“Indeed. Too far away.”
She came back to herself and focused on Green’s face.
“Now, it is time for my question.”
“I don’t think I have any secrets to rival ‘I’m five hundred years old,’ but shoot.”
Something twisted in Green’s guts as it came to him.
He did, very much, have secrets.
“We shall see. Between the rag moth and the glass fawn, well…Last night, I researched the previous six sightings of the fawn. Four of the reports are very old and very incomplete, threadbare oral tradition mixed with allegory. Not ideal.”
“Okay. Not sure what I can answer about that.”
She pulled two notebooks from a nearby desk and opened them in front of Green. He stooped over and read a highlighted passage on the page.
…the others were not so fortunate. They were too close. I watched them fall…
Valentina continued.
“The most recent two accounts are better. Armed with new information and reading between the lines, they seem to agree on two points—that the glass fawn is a bringer of ill fortune and, more to the point, no one who gets closer than perhaps one hundred meters to it survives to tell the tale.”
Green turned his attention to the second journal.
A block of underlined text.
…I only saw its light, but it was the deer. Nothing glows like that in the jungle. When I made it down to the valley camp, it was a charnel house, a place of the dead…
She spoke on.
“They do not mention localized cold specifically, but certain colorful phrases imply it. I’m afraid I trusted my recollections too much. I sometimes fail to reckon with the truth that human brains are not meant to house a collection of memories as large as mine. I should have researched the fawn earlier.”
He swallowed.
“But…if the fawn is so deadly…and it’s been seen before…why hasn’t it killed more? Hundreds? Thousands? Did those other accounts say how they stopped it?”
“Ah, Mr. Green. I believe these are the correct questions. No, the past accounts make no mention of thwarting the fawn, yet the killings seem to take place over a relatively short span of time before halting. Based on past patterns, I suspect that the fawn’s presence in our world is fleeting.”
“So, what, it’s normally…dormant?”
“Or, more likely, absent.”
“You said the Hole in Nothing leads outside our reality, right? Do you think it came through there?”
“That is precisely my current hypothesis. In fact, I suspect that the two phenomena are, essentially, one and the same. Dependent upon one another. If the fawn is from outside this dimension, then it is entirely possible that reality cannot heal while it is present. The fawn’s unrealness is an active injury to our world’s mode of existence that is expressed as that rift between the pines.”
She tapped the open journals.
“Clearly, it has torn its way into our reality on other occasions. The question is, what made it depart?”
Her words made Green feel unanchored, like he was drifting away from himself. A flash flood of dread crashed inside him. Listening to Valentina undercut her own humanity and then talk about the universe like a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing was beyond disorienting.
“Did you find any mention of the wolf? Did you look?”
She shook her head.
“The only data we have on the horned wolf comes from your observations, which, I remind you, include two encounters during which the creature could have killed you and did not. That alone marks it as less lethal than the fawn.”
