Ripley is practically vibrating when I open the passenger-side door. My water bottle goes into my backpack, I drape her slip lead across my shoulders, and a note with my information and reason for being here goes on the dashboard.
“Break.” I give her release word. Ripley leaps out, does a big stretch, and sets off sniffing the edges of the forest.
She wouldn’t be allowed off leash in a more populated setting. Not because of her, but because of untrained people andtheir untrained dogs. I’ve spent hours upon hours socializing and training Ripley. Any extra money or time I managed to scrape together went to trying new things with her: dock diving, lure chasing, scent work. But who has the time, let alone the money, to pursue any of those things consistently? Not me.
All that work means I now have a well-balanced, responsive dog that’s indifferent to other animals, fully ignores new humans, and can be trusted to snuffle around in the woods.
The truck beeps when I lock it once, twice, three times, because what if the first two didn’t work? You never know. Gotta make sure.
“Ripley, here,” I say when I get to the gate.
She abandons snorting around a clump of grass and runs to me. In a rush of white teeth and a pink mouth, she takes a treat from my hand.
The gate is composed of thick metal painted red. A shiny chain wrapped in snaking loops around the middle keeps it closed. Cicadas’ exoskeletons dangle from the red metal. Thickets have grown over the barbed wire fence at each end of the gate.
I’m about to tug on the chain to see if it’s open like Ellis said when I see it.
See them.
There’s something on the gate, mostly obscured by overgrowth, and I have to move a bit of the brush aside to see clearly.
There are… things… hanging from the rusted bars. Things woven from dried grass and thin sticks, threatening and jagged.
Three circles, each with two sticks intersecting in the center. It’s the Zodiac Killer symbol, or what the Zodiac symbol was meant to be: crosshairs. Two small, hollow pieces of wood hang from each of the crosshairs. They’re attached by thin twine and make a softtock,tock,tocksound when they knock together.
This doesn’t feel like someone’s weird little arts and crafts project. It feels like a threat.
I should get in the truck and drive away. Every true crime podcast ever and Emma’s voice tell me that I really,reallyshould.
I take out my phone to call her. No bars. The phone itself is hot, which means that in about a week it’ll randomly turn off and never turn on again.
I stare at the gate, and it stares back.
Emma would say this job isn’t important enough to risk getting serial-killed or assaulted by a weirdo in the woods.
Except… isn’t it though? This job was supposed to save us. This job was supposed to be the rope I used to climb my way out of generational poverty and bring my mom with me. Ellis is giving me a second chance, one that I will not get again if I choose not to walk through this gate.
I dig the small hatchet out of my backpack. It’s so sharp that it’s hard to focus my eyes on the edge. I give it an experimental twirl, then stick it in an outer loop on my backpack.
If anything weird happens, we can turn back.
“Okay,” I say, and Ripley looks up at me, no less excited this time. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 4
No howling ghosts or slinking demons emerge from the forest when we walk through the gate. No haunting instrumentals erupt to herald my trip into a cursed dimension. No whispers of leaves crunching under the feet of a murderer.
I do hear Emma berating me.
What is wrong with you, Lou? Do you want to die?
My internal Emma shuts up when I answer,Yeah,sometimes I do. Sometimes the urge to no longer exist feels like the only thing that belongs to me.
The trees are tall and thick-leaved. Since a lot of the sunlight is blocked by the canopy there isn’t much vegetation on the forest floor other than ferns, leggy bushes, and other shade-tolerant plants. A lot of raspberry thorns and honey locust spikes. Sharp things growing in dim light.
The path itself is pockmarked with dark puddles of standing water, full of last year’s leaves and floating cicada corpses.
Ripley’s initial overwhelming excitement of being in anew place with new smells fades after ten minutes of walking. Instead of jumping from one patch of grass to the other, she snuffs slowly through leaves and fallen branches, glancing back at me to make sure I’m still there.
