Page 13

White fog lay heavy over Heritage Lane, thickening with every step. The weather had returned with a vengeance, the snow reaching Eve’s shins now, rising fast. The wind was picking up too, cold gusts lashing at her back, urging her forward. If this kept up, the bridge might close again…

Get home. Make sure that family is gone already.

She checked over her shoulder. Shylo was still close, still following. Snow clung to the dog’s black fur like a second coat, and yet she was still, mostly, happy to be outside. “Nearly home,” said Eve.

In good time, they reached the driveway. That narrow gap between the trees at the end of the road. Eve marched over and—fresh footprints. They led down the drive, carving a trail to the shoulder, rounding the family’s moving truck. Of course they’re still here. Muttering, she trod over. The imprints descended the embankment, bowed to the right, and ended with…

A figure, facing away, standing an arm’s length from the tree line. Who was that? A child? An adult? Eve could only discern navy green boots, blue jeans, and… a white T-shirt? Or a tank top? Was that Jenny? Had she somehow snuck outside? Whoever it was, they clearly weren’t dressed for this weather. “Hey?!” Eve called out, but the figure remained still, swaying in the wind as if their feet were bolted to the ground. Eve tried again. This time, the figure wandered into the reddish pines and dissolved into the fog.

“Shit,” Eve hissed through gritted teeth. She looked to the long, serpentine driveway, then back to the foreboding woods. Even bundled up in all her winter layers, she could barely stand the icy chill. That stranger? They might freeze to death. With a resigned sigh, Eve plodded down the snowbank and ventured into the trees.

As she pursued the tracks with Shylo by her side, the old pines around them whispered and bellowed, as if holding some ancient council. As if they might spring to life and banish the intruders. Eve stayed focused. The footprints wove a confounding route, hooking left and right, circling trees, sometimes the same tree more than once. Yet there was an eerie purpose to this dance, as though tracing an unseen labyrinth—an incoherent thought, but one that Eve found difficult to shake. She clambered over a felled tree and—

Some ten yards away, the figure slipped behind a jagged boulder. For a second, Eve thought it might’ve been Charlie, but this person had shoulder-length hair. Still, Eve called out again, her voice vying with the murmur of trees. She picked up the pace, nearly running now. The meandering footprints led her deeper and deeper through the pines. Branches clawed at her skin. Brambles snagged her clothes, snapping and breaking as she came upon a sloped clearing and… the tracks simply ended.

Hard stop. As if the person she’d been chasing had ceased to exist. Eve swiveled around: trees, brambles, snow, and… more trees. Had they climbed? She looked up. The pines, straight and broad, towered into a stark white sky. The few branches within reach were thin, like twigs. Unclimbable. Leveling her head, Eve cupped her hands around her mouth and called out once more. “Hello?!” Her voice ricocheted throughout the clearing, unanswered.

Her eyes flicked back to the tracks, the abrupt end. How on earth? Had this person traced backward on their own prints, taken a different route? The notion seemed absurd, but…

More absurd than vanishing into thin air?Imaginary Charlie countered.

Whatever. Eve was too cold to question the logic. Either way, this stranger, kid or not, obviously didn’t want her help. Eve was about to head back home when Shylo barked, a shrill snap. The dog was staring off into the woods at the low end of the clearing. Ears pricked, tail straight, as if sensing some hidden threat. Eve strained her eyes. All she could see were fog and pines and the shadows laid between. “Okay, Shylo,” she said, “let’s go.”

Yet the dog stood unmoving, gaze unbroken, an oddly familiar scene. Leery, Eve had approached, readying to leash the dog up, when she saw it. Obscured by the mist, masked by the pillars of the forest—an A-frame cabin. Dark. She found herself drifting toward it, a moth to a flame. With Shylo at her side, she weaved through the trees, broke into another clearing, and paused at its boundary.

The cabin, planted in the center of this rocky glade, was clearly abandoned. Lopsided. Porch falling apart. White lichen clung to the walls, grasping the timber as if trying to prevent escape. The front door, hanging on a single hinge, swayed lazily in the wind, creak, creak, creak… A scattering of bullet holes, likely target practice from bored hunters, peppered the crooked door’s midsection. In short, the building seemed one stiff gust away from collapse.

But the windows—they were strangely intact. Eve’s attention carried upward. Above a corrugated awning, set between the roof’s angled slats, a porthole window. It mirrored the ashen sky, concealing whatever might be inside. Someone could be up there, watching.

Eve scanned the ground, searching for footprints. Nothing. Either way, she needed to get home. She had pivoted to leave when, without warning, Shylo bolted from her side, shot up the porch stairs, and vanished into the cabin. Fuck.

“Shylo,” she shouted.

Silence. Just that creaking door, an open gash of shadow. Eve cursed under her breath, glanced around the clearing. She tried calling a few more times, all to no avail. “Come on,” she groaned. Without much choice, she hoofed across the glade, up the rickety stairs, onto the porch and—

At her feet, hastily carved into the stoop—

OLD HOUSE

It was enough to make her take a small step backward. It felt like a warning… She squinted into the stubborn dark of the cabin, called for Shylo yet again, and, of course, nothing.

“Fucking hell.” The words clouded into fog.

Edging forward, she pushed the door fully open. Its low creak whined in the stagnant air, a protest of her trespass. Her silhouette, vague and hazy, stretched over the cabin floor. Checkered tiles. Black and white. She observed the cramped space. A narrow corridor with a kitchenette on the left, a double bunk on the right; the top bed was half collapsed into the bottom. At the far end was an olive-green door, half-ajar, paint cracked and peeling. Clearly, no one had lived here for a while, not even squatters. A realization that did little to comfort Eve.

As she took a careful step forward, the cabin settled. Beams groaned. Low clicks echoed, like the cables of a distant bridge. The sound here carried itself in a peculiar way—hushed and fleeting, as if the air itself were afraid to wake something.

“Shylo…?”

From behind the olive-green door, paws skittered over dry wood, farther into the cabin, click-click-click-click… Eve inched ahead and inhaled a sour note of rat shit, mold, and rotting wood. Lovely. She kept going, praying the structure wouldn’t collapse around her.

She was halfway there, when a gust of wind tore through the trees outside and slammed the front door shut. BANG. Eve whipped around. Through the bullet holes in the door, tendrils of gray light seeped in, tiny stars in a black sky. Shaking off her unease, Eve pressed on. It was only the wind.

She nudged the green door open, revealing a sparse room. An old armchair sat in the dead center, its upholstery worn away, exposing a wire-frame skeleton. A faint glow filtered in through a square window and spilled onto a worn rug.

“Shylo?” Her eyes took a moment to adjust. There, nestled in a dim corner beside the window, sat the dog. With a head tilt and a lolling tongue, she seemed oddly calm—proud of her own defiance. Eve marched over. “What’s gotten into you?” Leashing her up, Eve turned around and stopped in her tracks.

The wall and the door were covered, floor to ceiling, with maps and blueprints. An insane collage of conspiracy, all coated in dust. Eve narrowed her eyes and drifted closer. Most of the maps were of Kettle Creek and Yale, but some were different states, cities, countries. Yet they all seemed to be connected, forming one big convoluted chart, unified by black-ink pathways, arrows, and baffling notes. A lunatic’s labyrinth.

Heather’s words echoed in Eve’s memory, Some nut broke into town hall, pilfered most of the paperwork…

The notes, bizarre and too numerous to count, were scattered throughout:

The rest of the wall was covered in similar ramblings. Each note accompanied by an arrow pointing to a specific location…

“Okay, Shylo. Time to go.” A newfound urgency in her step, Eve pulled at the dog’s leash, guiding her back to the exit. They shuffled through the green door, into the checkered tile space, and—

Something was wrong. Different. But what? She scanned the walls, trying to scope the change. Then the realization struck: the bullet holes in the door, those pinpricks of gray light, had vanished. Blacked out. Eve forced her eyes to adjust…

A figure, tall and broad, was standing between her and the only way out. Blocking the light. Eve’s breath hitched, heart lurched. A silence, long and dark, slithered through the room, and then a voice:

“Y-you’re not supposed to be here…”

Its timbre was weak and raspy, the voice of an old man just about ready for the grave.

“You’re n-not supposed to be here,” he repeated, sounding even more scared than Eve felt.

“I— I’m sorry,” Eve sputtered, still unable to fully see who she was speaking to, only that looming silhouette. “My dog ran in,” she said. “I w-was just leaving…”

The man staggered away. The movement was sudden, as if Eve’s voice had somehow caused him to lose balance. He backed through the front door and stumbled out of view. As he did, the cold light caught the side of his face, gaunt, withered, and creased with lines. More silence. Eve hesitated, eyes fixed on the empty doorway—it framed the forest, a vertical painting.

The man’s voice trembled. “Just— Please leave…” The fog of his breath smoked into the frame. “Please…”

Heedful, Eve glided toward the exit, half dragging Shylo along. As she broached the porch, the old man was huddled off to the side, half turned away, averting his gaze, as if the mere sight of her might damn him to hell. His skin clung tightly to skeletal features, like vacuum-sealed Saran Wrap. Fragile strands of chalk-white hair did nothing to cover his liver-spotted scalp. And the side of his face was scarred with a terrible gash. Long healed, it started at the corner of his mouth and led up his cheek, nearly reaching his earlobe.

“Leave,” he repeated.

Eve hurried down the stairs. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I— I didn’t know anyone lived here.”

She was one foot on the ground, one foot on the steps, when the old man called after her: “Wait…”

Eve looked back.

He was still looking off to the side, avoiding eye contact. “Those people in your house… that’s not what they look like,” he said, talking more to the trees than to her.

“W-what?” Eve wasn’t sure if she’d heard him right.

He looked directly at her; his eyes were filled with a different type of dread now. Nothing like the manic anxiety from moments before. No, this was the kind of long-lived, substrate terror that digs in during childhood and gnaws at your bones and skin and keeps eating away until you’re rotting in the dirt.

“The family…” he said. “That’s not what they look like.”

Eve shook her head. “I— I don’t understand…”

“You need to be careful,” he added. “Get them to leave. Whatever means necessary…” Before Eve could respond, he stomped off into the dimness of the cabin, crashing the door shut in his wake.

Deeply disturbed by whatever the hell that was, Eve turned back to the woods. Beyond the curtain of trees, a soft orange hue shimmered. A lone beacon amid the fog. She squinted. It was a window, surrounded by the gray outline of another structure. Her own home… Was it that close?

As she slogged forward, a memory from the previous night surfaced, almost forgotten until now: when she’d been peering out from the foyer and saw, among the faraway trees, a pale blue light. A light that had been positioned roughly around where she was standing now. Still moving, she looked over her shoulder, up to that porthole window… She forged onward through the trees.

Home. Now.