3 UNSETTLING Desert Patrol Horror Stories Animated

📖 Free book of Kettleby Archive files: https://louloubooks.com/horror/free?ref=podcast-unsettling-desert-patrol

3 UNSETTLING Desert Patrol Horror Stories Animated · Kettleby Archive · Episode 26

Why would a shape moving across open ground cast no shadow when the moon was directly behind it? I'm a British Army reservist and a trained observer, six years in, and I watched that shape walk two hundred metres of flat scrubland in southern Spain on a clear night. It had height, it had width, it h

Chapters:
0:00 Something Wrong in the Dark
2:15 Four Minutes Standing Still
4:48 The Second Shape
6:19 The Voice on Channel Nine
8:39 The Voice on Channel Nine
10:55 The Voice on Channel Nine
11:26 📖 The free book (louloubooks.com/scary)
13:28 It Walked Back Into Camp
15:45 It Walked Back Into Camp

Written and narrated by Alice Kettleby.
Original fiction — names, places and events are invented.

Read the story

Why would a shape moving across open ground cast no shadow when the moon was directly behind it? I'm a British Army reservist and a trained observer, six years in, and I watched that shape walk two hundred metres of flat scrubland in southern Spain on a clear night. It had height, it had width, it had a stride. It just had no shadow beneath it.

Not even a faint line where one should have fallen. I thought about that for months before I decided to write it down. I had a grid card in my hand and four hundred metres of flat nothing ahead of me. The hide was a shallow scrape behind a dry stone wall with a single north-facing gap.

My watch partner was Roz, a corporal I had trained with for two years. We split the observation in one-hour stints. At roughly nine forty I uncapped my water bottle and pressed my eye to the gap. Something at the treeline edge had shifted. Forty minutes on, Roz took the watch and I lay down.

Sleep would not come. Then she said, low and flat: Hey. Look north. I rolled to the gap. Upright. Roughly person-height. My first instinct was a section member walking out. Then I tracked it and that thought died fast. Shoulders level and locked. No rise, no fall. Eating ground without effort.

Not walking toward the treeline. Walking directly at us. At the wall. I am a trained observer. The gait was not a limp, not a stumble, it was too smooth, with almost no rise and fall in the shoulders, arms barely moving at all. The closest I can get to it is this: it looked like someone mimicking walking from memory rather than actually doing it.

Roz had her hand on my arm and said nothing. The shape was roughly two hundred metres away and still coming directly toward us. I radioed the section commander at base camp, the officer running the exercise from there. Kept my voice flat. Gave a grid reference. Said there was an unknown individual approaching from the north.

He said probably a local walker, challenge verbally if they came within fifty metres. I said okay. By then it had closed to roughly one hundred metres from the wall. And then it stopped. Completely still, standing in open ground. No wind, no sound. Four minutes exactly. Then it turned and walked back toward the treeline, faster now, and somehow worse.

Roz pulled out her phone and took three shots before I could stop her. The first two showed empty ground, the same empty ground, from the same angle, nothing moved between them. The third showed something: a smear of darker air, roughly where the shape had been. If it had shifted between shots, you could blame motion blur.

It had not shifted at all. I sent the image to the section commander. His reply came back in under a minute: Could be a tree. There are no trees in that quadrant. The rest of the night was quiet. Too quiet. Normally there are insects, a little wind, sounds from the treeline. That night there was nothing.

We did not sleep. We watched the northern boundary in shifts until first light. Around four in the morning I heard a single sound from the direction of the treeline. A cough. Dry and short, exactly like a person clearing their throat. I called out the standard challenge. Nothing answered.

When sunrise came and the ground was empty, I almost believed we had imagined the worst of it. Back at base camp I showed the grid card to the section commander. A man in his forties, twenty years in, someone I respected. He read the entry and asked what I thought it was. I said I did not know.

He was quiet a moment. Then he said three years ago a different patrol in this area logged almost the same thing. Every single one of them put in a transfer request the following week. He handed the card back and walked away without another word. That evening he told me the patrol three years before had filed a full debrief.

He pulled up the scanned copy on his laptop. Same grid square, same time of year, same description of movement. No conclusion was ever reached. The file had been marked inconclusive and shelved. He closed the laptop and looked at me. He did not offer an explanation and I did not ask for one.

Neither of us said much after that. I keep the grid card in my desk. Throwing it away feels wrong. I checked the map afterward. No paths cross that section of open ground, no reason for anyone to be there at night. The thumbprint is still on the card. I never worked out whose it was.

Roz texted me two weeks later asking if I'd seen anything walk like that before. I said no. She said same. I didn't reply after that. What would you have made of it? I still count footsteps when I hear them on a hard floor. Slow ones. I get to fourteen and I stop whatever I'm doing.

I'm Craig Cole, fourteen years in the Royal Signals, and that number comes from a night alone in a comms tent on the Welsh exercise perimeter, when channel nine opened at two in the morning and played me fourteen footsteps on what sounded like flat concrete before a voice, very close to the source, said something I am going to let this story earn. Tess Morgan, my corporal, brought my food at seven in the morning and six in the evening. That was my only face-to-face contact during the exercise. The tent held one folding table, two radio units, a log book, a camping chair, a single battery lantern.

Channel nine, reserved for emergency traffic only, was silent throughout that first day. I noted that in the log and moved on. Just after ten, rain heavier and thunder starting to the west, a voice came through on channel nine. Male, flat, wrong rhythm, like someone reading from a prepared text.

It gave a grid reference, the location of my own tent. I raised the duty officer, who told me it was civilian bleed-through and to ignore it. At eleven fifteen the voice came back, read the same grid reference, paused, then read it again slowly. Like it wanted me to write it down twice.

I ruled out the obvious explanations the way my training makes you. Bleed-through from civilian signals does not produce names. I was not sleep-deprived, had slept eight hours the night before. Nothing unusual eaten, nothing that would cause hallucination, though I know how that sounds when someone is reaching.

I was not frightened. I was assessing. Unknown individual or equipment fault. I checked both radios. Both functioning normally. I keyed channel nine and asked for identification. No response. Then I did something I am not proud of. I stepped outside. Outside, rain cold and heavy.

I swept my torch toward the treeline, sixty metres away, dense enough to hide a person easily. I had been standing there maybe twenty seconds when I saw movement. Not inside the trees. In the open ground between me and them. A figure, upright, walking toward me. My first thought was Tess.

But Tess did not do night checks. And it moved wrong, smooth where it should have shifted, steady where the wet ground should have slowed it. It did not slow. I called the standard challenge, full voice. The figure did not stop. I shouted again. It kept coming, ten metres out now, close enough that my torch should have caught a face.

There was no face I could read. I stepped back inside, reached for the zip and pulled it hard. The zip was already undone, not from the inside. I had never once touched it. I zipped it fast. The canvas pressed inward once, like something had come right up against it. I keyed the duty officer.

Time: eleven forty. Channel nine stayed silent for two hours. I tried to sit with some ordinary explanation. At just after two in the morning it opened again. No voice first. A sound. Footsteps, slow and even, on what sounded like hard flat ground. I counted them. Fourteen. Then silence.

Then, very close to the source, someone used my name. Not my rank. Craig. Then: "You should have answered." I did not move for several seconds. Then I called Tess on a non-exercise channel and told her, very calmly, that one of my main radio units had developed a fault and I needed a second opinion.

A lie, but one she would come out for, because a comms fault on exercise is serious. She arrived twenty minutes later. She climbed out, walked toward the tent, then stopped and stood still, looking toward the treeline for a long moment. Then she came inside and zipped the tent without me asking.

Tess filed her own incident report that morning, which triggered the first-light search. The check team found a small commercial transmitter at the base of the treeline, switched on, set to channel nine. It was voice-only hardware. The team confirmed that: no second device, no microphone, no recording component that could have carried audio.

There is no explanation on record for the footstep sequence that came through that channel. None. I have told this to other signals operators. The reaction is always the same: a pause, a look, then they change the subject. The log entry reads: unidentified individual, crossing open ground, irregular gait, failed to respond to challenge.

Fourteen words. Standing in that rain, pointing a torch at something that moved like a person practising being one, fourteen words do not come close. I have not worked a solo relay since. One thing before we carry on. There's a story I've never told on the channel. A woman was paid four hundred pounds to be filmed while she slept, and on the seventh night the camera caught someone sitting on the edge of her bed.

It's in a free book of Kettleby Archive files. Go to LouLouBooks.com slash scary. That's LouLouBooks.com slash scary. What do you do when the scrubland around your camp says a man's name back at you, quiet as a question it already knows the answer to? I had been running civilian survival courses in the Spanish interior for twelve years.

I knew desert sounds: insects, dry wind, the odd distant dog. What came out of that dark was none of those things. And Glen Poole, my lead assistant, was sitting right beside me when it happened. I sent the group to their tents at nine. Glen was not on the official course register, just someone I trusted enough to bring out informally, five years running.

He poured us both black coffee from a flask and we sat doing a kit check by the fire. Eight tents in a rough circle, mine at the north end, his at the south, the supply tent between us. Nearest road three kilometres east, across open scrub and dry brush. That is the last normal moment I can point to.

Around nine thirty, one of the students unzipped and said he needed the toilet. I told him thirty metres from camp, small spade, the protocol we covered that morning. I watched his head torch beam move out into the dark and went back to the kit check. Eight minutes later he came back walking faster than he should, his beam swinging around a lot.

I asked if everything was fine. He said yes and got back in his tent. I made a note in the log. Nothing unusual. I half-ignored it. The same student from scene 23 came back to the fire twenty minutes later and said someone had been standing at the edge of camp, facing in, not moving.

He assumed it was me or Glen. Glen and I looked at each other. Neither of us had left the fire. Glen did a circuit, came back, told him it was probably his own shadow. Then he sat down. He was quiet for a moment, staring at the fire, and then he said it quietly, almost to himself: my shadow does not stand and watch a camp.

I did not sleep. I sat in the dark listening. Glen was awake too. Around eleven he checked the supply tent, came back, and then we both heard it. A soft metallic snap from the eastern side of the ring. Then another, further along. Then a third. Glen put his hand on my arm. Someone was moving around the outside of camp, pulling tent pegs.

Slow and methodical, working their way around. We were both watching north, and the sounds kept coming. We counted six pegs pulled before it stopped. Glen swept his torch along the northern boundary. Nothing out there. No figure, no movement, just wet heather and dark. I walked the eastern side and found the pegs laid flat, side by side, set down carefully in a neat line where the snaps had started.

Glen looked at them and said nothing for a long time. I checked my watch. Eleven fourteen. That deliberateness was worse than anything I could have named. The rain had just eased when I heard it, one footfall, a single soft compression of wet heather, close enough to be inside the ring.

I spun around. The supply tent zip was wide open, its pull swinging in the still air. Then I saw it. The satellite phone, which I had left zipped inside, was lying on the ground outside the entrance. Glen was already beside me. Neither of us had been near that tent. It had been zipped shut ten minutes before.

Just before midnight I used the satellite phone to call mountain rescue. I kept my words careful: unidentified persons, poor visibility, welfare check. Glen checked the call log while I was still talking. When I hung up he held the screen toward me and pointed. An outgoing call to the same number, timestamped twenty-three minutes earlier, fourteen seconds long.

We played it back on speaker. Open air, one slow breath, then silence. No voice either of us recognised. I had been holding that phone since I pulled it off the ground. Just after midnight I heard footsteps on the southern side. I took my torch, walked to the gap, waited. I was about to turn back when the beam caught the ground at my feet.

Two prints in the soft earth, just outside the gap, deep and clear and human-shaped. Facing inward. Whatever made them was not walking away from camp. It was standing right there, facing in, and then it was not standing anywhere at all. They brought us out before two. Everyone safe, everyone accounted for.

The investigation found nothing on the moor. The satellite phone was examined and the early call was logged as a network error, which is apparently a thing that happens. I have been running wilderness courses for twelve years since that night. I still brief every group the same way before lights out: stay inside the ring, never walk the perimeter alone, always count your tent pegs in the morning.

I just don't tell them why.