One of the crosshairs has fallen to the ground. I crouch to get a better look. It’s a mirror image of the three that hung from the gate.
My knees pop when I stand. That’s not weird; joints do that sometimes. What’s strange is that it’s theonlysound in an otherwise silent landscape. Birds don’t call or move through the trees. The scream of frogs is gone. There’s not a rustle or the soft sound of wind in the leaves.
There are no cicadas. Not one buzzing, not one flying. None.
And I don’t see Ripley.
She hasn’t been more than ten feet ahead the entire time. She couldn’t have gone far. I take a breath to call her name,but I can’t make myself break the silence. The woods have decided to be quiet. There’s probably a good reason for that.
A soft rustling comes from behind a tangle of bushes up ahead. I pick my way from stone to fallen log to exposed ground, avoiding noisy twigs and brittle leaves.
The smell comes first. It’s the thick, decomposing scent of spinach two weeks past its best-by date with a wisp of sweetness I can’t place.
Behind the tangle is a natural hollow that, at one point, was carpeted by ferns. Now, their plant-corpses cover the ground in a rough circle maybe twenty feet in diameter. Liquid, dark and shining, slicks the ground. A black crop circle cut into the trees.
Dark masses varying in size are scattered through the hollow. Some are small as a fist, and others have the size and slump of a raccoon bloating on the side of the road. All the darkness—on the ground, on the mounds, on the ferns that haven’t yet fallen—blends into itself.
It’s eerily similar to the kill scene in the meadow. Too similar to be a coincidence. And this black gunk… Much of the coyote’s fur, where the skin underneathhadn’tbeen stripped from its body, was coated in something dark. Maybe it’s whatever’s currently seeping into my boots.
One of the masses twitches, and I swear, Iswear, it cocks its head to look at me, which is impossible because its ribs are exposed to the air and nothing can be alive when it’s torn up like that.
The maybe-twitching corpse isn’t even the most interesting thing in the hollow.
In the center of the dead earth sits a box.
The box sits on a trailer meant to be pulled by an ATV. The trailer’s bed is bowed in under the box like the spine of an animal pulled down by a swollen, pregnant belly. Divots in the earth, obscenely wide and deep, mark where it was dragged.
The box itself is square and made of dark brown—nearly black—wood. Metal bands wrap around the outside. They’re thick and burnished dark by age. Something is etched into the metal bands. It’s too far away to see clearly. A vague outline remains of something circular that used to be painted on the side. It’s not large. No bigger than the width of my hand. Most of it has been washed away. Sun-bleached.
The door—the mechanized kind meant to let pets outside—is raised. Inside is a deep, impossible darkness.
There’s a new sound. It’s meatier than the drone of cicadas. More of a hum. I’m not sure if it’s coming from the box or from inside my head.
The soft rustle again, this time to the right. The hum falls away as soon as I look away from the box.
Ripley emerges from twiggy bushes and living, knee-high ferns. The pure relief of seeing her is short-lived. She’s not looking at me. She’s not looking at anything. Her gaze is unfocused and her head is hanging low. Everything about her is slumped.
I kneel in front of her. She doesn’t react. Not when I say her name quietly. Not when I cradle her head in my hands. Her cheeks and snout are wet.
My palms, when I pull them away, are stained black.
I know it’s a mistake to bring my hands up to my nose, but I do it anyway.
I gag at the slimy spinach smell and press my mouth to my shoulder to keep from throwing up. Wiping my hands on the spongy earth clears most of the goo away.
The dregs of my water bottle go to cleaning the gunk off her head. She sways through all of it. Still not really looking at anything.
I’m crying when I finish, because I don’t know what this gross shit is, but it’s clearly making my dog sick and the blisters on my feet sting and I got some off her, but not all of it and I don’t know what todo.
The forest is being quiet, which means I should be quiet too, but Ripley is acting strange and I can’t stop crying and shivering and there’s humming in my head again and—
And in the mess of the thoughts, one is very clear:I feel weird. I think the black goo ismakingme feel weird. Is this shit toxic?
Something moves in my peripheral vision. I wipe at my teary eyes with the back of my hand, realize my mistake, and use the inside of my shirt instead.
There. Something just moved behind a tree.
I stare so hard at it that my eyes sting. There’s a hatchet wound of discoloration across the trunk where naked wood has been exposed to the world.
