“Fourteen total,” she said. “All appear remarkably fresh. No variation at all in level of decomposition. Interesting.”
“What does it mean?” Green asked. “I saw a dead bird at Kinkaid too. It didn’t seem important at the time.”
He recalled the lifeless robin in the grass. After the van, after seeing her face beneath the sheet, it hadn’t seemed worth mentioning. Were there dark stains on the flesh beneath those feathers?
“I’m not sure. I need to study these remains. Though, I am more certain than before that this is not a good place for children to loiter.”
She looked down at an abandoned sock at the edge of the clearing.
She patted her pack.
“At least we now have some physical evidence to examine. Our day has been fruitful.”
“It was a dead robin,” Green said. “At the cabins, I mean. Just one more cursed sight on a day full of cursed sights.”
The concern on Valentina’s face told Green that he had that unraveling look again.
“I’m alright. Or I will be. I’m…adjusting.”
“I know, Mr. Green. I know.”
Valentina raised her eyes to the canopy.
“It is too quiet here.”
She looked around the clearing.
“I can’t guarantee if I would have noticed dead birds on the ground in my earlier visits to this place. I feel I would have noticed this…absence.”
She turned and held her hand up, fingers parallel to the horizon.
“Each hand width between the horizon and the sun is an hour of remaining daylight. Plenty of time to find a more wholesome place to rest for lunch and still make it home before evening.”
Green imitated her motion, guessing five hand widths until sunset.
Only five hand widths until another night. Another tide of darkness to hide the thing that is killing this place.
He looked back toward the Hole in Nothing, wishing he had thepower to close it. Valentina turned and headed back up the path toward Candle-Fly Camp. Green followed.
“Should we do anything to stop the local kids from coming here?”
Valentina tutted.
“Paradoxical human time travel is more likely than us accomplishing that.”
They put an hour between them and the hole before stopping for a brief lunch.
The day had changed. Now, as they walked back to Candle-Fly, he couldn’t help searching the ground for little bodies. The silence had been companionable on the morning’s hike. It had metastasized into something different.
Back at camp, Green moved the truck to his site and tried to text Alf about his car.
No service.
He was still receiving spam texts from time to time, so he hoped his message would slip through the mountain’s nets at some point that evening. He considered adding a “PS” urging Alf to get rid of his flyer about the Hole in Nothing, but decided that was more of an in-person conversation topic.
The evening was spent in the library tree, reading about an endless stairway leading down from a traveling alley and the ongoing debate about whether the place itself could be classified as a cryptid. He decided it was mostly fiction, but the subject made him uneasy. Yet, as the sun set and Green imagined his own personal monster awakening somewhere out in the dusk, the treetop study felt mercifully safe, even if some of the information it protected did not.
“You killed those people.”
