Beyond the Blog with Pamela Beach

The trail up Black Hill is a liar.

It starts easy, a gentle, sandy path winding through coastal sagebrush that smells like dust and wild honey. You can hear the sea lions barking in the bay below, see the white slash of the sandspit. But as you climb, the switchbacks get tighter, the air gets thinner, and the world gets quiet.

The fog, of course, was already there. It was a high fog, a ceiling of dirty grey wool that snagged on the peaks of the Santa Lucia mountains. Down in Morro Bay, it was just a gloomy morning. Up here, it was a different world.

Ben and Chloe, weekend hikers from L.A., were blissfully unaware. They were here for the “vibe,” as Chloe called it, and the perfect Instagram shot from the summit. Ben, a gear fanatic, was tracking their progress on a GPS watch.

“Heart rate’s 135,” he puffed, adjusting his pack. “We’re making good time. Should be at the eucalyptus grove in ten.”

“Ugh, can we just be here?” Chloe said, already framing a shot of a lichen-covered rock. “It’s so… primal. Look at the fog, Ben. It’s just sitting on the hills.”

She was right. The fog wasn’t rolling; it was settled. It filled the canyons to their right, a vast, unmoving sea of white, making islands of the highest peaks. And on those peaks, on the ridges far across the canyon, were the figures.

Chloe was the first to see them.

“Oh, wow. Look,” she said, pointing her phone. “Are those other hikers? They’re huge.”

Ben squinted, following her finger. On the opposing ridge, at least a mile away, stood two silhouettes. They were impossibly tall, dark figures, standing perfectly still against the bright, white backdrop of the fog. They looked like men, but stretched, their limbs too long, their shoulders too broad. They wore no color. They were just… black.

“Must be the ‘Dark Watchers,’” Ben said, his voice a little too casual. He’d read the local folklore blogs. “The diablos. Supposed to be shadows, optical illusions. Steinbeck wrote about them. Said they’re just… watchers.”

“Creepy,” Chloe said, zooming in with her phone. The figures were just blurry pixels. “They’re not moving at all. Are they statues?”

“No,” Ben said, a knot of unease tightening in his stomach. “They’re never there when you get close. Just… watch you from a distance.”

“Well, I’m watching them back,” Chloe said, snapping a picture. “Come on, I want to get to the top before this fog decides to come say hi.”

They kept climbing. The trail ducked into a dense thicket of coastal oak, the gnarled branches dripping with moss and condensation. The world became a small, damp tunnel. The silence was deafening, broken only by their footsteps and the rhythmic drip… drip… drip of water.

When they emerged from the oaks twenty minutes later, the world had changed. The fog had risen. The distant ridges were gone, swallowed. The world was now a fifty-foot circle of grey. The air was cold, clinging, and smelled of wet rock.

“Whoa,” Ben said, checking his watch. “GPS is… spinning. Signal’s gone.”

“It’s fine,” Chloe said, though her voice was a little thinner. “The trail’s right here. We just keep going up. We can’t get lost.”

“Right. Right.” Ben looked over his shoulder, back into the grey void where the canyon had been. “It’s weird, though. I feel like… I don’t know.”

“Like what?”

“Like we’re being… herded,” he whispered.

Chloe laughed, a sharp, nervous sound. “Don’t be weird, Ben. You’re just spooked by those ‘Watcher’ things.”

“Maybe.”

They walked on, the trail growing steeper, the ground underfoot turning to slick, black rock. The fog was so thick now it felt like walking through spiderwebs. They passed a sign, its letters barely legible under a coat of green slime.

CERRO ALTO – DANGER: STEEP GRADES

“Wait,” Ben said, stopping. “Cerro Alto? That’s not right. This is Black Hill. Cerro Alto is miles from here.”

“The sign’s probably just old,” Chloe said, pulling at his arm. “Come on. I’m getting cold.”

“No, Chloe, look.” He wiped the slime away. “This is a different trail. We… we must have taken a wrong turn in the oaks.”

“What? How? There was only one path.”

“I don’t know.” Ben’s heart was hammering now. “My watch is useless. My phone has no signal. We should go back. We should go back right now.”

“Fine,” Chloe snapped, her fear turning to irritation. “But you’re navigating.”

They turned. The trail behind them, the one they had just walked, was gone.

“Ben?” Chloe’s voice was small.

“It’s… it’s just the fog,” Ben said, his voice shaking. “It’s disorienting. It’s right here. We just… we just can’t see it.”

He took a step off the path, into the dense, grey nothing. His foot met only air.

He yelled, windmilling his arms, and fell backward onto the trail, scrabbling at the rock. He had stepped off the edge of a sheer, thousand-foot drop. The fog had been hiding the cliff’s edge, making it look like solid ground.

“Okay,” Chloe breathed, her face pale. “Okay. No. We’re not going back. We’re going forward. The sign… maybe the trail loops. We’ll just keep going.”

“Yeah. Okay. Forward.” Ben’s bravado was gone. He was all animal fear

They continued, not climbing, but descending now, into a deep, misty bowl in the mountainside. The fog was thinner here, pooled at the bottom, just like in the legends. A place “where the fog settles first.”

In the center of the hollow was a single, massive boulder, split in two. And on that boulder… was a camera.

It was an old, battered Canon, its strap green with mildew, its lens cracked.

“Oh my god,” Chloe whispered, walking toward it. “Someone… someone left their camera.”

“Don’t touch it, Chloe,” Ben warned, his voice a low growl. “Just… don’t.”

But she was already picking it up. It was heavy, wet. She pressed the ‘On’ button.

It worked

The small LCD screen flickered to life, showing a low-battery warning and a single image.

The image was of them.

It was a shot of Ben and Chloe, taken from a great distance, their small, colorful figures bright against the trail. They were at the spot where they had first seen the Watchers. It was taken from the perspective of the Watchers.

“What is this?” Chloe said, her voice trembling. “Is this a… a trail cam?”

“Chloe,” Ben said, his voice flat, dead. “Look up.

She did.

They were no longer alone in the hollow. The fog was still, but the Watchers were there.

They stood at the rim of the bowl, surrounding them. Dozens of them. Tall, black, stretched figures, identical to the ones they’d seen on the ridge, only now they were close. They were perhaps a hundred yards away, standing in perfect, unnerving silence. They had no faces. They had no features. They were just… shadows. Voids in the shape of men.

“They’re… they’re just watching,” Chloe whispered, tears streaming down her face. “Like you said. They’re just watching.”

“No,” Ben said. “They weren’t just watching, Chloe. They were waiting. Waiting for us to get here.”

One of them, at the far end of the ridge, moved. It didn’t walk. It just… drifted a few feet to the left, a slow, terrifying slide.

Then another moved. And another. They were closing the circle.

“They’re not… they’re not shadows,” Ben stammered, backing up against the boulder. “They’re… they’re the ‘Takers.’ The woman. The one at the history museum… the one who told me the legend.”

“What?” Chloe was sobbing now. “What legend?”

“The Watchers don’t do anything,” Ben said, his mind racing, recalling the old woman’s words. “They’re just… the audience. They’re here to see the fog.”

As he said it, the mist at their feet began to move.

It wasn’t the wind. It was coiling, thickening, rising from the ground in oily, grey tendrils. It wrapped around their ankles, cold and impossibly strong.

“Ben!” Chloe screamed, as the fog-tendrils tightened, pulling her feet out from under her. She fell, dropping the camera.

Ben lunged for her, but the fog was alive. It was the same entity from the tide pools, the “Takers” Piper had warned of. But here, in the mountains, it was… different. It was the same… but it was more.

The Takers from the sea were ancient, elemental. This thing, here… it was worshipped.

The Watchers on the ridge… they were its priests. Its congregation.

“The Rock sees you! The shore holds you!” Ben screamed, the words he’d read on the folklore blog, the old “protective” charm.

The fog… paused. The tendrils loosened.

The Watchers on the ridge, as one, tilted their heads.

A new sound entered the world. Not the foghorn. Not the surf. A low, dry, scraping sound. Like stone on stone.

The Watchers were… laughing.

“That’s the sea-charm, boy,” a voice whispered, coming from all around them. It was the voice of the fog, of the wet rock, of the empty, hollow Watchers. “The Rock can’t see you here. The shore can’t hold you. This is our place. The Rock belongs to the sea. The peaks… the peaks belong to us.”

The fog surged. It wrapped around Ben and Chloe, a crushing, suffocating weight of impossible cold. It filled their mouths, their lungs, their minds.

Ben saw one last thing before his vision went grey. The Watchers, all of them, had turned their “faces” skyward. They were no longer looking at them. They were looking up, at the impenetrable ceiling of fog, as if offering a silent prayer.

And in the grey, swirling mist that was consuming him, he saw it. The same thing he’d read about in Piper’s story.

A swirling constellation of tiny, cold, blue lights. The eyes of the Taker.

Two weeks later, a new pair of hikers made their way up the Black Hill trail. The sun was shining. The bay was a brilliant, postcard blue.

“God, it’s so beautiful here,” the woman said, stopping to take a breath.

“Yeah, amazing,” her boyfriend replied, checking his phone. “Hey, weird. Did you see that camera?”

“What camera?”

He pointed. Sitting on a large, split boulder just off the trail was a small, black mirrorless camera. A Sony. Chloe’s camera.

“Huh,” the woman said. “Someone must have left it. Is it… is it on?”

The man picked it up. The small red light was blinking. It was recording.

He turned, panning across the beautiful, sunny, empty ridge. He filmed the blue sky. He filmed the distant, sparkling sea.

He never once thought to aim the camera at himself.

If he had, he would have seen the two tall, dark, perfectly still figures standing on the trail right behind him, watching him with the patient, silent interest of a spider observing a fly.

Written by Pamela Beach ‘Beyond the Blog’

The fog holds more secrets…

“The Watchers on the Ridge” is just one piece of the legend. Discover the other terrifying tales of the Watchers, the Takers, and the mist that consumes, in the full Morro Bay Fog-Mythos Collection.

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Pamela Beach is a multi-genre author, poet, and lyricist who writes from her home on California’s foggy Central Coast. She is the creator of the “Morro Bay fog-mythos” and author of The Unstoppable You. You can read more of her work and explore her complete “fog-mythos” collection at her blog, Beyond the Blog with Pamela Beach

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