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It starts with a rumour, passed on from one small town to the next by a gossipy traveller.
He’d seen it himself, he claims. The shack in the forest. It’s a story worth hearing, he assures to a man sat next to him. The man only giggles, too drunk to take anything anyone says to him seriously tonight. The traveller continues:
Once, the shack had been the home of an old man living in a small town. His job had been to tend to the land. It was said he kept the brush from overtaking the path and made sure all the folks who passed through felt safe. He had been a quiet but respected member of the town, or so the locals had told the traveller.
That same old man had also died almost four years ago now.
No one had been inside the house - if you could call it a house, with only a downstairs comprised of three small rooms - since its previous owner had passed. It wasn’t worth selling and no one wanted to move in but the locals, who had known the old man beforehand, were hesitant to tear it down. So empty it remained, for three years.
Until last month.
The traveller had been up in his rented room, next to the window that faced the forest. He could see the shack from up there… which was odd because it was pitch black night outside and the shack was hidden in the shadow of the trees.
Except it wasn’t. Because there was a light, peeking out from the edges of a curtain that had been drawn across the window of the shack, illuminating it just enough to catch the traveller’s attention.
And this, of course, had struck the traveller as a curious thing.
One of the locals came with him to check out the shack.
“And that’s when things got weird,” he says and his audience is a little more attentive now.
Just as the local was about to raise his fist to knock on the door, the light in the window went out, plunging the area into darkness. It took a few minutes of bewildered blinking for the traveller’s eyes to adjust to the moonlight and by that time his companion was tugging on his arm, claiming they needed to get a light if they were going to investigate this stranger in the shack. Could be dangerous, the local had said. So they left, and came back with torches and two other men.
When they finally forced down the door, they discovered a rather peculiar scene. Like something out of a ghost story, except this was real, he swears.
Each and every glass surface in the house, from the windows to television screen to the small bathroom mirror, had been smashed to pieces.
And as the group of men took in the mess, took in the destruction of the beloved old man’s house, one of the trees outside crashed to the ground. It fell in such a way that it blocked the doorway and protruded into the window, a few branches snapping and falling to the glass-strewn floor.
They were lucky none of them were standing too close, the traveller says to his present companions, some of whom are now on the edge of their seats.
In particular, there’s a young man sitting on the table behind them. He’s been waiting for his friend to come back from the bathroom for a good fifteen minutes now. At the traveller’s story a thoughtful frown plasters on his face. By the time his friend has returned, he’s downed his only drink and is making excuses to leave early.
His motorcycle is parked just outside, and he takes no time at all to start it up, heading off in the direction of the town the traveller had come from.
Finally… he has a lead.
Several hours later, just as the sun is beginning to rise, Rick Jones’ motorcycle comes to a stop on the edge of the forest, unable to go any further as the road cuts off to become a narrow footpath. But that’s okay. The shack is within his sight already so there’s no fear of him getting lost.
He weaves his way into the dense woodland, stopping for a moment to study the fallen tree as he passes by.
Not only has it been torn up from its roots - a feat that must have required quite a tremendous amount of force, judging from the size of the roots - there’s also a large, splintering crack around the middle of its trunk. As he trudges forward, towards this middle section of the tree, he puts up a hand and hovers it just over the crack. He holds it right over the centre, where the splinters jut out in all directions and then he nods to himself. Yes, this is a good sign.
He can imagine - if his hands were quite a few sizes bigger and stronger of course - gripping the trunk and squeezing it so hard that it’d create cracks just like this.
Satisfied, he moves on to the building itself, a sorry looking shack with the door-frame broken open by the topmost part of the tree. It looks like it’s been cut away at this section, probably to allow whoever investigated the incident an easier access. Which works in Rick’s favour too.
When he steps inside he finds, indeed, the scene is just as the traveller at the bar had described. There’s brown, stained tea towels nailed over the remaining shards of the widows, one of them ripped down by the force of the tree falling on top it. There’s also a rather curious pile in the corner, comprised of shards of various thickness and colours that he realises must belong to the broken glass furniture in the room. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the ground is good to walk on on his bare feet but he can imagine the constant crunch of glass getting quite annoying.
And he knows that that is something that the Doc would actively try to avoid.
Scouring the house doesn’t take long. The three rooms - a bedroom, a bathroom and living room/kitchen combination - are relatively small. By the time he gets to the bathroom he is almost certain that he’s on the right track.
The mirror in the bathroom is about the size of his face, stood at eye level on a shelf above the sink. This one, unlike the other glass surfaces in the building, isn’t entirely shattered. Actually, he has to uncover it from beneath the towel that had been draped over it first, before he’s able to find it badly cracked but not broken. He pushes his nose up to it, squinting as his eyes follow along the jagged spider web pattern protruding from the middle.
The Doc had smashed his one by hand. That much is clear. Maybe in a panic, Rick thinks, hence why it’s been covered but not disposed of. Because if he was thinking straight, the Doc would never have left this out for anyone to find. Not with the dried traces of his precious blood still clinging to the cracks.
Must have split his knuckles, Rick thinks, re-wrapping the mirror and shoving it into his bag. He’ll give it back to the Doc when he finds him.
The last thing he does before leaving the house is to flip open the burner phone that he keeps in his pocket. Emergency use, the Doc had said. Rick smirks and sends a quick text.
I should be a detective.
It joins the long string of text that Rick has sent over the past half-year. He knows he won’t get a response. He doesn’t even know if the Doc reads them anymore. But he’s done with waiting for his friend to come out of his self imposed isolation.
He’s going to find him, whether he answers Rick’s texts or not.
…
One year later, the other half of the burner phone pair buzzes in Bruce Banner’s pocket.
He ignores it, trying to remain focused on reading the three-day-old paper he’d borrowed from the seat next to him. It’s not easy; he’d lost his glasses several weeks ago in a transformation and had yet to replace them. The jolting of the bus as it travels along the pothole-riddles roads doesn’t really help him either.
Fortunately, he doesn’t have too far left to go. By the time he’s finished this paper, he’ll be so busy getting his bearings in the new town that he’ll forget all about Rick’s messages.
(He tells himself something similar each and every time the phone buzzes. And yet, if someone were to ask him, Bruce could recite the last sixty messages from memory in reverse order with no struggle.)
As he thanks the bus driver - making sure to keep his face conveniently turned away as if distracted by something outside - his hand slips into his coat pocket, fingers tracing the edge of the phone inside, turning it over and over as he walks along the path.
He’s planned his stay here well in advance and a little differently to his usual pattern. There’s a house, right on the edge of town, just before you hit the empty badlands that stretch out to the horizon. No one has occupied it in well over a year and it’s owner has dropped the rent price well under half of what it was worth back in it’s glory days. It’s perfect and for once, Bruce has the money. This will be the first house in many years that he occupies legally and that thought has lifted his spirits, somewhat. Perhaps this will be the place where he can stay for longer than a few days.
He stops at a junction in the road and pulls his sleeve up to check the battered looking watch on his wrist. It’s four o'clock. He’s supposed to meet the owner at six for the keys. He has time.
He pulls his sleeve back down, pondering which direction he should explore first. And, as he’s doing this, his eyes catch his reflection in the window of the building opposite him.
And, just for a moment, his chest seizes up in panic. When he finally gets himself to loosen up and exhale the breath he’d been holding, he’s trembling a little.
For a minute, he seems unable to draw his eyes away from his own reflection. It’s just him. Alone, stood in the middle of the street; tanned skin, tattered coat, brown hair getting a little long, a little greasy after several days travelling. He runs a hand through it, as if to attempt to tame the mess a little. He tries not to make it about testing if his reflection will do the same.
Because why wouldn’t it? It’s daytime.
Finally, he manages to pull his eyes away… only to turn them to the burner phone in his hand. He sighs, knowing that he can’t resist any longer, and flips it open.
It reads: You made it!
There are no other words but attached is a link to an article about a mysterious phenomenon, being covered by one of Rick’s favourite journalists.
It describes a string of houses, often ones that are secluded or abandoned, with their furniture left in a rather specific state of disrepair. No one knows who the mysterious figure who occupies these houses is. Some claim to have seen a ‘dishevelled, gaunt-looking figure’ hanging around in some areas but there’s no evidence. It’s all hearsay.
Unlike many of Rick’s other lighthearted messages (and he feels a fond exasperation when he thinks about how Rick has deliberately ignored his instructions to contact him for emergencies only) this one doesn’t make Bruce feel any better. Perhaps it’s the remainder of his fright from just moments earlier. Or perhaps it’s the fact that some people have started to take notice of his movements.
Either way, by the time Bruce meets the man with the keys, he’s feeling a lot less confident about his plan to stay here legally.
Two hour later, he’s rushing along through the town, not quite running towards his secluded lodgings on the outskirts. He keeps his head bowed the entire way, hands deep in his pockets. He doesn’t dare look up. There’s a fear in his brown eyes, that remain fixed on the path the whole way.
The owner had been late by over an hour and now Bruce can feel himself running out of time.
It takes him a few tries to get his key in the door because his hands tremble so much as he frantically jabs it in.
He doesn’t waste time locking it behind him. Instead he flies over to the window, keeping his eyes deliberately on the cracked plaster of the wall next to it as he draws the curtains. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the last light of day sink into an inky blackness.
The sun has set.
There’s a small boxed television next to the couch and this gets a t-shirt from his bag blindly thrown over it. He decides to stay out of the kitchen for now, it’s much too dangerous to even attempt securing it, but he does pause at the door of the bathroom. After barely a few seconds of deliberation he grimaces and closes the door to that room too.
This, as it turns out, was a mistake.
The brief thought of ‘who puts a mirror outside a bathroom door?’ is quickly set aside as full blown terror at what lies before him - a terror ten times that of the scare he’d had with his reflection just several hours ago - sets in.
It’s nighttime now. Which means the face looking back at Bruce is not his own. Instead, he finds himself looking into two bright green eyes, set into the face of a slightly darker green figure, whose head is twice as broad as Bruce’s own. And it’s grinning.
With a yelp of horror Bruce punches his fist into the mirror, which cracks and distorts the green figure into a Picasso painting of bright eyes and bared teeth. But the damage is done.
He falls to his knees, shards cutting through the thin material of his trousers, only they don’t seem to be able to pierce the thick, green skin that is slowly replacing his own. He shouts, maybe in pain, maybe to protest or maybe simply to give voice to his frustration at his hopes of making something of a home here being dashed by the unexpected placement of a mirror.
But it soon gets drowned out, replaced by the victorious roar of the Hulk emerging at last.