventured farther out into the oppressive dark, but it was difficult to get their bearings. It was even harder still to make sense of where the mysterious ringing bells were actually emanating from.

"I can't make out shit," Dean mumbled before stopping to rub his eyes. The dull ache in his head had also grown into a full-blown, throbbing headache, and staring at the camera's bright screen certainly wasn't helping. He could only imagine how the other two were feeling. They'd eaten even less than him at breakfast, and Arlo was the high metabolism type.

"What are you doing?" Arlo whispered when Dean suddenly lowered the camera and started messing with the settings.

"Switching to thermal," Dean replied. "Higher contrast, which should help us see through some of this fog a little better." He took a few more steps before stopping so abruptly that Arlo and Chris nearly collided with him.

"What? Why'd we stop?" Chris said, leaning to the side to try to see over Dean's shoulder.

"Something emitting heat on the ground... just that way," Arlo said from his better vantage point on Dean's left.

Chris tensed. "An animal?"

"It's staying awfully still if it is," Dean muttered.

As they cautiously approached it, they quickly realized that the hot spot was actually two. Once the smear of yellow and orange on the screen was right in front of them, Arlo focused his flashlight on the muddy, soft ground in front of them. He immediately wished he hadn't.

Someone's footprints were imprinted in the mud... pointed right at them.

Dean was the one to notice and point out a trail of far fainter prints that apparently led right up to the one they'd found. As if someone had walked towards them from the darkness up ahead and just stopped.

Chris's skin crawled. "Noooooope," he shook his head rapidly. "This can't be right. This isn't happening right now. We're all just tired. Maybe hit our heads on something. Ran into some psychedelic moss or some shit. I don't like this."

Arlo knew if they were to tell any one of their friends about this, they'd laugh at the idea of being scared of some damned footprints. But fact that they weren't the imprint of boots, or sneakers was upsetting in a way he hadn't expected. Bare feet... Someone was walking around in the woods... at night... without shoes.

"You think it's those girls?" Chris asked, panning his flashlight around them again.

Arlo almost couldn't stand to look every time Chris did. At this point, he was more afraid of actually seeing someone among the silent, twisted trees. "I didn't think to look for shoes. I just saw their clothes."

Dean shushed both of them harshly as the bells chimed again. Soft, but clearer this time. "If they are out here just fucking with us, I wanna know," Dean said.

Chris swallowed thickly. "And if they aren't fucking with us?"

"Then I wanna know what happened to them."

Then, as if on cue, the rain just suddenly stopped. Well, maybe it hadn't stopped completely, but it had slowed enough that everything sounded even more still in its absence. Almost as if the weather itself was trying to encourage Dean's bizarre curiosity.

Dean took a few more tentative steps, using the camera to try to follow the trail that was getting harder and harder for the thermal to detect as the ground cooled. Arlo was just behind him, with Chris at his back.

The boys' flashlights sifted through the thick fog that moved in clouds all around them, illuminated like plumes of dust by the beams of light, which seemed to be growing weaker... That, or it was getting even darker now.

It took another moment for them to make the distinction that it seemed so much darker because the trees had fallen away. Now nothing but stunted, stubby grass, fog, and an oppressive black stretched out before them—a vast emptiness that threatened to swallow them whole.

Realization seemed to hit all three of them at the same time.

"Wait," Chris said. "Is this it? The-"

"Yeah," Arlo interrupted. "I think so." He didn't wanna hear the word 'dead'. "The place where nothing grows..."

Dean turned around, his flashlight searching for the campsite and catching the faint glow of the fire back in the trees. The girls were camping almost right inside the clearing. Just another unnerving thought that brought up more questions.

But those would have to wait, because before any of them could say anything else, Arlo spotted movement. "Whaaat the fuck is that!?" He didn't even breathe between words, pointing just before the barely visible figure darted straight towards them from across the clearing.

Arlo stumbled back into Chris, a scream leaving both of them until... Annie came bouncing up into the reach of their lights. She was completely nude and soaking wet but had a big grin on her face.

"Oh my fucking god," Chris groaned, planting his free hand over his chest while redirecting his flashlight out of courtesy.

"Hey! I didn't think you were coming back!" she said, then turned to shout into the darkness. "Sara! They came back!" she called excitedly.

Sara looked a bit more timid as she approached, trying to cover what little of herself she could manage despite the boys quite obviously doing their best to keep their eyes on Annie and Sara's faces. "Sorry... We thought we had the place to ourselves..." she explained, intentionally putting Annie between herself and their idols.

"So, you're really all just out here in a haunted forest, at night, with no clothes on?" Dean said skeptically, face burning. "What in the actual hell?"

"Yeah! It's pretty exciting!" Annie exclaimed.

"Aren't you cold?" Arlo wondered.

"A little-" Sara began before Annie spoke over her.

"No, not at all!"

"She had a little more to drink than I did." Sara was looking more uncomfortable by the minute. "Can I go get my clothes?"

The boys moved out of Sara's way, turning towards each other while letting her and Annie pass and get a few paces ahead before following them back to the camp.

"Man," Dean said, shaking his head and letting out a huff of a laugh in disbelief. "This night just keeps getting weirder."

"I hope you're getting my good side," Annie said as she glanced back at the cameraman and winked. "You guys look like you've had a time of it. Want a drink?"

"It's not recording. And I'm good," Dean declined.

"I'll take one," Chris said, catching a disapproving look from his two friends. "Look, it's been a wild night, okay?" If he couldn't get his nerves to calm on their own, a hard drink didn't sound like it'd hurt.

"Why? What happened?" Sara wondered as she rejoined them from her tent once she was fully covered again.

"It's gonna sound completely crazy, but we were on our way back to our car after we parted ways with you two, and it just vanished," Arlo explained.

Annie turned to look at them as she pulled a cropped sweater over her bare chest. "Vanished?"

Arlo nodded as he stared at her muddy feet. "Yep."

"Cars don't just vanish..." Sara said in a skeptical tone.

"Ours did, though," Chris agreed. He still couldn't wrap his mind around it. Nor was he sure if he really wanted to right now. "We definitely saw it. It was less than half a parking lot away."

"And heard it," Dean added, as he turned off the camera and shifted his bag around to put it away.

"And then, next thing we knew, we were just outside of your camp..." Chris said as Annie returned with a bottle of hard lemonade and handed it to him before she started to wriggle back into her jeans.

"I've heard of that happening!" Annie laughed. "I guess the forest doesn't want you to leave yet."

"It's more likely that they were just letting the stories get to them," Sara insisted as she put another log on the fire. "This forest has a lot of stories surrounding it, but they are just stories..."

"No," Chris said, shaking his head as he twisted open the long-necked bottle. "We definitely saw it."

"And heard it," Dean reiterated.

"Ever heard of mass hysteria?" Sara said in a skeptical tone.

She had a point, though. Things like that don't just happen. Sure, there were times when they'd catch an unexplained 'bang' or knock, or a weird audio distortion while filming episodes for their channel. But most of the time everything was either explainable and played up, or fabricated by them entirely for the views.  

"Did you at least get it on camera?" Annie wondered as she finished getting dressed.

Dean sighed as if that very thing had been on his mind since the incident with the car happened. "No."

"Uh-huh, of course not... Because cars don't just disappear... You're all just tired and freaked out," Sara insisted. "It's messing with your heads."

"Says someone we found dancing around in the rain at night without any clothes on in the middle of a forest," Dean shot back with a smile, the first Arlo or Chris had seen all evening.

"We're having a lot more fun than you all seem to be having. No ghosts or demons have come and taken us away... So, I suppose we're not doing anything too reckless," Annie pointed out.

They talked for a little while longer about strange things that were said to have happened in the forest, Sara often chiming in with 'perfectly reasonable' explanations for most, until the girls started eating. Though they were all hungry, only Dean was brave enough to accept their offer of food, while Arlo and Chris excused themselves to go get more firewood.

Once Chris was sure they were out of earshot, he turned to Arlo. "Look, I don't have a good feeling about this."

"I don't really either, but maybe they're right. I mean, maybe we are just overreacting, you know?"

"But we saw the car... and no matter which way we go, we somehow end up deeper in this damned forest!" Chris said, only raising his voice as loud as he dared. "Did you notice they don't have any backpacks? And how did they get all this stuff here? There's way too much at that camp, this far into the woods, for two girls to have carried. And we didn't see another car when we got here."

"So, maybe they've been out here for several days?" Arlo hypothesized. They could've caught a bus and walked, but that didn't explain how they would've brought so much supplies with them. "Maybe they did it while we were hiking around and filming? Or before we even got here. There could be another place to park that we just didn't know about."

"Yeah, well... We heard bells, and neither of them has any bells and I haven't heard any chiming since. Also, remember what that lady said? Naked girls luring guys into the forest?"

Now that Chris had laid it all out, it honestly started to sound really incriminating.

"Well... what else did she say?" Arlo said, half to himself as he tried to remember. It had only been this morning, but that practically felt like a week ago at this point.

"Don't eat or drink anything from them?" Chris said, grateful he'd not actually taken a drink from his lemonade before they'd come to get firewood.

"Ugh," Arlo groaned, stooping to pick up another stick. "That's the last thing I wanna hear. I'm so fucking hungry."

"Look, we still have a tiny bit of water and snacks from the hike. That'll hold us until morning. Christ, it isn't like it's that long. We're not on Survivor, here."

"You hope," Arlo said before Chris patted his shoulder. "Okay, yeah. We'll make it work," he agreed. He and Chris went a little bit further before finding a downed tree trunk and sitting down to go through everything they had left to eat.

It really wasn't much, but Arlo took one of the protein bars and had already taken a bite when he realized that something was wrong. The crunch of nuts and granola never met his teeth. Instead, all he felt was a wet mush that tasted as bad as it felt. In a split second, he'd spit it out and stood as he tried to clean every last speck of the disgusting, rotten material out of his mouth.

He barely had time to look at the moldy sludge that he'd expelled when he heard Chris spitting out his water and making an equally disgusted sound.

"Is the water bad too?" Arlo croaked, before rubbing his mouth across his sleeve, only to get a surprised and unamused look from Chris.

"Are you serious right now? Dude, look at it!" Chris held up the water bottle, shining the flashlight on it, but Arlo failed to see what he was reacting to.

"Um... I don't see anything.." Arlo said apologetically, and Chris's frown depended.

"Are you fucking with me right now? It's mud or tar or something!" Chris exclaimed, swishing the bottle, but Arlo didn't see anything besides the clear, illuminated water in a cheap plastic bottle. His gaze then dropped to the rotten mush he'd spit out.

"Do you see this?" he said, holding out the opened granola bar.

"Man, don't do this to me right now..."

"I'm serious, Chris, what do you see?"

"All I see is a half-chewed granola bar," Chris huffed back as he paced a small circle around Arlo with his hands against his head. Now they couldn't even rely on each other to corroborate what was happening... "Oh shit, we need to get Dean!" Chris said but before Arlo could reply, a voice made both of them jump nearly out of their skin.

"What did you need me for?" Dean wondered giving both of them a side-long look. "Hey, are you guys ok?"

"Have you noticed anything weird about anything you've eaten?" Arlo asked.

"No, why?"

"You can't eat any more of their food!" Chris insisted. "Something really weird is going on here, man!"

"Are you for real right now?" Dean asked, shining his flashlight on one of them, then the other. "It's just franks and beans..."

"But..." Arlo trailed off, what was he going to tell Dean? That they were still seeing things? How was that going to convince him that they weren't just imagining or hallucinating this all? That dehydration and hunger hadn't contributed to any of this? Dean was still looking at them, waiting for some explanation for why they looked even more frantic than before, but when neither of them could come up with anything that didn't sound crazy, he just sighed and shook his head.

"Come on back to the fire, okay? Don't need you guys running around and getting hurt in the dark. We'll rest and head back to the car first light ok?"

When they got back to the camp, it looked as though the girls were already in their tents, fussing with bedding, or perhaps their clothes again.

"Where are you going?" Chris asked as Dean headed towards one of the two tents.

"Well, uh... Annie invited me to stay in her tent. So... ya know..."

"Are you serious!?" Arlo hissed. They had a rule about hooking up with fans. Dean was usually the first to bring it up to anyone they brought along on trips with them.

"Yeah but... She's kinda cute, and fun... or at least a lot more fun than you two are being right now," Dean said as he turned and strode back towards the campfire.

"Fun?" Arlo whispered, face pale as he turned to Chris. "Is he for real right now?"

"Ar," Chris whispered back; his voice sharp with fear. "I think they got to Dean."