He wanted guidance. He found it like a kid who wanted a cigarette and was forced to smoke a whole pack as punishment.
Valentina gave him time.
He forced slow breaths, then returned to the conversation.
“So far, it’s more like cryptonature is studying me. Also, it doesn’t seem to be hiding very well. I wish it would.”
Valentina sniffed.
“I have told you already that in your first night here youdiscovered a new cryptid, a thing reasonably rare even among established cryptonaturalists, and you spotted a creature that has only been observed six times prior. These things are profoundly hidden. Though, apparently, not to you. Which is the crux of my assertion that youarea cryptonaturalist.”
“Okay, but how? Why? What is it about me? I’m starting to feel a little…cursed.”
His new life was coming too fast, speeding toward him as dark and implacable as bus tires. Would it have mattered if he hadn’t gone to meet it halfway, if he hadn’t driven into the mountains? Perhaps some contrivance would have landed the wolf on his condo doorstep. Perhaps Valentina would have sat down next to him on the subway. The acorn suddenly seemed to have the weight of inevitability on its side.
“Ah. A more complicated question,” she said. “Though, I would not say you are cursed.”
Valentina tapped the tabletop.
“This moth. This is a rag moth. A monumentally dangerous creature. Obscenely dangerous.”
Green took a step away from the table.
“This one is quite dead, which is the only way we safely study them. They have a defense which is like concentrated entropy mixed with localized time dilatation. I suppose that is the sense of rot you perceived. In short, they cause instant, severe decay when startled.”
“Are they common? For cryptids, I mean.”
“No. Not common. But not in the same class of rarity as the glass fawn.”
“How did you find it?”
Valentina opened a manila folder on the table and slid a newspaper clipping toward Green. The headline read “Ancient Mummy Found in New Jersey Storage Facility.”
“That’s from another specimen found last year. An unfortunate soul opened their rented storage unit and surprised a rag moth sheltering within.”
“That’s awful.”
She nodded.
“With rag moths we look for reports of uncommonly old remains found in incongruously modern settings, then we wait a few weeks and go looking for a dead moth. Like most large moths, they have fairly short lifespans.”
Green looked at the creature on the table, imagining it as someone’s last sight before an inexplicable death.
“Is there some way to warn people about these things? Or, I don’t know, keep them away from humans?”
“We are looking for ways to mitigate their damage, but they aren’t conventionally linked to time-space. They are not objectively here. What we sometimes call a subjectomorph. So, their patterns are hard to predict with conventional thinking, but we have strayed from my point.”
Green stared at the newspaper clipping and wondered how Valentina would have interpreted his unusual remains if the wolf creature had killed him. He thought of the man loading fishing gear into his truck. He wondered how much of her field was linked to bizarre deaths.
“You said Dancer sent you to me, yes?”
Valentina glanced at the hat wadded in Green’s fist.
“Oh, yes.”
“Then I do not need to tell you that she isn’t exactly a conventional sort of person, and yet, were she to walk in that door and begin speaking with us, she likely would not mention the enormous moth corpse spread across my table. When you entered, I assumed you wouldn’t see it.”
“But how could that be? That moth is hard to miss.”
