Vanishing Point

Elias Mercer hadn’t slept in three nights.

The dorm room around him was a blur of papers, highlighters, and half-empty coffee cups. Snow rattled against the window of Orton Hall, softening the world beyond while fluorescent desk lamps kept the inside sharp and unforgiving. His statistics textbook sat open in front of him, its graphs and formulas swimming like minnows on the page.

He told himself he only needed to stay awake one more night—just until finals were over. Then he’d collapse, catch up on a week’s worth of rest, and laugh about how close he’d come to losing his mind.

But at 2:37 a.m., the words on the page dissolved completely, and his head sagged forward onto his arms.

He didn’t remember standing. He didn’t remember sliding his coat over his shoulders or slipping his feet into boots. He didn’t remember opening the door.

Campus was a silver wash of moonlight and snow. Streetlamps stretched pale halos across the sidewalks, and the air was still enough that even the pines looked like they were holding their breath.

Elias walked.

He moved without thought, past the library with its shuttered windows, past the student union glowing faintly from vending machines inside. His boots made neat impressions in the powder, one after another, an unbroken chain.

When he reached the edge of campus, a small wooden gate stood half-buried in drifts. Beyond it lay Whitlow Forest, fifty acres of old trees that sloped down to a frozen river. A sign warned students not to wander there in winter: footing treacherous, cell service unreliable, rescues slow.

Elias stepped over the sign and kept going.

By dawn, the search had begun.

His roommate, Jordan, woke to find Elias’s bed still made, boots missing, phone left behind on the desk. Campus security traced the boy’s prints across the snow-covered quad, through the gate, and into the forest.

The trail was strange from the start. The footprints were evenly spaced, never hesitating, never turning back. They wove between birches and black spruces, skirted fallen logs, and continued deeper, always purposeful.

Then, a mile and a half in, the prints simply ended.

The snow around the last step was smooth and untouched, glittering with frost. There were no drag marks, no churned ice from an animal attack, no branches bent as if someone had climbed into the trees. Just one final bootprint, clear as a signature, and beyond it—nothing.

Sheriff Anne Calhoun crouched beside the last impression, breath smoking in the morning air.

“Clean,” she muttered. “No sign of collapse or jump. Just stops.”

The campus security chief, a square-shouldered man named Vic Ramirez, rubbed his chin. “Could he have doubled back?”

“We’d see it.” Anne gestured to the pristine surface. “His inbound track is sharp. If he walked out the way he came, we’d have an outbound one.”

A deputy knelt nearby, scanning with a thermal camera. “Nothing warm,” she said. “If he’s here, he’s colder than the trees.”

They fanned out, probing the drifts with poles, calling his name. Dogs sniffed the print and circled, whining, unable to pick a direction.

By noon, search-and-rescue volunteers arrived: students, faculty, locals. They combed the forest grid by grid. Helicopters swept low, blades scattering plumes of snow, but the forest offered no answer.

Jordan sat on the tailgate of an emergency truck, hugging a thermos of coffee he couldn’t bring himself to drink.

“He wasn’t… like this,” he told Anne when she came over. “I mean, he was stressed—everybody’s stressed—but Elias doesn’t do reckless stuff. He never drinks, never skips class. He just studies too hard.”

“Any reason he’d head into the woods?”

Jordan shook his head. “He was terrified of ticks.”

Anne allowed herself a wry smile before turning serious again. “You said he hadn’t been sleeping?”

“Not since Monday.” Jordan’s voice wavered. “He kept saying he felt like he was underwater, like everything was muffled.”

“Did he mention wanting to hurt himself?”

“No! He just wanted to pass calculus.”

Anne looked back toward the tree line. A light wind had risen, skating powder off the branches. The single line of prints gleamed in the sun, ending with that perfect, inexplicable absence.

As darkness crept over the forest, the searchers regrouped. Their lamps pricked the dusk like fireflies, but no trace of Elias emerged.

Anne walked once more to the last footprint, now ringed with pink survey flags. The print looked fresher than it should have, as though whoever made it might return at any moment to finish the next step.

She crouched, pressing a gloved finger along the edge. Solid. Crisp. She brushed aside nearby snow, testing for a hidden hole or thin crust. Nothing. Beneath the powder lay firm ice, unbroken.

Above her, the trees swayed lightly. The sound they made was not quite wind—not quite words either, but something in between.

Anne stood abruptly and headed back to camp.

That night, Jordan lay awake in the dorm, listening to the radiator hiss. Elias’s desk lamp was still on, pooling light over a scatter of formulas. Beside the lamp sat a notepad filled with frantic handwriting:

“Stay awake. Don’t let it catch you.”

“Noise in the trees—just the wind? no.”

“If you go under, you don’t come back.”

Jordan read the lines twice, heart pounding. Elias hadn’t shown anyone these notes.

He closed the pad and shoved it under his mattress.

By the second day, rumors bloomed across campus: that Elias had fallen through a snow-covered sinkhole, that wolves had dragged him off, that he’d staged his own disappearance.

But the sheriff’s team found no caves, no blood, no sign of life or struggle. Even the wolves kept their distance that week, tracks scarce in the woods.

Anne began digging into old records. She found three similar incidents dating back to the 1920s—each winter, each involving someone who’d wandered into Whitlow Forest and never returned. In every case, the search teams reported a trail that stopped “as though the subject had ceased to exist.”

Locals had a name for it: the Vanishing Point.

On the third night, Jordan dreamed.

He was standing where Elias’s tracks ended. The moon was full, staining the snow pale blue. A hush lay over everything, heavy and absolute.

Something stirred at the corner of his sight—a shimmer, like heat above asphalt, rippling between two pines. He felt a pull, gentle but insistent, beckoning him forward.

He woke drenched in sweat.

Meanwhile, deep within the forest—far beyond any map—Elias opened his eyes.

He lay on cold ground under a sky that wasn’t quite night or day. Colors slid across it in slow waves: violet, green, silver. Around him, the trees leaned inward, their bark slick and black as ink. The air smelled faintly of cedar and something older, metallic.

He sat up. His boots were still on, dusted with frost. Behind him stretched the faint imprint of his own steps, etched in pale soil rather than snow. They, too, ended a short distance away, swallowed by darkness.

Elias tried to remember walking here, but his thoughts were syrupy, resisting shape. He recalled exhaustion, formulas, the sense of falling inside himself. Then this place.

A figure stood among the trunks.

It was tall and narrow, wrapped in a cloak the same hue as the sky. Where its face should be was only a blur, shifting like water over stone. When it spoke, the sound was neither male nor female, but a cool vibration in the air.

“You crossed while you slept,” it said. “Few manage it.”

“Crossed what?” Elias asked, his voice trembling.

“The skin between.” The figure gestured at the trees. “Most drift near the seam, but only those hollowed by wear slip through.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You were emptied by worry, by wakefulness. There was room for the forest to take you.”

Elias stepped back. “I want to go home.”

“Do you?” the figure asked softly. “Your world gnaws at you—expectations, dread, endless hours. Here, you may rest.”

For a heartbeat, Elias felt the temptation: silence instead of deadlines, calm instead of caffeine shakes. The snowless ground looked almost inviting.

Then he thought of Jordan, of his sister texting good luck before finals, of the life he hadn’t yet lived.

“I can’t stay.”

The figure regarded him. “Most don’t choose.”

Elias squared his shoulders, though they shook. “Show me the way back.”

The figure inclined its head. “Step where the snow should be.”

A patch of ground near the vanished footprints brightened, paling toward white. Elias took a breath and stepped forward.

The forest folded around him like paper.

Searchers found him at dawn.

He was lying curled beside the last footprint, coat rimed with frost, but breathing steadily. Paramedics bundled him into a sled, wrapping him in blankets as they hustled him to an ambulance.

Jordan was waiting at the hospital when Elias woke.

“You scared the hell out of me,” Jordan said, voice thick.

Elias tried to speak, but only managed a rasp. Finally: “I walked too far.”

“What happened out there?”

Elias stared at the window, where snow was falling again, thin and delicate. After a long pause he said, “I got lost. But I came back.”

He didn’t mention the figure, or the rippling sky, or how close he’d come to letting go.

Some things, he decided, weren’t meant for daylight.

Elias withdrew from two courses, caught up on sleep, and began therapy through the university’s counseling center. He started taking slow walks on campus in daylight, breathing in the cold air, reminding himself where he belonged.

When spring arrived and the last drifts melted, he and Jordan stood at the forest’s edge. Mud pooled where snow had been; the Vanishing Point was just bare earth again.

“Think you’ll ever go back?” Jordan asked.

Elias shook his head. “Not alone.”

He placed one boot on the path, just to prove he could, then turned toward the sunlit quad.

Behind them, the pines stirred faintly, though no breeze passed.