Chapter 10
I don’t know where I am exactly, but I do know that if I keep walking due south I’ll hit a county road eventually.
And so we walk.
And walk.
And trip on roots hidden under detritus; and get caught on bramble thorns; and just keep putting one foot in front of the other until I’m pouring sweat and the sun is slowly creeping across the sky.
Ripley sticks her snout in the second creek we come across. She holds it under, then jerks back with a loud sneeze. Dogs are so weird. She got chased by a rabid coyote, tossed down a hill, and pepper sprayed, and barked at a weird guy. It took her about half an hour to bounce back.
I, on the other hand, haven’t been able to stop my mind from barreling from one explanation to another. My newest and most boring theory: drugs.
A backwoods narcotics operation with a sheriff on the take is far from the most convoluted thing I could think of. Two cops were caught in Columbus transporting fentanyl just a few years ago.
Assuming a white person wearing a pride shirt wouldn’t associate with a sheriff is pretty naive of me, if I’m honest with myself.
I’ve been to Columbus Pride. It was very clear just how far white queer people are willing to go in order to support the police.
After whiteness, money does tend to be the strongest uniting factor.
Regardless of the who or the why, the most important thing is to keep moving. Emma’s on her way. She might have even called 911 herself. I can easily see her convincing whoever had the misfortune of answering to send a full fleet of firefighters.
We just have to keep moving.
Which is much easier to say than do. I used to think of myself as a hiker. I think I might just enjoy a nice little walk. This off-road shit sucks.
The suck level increases when the terrain begins to change. Less light makes its way through the canopy to the ground, which has taken on a moist and lightly spongy texture. Screaming frogs in the distance rival the hum of cicadas in the air.
After a few more minutes of walking, we come across a crime scene.
Clumps of fur litter the area. It’s on the ground; clinging to the bark of an oak tree; stuck to a muddy, melon-sized rock.
Soft clumps of undercoat rest like tiny fairies on ferns.
Animals fight. Animals die. This isn’t just a raccoon who got into a tussle and left bits of its coat behind. It’s everywhere.
One silver tuft appears to be floating in the air a foot or so above my head.
On second glance, it’s not floating at all.
Dozens upon dozens of those things that were on the gate hang in the trees like fucked-up Christmas lights.
The crosshairs are secured to brown twine that snakes through the branches in a long, seemingly endless line.
How far would I have to walk before I found the end?
If there’s an end at all. It could be as perpetual as an ouroboros. As endless as this crappy day.
Hollow wood chimes dangle from most, but not all, of the crosshairs. It’s enough that the gentle tock, tock, tock is near constant.
The fur that looks like it’s floating is snagged on one of the bundles of twigs.
Why would someone do this Blair Witch bullshit?
One of the crosshairs has fallen to the ground. I crouch to get a better look. It’s a mirror image of the three that hung from the gate.
My knees pop when I stand. That’s not weird; joints do that sometimes. What’s strange is that it’s the only sound in an otherwise silent landscape. Birds don’t call or move through the trees. The scream of frogs is gone. There’s not a rustle or the soft sound of wind in the leaves.
There are no cicadas. Not one buzzing, not one flying. None.
And I don’t see Ripley.
She hasn’t been more than ten feet ahead the entire time. She couldn’t have gone far. I take a breath to call her name, but I can’t make myself break the silence. The woods have decided to be quiet. There’s probably a good reason for that.
A soft rustling comes from behind a tangle of bushes up ahead. I pick my way from stone to fallen log to exposed ground, avoiding noisy twigs and brittle leaves.
The smell comes first. It’s the thick, decomposing scent of spinach two weeks past its best-by date with a wisp of sweetness I can’t place.
Behind the tangle is a natural hollow that, at one point, was carpeted by ferns. Now, their plant-corpses cover the ground in a rough circle maybe twenty feet in diameter. Liquid, dark and shining, slicks the ground. A black crop circle cut into the trees.
Dark masses varying in size are scattered through the hollow. Some are small as a fist, and others have the size and slump of a raccoon bloating on the side of the road. All the darkness—on the ground, on the mounds, on the ferns that haven’t yet fallen—blends into itself.
It’s eerily similar to the kill scene in the meadow. Too similar to be a coincidence. And this black gunk … Much of the coyote’s fur, where the skin underneath hadn’t been stripped from its body, was coated in something dark. Maybe it’s whatever’s currently seeping into my boots.
One of the masses twitches, and I swear, I swear, it cocks its head to look at me, which is impossible because its ribs are exposed to the air and nothing can be alive when it’s torn up like that.
The maybe-twitching corpse isn’t even the most interesting thing in the hollow.
In the center of the dead earth sits a box.
The box sits on a trailer meant to be pulled by an ATV. The trailer’s bed is bowed in under the box like the spine of an animal pulled down by a swollen, pregnant belly. Divots in the earth, obscenely wide and deep, mark where it was dragged.
The box itself is square and made of dark brown—nearly black—wood.
Metal bands wrap around the outside. They’re thick and burnished dark by age.
Something is etched into the metal bands.
It’s too far away to see clearly. A vague outline remains of something circular that used to be painted on the side.
It’s not large. No bigger than the width of my hand.
Most of it has been washed away. Sun-bleached.
The door—the mechanized kind meant to let pets outside—is raised. Inside is a deep, impossible darkness.
There’s a new sound. It’s meatier than the drone of cicadas. More of a hum. I’m not sure if it’s coming from the box or from inside my head.
The soft rustle again, this time to the right. The hum falls away as soon as I look away from the box.
Ripley emerges from twiggy bushes and living, knee-high ferns. The pure relief of seeing her is short-lived. She’s not looking at me. She’s not looking at anything. Her gaze is unfocused and her head is hanging low. Everything about her is slumped.
I kneel in front of her. She doesn’t react. Not when I say her name quietly. Not when I cradle her head in my hands. Her cheeks and snout are wet.
My palms, when I pull them away, are stained black.
I know it’s a mistake to bring my hands up to my nose, but I do it anyway.
I gag at the slimy spinach smell and press my mouth to my shoulder to keep from throwing up. Wiping my hands on the spongy earth clears most of the goo away.
The dregs of my water bottle go to cleaning the gunk off her head. She sways through all of it. Still not really looking at anything.
I’m crying when I finish, because I don’t know what this gross shit is, but it’s clearly making my dog sick and the blisters on my feet sting and I got some off her, but not all of it and I don’t know what to do.
The forest is being quiet, which means I should be quiet too, but Ripley is acting strange and I can’t stop crying and shivering and there’s humming in my head again and—
And in the mess of the thoughts, one is very clear: I feel weird. I think the black goo is making me feel weird. Is this shit toxic?
Something moves in my peripheral vision. I wipe at my teary eyes with the back of my hand, realize my mistake, and use the inside of my shirt instead.
There. Something just moved behind a tree.
I stare so hard at it that my eyes sting. There’s a hatchet wound of discoloration across the trunk where naked wood has been exposed to the world.
A low, weak growl vibrates in Ripley’s chest. She’s gone whale-eyed, and her hair is up all the way down her back.
I look back to the tree.
The discoloration has separated into four distinct fingers. The hand falls from the bark and vanishes behind the trunk.
Icy fear snakes through my veins and freezes me in place. I’m a rabbit that’s caught sight of a predator. I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t think a single thought other than, Don’t let it see you. And then just like a rabbit, I bolt.
Ripley is limp as a bag of bricks when I scoop her up. I hold her to my chest with one arm under her ribs, the other under her butt, and run. Branches whip my cheeks and sweat stings my eyes. A log nearly sends us down when I trip on it.
The sound of someone crashing through the woods follows us.
Don’t look; just keep running—if what I’m doing can be called running.
I should have grabbed the sheriff’s gun from the holster, but my hands are full and Ripley’s so heavy that my feet drag more and more, and then they’re right behind me, and I can feel them reaching for the back of my shirt, and—
We break through the trees onto the shoulder of a dirt-and-gravel road.
Scattered gravel slides under my boot. I flail and land in a lunge, one knee slamming onto rocks. I squeeze my eyes shut, fully expecting whatever’s pursuing us to smash into my back.
A beat. Another. After a third, I stand, then turn slowly. I don’t know what I’m expecting. What I find is nothing but trees and dozens of crosshair chimes hanging from branches and nailed to their trunks.
I can’t look away. It feels like I just trespassed through someone’s yard and hopped the fence just in time to escape the guard dog trapped inside.
Shivers run through my body like I’ve got a fever. Everything aches. I think both me and my dog are high or poisoned, or both. The idea of sitting down and not moving for a while is becoming more and more appealing by the second.
And then one of the trees shifts.
Except it’s not a tree at all. A figure taller than any person I’ve ever seen looms between two close-set trunks. It’s mostly hidden by sucker branches and cast in shadow by the canopy. Dappled sunlight falls on an emaciated hand dangling by its sharp, bony knee.
There’s a pit in my stomach. I have an overwhelming sense of déjà vu that I know the figure like I’d know a bloody tooth pulled from my own mouth. The hum that began when I looked into the box gets louder. It feels like someone’s holding a tuning fork to the base of my skull.
Ripley weighs so much, but I think if I set her down I could go to it and—
Only once gravel shifts under my foot do I notice I’ve taken a step forward.
I tighten my arms around Ripley despite shaking from the strain. I could go to it and do what? Abandon my dog? Leave her by the side of the road so I can touch whatever weird fucking thing is staring at me from between the trees? No.
Something is wrong. It feels like there’s something in me that shouldn’t be there.
There’s an odor. A scent so thick I’m swimming in it. Something is—
burning, burning, my skin is
burning. Something is on—
fire where it touches
But there’s no smoke. No—
screaming and screaming and screa—
I’m so focused on the tree line and the smell and the burning that I don’t notice the car speeding around the curve until it’s far, far too late.