Chapter Text
Pale moonlight spills down through a canopy of oak leaves and pine needles and across the coarse dirt ground of a dense area in the Monongahela National Forest.
The night sky is clear as the sounds of crickets and a swelled, gentle stream nearby fill the evening spring air. It has rained recently, and so the forest floor is damp and littered with fresh leaves that have been ripped from their trees by the rough wind.
Several chains from the main pathway through the Monongahela, this thicketed area is quiet, dark and still. But that stillness is disturbed by a quiet rumble under a patch of ground around the neat trunks of red spruce.
The rumble - the rattle, grows louder and louder until the area shakes and shudders, the earth quaking in its contained place until it is simply broken.
A split in the ground forms until it’s ripped from the inside, a black mist enveloping the space, woodland creatures darting from the scene. The split grows in size until this dark fissure is just over a foot wide and the mist becomes spiraling and thick. It swirls around the center of the split before culminating together, and seemingly being seized and pulled back down beneath the ground.
The fracture in the forest floor is still once again, and after a few moments, calm returns to the area.
Finally, when a handful of the surrounding trees rattle and are pulled towards the fissure in a twisting motion, the horrified, desperate creaking of old trees being willed into a position they didn’t grow to be in echoes across the Monongahela.
The pale moon stares down on Kepler, undaunted.
Duck Newton couldn’t feel his hands.
He stood still in a green meadow, seeing several yards around him before the land was enclosed by a thick, green mist. It was warm and he could smell the saturation and claustrophobia that came with humid air. There was faint buzzing sound surrounding the area, and Duck was reminded vaguely of the chirping of summer cicadas.
His eyes adjusted, and as they did, in front of him, he saw something standing proud and dead.
A huge, black tree. Leafless. Roughly fifteen feet tall from where Duck could see. Branches reaching up into the fog above, spiraling and stretching like vines into patterns so esoteric he had no idea what type of tree this could have been.
As Duck surveyed this tree, he noticed it was almost... twisted into a bizarre posture as its trunk met its roots. It was as if something had distorted it, like it had been ripped apart and stitched back together. As if its roots and the ground beneath was all dislocated limbs, sculpted back together with several grassy knolls.
Something burned in Duck's chest as his eyes trailed down the tree, and found that in front of it, lay a body, face down. Out cold, but breathing.
The figure's unmoving hands seemed to fade into the tree, their fingers and the tree’s roots seemingly weaving together into one. It was impossible to tell where flesh met black bark.
Soft brown hair spilled around into the saturated grass...
And a park ranger hat lay abandoned on the ground a few feet away.
A chill shot up Duck’s spine and he woke up coughing, hunching over into a sitting position. The burning in his chest was still there and remained for a few seconds.
He rubbed his eyes and blinked them open, and he was back in his bedroom.
“Shit...” he said, voice hollow. “A fuckin’ tree ?”
The time on the alarm clock read 6:14 a.m. and Duck remembered he wouldn’t have to leave for work until the afternoon. He was gonna go back to sleep, but he wanted water first.
He pushed the blanket away and got to his feet, the floor was cold in the chill of the early morning. Slivers of orange street light filtered through the blinds, casting bars over his room as he slowly walked. He was a droopy, tired man.
He pushed open his bedroom door and flicked on the living room light. Next to the television, Lily’s eyes reluctantly opened, and she squinted at him from the stack of blankets she was curled up on. Duck had bought her her own little cat bed months ago and she’d straight up ignored it and tried to move into the cardboard box it came in. It was still in the corner of his bedroom, untouched.
She yawned, stretched out a brown speckled paw, and chirped once at him as he walked to the kitchen.
“No breakfast yet,” Duck told her. His voice was slowly clearing, and he turned into the kitchen.
He got his water and drank as he wandered over to where Lily was. She chirped at him again and pushed her head forcefully into his hand as he pet her. When he scratched behind her ear, she stood and turned around in circles on the blanket a few times, purring all the while.
Duck sighed and crouched down beside her, careful not to spill the water. He closed his eyes and focused on the feeling of soft fur between his fingers, and the shape of that black tree flashed in front of him again. It was only a couple weeks until the full moon, and there were a lot of fucking trees around. And shit - whoever that ranger was, it was one of his co-workers. Something was going to try and hurt one of them.
Each of their names rang through his head like alarm bells.
Juno, Tara, Kaida, and James.
Whether he knew one better than the others or not, it didn’t matter.
Duck noticed when he got back to his feet, he felt dread pooling in his gut.
He went back to the kitchen, placed his empty glass in the sink, and dragged himself back to bed. With how heavily his thoughts weigh against his head, he didn’t notice Lily hopping off the blankets and following behind him.
She used her mornings.
She used them to allow herself to be an old lady. She used them to cook for her neighbors, to sing to herself, to call her mom, fix household objects that needed fixing, anything the Monongahela trails took away the time for her to do during the week.
With her hair pinned back, Juno sat on the steps leading down from the deck in the backyard, cool morning air whipping at her neck. Soft soil speckled her jeans as she worked on moving a bulb of sage from a spot in her garden into a clay pot, whistling as she went. On the small table by the door, sat the three other pots of herbs she’d finished work on so far that were ready to go indoors and live on her kitchen windowsill.
Juno’s garden was small and only extended a few yards down before being closed off by a wooden fence. It used to have stone tiles covering the ground, but she’d ripped them up a few years prior, and made use of the free space and built a little vegetable garden.
Over the winter, she’d tried her best to care for the plants as she could, and she was always being reminded that spring was on its way.
She was deeply in love with all those small reminders. The lilting songs of blackbirds, snowdrops wilting one by one, frost no longer appearing on fences and cars in the mornings. It was always nostalgic and heartwarming.
She reached over and took a sip from the coffee mug next to her, and proceeded to finished patting the soil down in the pot gently around the bulb with her gloved hands.
“Nice,” she said - she wasn’t sure who to, probably the sage.
The steps creaked as she pushed herself up to her feet. She carried the pot across the deck with both hands and placed it down with the others by the door, and grabbed a broom.
She swept the soil off the steps and listened to the swishing noise of the brush on the deck. The sound blended with the sounds of cars driving by and birds singing, the motion was continuous and it sent her thoughts darting with each movement.
She spent about five minutes in that trance, snapping out of it just before she accidentally swept the broom into the half-full coffee mug. She stared it for a moment and bent down to pick it up. She examined its contents, swirling it around in the mug for a moment in case flecks of dirt had been swept in.
She looked around the deck as she lifted the mug to her lips and let her shoulders drop. Closing her eyes and smiling to herself, aware of the fact that she was likely letting herself slip into another daydream, Juno leaned on the broom and felt a chill breeze sweep across her face. It was brisk in the early spring morning, and the lukewarm coffee through her body worked wonders.
She opened her eyes and turned on her heel towards the door to find herself facing the birdfeeder. It was a cute frame attached to the wall, in a position where you could see it perfectly from the kitchen window.
It needed refilling. Juno knew she had a huge thing of birdseed in a cabinet by the sink. She put the broom back and took the mug of coffee into the kitchen and poured it down the drain. She then set to work on filling the birdfeeder and carrying the pots of herbs in one by one.
Juno liked using her Saturdays for things like this. She wasn’t sure if she had any other chores that needed doing in her house, maybe some dusting, maybe a bit of grocery shopping.
The kitchen was clean, all washed windows and polished counters. She scoffed a little to herself at the reality that the girl who, in high school, had broken a window to an abandoned department store with a hockey stick, a cigarette tucked behind her ear, had decades later, became a woman who cleaned her kitchen on a Friday night. People change.
Once the birdfeeder was full, and the herbs were situated happily on the windowsill, Juno kicked off her boots, and brewed another cup of coffee. She took it to the living room, kind of just hovering around, like she usually did when she ran out of things to do. She scanned the framed pictures of her family scattered about the walls for cobwebs, looked if the rug required a vacuum, combed through her mind, looking for tasks she’d forgotten. She came up empty.
The window was now letting in bright morning light, gleaming off the table lamp on the small wooden desk at the front of the living room. It consisted mainly of paper stacks, candles and a cup of pencils. There was a large, 400-page book sitting closed on it, which was busy pressing some small flowers.
Maybe she’d try and draw something.
“Through the clouds does the sun scream her way
To cast on you a daily ray
She will do so until her nightly rest,
With which to her do we share and repay.”
Aubrey smoothed over the book’s pages and listened to the cracking of the binding. Morning light poured through the lodge’s lobby windows, setting the book in a soft glow.
“That one was nice,” Dani said, leaning over to look at the small illustrations of flowers next to the small poem. “Who was that?”
Aubrey looked down to read off the poet’s name next to the poem’s title. “Uhhh, someone caaalled… Aivery. It just says Aivery.”
Aubrey watched Jake throw his legs over the back of the armchair and lean upside down to let his blond hair fall brush the wooden floor. “I liked that one, I got it,” he said, closing his eyes.
It had been like this for almost half an hour. Aubrey sat on the soft rug, back against the couch, with a gigantic anthology of Sylvain poetry in her lap, reading off short poems from different time periods.
Dani lay on the couch, looking over Aubrey’s shoulder at the small illustrations of the poems in the book and scribbling them out onto her sketchbook. Dr. Harris Bonkers was climbing about the couch and around her feet, looking for fun.
And Jake was just reclining in any way he saw fit, legs thrown every which way, on the large armchair.
Aubrey stretched out a leg towards him and booped his forehead with her toe, and scooted back when he opened his eyes. He saw her, but smiled warmly at her anyway.
An arm reached over Aubrey’s shoulder, pencil in hand, and used it to tap the book lightly. Over the last half hour, that had become Dani’s signal for Aubrey to turn the page.
“You done?” She asked.
“Mm-hm.” Dani’s sketchbook appeared at her side and she saw scattered around on the paper in dark pencil strokes, the flowers, a two-headed swan in a small lake, an intricate crown, a little teapot, a strange shaped tombstone and a few patches of grass. All from different poems Aubrey had read to them.
“They’re great,” Aubrey said with a smile, and turned her attention to the book and turned the page.
More illustrations were printed on the bottom half of the page and two short haikus were arranged above them. Already, Aubrey heard the soft scratching of pencil on paper behind her head.
Her gaze lifted and she soon ended up staring out the window, and steadily processing how warm the room was after spending a bit of time being bathed in soft light through the glass windows. From here, she could see the tops of pine trees outside that swayed only gently, and clouds parting slow in the sky. The sunrays cast into the room gleamed over the floor and across Jake’s weary face, who peered at her through one open eye, which seemed to glow a paler shade of blue in the sunlight.
Thank you, sun. Aubrey thought. Then she blinked, and snapped back into the present. “Oh,” she said, tapping the book a couple times with her fingers. “Okay, uh. Another one?”
“Yeah, man.” Jake stretched out like a cat, and almost lost his place on the chair, slipping down but catching himself before he fell to the floor like a dumbass.
“Alright, uh…
Flowers, so meticulously built
Animals, so tactfully structured
The ocean, so daringly painted
Ourselves, so haphazardly assembled .”
The Cryptonomica: Kepler’s home for the mystifying, morbid, and the Macabre!
“Sidenote: gathers dust like a motherfucker,” Ned mumbled under his breath as his eye caught the small placard on the front counter.
He was alone. He’d always given Kirby Saturdays off but he usually came in to write anyway, sitting in the corner and typing away on his laptop. And yet, today he was nowhere to be seen.
Ned paused, and leaned against the counter, looking around. This room was definitely in need of a deep clean no matter what kind of fancy spin he tried put on the cobwebs and dust giving everything a more antique, authentic touch to every object.
The dust drifted through the air like a fog, highlighted by the sunlight coming through the window. He could smell the mustiness that tended to always dwell in old rooms. He pushed himself off the counter, and he heard the floorboards creak quietly beneath his weight. For some reason, he felt himself shift back and forth between his feet, listening to the soft sounds.
He opened his eyes, he hadn’t realized they were closed.
His gaze landed on a couple cardboard boxes by the entrance and he made his way over towards them, shaking himself from his daze.
Ned never would have taken himself for a man of deep thinking.
He hauled the two large boxes across the floor, pushing them along until they were by the counter, and ripped them open.
A bit of restocking was in order, something he hadn’t had to do for a long time.
The Cryptonomica seemed to get a little extra traffic through December, as people tended to buy their friends tacky cryptid-related gifts for Christmas, but after the holidays, activity in the store seemed to drop back down to the usual handful of customers per day.
Inside one box, were a few plush stuffed toys. One set of Mothmen, a set of Bigfeets, and a set of little Nessies.
“Cute and cuddly,” Ned said. “Just like me.”
He placed a few on the counter and a couple in the exhibits. He patted Nessie’s head gently. The sunlight bounced off Mothman’s beady red eyes.
“Indrid,” he nodded respectfully. “How’s it hanging?” He received no answer.
In the other box, was a selection of flyers and posters. Half of them for advertising the Cryptonomica, and half specifically for Saturday Night Dead. Both shared the dark color schemes with storm clouds drawn in a crude, cartoony style. He'd hand a chunk of the stacks to Kirby at some point. To be honest, he didn't know what that kid would do with them.
Ned looked around the museum one more time and deduced - yup, he was bored as shit.
Luckily, he recalled an invitation Barclay extended to him a little while ago, to come spend time at the lodge if he ever did get bored, and he had yet to take him up on that.
He grabbed his keys, and a couple flyers just in case.
Stepping outside and locking the door, he caught sight of the sunlight against the window. He could see dust speckling the glass panes and the windowsill inside. Yikes.
He turned to go find where he’d parked the van, casting one more glance at the window that hadn’t been cleaned in over a month.
As he walked, he mentally set a reminder for himself to pick up some Windex and some rags on the way home. He supposed it was called spring cleaning for a reason.
Sunlight kept finding its way to his face. Between the pines and through the glass window. Maybe it was an effect of the light, or the melting of the snow, but despite the cold, he felt as if the weather was already warming.
It had been a long, rough winter.
It had been a winter that left a lot of guilt in his stomach, heavy bags beneath his friends’ eyes. It had been a winter that the Pineguard would spend a lot of the spring recovering from.
His head seemed to remain deeply lined with thoughts like that - as it had always been - as he spent more and more time with the folks he so fondly cared for now. As he slowly drove the fifteen minutes up the road. As he parked the van in the small gravel lot of Amnesty Lodge and got out to wander up the wooden path to the door.
The afternoon sun slipped behind a cloud.
Ned entered the lobby, and his footsteps met the sounds of piano music and chatter.
“Happy spring, lodge friends!” He called as he walked to the sitting area, “Isn’t the sunshine delightful?”
He found Aubrey alone on the couch, her nose in a book so big he didn’t know how she was holding it. Her eyes appeared over the book and she gave him a big smile and a wave when he turned into the kitchen. He could hear Barclay rattling around in there.
He walked in and saw Mama and Barclay’s tired faces. Mama was putting away groceries. Barclay was writing in a ledger (that Ned knew Mama had repeatedly told him he didn’t actually need to keep) and brewing some tea for a few mugs set on a tray. “Are we all okay here?”
Barclay nodded, still writing, and Mama hummed.
“You any good with lawn maintenance, Ned?” Barclay asked, grabbing another mug from a cupboard and adding it to the tray, meeting Ned’s eyes.
“Uh,” Ned blinked. “Probably not. Why?”
“The garden out back.” Barclay jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen window “I’m gonna try and clear it up one of these days. It’s all overgrown.” He quit writing and poured the tea.
“He’s literally repeatin’ what he said to me,” Mama said, sliding a bag of cookies across the counter in Barclay’s direction.
“I could get some benches down there, make it nice. Get a space somewhere to give Dani the garden she wants.”
“Well, that’s sweet,” said Ned. “Best time of year to do it.”
Mama closed the cupboards with a sigh. “Well, maybe - maybe leave it for a few weeks? Ain’t got nothing on whatever hunt’s comin’ up. We need to start being careful.”
“Ah.” Seemed like two weeks ago, the holidays passed and they were running through the numbing cold forest after bikes and goats. Now it was March and they’d have to do it all over again. “You’re right. It’s soon.”
“It’s so soon.” Barclay ran a hand through his hair.
“I didn’t mean to stress either of ya,” Mama sighed.
“No, no, it’s fine. Let’s uh,” His hand dropped to his side. “Let’s have a Pineguard meeting tomorrow, and see if anyone’s seen or heard anything. I’ll go into town in the morning and… I don’t know, keep my ears open.” He lifted the tea tray and made for the doorway. “I’ll take these in there.”
Mama started to follow, but Ned put out a hand to stop her for a moment. “Are you alright there?” He knew that it was a question he wasn’t likely to get an elaborate answer to, but she looked like she was carrying a weight on her shoulders she hadn’t been earlier that week.
“I suppose.” She said, her hand resting on the doorframe. “We usually have somethin’ by now. Y’know what I mean? I guess I get a little bit jittery in these cases.”
“Understandable. We’ll keep at it.”
“Thank you.”
They heard Barclay talking in the living room with Aubrey and made their way in and took their seats.
“You’ve been absorbed in that thing all day.” Barclay said, handing Aubrey a mug of tea, which she took with a smile.
“It’s usually Moira reading that thing,” Mama said. Ned realized the piano music had stopped.
“It’s real good!” Aubrey said, sipping her tea and flipping back through the pages. She looked to be about two hundred pages in. Two hundred very, very big pages. “They have poems about space and history and all kinds of stuff.”
Ned looked at Barclay. “She’ll be writing her own soon.” Aubrey chuckled softly, and put her mug down.
Barclay’s eyes flitted to Ned and he shook his head and mouthed silently, “ All day .”
“Hm.” Ned sat back into the armchair like an old man. “What have I done today?” He murmured, “What did I do? Uh... hm. Oh, that’s right - jack shit.”
“You said you were getting deliveries.” Aubrey flipped back to the paged she was on originally.
Ned’s mouth spread into a grin. “Oh - hold on a sec.”
He felt the others’ eyes on him as he produced from his jacket - a small, plush, fluffy little stuffed Sasquatch toy with purple beady eyes.
“Just got in an order,” he stated proudly. “Do you like him?”
Barclay took it with a resigned sigh. “He… has my eyes,” he said with a tired smile.
Duck leaned back in his chair, and let it roll backwards on the wheels with a smile on his face. A smile that matched the ones that rangers Tara and James were trying to talk through.
“Uh, meerkat.” Tara said, her nose scrunched up as she laughed.
“Ah, shit. “ James dragged a hand down his face, wheezing. “Fucking… I guess. Maybe. Maybe a long time.”
“Imagine it. It’s wearing a helmet.”
“Why does it have a helmet ?!”
“Everyone else gets one!”
Duck rolled his chair forward to bury his face in his crossed arms, trying to stifle the monster of a laugh that was trying to burst out of him. It had been like this for ten minutes, heated debates and loud laughter.
If something could be turned into a joke, and Tara or James were present, it definitely would be. James was a rambunctious goofball, and Tara was a giggly firebrand.
Duck still had his head down when he heard the sounds of their voices being met with the sound of the front door of the station opening and closing. They didn’t stop talking so the joke continued on. It was funny as fuck.
“Oh, a fucking giraffe. How ‘bout a giraffe?”
James’s voice responded full of malice. “ Tara, a giraffe would not survive in a war trench, what the fuck .”
“What on god’s green earth?” Juno Divine’s voice said, half shaking with laughter and pure bewilderment.
Duck lifted his head and saw her leaning against the doorframe, watching as Tara and James descended into laughter. “They’re, uh... Decidin’ what animals would survive in a trench.” He clarified.
Juno nodded and a smile crept onto her lips. “Alright.” She threw her jacket over the back of another wheely chair and sat herself down on it in front of her own desk. “Hard at work.”
There was a leaf in her hair and a little smudge of dirt on her cheek. Duck would have wondered whether she'd been dragged through a hedge if she didn't come to work looking like that all the time anyway.
He turned away from his co-workers and back to his computer where he was filling in a survey report, but he wasn’t really focusing. Most of his focus was trying to bury the weight in his stomach that reared its head whenever Tara named an animal. Whenever James snorted with laughter. When he’d looked at Juno for the first time that day. When he’d waved over at Ranger Kaida earlier that afternoon. When his eyes flitted over to the framed photo of the late Rick Dannen on the wall next to a map of the forest.
His only clue was a tree, he thought. A black tree in a humid meadow.
He was staring at his computer screen with no real motivation to finish this report. He wanted to listen to Tara and James make jokes. He wanted to make Juno a sandwich and have a chat with her. He wanted to call Kaida and ask her how her massive family was doing.
The phone next to his computer mouse rang and he almost punched it.
“Fuck -” he sighed and picked up the receiver and lifted it to his ear how people usually do with phones. “Kepler Forest Service station. How- Yes. Hi.” Jesus christ.
He heard Tara trying to keep more giggles from escaping. He wasn’t sure whether he hated it or not.
A man’s voice came through the receiver. “Hi there, uh. My name is Daniel Moore. I was on a hike with my family through one of the trails in the forest earlier this afternoon. And we found something uh… a little strange, I think.”
Duck blinked. “Can you… tell me what you found, sir?” He grabbed a notepad and pen.
“Well, we think that it’s a log. And some rocks and some tree roots. But they’re all kinda wrapped 'round each other? The ground looked like it’d been dug up and… filled back in. It kinda reminded me of when a tree falls down and pulls up its roots with it but… weirdly shaped and all disjointed. ”
Duck stifled his groan. “Okay, that - that does sound... strange. Uh -”
“ Also, I think that there might've been a mole’s den near it.” Mr. Moore continued while Duck took down his words. “There were a few dead ones near this… log thing. It really upset my daughter. I thought maybe a ranger would want to come and look at this, it - It freaked us out a little.”
Duck grimaced. “Well, thank you for calling. We’ll definitely… check this out, and see what we can do. Where in the forest did you find this, sir?”
Moore gave Duck the location he’d made sure of beforehand, which was very helpful, and the information that his wife had taken a few photos of what they had seen that she intended to email the forestry service if they required it.
They said their goodbyes and Duck put down the phone. Wrote some more notes and dragged a hand down his face. This was going to be what he thought it was.
He got to his feet. “Jeez…”
“You okay?” Came Juno’s voice again, and he looked to see her looking at him, Tara and James gone from the room.
The rays of sunlight missed her hair by an inch.
Duck bit his lip and scratched his face. “Uh. Yeah…” He looked down at his notes, and hated what he was about to say. “We have, uh… We have an abnormality.”