The Hike

The Hike Plot Summary

Introduction

The path appears without warning—two parallel lines carved into Pennsylvania woodland, leading Ben deeper into darkness than any suburban father should ever venture. What begins as a simple wrong turn during a business trip transforms into a nightmare odyssey through impossible landscapes populated by giants, demons, and creatures that feast on human flesh. Ben discovers he's trapped in a realm where time bends, reality shifts, and escape demands a price that may cost him everything he holds dear. This is no ordinary tale of survival. As Ben struggles through enchanted forests, blood-soaked deserts, and cursed mountains, he encounters fellow travelers who reveal the terrible truth: the path chooses its victims across centuries, subjecting them to trials that strip away their humanity one horrifying layer at a time. Yet within this cosmic torture chamber lies a deeper mystery—one that will force Ben to confront not just monsters and madmen, but the very nature of existence itself.

Chapter 1: The Entrance to the Supernatural

Ben never should have left the hotel path. The aging businessman, scarred by a childhood dog attack that left a permanent mark running from his eye to his mouth, had only wanted a simple evening walk to clear his head before dinner. The shabby Pennsylvania mountain resort where he'd checked in seemed harmless enough, despite the clerk's insistence that no hiking trails existed nearby. But trails did exist. Beyond the groundskeepers' shed, Ben discovered a marked path winding through autumn woods, complete with mile markers and charming birdhouses. The peaceful walk should have been a brief respite from his mundane life as a husband and father of three back in Maryland. Instead, it became his doorway to hell. The first sign of wrongness came when he spotted two men dragging a small body from an aluminum shed. The corpse wore a child's nightgown, her feet severed, hair matted with blood. When the men turned toward him, Ben's rational world collapsed. Their faces had been replaced with the skinned heads of Rottweilers, ears and all, eyes gleaming with predatory intelligence through the grotesque masks. Terror gave Ben unexpected strength. He ran faster than he'd moved in years, crashing through underbrush as inhuman laughter echoed behind him. The dogfaces pursued with supernatural persistence, their heavy footfalls promising death. When a second killer appeared ahead to block his escape, Ben's desperation transformed into rage. Drawing on half-remembered football instincts, he charged straight at the ambush, delivering a perfect stiff-arm that dropped his would-be murderer. But escape brought only deeper horror. The familiar trail vanished, replaced by alien geography under twin moons that had no place in any earthly sky. Ben's phone found no signal, his compass spun wildly, and the very landscape seemed to shift when he wasn't looking. He had stumbled onto a path that existed outside normal reality—a cosmic trap that had claimed him as surely as quicksand claims the unwary.

Chapter 2: Trials of the Unwilling Traveler

Lost and freezing on an impossible mountaintop, Ben discovered the path's first terrible lesson: deviation meant death. Every time he strayed from the parallel lines that served as his supernatural roadway, monsters emerged from the shadows. Skinless zombies clawed their way from desert sands. Wolves materialized from thrown seeds. Tsunamis rose to crush him when he sought shelter in ghost towns that existed only to lure travelers astray. An old woman's cottage provided his first real sanctuary. Mrs. Blackwell appeared grandmotherly and kind, offering food and shelter in exchange for garden work. But her gifts came with cryptic warnings and mysterious seeds that would "grow at the exact moment you need them." She spoke of her vanished husband who had "left the path," her words carrying the weight of permanent loss. The seeds proved their worth when Ben encountered his first true supernatural challenge. Trapped in an iron tower by the same dogfaces who had originally pursued him, he threw one seed and watched it transform into a savage wolf. The beast tore his pursuers apart with methodical brutality, then turned its hunger toward Ben himself. Only the tower's height saved him from becoming the wolf's next meal. Each trial taught Ben harsh lessons about survival in this twisted realm. Magic existed, but always with conditions and costs. Safety was temporary, monsters were numerous, and the path demanded constant forward movement. When he threw his second seed to stop a massive tsunami, creating a wall of fire that stretched beyond the clouds, Ben realized he was no longer just lost—he was being tested by forces beyond human comprehension. The path wasn't random. It was intelligent, sadistic, and hungry for the suffering of those who walked upon it. And Ben had only begun to understand the price of his unwilling pilgrimage.

Chapter 3: Captivity and Companionship

Fermona the giant embodied the path's cruel sense of humor. Standing thirty feet tall with ruby lips and chestnut curls, she could have stepped from a fairy tale if not for the stench of human remains that permeated her mountain cave. Her pile of stolen belongings reached toward the cavern ceiling, a monument to the travelers she'd captured over the centuries. The bubbling cauldron of human stew she tended with motherly care made her intentions crystal clear. Ben's imprisonment in her fighting pit became a masterclass in psychological torture. Fermona treated murder like entertainment, her cheerful demeanor never wavering as she forced captured men to battle for her amusement. She spoke of death matrices and combat statistics with the enthusiasm of a sports commentator. The giant genuinely believed she was providing her prisoners with exciting experiences before she ate them. The dogface that emerged to fight Ben in Fermona's octagonal cage was no stranger—it was the same monster who had first chased him onto the path. Their battle became a reckoning years in the making. Ben's desperation transformed into savage fury as he choked the life from his tormentor, feeling bones crack and breath stop beneath his hands. The moment marked his transformation from victim to killer, a line he could never uncross. But the path's cruelest joke wasn't Fermona's cannibalistic hospitality or even the blood sports she organized. It was the small blue crab that eventually helped Ben escape. The creature spoke with intelligence and bitter humor, offering assistance while maintaining cynical commentary about human stupidity. Only after their successful flight did the crab reveal its devastating secret: it was Ben himself, transformed by the path into this diminished form after completing its own journey years earlier. The revelation shattered Ben's understanding of time and identity. He wasn't the first to walk this supernatural gauntlet, nor would he be the last. The crab was his future self, trapped for a decade in crustacean form while waiting to guide his younger incarnation through trials they both had already endured. The path wasn't just a prison—it was a temporal loop that fed on its victims across multiple lifetimes.

Chapter 4: Transformations and Revelations

The desert years broke Ben in ways that simple torture never could. Enslaved by the wraithlike Smokes under Voris's command, he spent over six years building a castle from nothing but sand, stone, and his own diminishing humanity. The work was Sisyphean—every day brought new obstacles as the desert fought his construction with sandstorms, cave-ins, and attacks from the skinless dead that rose from buried depths. His salvation came in the form of Cisco del Puente, a Spanish explorer from the 15th century who believed he'd discovered the New World. The diminutive conquistador brought Old World charm and modern pragmatism to their shared captivity. Where Ben had grown bitter and desperate, Cisco maintained faith that God had sent him on a sacred mission of discovery. Their friendship became the anchor that kept both men sane through years of backbreaking labor. Together, they devised an escape that would have impressed any heist film. Ben's accumulated knowledge of the supernatural realm, combined with Cisco's maritime cunning, allowed them to defeat their ghostly overseers and poison the demonic Voris himself. The plan required horrific sacrifices—pulling teeth to obtain the gold needed for their poison's final ingredient—but both men understood that freedom demanded payment in flesh and pain. Their triumph was short-lived. Success on the path only led to new trials, new separations, new agonies. When the time came to part ways, Ben faced the terrible truth that meaningful connections in this realm were always temporary. Cisco drove away in a commandeered pickup truck, still believing he would return to Spain as a conquering hero. Ben knew better—the path never let anyone truly go home unchanged. The villa by the sea offered Ben a final taste of earthly pleasures before his ultimate transformation. Fine food, cold beer, and visions of his wife's embrace reminded him of everything the path had stolen. But the vial waiting on his private dinner table contained the poison that would complete his metamorphosis. As the liquid burned through his human body, Ben felt his consciousness compress into something small, hard-shelled, and alien. He had become the crab that would eventually guide his own past self through these same trials.

Chapter 5: The Choice at the End of Time

Ten years passed in the ocean's depths before Ben's crab form finally reached the path's terminus. The journey back to the beginning—watching his younger self stumble through trials he'd already endured—revealed the circular nature of his supernatural prison. Time moved in loops here, each iteration bringing fresh suffering while maintaining the illusion of progress toward some ultimate goal. The Executive Producer's office existed outside normal space and time, a white void where cosmic bureaucracy determined the fates of the path's victims. Bobby, the tanned and cosmetically enhanced entity who claimed to manage Ben's ordeal, presented himself as a Hollywood executive with godlike power. His casual demeanor masked the terrible authority he wielded over reality itself. The choice he offered was elegantly simple and utterly cruel: Ben could return to his old life, but with complete silence about his experiences, or step through another door into an eternal paradise where he would become a Producer himself. The first option meant reconnecting with his family but carrying the burden of unexplainable trauma forever. The second offered unlimited power and pleasure but required abandoning everything real he'd ever known. Bobby's sales pitch was seductive. Why choose ordinary mortality when godhood beckoned? Why return to a world of bills and responsibilities when infinite possibilities awaited? The path had already demonstrated reality's malleable nature—time could loop, bodies could transform, and the impossible had become mundane. Perhaps embracing the supernatural was simply accepting a higher form of existence. But Ben had learned something during his long imprisonment that the Executive Producer couldn't understand. Love wasn't about perfection or control. It was about choosing to remain connected to imperfect, mortal, suffering people despite having other options. The path offered escape from human limitation, but human limitation was what made love meaningful. In the end, Ben found a third option through the very power the path had taught him to wield. Splitting himself in two—one version choosing paradise, the other choosing home—he refused to accept a universe where love required the sacrifice of beloved souls. Some choices were too important to make at all.

Chapter 6: The Return to What Was Lost

The aluminum shed in Pennsylvania looked exactly as it had when Ben first encountered the dogfaces, but everything had changed in his absence. The monsters were revealed as ordinary groundskeepers. The path through the woods was a simple hiking trail. The supernatural gauntlet that had consumed years of his life compressed into the few hours of his original business dinner appointment. Yet Ben carried the weight of every trial, every death, every moment of terror and transcendence. His phone showed no missed calls, his hotel room remained undisturbed, and the world had continued its ordinary rotation without noticing his absence from reality. The path's greatest cruelty was this: making his suffering invisible, transforming cosmic significance into private madness that could never be shared or validated. The drive home should have been triumphant. Instead, it became a meditation on isolation. Ben could never tell his wife about Cisco's friendship or Fermona's twisted hospitality. He could never explain the knowledge that had aged him decades in a single day. The Executive Producer's curse ensured that his deepest experiences would remain forever locked inside his skull, a treasure trove of wisdom that would die with him. But when Ben finally reached his house on Crocus Drive, when his children ran screaming with joy to greet him and his wife emerged from their red front door with that familiar smile, he discovered something that made all the suffering worthwhile. In Teresa's eyes, he glimpsed recognition—the same haunted understanding that marked his own gaze. Her nervous habit of rubbing her wedding ring, her unexplained knowledge of fighting techniques, her cryptic breakdown years earlier after losing patients at the hospital.

Summary

The path had claimed them both, perhaps claimed them all. Every meaningful relationship in Ben's life might have been forged in the crucible of supernatural trial. The suburban normalcy of his neighborhood could be an elaborate stage set, populated by fellow survivors who had each chosen love over transcendence. The terrible beauty of this revelation was that it changed nothing—love remained love regardless of its origin story. Drew Magary has crafted a masterpiece of cosmic horror that uses fantasy elements to explore profoundly human truths about sacrifice, connection, and the price of love. Ben's journey through impossible realms becomes a mirror reflecting our own daily choices between comfort and meaning, between selfish desire and selfless commitment. The path may be supernatural, but the emotions it evokes are utterly, devastatingly real. In choosing his imperfect family over perfect paradise, Ben affirms that some things are worth more than happiness—they are worth existence itself.

About Author

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Drew Magary

Magary investigates the intersection of irreverence and authenticity in his writing, consistently blending dark humor with satirical critique. His works explore speculative premises interwoven with deeply human responses, drawing comparisons to writers like Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut. In both fiction and non-fiction, Magary often uses absurdist elements to dissect contemporary society, while his memoirs delve into personal vulnerability and recovery, as seen in "The Night the Lights Went Out," which details his own journey of recuperation after a brain injury. This thematic focus on resilience and humor renders his narratives relatable and insightful.\n\nFor readers, Magary’s distinctive approach offers a refreshing take on familiar subjects, encouraging a broader understanding of complex themes such as societal norms and personal adversity. Those engaged in exploring cultural critiques and human experiences will find his bio a testament to the impact of storytelling. His books, including "The Postmortal," which garnered nominations for major science fiction awards, demonstrate his ability to captivate audiences through both compelling narratives and thought-provoking commentary. Moreover, his work as a columnist for Deadspin and other prestigious publications solidifies his status as an influential voice in contemporary journalism.

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