Chapter 5 Job Interview #2
“The deer you saw is known. Some call it the glass fawn. Others name it the ghost deer or the fairy deer. Its discovery and place in oral and folk histories is a bit muddled, but your description is consistent with what I recall. The pale light. The transparent body. The half dozen other recorded encounters more or less match yours, I believe. You’ll notice the article ‘the’ in each of the common names.
Most assume it to be a singular creature.
One of a kind. If memory serves, it has been seen on three continents, but never any simultaneous sightings. ”
“Six encounters? That’s all?”
“Six is a generous record compared to some cryptids, Mr. Green.”
“Cryptids? Like…bigfoot?”
“Hidden creatures. Often presumed to be myth by laypeople.”
“Is it dangerous? The glass deer, I mean.”
“Glass fawn. It is a living creature, so I don’t doubt it is dangerous in certain contexts, but nothing I recall suggests that you would be a prey animal for it, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yeah, that’s very much what I mean. And the wolf? What’s the wolf called? Pretty sure I’m a prey animal for that thing.”
“That question is going to be your responsibility, not mine.”
Green’s fingers defensively searched for the acorn in his pocket.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Valentina folded her hands together and tucked them under her chin. It made her look like a contemplative praying mantis.
“I am debatably the oldest living cryptonaturalist, not a common topic of discussion. I daresay I am demonstrably the most knowledgeable, a very common topic of discussion. I am willing to say, with a fair degree of confidence, that the lupine creature you described is unknown and undocumented. In my community of inquiry, traditionally, a creature’s discoverer gets the honor of naming it.
Well, naming it in human languages, you understand. ”
Green did not understand.
Valentina smiled and the expression was part predatory cat, part evil fairy.
“It is…very exciting,” she added.
He felt sick. He felt he had made another mistake in entering this woman’s cabin, entering her world.
“If you are worried about Latinate naming protocols, set that worry aside. The absolute rarity of the creatures we study allows us to indulge in common naming conventions.”
“No, that wasn’t the first worry that came to mind.”
Valentina sipped from her steaming brass cup, the disquieting glee lingering in her eyes.
Green bent over and pressed palms to his forehead, trying to think of what to do next.
His monster remained a monster, whatever semantic games Valentina wanted to play.
An image of his campsite menaced his mind like a downed power line.
A car with a shattered windshield and a back seat full of inadequate camping gear.
Another night racing to meet him. A dead man crumpled on a dark roadside.
A gentle touch on the knee brought Green back to the moment.
“Mr. Green, I will be much more helpful to you if you think aloud.”
“I don’t know where to start. There are too many problems, and I don’t know what I don’t know and the main thing I’ve learned in the last twelve hours is that I am a danger to myself and a potential burden to others.”
His throat tightened.
Valentina gave a half shrug.
“If that is the case, it is better to know it than not. Yes?”
“It’s just…I used to know things.”
He barked out a joyless laugh.
“Or, well, I felt like I did. In my old life.”
“So? What brought you here?”
“That man died and Dancer said you were an expert in monsters…or cryptids…and I thought I had to warn someone about the wolf.”
“No, Mr. Green, I mean why did you come to these mountains. To this camp? Candle-Fly is not a popular destination.”
The acorn had its own gravity, tugging Green off-balance as he considered the question.
“Something happened.”
“Mmm. Something often does.”
“This felt like a big something. Okay? And I knew, without a doubt, I just needed to get away. To, I don’t know, reconnect with nature. It didn’t feel like a choice. I just needed to get back to fundamentals. Whatever the hell that means.”
“Not unreasonable. Not unheard-of. Rather traditional, actually. Why here?”
Green tried to think. His attention felt jerked in a dozen opposing directions.
“I mean, I did research. I looked at maps, pictures, satellite photos. I read the story of the geography. The Appalachians. The Catskills. This region. The Catskills were in a book I loved as a kid. I don’t know.
This was just the place. It felt obvious.
At least, it did at the time. But everything about the last day and a half has been screaming at me that this was all a mistake. ”
Valentina set aside her cup.
“To review. Something happened. You felt called to the wilderness and then, specifically, to this area. Upon arriving, you failed utterly at the basics of woodcraft and passed a harrowing night during which you became the seventh person on record to see the glass fawn, and discovered a hitherto undescribed cryptid. In the morning, Dancer encouraged you to call upon your only neighbor, who happens to be one of the foremost cryptonaturalists on the planet.”
Green’s scalp tingled.
“What? Are you saying that all of this is somehow meant to be?”
Valentina frowned.
“Childish. Broad. Subjective.”
Green squeezed his eyes shut and bit back the urge to scream at the odd little woman.
“But,” Valentina continued, “I will say that human ways of knowing are not the only ways of knowing. As a species, we are relatively young, but the biological mechanisms that authored us are not young. We do so adore recognizing patterns and measuring out the world, but we typically disdain qualifying the enormity of our ignorance. We were shaped by natural cycles and forces that we do not fully understand. We did not escape those cycles and forces simply by inventing spoken language or algebra or internal combustion. No, we are clever, but we neither grasp nor control the enormity of nature.”
Green studied Valentina’s face. She was suddenly very talkative and the shift was somehow threatening. A new door had opened in the conversation.
“Modern people. They so love to cast themselves as some sort of alien intelligence on this world, visiting and observing. Arrogant. Absurd. Myopic. As if our very lungs are not a call-and-response with phytoplankton, with the nations of trees and plant life. As if our bones are not an essay written in mineral by the force of Earth’s gravity.
Visitors. Masters. Fools. What gave you that iron in your blood, visitor?
Where was that water which fuels your life a week ago, master?
Some humans are as children of devoted parents who enjoy a care so deep and ubiquitous that it has become invisible to them. ”
There was a threat in Valentina’s words, but it wasn’t the threat of physical harm or a prophecy of danger.
Green had never felt the pull of any religion in his life, but there, in that moment, he thought he knew what that pull must feel like.
This person didn’t need to be told about the voice of the acorn. She spoke with the same voice.
Valentina’s attention seemed far away, then refocused on her listener. Her mind returned to the little cabin, shifting back to the present moment.
“No, things are not meant to be in the way I believe that phrase is commonly used. That is, meant for us because of some special merit or grace we possess. And yet, the idea that human purposes are the only purposes with weight and worth and meaning is manifestly absurd.”
“So,” Green said tentatively. “What does all of that mean for me? What are you saying?”
Valentina thought a moment.
“I am saying it would be…professionally irresponsible of me to allow you to be eaten tonight.”
“Okay. Good start. I guess. Honestly, I was planning to be a hundred miles from here before it gets dark. I also don’t plan to be eaten.”
“Leave? You would abandon your current path entirely due to the mishaps of a single night?”
“Lady, you weren’t there. Nearly getting my head bitten off by a thing I could hear inside my head is not just a mishap.”
The wolf’s voice still echoed in his thoughts.
Not-man.
“Ms. Blackwood will do, thank you. You said you intended to be here. Did you have a goal in mind beyond simply being here?”
“Well, no, not really. I kinda assumed just being here would be enough of a challenge and it turns out I was underestimating.”
Valentina retrieved her cup and studied her coffee.
“And how long are, or were, you planning to face the challenge of being here in the mountains?”
“For the foreseeable future.”
He answered quickly and instantly distrusted the words. That was the acorn’s answer. The acorn he still hadn’t mentioned to Valentina. The acorn that had been by his side since his near death. The acorn that he couldn’t even define for himself.
“Mr. Green, I find myself in the uncomfortable and presumptuous position of feeling I know what you, a near stranger, should be doing with your time. ‘Should’ is by its very nature a treacherous and untrustworthy word, but if you are interested, I’ll risk overstepping and speak my thoughts plainly. ”
The offer felt like a trap.
But her bait, the chance to shrink the towering unknown crushing his bones, was too tempting to resist.
“Yes, God, please. At this point, I’ll take anything.”
“You may want to reserve your judgment on that, but so be it. Come over here.”
Valentina stood and returned to the table with the giant moth.
He followed.
“Describe what you see, Mr. Green.”
The smell hit him first. It was like burnt dust, that domestic brimstone scent of the first time the furnace kicks on in late autumn. It was old books and mildewed paper. Kitchen scraps and dog breath.
He looked hard at the moth and searched for words.
It was monstrous, but it wasn’t threatening. It was still and silent and approachable. And, somehow, to his own surprise, he found the creature oddly beautiful.