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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/No_Ad2754 on 2026-08-08 21:02:36+00:00.

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Let me preface this by saying that I am a security agent of the Echo Supernatural Institute. Before all of that, I made a living delving through abandoned military infrastructure searching for old Soviet doo-dads and secrets that had been left behind after the Third World War.

I was an able-bodied but poor and uneducated young man in Eastern Europe during the ‘90s, and as such with the military crippled from the War with the West I, like many others, found scavenging to be perhaps the most accessible job for me considering my circumstances.

Eventually after the Echo Institute started to crack down on the black markets I sold most of my loot to, they found me. Lydia, a woman I'd met on the job who'd taught me English and who would later on become my wife, had recommended me to them for a job as a security agent at their headquarters in Hawaii, a place which is essentially a small city's worth of laboratories, containment facilities, offices and all sorts of other amenities. They wanted to take me on for my experience with the supernatural.

The choice for me was easy - I’d learned from the woman who would become my wife before about how good it was to work for the Echo Institute. I didn't necessarily want to leave her and besides all that, exploring old Soviet military sites wasn’t exactly the safest choice of profession, nor the most stable. You could find dangerous things down there.

On good days it was a fellow scavenger (scavs, as we were so affectionately nicknamed by the local populace), and on the better of these days the two of you simply wanted nothing to do with each other, nodded as you passed with your gear clinking here and there. Perhaps you sometimes even traded supplies.

On worse days your fellow scav wouldn’t be nearly as agreeable or the both of you would be looking for the same very valuable thing somewhere in the immediate area, and more often than not that would result in a firefight. People died, died at my hands, but I just always tried to rationalize it within my mind by telling myself they knew the risks when they volunteered to go concrete-diving.

Then on the worst of days you would come across supernatural obstacles. Splotches of destabilized reality that would skin you or turn you into flowers if you got too close. Man-eating monsters and beasts that stalked dark Soviet hallways, abandoned bio-weapons that had seen the war’s end before their deployment; Tammers, as these supernatural things are called in more professional settings.

In those situations, most of the time the only thing you could really do was run - but still, to this day I have a scar down my right arm from running into a particularly vicious tammer, a little homunculus goblin-looking thing that took hold of my forearm and bit down hard before I was able to draw my pistol and shoot it through the head.

In any case, security at the Echo Institute suits me. Some days are better than others, of course, but by and large it's a good fit. Lots of structure, schedules organized to a T. Sometimes you would get put on surface duty, too, and as it happened that was where I was when all of this happened.

The day I am writing about I was at first just driving along some of the more unpaved roads that weaved throughout the Hawaiian island the facility had been built on, heading towards a traffic incident that had been reported. I'd taken this particular path many times before, and by now I'd memorized it to a degree that many of my coworkers called impressive.

It was a fine day, with the sky particularly clear and carrying only a small gathering of clouds on the horizon, wispy and light. A welcomed contrast from the day before, which had been wreaked with tropical thunderstorms rolling across the island, clusters drifting in from the mainland.

On days like this I'd often take to reflecting on how much the facility's surface could look like an advertisement from a travel brochure, like some kind of tropical paradise. Green foliage everywhere, palm trees vibrant and full of life, exotic birds calling from the branches of trees, and picturesque ponds and small lakes filled with tropical water. Then, if you go close enough to the coastline you can see the Pacific stretching out to the horizon, coloured this really beautiful shade of cyan when the clouds clear up. All of this considered, the Echo Institute really could've chosen a worse place to set up. But I digress.

I eventually came to where usually there was a fork in the road, where the path split off into three distinct routes. I had gone down all of them before, and as such I knew exactly which one I had to go down to get to where I needed. At this intersection specifically there was a meagre little waterfall pouring from an elevated position just to the left of the fork in the road, coming from a little stream and collecting in a small pool before running off further down the island and reaching the Pacific. Sometimes people would come here to relax, to rest, and in the past I'd counted myself among them. Today, however, as I approached a sense of confusion replaced the usual serenity this spot gave me.

The fork in the road was gone - simply vanished, almost as if it had never existed. Instead, the road continued moving forwards, not splitting and instead turning left some ways up the road into a more heavily-forested section of the jungles. The first conclusion that came to my mind, of course, is that it must’ve been a tammer, must’ve been some kind of supernatural occurrence. I knew of tammers who could do things like this, after all, could alter terrain like this. Perhaps it was a trap, and as such I reached for my radio transceiver.

“Hey, Campbell?” I asked, looking ahead at the now straight pathway and reflecting on how such a simple change could be so unnerving to me as the sense of confusion began to turn to a strange kind of dread within my mind.

“Yeah?” a voice asked over the radio.

“I’m at the fork with the waterfall, right?” I said, beginning to tap the dashboard of my SUV absentmindedly. “Except it’s the weirdest fucking thing - the fork in the road is gone. Now  the path just… goes straight. Veers left off into the jungle a bit up the way.” There was silence on the radio for a few seconds before my coworker responded.

“And you’re sure you just didn’t take the wrong path again?” she asked over the radio in a tired voice which had been dragged through the dirt by an overtime shift. I rolled my eyes almost instinctively. “I know you’ve been a bit unfocused, ever since that tammer killed your wife -”

“Fuck off. I’m being serious. I’m at the waterfall and all, with that bench that has the memorial to Doctor Williams. This is the same intersection as always, no other way around it.” I heard Campbell sigh over the radio.

“I was being serious too, you know,” she grumbled as I heard pages begin to flip, with Campbell almost surely beginning to look through sets of documents looking for procedures.

“That fucking kid,” I mumbled to myself. I had the sneaking suspicion that Campbell wasn’t taking this nearly as seriously as I was, a situation we found ourselves in a bit too often. Don’t get me wrong, I like Campbell, she’s a good coworker and all, but I can tell she doesn’t treat tammers with the amount of caution I have. Hasn’t been around them nearly as long as I have - after all, by the time I was sneaking through old Soviet military sites, dodging monsters here and there, she was still in kindergarten. Hasn't lost the people I've had at their hands.

“Alright,” she eventually said after a lengthy pause. “I’m gonna send someone else to deal with that traffic incident. Meanwhile, uh, protocol says that you’re supposed to move forwards and check this out. Confirm if possible if the area’s really been affected by reality-altering tammers, and then we send a QRF over and have them quarantine the area until they can find the source of the reality destabilization.” I had no choice but to sigh.

“Fine,” I muttered to myself. “Fuck this…”

“It’s just a path,” Campbell retorted. “Just a path going through the jungle on a nice, sunny day. You’ll be fine, Vasily.”

Mhm, I thought to myself before getting out of my SUV. I travelled to the back of the vehicle, popping the trunk open and extracting from it my rifle before travelling back to the driver’s seat, resting the rifle in the passenger’s seat. With a somewhat shaky breath, I grabbed my steering wheel with hands that were perhaps too stiff to be safe and began to drive forwards down the path.

It wasn’t long before I had reached the point that it veered into the rest of the jungle, and stopping only momentarily to check my rifle’s ammunition I began to drive forwards. At first the path seemed to be well-paved to the extent that my ride was actually pretty smooth, all things considered.

Soon enough, however, my route had begun to seem more unpaved, more wild. Tree branches hanging low began to brush against my SUV's windshield, scratching against the sides of my vehicle as I jolted here and there periodically, driving over pivots and bumps in the increasingly untamed road.

As a matter of fact, it got to the point that the path had begun to narrow so much, had begun to seem so overgrown and undermaintained, that I was forced to stop my SUV. It took some mustering of my courage after that, but eventually I retrieved my rifle from the passenger seat, checking its chambering before exiti...

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