10. Wren #2
The phone on the desk rings, the sharp trill making me jump so hard I knock my coffee mug over.
Luckily, it’s empty. I check the caller ID.
It’s an out-of-state number, probably another ‘tracker’ from Ohio.
I let it go to voicemail. I can’t deal with the fanatics tonight.
Not when the lead actor just gave me his notes.
I get up and walk to the small window behind the desk that looks out toward the back of the property.
The rain is coming down in earnest now, a silver curtain that turns the world into a series of gray silhouettes.
I think about him out there. Does he have a house?
Or does he just... stand under a tree and wait for the sun?
The thought of him standing out in this, stoic and lonely, has a strange, sharp knot forming in my chest. Pity?
No, you don’t pity a mountain. But it’s something uncomfortably close to empathy.
We’re both trying to hold onto a legacy that the rest of the world thinks is a joke.
I touch the glass. It’s cold. My mind drifts back to the North Ridge, to the moment he changed.
I’d expected his skin to feel like rough bark, but it didn’t.
It was something living, something structured and intentional.
I think about his eyes, the way they didn’t change even when everything else did.
They were the same eyes that looked at me with dry exasperation in the gift shop.
Rowan isn’t a monster. He’s just... a very, very old man with a very, very difficult job.
I pull my hand away, leaving a faint smudge on the glass. “No melodrama, Wren,” I mutter to the empty room. “It’s a business arrangement. He provides the mystery, you provide the screen. That’s it. Don’t go turning him into a project.”
I walk over to the ancient filing cabinet in the corner.
This is where we’ve always kept the records from my great-great-grandmother’s era.
If there’s an ‘arrangement,’ it would be documented.
It has to be. The Cassidys never did anything without a paper trail.
I spend the next hour digging through yellowed folders and ledger books that predate the invention of the television.
I find records of timber sales, grocery lists from 1924, a furious letter to the county regarding a dispute over a fence line, and an accounting ledger for honey sales, which makes something in my mind itch, but nothing about a Guardian.
Until I hit the very back of the bottom drawer.
Tucked behind a stack of old property tax receipts is a small, leather-bound journal.
The cracked leather is the color of dried tobacco.
I pull it out, my heart doing that tap-dance again.
On the first page, in cramped, elegant writing, are the words: Observations on the Silent Neighbor.
I sit on the floor, cold seeping through my jeans, and start to read.
My ancestor, Florence Cassidy, didn’t write about a monster.
She wrote about the man who speaks to the bees.
She wrote about a presence that kept the deer from the garden and the wolves from the porch, provided the family respected the deep timber boundaries.
There was no mention of a transformation, but there were mentions of a height that exceeded the measure of any man in the valley.
There was a debt mentioned, too. Something about a fire in the 1890s that nearly wiped out the lodge back when it was just a house, and a stranger who carried Florence’s children out of the smoke before the roof collapsed.
The arrangement was a blood-debt of gratitude.
We protect his privacy, and he protects the ground we stand on.
I close the journal, the weight of it feeling like an anchor in my lap. I’ve been treating the forest like a resource to be mined for content, while my family has been treating it like a partner for over a century. By starting the hotline, I broke the treaty.
The guilt I felt on the ridge returns, sharper now, more focused. I look at the legal pad on the desk, where I wrote down the cynical marketing points. I can’t just manage the narrative. I have to be the Guardian of the Guardian. If I fail, I’d lose centuries of integrity as well as the lodge.
I stand up, my knees popping, and put the journal back in its place. I don’t need the legal pad anymore. The plan is the same, but the motivation has shifted. This isn’t just about the bank account. It’s about keeping the silence that my great-great-grandmother promised.
I walk back to the desk and pick up the phone.
I have a lot of voicemails to delete. I start with the one from the guy who claims he saw Bigfoot eating a Slim Jim behind the dumpster.
Delete. The woman who thinks the calls are coming from inside the mountain?
Delete. I work through the list, pruning the noise to create a buffer of boring, explainable reality.
By the time I finish, the clock on the wall says it’s nearly midnight.
The storm has settled into a steady, rhythmic thrum against the roof.
I’m exhausted, my brain feels like it’s been put through a woodchipper, and I have to be at the trailhead in five hours to meet a man who might actually be a tree.
I turn off the light and head to the stairs. At the front door, I stop and check the lock, looking out at the dark tree line, the edge of the world where my authority ends and his begins.
“We talk first,” I whisper to the shadows.
And I like to think that he can hear me out there in the deep quiet where no drone can reach. I toe off my father’s boots and leave them beside the door, then head upstairs. For the first time since I moved back home, I don’t feel like I’m just waiting for the end. I’m waiting for the morning.
And as terrifying as that is, it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.