Chapter Text
Something lives in the woods behind your new home.
Thus far, you haven't been able to catch a good look at it - only glimpses of it, out of the corner of your eye. Whatever it is, it's big - it usually crouches, so it's hard to get an estimate of size, but it's taller than you even without standing to its full height.
It's also incredibly fast.
So fast that, by the time you turn your head, it's gone.
You'd be lying if you said you weren't more than a little afraid.
When you first received notice that you inherited a house from some long-distant relative you've never even heard the name of, you were sure it was a scam of some kind. When it turned out to be legit, it didn't take long for you to make the choice to pack up and move. You didn't have much reason to stick around your dinky, overpriced apartment, anyways - your job was remote and could be done anywhere with a good internet connection, your friends had all moved to other states long before you had, and family? Well. . . There's a reason you inherited this place: you had no family left.
You knew from the photos that this place was gonna be a little. . . rough, but the foundation was solid, there weren't any leaks, and the roof had a few years left in it before it needed to be replaced, so you counted it as a win. Mostly it was just dusty, and needed several fresh coats of paint. Maybe a new window frame or two.
It seemed too good to be true, really, and you waited for the other shoe to drop. (You'd been called a pessimist before, but you preferred the term realist, thank you very much.)
It wasn't long after the movers left, kicking up a fine layer of dirt as they traveled down your unpaved driveway, that you started seeing it, and finding little. . . "gifts" on your back porch: pretty rocks, feathers, bottle caps - even animal bones, long cleaned by the elements.
You were freaked out, but you were naturally an anxious person who always had a rationalization or two in your back pocket: there were crows in the area. Maybe they were friendly with the previous inhabitant of the house? Maybe they've always left these little trinkets, and you just. . . haven't been able to catch the corvid bold enough to leave them right outside your back door. . . The door that's only a handful of yards away from the woods. . . where you've caught glimpses of some huge thing. . .
No! No. The gifts were from crows, and the thing you've been seeing out of the corner of your eye is a visual manifestation of your exhaustion. Yeah. . . That's it. You've seen things out of the corner of your eye before and it was always just because you were tired!
(Nevermind that some of the rocks were too heavy for a crow to lift, taking up nearly your entire palm. Nevermind that you only ever found them in the morning, left behind in the dark of the night. Nevermind that your previous experiences with seeing things in the corner of your vision were mere flickers that disappeared after a good night's sleep, not solid figures that reappeared for days on end.
Nevermind all that.)
For your own peace of mind, you had your locks changed, with extra deadbolts installed. That was a good thing to do when you get a new house, right? After all, there's no telling who might have had access to the old keys!
You also bought bear spray. And a taser. In case - in case the thing you kept seeing was a freakishly large bear! You were not being paranoid, shut up. You were being cautious. And why shouldn't you be, all alone in a new, empty house, nearest neighbor three miles away. . .
Maybe you should have just - stayed in your rinky-dink little apartment in the city. You've never lived in the country, never lived somewhere without the ambient noise of traffic, without hearing neighbors slamming doors at all hours of the day, without constant signs of human life around you.
Was the never-ending noise annoying, even overstimulating at times? Yeah. But at least you never had to deal with mysterious creatures leaving mysterious (and kind of ominous) gifts on your porch!
You can't help but sigh and pinch the bridge of your nose. In truth, you didn't mind the gifts - not even the animal bones. In fact, you. . . well, you liked them. A lot. You've always had magpie tendencies; a need to collect your own hoard of treasures. Usually, it was mass-produced fare, but you had sold a lot of it when you moved, eager for a fresh start. (Well, somewhat fresh. . . You still kept a few bobbles, here and there.)
What you didn't like was the gut-clenching uncertainty surrounding them. What was leaving them, and why?
"Crows," you told yourself, "crows being crows. And a particularly large bear. Maybe. . . maybe a hallucination. Concerning, but not - not supernatural, nothing to get worked up about!"
The amount of times you'd have to give yourself this pep-talk right after waking up was probably something you should have felt more concerned about. You could feel your sanity hanging on by a thread, but what else was new?
Still, no amount of denial and hyping yourself up could convince you to step foot off of your back porch, let alone into the woods themselves. You had hoped, on your first day in your new life, to go hiking and explore the great wilderness stretched before you, but now? You were dumb enough to move into a house left behind by some mysterious relative, but you weren't white-person-in-a-horror-movie dumb.
. . . Right?
(Someone, somewhere, was laughing at your naivete.)