Chapter 8 A Growl in the Aftermath #2
She held up the pillowcase in her right hand. Balled up her left fist, and plunged it into the bag. Her face was calm, but Green saw the moment when her shoulders tensed. She withdrew her arm. There were no visible marks. She handed the bag to Green.
“Your turn. Do what I did. Fist closed, nondominant hand.”
The pillowcase was heavy. It felt like a brick in a bag. His stomach turned and, in an instant, he felt both cold and sweaty. A panic rose in his chest, a certain urgency that if he didn’t do exactly what Valentina said at that exact moment, he would never be able to do it.
He did it.
He closed his fist. Squeezed his eyes shut. And stuffed his left arm into the pillowcase.
He felt his knuckles resting against something hard, cool, and smooth like heavy plastic. Then, the rigid surface moved away and an electric shock jolted through his thumb. He sucked in a breath and yanked his arm free.
He held up his left hand and opened his eyes, fearing what he might see. There was nothing. A little redness in the fleshy rise where his thumb joined his palm.
“Ow. Now what happens?”
He looked up at Valentina and felt dizzy from the sight.
Her arm was gone.
No, not gone, made of water with twisting threads of shadow running through it like veins of smoke.
The top of her head was the same and the effect was moving, spreading downward.
Green watched the line of nothing reach her eyes and the color drain away.
It looked as though Valentina had been a tank full of living pigments and now she had sprung a leak.
He looked down and made a choked gasp when he saw the leak was literal.
Pinks and grays were pooling at Valentina’s feet, glistening wetly on the leaves like spilled paint.
“What’s happening? What’s happening to you?”
“Stay calm, Mr. Green. The venom will not hurt you, but it does affect your perception. Vision especially. It will conceal us, but it also alters our senses in unpredictable ways. Trust my voice. Be suspicious of your eyes.”
Green checked his own arm again and saw the same unpleasant image. Inky branches stretching through dim water. A drowned tree in a rising flood. The sight made his stomach turn.
She tied off the pillowcase and returned it to her backpack.
“We will return this creature to its burrow with our apologies this evening.”
As she stowed the pillowcase with one hand, the other pulled from the bag a section of gnarled log covered in moss.
It looked like something she might have just plucked from the forest floor, a joint of punky wood, except it had a polished leather strap attached at each end.
She tossed it over one transparent shoulder to hang at her hip, then hoisted on her backpack.
“Follow me.”
She moved on in the direction of the gunshots.
Keeping up with her was a weightless, drunken experience. She was unpleasant to look at, emotionally and physically, a ghost image that his brain was desperate to blink away.
The discomfort was amplified by the fact that Green could no longer see his own limbs, which made him feel further untethered from reality. A phantom following a phantom. Only his heavy breathing and pounding heart kept him feeling anchored and alive.
There were other changes to his vision too.
Every tree was outlined in a green shimmer that called to mind night vision goggles.
Points of light like living campfire sparks scurried about the underbrush and darted through the air.
He didn’t know whether they were insects or inventions of his altered perception.
Thorns and briars tore at his hands and face as they rushed onward. Green pictured himself bleeding rainwater, clear rivulets tumbling into the dark soil. He had no options. Continue to move forward or fall bodily like a mist and feel himself drunk down into the rich, thirsting earth.
His mind groped for handholds. Fragments of memory. Bits of old learning. Essays from college English.
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
He risked closing his eyes for a moment. Mercifully, his eyelids still shut out the light. Then he wasn’t actually transparent. It was an illusion.
In that reassuring inner darkness, he felt for himself and found the familiar comfort of breath.
In and out. The smell of the forest and the dry paper crunch of leaves underfoot.
With his eyes closed, nothing had changed.
He could always retreat there. In the blink of an eye, he could retreat there.
She stopped at the edge of a clearing. Not far ahead, Green saw a circle of squat yellow cabins. Off to the left, partially concealed by another police vehicle, a line of crime scene tape swayed and fluttered in the wind.
He stepped up beside his teacher.
“How are you acclimating, Mr. Green?”
“Not great, but I’m still here.”
He thought Valentina nodded. It was hard to tell.
“Understand that it is not that they can’t see us. It is that they don’t want to on a cellular level. We have, essentially, become cryptids. I have a great deal of experience studying odd and hidden things and even I deeply dislike looking at you in your current state.”
He felt the bile rising in his throat as he tried to watch her speak, so he closed his eyes again.
“We will move unaccosted. Often, people will even unconsciously answer direct questions in order to be rid of us. They won’t remember the questions because we are currently damaging to their hold on reality and their mental immune system rejects us.
We are not, however, immune to stray bullets or the attention of aggressive cryptids, but I have contingency plans. ”
Valentina patted the rotten log at her side with a spectral hand.
She turned and left the tree line. Green followed, wondering how frequently his new teacher had needed to worry about stray bullets or deadly cryptids.
A cruiser and a white van were the only vehicles at the scene.
Beyond an oblong ring of yellow police tape strung from tree to tree around the nearest cabin’s fire ring, two deputies were standing by the hood of the cruiser, looking off into the woods.
The deputies, a man with a shaved head and a woman with a ponytail, looked unhappy.
A gaunt young man in blue scrubs was walking away from the pair, scowling.
Shaved Head was holstering his weapon as Green and Valentina approached. Green saw the moment both cops heard their footsteps. Their heads swung toward the sound. Apologies and explanations raced to Green’s lips, but the cops made a face like they had bitten into a lemon and looked away.
Valentina spoke in a voice that seemed entirely too loud to Green.
“Observe and listen.”
If the deputies heard her, they made no sign. They continued their conversation.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ponytail said. “Say you saw a black bear and wanted to scare it off.”
Shaved Head grunted.
“It does matter. I think they’ll like that story about as much as Kevin did. Hell.”
He looked to the man in scrubs who had returned to the boxy white van.
“He’s just pissed because he almost shit his pants,” Ponytail said.
“Yeah. Well, me too.”
Shaved Head looked off at the tree line.
“Alright. I guess it might have been a bear. Never discharged my weapon before on the job. Didn’t even think about it. It just happened. Felt like something was coming at me.”
“Look, you just leave when that last body leaves. Should be soon. I’ll drive you down to your cruiser.”
It was surreal.
Green and Valentina stood fifteen feet off from the officers, loitering in broad daylight, eavesdropping on the police. It was like walking onstage during a play, all the actors pretending not to notice.
It was stranger still when Valentina spoke. She wasn’t even bothering to whisper.
“Look around. If we are separated, we will meet back where we exited the woods.”
Green agreed before realizing he had no idea where they exited the woods or what he was supposed to look for.
Valentina was a blur and then was lost from sight.
He sighed and risked taking a few steps closer to the deputies. Maybe he could do some good by listening. They didn’t turn, but Shaved Head rested his hand on his holster. Green wanted to close his eyes again, but he couldn’t watch for pointed guns if he retreated to the comforting dark.
“Alright,” Shaved Head said. “I’ll be in the car.”
“Sounds good. I’m gonna walk that little field again. I don’t like that we haven’t found any paraphernalia. Gotta be ODs, but they must have chucked their kit someplace.”
Shaved Head looked back to the tree line.
“Hey, maybe don’t. Not solo. Let forensics do their job. They already looked. The toxicology report will find whatever there is to find.”
Ponytail smirked.
“Yes, Mother.”
Green moved like the air was molasses. There was a sensation of pushing through his own disbelief, wading hip-deep through his mind’s need to reject the scene around him.
He turned and moved toward the van.
It was idling near the front steps of the little cabin.
A tired-looking woman sat in the driver’s seat, tapping at her phone.
The man in scrubs leaned over the hood, scribbling something on a clipboard.
Green rounded to the back and flinched when he registered the van’s contents.
Two gurneys. One empty. One holding a sheet-draped body.
He knew three bodies were found.
Why weren’t they taken away all at once?
Up close, the white van didn’t look very official.
The back bumper had once been chrome, but rust gnawed away its shine.
The broadside panel was dented in around an impact that left a scuffed crescent of missing paint.
It looked like somebody hit it with a sledgehammer.
Maybe the department didn’t have money for repairs or maybe this wasn’t the sort of vehicle anybody was supposed to see anyway.