I’m a Private Investigator, and I specialize in missing persons. I was hired to go to the New Mexico wilderness to find one of six people that have gone missing there, and I came back… empty.

This one isn’t like my other cases. Usually, I’m hunting down runaway teens, or silver-alert grandparents. It’s pretty rare, actually, that I get involved with a criminal case, but here, I felt I had no choice. When I got the call from an elderly grieving father, saying his daughter had gone hiking in the wilderness and never returned, I was on the cusp of telling him to call Search-and-Rescue and turning him down – until he mentioned the five others that’d gone missing.

Then, he had my attention.

As I stared out of my office window, on a hill overlooking the city of Albuquerque, he spilled his woes over the phone for me. Two weeks prior, according to him, his daughter approached him almost in a… frenzy, I guess. Manic might be a better word. She told him she’d heard of this magical place out in the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pa Wilderness, an arid badland wilderness in the north west of New Mexico, that hosted wonderful formations of hoodoo stones, including something called the Alien Throne.

As he spoke, I searched the location up. About two and a half hours or so away, there it was, all documented in stunning photography. Beautiful badlands, otherworldly stone formations, and yep – the Alien Throne, a tall, oddly symmetrical three-pronged flat-headed hoodoo that could capture the sun at just the right angle. And while I could see it all in 4K, I couldn’t find much about any missing people in the area.

So I asked him how he knew others had gone missing, and he said that that’s what his daughter told him before she left. He said he tried to stop her from going, but there was a fire in her eye that he’d never seen before. Despite this, she was an avid hiker and possessed quality survivalist skills, so he let her go in the end.

And so now he was here, having not heard from her in almost two weeks.

My first, natural question, was, “Why didn’t you call the cops?”

To which he responded, voice cracking, “I did; they said they’d look into it, but haven’t followed up at all. I’m here out of desperation, not instinct.”

I felt for the man. More than that, I felt *intrigued*. I can handle myself, you see. I’m trained in Jiu Jitsu, and carry a handy .357 revolver almost everywhere I go, and it’s saved me more than once. I told him I’d look into it. He asked my price. I said it was on the house.

The next day, I loaded up my hiking bag, hiking pole, gas cans, and a map of the area into my SUV and departed for the long northward trip.

Most of it is roughshod road. Potholes and cracks, but nothing too serious. But the last, say, 10 miles or so, are all dirt on the Navajo reservation. There’s a point where the road just, ends, and you’re on washboard sand and rocky slants the rest of the way. At one point, I thought I’d tip over, right at the end, but luckily and by grace, I made it to the parking lot of the badlands.

First thing I noticed was a sign. “No trails, no shade, no water.” Truly, anyone hiking this would be on their own. On the sanded bluff overlooking the badlands valley, I pulled out my binoculars, and scanned the area. I could see the first set of hoodoos, and a field of washes and desert that led to the main wilderness attraction, where the Alien Throne was supposed to be. And that’s all I saw. No evidence of people, no proof of life. The entire area was still, silent, and voided.

I packed the binoculars away and headed down the slope to the valley. I must say, the hike, though hot and unmarked, is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever done. Sandstone and limestone sandwiched atop each other in spires rose like a sea of ancient, burnt cathedrals around me. Petrified wood littered the landscape, and the sun on the stone made it almost glow.

In some ways, it felt like being on an alien planet.

The hike to the Alien Throne took maybe an hour or so, hour and a half. Way out in the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pa, there is a forest of hoodoos and formations, and when I made it there, I finally began to see hints of life. There at my feet, on the edge of the formations, was an abandoned hiking pack.

I unzipped it and rummaged through the contents. Water, a compass, some energy bars, and, interestingly, a small digital camera. No phone, no wallet. I pulled out the camera and found it to be dead. Luckily, I brought a cord and a power pack, and plugged it in, stuffed it in my backpack to charge, and moved on.

Wandering through the formations brought me other interesting finds. A hiking stick, leaning against a mushroom-looking rock. A shoe, seemingly stuck in the sand, which must’ve been there for some time. No footprints to or from it, either.

The closer I got to the Alien Throne, the more items began to appear. A credit card with the name “John Polanski”. A dusted leather wallet, empty save for John’s ID. Must’ve been another who went missing.

A half empty metal water bottle, encased with national park stickers. The water was still cool.

A ball cap from the Rocky Mountains, tattered and sun-worn.

I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. And by now, the clear blue sky had begun to fade to a bruised purple as the sun began to sink. I knew I didn’t have much time, so I hurried on my way to the Alien Throne itself. And swiftly, I found it, majestic and truly inhuman. It stood like a monument to the strange, a monolith of “this shouldn’t be here”, if that were ever a human emotion.

I actually started feeling that way about the entire place by this point. Something here was deeply, deeply… weird. A breeze rolled through, right around then. Created the first true noise I’d heard in a while. besides my own heartbeat and breath. But it wasn’t a susurrus, nor a whistle.

It was more like a… well, like a groan. A pained groan, like the land itself ached.

Searching around, I found another wallet, and this time, a phone. I picked them up, opened them in the welcome, if unsettling, wind. They belonged to his daughter, Audrey. The picture on the phone seemed to be her and her father, and the ID in the wallet confirmed. So she was here, and something did happen. I made some mental notes of this, but found I really didn’t have all that much to go on. No signs of struggle, no scrawled notes, there were just items in the silence.

I did take them. Packed them away to give to her father on the likelihood that I couldn’t find her, as I was starting to believe. Something was very wrong here. I started taking pictures with my phone, though its battery by this point was heavily drained. Examining the pictures revealed nothing out of the ordinary, just the stone and the objects. I got maybe fifteen photos before I decided to pack it away to save the battery.

Had I had any cell service, I’d have called the police right then to demand they come out and investigate. But I didn’t have any service. Nor did I have time.

The sun hit the horizon on its descent in perfect alignment with the Alien Throne. Its light went through the hoodoo’s holes and cracks, casting a fiery golden glow on me. The moment, I mean the moment I was hit with the light, the groaning wind silenced. Became still, as though the whole world had frozen up.

Unsettled as I was, I decided now would be the perfect time to make my escape from this haunting landscape. I spun on my heel to backtrack as the light gilded the area through the Throne. But as I got to the edge of the hoodoo formations, I stilled, as did my heart. This… wasn’t right. It all looked somewhat familiar, but it just wasn’t. It was too still, too empty. Too much of an emotional void. It took me a minute to understand what I was seeing.

What had been desert grasslands sprawling out from this point, were now nothing but hoodoos, as far as the eye could see. Eclectic, otherworldly, alien stone formations that seemed almost Euclidean in construction.

And they went on forever. Out to all horizons, sinking lower and lower from the Alien Throne out as though I stood atop a never ending downward hill. I swallowed nervously. It was all I could do to keep my calm, like I knew to do.

I tried to rationalize it, but just couldn’t. It couldn’t have been real. Shouldn’t have been real. But here it was, before me. Staying calm grew increasingly difficult. I wasn’t in New Mexico anymore, quite clearly.

Staring out at the sea of stone, I felt something begin to stir inside of me. This, this calling. An… *urge*, to explore the hoodoos before me. I could feel that there was something deeper to them, something greater out in that forest of rock, if only I had the courage to seek it out amongst the twisting spires of sandstone and pale granite. It was more than a calling, more than a want; it was a need, one that had gone unfulfilled for centuries, it felt like.

And that… that scared the shit out of me.

As a PI, I know better than to let curiosity get the better of me. I’ve seen good people end up in bad, bad situations before merely on the basis of being curious bastards. Wasn’t me, wouldn’t be me. And yet… and yet, I felt hungry, to walk into that stone.

Perhaps foolishly, perhaps incredibly intelligently, I called out to the expanse, “Hello‽”

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And eventually, I heard something back. My own voice. My own “hello”. But it came from behind me, an echo from the wrong direction. And that cemented it for me. If anyone was out there… they weren’t going to hear me.

By now, the sun had sunk down, down below the forever horizon, and when I looked up, an alien sky greeted me. There were two, hear me two, intersecting galaxies overhead, their bright, unfettered arms stretching across the yawning sky. Where they met, a great, almost eyeball-looking light shone down from those heavens. I felt like it was staring at me, waiting. Watching.

I shivered. Not from the cold, but from the, the malice in the air. I’m not sure how to describe it otherwise. I could almost smell, feel the… malintent. The starvation of the land. It felt like teeth under my skin.

My phone had died by now, but I knew I needed to capture what I was seeing. So I reached into my bag and pulled out the camera I’d found, fully charged from my now-drained battery pack. I flipped it on, pressed it to my eye, and began taking pictures. One. Two. Then three, and then it too died. Something here was eating the charge.

I placed it back in my pack and retreated to the Alien Throne. I’m not sure why, but it was the only place where I felt a modicum of hope. Logically speaking, it had gotten me here. Maybe it was my way out too. I set my things against it and did my best to think about my predicament. I could only assume the others had caved to the hunger, the thirst around them. And admittedly, I felt close to caving too. It began to hurt me, harm me even. I felt a deep, melancholic suffering in the pits of my soul, only to be relieved – and this I just knew – by wandering into those ghostly formations.

I resolved to not leave the Alien Throne no matter what. I would’ve preferred to break my own ankle before I descended into the maze below. My teeth began to grind. My jaw clenched up. It was as though the sparkling sky above could read my intentions, was coaxing me out. I swear it was watching me.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. Every so often, I’d hear the only sound I ever heard in that cursed land: a pained, distant groan, longing for release. The ghosts, I started to call them, it felt like they were calling for me. Like they knew I was there. And as badly as my virtues called upon me to seek them out, to find them, I remained by the Alien Throne.

The temperature never changed that night. The longer the darkness grew, the less certain I was that anything ever changed here. I even became less sure that I’d see the sun again. The night was impossibly long, and with no way to tell time, I simply had to sit, wait. Listen to the agony. Watch the watcher.

It took quite some time, but just as I was on the cusp of fainting into an inky, sleepless sleep, a hint of color tested the horizon again. Orange, burnt and flaming, lipped what might’ve been the eastern expanses of the hoodoos. I leapt to my feet, grabbed my pack, and ran around to the western side of the Alien Throne. For all my thinking that night, my one best guess to escape was this.

And, seemingly reading me, the groans of the land grew louder. More haunting, more afraid. The anger in the air grew more desperate and biting, sinking into my soul like fangs. But still I stood my ground, more certain that I was correct, and waited for the filtered morning light to hit me through the Throne.

In what felt like an hour, the light hit my face, bathed me in relief. I blinked. I felt, heard the land around me screaming, crying out, yelling like a storm. But when I reopened my eyes, I was… back. In New Mexico. The sea of hoodoos was gone, the hate in the air, vanished. The groans were silenced and the wind had returned. And as swiftly as I could, I gathered my bearing and ran.

I ran almost the entire way back to my car, where I promptly vomited a spew of bile. It was here that I realized the tension I’d been carrying. As I finally sat in my car, I felt my body go limp, and I passed into a long, dreamless sleep.

Suffice to say I got back to my office that night, shaken and rattled unlike I’d ever been. I wept like I was in mourning when I saw the city lights. Despite having made it out, I feel like I lost something there. Some innocence, or a piece of my soul, I’m unsure.

I’m here at my desk now, looking through the photographs on the camera. Most are of the badlands, selfies of Audrey, and older family pictures. But then there are the ones I took. They’re… different. They don’t show the forest of hoodoos, nor the angry eye in the sky. They’re just, black. Empty. Like I’d taken pictures of a void. And yet when I stare at them, I can still feel echoes of that malice, that starving hatred.

I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how to feel. I have no idea what I’m going to tell Audrey’s father. I’m starting to think I know almost nothing at all, honestly.

All I know is that I’m… hungry. And I’ve eaten, had water, and physically that hunger ceased. But that’s not the type of hunger I’m talking about. This, I feel somewhere inside. Like what once made me complete is now empty, starving for what it once had. It is voracious, and angry. And it terrifies me.

I feel that, even if I made it out… I didn’t make it out whole. I don’t think I’ll ever be “whole” again. I’m emptier now, like those forsaken lands, a maw that nothing will fill, sitting between what is and what is not.

I left that place, but… I didn’t, at the same time. And it, well. It didn’t leave me, either. I went outside earlier, and stood in the wind to have a smoke.

In the wind, I swear, I could still hear something. Something distant and ghastly, and venomous and pained.

It’s the groaning. I can still hear the groans.