by K. T. Tomb
“You think this trip is useless.”
It wasn’t a question. She squatted down on the sandy bank next to him. She could smell the murky dampness of the water and the mud and the rankling of dried sweat coming from Ben.
“Yes,” she said.
“The others do not,” he said.
“No,” she agreed.
They were quiet. The sun reflected off the water. The forest slowly woke. Lux kept her body relaxed, but she was tense. Something was going to happen soon, she could feel it in her blood.
“You think this trip is useless, but,” his eyes turned to hook hers, “but you know that something out there isn’t natural.”
Lux caught her breath. The air itself was heavy with the weight of something that was just wrong, and he knew it too. “You speak like a shaman or something.”
For the first time Ben smiled.
“When was the first time you realized you would die one day?”
She wasn’t sure whether she should be freaked out or sad. His face was expressionless, an absolutely still mask. She watched his pulse beat even and steady in his throat.
“When I was very small,” she said.
“Me too. This is a trip for people who have realized that.”
Lux shifted uncomfortably. His words didn’t have an innocent ring to them, and Lux was one to always trust her gut. Ben Makarios made her uncomfortable.
“Why are you here?” she said.
He didn’t respond for a minute.
“I’m here for the same reason you are.”
“And what is that?” she said.
His fighting eyes sunk down to the river. He didn’t need to answer because Lux knew it. He could read things like she could, the little details written in invisible ink on trees and wind and faces. But at the same time, there was something very different inside of him. He could read those details like she could, but he saw them differently, of that she was sure.
She watched a bead of sweat roll down his side over the dark green letters of one of his tattoos.
It was something in Greek. The letters were little and square. She looked back up to his face, but his eyes were still very far away.
“Why does nobody here have a next of kin?” she asked.
The sun was bright by then, the gray of the dawn gone. Hot rays burst white into the leaves, shattering yellow all around. Behind them, there was the ripping noise of a zipper being pulled.
Ben looked back to her.
“Some things are better left unsaid.”
He stood, his boots digging into the dirt and his chest flexing.
“I imagine we will move out soon.”
Lux sighed, nodded, and stood along with him. The day was growing up, but her worries were too. Ben had only made the whole adventure more unsettling and strange rather than clearing anything up.
The dark green that enveloped them like water was lush and alive. Lux felt like every leaf was an eye in disguise, watching them, watching her, waiting for her to make a mistake. She led them deeper and deeper into the bristling forest.
“Wait,” Julie called out from the rear of the column.
The group froze; the tension in the forest palpable. All ears scanning for noise.
Lux turned.
“What?” she said, doubling back to come alongside the other woman so that they could speak softly.
Julie stood by a tree, her delicate face scrunched in confusion. The expression made her look much older than she actually was. It was not a look of fear or even of having been shaken up. There was only confusion, and Lux found that reassuring. The tree was a normal tree, so far that Lux could see anyway. But Julie obviously didn’t think so.
“Look at this,” she said.
Lux crouched down close, the rest of the team peering in. There were four thick gouges along the base of the trunk. Lux sniffed at it, ignoring the questioning looks on their faces. She was the tracker and she would track how she wanted. Through the scents of the team’s sweat and deodorant, she caught a whiff of the faint tangy odor of urine. It was weak and barely there, but she was certain.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Julie said. “And I’ve been in the jungles of both South America and Africa.”
“What do you think made it?” Hal asked.
Lux did not miss the excitement in his voice.
“I don’t know; your guess is as good as mine.” Julie was looking nervous again, but she didn’t seem to be freaking out. She examined the ground around the tree carefully. “It’s old, whatever it is.”
“You mean the mark or what made it?”
“The mark,” she confirmed.
Lux stood. She had never seen anything like it either, and since she did not believe in ghouls, ghosts, or anything to do with cryptozoology, there was only one animal that could have caused it in her mind: human. She had no illusions about the type of people who went deep in the woods and never came out. Some were hermits; fine, just anti-social. But there were others, crazy and dark. She had seen them before, tracked a few of them. Hal and Samuel were mumbling to each other excitedly. Julie had taken out a camera and was carefully documenting the scene. Ben was standing, like her, watching the woods. Nothing big moved, just the skittering of squirrels and flutter of birds.
“Julie?” Lux asked.
“Yeah?” She packed the camera away as she peeked up.
“Have you seen any dog or pig prints today?”
“Not since this morning. We crossed an old path used by a pack of dogs at about ten or so.”
Lux nodded.
“That’s what I thought too.”
“Why?”
“Because that would mean that something’s driving them away.”
Ben met her eyes over Julie’s head. She wondered if he actually believed that they were going to find a Bigfoot or if he was there for some other reason. She would have paid half of her earnings from the trip to know that reason. Well, maybe not half, but she might have bought him a beer.
“We should keep moving,” she said. “This is old. It will lead us, but that’s all.”
The wind was picking up, bringing all sorts of interesting scents to her. Lux opened her mouth and put her nose to the wind. The smell of some type of spore came from the east, from where they were headed. Lux pulled out her map and marked the spot where they stood at that moment.
“Ready?” she asked the group at large.
“Did you just sniff the air?” Julie asked.
“Yes.” She felt color in her cheeks.
“What are you, part dog or something?”
Lux shrugged.
“Just because I’m human doesn’t mean I have to stunt my senses.”
No one said anything after that. Fine by her. Humans were annoying.
***
Lux strung her hammock up in the fork of a thick oak, higher up off the ground than usual.
“How’s it going up there?” Hal asked her jokingly as she tied the final knot.
“You should think about it yourself,” she said.
“Why?” Samuel asked, coming over to them.
“Because,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “there’s obviously something in these woods and we don’t know what it is. Until we do, I’m taking the precaution.”
She didn’t care if it was the abominable snowman, Hannibal Lector, or just some backwoods redneck; she wasn’t going to be caught by any one of them at night, at least not without some advance notice.
“You’re kind of paranoid, you know that, right?” Samuel said.
She watched every one of them scale their hammocks higher. Lux slept fitfully. Something was bothering her, and she wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe it was just all the talk of monsters hiding in the woods, but around three in the morning, she heard something moving. Lux took a deep breath and hoped that it was just one of the team getting up to pee. She hadn’t heard a zipper though. Slowly and oh so carefully, she rolled over to look out of the netting along the
sides of her hammock. A shadow moved, just a twitch really. Her breath caught in her throat. It could just be a wild dog, but she didn’t think so. It was too... hulking.
There was only the faintest of rustling noises to accompany it, but her sharp ears picked them up. She watched, frozen in her hammock, as it slunk through the camp, stopping every few feet to snuffle at something. It could be a bear. There was a small black bear population in the woods, she knew.
She tried to reassure herself that it was a bear, but deep down, she knew it wasn’t. There was a humanoid lilt to its gait, comfortable on two legs in a way that bears weren’t. There was no lumbering. It flowed through the night like a raw shadow and nothing else. It was just the night playing tricks on her, she told herself. Too many bug bites and not enough water, that was all. There was just a bear down there and she was tired, imagining things.
The wind tiptoed through the trees, clearing the clouds away. Moonlight streamed down through the dark leaves, illuminating the camp ever so slightly. Lux’s stomach clenched and curdled.
It was a demon. There was no mistaking it, even to Lux’s doubtful mind. She was not religious, but more than anything, she trusted her senses. And those senses were on fire with panic because the thing below was not natural. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
Then it was gone, in just one leap into the shadows. The flash of horns. The glow of black fur. The easy gait of something on two legs.
Lux felt bile rise in her throat, but she swallowed it down.
Hoax, hoax, hoax, she told herself.
Dr. Ramsey Stevens was planning an elaborate hoax to become famous. He had rigged the whole thing and sent them into a trap. Bastard.
That was all.
She didn’t go back to sleep that night. She laid, eyes wide, staring at the top of her covered hammock.
The tracker in her wanted to rise immediately and search out the creature, to yank the mask off and reveal a conman. But there was a part of her that did not believe it was a hoax, and that scared her more than anything. Lux made her living by not being afraid of things. She would march headlong into anything and retrieve a person. There was no one and nowhere that could stop her. She had pulled grown men out of their mothers’ basements and delivered them, very illegally, to loan sharks for their beating. She had tracked a woman out of hiding in the northern badlands to stand as a witness against MS-13 violence.
But never had she seen anything like that creature.
The morning was slow to come. It crept like a scared child, inching along the ground. She stayed in her hammock while the darkness lingered, not emerging until she heard someone’s zipper.
Rolling her head, she could see Hal slide out of his hammock and slip to the ground. His dreads were splayed in all sorts of crazy directions, making him look like a sad and wet puppy. His face was calm; he had not seen the thing during the night. Maybe it had just been a bad dream. She clambered out and began untying her hammock. It was a dream, she decided. That was all.
They broke camp after a hurried breakfast. No one seemed very talkative. Lux was relieved.
Her dream, she now believed it to be a dream, had rattled her.
Lux kept her senses sharp as they slid through the forest their third day on the hunt, without sure aim or a clear quarry. They were well within the territory they were looking for, so all that was left was to search for signs of Bigfoot, or as Lux felt sure was more likely, a six foot five, overweight cousin Clem hiding out in a shack.
A few miles further down a gentle incline, a valley in the woods, they found more of the gouges in trees all accompanied with the smell of urine. They were definitely in something’s territory. Lux didn’t like it. Humans could be crazier than monsters of legend. Check weapon. Check safety.
At noon, they stopped on the bank of a small creek to eat. Samuel and Julie were comparing notes taken on the trip and Hal sat with them.
“Those marks are right out of a horror movie,” he said, a grin splitting his tan face.
Lux suppressed a laugh. She had never thought she would hear that kind of a phrase delivered with a smile.
“How’d you get into cryptozoology?” she asked him, inviting herself into the conversation.
He shrugged. “It’s in my blood.”
Lux raised her eyebrows.
“Hunting things may be, but why creatures that don’t exist?”
He grinned again. She wondered if anything upset him.
“Because they do exist. I’ve seen them with my own two eyes. You can’t deny what you see.”
Lux thought of the demon she had dreamed about.
“Perhaps. But you can’t always trust what you see.”
“I can.”
“Do you see that plant there?” she pointed to a thick-stalked weedy plant. “It’s called henbane. It’s full of tropane alkaloids. There are about six hallucinogenic plants around us right now that look almost identical to garden variety weeds that are edible. You could eat one and see the craziest shit and never know you were tripping.”
Hal looked at her curiously.
“You’re a glass half full, aren’t you?”
“Did you hear that?” Julie said.
“It was just a bird,” Hal said.
Lux ignored him.
“What?” she asked Julie.
She was staring into the trees a little to their left.
“I thought...” she trailed off, not finishing.
Lux wasn’t sure whether to listen to her or not. Julie was scared of her own shadow, but at the same time, fear amplified senses. She scanned the forest, looking for anything out of place. There didn’t seem to be anything. Then she saw it. She couldn’t have seen it. But there it was. Unfortunately for her sanity at that particular moment, she was the sole witness.
“Come on,” Samuel said, starting to move forward.
Lux reached out without thinking and clamped her hand around his arm hard, jerking him to a stop. “No.”
Samuel spun in her grip and shook her off.
“You aren’t in charge of this group, Lux.”
She turned her face to him; but didn’t leave the shadows with her gaze.
“Don’t move,” she said. “There is something there.”
A murky green gaze met hers from deep within the trees. Dog eyes, she convinced herself, just dog eyes. They were certainly not human eyes. Even from the distance of fifty or so yards, that much was obvious.
“Where?” Ben said, quiet enough that it was almost sub-vocalized.
“My twelve o’clock, your two.”
He found the eyes instantly. She saw the hair along his arms stand up. The hot sun was low in the sky behind them, reflecting into the far away eyes.
“What should we do?” Julie asked.
Lux was relieved when her voice didn’t sound shaky. Fear was never a good thing to face the forest with.
“We could keep moving, see if it follows us?” Hal suggested.
The excitement in his voice was back in full force. There was silence. One minute, not even that, when barely anyone breathed. Then the eyes were gone. The forest was empty of anything but Lux and her team. The green glow was simply not there anymore. There was no transition. There, not there. The team stayed motionless, afraid to be the one to move first. Julie was reaching out her left hand, frozen in place as if she was in the motion of grasping for Smith’s sleeve.
“Let’s move,” she said. “Just keep an eye out for anything.”
The evening was drawing in, but there was no good place to stop. Lux knew that they could not keep going in the dark. They were tired and the night was full of too many dangers to count, but she wanted to find a very, very safe place.
“Here,” she finally said.
The tree she stopped in front of was so thick that if all five of them joined hands, they probably could not create a circumference around it.
They hung their hammocks in a tight row that night, each within arm’s reach of the next. It was a set up
similar to when Lux was a kid and she took to the woods with her cousins. They would sleep close for the same reason, scared of invisible boogeymen.
“Do you believe in monsters?” her older cousin Janie had asked.
“No!” Lux had exclaimed with all the courage of a seven year old.
“Good,” Janie had grinned. She lowered her voice. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”
Lux hadn’t slept that night. Every sound had been Godzilla oozing out of his festering hole to come and eat her alive. Of course she had never confessed that.
Ben was perched next to her.
“Do you think it was a dog?”
Her eyes trailed across his face carefully.
“No,” she said finally.
A grin, small but there, flitted across his face.
“But you don’t believe in monsters.”
“No,” she said carefully, knowing that he was setting up some word trap and that she was going to fall into it.
“We’re hunting Bigfoot, you know that.”
“Yes, that doesn’t mean I think that the idea is any less ridiculous.”
“Then why are you here?”
“You first,” she said, desperately curious.
His face was blank, a meticulously controlled coating over the surface of his skin to hide his thoughts. It only strengthened her curiosity.
“Why do you think I’m here?”
“Why are you evading the question?”
He laughed shortly. “You were a skip tracer. So you read people just like you read this forest.”
She nodded.
“Your job is to take us to the monster’s lair. Smith’s job is to make sure it’s humanoid or whatever. Julie’s job is to confirm that whatever we find isn’t just an escaped gorilla and to keep us from accidentally poisoning ourselves. Hal’s here because he knows how to search for things that don’t exist.”
“That is all true.”
He fell silent.