Page 41 of Claimed By the Mothman

He nodded sagely. “Ah. A Janus text. Thank you.” He waddled away.

She returned to the Special Collections Room about an hour later, a dusty styrofoam cup clutched in her hands. The port wine she’d found on a neglected shelf sloshed inside—too sweet, too old, and exactly what she’d needed.

Goldie’s work area looked like a war zone. Books were fanned open in concentric circles around her chair, half of them marked with neon tabs and angry paper scraps. Her legal pad had grown into a full-blown ecosystem with scrawled arrows, underlines, diagrams, a napkin with a hastily sketched mothman in the corner, and one ominous sheet labeled FUCK THIS SHIT in all caps.

As Nell stepped closer, Goldie set her pen down with a flourish like she’d just finished signing a treaty. “Sit,” she declared. “I have information.”

Nell handed over the port. Goldie took one sniff, grimaced, then knocked it back in a single heroic gulp.

“Oh gods,” she gasped, eyes watering. “That tastes like fermented regret and cherry cough syrup. Bless you.”

Nell sat, bracing herself.

“Okay,” Goldie said, dragging a piece of paper across the table toward her. “Behold: the Goldie Townsend Framework for Interdimensional Shit We Don’t Fully Understand Yet.”

Nell squinted down at it.

It was a matrix. The X-axis stretched across the top, labeled in blocky Sharpie:LUSTRUM,HARBINGER,BOND. The Y-axis ran down the left side, broken into oddly specific categories:

Known Behaviors

Observed Side Effects

Theoretical Protections

Residual Weirdness

Comparative Case Lore

Gut Feelings

“So, here’s what I’ve got.” Goldie tapped her pen against theHARBINGERcolumn. “Sexy mothman cryptid is probably—more than likely—a Harbinger, which is a role within the established omen-bearing phenotype cluster.”

Nell squinted at what Goldie had doodled in the corner of the column—a long-limbed figure with exaggerated wings, dramatic thighs, and what might’ve been a strategically placed shimmer line across its lower half. “It’s his job?”