When the third call came in, we knew we had a problem. They all described the same thing, a man in a black jacket following them at a distance as they hiked through the forest. The man didn’t say anything. He had a hood pulled tight over his head. No one saw his face.

All three sightings occurred up over the ridge to the west of the station. Someone had to go and take a look. Jim and I played a lightning game of rock paper scissors. It’s like the man can read my mind. I clipped a radio to my belt and jumped in the truck.

Hikers often report seeing something strange out in the forest. The dark spaces between the trees play tricks on the mind. That and the isolation. But three sightings within a week describing the exact same thing ruled out a simple case of imagination in overdrive. Someone was out there, the question was who and why.

I rambled up the slope as far as the truck would take me and then jumped out. I still had to negotiate the worst part of the ridge. The slope gets steep in parts and is hell on your legs. It made me think. Why has someone been spotted way up here on three different days across the space of a week? No one lived up this way. It wasn’t a place for folk on a daily walk. A pang of fear gripped my stomach. Should I have come alone?

I crested the slope and reached for my radio, and then I saw him. A silhouette mingling with the shadows between the thin trunks of birch. He was the length of a football field from me. Black jacket and a hood.

He half turned in my direction and took a step forwards. In a strange way it gave me comfort. If there were any nefarious reason for him to be out here, I’d have expected him to retreat into the woods. Even at this distance he couldn’t fail to recognise my Ranger uniform.

As I came within a distance where I could call to him without yelling, I raised a hand in greeting. I strained to see his face, but a deep and dark shadow obscured his features. I opened my mouth to say hello, but before any sound came out, he turned and strode into the forest.

I called after him, but he continued to thread his way through the trees. I skipped a few paces to bridge the gap between us. Within touching distance, I reached out and a strange sensation flowed through my fingertips. It felt like a controlled release of electricity, not painful, almost like a severe case of pins and needles.

Before I could retract my hand, a brilliant light flooded my vision. I shut my eyes and covered them with my hands. Somehow the light shone through. I cried out and stopped dead in my tracks.

And then the light was gone. I opened my eyes. I stood in a clearing. The sun streamed down through the gap in the trees. At the centre of the clearing stood an old stone well, the walls extending up to about waist height above the ground. I had seen structures like this around town, relics of frontier times. That a well would be out here in the middle of the forest, far from any settlement past or present, was baffling. The man in black stood behind the well and motioned me toward it.

I approached the well, adrenaline sending my heart into a frenzy. Why had he led me out here? The sun warmed my shoulders from above. Despite the bright sunshine, the man’s face remained shrouded in shadow.

He pointed to the well. I stopped a few paces short. Something about this wasn’t right. Everything about this wasn’t right. Did he mean to throw me down? A voice sounded in my head. It did not come via my ears but seemed to somehow feed directly into my brain.

You must look.

I watched the man suspiciously and inched closer to the well. The mortar between the stones crumbled and moss stained the outside face green. This well was old. I saw something strange on the inside face. Writing. Something carved into the stone.

It read: Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

What truth? I peered down.

The shaft was deeper than I expected. Black shadows shrouded the walls at the base. All was dark except a sliver of light reflecting off the water sitting at the bottom. The reflection shimmered as if tiny waves swept over the water. I lowered my head and squinted. An image appeared in the bottom like a movie projected onto a screen.

The image sharpened and came into focus. The forest at night under a full moon. Mist mingled with the trees. I felt the cold. I did not imagine it, but felt it. My skin prickled and I shivered.

A road snaked up through the forest. I recognised it. It is a few minutes north of the ranger station. A figure walked beside the road. He wore a black jacket, the hood pulled up over his head. It was the same man who led me out here. A set of headlights flickered through the trees and then came into focus. The man in black stuck out a thumb.

The images cut to the inside of the car. For a moment a bottle of whisky obscured the identity of the driver. When the bottle lowered it was Jim who appeared. Music blared from the radio. The revs on the dial pushed into the red.

I turned away from the movie playing at the bottom of the well. This was madness. The man in black – the hitchhiker – pulled back his hood. His face was youthful and innocent, but there was something wrong. His skin wrinkled and pulled away from his eyes revealing a ring of red around the perimeter. Two black holes were where his nose should be. Blood poured from his mouth and a few teeth were missing. The temple on the right side was caved in.

I took a step back and cried out. I almost turned to run, but the hitchhiker held up his palms. He pointed down the well. I hesitated. The words repeated in my brain.

You must look.

My legs were jelly. My mind was torn. Part of me wanted to run and get as far away as possible, and the other part wanted to see what was down at the bottom of that well. I stepped forwards and looked down.

The projection at the bottom of the well resumed. The bottle of whisky slipped from Jim’s grasp. One hand pulled and pushed the steering wheel as the other fumbled at his feet for the bottle. The truck drifted and then overcorrected. The man in black, stood by the side of the road with his thumb outstretched, had no chance.

The truck skidded to a stop. Jim breathed rapidly from behind the wheel. He searched the rear vision mirror and found a black lump at the side of the road. He turned to confirm what the mirror told him. He put the truck in gear and drove. He rounded the next bend and stopped. The road was quiet. He killed the headlights and reversed.

Under the pale light of the moon, Jim dragged the hitchhiker off the side of the road and into the forest. He came to a gully and tumbled down the bank. Jim scrambled back up the slope and pulled the hitchhiker down. Jim paused for a moment at the bottom, watching the face of the hitchhiker, before setting to work covering the body with branches and leaves.

The moon grew and brightened until the light forced me to close my eyes. When I opened them I was back in the forest. The clearing and the well and the man in the black jacket were gone.

I walked back to my truck. I sat there for fifteen minutes before starting the engine and driving back.

I searched the parking lot for Jim’s truck. It wasn’t there.

Jim narrowed his eyes when he saw me. I didn’t blame him. I was white as a sheet and knew it. He asked me what I saw, and I told him nothing. I stammered a question about his truck. He paused and licked his lips and told me it was in the shop.

I told two lies the following morning. The first was to our boss. I told him we’d had another call about a man in a black jacket and that Jim and I would take a look. The second was to Jim. I told him we had a report of a tree down on a walking trail and we had to go clear it up. We got in the truck.

I took the road I saw in the vision at the bottom of the well. I knew the curve, when you take a road every day you get to know it almost to a point you could drive it with your eyes closed. I stopped right at the spot where Jim had smashed into the hitchhiker. Jim looked over at me confused. Which walking trail were we going to? His hands shook. I got out of the truck and instructed him to follow. We were taking a shortcut.

I had to see it for myself. If what I had seen in the well was the truth, then the boy might still be there in the gully where Jim left him. And I had to know if it was Jim, and the only way to do that was to have him there. To see the look on his face. To see it in his eyes that it was him.

Jim fell behind and I barked at him to keep up. We were almost at the gully. I turned back and Jim had stopped. He implored me to turn back. I kept going.

The gully fell away below my feet. At the bottom, partially hidden below a stack of branches, was a figure wearing black. I shouted back to Jim. I told him something was down there. He begged me to stop. I unclipped the radio from my belt and called it in.

Jim’s shoulders fell. He ran a hand through his hair. He searched the slivers of sky visible through the trees for answers. For a split second his mouth turned downwards like a child about to cry. I had him. But a moment later all fear left his face. He sighed.

He strode confidently to the crest of the gully and looked down. He told me I was right and that there was something down there. I searched his eyes. I looked for guilt. I saw only Jim, the guy who worked at the desk on the other side of the partition. How could he be so calm? How could he not break down and confess?

The police came and retrieved the body. They identified the hitchhiker. An eighteen year old runaway escaping an abusive father.

Two officers interviewed me in a small room. I told them we had found the body by accident. They found it strange we had reports of a man matching the hitchhiker’s description from the last week. I agreed, but I could not explain it. There was no way I could tell them about the well and what I saw in the bottom. I only told them that I thought it was strange that Jim suddenly didn’t have his truck. This produced furrowed brows. I only repeated that I wanted them to look into it.

Whether the police investigated or not I cannot say. Jim’s truck never resurfaced. He says he sold it.

The death was classified as an accident and no suspect or witness was ever identified. I know the truth and so does Jim. But I can’t prove it.

I still sit at the desk on the other side of the partition. If it plays on Jim’s mind, he never gives anything away. One night I left a note in his letterbox that said, I know it was you. He has never mentioned it.

I see the hitchhiker in my dreams. The headlights from Jim’s car lighting his face in the last moments of his life. There is nothing I can do for him.

Sometimes, I go out to the forest and search for the well. I have not seen it since.

Sometimes the truth lies just out of reach, and sometimes it seems so far away it could be down at the bottom of a well.

Me