6. Wren
WREN
THAT IS NOT WHAT WE SOUND LIKE
The common room is musty with the stench of damp wool and expensive cedar-scented beard oil, but I don’t mind it.
Tonight, the lodge feels less like a failing family legacy and more like a crowded bar.
I’m standing by the fireplace, leaning against the soot-stained stone, watching the light from the dying embers catch on the tactical zippers of a dozen different cargo pants.
Barnaby is holding court on the sofa. He’s surrounded by three of his so-called researchers, all of them listening with the kind of intensity usually reserved for bomb disposal.
In the center of the coffee table, right next to a half-empty mug of Marge’s peppermint tea, sits a Bluetooth speaker that looks like a rubberized grenade.
“Okay, listen to this,” Barnaby says, his voice dropping into a register he clearly thinks is cinematic.
“This was recorded three miles north of the Silverton trailhead. Dual-channel audio, high-gain mics. No digital artifacts. This is the real deal. In fact, there has been interest in it from a production company who wants to make a documentary of the area.”
He taps his phone. The speaker crackles for a second, a hiss of static and mountain wind, then a long, mournful howl that starts low in the chest and peaks in a jagged, metallic shriek rips through the room. It sounds like a timber wolf having a nervous breakdown inside a corrugated steel pipe.
Silence falls over the room. Even the birdwatchers from Cabin Four, who usually ignore everything that doesn’t have feathers, look up from their field guides.
It’s a haunting sound. If I didn’t know better—if I didn’t spend my mornings looking at invoices for Bigfoot-shaped cookies—even I might find it convincing.
“Did you hear that shift?” Barnaby whispers, looking around the room for converts. “That’s a dual-tone vocalization. Humans can’t do that. Bears don’t have the lung capacity for that sustain. That, my friends, is a territorial marker.”
I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. Rowan is standing in the shadows near the kitchen door, a seven-foot-two pillar of disapproval in a flannel shirt that looks like it was woven from the hair of grumpy gods.
He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at the Bluetooth speaker with an expression that can only be described as intense offense. It’s the same look my art history professor used to give students who suggested that Warhol was just a guy who liked soup. It’s a soul-level rejection of the premise.
“Play it again,” someone from the back of the room says. “I want to see if the EMF meter spikes on the replay.”
Barnaby obliges. The howl shreds the air again. It’s louder this time, bouncing off the heavy oak beams and the framed SAR graduation photo I still haven’t moved. The sound is aggressive, desperate, and entirely fake.
“Incredible,” Barnaby breathes, leaning back as if he’s just witnessed the creation of the world. “The resonance alone tells you the size of the thoracic cavity. We’re looking at an apex primate, at least eight feet tall, mid-migration.”
Rowan moves, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, but he seems to take up more space than the room should technically allow.
He steps out of the shadows, the low light of the fire catching the hard line of his jaw and the strange, bark-like texture of his skin that I’ve decided is just really intense mountain-man exfoliation.
“That is not what we sound like,” he says, just as Barnaby replays the recording a third time.
He doesn’t shout it. It isn’t even loud.
It’s delivered with the flat, unadorned certainty of a man stating the current temperature or the fact that water is wet.
It’s an instinctive correction, a reflex that happened before his brain could put a filter on his mouth.
He sounds bored by the inaccuracy of it.
The silence that follows is different than it was after the second replay of the recording.
It’s heavier. Barnaby blinks, his phone still gripped in his hand, looking up at the man who currently towers over his entire research team.
Rowan is staring at the speaker as if he’s considering stepping on it just to end its suffering.
“Excuse me?” Barnaby asks, his voice cracking slightly.
Rowan doesn’t blink. He doesn’t even look at Barnaby.
He keeps his eyes on the blinking blue light of the speaker, his hands hanging loose at his sides, though his fingers are curled slightly into his palms. He looks like a man who has just been told the sky is green and is trying to decide if it’s worth the energy to argue.
“The pitch is wrong,” Rowan says, his voice like gravel grinding on granite. “Too much throat. Not enough chest. And the ending—that’s a coyote with a cold. It’s a mess.”
Barnaby laughs, but it’s a nervous, jagged sound that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He looks around at his team for backup, but they’re too busy staring at the sheer physical reality of Rowan Warden. “A mess? This is the Silverton recording. It’s been verified by three different bio-acousticians.”
Rowan finally shifts his gaze to Barnaby. It’s a slow, heavy movement. Being looked at by Rowan is like being measured for a coffin you didn’t know you needed. There is an absolute lack of doubt in his eyes that makes everyone else in the room look like they’re made of wet cardboard.
“Then your acousticians are deaf,” Rowan says. “Or they’ve never actually been in the woods after dark. Either way, that sound is a lie.”
He doesn’t wait for a rebuttal, nor does he look at me as he turns and walks back through the kitchen door.
His boots don’t even make a sound as he walks, which is peculiar because these floorboards creak when you look at them wrong.
He disappears through the doorway, the heavy door swinging shut behind him with a finality that leaves the air in the common room feeling thin.
I stay where I am. I don’t move, don’t even breathe for a few seconds.
I just stare at the closed door, my mind doing a slow, dizzying loop around the words he just dropped into the room like a live grenade.
My art history degree might be useless when it comes to paying the electric bill, but it taught me how to pay attention to the details.
“Well,” Barnaby says, trying to regain his footing. “Local color. You can’t beat it for the atmosphere, right? Every lodge has a crank who thinks he knows better than the equipment.”
His team nods, but it’s half-hearted, their gazes drifting between the speaker and the door.
The magic of the “real deal” has been sucked out of the room, replaced by the lingering weight of a man who didn’t look like he was pretending.
The recording plays one more time—Barnaby must have hit the button by accident—and this time, it sounds exactly like what Rowan said. It sounds like a coyote with a cold.
I push off from the fireplace. My hands are freezing, a sharp contrast to the heat of the stones.
I need to go back to the office, check the hotline logs.
I need to do anything that involves numbers and marketing and the safe, digital fiction I’ve built to keep this place running.
I stride into the lobby, my father’s boots feeling four sizes too big, my heart thrumming irregularly against my ribs, but I dismiss it as a side-effect of too much caffeine and stress.
I walk past the gift shop, where the HIDE & SEEK WORLD CHAMPION shirts are still stacked on the shelf.
I think of Rowan buying one. I think of the way he looked at the plush toys.
I think of the way he looked at the speaker.
Mostly, I think about the sentence he uttered. The grammar of the revelation.
I get behind the desk and open the ledger, but the numbers don’t make sense.
They’re just black ink on white paper, static and meaningless.
I find myself replaying the moment in the common room over and over.
I can hear the crackle of the fire. I can hear Barnaby’s breathing.
I can hear the exact, dry timber of Rowan’s voice.
He didn’t say “That is not what they sound like.” He didn’t say “That is not what he sounds like.” He didn’t even say “That’s not it.”
He used a collective. A plural. An admission of belonging.
I tap my pen against the oak desk, the sound sharp in the quiet of the empty lobby. The mountain is dark outside the window, a vast, black shape that feels less like scenery and more like a witness.
My mind is working overtime. How did the trail cameras keep getting turned toward the trees? How was he able to appear out of thin air the day I checked said cameras? Why did he never make a sound when he walked? The sheer size of the man should register on the floorboards of the lodge.
I’m a smart woman. I’m a marketing expert whose late-night whim turned into a viral sensation.
I know how to curate a mystery and spot a bit.
But as I sit there in the dim light of the lobby, the silence of the woods pressing against the glass, I realize I’ve been looking at the icons and missing the landscape.
I’ve been so busy faking a legend that I didn’t notice I might be living in one.
I close the ledger. I don’t need the numbers.
I need to think about the way he said those words.
Involuntary. Fast. Certain. Like a man correcting a typo in his own name.
He hadn’t been trying to convince us. He had been stating a fact of his existence, and the fact was too big for the room to hold.
I look at the door to the kitchen. Is he still in there?
Probably. He’s likely helping Marge with the heavy crates or staring at a wall with that patience that I found irritating up until ten minutes ago and now find terrifying.
I should go back there and demand an explanation for what he said.
This is my lodge. I should know all the people who help out here.
But I don’t move. I stay behind the desk, the anchor of the Cassidy legacy, and let the word settle into the floorboards like a secret.
It’s a small word. Two letters. A bridge between the human world of Bluetooth speakers and the dark world of the high timber.
It’s a word that changes everything, and yet, it changes nothing at all.
A new notification pings on the hotline dashboard on my laptop. A hiker in the Cascades thinks they saw a hairy giant near the ridge. Usually, I’d be drafting a witty response, something about grainy photos and forest fashion. Tonight, I just stare at the red dot until it feels like a warning.
I close the laptop. I don’t want the internet right now. I don’t want the marketing. I want the truth, even if the truth is seven-foot-two and buys tacky T-shirts in my gift shop.
I sit in the dark, the lodge creaking around me, a tired old house that has seen generations of my family come and go.
It feels like it’s holding its breath, too.
It feels like it’s been waiting for me to catch up to the things it already knows.
My father’s boots are where I left them after I wore them today.
The sign still leans five degrees to the left.
But the air in the lobby is different now.
It’s thicker, heavier. Charged with the kind of energy that Barnaby’s meters will never be able to catch.
I close my eyes and rub my temples.
We.
That word echoes through my mind.
I find myself tracing the grain of the oak desk, my finger following a deep, jagged scar in the wood where a guest’s trunk must have caught it decades ago.
My brain is a frantic machine, trying to find a way to make that pronoun mean anything else.
Maybe Rowan was talking about the town? We, the residents of Silverton?
No. Even Barnaby, in all his delusional glory, wouldn’t claim to be part of the species that makes those sounds.
Rowan hadn’t been speaking as a local, but as an authority on the sound itself.
As a peer of the thing on the recording.
Only, according to him, a better-sounding one.
The math is inescapable. If I were an art historian looking at a disputed canvas, I’d be looking for the brushstroke that the forger couldn’t replicate—the one movement so instinctive it serves as a signature. Rowan’s signature is that ‘we’.
Could he really be the thing I’ve been marketing?
I stand up, my knees feeling a little like jelly, heart beating wildly, and walk to the front doors.
I need air that doesn’t smell like beard oil and desperation.
I push through the heavy wood and step out onto the porch.
The night air holds a sharp, biting chill that usually makes me want to retreat back to the radiator, but tonight I welcome it.
I lean against the railing, looking out over the gravel lot and toward the dark, impenetrable wall of the forest. Somewhere out there, the real version of that howl exists.
Or something like it. Something Rowan knows well enough to defend.
A shadow moves near the edge of the light.
My heart does a frantic double-tap against my ribs, but it’s just Walt heading toward the tool shed with a flashlight that’s beginning to dim.
He’s been here since my grandfather’s time.
He knows every inch of these woods. I wonder, briefly, if he knows what’s in them.
I wonder if Marge knows. I wonder if my family has been the keepers of the gift shop or the keepers of the secret for the last hundred years.
There had been something in the way Rowan had looked at me when he told me his name.
As if he had been looking for recognition.
I think back to Rowan holding that HIDE & SEEK WORLD CHAMPION shirt.
He hadn’t seen it as a joke, but a statement of fact.
I grip the railing tighter, the cold wood biting into my palms. The hotline, the viral photos, the so-called experts in the common room…
I’ve been treating this all like a game of strategy, a way to win a war against the bank. But…
Suddenly, it all makes sense. His distaste for the ring lights and the cameras. The increase in people in the woods. The drones he complained about. Telling me to stop the hotline.
Could it really be? Or was I losing my mind? Was the hotline getting to me? Turning me into a believer?
I burst out laughing. Yeah, there’s no way. Rowan is just really committed to being grumpy. He doesn’t like that people are going into the woods and disturbing the silence with their drones and their cameras. He was just trying to scare the tourists off.
That’s all it is.