The Dry Season

Before I write this, you should know that my sister Alina and I share a peculiar family trait: we see the dead. Not just glimpses, but full-bodied apparitions, often with a clarity that makes them seem more real than the living. Our mother can hear them if she focuses on a photograph, but she’s never seen one. Our father gets brief, static-filled impressions, like a radio picking up a distant station. Our three younger siblings have never shown any sign of the gift, and frankly, they’re terrified of the whole idea. But Alina and I have always been the ones the spirits find. Usually, it’s harmless—a grandmother checking on her grandchildren, a soldier standing at attention in an old house. But sometimes, they’re not harmless. And Alina, more than me, seems to draw the ones that are hungry.

This story is about an experience Alina had five years ago, and she’s still haunted by it. She’s asked me to tell it here, hoping someone might offer an explanation, because the only one she’s come up with is too horrible to accept.

It happened during the summer she took a job as a fire lookout in the Bitterroot National Forest, in a remote tower perched on a granite peak called Mount Thorne. It was a seasonal position, and she loved the solitude. The tower was a cramped metal box on stilts, with a 360-degree view of endless pine and the jagged ridges of the Sapphire Mountains. Her only companion was a scrawny orange cat named Moth, who had adopted her on the third day.

The first few weeks were uneventful. She’d scan the horizon with her binoculars, radio in false alarms, and read paperback novels in the afternoon heat. But then the dry season arrived in earnest. The air turned brittle, and the sky became a bleached, white-blue. The forest floor crackled underfoot. The animals grew skittish. And Alina began to see a figure on the far ridge, just a speck of black against the gray rock, standing motionless. She assumed it was a hiker, but it never moved. When she’d focus her binoculars on it, it would blur, like looking through a heat shimmer. She’d blink, and it would be gone. It happened every day for a week.

Then, one night, she woke to a knocking. It was insistent, three rapid raps on the metal door at the base of the tower. She glanced at her watch: 2:47 AM. Nobody would hike up here at that hour. She grabbed her flashlight and called out, ‘Hello?’ No answer. The knocking came again, harder now, rattling the thin walls. She crept to the door and peered through the peephole. The beam of her flashlight illuminated a figure standing just beyond the pool of light—a tall, gaunt man in a ranger’s uniform, but his face was obscured in shadow. Before she could react, Moth hissed and arched his back, his fur standing on end. Then the knocking stopped. When she dared open the door a crack, there was no one there.

Alina didn’t sleep the rest of the night. She radioed the district office in the morning, but they said no rangers were in the area. They told her it was probably a prankster or a lost hiker, but she knew better. She’d felt something—a cold, malevolent presence that clung to the air like smoke.

The figure appeared more frequently after that. She’d see it standing at the treeline, or watching her from the ridge when she stepped out to use the outhouse. Once, she saw it’s reflection in the window pane, right behind her, but when she spun around, nothing. She started leaving the light on at night, and she kept a hatchet by her cot.

Then the fire came. It started on the opposite ridge, a thin ribbon of orange that grew into a roar. She had to evacuate, but as she was grabbing her pack, she saw the figure again—not on the ridge, but at the base of the tower, reaching for the ladder. And it wasn’t alone. Behind it, emerging from the smoke, were dozens of figures, their faces contorted in terror, their mouths open in silent screams. They were not like the man in the ranger’s uniform; they were translucent, flickering like heat waves. They were the ghosts of the forest, and they were fleeing the fire. But the man in the ranger’s uniform was not fleeing. He was walking toward the flames, and as he got closer, the fire seemed to part around him, as if it recognized him.

Alina fled down the zigzag trail, her lungs burning, the roar of the fire chasing her. She stumbled, and when she looked back, the man was standing at the edge of the cliff, silhouetted against the inferno. He raised his arm and pointed directly at her. And then the promontory where he stood collapsed, and he was gone.

She made it to the ranger station at the base, and they drove her to safety. The fire burned for three weeks. When it was finally contained, they surveyed the damage. The forest was a blackened wasteland, and at the bottom of a ravine, they found the wreckage of an old fire lookout tower—not hers, but one from decades earlier. Inside, they found the remains of a ranger who had died in a fire in 1974. His name was Edward Munro. He had been the lookout on that very peak, and he had refused to evacuate, trying to save the tower. His body was never recovered, but his name was in the records.

Alina hasn’t spoken of it much since. But she told me that the man in the ranger’s uniform was not trying to hurt her. He was trying to warn her. She saw that now. The ghosts he had with him were the ones who had stayed behind, unable to leave, bound to the land by their fear of the flames. And he, Edward Munro, was the keeper of that burning place. He was still trying to save people, even in death.

But what haunts her most is what happened on the last night, before the fire. She had a dream, if you could call it that. She was standing in a clearing, and the man was there, close enough to touch. He didn’t speak aloud, but she heard him in her mind, a voice like the crackle of dry leaves: ‘The dry season is coming for you all.’ Then he turned and walked into a wall of flame, and she woke up with a scream caught in her throat.

She’s never told anyone that part before. She’s afraid that if she does, he’ll come back. And she believes, with all her heart, that he will. Not to warn her this time, but to take her with him.

That’s her story. If anyone has any insight, she’d be grateful. But I think she’d also be terrified of the answer. Because in her heart, she already knows. He’s still out there, and the dry season never really ends.