TOWN IN UPROAR AS ECONOMIC HARDSHIPS SHUTTER BELOVED STOREFRONTS!

  In the rich history of our town, generations have grown up alongside the familiar homes and businesses we all know and love! Unfortunately, due a shift in economic foundations, the mayor’s latest tax phenomena, and the downturn of our noble homeland’s pride, industrious joy, that shall soon be changing! As outside investors buy up our town, we find ourselves losing the places we have long defined ourselves by, as things continue to…

  The Hollow Springs Gazette, 1973, page 1, by Gene Springer

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  “And you’re sure it’s a good idea to start here?” Jay asks, his voice more than a little hesitant.

  I let out a breath, staring out the car window. “Nope. But I think it’s more of a good idea than my other ones, so this is the one that won out in the end.”

  Jay turns to match my gaze, staring out the windshield at the edifice before us, looming up into the sky.

  The idea of a mill implies height, at least in my mind. Looming smokestacks, massive towers belching out smoke and fumes across the horizon and leaving a smell that coats everything around them. A lumber mill, as it turns out, doesn’t really look like that.

  It reminds me of a barn, in shape and style, if not in execution. For one thing, it’s a lot longer, and maybe a bit wider as well, holding two floors and an attic space, rather than the one-floor and loft of a proper barn. Pillars of wood allow the building to crawl out over the lake it resides near, a long slide extending from one side of it and down into the water. The other side of it, where we sit, is a massive yard, facing the back end of the industrial portion of the mill, where it metastasizes into something like an office and storage building, the loading docks for logs somewhere between the two of them.

  From scale alone, it’s an impressive building, playing lightly with the sense of scale that makes architecture feel alien at times, but it’s more than that. The place feels… quiet, in a way that it shouldn’t be. There is an alien thing about forests in this part of the country, where one can find evidence of life in passing, but rarely direct contact with it. Birdsong, but no wings flapping in sight. The mill feels like an extension of that, but darker, more intense. There is no birdsong here. The emptiness of nature, of something vast and alien to you and void of visible presence, magnified further.

  It doesn’t seem dead. It hasn’t rotted or decayed, despite the presence of water, of moss, of vines that have snuck in from the sides, where the forest has slowly regrown over the decades.

  It just feels quiet. None of the decay or activity of death, but none of the presence of life or activity, either.

  Jay turns back to look at me, one eyebrow raised.

  “It’s… not ideal, no.”

  “I know it was on the list, honey, but there wasn’t anything more appealing?”

  I can’t help but sigh. “Nope. I’ve already got an appointment with the clinic tomorrow through my roommate, so that’s not first priority for today. I had a run-in with the sheriff’s department like, less than two days ago, and I’d rather not drive my extremely recognizable car through the nightmare of suburbia until I have to. And until I’m sure that no one will notice the whole… hand-thing.”

  Jay’s eyes immediately flick to my hand, and I actually see the way his pupils expand and contract, focusing and unfocusing. He blinks, and they come back as he squints, and then turns away with a shudder.

  “Still can’t believe you did that to yourself, girl. It’s fucking horrifying.”

  I snort, not bothering to correct him on it. The original product was horrifying. The way it transformed through integration, my “Divine Bloodling” bridging the gap between my still-forming skills and the limits of the possible, is… disturbing, maybe. But not horrifying. Terribly biased of him, honestly. I flex my digits around the steering wheel, feeling the way they expand and coil around almost a quarter of it with ease.

  His eyes flicker again, focusing in and out at the odd movement, but then fading as he shakes his head, apparently fighting off some sort of pressure as he does.

  It’s like the wall- meat. He can see it, but only kind of. It takes drawing attention to it for him to notice it, and I’m not exactly sure why. It would be one thing if he couldn’t see the cracks, but could see the Glove just fine, I’m pretty sure there’s some dimensional fuckery going on there or something, but the fact that he can’t really see either implies something more. Like there’s some sort of… resistance. Normally, people can’t stop looking at a weird deformity, but his eyes sort of glide off of it whenever he stops paying attention.

  Yet again, I’m faced with the wall of things I don’t understand about what’s happening.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want my extremely recognizable car to be connected to my extremely ‘horrifying’ hand. I don’t really have a good excuse to travel that way, and I can’t travel at night right now, for fear of the “big guy”. So… lumber mill.”

  “And you’re sure this ‘big guy’ won’t show up here? In this giant, abandoned, creepy-ass building at the edge of the woods?”

  I laugh, shaking my head. “No, I’m not sure at all. I was told it can’t hunt me except at night, though, so I’m assuming it’s got some sort of reason for that. Like maybe it doesn’t like the daylight. Risky in there, sure, cause I don’t know where the fuck anything is, least of all it, but the last time I saw it was in the middle of town, so… yeah. No clue.”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “I just don’t think that-”

  “You’ll be safe out here, remember? You’re the getaway driver, and it doesn’t hunt in the day for some reason.”

  “Ok, your info on that is wildly untrustworthy and unsecure. You’ve been to college, honey, you know you need sources for claims like that.”

  “Yeah, well, all I got is lived experience and confusion, hun. My lived experience says this thing is smart, it’s not afraid of being in a population center, and that someone with no clear interest in causing me harm said I should be safe during the day. It hasn’t attacked me since last time, and I haven’t been out anywhere in the dark since last time. So, lumber mill it is.”

  I twist the keys out of the ignition, pulling with a bit of force as they get stuck at the halfway-point, per the usual. The car dies a groaning death, its engine rattling a bit as it idles down, and I ignore Jay’s pointed look at the hood as it goes silent at last.

  “You just stay out here and be ready, ok? I’ll head in, look around, see what I can see. It’s not like you can notice the weirdness that well anyways, and I have the grenades and stuff, ok?”

  He scoffs, rolling his eyes at me. “It is weird to have someone call me un-perceptive and mean it. I have the finely honed instincts of a victorian detective I’ll have you know. If Conan Doyle wasn’t basic, he’d have been writing about me instead of Sherlock.”

  “It’s not- I don’t know what you can and can’t see. It’s weird, ok? It’s just weird. If I point it out, you can see it, but if not-”

  “No, I know. I still have trouble noticing it until you move it. It’s like, I know there’s something weird about your hand, but I have to look for it, you know? It’s hard to pick out the details, not that I want to. Nasty nastiness.

  “But! That doesn’t mean it’s smarter for you to go alone! I might not be able to notice weird space monsters, but I can notice heavy beams and pitfalls and shit. And if there’s some kind of animal in there, it won’t be a bad idea to have some backup for your scrawny ass.”

  I look his svelte, five-seven-looking ass up and down once, and then look at my own six-foot form, still in the process of losing weight accumulated over years. I’m not exactly thick or muscular, but I’m not skinny, that’s for damn sure, and I’m pretty sure I could lift him if I tried.

  I refrain from commenting, instead choosing to shove open the car door, despite its protesting, and step out.

  I’m wearing a heavy jacket, winter vinyl over a heavy layer of wool. It’s the best armor I’ve got, given the circumstances and the fact that I’d rather not get heatstroke in late autumn, and over one shoulder I have my best duffel bag, weights and gym clothes unused and removed and replaced instead with my meat-nades, my “totem”, and two kitchen knives.

  That and work boots are all I’ve got. It’ll have to be enough.

  Behind me, I hear the passenger-side door squeal as it’s pushed open, disgorging Jay out onto the gravel.

  I turn to glare at him, and he effortlessly and artfully ignores me, rolling his neck and staring up at the looming structure ahead.

  “What do you think, Scoob? Should we split up, cover more ground?”

  I resist the urge to glare at him harder, grumbling something under my breath instead.

  “No no, you’re right. We should send just one person in alone, and leave the other in a position where they can’t do anything to help. That’s much more sound, as far as strategies go.”

  “That’s-”

  He turns to look at me, a beautifully enacted side-eye informing me about what he thinks of whatever I was about to say.

  I breathe in deep, nice and slow- and then unleash the longest, slowest, groaniest groan I can manage.

  And then I open the duffel bag and pass him a knife, handle first.

  He looks at it, and then at me, the movements a lot less sure now.

  Then he takes the knife, holding it low and close to his body. Not like someone who knows how to use it, but like someone smart enough to respect it in spite of (or because of) that fact.

  He nods at me, once, from beneath his poofy vinyl winter coat.

  Hopefully it’ll do.

  Together, him one step behind me, we walk towards the building, it’s red-coated exterior turned from bright artifice into the hide of something unknown, and vast, and laying perfectly still.

  I walk up to the door, turn the knob, and push, ready to enter-

  It’s locked.

  I blink. For some reason, that entirely logical conclusion just didn’t come up as a possibility.

  Jay laughs from behind me, my own body language betraying me as I refuse to blush, rolling my eyes instead.

  “The smart thing to do is to check!” I yell over my shoulder, like I always assumed this would be a possibility. Which I should have, to be frank.

  I sigh, looking around. If we’re lucky, there should be some kind of gap, some kind of breach- it’s been decades since the facility was properly shuttered, and it doesn’t look particularly well maintained, not by a long shot. If we just-

  Jay steps past me and kneels in front of the door, pulling out what looks like-

  His wallet?

  “What are you-”

  It takes him maybe, maybe ten seconds from start to finish, swiping out a credit card and his own set of keys. He yanks the card up through the gap between the doors, and I hear something click almost immediately, followed by the jangling of his keys as he slips them into the lock and jiggles them a bit. At first, nothing happens, but-

  Click-clack.

  I stare down at him, one eyebrow raised.

  He shrugs, all nonchalant like. “What? It’s not that hard. Older doors are usually way easier. Brought my picks for nothing.”

  “You brought lockpicks?”

  “You told me you wanted to break into an abandoned industrial site, hell yeah I brought lockpicks!”

  “Since when do you know how to pick locks?”

  “Since I was fifteen, incredibly bored, and still trying to prove to my friends that I wasn’t a fag. It’s really not that hard, and they sell all kinds of kits for it online. If it’s, a real lock then it’s a different story, but most casual and residential doors are all more or less the same.”

  “Huh. That’s…”

  “Incredibly useful? Why thank you. Now- ladies first?”

  “Age before beauty~”

  “...You know I’m like, a month older than you, right?”

  “Truth is true bestie.”

  He rolls his eyes, and I take the opportunity to step past him, opening the door into the dark.

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