by K. T. Tomb
At noon, they stopped on the bank of a small creek to eat. Samuel and Julie were comparing notes taken on the trip and Hal sat with them.
“Those marks are right out of a horror movie,” he said, a grin splitting his tan face.
Lux suppressed a laugh. She had never thought she would hear that kind of a phrase delivered with a smile.
“How’d you get into cryptozoology?” she asked him, inviting herself into the conversation.
He shrugged. “It’s in my blood.”
Lux raised her eyebrows.
“Hunting things may be, but why creatures that don’t exist?”
He grinned again. She wondered if anything upset him.
“Because they do exist. I’ve seen them with my own two eyes. You can’t deny what you see.”
Lux thought of the demon she had dreamed about.
“Perhaps. But you can’t always trust what you see.”
“I can.”
“Do you see that plant there?” she pointed to a thick-stalked weedy plant. “It’s called henbane. It’s full of tropane alkaloids. There are about six hallucinogenic plants around us right now that look almost identical to garden variety weeds that are edible. You could eat one and see the craziest shit and never know you were tripping.”
Hal looked at her curiously.
“You’re a glass half full, aren’t you?”
“Did you hear that?” Julie said.
“It was just a bird,” Hal said.
Lux ignored him.
“What?” she asked Julie.
She was staring into the trees a little to their left.
“I thought...” she trailed off, not finishing.
Lux wasn’t sure whether to listen to her or not. Julie was scared of her own shadow, but at the same time, fear amplified senses. She scanned the forest, looking for anything out of place. There didn’t seem to be anything. Then she saw it. She couldn’t have seen it. But there it was. Unfortunately for her sanity at that particular moment, she was the sole witness.
“Come on,” Samuel said, starting to move forward.
Lux reached out without thinking and clamped her hand around his arm hard, jerking him to a stop. “No.”
Samuel spun in her grip and shook her off.
“You aren’t in charge of this group, Lux.”
She turned her face to him; but didn’t leave the shadows with her gaze.
“Don’t move,” she said. “There is something there.”
A murky green gaze met hers from deep within the trees. Dog eyes, she convinced herself, just dog eyes. They were certainly not human eyes. Even from the distance of fifty or so yards, that much was obvious.
“Where?” Ben said, quiet enough that it was almost sub-vocalized.
“My twelve o’clock, your two.”
He found the eyes instantly. She saw the hair along his arms stand up. The hot sun was low in the sky behind them, reflecting into the far away eyes.
“What should we do?” Julie asked.
Lux was relieved when her voice didn’t sound shaky. Fear was never a good thing to face the forest with.
“We could keep moving, see if it follows us?” Hal suggested.
The excitement in his voice was back in full force. There was silence. One minute, not even that, when barely anyone breathed. Then the eyes were gone. The forest was empty of anything but Lux and her team. The green glow was simply not there anymore. There was no transition. There, not there. The team stayed motionless, afraid to be the one to move first. Julie was reaching out her left hand, frozen in place as if she was in the motion of grasping for Smith’s sleeve.
“Let’s move,” she said. “Just keep an eye out for anything.”
The evening was drawing in, but there was no good place to stop. Lux knew that they could not keep going in the dark. They were tired and the night was full of too many dangers to count, but she wanted to find a very, very safe place.
“Here,” she finally said.
The tree she stopped in front of was so thick that if all five of them joined hands, they probably could not create a circumference around it.
They hung their hammocks in a tight row that night, each within arm’s reach of the next. It was a set up similar to when Lux was a kid and she took to the woods with her cousins. They would sleep close for the same reason, scared of invisible boogeymen.
“Do you believe in monsters?” her older cousin Janie had asked.
“No!” Lux had exclaimed with all the courage of a seven year old.
“Good,” Janie had grinned. She lowered her voice. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”
Lux hadn’t slept that night. Every sound had been Godzilla oozing out of his festering hole to come and eat her alive. Of course she had never confessed that.
Ben was perched next to her.
“Do you think it was a dog?”
Her eyes trailed across his face carefully.
“No,” she said finally.
A grin, small but there, flitted across his face.
“But you don’t believe in monsters.”
“No,” she said carefully, knowing that he was setting up some word trap and that she was going to fall into it.
“We’re hunting Bigfoot, you know that.”
“Yes, that doesn’t mean I think that the idea is any less ridiculous.”
“Then why are you here?”
“You first,” she said, desperately curious.
His face was blank, a meticulously controlled coating over the surface of his skin to hide his thoughts. It only strengthened her curiosity.
“Why do you think I’m here?”
“Why are you evading the question?”
He laughed shortly. “You were a skip tracer. So you read people just like you read this forest.”
She nodded.
“Your job is to take us to the monster’s lair. Smith’s job is to make sure it’s humanoid or whatever. Julie’s job is to confirm that whatever we find isn’t just an escaped gorilla and to keep us from accidentally poisoning ourselves. Hal’s here because he knows how to search for things that don’t exist.”
“That is all true.”
He fell silent.
Lux didn’t break it, just watched him. His thick eyebrows were crunched down over his face almost violently. The bronzed color of his skin almost shone in the night. His eyes flitted back to her and she blushed, feeling like she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t have. But she didn’t look away.
“That still doesn’t tell me why you’re here.”
He cocked his head. “I suppose I’m Stevens’ insurance policy.”
A small river of cold rippled through her. Lux had been an insurance policy before, and it was never a good thing. Good for her, but never for anyone else involved. She shivered.
“Your turn.” He said.
“My turn, what?”
“Why are you here tracking an animal that you don’t believe in?”
She hesitated.
“I needed the money,” she finally said.
“How do you find something you don’t believe in?”
“I can find anything,” she boasted. “There’s something here. I don’t believe in fucking Bigfoot, but certainly there is something here. I can find what is here, be it Bigfoot or just a couple of hermits.”
“What happens if this is a hoax?”
The cold shivered through her again. If it was a hoax and they found out, the insurance policy might sentence them to something she didn’t even want to imagine.
“I don’t care what’s out there,” she said. It was mostly the truth. “I would lead us right back out of here and let everyone else deal with it. I just want the money so I can get out.”
“Get out of what?”
“Nothing,” she mumbled.
She had forgotten she was talking to someone like herself, someone who read the slightest movement, inflection, word. She had to be careful around him. Ben said nothing.
Lux turned her brown eyes to the woods and away from Ben. She felt like in any other situation they would have perhaps been friends. He was too much like her, though. The situation was tense, and he was the insurance policy. There solely to ensure Dr. Stevens’ interests were served, by everyone, even if it meant… what? That he would kill them? Lux decided she’d rather not know, but felt reassured by the weight of the pistol on her hip.
“When did you start tracking?” Ben asked after a while.
The sun was set and the darkness was there like spilled ink. Lux sighed. She didn’t like talking about her life. It wasn’t something that she had much pride in.
“I was seventeen when I started doing it professionally.”
He looked surprised; the darkness couldn’t hide it.
“That’s young.”
She shrugged.
“It’s what I’m good at, and people knew it.”
The silence was filled with the low buzz of bugs in the night. Lux didn’t feel the need to say anything and nor, apparently, did Ben. Soft snores came from at least two of the other three hammocks, but she was awake, wide awake.
“Are you from Texas?” she asked eventually.
“No.”
She didn’t press for more information, and he didn’t give it.
“Why don’t you believe in monsters?”
Lux pondered her answer. She didn’t want to just say because it’s ridiculous, but that was her honest answer.
“I’ve been on cryptid hunts before,” she said. “They were hoaxes or drunkards or other human errors. I believe in evidence.”
“I think it’s out there,” Ben said quietly, “and whatever it is, it isn’t natural.”
She wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Chapter Three
Prints; strange, bowed and clawed, wove faintly through the trees. Lux tied her bushy blonde hair back and squatted down to examine them. She was no biologist, but she was sure that there was something strange about them. She had seen the prints from every animal that crawled through the woods, and these were made by none of them.
“Hey, Julie,” she called out, “come look at these.”
Julie hurried over, the three men jumbling and jostling behind her for the best view over the girls’ shoulders.
“What?” she asked, squatting down next to Lux.
“Take a look at these prints and tell me what you think.”
Julie pulled out her camera and ruler and started snapping away.
“I don’t recognize them. There are two, actually three, individuals here, I think,” she said, using her pinky to outline different prints.
The selection looked random, but Julie clearly knew what she was talking about or Dr. Stevens wouldn’t have assignedher the spot.
“It rained, night before,” Lux mumbled.
Julie nodded.
“They’re fresh,” she confirmed. “Like last night or something.”
“Whatever made them probably weighed about as much as us,” Samuel said, nudging his head between them.
Lux frowned at him, scooting away. There was about a hundred pound difference between Julie and Hal. Julie stood five foot nothing and Hal probably topped six-three. The prints had more variety than most in the animal kingdom then. Lux stood, Julie and Samuel following suit. The five exchanged glances.
“Well,” Lux said after a moment, voicing what they were all thinking, “let’s follow them.”
She looked at Ben last. His still eyes and smooth face gave nothing away, which made her nervous like Julie. The wind was quiet. The birds were quiet. The forest was silent. Lux walked like a cat, her feet alighting upon the ground with still air. The others were equally cautious, the still woods bringing to life all the fears that lurked shadowy in the human mind. In dead-still woods, they walked silent as the grave for hours. The prints wound through the trees in seemingly random patterns, but they were going purposefully east, deeper and deeper and deeper. The darkness grew, as did the frequency of tracks they found.
“There are definitely five,” Julie said. “See how this one is missing a toe? This is a longer print over here.”
“Let’s stop early,” Lux said, eyeing another hefty tree thirty or forty yards from the path. “I don’t want to be wandering the woods in twilight with something I don’t know about.”
“Ha! Big bad hunter girl, are you afraid?” Samuel sneered.
Lux pinned him with angry eyes.
“Aren’t anthropologists supposed to be likable?”
Samuel opened his mouth with an angry wrench of the jaw and was about to respond when Ben cut in. “We’ll stop here. Is that a problem?”
Lux decided that Ben would be useful to keep around. She was perfectly capable of fighting her own battles, she wouldn’t be alive otherwise, but she was fine with letting Ben deal with Samuel. Samuel dropped the issue.
“Can I see those pictures you took of the prints?” Hal said to Julie.
Lux strung up her hammock and ignored everyone. She was ready for the trip to end. She wanted to get out of the woods, of Texas and of tracking. She could start over with the money from the trip, go wherever she wanted. Washington State had always interested her. It was beautiful there, new. She flicked a mosquito off of her arm. The little red smear it left looked like a tree branching out in tiny thin feelers. The bugs in Piney Woods were what drove people crazy. She didn’t care how many monsters hid in the trees; the danger was in the bugs. They gnawed at the skin, impossible to stop. With a yawn, she slithered back down to the fire. Hal divvied up a portion of hot beans from the camp cooking gear for her, which she took with a smile, but wished it was a steak and a beer.
Hal was apparently thinking the same thing.
“I don’t think I want to see beans for a while when this is done.”
“Me neither,” Julie agreed quickly.
“Beans, beans, the musical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot. The more you toot, the better you feel. So we have beans at every meal!” Hal sang, and they all, even Samuel and Ben, joined in for the second verse, “Beans, beans, they’re good for your heart. The more you eat, the more you fart. The more you fart, the better you feel. So we have beans at every meal!”
Lux couldn’t help it. She snorted all over her beans and Julie laughed out loud. Her laugh was clean and clear and light like a fairy. Even Ben smiled, teeth showing in a white line. The night stayed quiet and simple, lulling the weary travelers to sleep with the skittering of nocturnal animals and chirruping insects. Lux slept the whole night through, exhausted from the day’s travels. Bigfoot could have waltzed through the camp with a whole troop of traveling musicians and she probably would have snoozed right through.
Daybreak brought the fresh smell of brief summer rain. Lux yawned widely, pulled herself up and began to pack up the hammock. Leftover water droplets clung to everything and she had to snap the hammock out several times before she could roll it up. But the cool morning air and the chipper scent made it impossible for her to feel irritated. She scaled her way down the tree, and then turned to watch Hal come down. He was worth bringing along just to watch him climb trees because he moved as comfortably through the trees as well as a goat attempting ballet. She was certain he had at least a dozen splinters in each hand by the time he reached the bottom and that was clearly why he was always so quiet in the mornings as they walked; he was picking them out with his teeth.
When the Hal entertainment was over, she squatted down next to Julie and began to eat her power bar breakfast.
“How’d you sleep?” she said, around a mouthful of oats and fruit.
Julie shrugged.
“I thought I heard something moving around all night, but it was probably just Hal or Sam. They snore a lot.”
“I never!” Hal insisted, coming to sit with them. Lux was pleased to see him handling his power bar gingerly.
Julie gave a watery smile.
“Sure, and your breath is always minty fresh too!” Hal mugged, and m
ade a show of cupping a hand to his mouth and grimacing.
Lux didn’t say anything. She remembered the creature she thought she dreamed the night before, its dark body, smooth gait, thick horns. She remembered the quiet noises it had made. Was there a chance that she had not dreamed it? No, she decided. There was no chance that she hadn’t dreamed it. Demons were never real; she knew that. They broke camp and Lux quickly found the trail of the animals again. It was thinner, partially washed away by the light rain. Lux cut a quick pace, hoping to follow it as deep as they could; moving uphill, there was a greater chance of the land being exposed to the elements, and therefore of the trail going completely cold. It was only thirty minutes before they came across a fresh print atop the old ones. No one moved. Five pairs of eyeballs were glued to the raised and pressed dirt, scanning the ground for the next print, which Lux with her experienced eye found first. The new route ran away from the first, down deeper into the forest.
“Um.”
Julie poked her head around Lux’s shoulder.
“Yeah, um,” Lux agreed.
“So, that means whatever made these tracks is less than a day ahead of us, right? If the print is laid in fresh mud…” she trailed off leaving the sentence unfinished.
“Yeah,” Lux agreed again. “Let’s go, but quietly. Follow only in my exact footsteps. Whatever it is we’re tracking knows these woods better than we do. No deviation from my path, got it?”
“Yeah,” everyone said almost in unison.
At half the usual pace, Lux led the party down, following a near random, twisting route that nearly circled the bluff the first set of tracks had followed, then doubled back on itself, and again. It was infuriating, animals rarely behaved like this, being creatures of habit in the main. Animals hunted the same spots, went to the same places to get water. They liked routine, just like humans did. Two hours passed in this slow pursuit, but before long and without warning, the tracks disappeared entirely.
Lux swore under her breath, the low curses reaching the others’ ears.
“What?” Samuel said, his previous animosity gone for the moment, presumably thanks to the progress they had made.
“The tracks, they stop,” she growled, scanning the dirt. Tracks didn’t just stop. She had been neck deep in the woods for her whole life. Tracks didn’t just disappear, not when there was nowhere to go.
