He didn’t know. He wasn’t certain he wanted to know. He just wished he could make it stop.
Over the next few days,Valentina started her camp basics training as promised. It was a dizzying array of subjects ranging from solar panel maintenance to splitting and stacking firewood. Some of the skills seemed modern. Others felt anachronistic. They used an old tin throat lozenges box stuffed with cotton scraps and wedged in a bed of smoldering coals to make char cloth for catching sparks from flint and steel. They covered navigation with a map and compass. They used a post-hole digger to excavate a privy pit near Green’s camp. They did laundry creek-side with a washboard and ringer. They took inventory of winter provisions and discussed best practices for food storage, preservation, and thwarting mice.
Green was certain he couldn’t retain the information at the pace with which Valentina delivered it, but he thought he understood her motivations. She was trying to build him up, trying to make him feel less like a guest and more like a resident in his new life. Information, he was beginning to understand, was Valentina’s love language, her currency of care.
During the lessons, he could feel her trying to keep cryptonature out of the conversation. When he asked about their work and the lingering threat, she would only say, “I am not ignoring the subject, but this is the best use of our time at present.”
As afternoon of the third day arrived, the lessons culminated in new housing for Green. He moved from the cot in the cabin to an insulated structure with a corrugated metal roof, a wooden plank floor, and a modern wood-burning stove that you didn’t need a pot holder to open safely. The structure seemed new, but he couldn’t recall whether it had been there the day before.
The place was small and smelled like sawdust. It was ugly. He loved it.
He named his new home “the shed” and, if he thought he understood Valentina’s motivations for the days’ lessons before, moving into his own space allowed him to feel the wisdom behind her plan in a much more real and immediate way. That morning, he understood her reasoning intellectually. Now, he understood emotionally.
He looked around at his cramped storage closet of a home and felt that he had been invited in off the porch of his new world and given a seat by the fire. Valentina often seemed to have all the human warmth of a lichen-speckled stone jutting from a mountain lake. Yet, as Green stretched out on his new cot and studied the manufacturer logos on the foil-backed insulation tucked against his metal roof, he reflected that human warmth is as varied as the people who keep it alive.
Outside, the shadows grew long. Evening was coming. The things that waited for evening were coming too.
For days, Green had received a “not now” when he tried to talk about the death stalking the mountainsides. It had been a hectic but peaceful respite, and he could feel it coming to a close. Valentina had left him to situate his belongings in the shed. With the dark only a few hours away, he felt a pull to get back to business.
He heard the library tree hatch thud closed.
Apparently, Valentina had a similar impulse.
Green climbed the spiral log stairs to the library, trailing his fingertips along the oak’s bark as he went. He lifted the hatch and stepped inside. Valentina was already seated at the little table by the trunk, tinkering with the polished wooden broadcast box. With its side panel open, it looked like a cross between an antique radio and a hamster cage full of colorful, transparent tubes. The tubes housed tendrils of something pale and fleshy.
“Time to get back to cryptonaturalist work?”
Valentina shut the box.
A light flashed amber above a toggle switch.
“Yes, Mr. Green. We have two messages and I’ve been waiting on several responses to inform our next steps. I haven’t been idle during your studies.”
She handed Green a sugar cube. He dutifully placed it in the fungal hand of the network administrator as it bloomed from the space beneath the floorboards. It withdrew in eerie silence and a dusting of spores. He retrieved the little broom and swept the mess through the gap by the bark.
She flipped the switch.
“Val, this is Clara.”
The voice carried the grit of a long life or a heavy smoker.
“I didn’t want to make you wait, but I’m still doing research on my end. Thought I’d shoot over my first thoughts. I’d try will. I’d try water. And I might try matter stitching, like the Heinze brothers did on that epistemological sinkhole in Pataskala, Ohio.”
Valentina shook her head at the box.
“Anyway, more to come soon. The boys are taking me to catch the archive train and see what I can dig up there. I’ll be in touch.”
She clicked the switch off and sighed.
“I’ve tried water and will. I’ve tried stitching.”
“Teacher, can you give me a hint of what we’re talking about?”
“Closing the Hole in Nothing. That was Clara Rodriguez. She hasmade a special study of various rifts and portals, so I asked for her opinion. You’ll recall, I explained the principle behind stepping through to close it from inside when we visited the hole.”
“I remember. And I remember all the reasons that’s a terrible idea in this case.”
“As I said, there are other, less dangerous methods. Running water through a rift sometimes closes it. Water has many properties we do not fully understand. The stitching she mentioned involves moving objects in and out of a rift rapidly, which can cause a collapse from overtaxing the system. Unfortunately, I tried both of those options after my initial observations of the hole.”
