The Voice Beyond the Fire

I stared at the acceptance letter until the words blurred together. A fully funded clinical psychology doctorate at the University of Edinburgh. Everything I had worked towards since first year, set out on crisp university letterhead.

I should have been ringing my parents. I should have been messaging everyone I knew. Instead, I folded the letter in half and pushed it into my desk drawer beside the printouts for three other offers I had not answered. My flatmate was at her boyfriend's again, so the room in halls felt especially quiet.

Too quiet.

I took out my laptop and opened a new tab. My fingers automatically began typing Cairngorms National Park missing persons into the search bar. It was the same habit I had developed over the past two years, like picking at a scab that refused to heal. Before I pressed Enter, I closed the laptop.

Not tonight.

The thing was, I used to be normal. Anxious, certainly, but normally anxious. The sort of person who worried about marks and whether people liked me, not the sort who researched folklore until 03:00 and jumped at shadows.

That changed during the Easter holiday in my second year.

I had never been outdoorsy. I still was not, honestly. But my friends had a tradition. Every Easter holiday, they disappeared into the wilderness for a long weekend: Rowan Price, Imogen Clarke, Callum Shah and Jamie Fraser. They had been doing it since first year, and somehow I had been pulled into their orbit.

"Come on, Beth," Rowan had said that March, sprawled across the floor of my room in halls with his usual dramatic flair. "You can't spend another holiday shut up in the library. Live a little."

Imogen had been more direct. "We're going whether you come or not, but it's more fun with the whole group."

The whole group. As if I were truly part of something, rather than the anxious girl who tagged along because she was afraid of being left out.

So I said yes, even though something about those trips always made my skin crawl. It was not the camping itself, although sleeping on the ground was hardly my idea of fun. It was the way darkness pressed in around our little fire. The way the forest seemed to watch us.

Jamie had found the place in first year. It was an authorised remote camping site in a managed pine forest deep within the Cairngorms National Park, far from the nearest settlement. There was no mobile signal, even on the higher ground.

"That's the point," he always said when I complained about being completely cut off. "No distractions."

We drove for hours along A-roads, then followed increasingly narrow single-track Highland roads with passing places before turning on to an authorised forestry track. Jamie navigated from memory, pointing out junctions and landmarks that looked like identical trees to me. Rowan owned the battered Vauxhall Astra and drove, while Jamie sat beside him directing us. Callum and I were wedged into the back amongst the camping gear, and Callum kept making jokes about my white-knuckled grip on the door handle whenever we struck a rut.

"Relax, Beth," he said, grinning. "Jamie's only got us lost twice."

"Once," Jamie corrected. "And we found our way back."

"After six hours of driving in circles," Imogen said from beside me.

"That was because Rowan insisted he knew a shortcut."

"I did know a shortcut," Rowan protested from behind the wheel. "It simply involved more walking than anticipated."

Their easy banter should have comforted me. Instead, I felt as though I were watching them from outside, playing the part of the friend who belonged there when I was really only the person who could not say no.

We reached the site at about 16:00 on Friday afternoon. It was the same place as always: a rough circle of level ground surrounded by dense Scots pine and commercial conifers that obscured most of the sky. Heather crowded the margins, and peat, moss and pale granite showed through the carpet of fallen needles.

Rowan parked in the small gravel forestry car park at the end of the track.

"Home sweet home," he announced, climbing out and stretching.

The air smelt of pine resin, damp peat and something earthy I could not identify. It was not unpleasant, exactly, but it felt heavy, as if the forest were holding its breath.

Jamie began unloading gear with the efficiency of someone who had done it a hundred times. Callum took the cool box while Rowan wandered off to gather the fallen wood we were permitted to use, probably searching for the driest branches so he could display the knowledge he had gained in the Scouts.

"You all right?" Imogen asked, appearing beside me with an armful of tent poles.

I realised I had been standing there like an idiot, staring at the trees.

"Yes. Just taking it in."

She followed my gaze towards the canopy, where interlocking branches made the woods feel like the inside of a cathedral.

"Pretty amazing, isn't it? Sometimes I forget how quiet it is out here."

Quiet was not the word I would have used. The forest was full of sound: branches creaking, needles stirring and unseen things moving through the undergrowth. It felt alive in a way that made me want to remain very close to the others.

"Beth, can you help me with the tents?" Jamie called. He was already shaking out the first one.

I spent the next hour trying to be useful while Jamie and Callum established the camp. My role consisted mostly of holding things and staying out of the way, which suited me. Rowan returned with an excessive armful of deadwood and dropped it beside the raised metal fire bowl provided at the site. Open fires were prohibited elsewhere in the forest, and Jamie was strict about keeping this one contained.

By the time the tents were up, the sealed food barrels secured and the rest of the gear arranged, the sun was sinking behind the trees. The temperature fell quickly when the direct light disappeared, and I pulled on my fleece while Imogen unpacked the cool box.

"Cider?" she asked, holding up a can.

"Thanks."

I was not much of a drinker, but the can gave me something to do with my hands. Jamie lit the fire with the casual competence that made everything look simple. Soon a modest blaze crackled inside the raised bowl, throwing restless shadows across the camp.

This was the part I always dreaded.

Once night fell, the woods beyond the fire became a wall of blackness capable of concealing anything. My friends seemed perfectly comfortable, settling into their folding chairs as though they were in someone's garden rather than miles from the nearest village.

"So," Rowan said, taking a long drink from his cider, "does anyone want to hear about the documentary I watched last week? It was about disappearances during winter on a remote Scottish island."

"Let me guess," Imogen said. "Aliens."

"Actually, no. Much stranger than aliens."

Callum laughed. "How is anything stranger than aliens?"

"Trust me. You'll see."

I sipped my cider and tried to look interested rather than nervous. This was how it always went. Rowan told stories, Callum cracked jokes, Jamie tended the fire and Imogen supplied a dry commentary. I sat amongst them, trying to laugh at the right moments and not notice how the darkness appeared to creep closer whenever the flames subsided.

It was another ordinary camping trip with my friends. There was nothing to worry about.

Except I could not shake the feeling that something was different this time.

Perhaps it was the way Jamie kept glancing towards the trees, or the way Rowan's stories seemed darker than usual. Perhaps it was simply me, allowing my imagination to run wild again. I settled deeper into my chair and concentrated on the heat of the fire instead of the cold weight of the forest watching from the shadows.

The flames had fallen to a bed of orange coals by the time Rowan reached the story he had been building towards all evening. I could tell from the way he kept looking around our circle, measuring his audience.

"I was doing some research for my folklore module," he began, which already made me want to retreat to my tent. Rowan's research always produced stories that remained in my head for weeks.

"Here we go," Imogen muttered, although she was smiling. She enjoyed mocking his dramatic tendencies.

"No, honestly, this is fascinating." Rowan leant forwards, and the firelight sharpened the planes of his face. "I found an obscure early nineteenth-century account from the central Highlands. It had been pieced together from a minister's journal, papers from an old estate and notes made by later folklorists. The references contradict one another, so it isn't established Highland folklore. It might have been nothing more than a local story, or something the minister embellished."

"Reassuring start," Callum said.

"The account calls the creature the Hollow One."

Callum raised his eyebrows. "Cheery."

"Picture it. A hard winter. A remote household or travelling party cut off by snow, with no food left. Someone begins looking at the others as if they aren't people any longer. As if they're meat."

I shifted in my chair and pulled my fleece tighter. The cold had deepened since sunset, but the chill moving through me had nothing to do with the air.

"According to the story, if a starving person resorted to cannibalism, they became something else," Rowan continued. "Something hollow. Not dead, exactly, and not human any longer. Gaunt, endlessly hungry and unable to move like a normal person, though it could imitate one from a distance."

His voice had dropped. Even Imogen had stopped checking her mobile, despite the lack of signal.

"That's genuinely horrible," Callum admitted.

Rowan was only getting started.

"It kept enough intelligence to be cunning. It could mimic voices perfectly and call from the darkness to draw people away from shelter. Imagine hearing your brother shouting for help amongst the trees. You follow him farther and farther into the woods, then realise too late that your brother is sitting behind you beside the fire."

A branch collapsed amongst the coals, sending sparks spinning upwards, and I jumped. Callum laughed, but the sound was strained.

"The descriptions never agree on what it looked like," Rowan said. "Only that it was far too thin, and that its movements were wrong. It could pass silently through the forest until it wanted you to hear it. And there was a smell."

He wrinkled his nose.

"Rotten meat and wet earth. The sort of stench that makes you gag before you see what's causing it."

"Rowan," Imogen said, although there was little force behind the warning. "You're going to give Beth nightmares."

"I'm fine," I lied, lifting my cider again.

His stories always affected me, but admitting it would only encourage him.

"The worst part," Rowan continued, plainly enjoying himself now, "is that it was patient. The Hollow One might stalk a group for days, learning their voices, habits and fears. Then it would begin taking them one at a time, using what it had learnt against whoever remained."

Jamie had been silent for most of the story, staring into the coals and occasionally moving them with a long stick. Something in his posture had changed. He sat straighter, alert in a way that suggested he was listening for sounds beyond Rowan's voice.

"Some of the later notes mention supposed methods of protection," Rowan went on. "Marks on doors, prayers, tests intended to reveal whether somebody had changed. One version says the person seemed normal during the day, but at night..."

"At night what?" Callum asked, sounding uncertain whether he wanted the answer.

"At night, they wandered. They walked in circles around sleeping people, moving closer each time, testing the boundary of the light."

I looked around our camp. The fire made a small bubble of warmth, but beyond it the forest was an unbroken wall of darkness. Something could have been watching us from only a few metres away and we would never have known.

"You're inventing half of this," Imogen said.

She had moved her chair closer to the fire.

"I swear I'm not. The minister's journal and the estate papers are real, although the folklorists disagreed about what they meant. There are accounts of people going into the wilderness and returning changed. Their families noticed how they stared, as if measuring the amount of meat on a body. They disappeared for hours and never explained where they had been."

Jamie finally spoke. His voice was quiet but carried clearly through the still air.

"Old stories usually begin with something."

Callum laughed. "Come on, Jamie. You don't believe in monsters."

Jamie shrugged without looking away from the coals.

"I believe there are things in wild places that we don't understand. Things that were here long before we arrived with tents and decided we knew what was possible."

Something in his tone made me study him. Jamie was usually the practical one, the person who could pitch a tent in the dark and find his direction from the stars. Hearing him speak about inexplicable things felt wrong, like discovering that a maths lecturer believed in ghosts.

"There," Rowan said, gesturing towards him. "Even our resident outdoorsman knows there's strange stuff out here."

"I didn't say strange," Jamie replied. "I said we don't understand it. There's a difference."

The fire cracked again. This time all of us flinched. Callum began laughing, which set Imogen off, and soon we were all laughing at our own nerves.

It felt thin and forced, an effort to disperse the tension Rowan had created.

"Right, that's enough horror stories for one night," Imogen announced, standing and stretching. "Some of us would actually like to sleep."

"Oh, come on," Rowan protested. "I haven't even reached the part about how they reproduce."

"No," I said quickly, rising from my chair. "I'm with Imogen. I'm exhausted."

That was not entirely true. I was tired, but I wanted more than anything to escape the oppressive darkness beyond the fire. Inside my tent, I could zip myself into a small, enclosed space and pretend the forest was not pressing in around us.

"Fine, fine." Rowan lifted his hands in surrender. "Don't blame me if you have boring dreams."

Callum yawned theatrically. "I'll take boring dreams over whatever nightmare fuel you were about to serve us."

We went through our usual routine. Jamie extinguished the fire until only safely contained coals remained, and we checked that all food and rubbish had been sealed inside the wildlife-resistant barrels. I collected my toiletries and head torch for a quick visit to the discreet toileting spot we had established well away from the burn and our small lochan, following wild-camping practice.

"Want company?" Imogen offered.

I shook my head. "I'll be quick."

The beam of my head torch cut a narrow passage through the dark as I picked my way over granite, roots and patches of heather. The forest felt different at night, more intensely alive. Every shadow might contain something watching me. Every sound might be a footstep just beyond the edge of the light.

I finished as quickly as I could and hurried back. Callum was already inside his tent, and Imogen was brushing her teeth beside the dying glow of the contained coals. Rowan remained in his chair, probably composing the next evening's story in his head.

"Sleep well," Imogen said around her toothbrush.

"You too."

I ducked into my tent and zipped it shut. The small enclosure made me feel safer at once. Through the thin nylon, I heard the others completing their routines: Imogen's zip closing, Callum calling a muffled goodnight and Rowan finally rising from his chair with an exaggerated complaint about his back.

As I arranged my sleeping bag on the uneven ground, I realised I could still hear movement outside. Footsteps circled the camp. Something softly scraped amongst the coals.

Jamie was still out there, I decided, making a final check before bed.

I tried to find that reassuring. He was the most experienced of us, with years of knowledge learnt from his father, a long-serving national park warden. Yet something about the sound bothered me. The footsteps were too even and deliberate. They sounded like pacing.

Every so often, I thought I heard him speaking under his breath, although I could not distinguish any words.

I pulled the sleeping bag to my chin and concentrated on ordinary noises: wind stirring the canopy, wood settling as it cooled, my own breath. It was only Jamie being Jamie, checking the perimeter once more before turning in. There was nothing to worry about.

But as sleep finally took me, Rowan's words repeated in my head.

At night, they wandered. They walked in circles around sleeping people, moving closer each time.

It was only a story.

I woke sharply to footsteps crunching over fallen pine needles.

My mobile showed 03:17. For a moment, I assumed somebody had got up to relieve themselves. These were not the hurried, awkward steps of a person trying to avoid guy ropes in the dark, however. They were slow and measured, like someone taking a midnight stroll around the camp.

I held my breath and listened.

The footsteps continued in what sounded like a broad circle just beyond the ring of tents. The last coals cast a dim orange glow through the nylon wall. Beyond them lay complete darkness.

Then I saw a shape moving between the trees at the edge of the site.

It was tall and thin, but it was the movement that tightened my stomach. Its gait was wrong, stiff and disjointed, as if controlled by something that had never watched a person walk closely enough. It did not appear to bend its knees properly. Its arms hung too long at its sides.

My first thought was Jamie. It had to be Jamie. Perhaps Rowan's story had affected him too, and he had decided to frighten us in revenge for all the jokes about his serious outdoorsman routine.

"Jamie," I whispered, loudly enough to carry without waking the others. "Pack it in."

The figure stopped.

I waited for him to laugh, answer or do anything recognisably human.

It remained in precisely the same position. Perfectly still. Not the stillness of someone suppressing laughter, but an absence of all the unconscious adjustments a living body makes.

Minutes passed. I counted them on my mobile. Three. Four. Five.

The figure did not move. It did not shift its weight. It might have been a statue placed amongst the trunks.

My rational mind insisted that Jamie was playing a trick. Something older and more instinctive screamed over it, telling me to remain absolutely silent.

The stillness continued until I could bear it no longer. I needed to know what I was seeing.

My hand shook as I lowered the tent zip far enough to look through the gap. Moonlight filtered through the Scots pine in pale strips, illuminating fragments of moss, granite and tree bark. Our folding chairs remained around the fire bowl. Callum's walking boots lay where he had kicked them off. The food barrels stood exactly where Jamie had secured them.

The place where the figure had been was empty.

I stared until my eyes watered, searching for movement.

There was nothing. Only trunks, shadows and the absolute stillness that exists in a remote forest in the middle of the night.

I closed the tent and lay down, dragging the sleeping bag to my chin. Obviously, I had dreamt it. Rowan's stupid story had worked its way into my subconscious and produced a nightmare about a figure stalking the camp.

It was a perfectly reasonable explanation, except that I was wide awake and remembered everything with a clarity no dream had ever possessed: the long arms, the rigid stillness, the gait without any normal shift of weight.

I checked my mobile again. It was 03:31. Dawn was still hours away.

I tried closing my eyes and thinking about ordinary things: an essay I needed to finish when we returned, the notes scattered across my desk, my mother's voice when I told her about the trip and she made me promise to be careful and stay with the group.

Every time I began to drift off, I heard something. A branch snapping. Needles stirring when there was no wind. The soft scrape of something moving about one metre from the tent.

Whenever I held my breath to listen, the noise ceased, as though whatever was outside knew I was awake and was waiting for my attention to weaken.

At about 04:00, the slow circuit of the camp began again. This time I did not look. I squeezed my eyes shut and counted my breaths until the footsteps faded.

When my alarm sounded at 07:00, I felt as though I had been flattened. My body ached from lying rigid for hours, and my eyes burnt from staring into the dark whenever I heard a noise.

Sunlight filtered through the tent, however, and Callum was outside complaining about the cold. They were ordinary sounds, daylight sounds, the sort that made the terrors of 03:00 seem absurd.

I unzipped the tent and crawled into the morning air. Rowan was attempting to revive the permitted fire, muttering about damp wood. Imogen emerged looking as if she had slept better than I had in months.

"Morning, sunshine," Callum called, grinning at my dishevelled appearance. "You look as if you've wrestled a bear."

"I couldn't sleep."

"Rowan's story get to you?" Imogen asked, without malice.

I nearly told them. I nearly described the figure's wrong gait and the way it had watched our camp without moving. In full daylight, with my friends joking and the smell of coffee rising from the stove, it sounded mad even to me.

"Something like that," I said.

Rowan glanced up. "Sorry, Beth. I didn't think you'd actually have nightmares."

"It's fine. My imagination ran away with me."

As I helped Imogen sort the breakfast supplies, I kept looking towards the place where the figure had stood. By daylight, it was an ordinary patch of woodland: pine trunks, heather, moss and dappled shade. Nothing about it seemed threatening.

Still, I could not rid myself of the sense that something had watched us during the night, something that knew we were there and had been deciding what to do.

I told myself that I was being paranoid, that Rowan's story had lodged more deeply in my mind than I wanted to admit and that too much time in the wilderness had made me jump at normal forest sounds.

Then we realised Jamie was missing.

His tent remained zipped, but Rowan found it empty when Jamie failed to answer. The sleeping bag was cold. Jamie's rucksack, water bottle, head torch and safety kit were still inside. His walking boots, however, had gone.

The four of us sat around the fire bowl, staring at the vacant tent. No one attempted the usual morning jokes now.

"Beth, thank God," Callum said when I joined them. Relief was plain on his face. "Did Jamie say anything to you about going somewhere?"

My mouth went dry.

"What do you mean?"

"He's not in there," Rowan said. "I've checked."

"Perhaps he's gone for a walk."

"That's what I said," Callum replied. "But his rucksack is here. So is his water. Jamie doesn't go anywhere without water."

Imogen stood and brushed pine needles from her trousers. "We've been calling him for twenty minutes. There's been nothing."

I tried to form a reasonable explanation, but my thoughts returned to the footsteps, the shape amongst the trees and the way it had moved like something pretending to be human.

"I saw someone walking around last night," I said before I could stop myself.

All three stared at me.

"What do you mean, walking around?" Imogen asked.

"At about 03:00, someone was circling the camp. I thought it was Jamie, but when I spoke, they stopped and stood amongst the trees."

Rowan's face lost its colour. "For how long?"

"I don't know. Five minutes, perhaps longer. They didn't move at all. They just stood there like a statue."

Callum laughed, but it sounded forced. "That was probably Jamie. Maybe he couldn't sleep and went for a walk to think."

"Then where is he now?" Imogen asked.

None of us had an answer.

For the next hour, we kept ourselves occupied. We made coffee, checked his tent again and ate oat bars that tasted like cardboard. Every few minutes, one of us called Jamie's name or looked towards the trees in the hope that he would stroll back into camp and make us feel ridiculous.

At nearly 10:00, Imogen checked her watch.

"We need to search properly."

"He's probably fine," Callum said, although he was already reaching for his small walking pack. "You know Jamie. He gets interested in something and loses track of time."

Rowan nodded, but his nervous glances towards the woods matched my own. "We give it until noon. If he isn't back, we work out how to get help."

We divided into pairs. Rowan and Callum followed the route towards the burn beside the small lochan where Jamie often sat alone. Imogen and I took the main path towards the gravel car park. We agreed to search for two hours and return to camp.

Walking with Imogen felt different from walking with the whole group. She was direct and practical, less concerned with keeping everyone's spirits up. As we followed the narrow trail and called Jamie's name every few minutes, she began to speak.

"He's been odd lately," she said, stepping over a fallen branch. "Odder than usual."

"In what way?"

"More withdrawn, I suppose. Last week I was talking to him about my engineering project in the dining hall, and he stopped listening completely. He stared at nothing for five minutes."

I remembered his behaviour beside the fire, his gaze fixed on the coals as if he could see something the rest of us could not.

"Did he say he wasn't sleeping?"

Imogen stopped and looked at me. "How did you know that?"

"Only a guess."

"He mentioned it a few times. Said he'd been having strange dreams." She resumed walking, faster now. "I thought it was stress about the end of term."

We called his name again. Our voices travelled between the trunks and died without an answer.

The path wound through dense Scots pine and planted conifers. Normally, I found the scale of the woodland beautiful in an intimidating way. That morning, the trees felt oppressive, closing around us and concealing whatever we most needed to see.

"Jamie!" Imogen shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth. "Where are you?"

Only the wind answered, moving through the high branches above our footsteps on the bed of needles.

We walked for nearly an hour, checking every side path and clearing we could find. I kept expecting to discover Jamie sitting on a granite boulder, perhaps with a sprained ankle or simply lost in thought. There was no sign of him. No clear prints in the damp peat, no broken branches where somebody had forced a way through the undergrowth. Nothing.

"This doesn't make sense," Imogen said when we turned back. "Jamie knows these woods better than any of us. He doesn't simply get lost."

I wanted to tell her more about the figure, but beneath the clean morning light, beside Imogen's practical certainty, the memory sounded impossible.

"Perhaps he went farther than usual and lost track of time."

"Without water or his pack?" She shook her head. "Jamie's too careful. He's the one who lectures us about safety."

She was right. He made us check our kit twice before every walk and insisted that we carry first-aid supplies and emergency whistles. He would not have gone into the forest unprepared.

Rowan and Callum were already back when we reached camp. Their expressions told us that they had found nothing.

"We went all the way to the lochan and followed the burn," Rowan said. "Called his name the entire time."

Callum was staring at his mobile, although all of us knew there was no signal.

"Maybe we should check the car park. See if he went that way for some reason."

"Why would he?" Imogen asked.

"I don't know. Perhaps he felt ill and was trying to get help."

It was a weak theory, but we were running short of alternatives.

We sat beside the fire and produced explanations that sounded less convincing each time we repeated them. Jamie had gone walking and become disorientated. He had noticed something interesting and followed it too far. He had suffered an accident and was waiting for us to find him.

None of it felt right. Jamie did not get lost or make careless decisions in the wilderness. If he were injured, he would have remained near a recognised path or called from somewhere close enough for us to hear.

At 11:47, I checked my watch.

"Thirteen minutes," Callum said, following my gaze. "Then we decide what to do."

We listened to sounds that had seemed peaceful the previous afternoon: birds calling in the canopy, small animals disturbing the heather, branches creaking in the wind. All of them were ordinary. None explained where Jamie had gone, why his essential equipment remained in his tent or what I had seen moving around us in the night.

As noon approached, certainty settled inside me. We were not going to find him nearby.

Whatever had watched from amongst the trees had already taken what it wanted.

By 14:47, Jamie had been missing for nearly twelve hours. We had covered every path and patch of accessible ground within roughly two kilometres of the camp. My feet hurt, my throat was raw from shouting and the knot in my stomach felt permanent.

"This is insane," Callum said, dropping his walking pack beside the fire bowl. "People don't vanish into thin air."

Rowan wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "Perhaps we missed a side path, or-"

"We didn't miss anything," I interrupted, more sharply than I intended. "We've searched the same ground twice."

I had been searching for more than Jamie. I scanned the peat for prints that might match the figure from the night before and inspected the undergrowth for snapped branches or crushed heather. I wanted anything that could explain the motionless shape I had watched between the trees.

The forest gave us nothing. It was as if Jamie had ceased to exist when he left his tent.

Callum straightened suddenly and snapped his fingers. "Wait. What if he went back to the car? Maybe he felt ill and decided to sleep there rather than wake us."

It was a desperate suggestion, but Rowan seized on it.

"That isn't completely mad. Remember the first-year trip when Jamie got food poisoning? He spent most of the night in the car because he didn't want to disturb anyone."

I wanted to point again to the rucksack, water and head torch in Jamie's tent. He would not have walked even to the car park without basic supplies. Callum was already shouldering his pack, however, and Rowan was carefully extinguishing the fire.

"It's worth checking," I said, although my instincts told me we would not find him there.

The walk to the gravel car park took forty-five minutes. With every step, I became more certain that we were wasting time. Jamie treated wilderness safety almost as a moral duty. He checked our kit twice, made us carry whistles we never used and lectured us about hydration until we threatened to throw our bottles at him. The idea of him walking off without supplies made no sense.

When the trees opened around the car park, I nevertheless felt a flicker of hope. Perhaps Callum was right. Perhaps there was a simple explanation after all.

Rowan's battered Vauxhall Astra stood exactly where he had left it on Friday, dusted with needles and pale grit. He took out his keys, unlocked the doors and checked the seats and footwells.

"Nothing," he said flatly. "No sign that anyone's been here."

Callum walked around the Astra twice, as if Jamie might be crouching behind a wheel.

"Maybe he's on his way back. Perhaps he went to get help."

"From where?" Rowan asked.

The nearest settlement was twenty miles away, much of it along a narrow, twisting single-track road with passing places. Jamie would never hitch-hike. I stared at Rowan's battered Vauxhall Astra, trying to make sense of the timing. If Jamie had left camp after the rest of us went to sleep, he would have had to follow the trail in complete darkness. His walking boots were missing, but his rucksack, water, head torch, food and all the safety kit he invariably carried were still in his tent.

"This doesn't make sense," I said aloud.

"What doesn't?" Callum asked.

I gestured towards the empty gravel car park. "Any of it. Jamie doesn't take risks like this. He's the one who's always telling us to be careful."

Rowan kicked a pine cone across the gravel. "People do strange things when they're under pressure. Maybe he's been dealing with something he hasn't told us about."

"What sort of thing?"

"I don't know. University, family, whatever. You know how quiet he gets sometimes."

I thought about Jamie's behaviour around the fire on Friday night. He had fallen silent during Rowan's story, staring into the coals as though he could see something the rest of us could not. Then he had said that old stories usually contained some truth, which did not sound like him at all.

"We should go back," I said. "In case he turns up at camp."

The walk back felt longer, perhaps because we had stopped calling Jamie's name. We had given up after the first few minutes, when our voices echoing through the empty woodland began to sound more desperate than hopeful.

By the time we reached the campsite, the sun was sinking behind the dense Scots pine and commercial conifers. Long shadows crossed the clearing. I checked my watch. It was 18:15. In another hour, the forest would be completely dark.

Imogen was waiting beside the cold, raised fire bowl, her rucksack on her shoulders and her head torch clipped to her belt. She took one look at our faces and nodded grimly.

"No luck, then."

"The car's still locked," Callum said. "No sign he was ever there."

Imogen tightened her shoulder straps. "Right. That's it. I'm going to get help."

"Now?" Rowan asked. "It's getting dark."

"That's exactly why I need to leave now. The national park warden post is roughly five kilometres down the main track. I can make it in about an hour, report Jamie missing and come back with someone."

Relief surged through me because at last we were taking action, but anxiety followed close behind at the thought of separating.

"Maybe we should all go."

"No," Imogen said firmly. "Someone needs to stay here in case Jamie comes back. And I'll move faster on my own."

She was right. Imogen was fitter than the rest of us, and she knew the route.

"Take my mobile," Callum said, pulling it from his pocket. "In case you find a signal."

"I've already got mine, but thanks."

Imogen looked at the three of us. "Keep the fire going. Stay together. If Jamie comes back, don't let him wander off again."

Something in the way she said it told me she was more frightened than she wanted us to know. Perhaps she had been carrying the same sense of wrongness that had followed me all day.

"Be careful," I said.

"Always am."

Her brief smile did not reach her eyes. "See you in a few hours."

We watched her disappear along the track, the beam of her head torch darting between the trunks until the forest swallowed it. Then only the three of us remained beside the cold fire bowl while darkness crept in from every side.

Rowan immediately gathered more wood and built the contained fire higher than we normally allowed it to burn. Callum dragged his folding chair closer, and I did the same. None of us admitted we were scared, but none of us needed to.

"He's probably fine," Callum said as Rowan coaxed flames from the kindling. "You know Jamie. He's tough. He can look after himself out there."

"Yes," Rowan agreed, although he kept glancing towards the trees. "He probably got turned round and found somewhere sheltered to wait for daylight."

I nodded and made noises of agreement, but I could not stop thinking about the figure I had seen on Friday night. It had moved incorrectly, as though something were attempting to look human without understanding how a human body worked. Then it had stood perfectly still for minutes, with no shift of weight, no visible breath and none of the unconscious adjustments a person would make.

What if it had not been Jamie walking around our campsite? What if it had been something else?

The fire caught properly, throwing orange light across our little circle. Beyond its warmth, the forest pressed close like a black wall. Anything might have been watching from among the trunks and we would never have known.

I pulled my chair closer to the flames and tried not to think about the hours remaining until dawn.

We tended the fire and waited. As the evening dragged on, our conversation dwindled into strained fragments. Eventually we withdrew to our tents, though none of us expected to sleep. I lay inside my sleeping bag, staring at the fabric above me and listening to the forest.

Some time later, voices came through the trees. One was Imogen's. The other belonged to a woman whose calm, professional tone brought an immediate rush of relief.

Help had arrived.

"Over here," Callum called.

Footsteps entered the clearing, followed by the sound of equipment being lowered to the ground. I unzipped my tent and crawled out. Imogen stood beside a woman in her forties, compact and sturdy, with a weathered face that suggested a life spent outdoors. Her uniform was neat despite the walk, and she carried herself with the quiet authority of someone accustomed to being obeyed in emergencies.

"I'm Aileen MacLeod, the national park warden," she said, taking out a small notebook. "Imogen has given me the essentials, but I need the details from all of you."

Rowan and Callum emerged from their tents, and the four of us gathered around the fire while MacLeod asked her questions. When had we last seen Jamie? What had he been wearing? Did he have any medical conditions or take any medication? Had he seemed distressed, confused or disorientated?

I studied her face as we answered, searching for some sign that she considered us careless students who had simply lost track of a friend. Instead, she listened closely and wrote everything down as if every answer mattered.

"People become disorientated in woodland more often than you might think," she said when we had finished. "Most find shelter, wait for daylight and then work their way back. Your friend sounds experienced."

"He is," Callum said quickly. "Jamie's the most careful person I know. That's why this is so strange."

MacLeod nodded. "I've radioed the details to the post. Police Scotland has been informed, and mountain rescue is assembling volunteers, trained search technicians and a search-dog team. They'll be here at 06:00. We'll begin close to the campsite and expand the search from there."

The relief was so powerful that my knees weakened. This was real help, from people who knew what they were doing. By the following afternoon, Jamie might be back with us, embarrassed and exhausted but able to offer a perfectly ordinary explanation.

"What should we do tonight?" Imogen asked.

"Try to rest. I know that will be difficult, but you may need your strength tomorrow if the search expands. Keep the fire bowl safely tended and stay together. If Jamie returns, don't let him leave again."

The last sentence reminded me of Imogen's warning before she had set out. It made me wonder whether MacLeod considered the situation less routine than she was pretending.

She closed her notebook, clipped it away and checked her radio.

"I need to return to the post and coordinate access for the search teams. I'll be back at 06:00 with them. Try not to worry too much. Most missing people are found during the first day."

We watched her head torch retreat down the main track. Then the four of us were alone again.

Her visit had changed the atmosphere. We were no longer merely frightened students allowing the dark to work on our imaginations. Jamie was officially missing. Police Scotland had been notified. Search procedures had begun.

"There," Callum said, prodding the fire with a stick. "Jamie's going to be fine. Tomorrow we'll all be laughing about this."

Rowan nodded, but his gaze kept straying towards the trees. "He probably got turned round and found somewhere to wait it out."

I wanted to believe them. Yet I could not forget the figure I had seen on Friday night, moving as though it had learnt the idea of walking without mastering the act itself.

What if Jamie had not simply become lost?

"We should try to sleep," Imogen said, although she did not sound as if she believed sleep was possible. "Tomorrow will be a long day."

We banked the fire carefully within the raised bowl and said goodnight. Once I had zipped myself into my tent, I heard the others shifting restlessly. Callum muttered to himself, perhaps trying to persuade himself that everything would be all right. Rowan's sleeping bag rustled every few seconds.

I checked my mobile. It was 23:23. A little over six and a half hours remained before the search team was due.

I tried to think about ordinary things: the four offers waiting for me back in halls, the dissertation work I still needed to finish, my mother's voice when I had rung her before the trip. Every time I began to relax, another sound tightened every muscle in my body. An owl calling high in the canopy. Branches creaking in the wind. Small animals rustling through the heather and undergrowth.

They were all normal forest sounds. None of them meant danger.

At 02:17, I heard footsteps.

They were slow and deliberate, moving around the edge of the campsite just beyond the dying glow of the fire. I held my breath. My heart hammered so violently that I was sure whoever was outside could hear it.

The steps were measured and careful, like someone trying to move silently without quite knowing how. They circled our tents, pausing every few seconds as though the walker were listening.

They stopped outside Rowan's tent.

I heard breathing: slow, wet and rasping, recognisably human but unpleasantly laboured.

The footsteps moved to Callum's tent and stopped again. After what felt like several minutes, they resumed their circuit.

When they halted beside mine, I squeezed my eyes shut and made myself as small as I could. The breathing came from about one metre away, separated from my head by nothing but thin fabric. I wanted to call out and ask who was there, but some primitive part of me screamed that silence was the only thing keeping me alive.

The footsteps moved to Imogen's tent, then continued their slow circle. I counted the seconds until they seemed to fade towards the trees.

For a moment I tried to convince myself I had dreamed it. I knew I had not. I was fully awake, and every sound had been too clear.

Someone had walked around our campsite and stopped to listen at every tent, as if searching for something particular.

The forest fell silent again. It was the deep silence of remote woodland, but now it felt as though the whole world were holding its breath.

Then I heard Jamie's voice.

"So cold out here."

It was unmistakably his voice, but something about it was wrong. The words came slowly, as though his mouth were full of something thick and wet.

"Been walking all night. So hungry."

My heart slammed against my ribs. Jamie was alive. He was directly outside my tent. I should have opened the zip, asked where he had been and helped him.

Every instinct I possessed told me not to move.

"Beth."

His voice came closer, as though he had knelt beside the tent.

"You awake in there? I can hear you breathing."

I held my breath, though he had already told me he could hear it. The cadence crawled over my skin. It had Jamie's pitch and accent, but the pauses were too long and the rhythm too deliberate, like a recording assembled by something that did not understand why people spoke as they did.

Then it laughed.

It was not Jamie's usual quick bark when Callum said something ridiculous, nor the quiet chuckle Rowan's theatrical stories sometimes drew from him. This was soft and breathy, as if he were sharing a private joke with himself. It continued far too long, rising and falling until I wanted to cover my ears.

"So funny," he murmured between giggles. "Walking in circles. Round and round. They don't even know."

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to understand. Was he describing being lost? If so, why did he find it amusing?

The voice moved away from my tent and began speaking beside another, probably Rowan's. I could not distinguish the words, but the tone became conversational, almost friendly. Then came the same dreadful laugh, quieter this time.

I wanted to call out and ask whether he was all right. Something kept my mouth closed. Perhaps it was the way he had said, "They don't even know," as if we were the joke.

The muttering continued while he circled. At times he sounded like Jamie asking for help or complaining of the cold. At others, his speech dissolved into wet giggling that turned my stomach. I caught fragments about hunger, walking all night and finding what he was looking for.

There were other sounds too: whispered phrases too faint to understand, spoken as though in answer to questions no one had voiced. It seemed to linger beside each sleeping person and then move on with some new scrap of knowledge. I had the appalling impression that it was listening to more than breath, probing at thoughts or dreams as it circled us.

Abruptly, everything stopped.

I counted my heartbeats and strained to locate it, but the forest had become utterly silent.

At 04:23, running footsteps crashed through the undergrowth away from our campsite. Branches snapped as whatever had been outside fled deeper into the trees, fast and careless now, no longer pretending to move quietly.

Dawn was still more than an hour away.

I dragged my sleeping bag over my head and tried to believe Jamie had merely been disorientated after a night and a day alone in the forest. Exhausted and frightened people said strange things. The laughter might have been shock or nerves.

But I could not escape the feeling that something fundamental had been missing from his voice. It had sounded like an imitation that reproduced nearly every detail yet failed to grasp the person underneath.

I must eventually have drifted into an uneasy doze, because the next thing I heard was a tent zip opening.

"Everyone," Rowan called, his voice unsteady. "Are you awake? We need to talk."

I crawled out. Rowan, Callum and Imogen were already standing around the cold fire bowl. In the grey morning light, all three looked as though they had been awake for hours.

"You heard him too?" Callum asked.

I nodded. "Jamie was right outside my tent. He kept saying he was cold and hungry."

"He came to mine as well," Rowan said, dragging both hands through his hair. "But there was something wrong with the way he sounded."

Imogen folded her arms tightly across her chest. "He knew things. Private things I've never told any of you."

We looked at one another, and the same terrible understanding began to show in every face. Whatever had walked around the campsite, whatever had spoken through our tent walls, might have possessed Jamie's voice, but it had not been Jamie.

I felt as though I had been flattened. Callum bounced on the balls of his feet, a nervous habit I had seen a hundred times. Imogen seemed to be physically holding herself together.

"All right," I said, my voice rough. "What exactly did everyone hear?"

Rowan answered first. Even frightened out of his mind, he could not help becoming the storyteller.

"It came to my tent sometime after half two. At first it said it was lost and needed help. Then it started talking about my family. Things I've never told any of you."

"What things?" Imogen asked.

Rowan's face lost what little colour remained in it. "My dad's drinking. The real extent of it, not the vague bits I might have mentioned. It knew my mum has been going to support meetings. It even knew that last month my dad drove into our neighbour's fence and we had to pay for the repairs."

He looked from one of us to the next.

"I've never told anyone those details. Not even my girlfriend."

My stomach lurched. "What else did it say?"

"It laughed. Like my family falling apart was funny." Rowan's voice cracked. "That isn't Jamie. Jamie would never laugh about that."

Callum cleared his throat. His hands were shaking.

"It came to my tent at about three. It started asking about Lucy. It knew her name, that she's fifteen and that she's been having trouble at school. But the way it asked about her was... hungry. It wanted to know which school she goes to, what time she gets home and whether she ever walks by herself."

The nausea worsened.

"Jamie's never met Lucy," I said.

"Exactly. When I wouldn't answer, it started laughing. Soft and breathy, just like Rowan said. As if it was enjoying a private joke."

We turned to Imogen. She stared at the ground for several seconds before speaking.

"It knew about the mortgage repossession warning my parents received last month. I haven't told anyone about it."

When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes.

"It knew the precise arrears. It knew my mum has been working evening shifts at a supermarket. It knew I've been sending money home instead of paying for course books and other essential university costs. It even knew about the argument my parents had last week over whether they should declare themselves bankrupt."

"Christ," Callum whispered.

"That wasn't the worst of it," Imogen continued. "It offered to help. It said it knew ways to get money, ways to make problems disappear. The way it said it... It sounded as though it meant hurting people."

I thought I might be sick.

"That wasn't Jamie," I said. "Whatever was outside last night, it wasn't him."

"But it sounded exactly like him," Rowan said. "The same voice. Most of the same speech patterns. How could anything imitate him that well?"

I remembered the figure from Friday night: the long arms, the rigid stillness, the gait of something wearing the idea of Jamie without knowing how to carry his weight.

"I don't know. But Jamie would never threaten Lucy or laugh at your family. And he couldn't know secrets none of us ever shared."

"Then how did it know?" Callum asked.

No one answered. I remembered the way it had paused beside each tent, breathing and listening. Perhaps it had overheard words spoken in sleep. Perhaps it had found some way into thoughts we never voiced. Whatever the mechanism was, it had been studying us.

"What are you saying?" Callum asked, although his expression told me he already understood.

"I'm saying Jamie may have died on Friday night. Something else learnt his voice and came back to make us open our tents."

The words hung between us.

None of us wanted to mention Rowan's story about the Hollow One: the starving figure from a contradictory collection of early nineteenth-century papers, condemned to endless hunger after cannibalism, able to copy voices but incapable of reproducing ordinary human movement. Rowan had found it pieced together from a minister's journal, estate records and later folklorists' notes. He had never claimed it was genuine Highland tradition. Until then, I had thought he had embroidered half of it for effect.

"We need to pack and leave," I said. "Now."

"But the search team-" Rowan began.

"The search team may be looking for someone who is already dead. If we stay, whatever took Jamie could come for us next."

Callum was already moving towards his tent. "She's right. This is mad. We have to go."

Rowan caught his arm. "Wait. Think. If Jamie's dead, the search team needs to know. We can't simply abandon them."

"We'll warn them," Imogen said, shouldering her rucksack. "We'll leave a note here and tell the warden post as soon as we have a signal. But Beth's right. We cannot stay."

I tore a page from Rowan's notebook and wrote in block capitals that we had fled because someone or something was circling the tents and impersonating Jamie. I added the time, warned that the search team was due at 06:00 and told anyone approaching the site to contact MacLeod by radio before entering the clearing. I sealed the note in a clear food bag and fixed it prominently to the camp table beneath a metal mug.

Then we heard the crashing.

It began deep in the woodland: something large moving quickly through heather, brush and fallen timber. Branches broke. Heavy footsteps struck peat and granite without any attempt at silence.

The noise was coming closer.

"Move!" I shouted, snatching up my rucksack and sleeping bag. "Everyone, move now."

We abandoned nearly everything else: the tents, folding chairs, sealed food barrels and cool box. Callum grabbed his small walking pack while Rowan snatched the Astra's keys from his tent. Imogen was already jogging towards the trail, looking over her shoulder at the trees as the crashing grew louder.

"Is it following us?" Callum panted.

We half ran, half stumbled down the narrow path. Something moved parallel to us about fifty metres inside the forest. It kept pace easily, battering through undergrowth as though fallen branches and broken ground did not matter.

"Don't look back," Imogen called. "Just keep moving."

Callum looked anyway. Each time he glanced over his shoulder, his face grew paler.

"There's something among the trees. I can see it moving."

"How much farther?" I asked Rowan. He was clutching the keys so tightly they dug into his palm.

"Ten minutes if we keep this pace."

The crashing drew nearer. Beneath it came another sound.

A voice called our names from within the forest.

"Beth. Rowan. Where are you going?"

It was Jamie's voice, wrong in every way that mattered. Too eager. Too hungry. Excited by something none of us wanted to understand.

"Callum. Imogen. Don't leave me here."

The voice moved with the crashing, sometimes seeming close to the path, sometimes deeper among the trees, but always keeping pace.

"I'm so hungry," it called. "Been walking for days. Need something warm."

Rowan made a choking sound but continued running. We all did, blundering along the trail and making enough noise to scatter every living thing ahead of us.

At last the gravel car park appeared between the trees. I had never been so grateful to see Rowan's battered Vauxhall Astra.

We reached it at a dead run. Rowan pressed the unlock button while we were still several metres away. I wrenched open a rear door and threw myself inside. Callum dived in after me. Imogen took the front passenger seat while Rowan fumbled with the keys, his hands shaking so badly that he missed the ignition.

"Lock the doors," I gasped.

All four locks clicked down.

Rowan started the engine on his second attempt and accelerated out of the gravel car park far too quickly. Stones sprayed behind us as the Astra slewed on to the authorised forestry track.

I looked through the rear window.

A figure stood at the edge of the clearing, roughly ninety metres away. It was too distant for me to see a face, and dust and morning mist blurred its outline, but it was tall and thin, with arms that seemed to hang too low. Its posture was rigid. It did not shift its weight or turn its head as the car moved away. The wind stirred the pine branches around it, yet the figure remained perfectly still.

For an instant I had the dreadful impression that it was smiling, though from that distance I could not possibly have been certain.

"Is that...?" Callum twisted to look.

"Don't," I said, gripping his shoulder and pulling him from the window. "Just don't look at it."

Rowan took the first bend too fast. The tyres protested on the forestry track before we reached the narrow, twisting single-track road.

"Slow down," Imogen said tightly. "We won't help anyone if you put us into a tree."

He eased off only slightly. His knuckles were white on the wheel, and sweat stood on the back of his neck despite the morning cold.

None of us spoke for the first twenty minutes. We listened to the engine labour and the tyres scrape at every sharp turn. I think we were all thinking about Jamie. We had left him behind, whether that meant abandoning a lost and injured friend or fleeing the thing that had already killed him.

As we descended, the forest began to thin. Power lines appeared, then road signs and isolated houses. The ordinary world should have reassured me. Instead, it felt unreal.

Everything looked as it had on Friday, but we were no longer the people who had driven into the Cairngorms.

"I've got a signal," Callum said, staring at his mobile as though surprised that the outside world still existed.

Imogen immediately dialled 999 and put the call on speaker. A call handler asked which service she required.

"Police," Imogen said. "And mountain rescue. Our friend is missing in the Cairngorms, and a search team may already be approaching our campsite."

The handler asked for our location, whether anyone was injured, whether we were in immediate danger and which route gave access to the site. Imogen answered as steadily as she could. Jamie had vanished on Friday night, roughly two nights earlier. We had last seen him at the authorised remote campsite. We were now in Rowan's Astra on the single-track road leading away from the forestry access route. None of us was physically injured.

"Why did you leave the campsite?" the handler asked.

Imogen hesitated. "Someone was walking around our tents. It sounded like Jamie, but it wasn't him. It knew things Jamie couldn't have known. Then something chased us towards the car."

There was a brief pause before the handler resumed in the careful, level tone used for frightened or confused callers.

"I need you to slow down and tell me exactly what you observed."

Imogen described the voice, the private information and the laughter. With each sentence, I heard how impossible it sounded to someone who had not been there.

The handler asked whether we had seen Jamie clearly, whether anyone had consumed alcohol or drugs, and whether the person outside the tents might have been confused, injured or hypothermic.

"It wasn't Jamie," Imogen insisted. "And you need to warn the team due at 06:00. We left a written warning at the campsite, but please contact Warden MacLeod before anyone goes into the clearing."

The handler confirmed that Police Scotland would relay the warning and coordinate with mountain rescue and the warden post. She instructed us to continue there without stopping and to ring again if the vehicle broke down or we saw anyone following us.

Callum stared through the windscreen. "The way it said Lucy's name... It was as if it were tasting it."

Rowan kept both hands locked around the wheel. "We have to tell them everything."

"And say what?" Imogen asked after ending the call. "That a creature killed our friend and pretended to be him? They'll think we're all having some sort of breakdown."

She was right, but we still had to try.

When we reached the warden post, Aileen MacLeod was waiting in the car park with two Police Scotland officers and a woman in a dark suit who introduced herself as Detective Inspector Sarah Kerr. MacLeod looked alarmed rather than annoyed. Kerr looked tired and guarded.

"You're the group who made the missing-person call?" Kerr asked, taking out a notebook.

We spent the next three hours in a meeting room at the warden post, telling our story repeatedly. Each time, it sounded less believable.

The officers remained professional. They asked careful questions and took detailed notes, but scepticism showed in their eyes. If the voice sounded exactly like Jamie's, how could we be certain it was not him? Why had we fled rather than helping a friend who was plainly distressed? Had we drunk more cider than we admitted? Had anyone taken drugs? Had there been an argument or conflict within the group?

That final question struck like a blow. They were considering whether we had harmed Jamie and invented the rest to conceal it.

"Jamie Fraser is an experienced outdoorsman," MacLeod said, consulting her notes. "His father has been a national park warden for many years. Jamie knows remote woodland and mountain terrain better than most people his age. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be unusual for him to become lost without his safety equipment."

The implication was clear. If something abnormal had happened to Jamie, the four of us were the most obvious abnormal element.

Rowan tried to explain the Hollow One. He described the obscure early nineteenth-century account he had assembled from a minister's journal, estate papers and later folklorists' notes: a starving person driven to cannibalism who became gaunt, endlessly hungry and able to mimic voices, yet could never reproduce ordinary human movement. He stressed that the sources contradicted one another and that he had found no basis for presenting it as authentic Scottish folklore.

Kerr listened without interrupting. Then she asked whether Rowan had researched the material before the trip.

When he admitted that he had, she wrote something in her notebook.

"People under severe stress in unfamiliar environments can misinterpret sounds," she said gently. "Especially when they've recently heard a frightening story that gives those sounds a particular meaning."

"All four of us heard it separately," I said. "How do you explain that?"

"Suggestion can operate across a group. One person reports a sound, the others become hypervigilant, and ordinary noises are interpreted as confirmation."

"It knew things," I said. "Private details about our families. Things Jamie never knew."

Kerr's expression remained patient, but I could tell she had already settled on the kind of explanation she considered possible.

Police Scotland took our contact details and instructed us not to leave the area until they had completed their initial enquiries. MacLeod confirmed that the search was continuing, though the team would approach the abandoned campsite cautiously after our warning. For official purposes, Jamie remained a missing person who had probably become lost or injured, not a victim of something that had taken his voice.

Eventually we were allowed to return to campus. Rowan drove. None of us spoke.

I kept thinking about the figure at the edge of the gravel car park and the way it had watched us without shifting its weight, as if memorising us for later.

Three days later, on Wednesday, Callum rang to say they had found Jamie's body.

The search team had discovered him roughly eight kilometres from the campsite, in a remote ravine where dense canopy, fallen timber and broken granite had concealed him during the first local searches. His body was wedged between two fallen trunks and could not have been seen from above.

The preliminary account said that he had died from injuries sustained in a fall, followed by exposure. The official estimate placed his death on Friday night, only hours after he had vanished from camp.

That meant Jamie was already dead when his voice walked around our tents early on Sunday morning.

Whatever had whispered our secrets through the fabric, whatever had laughed about our families and called us by name, could not have been him.

I asked Callum whether he had seen the body, but he said Police Scotland had not allowed any of us near the ravine. The post-mortem report supplied to the procurator fiscal treated Jamie's death as an accidental fall followed by exposure - a tragic case of an experienced walker making a fatal mistake in the dark. It also placed his death on Friday night, before any of us had heard his voice outside our tents.

The regional-news report was only three paragraphs long. Its headline read: "Student dies after Cairngorms fall".

It said that Jamie had been camping with friends, that he had wandered away from the site and fallen into a ravine roughly eight kilometres away. The broken ground, fallen timber and dense canopy had concealed his body during the first search. There was no mention of the voices in the night, the thing circling the tents or the fact that we had fled shortly before the search team arrived.

I never saw the confidential post-mortem report, but Callum heard things through his father, who knew someone in Police Scotland. Jamie's body had shown signs of animal predation, which was not unusual after several days in remote woodland.

But the damage was apparently more extensive than anyone had expected, particularly in an area with so few large predators. The facial injuries were the worst. According to Callum's source, Jamie's features had been damaged so badly that dental records were needed to confirm his identity. It sounded as though something had tried to learn the shape of his face by taking it apart, piece by piece.

I never repeated that detail. I never told anyone about the dreams that began afterwards, either. In them, I watched Jamie's face change beyond the fire, his features shifting and rearranging themselves while he smiled at me with too many teeth.

Some knowledge is too heavy to share, even with the people who survived it beside you. Especially with them.

I closed my laptop without searching and stared at the letter on my desk. The University of Edinburgh was offering me a place on its fully funded clinical psychology doctorate. It was everything I had worked towards since first year.

I should have been celebrating. I should have rung my parents or posted the news online. Instead, I folded the letter carefully and slipped it into my desk drawer with the details of three other offers I had not answered.

My flatmate from halls was staying at her boyfriend's again, leaving me alone with far too much silence. I had been doing the same thing for two years: opening my laptop, typing "Cairngorms missing walkers" into the search bar, then closing the window before I could press enter.

It was as though I kept testing myself to see whether I was ready to learn what else might be out there.

I was not.

The thing about trauma is that everyone expects you to recover eventually. You are supposed to move on, process what happened and turn it into a lesson that makes you stronger.

But some experiences do not make you stronger. They only teach you how much you do not want to know about the world.

For two years I had tried to rationalise what happened during that Easter weekend. I read everything I could find about mimicry, famine legends, similar stories from other cultures and psychological explanations for collective hallucinations. I returned to the contradictory references Rowan had found in a minister's journal, estate papers and later folklorists' notes, although I knew the Hollow One was not recognised Highland folklore. It might have been no more than an obscure story assembled from scraps and sharpened by Rowan's imagination.

I had a folder on my computer innocuously labelled "dissertation sources". It was filled with material about voice mimicry, missing walkers, predatory animals and fragments of regional folklore. The academic part of me wanted a rational explanation. Group panic brought on by stress and Rowan's story. Auditory hallucinations caused by exhaustion and fear.

Perhaps we had been primed to expect something unnatural. Perhaps we had imposed a sinister meaning on sounds and movements we did not understand.

But the part of me that had been there - the part that had heard the hunger in Jamie's voice when it spoke my name - knew those explanations were not enough.

Rowan transferred to another university the following term. He packed his things and left without saying goodbye to any of us. Mutual friends told me that he had abandoned English for something practical, perhaps accountancy, and had stopped telling stories altogether.

Callum developed anxiety so severe that he could no longer sleep in his room in halls. Eventually, he left university. The last I heard, he was living with his parents and working at his family's takeaway, scarcely leaving the house except for his shifts.

Imogen completed her degree but moved to Bristol immediately after graduating. She found work with an engineering firm and put as much of Britain as she could between herself and the Cairngorms. Once, a new account under the name Imogen Clarke sent me a friend request. I never accepted it. Her profile photograph showed her smiling at a company event, surrounded by colleagues who had no idea what she had seen among those trees.

None of us ever spoke about what had really happened. Not to one another, not to therapists and not to our families.

How could you explain that you knew the difference between your friend and something copying his voice? How could you tell someone that a story invented from contradictory archival fragments had described what came to your tent in the dark?

The Hollow One was supposed to be a warning about starvation and cannibalism: a person hollowed out by hunger until they became gaunt, endlessly ravenous and able to mimic human voices, though never human movement. Whatever killed Jamie seemed to share those qualities. It could reproduce his voice and scraps of his personality, but the cadence was wrong. Its gait was wrong. Even when it tried to sound ordinary, hunger leaked through.

It had tried to draw us deeper into the forest using Jamie's voice as bait. It had studied us, learned our fears and secrets and discovered exactly what might persuade each of us to go outside. Some of the things it knew had never been told to Jamie. We came to believe that it had somehow probed at us, or overheard thoughts as it circled while we slept. We never understood how.

If we had unzipped our tents when we first heard what we thought was Jamie, it might have taken us one by one.

The thing that haunted me most was not the creature itself. It was the knowledge that my fear had probably saved my life.

I had always been the anxious one, the suspicious one, the friend who imagined the worst possible outcome. People made my fear seem like a weakness, something embarrassing that I ought to overcome. Yet when every instinct I possessed screamed at me not to open the tent, not to step into the darkness and not to trust that voice, fear kept me alive.

Jamie had been brave. He was the sort of person who investigated strange sounds and helped anyone in trouble. He would never have ignored a friend calling for him.

But I did not know why he had left his tent that Friday night. None of us did. I could not turn his death into a simple punishment for courage any more than I could turn my survival into a virtue.

My mobile buzzed.

Imogen's name appeared on the screen, and for a moment my pulse leapt as though I were back in that tent, listening to footsteps circle the campsite.

"Hi, Beth. I'll be in Scotland over the Christmas holiday visiting my family near Edinburgh. Do you want to meet for coffee? It would be good to catch up."

I stared at the message for a long time, imagining what catching up would mean. We would sit opposite each other in an Edinburgh cafe, making small talk about work and our lives while carefully avoiding the one event that had defined both of us for two years.

We would pretend we were ordinary friends who had drifted apart after university, rather than survivors of something that should not have existed.

Or perhaps she wanted to discuss it. Perhaps she carried the same weight I did, the same knowledge that made ordinary friendships feel impossible. Perhaps she had been researching too, searching for answers or merely for proof that we had not all lost our minds together.

But I knew that was not what would happen. We would be polite and distant, both thinking about Jamie's voice calling our names from the darkness. We would both remember running through the forest while something crashed between the trees behind us.

Afterwards, we would feel worse than before.

Some friendships are too heavy to carry forwards. Some shared experiences create bonds more like scars, joining you to people in ways that hurt whenever they are touched.

I deleted the message without replying and placed my mobile face down on the desk.

The Edinburgh letter was waiting in the drawer. It offered me the chance to study the human mind, to understand trauma and fear and perhaps help people who had witnessed things they could not explain. But accepting it meant remaining in Scotland, close to the Cairngorms and close to the others. It meant living where a road north could carry me back towards that managed pine forest.

It meant building a career upon understanding the mind while knowing that some things might exist beyond psychology's boundaries.

I opened my laptop again and found the email from the University of Exeter. Its funded clinical psychology programme was not as prestigious as Edinburgh's, but Exeter lay in southern England, roughly five hundred miles from the Cairngorms. The emotional distance felt greater. It was far from the forest, far from Edinburgh and far from the place where I had learned that fear was not always weakness.

Sometimes it was the only thing standing between you and something that wanted to wear your voice after you were gone.

I began typing my acceptance to Exeter, my fingers moving quickly before I could change my mind.

Some knowledge was too dangerous to carry in the place where you had acquired it.

Some fears were worth obeying, even when everyone else called them paranoia.

Especially then.