The Hike

Ben, a 38-year-old financial manager, arrives at a shabby mountain resort in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania for a business dinner. He is married to Teresa, a nurse, and they have three children: nine-year-old Flora, six-year-old Rudy, and three-year-old Peter. A long scar runs from his eye to his mouth, the result of a childhood dog attack. With hours to kill, he sets out on a trail behind the hotel.

Beyond a NO TRESPASSING gate, Ben sees a large man wearing the skinned face of a Rottweiler as a mask, dragging a dead girl's body from a shed. The man spots Ben, and a second masked killer appears ahead. Ben sprints away, but the landscape transforms: Roads, houses, and civilization vanish. He is lost in an impossible place.

He finds a cottage where Mrs. Blackwell, a short old British woman who has never heard of phones or Pennsylvania, gives him three magic seeds, each producing a different defense when needed. She warns him to never leave the path. When he strays toward a distant light, the dogface killers reappear. He uses two seeds to escape, one producing an iron tower and another a wolf, then falls through a trapdoor and wakes on an empty beach at Courtshire, lined with vacation homes on stilts. His final seed creates a wall of flame that extinguishes a massive tsunami.

In a beach house, Ben kills a monstrous cave cricket and finds a coded disc inside its head. On the beach, he meets a talking blue crab, abrasive and profane, who joins him. Ben enters the code into a console, and a 70-foot hovercraft rises from the ocean. Mrs. Blackwell appears on his phone, instructing him to "Find the Producer" (66) at the end of the path. As Courtshire sinks, Ben and Crab follow glowing algae into an ocean lit by two moons, confirming they have left Earth behind.

The hovercraft strikes an iceberg. They reach a frozen mountain cave where Fermona, a cheerful, 30-foot-tall woman, imprisons travelers, forces them to fight for entertainment, and eats the losers. She keeps a bubbling cauldron of curry-spiced human stew. She drops Ben into a dungeon pit. During a week of isolation, he has a dreamlike vision of identifying his father's charred body after the man died in a fire. He wakes to find his father's class ring beside him. Fermona gives him a stuffed fox toy as a proxy for Flora.

Crab sneaks Ben's gear back. Fermona puts Ben in a cage against a dogface fighter. Using jiu jitsu techniques Teresa taught him, Ben kills the man, his father's class ring opening gashes in the fighter's face. When Fermona sends in more attackers, Crab delivers new seeds. Ben slams one down, producing a gun, and forces Fermona to free all her prisoners.

On the prairie beyond, Ben sees a mirage of his home with Peter waving from the stoop but cannot cross without leaving the path. At a fork, Crab reveals that he is also named Ben, a future version who walked this path for over a decade before being transformed into a crab. The path ahead will take roughly 10 more years. Then Crab disappears down the other fork.

In a magical tent-library, Ben discovers a book by Dr. Abigail Blackwell describing Voris, a winged undead lord with burning eyes. A recipe for poison requires curry powder, the tissue of undead and human dead, an unknown ingredient, and peach schnapps. Ben returns to Fermona, trades hot dogs for a ladleful of human stew, and mixes it with schnapps in a pickle jar. He uses another seed that becomes a tranquilizer gun labeled "SHOOT YOURSELF" (160), injects himself, and grows to 26 feet tall, intimidating Fermona into letting him scavenge freely.

Voris's castle conceals a modern hotel. Ben fights a Mouth Demon, a creature covered in drooling mouths, and adds its flesh to the poison jar. A crow delivers a construction-paper handprint from Rudy, joining the fox among his cherished keepsakes. That night, Voris seizes Ben and flies him to a red desert, where two Smoke guards, small sentient black clouds, force him to build a castle by hand. Six years pass. The Smokes destroy the fox, the handprint, and all his keepsakes.

Voris delivers Cisco del Puente, a Spanish sailor from 1485, to share Ben's labor. Over four more years, they plan their escape. Ben realizes the final poison ingredient is gold and convinces Cisco to surrender his gold tooth. When the tooth drops into the jar, the solution glows green. Ben smashes his last seed, which becomes a vacuum that traps the Smokes, and they escape in a pickup truck.

At a mirrored building, they find Voris's sarcophagus behind a wall of fire. Cisco recites Isaiah 43:2 with his back to the flames, and both men pass through unburned. They pour the poison into Voris's mouth, but Voris wakes and attacks. Cisco throws a seed found in the truck's glove compartment. It grows into Fermona, who swallows Voris whole and drinks the remaining poison, finishing him internally.

At a tropical beach, Ben and Cisco part ways. Ben drinks a vial that transforms him into a small blue crab. Weeks later, he arrives at Courtshire and watches a 38-year-old man with a scar fight the cricket. He approaches and speaks every word exactly as Crab once said to him. The loop closes.

After guiding his younger self through the journey and parting at the fork, the Older Ben crawls across the prairie as a dying crab until Mrs. Blackwell restores him to human form. She offers him a train to the Producer or a loaded gun. He boards the train. In a dream-vision, he relives his father forcing him onto a terrifying roller coaster as a child. He learned to lean into the turns and pretend he was driving. His father told him, "Everything bad can be made good if you know how to use it" (259). Determined to take control, Ben seizes the locomotive, launches it skyward, and flies through a glowing triangle between the two moons, his body dissolving into light.

In a white office, the Executive Producer, an elderly man who calls himself Bobby, explains that the path chose Ben and that Bobby sculpted the journey from Ben's subconscious. He offers two doors: The left returns Ben to his old life; the right offers eternal paradise. The catch is that Ben can never speak of the path, or he will die.

Ben declares, "I want what I had" (271). While still on the path, he retains its power. He cuts himself with a letter opener, and a second Ben emerges. The Younger Ben sends his older self through the right door and walks through the left, back to reality.

He emerges near the hotel. His car waits, his phone fully charged. He drives home to Crocus Drive. His children run out screaming with joy. Flora holds a stuffed fox. Peter wears pajama pants. Teresa comes out, sees something altered in his eyes, and gasps. Ben remembers the night Teresa came home devastated, saying she had killed people but refusing to explain. He remembers her habits: painting horses, training in jiu jitsu, rubbing her wedding ring. He realizes she is far older than 39. Teresa has been on the path, too. They stand staring at each other, unable to speak a word about it.