Chapter 5
Chapter Five
We set out for the forest as dusk was just beginning to overtake Silver Hollow. Even though Ben and I had wandered through the woods on multiple occasions over the past month, I couldn’t quite prevent a small chill from sliding down my spine.
What if the man we’d seen on the trail cam footage decided he didn’t want any witnesses to his symbol-carving?
I hadn’t noticed that he was wearing a sidearm of any sort, but he’d definitely wielded that knife with a sort of calm efficiency.
It didn’t take too large a leap of the imagination to think he might turn it on us if he decided he didn’t want any witnesses to his work…
whatever his reasons for cutting those letters into the trees might be.
I tried to reassure myself that it would be two against one if this turned into a confrontation.
It wasn’t as if I had any kind of martial arts or self-defense training, but I was in decent shape and stronger than I looked.
And Ben…well, he didn’t exactly come across like a barroom brawler, either, and yet I couldn’t forget the way he’d interposed himself between that bulldozer from Northwest Pacific and the tree it was trying to knock down.
If nothing else, he seemed pretty fearless.
The moon wouldn’t rise for a few more hours, but because the light hadn’t completely gone, we could see well enough, especially when we supplemented those last dregs of daylight with a couple of high-powered flashlights.
However, as we got closer to the clearing that was our destination, Ben shut his off and I followed suit.
We wanted to avoid alerting our quarry to our presence if at all possible.
When we reached the clearing, though, it was empty, and I shot him a questioning look.
“What now?” I asked, making sure to keep my voice pitched low…just in case.
“We find a good hiding place and wait,” he responded in a similar undertone. “There’s no way of knowing when our man is going to show up, and it’s still fairly early.”
I’d been afraid he would say something like that, although at the same time, I understood that it wouldn’t be very wise to go tearing all over the forest in search of the stranger.
If it turned out that he didn’t come to this clearing tonight, then we’d check the trail footage again the next morning and see if we could establish some kind of pattern to his behavior.
For now, though, we needed to conceal ourselves as best we could.
On the other side of the clearing was a grouping of young fir trees, not much taller than Ben.
Their branches were thick and full, and would provide much better cover than the birches with their skinny trunks or even the full-grown coast redwoods, which were often bare for yards along their trunks before they fleshed out toward the forest canopy.
I inclined my head in that direction, and he nodded.
Moving as quietly as we could — although I couldn’t help wincing when I stepped on a twig — we headed toward the little trees that would provide our best cover.
There was always the chance that the stranger might approach from behind us, in which case we were sunk, but I didn’t think that would happen.
The trail came into the clearing from the other direction, and behind us was pretty much trackless wilderness.
True, the man we were looking for had seemed like like a professional, but I had to hope he still wouldn’t think that blundering around in an section of the forest that didn’t have the slightest hint of a path was a very good idea.
By necessity, Ben and I had to stand close to one another. I could feel the heat of his body, even sense the warmth of his breath, before he turned to look behind us. All my senses seemed unnaturally heightened, which I knew must be due to his proximity rather than any impending confrontations.
But I couldn’t allow myself to be distracted. Even though it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore how I responded to Ben Sanders, this wasn’t the time or the place.
Despite the way my traitorous mind whispered that kissing him and having the stranger catch us in an embrace would certainly provide a good alibi as to why we were out here in the middle of nowhere as night fell.
On the other side of the clearing, a twig snapped, and Ben went immediately on the alert, head lifting as he tried to peer through the young fir trees’ branches to see what was going on.
While they provided good cover, they were something of an obstacle when it came to having a good view of our surroundings.
I also pulled apart a couple of branches, trying to ignore the tree sap sticking to my fingers. Well, some hand sanitizer would take care of that. I always carried a little purse-sized bottle in my backpack, just in case.
But it wasn’t the stranger who’d snapped that twig.
Instead, it was a mule deer doe stepping delicately into the clearing, accompanied by her white-spotted fawn, probably only a few months old, all fragile legs and big, liquid eyes.
I held my breath, not wanting to scare off the elegant little pair as they nibbled at the sparse grass in the clearing before they moved on, following a trail only they could see as they moved deeper into the forest.
Beside me, Ben held himself equally still, waiting for a long moment after the doe and her fawn had disappeared into the forest before he said anything.
“Maybe they weren’t what we came here to find, but I’m glad we saw them.”
So was I. While I knew these woods held all sorts of wonders, it reassured me to see that ordinary creatures flourished here, too, and that sometimes your soul needed a reminder that life went on despite whatever drama might be occurring in your personal orbit.
I nodded but didn’t say anything. Although the presence of the deer told me the man we were waiting for probably wasn’t anywhere nearby, it still seemed better to remain quiet, just in case.
So we waited in silence…and waited…and waited. The woods grew darker, but my eyes adjusted enough to tell me the clearing remained stubbornly empty.
At last, Ben spoke.
“I don’t think anyone’s coming here tonight.”
The same notion that passed through my mind, but I was still glad he was the first one to give voice to those doubts.
“So…what now?”
He hitched his shoulders. In the gloom, I couldn’t see his expression clearly, and yet I guessed he wasn’t looking too thrilled about life right then.
“Well, we came all the way out here. I suppose we might as well take a closer look at the carvings and see if there’s anything we missed.”
If that was all he wanted to do, then we should have come out here in the daytime when we could have seen better. However, I knew that thought wasn’t entirely fair. After all, neither of us could have known that the black-clad stranger was going to be a no-show.
“All right,” I said, and knew I sounded way too resigned.
At least we both had decent flashlights.
Dutifully, we went from one tree to another, taking more pictures with our phones. I still wasn’t sure what any of this was going to do to help, but I had a feeling that bringing up the sunk-cost fallacy with Ben right then probably wouldn’t be a very good idea.
“I still can’t figure out why he marked only half the trees,” he said as we sat down on a fallen log to regroup. “If he meant to come out and finish the job, then why didn’t he show up tonight?”
My shoulders lifted, and I reached inside my pack to pull out my steel water bottle. “I have no idea,” I replied. “Maybe he only works on half the trees at a time so he can range farther afield and then can come back to finish the job when he has time.”
“That doesn’t sound very efficient,” Ben said, and I had to agree with that sentiment.
“No, it doesn’t. But I don’t have any other theories.”
Neither did he, it seemed, because we were both quiet for a moment as we drank from our respective water bottles and pondered the situation.
“I’m still trying to understand why anyone would put these markings here in the first place,” I said. “Why the Ogham letters? Why not Roman letters, or Chinese? Or Elvish, if you want to get crazy about the whole thing.”
Not much moonlight filtered through the clouds and the thick canopy overhead, but I thought I still saw the flash of Ben’s teeth as he smiled. “What, do you get a lot of Lord of the Rings live-action role-players out here in the forest?”
Despite my worry, I couldn’t help grinning in response. “Not that I’m aware of. Silver Hollow is kind of far afield for that sort of thing.”
However, his smile faded as he appeared to consider the problem once again. “The letters carved into the portal are Ogham.”
“No one knows about that portal,” I argued, even though a chill wanted to work its way down my spine as the implications of Ben’s words sank in.
“Hell, even my mother and grandmother only found out about it lately. I’ve been thinking about it, and I have to believe that if my grandmother had known about the portal before then, she would have written about it in her journals. ”
Or at least, I hoped she would. After all, she’d written about seeing unicorns and griffins and manticores, so I didn’t see why the portal wouldn’t have earned a mention if she’d ever stumbled across it sometime in the past.
Unless she’d thought that information was too dangerous to put into written form, just in case someone found those journals and learned exactly what they contained.
But that didn’t make any sense, either. If she’d really been worried about a person outside the family discovering exactly what the woods concealed, then she wouldn’t have written about the unicorns or the griffins or any of the rest of it.
I reached up to rub my temple. The last thing I wanted right then was to get a raging headache, but I couldn’t really fault my brain for starting to hurt.
“Maybe so,” Ben said in response to my earlier comment.
He spoke slowly, and I got the sense that he was taking care not to upset me or dismiss my concerns.
“However, that guy didn’t look like someone out for a nature stroll.
The way he moved — the carvings he left behind — it’s all way too calculated for someone who is your regular garden-variety hiker or nature enthusiast.”
As much as I might have wanted to argue with that statement, I knew he had a point. While I still had no clear idea what the man in the black fatigues had been up to, it was a whole lot more than someone deciding to leave their own mark on the forest.
“If it’s all the work of one person,” I said, “or even the same team, since we don’t know for sure if there could be more people involved than we thought, why aren’t they writing anything that makes sense?
Those first carvings we found out in the oak grove last month were pure gibberish. You said so yourself.”
“Yes, they were,” Ben agreed. “But it could be they only looked like gibberish because I couldn’t crack whatever code they were written in. I’m a cryptozoologist, not a cryptographer.”
That comment made me shake my head. It was true, though; he might have earned a Ph.D. in archaeology, and he might have expanded his field of interest to something on the very fringes of science, but it wasn’t as if he was trained to crack the Enigma code or anything close to it.
“So…what do you suggest?”
“That we pack it in for the night and regroup, maybe check the trail cam footage to see if our black-clad friend went to a different clearing instead of this one. But there doesn’t seem to be much point to hanging out here.”
No, there wasn’t. And after putting in a full day at the pet shop, I was ready to head for home and put my feet up.
Whatever mysteries the forest was concealing, we obviously weren’t going to solve them tonight.