Chapter 25: Conjoined toddlers with rampant bone cancer

Red and blue light flashes and flickers in the predawn dark. My [Light] spell does its damnedest to dispel the otherworldly dark around us as I turn to the unhelpful and sparsely worded page describing our trip to the actual ruins we're intended for. The only potentially helpful thing is these mountains being described as “like the Appalachians in all the worst ways.”

“Mato, what do you know about the Appalachians?” I quickly ask him, looking up with a fevered hope now that I've found something to latch onto.

“What? You’re asking a random question now?” He asks, astonished, before he turns back and lowers his crossbow as he looks down to see me holding the open binder. A flash of frustrated relief textures his face before he continues.

“Little to nothing. My mountains were the Rockys. My parents had some stories they heard about that region from my grandparents on the rez though.”

“Well? What stories?” I ask, my patience one of the first casualties of this disaster.

“Nothin’ specific. I can barely remember them, and I heard them secondhand—”

“Then summarize!”

“Nothin’ good! People that get lost n’ go mad, spirits wearing the skin of animals and stealing the voices of their victims, the ghosts of mothers’ griefs doomed to always search for their lost loved ones— how the hell d'ya fight a ghost Cy?!”

There is some foul intelligence in whatever stalks around us, just past the light, every time it— they?— thinks it's losing us, or when it thinks we're rallying ourselves against it, the voices begin again.

Except this time, this time it's Demarcus.

“Help! Oh god, Cy! Cy please! I've killed it but I'm bleeding bad man! I think there's more of them coming! Plea—”

An absolute din of a guitar screech cuts it out, then continues on with the same chord as Izzy does her job, and drowns out the voices.

“It's not him, it's not him, it's not him—” I mutter to myself beneath the sound.

In the best case scenario, whatever tricked Demarcus plans to eat him. And that is the best case scenario. Already my mind spins up like a turbine, spinning out a thousand worse fates, everything between flaying and being trapped forever in the same endless halls we head toward until his mind finally snaps and he joins them.

“Ma— yo— — —ack —!” My shout is lost in Izzy's sound.

I stumble and trip up the trail to Isabella, signaling for her to cut off the noise.

She lets up and we're plunged into sudden, unnatural silence.

“The sun should've started to rise by now, why is it still dark?” Mato asks, angrily, as if he's challenging the sky itself.

“Cuz we're in over our heads against whatever is out there! Oh god I never should have come with you!” Izzy cries.

I stumble back down to Mato, tripping as I lose track of rocks beneath me in the shifting blue and red light.

“Mato you gotta track Demarcus. [Tracked Quarry] should help you. C’mon we gotta go back down the trail!” I say to him then yell up to Izzy, who comes scrambling down to us.

“We're gonna follow him?” Izzy asks, incredulous.

“We don't have time to hope that the ‘sun’ will rise first. Something else is clearly in control of it. C’mon Mato, we can't wait.” I say, dragging him back down and pulling out my Pokin’ Stick with the leather cord still lashed to it.

“Alright, alright! Son, I agree with you. Tell me about him. Anything that might help me find him. I've done SAR before.” Mato assures.

“He's wearing metal so his footprints are gonna be heavy, he walks upright and chest out to look bigger and scarier but when he heard Higgy he probably threw that aside and just ran—”

“Higgy?”

“—he's still using the crowbar but if that thing also looked like Higgy then he probably didn't swing. He's got hairy ass arms but they're hard to see, he gets pee shy if people are waiting on him, he wears basketball shorts beneath his pants and he's my best friend will you please just find him?!”

My voice rattles off dubiously helpful facts growing faster and more desperate as it goes until I snap at the sight of Mato and Izzy just standing there listening to me.

Mato nods, then ducks down and starts following Demarcus’ footsteps. I let the light drift next to him as he carefully treads, occasionally stopping to search for snapped branches, rocks with their damp darker underbelly upturned by his flight, or bits of bark stripped by his metal gauntlets where he grabbed the tree.

“We're coming to kill them, why haven't the voices started again? They usually start whenever we start doing stuff that threatens them or might let us get away.” I whisper to Izzy as we follow Mato.

“Maybe they're staying quiet so I can't find them.” Mato whispers from ahead.

“Or maybe it's because we're going exactly where they want us to.” Izzy offers, sticking close to Mato and looking around with wide, terrified eyes.

Mato stops us as we reach a particularly rocky slope, then ushers us forwards and holds up something for us to see.

He holds up a rock, just a rock, but with a small splatter of fresh blood across it.

My heart twists.

He then points up the rocky slope and we can clearly see the path Demarcus took in the upturned and disturbed stones, as well as the things that hounded after him.

I quickly begin chasing up after it, but Mato pulls me back by a leg.

“Oy, if you go runnin’ after him you might be runnin’ into an ambush or just lose his trail. Lemme go first, I promise I'll hurry.”

With gritted teeth I let him take point, controlling the flashing [Light] spell as best I can as a flimsy paper shield against the feelings of helplessness.

It's beginning to feel less like we're coming to save him from whatever fate these woods have for him, and more like we're merely discovering what fate has befallen him. Far too late to do anything.

Mato climbs up the slope, and ducks under an outcropping of stone and stops. When Izzy and I follow, our steps stop dead still next to him.

All 3 of us attempt to look down at something on the ground— I say attempt, because my one eye threatens to dehydrate me from how much it waters. My body flinches, and I lean away, trying to see it out of my peripheral vision. It burns the eyes like the sun, but even my [Light] spell sputters and sparks— whatever this thing is, whatever power this place has, it does not want to be seen.

We look down at the cleanly killed corpse of some creature. Through my watery eyes I see blackish brown skin, rough like bark, flabby and folded like the skin of a knuckle. It was bipedal, but seemed to have vestigial legs and arms with hooves and claws hanging loosely from its back and shoulders.

Its skull, however– which resists my gaze more than the rest– is what concerns me the most.

The skin has been sheared off of one side of it, and reveals that It is not one skull, but several. Antlers, now broken, grow from one side on a caved in chunk of what looks like a human skull— but only up to the eyesockets, after that it is cancerously grafted onto the skull of a bovine, and where that ends grows the skulls of some insectile thing as well as a bird.

Picture the skull of conjoined toddlers with rampant bone cancer, and you'll have it.

From where the blunt weapon crushed the side of the skull— and god I hope it was Demarcus fighting the good fight— brown blood, syrupy and brackish, slowly oozes.

Mato fights through the resistance and crouches to examine. He tries viewing it through a reflection to see if that will help, but nothing reflects enough. After a few blinking seconds of looking at the skull, he lifts one of the creature's clawed hands and smears something on it with his finger.

He quickly stumbles away from the body and we follow him. Grim and grave, he lifts his fingers to show the drying red blood he pulled from the creature's claw upon them.

Breath heavy from the ordeal and from the boiling helpless rage, I look Mato in the eyes and nod back to the creature.

“Any stories about that?”

“No. Not so specifically.” He replies, almost ashamed.

He sets back to tracking with renewed fervor, the creature's carcass reminding him just what horrors we deal with.

Quickly, we find a section of the slope where it looks like Demarcus fell heavily. Mato explains as he investigates, and points out which grooves are his fall, which upturned rocks are the creatures, at least two, running at him on all fours. Gravely, his voice growing faster in panic, he points out the splatters of red blood, then the deep grooves of Demarcus being dragged away.

Mato begins to run, following the trail, still explaining as he goes. Points out where Demarcus took a swing at his captors, where he jabbed his crowbar into the dirt to try and slow their drag, then finally, he stops and kneels.

I look up from the trail he described as I hear Izzy gasp in distress, and see Mato holding Demarcus’ crowbar. It's head brown with their blood.

He lifts it from where it laid, at the foot of a tall rocky slope— except, in the red and blue light, I realize these pale things lining our path are not rocks or branches, but bones.

Bones of all kinds; animal, bird, ancient and new, I look in dawning horror at a human skull, yellowed with age, resting as a head atop an effigy of bones like a scarecrow at the top of this slope.

Silently, solemnly, as the pits in our guts grow ever deeper, we follow the trail of Demarcus’ capture as it cuts through the bones, dragged straight up the side of this mountain into the yawning mouth of an impossibly dark cave.

The woods are silent as we look between each other, then begin to slowly crest the pile, bones cascading down from our steps.

The woods should never be silent.