The Man Without a Heart. That January day, the guards at the Red Miner coal mine noticed a man walking down the rail gallery straight toward the gates.

 

 

Snow was falling thick, the lamps swallowed by the blizzard, footsteps echoing off the steel as if he were crossing a bridge. He wore an old coat, the kind you’d see before the war, and a narrowbrim cap. He walked unhurried, steady, as if he knew the way better than the miners themselves.

 When they shouted, “Stop!” he didn’t quicken his pace, only halted at the gate and raised his hands. The gesture was calm, peaceful, without fear. The first thing he said sounded strange. I’ve come to deliver a warning. At first, the guards figured he was either a lunatic or a prankster, but the stranges piled up fast.

 In – 8° Fahrenheit, he didn’t shiver, didn’t hide his face. His breath made no steam in the freezing air. In his pockets, they found only a dark rectangle of thick paper. Under the lamp, lines on it came alive. They shifted like a living diagram, weaving into patterns no one recognized. When asked his name, he gave a rare one, and it matched a minor who had died in 1954, a name still written on a plaque in the dispatch room. They seated the man in the security office under a camera.

 His behavior was odd. He stared at everyday things like he was seeing them for the first time. He touched the kettle with cautious fingers, held the mug in both hands, blew on the steam as if afraid of it.

 But when his eyes lingered on ventilation schematics and pressure gauges on the wall, it was with the concentration of someone checking something familiar. Date? The inspector asked. January 12th, 2147 by your count? the man replied. Silence fell. The hiss of hot water in the pipes was the only sound. Where from? From the return tract connected to your place. He repeated, “I didn’t travel.” I was pushed back. Then he asked for paper to record the facts.

The shift boss decided not to risk it. Let the professors figure it out. His words still sounded ridiculous until an hour later the mine siren went off. Methane levels spiked. The power line cut out. The man raised his head and said, “Exactly on schedule.” A small coincidence, after which you’ll stop laughing. From that moment, no one treated him like a drunk.

 

 The doctor who examined him first noted the skin. Grayish, dense, almost no blood vessels visible. No hair on his arms at all. When he looked down, faint glowing lines lit at the corners of his eyes, vanishing within seconds. His hands never trembled. His breathing never faltered. Every motion seemed executed by instruction. Simple questions baffled him.

 asked the day of the week, he replied, “Your naming, Thursday.” But when two electricians mentioned a clipper, he interrupted, correcting their terms with such precision that they glanced at each other and fell silent. Simple things were difficult for him, while complex ones were clear. He showed almost no emotion.

 A smile looked borrowed, unnatural, as if he had seen others do it and copied it. He only sat when invited, spoke softly, never interrupted. He noticed new people before the door even opened as if he heard the air change. The doctor noted in his file, emotional expression reduced, social reactions simulated, intellect high. His speech was understandable but shifted. He called people versions and memory a build.

Asked, “Are you human?” He answered, “In your sense, the original prototype.” In ours, a carrier of the returned set. It didn’t sound like philosophy. It sounded like a dry fact. His behavior was rehearsed. No wasted movement, steady posture, steps the same length. In pauses, he seemed to listen to the walls.

 His gaze often fixed on the window frame, where later an acoustics engineer detected a low hum. By evening, the doctors wrote a behavioral profile, not aggressive, task oriented, emotions protocol, behavior, adaptive. No one dared call him an ordinary man. His blood was thick, clotting not in a lump, but in a net. Under the microscope, the threads looked layered, like fabric designed to hold a charge.

X-rays showed extra cranial sutures as if his skull bones were assembled from panels. The heart looked blurred, smaller than normal. The document in his pocket behaved oddly. Under white light, it was blank. Under yellow light, flowing lines appeared. Under ultraviolet, it vanished. Photographs showed only an empty plate.

 The metal detector buzzed, but the signal came not from his body, but from the air around him. Instruments detected shifts when a magnet was brought near the chair. The gauge needle twitched, but not where expected. You shielding something? The engineer joked. Not me, the man said. Who then? The build. On the audio recording of his voice, there was a background rhythm, steady like a metronome.

 It matched his pulse, but without natural variation. Like a heart working as an algorithm, the acoustics expert said. The recording was saved as a separate file. Surveillance cameras caught something stranger. His face motionless, but beside him, a transparent shadow flickered and vanished within a second. The text noted, “Not glare, not noise.

” After these checks, the mine director signed a transfer order. The man was moved to the state research institute. In the papers, he was labeled simply carrier. That night, January 12th, he wrote four sheets. The first titled warning, the second goals, the third mechanism of the original event, the fourth what to do.

 He explained the existence of a return of testimony protocol. When a chain of events leads to catastrophe, one living person with a set of facts is thrown backward. This is not travel, it’s ejection, he wrote. His task warn of events that would begin right here. He listed which sensor would fail, which compressor would break down, which choices would spark the first ignition.

 In his time, the consequences were already known. Cities empty, people replaced by builds. We are returned versions, he explained. His goal wasn’t to save everyone, but to switch the branch. If they avoided certain mistakes on certain days, the chain would bend another way. The list contained dates and specific actions. Cut the line. Refuse the inspectors. Evacuate crews. No requests, only dry instructions.

In a separate section, he wrote, “We are not descendants. We are attempts at continuation. Our memory is compiled, not inherited. That is why I say your children will resemble me. I am their beginning.” The document ended. You trust a man more than paper. That’s why I’m here. Those lines hit harder than any explanation.

The first confirmation came the very next day after his warning. The sensor he’d named began acting up. Its readings dipped, then spiked erratically. The shift engineer, trusting his gut, grabbed a spare part and swapped it in. On the monitor, the graph looked stable again.

 But the old hands in the shop noticed the needles on the gauges no longer swung the way they used to. The man from 2,147 glanced at the printouts and simply said, “Time has started.” The calmness in his voice chilled them more than any threat. 24 hours later, a coal dust pile near the warehouse flared up. The fire started suddenly, as if from within.

Fire crews put it out fast, but the ignition point matched the coordinates listed in his notes. The duty officer wrote, “Time plus minus 5 minutes from predicted.” When that entry later disappeared from the log, a copy still survived in a worker’s pocket notebook. Around town, folks called it just another fire. But those who had read the warning knew the coincidence was too sharp.

 On the day the inspectors arrived, four men with suitcases showed up at the gate. They flashed papers with signatures and demanded immediate equipment replacement. But the mine director, for the first time in his career, told them flatly, “Turn around.” They didn’t have time to argue.

 At that exact moment, a thin smoke thread curled above the stack, barely visible. But in the shops, everyone knew that signal. “As a sign,” the mechanic muttered. Nobody else tried to force their way in. Meanwhile, the lab was seeing its own anomalies. The ultrasound sensor showed for a few seconds a perfect lattice of thin lines like a snowflake too precise to be random. Then it vanished. Its breathing, the acoustics man said.

After that, no one doubted him. It felt as if the grid the man described had its own life close by. A week later, the main compressor roared so hard the walls shook. The sound wasn’t mechanical. It was like the ocean’s low rumble. An old mechanic said, “The compressor knows it’s being lied to.

” That same day, the man quietly remarked, “You delayed the first spark. If you hold three more nodes, it gets easier.” To the mine boss, the word sounded like an order. From that day forward, he stopped arguing and followed the notes to the letter. The last sign was small but unforgettable. One evening, the town’s power went out. The lab went dark for several minutes.

When the lights came back, the EKG monitor showed a straight line, not zero, but a flatband, as if the heart had entered a mode of silence. “Is he alive?” the orderly asked. Yes, the doctor said. The acoustics man added, and that’s worse than if he wasn’t. After this, the man was moved into an isolation room under roundthe-clock watch.

 Soon, it became clear he no longer ate or drank. Food stayed untouched. The water glass never drained. Yet, his weight never changed. The doctor wrote coldly, “No intake, condition stable.” In the hallways, people whispered differently. He doesn’t live on bread. Sometimes faint glowing lines appeared on his skin like trails of phosphorus.

 They flared and faded as if current ran across an invisible grid in daylight barely visible in dim light clear. When an engineer asked, “Are those routes?” The man answered, “The grid.” For the first time, he shielded his eyes with his hand, as if the glow itself bothered him. He seemed to be unraveling in this time. Conversations with him grew shorter but heavier.

Your children will look like me, he said once, staring at the wall calendar. Why? The doctor asked. Because convenience will win over memory. You’ll choose replacement over continuity. At first a little, then entirely. He said it without drama, just as a dry fact. On the night of the 11th, he suddenly sat up in bed. It’s about to happen. 3 minutes later, the phone rang.

The duty officer was ordered to start the main line immediately. The man whispered, “If you switch on now, you return to origin.” The officer hung up and for the first time in his life disobeyed orders. 15 minutes later, a man from the city arrived, but the line was never started. By morning, on the 12th, he looked worn.

He asked for water for the first time ever. He drank a sip and smiled. Truly smiled naturally. For us, it’s called returned, he said. Returned where? Into you. Then he fell silent for a long time as if his strength was gone. That same day an order came from above. Treat the subject as a carrier of threat. In case of deterioration, contain and neutralize.

The lab director shoved the paper into a folder and told his colleagues, “As long as he breathes, we don’t touch him.” That evening, the EKG line trembled like rippling water. The man lifted his eyes and spoke his last words. The grid is fading. The rest, it’s yours. The official record listed death at midnight, 12th of January.

Dry wording, cardiac arrest. His body was zipped into a bag. The monitoring chamber shut off for maintenance for exactly 8 minutes. The next morning, the pathologist’s report read, “No heart. In its place, a cavity lined with crystallin threads in the margin, pencled as if something else held it instead.

But the guards kept a flash drive. On the surveillance feed, the body bag on the gurnie stirred. The zipper crept 2 in upward on its own, then slid back down. The next frame cut to gray static, the time code showing nothing but zeros. The technicians called it a glitch, but their faces were whiter than paper.

 That same day, the state office sent new orders. All launches must be approved by commission. Industrial safety priority. The mine boss placed it next to the four warning sheets and called the engineers. No games, he told them. Nobody argued. From then on, everyone worked as if a shadow stood at their backs. A week later, inspectors came.

 They combed through the shops, flipped through the logs. One suddenly asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?” The director replied, “I believe in people.” The archive was sealed for storage. Inside remained copies of the four sheets, X-ray scans, the doctor’s conclusion, and the flash drive of static. The list of names was filed separately.

 Instead of a seal, a pencled note read, “No excuses.” It felt more honest than any stamp. That spring, the guard who first met him was smoking by the ramp. Sometimes he thought he saw a thin man in a cap walking down the rails, but there was no fear anymore. Only the sense that they had listened, and that was enough. In town, they argued what he had been.

Man or something else. At the mine, they said it’s simpler. The only thing that matters is we didn’t hit the switch. The limping one. Hunters set out along a familiar trail early in the morning when snow still glittered with tiny crystals under the slanting rays of the sun. The cold locked their breath.

 The air rang with silence and it felt like the world around them was empty. Everything changed when the man walking in front suddenly stopped and cursed under his breath. He was staring down and the others bent to look too. In the snow stretched a chain of prince. At first they thought they were human. Each showed a heel, toes, and arch.

 But then they saw what made the blood run cold. There were three of them. Three separate footprints in a perfectly straight line. They didn’t wander, didn’t cross, didn’t stumble the way an animals tracks would. They marched forward with mechanical precision. And yet, looking closer, the hunters realized they were indeed feet.

 Each one nearly twice the size of a man’s. The most terrifying thing was the stride. Almost 13 ft between prints. No human, not even the tallest, could walk that wide, and no beast left tracks shaped so perfectly like feet. The snow was pressed deep all the way to the earth, as if something impossibly heavy had passed through.

 One of the hunters crouched and ran his hand along a print. The edges were sharp, not yet crumbled. Whatever had made them had passed through recently, maybe just hours earlier. They all exchanged glances, each man thinking the same thought, none daring to say it out loud. They followed the trail.

 It led to a clearing where animal tracks crossed and scattered. But the three-legged path cut through them all, unaffected, as if it belonged to another world entirely. Silence pressed down. Even the birds refused to sing. In his notebook, one hunter wrote, “Walks like a man, but on three legs.

” He didn’t yet know those words would become one of the rare documented accounts of the creature locals called Only the Limping One. Rumors of the Limping One had existed long before that morning. In archives from the 1930s, geologists wrote about strange three-legged prints leading toward the ridges. At the time, scientists insisted on explanations, a prank, an unknown animal. But none of the theories held up.

 Old newspapers once carried short blurbs, unusual tracks in the forest. Rangers claimed they encountered a three-legged beast. Those articles were quickly pulled. Entire issues vanished. In a few libraries, yellowed clippings barely survived. Their print half faded. In letters, rangers described, “The tracks are too even, as if not made by an animal.” Others wrote, “It walks like it knows the way.

” Few of those men lived to old age. Many simply disappeared. For those living in backwoods towns, the limping one was never just a story. They said, “Three tracks mean trouble.” Children were forbidden from going deep into the woods, and hunters avoided places where the odd prince appeared. It wasn’t folklore. It was survival.

 Every new sighting of triple tracks brought misfortune. In the 1950s, six gold prospectors vanished in the forest. Searchers combed the mountains for a month, but found only torn packs, split helmets, and three-legged prints leading toward the hills. The report called it disappearance without a trace. In 1963, an entire logging crew went missing. Their camp was destroyed.

 Tents shredded, fires stomped out, axes scattered. The snow around was stamped with enormous footprints. The trail led into the woods and simply ended. No bodies were ever found. Elders told that in every village someone eventually came back claiming to have seen the limping one or to have heard its steps.

 But those people were never the same. They returned silent, holloweyed, as if a piece of them had been left in the forest. Folks called them the marked. Locals tried not to talk about it, but silence didn’t save anyone. Whenever the three prince showed up, the woods became off limits.

 Land and snow alike seemed to warn, “This place is taken.” Tragedies piled up through the decades. Disappearances were always tied to one name, the limping one. In the early 2000s, a group of enthusiasts headed into the forest. They weren’t dreamers with cameras, but hard-nosed fact gatherers, GPS trackers, laser rangefinders, thermal imagers, plaster for footprint casts, even autonomous recorders.

 They chose their route from old ranger journals, the areas most often linked to three prints. For 2 days, nothing but elk trails and the scratch marks of bears. On the third morning, with mist still hanging like a wall between cedars, the lead man raised his hand sharply. On the edge of a clearing, the snow was cut with a familiar geometry. The tracks weren’t like an animals herring bone.

They were three clean lines of enormous feet. Two nearly parallel, the third slightly back and off to the side like a rear support. Each footprint was wider than a man’s hand and twice as long as a human foot. In one soft patch, the faint curve of toes showed. Arches, not claws, pressing firmly into the snow.

 They unrolled their tape measure, stride after stride, a steady 13 ft apart, no variation, as if the creature walked along an invisible line. The laser showed the trail cutting across the clearing straight toward the ridges. Farther on, they found something that shattered the last of their calm.

 An old wooden crutch bloodied where it would press under an arm. Tree bark was gouged with claw-like rips. The leather strap dark with dried stains. The crutch hadn’t just been tossed. It lay neatly between the prints, as if dropped the instant the limping one passed. No one said it out loud. They all understood the same thing. Someone had been here, and they’d met the thing that walks on three legs.

 They unpacked plaster for casting. In the freezing air, it set quickly, but the print still seemed to resist its shape warping. Not because it was vague, because the bottom was patterned, a faint scaled texture, as if the foot wasn’t skin, but hard plates meeting at angles. The thermal camera showed nothing, no heat.

But the unattended recorder on the silent clearing caught five breaths an hour later. By evening, wind blew the top layer of snow, and the tracks in the exposed patch looked darker, as if the ground beneath them had been scorched.

 The magnetic field sensor twitched in the same spots where the third foot dragged slightly to the side. “This isn’t machinery,” the leader muttered, though he kept skirting the prince like thin ice on a pond. That night, they set camp in a hollow 10 minutes away. It felt safer. Of course, none of them believed it really was around the fire. Their talk was hushed, broken. One scribbled in his field journal. “It’s here.

 Breathes like bellows.” The third leg isn’t a crutch. It’s a real limb. Walks smooth like a machine. Near midnight, as the thermometer slid past minus4, the sound came from the clearing. A heavy double breath like three lungs exhaling in unison. No one stepped outside to check. The recorder caught it anyway.

 Five repeating bursts of sound. Identical intervals like a metronome. By morning, the trail stretched deeper into the ridges. And at the clearing’s edge, new prince over overlapped the old, shifted half a step forward, as if the creature had returned, pausing to realign its stride. They left in silence, eyes on the ground.

 The official report later contained a tidy phrase. Anomalous tracks, classification impossible, the coordinates blurred. But in their private notes remained the real truth, not danger, but presence. The three-legged step wasn’t just a mark. It was a will pressed into the earth. And one detail no one dared write in protocol.

 A mile away, the third rear print seemed closer to the others, as though the thing had decided to shorten the distance. In the mid 1990s, a hunter from a small riverside town swore he had seen something strange in the ridges. He was walking home late, twilight already draining the color from the trees, when he noticed a silhouette ahead, tall, massive.

 It moved with odd bursts as if limping, but it covered ground at terrifying speed. He said it had three legs, two like a man’s, the third jutting out to the side, always a little behind, but moving in rhythm to steady the stride. It didn’t look like an animal. Its steps carried intent, rhythm, purpose. The hunter claimed he tried to raise his rifle, but his hand shook uncontrollably. I understood.

 He told neighbors, “You can’t shoot. It walked like it already knew I was there and didn’t care.” A week later, they found him dead in his shack. The rifle lay loaded beside him. He’d never fired a shot. friends whispered he hadn’t slept in days, muttering, “It’s following me. It knows the way.” By the late 2000s, talk of the limping one grew louder.

 Rangers spoke of strange sounds in the night. Double breathing like something with three lungs keeping rhythm. Campsites were found torn apart. Tents ripped open. Fires stomped out. ropes snapped as if something had walked straight through without slowing. Near those sights, always the same. Three massive prints trailing off into the forest. The rangers said it doesn’t always attack.

Sometimes it just follows 30 yards back. But the thought of something huge mirroring each of your steps was enough to break minds. Survivors came back pale, hollowed out, nearly mute. Some tried to test it. A young researcher recorded himself. He walked faster. The steps behind sped up. He slowed. The steps lagged with him.

 It didn’t just follow. It toyed with him. One story spread fast. A man went into the woods with his dog. The animal suddenly howled, whining, trying to drag its master home. The man refused to leave. Days later, searchers found only his backpack and empty sheath. The dog was never found. Those who returned from such encounters said the same words. It doesn’t just walk, it chooses.

 That phrase echoed like frost across small towns where folks already avoided speaking the name out loud. Parents warned kids with a rule as simple as it was final. Three tracks, turn back. But the more people tried to bury the story, the more often it clawed its way out. By decad’s end, denial was impossible. The limping one wasn’t folklore anymore.

 It was fact, unrecorded, but felt everywhere. In the summer of 2024, a small hiking group set out on a new trail. They were skilled, wellprepared, but they had never heard of the limping one. On the third day, one of them snapped a photo in the mud. Three clear prints, two humanlike, the third offset and stretched long. He posted it online.

Hours later, the picture vanished. His account went silent. Within a week, the group stopped sending updates. Rescue teams searched the route. They found only abandoned packs, overturned tents, no bodies, no signs of a fight, only a deep, unbroken trail of three-legged prince leading into the forest. Two weeks later, a single hiker returned.

 He was emaciated, eyes darting, speech fractured. To every question, he answered the same. The limping one took them. He claimed the creature had stalked them for 2 days. at first distant, then closer. At night, its breathing circled the camp. By the third day, one by one, his friends were simply gone.

 No screams, no struggle, just pulled away, he whispered. He begged authorities to mount a new expedition to go back for the others. But by then, roadblocks had gone up. The area sealed. soldiers told locals training exercises, but everyone knew the guards weren’t there to keep people out of the woods. They were there to keep people from meeting what still walked inside.

 And so by 2024, the limping one was no longer a hidden legend. It was recognized, if only in whispers, as real. Three prints in the snow meant something more than superstition. They meant a presence, a choice, and no one, not hunter, ranger, or hiker, was safe from being chosen.