Five Steps

No path led to it.

The woods weren’t deep, but they were quiet — the kind of quiet that gathers in the ribs and makes you breathe shallower. Josh had joked it was the perfect place to get murdered. Emma told him to shut up.

Then they saw the stairs.

Cut into the side of a slope, half-hidden by ferns and the creeping half-light of a dying day, the wooden steps looked as if they’d always been there. Five of them. Warped, water-stained, sunk into the hill like teeth. No railing. No platform. No destination.

“Creepy,” Josh grinned, already walking toward them. “Bet it’s part of some old cabin or—”

“Don’t go past the fourth,” Emma said, sudden and firm as he started to climb. She didn’t know why. The words just came.

Josh raised an eyebrow but didn’t stop. He planted one foot on the third step, then the fourth. He turned back to her, smirking. “See? Nothing…”

He moved to the fifth.

And vanished.

No sound. No flash. No stumble. One second there, the next... not.

Just five empty stairs and a wood far too quiet.

She ran to where he had been. His muddy heel mark on the third tread. No broken branches, no footprints on the slope behind. Just the stairs. Quiet. Waiting.

Emma gasped — choked — reached for her phone. “No signal.” Useless. Emergency calls failed. It might as well have been a stone in her hand.

She scrambled up the slope beside the steps, skidding on the pine needles, clambering for a better view — maybe he’d slipped down the far side? Maybe he was messing with her?

Nothing.

She ran in circles through the clearing, calling his name, circling back, heart battering itself against her ribs. The stairs remained exactly as they were. Indifferent.

Then — the phone again. Not for signal. For proof.

Her hands trembled as she opened the camera. She filmed the stairs. Zoomed in. “Josh disappeared,” she whispered, breathless and shaking. “He stepped here—” she panned down to the fifth step, “—and then he was gone. He was right there. I swear to God, he was right there.”

The camera shook as she circled back, filming her approach to the stairs. Her boots squelched in the mulch. She stood level with them now, still recording. “This is where it happened. I’m not making this up.”

And then — a slip.

Just a slip. Her heel caught on wet leaves. She stumbled forward, one hand flailing, one foot touching the fifth step.

The phone tumbled into the bracken.

The video kept recording for a few more seconds, staring at the empty staircase. Then static. Then nothing.

They found it weeks later. Battery dead. Screen cracked. No sign of Emma. No sign of Josh.

Just a muddy phone and a set of old worn-out stairs.