The ranger station sat fifteen kilometers inside the boundary of a national park I had never visited before.
It was a simple structure: one-story, wood-framed, set on concrete piers above the damp soil. An access road climbed to it through a stand of conifers, their branches shedding slow, intermittent clumps of melting snow. The sky was clear. The air smelled of sap and cold metal.
The park authority’s request had been imprecise. “Anomalous documentation,” the email said. “Staff reported that records at Station Seven don’t stay put. We’ve had missing entries, duplicate logs, strange time stamps.”
I arrived at 16:02. The sun was low behind the ridge.
The station door was unlocked. Inside, the lights were off, but the fading daylight through the windows was enough to make out the main room: radio desk, map table, a corkboard with weather bulletins, a row of hooks with green jackets hanging neatly.
No one was there.
On the central desk lay a hardcover journal, open to the middle, its cloth bookmark lying limp across the margin.
The handwriting on the exposed page was my own.
For a moment I thought the park staff had prepared it as some sort of joke. A poor one, perhaps, but not beyond imagination. They had my intake forms. They knew my name.
But the letters were not merely similar. They were identical: the slight rightward slant, the way I fail to dot my i’s consistently, the particular hesitation before long descenders on f and g. Whoever had written in the journal had done so with my hand.
I checked the inside cover. No property label. No identifying marks. Just a faint embossed code from the manufacturer.
The first entry I read—chosen at random from the middle—was dated 2025-10-09, more than a month prior.
Weather stable. Clouds holding east of ridge. Finch arrived later than expected. Spent first hour at radio, checking repeaters. Seems tired. Drinks coffee too quickly. Does not like the way the trees sound when the wind dies.
I do drink coffee too quickly. I have said that aloud, once, to a colleague. Not here.
I flipped forward. Later entries, closer to the bookmark, were shorter.
Finch doesn’t sleep well up here. Finch keeps checking the perimeter even though nothing approaches. Finch looks older today. Unsure why.
There was no record of me ever having been assigned to this station before. The Archive keeps detailed logs. My travel histories are not so dense that I could have forgotten a week in the mountains.
Still, the diary exited, and my hand had written it.
The earlier pages recorded mundane things.
Trail maintenance completed. Minor rockfall near kilometer nine. Visitor with twisted ankle transported down at 14:20.
The author referred to themselves in the third person throughout, as “Finch.” The entries were clinical, almost detached.
It was not how I write for myself.
I flipped toward the back.
After the bookmark, the tone shifted. Shorter sentences. More space between them.
Wind quieter today. Finch keeps commenting on the silence. He does not remember writing these entries. He is starting to suspect that time is not moving the way he thinks it is.
I stopped there.
The next page was blank.
The page after that contained an entry written in fresh ink, the lines darker than those that came before, as if the pen had just been uncapped.
There was no date.
He is reading this now.
The heater kicked on behind me, startlingly loud in the silence. Hot air rose through the vents, carrying the smell of dust and old pine needles.
I turned slowly, half expecting someone to be standing in the doorway.
No one was there. The parking area outside lay empty.
I tested the ink.
I touched it lightly. It smudged at the edge of a letter. Not fully dry.
“Station Seven log,” I said into the recorder. “Contains entries written in what appears to be my own hand, describing events that did not occur. At least, not for me.”
I paused.
“Some of those events may be occurring now.”
The radio on the desk crackled once, then fell silent. None of the indicator lights changed. The antenna outside, visible through the window, did not move.
I turned back to the journal.
A new line had appeared beneath the last one.
He hears the radio and pretends not to be afraid.
I had not looked away long enough for anyone to have written it.
There are only two possibilities when you encounter a document that knows you are reading it.
Either you are being watched very closely.
Or you are the one who wrote it and do not remember when.
The entries following that moment described things that had not yet happened.
At 16:19, he stands at the south window and counts the trees, as if the number will change. At 16:24, he opens the cabinet under the radio desk and finds the emergency pack. He does not like what he sees there. At 16:27, he considers leaving the station immediately. He does not.
I closed the diary and walked to the south window.
The trees outside stood where they had been when I arrived. The shadows between them had deepened with the lowering sun. The snowmelt along the path glistened unevenly.
I counted the trunks in the nearest stand.
There were twenty-two.
I did not like that number.
The cabinet under the radio desk contained the emergency pack exactly where the log said it would be: orange duffel, zipper stiff from disuse. Inside, instead of the expected flares and first-aid kit, I found:
a spare radio battery
a flashlight
a metal tin containing three blank keys on a ring
a folded map of the park with Station Seven circled in red ink again and again until the paper had nearly torn
and a second, smaller notebook, identical to the first
The smaller notebook was empty except for the first line on the first page.
This is where he starts writing for himself again.
Behind me, the station door creaked faintly in its frame, as if pressure outside had changed.
I did not turn around.
I returned to the main journal.
The next entries were shorter still.
At 16:31, he realizes the entries continue past the present. At 16:32, he reads a sentence he wishes he had not seen.
My eyes dropped lower on the page.
A single line, centered in the whitespace:
He should not turn around.
I stood with my back to the door, to the windows, to the rest of the room. The heater fan cycled off, leaving a vacuum of sound in its wake.
In that silence, I became acutely aware of every small noise my body made: the fabric of my jacket as I breathed, the faint click of my tongue on my teeth, the whisper of my pulse in my ears.
The journal pages did not rustle, but the words on them continued to propagate forward, line by line, as though some portion of my attention were being siphoned into text.
He thinks that if he refuses the instruction, the outcome may change. He is wrong.
I do not know how long I remained like that.
Eventually, the light dimmed enough that reading grew difficult. The ink blurred into the paper fibers, the edges of the letters softening in the failing light.
I forced myself to flip ahead, skipping several pages at once.
Halfway through the remaining section, a different kind of entry appeared.
The handwriting was still mine, but the angle had changed, as if written from a different posture. The pen strokes scratched deeper into the paper.
He finds me here.
That was all.
No context. No elaboration.
Beneath it, the rest of the page had been carefully, meticulously razored out. A thin fringe of paper remained near the binding, just enough to prove that something had been there and was now gone.
The pages after that were blank.
I left the station at 16:48.
As I stepped onto the porch, I had the sensation—irrational but persuasive—that if I turned around and looked through the window, I would see myself still standing at the desk inside, frozen in the act of reading.
I did not test it.
The road down the ridge was slick in spots where the snowmelt had refrozen. I drove slowly, watching the treeline in the rearview mirror. The station roof slipped out of sight.
At the next turnout, I pulled over and checked the journal again.
The last page, the one that had been blank when I closed it, now held a final entry at the very bottom, written in a cramped hand that pressed hard enough to emboss the cover.
He leaves with the book this time.
The word “this” had been written over something else, another word scratched out so thoroughly it was unreadable.
I checked the inside back cover.
In the corner, in faint, older ink, almost invisible under the newer strokes, I could just make out a line:
Property of Station Seven — Do Not Remove.
It had been crossed out long ago.
[End of recovered material]