It's cold and damp out here in the woods, I'm shivering already after just ten minutes, and I keep asking myself what the hell am I doing when the thing I'm almost afraid to find could be hiding nearby to pounce on me any minute now.

Ellie, calm yourself down, girl. 

Several deep breaths, and I still regret not wearing an extra layer or three under my overalls and rain jacket, but at least my heart isn't ready to jump out of my chest.

The naked trees stand around the clearing and look down as if I'm a meal offering myself up on their bed of fallen leaves. Overactive imagination? Yeah, guilty. 

So, what the hell am I doing here all by myself?

It started last night. Halloween night, because of course. 

My best friend Carly, her boyfriend Jake, and some others from our high school and the nearby community college got together at a house party, and then one thing led to another and soon we were heading outside and up to our usual shenanigans in the outskirts of amazing, fun, Sequim, Washington - except even more so on account of Halloween.

Someone suggested we go out and make a campfire at this old clearing and cook some bacon, play hide and seek to scare the crap out of each other in the woods, tell ghost stories and whatnot. We were all hella drinking by then, obviously. 

So we drove out a few miles out of town, then parked our cars about half a mile from the county road and we'd walked all the way here on the main trail. It was so dark and spooky, we were using our phones and had some flashlights but the trees and thicket around us seemed almost solid right at the fringes. Such a fun atmosphere. For a while, at least.

There were 10-15 of us, and some of the guys - I think they were football players or frat boys - were shooting off bottle rockets and generally causing a ruckus, and doing a pretty effective job of scaring away all the wildlife.

We were all laughing and shouting, but maybe I wasn't the only one who thought there were big shapes moving around in the bushes.

It's just the outdoors, Ellie, I told myself. There's deer and bears and probably wolves out here in the woods, because this is where they live, dummy. It seemed rational enough at the time.

We got to the clearing and it was almost like a movie scene, the full moon was shining down on the clearing with the pine trees and the trees without leaves looking like skeleton hands clawing up at the sky, it was wild.

The girls, all six of us, were sitting on the logs around the pit and talking, and the guys were goofing around and just about to set up the fire, when something - I don't know how to describe it any other way - like a giant curtain or something swept across the sky and covered up the moon for a second. Sounds crazy, I know, but the moonlight suddenly cut off - and all our phones and everything too! - and we were in total, goddamn thick darkness for a second. Can you imagine if you were in a movie theater, and the screen and every single light just goes off in that closed space - it was like that, and the thick blackness was almost heavy and solid, and suffocating for a moment. It seemed to last a second, but also for what felt like minutes. 

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Then everything was back to normal. Our phones and flashlights were back on. The moon was shining back down, casting shadows from the trees all around us, and the background noise of the forest at night sounded normal again. 

I freaked. I thought I was going batshit crazy. And looking around, I could see the wide-eyed crazy look on everyone else's face too. What the fuck was that?, one of the guys said and we all kind of laughed nervously and started looking around, almost dazed.

And then, for some reason, I happened to look over to my right, at kind of a forty-five degree angle, off into the woods, as everyone was starting to mumble and talk to each other just to keep themselves from feeling afraid. 

In the overhang of some branches and in the thicket underneath, probably fifty feet away, I saw what looked like a murky, round wisp of smoke floating in the air. Then I saw there were two of them. 

And then they blinked.

“There!" I screamed and popped up on my feet, pointing my finger. My eyes were locked onto whatever it was, and as everyone turned to see where I was pointing, the eyes sort of closed and then disappeared. The whole incident must have lasted a few seconds.

I was shaking from head to toe, still standing and staring at the now unremarkable spot. Everyone was quiet for a moment, looking at the thicket and then back at me, shocked.

“Holy shit! Something was watching us!" I said, trying to convince all of them, and myself, that I wasn't going crazy.

But I didn't have to worry much about that. 

The smell hit all of us at that moment. A stench like you wouldn't believe wafted through and filled up the clearing.

In my random speculation, the idea flashed through my mind that maybe it was the stench of not something but many somethings that were out there beyond the clearing. Watching us.

Everyone started gagging, and I made a beeline back to the trail with my phone light on, and so did everyone else.

We didn't talk much except some occasional lame joke or half-hearted laugh on the drive back.

I didn't sleep more than an hour, maybe, last night.

So this morning, soon after it got light, I drove back here to find some answers. I've seen plenty of Discovery channel and History tv documentaries about UFOs and cryptid critters to pique my curiosity.

I've got my shotgun in my pickup, just as I always do. If nothing else, Ellie is a country gal who can handle a gun if need be to shoot at a bear or even bigfoot, if need be.

So since then, I've been walking around this clearing for at least an hour, trying to remember where I was standing when I saw what I saw.

And so on for the next hour, I walk around the clearing and retrace my steps, even from sitting down on the log and then figuring out which way I'd been staring. I'm a detective, I could star in my own tv show, “Ellie Chase: Cryptid CSI." 

Then, after another half hour or so, when I'm shivering up a storm on the verge of catching fifteen strains of pneumonia and I'm just about to crawl back into my truck, I spot something.

And then I see it - half-hidden beneath a layering of leaves and pine needles that had fallen down and soggily covered it since last night's rain - an almost perfect indentation of a human-like footprint ...

A footprint that I could step both my shoes into.