uncannyinthegrove

[uncannyinthegrove]

Chapter Six: No Fun For Party Crashers

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Chapter One

(Content warning for Course Language, Disturbing Imagery and Graphic Depictions of Violence)

Colton sat on the front step of a dead woman’s house in the woods, while the person he had tried to kill less than twenty-four hours prior looked for clues. At first, he was too busy gagging into the grass and keeping his head bowed between his knees so he wouldn’t pass out to really think about much of anything besides the horrible sight of that charred corpse tied to a stake in the backyard. However, eventually he had the hysterical thought that it was probably a good thing Yarrow hadn’t immediately accused him of committing the crime.

Of course, that only made Colton realize there was a non-zero chance that he had killed her. Maybe in one of this weird fugue states, such as when he had tried to kill that weird Yarrow character, he had hoofed it all the way up the mountain and burned an old lady to death and he hadn’t even remembered.

That made his stomach roil again, and a cold sweat broke out across his skin. The guilt and dread he felt sat like a cold stone in the pit of his stomach and some frantic part of his mind cried it could not be.

Given the number of times Colton had ended up in this state in less than a day, it was a wonder he wasn’t in the hospital. Well, it was a wonder he wasn’t in a hospital for more than one reason.

Maybe that was a selfish thing to think when, compared to Yarrow, who Colton had seen covered in their own blood and bits of brain more than once, he was living the good life. Heck, compared to their grandmother, who he might have burnt to death, Colton had no room to complain at all. How could he be worried about how he felt when he’d maybe tried to murder two people and had possibly succeeded with one?

The only thing he had going for himself was that he could remember trying to kill Yarrow. He had felt like he had been so nightmarishly small and trapped inside a corner of his own mind. Except even though it was supposed to be his mind, it had been turned into a strange and foreign place, a cavern echoing with hostility, cold and endlessly dark. It was his, but it was so devastatingly bloodthirsty that it made Colton’s skin crawl, made him recoil and retreat even further into that corner until it was all that was left to him. But he had remembered.

Colton had still been there, present for the whole horrific thing. He had felt the first impact of the hammer, and then the way bone had given. He remembered the icy rain on his face, and the fresh blood on his hands. He remembered control coming back to him in waves, and then receding again in a way that left everything just out of reach.

He remembered the shovel in his hands, the exhaustion as he’d dug. He remembered the fighting, the scrabbling, the surge of hatred that wasn’t his, and the unadulterated fury. Then, later, when his sore protesting body was pulled out of the cold water by intangible, irresistible intent, he remembered the cold of the stone in his hands, the sinking in his gut and the smug gloating celebration of the thing in his head and way Yarrow had braced for the impact.

It was, of course, so super freaking weird that the victim of Colton’s thwarted murder-spree was immortal, or undying, or stubborn like a dandelion or whatever it was they insisted they were. However, every time they got back up after Colton had felt their skull crack and crumble under his hands, he was filled with such a strong wave of relief that it bordered on gratitude.

Well. Alongside a dread and fear that it meant he’d try again, that he’d have to feel someone’s life violently wrenched away from them, he’d have to feel them struggle and then go limp and still all over again.

And the frustration, the bitter regret that wasn’t his.

It couldn’t be, even if it came from inside his own mind.

Colton wasn’t expecting anyone else to understand what it was like to become a puppet inside his own body and made to kill someone, or what it was like to realize that he couldn’t fulfill that sickening compulsion. To not even really be sure where the feeling was coming from, but clinging to the idea that it didn’t belong because he could not handle the thought it was his.

Even if Colton did it a hundred more times, even if Yarrow said it still hurt to get killed, just so long as they could keep getting up and he kept not really killing anyone, maybe he could get through this.

Under his breath, Colton began to chant that it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t. It was whatever was in the woods.

If he had killed the old woman though, if maybe there was still more he didn’t understand about whatever was controlling him and he had somehow blacked out for it, or even just blocked it out of his own memories, then what did that mean for him? Worse, now that the person who was supposed to make this stop happening to him was also dead, his one hope that this could have all been turned into a very bad but forgotten dream had been stolen from him.

Possibly by the very thing that was using him to kill.

With that, the only person he could rely on was Yarrow and they were clearly still in denial that their grandmother was dead. They also had a messed up sense of self preservation. They hadn’t called the cops, and they hadn’t seemed too worried about sticking around for however long it took them to get their clues.

Then again, maybe as long as they were in denial, they wouldn’t begin to suspect him.

Colton leaned back, resting his head against the door frame in exhaustion while he contemplated what he was to do in the future. Honestly this, all of it, from the minute he had grabbed that hammer and lured a seemingly random guest out into the rainy night with the intent to kill them and bury them out there, had been over his head. And what? Now there was a weird forest spirit mind controlling both him and the dead, spells and seals and undying people who didn’t seem to understand the scope of the situation either, and witches getting burned.

All he had wanted was to stop smashing people’s brains out and to forget the horrible night had ever happened. Although Yarrow had been incredibly flippant with his attempts on their own life after the initial shock of it, they had also said some very worrying things about their family at large, and Colton was starting to wonder what they would do to him if he had killed the old woman. The last thing he wanted was to get cursed by some weird magic family, or worse.

Guiltily, Colton’s gaze drifted to the edge of the property, where the forest waited for him.

It would be dangerous to just run, he acknowledged. He had to remember that there was no guarantee he could get away from the forest’s control, and no guarantee he wouldn’t try to kill some other non-immortal. And if that happened, he’d be left spending years in prison with an innocent’s death on his conscience, rather than trailing after a supernatural anomaly.

He fiddled with the old string of bones and rock which Yarrow had slung around his neck. They’d insisted it wouldn’t hold out forever, and they had no reason to lie to him about that.

Unless they had been luring him all the way up here so they and their witch grandmother could bury him in her backyard, never to be seen again.

Colton swallowed nervously, his mouth going dry, and eyed the line of trees with a little more consideration.

Why had he trusted Yarrow enough to follow them all the way out to the back country, anyway? In fact, he wasn’t even sure that he had done it out of trust. Mostly he’d been consumed by guilt, haunted by the sensation of blood on his hands, and so desperate to make sure that it didn’t happen again he’d have done anything. In that sense, he thought Yarrow might have been quite cunning. They’d pushed and wheedled and bullied and guilt-tripped him into going along with them and Colton, not seeing any other option, had gone just settled all his hopes on the first solution that had been presented to him.

If there really was a whole world of things like Yarrow and their family though, then someone else out there had to able to help Colton. It wasn’t an ideal route since he really didn’t want to dip his toes any further into this bizarreness, and definitely didn’t even know where to start. There was a very good chance that he would just end up getting scammed by some online conspiracy theorist or new-age crystal hoarder.

But were the odds that Yarrow or their family would pull a fast one over on him that different from the odds that he would run afoul of some con artist in his own search for a solution?

He didn’t know. This was all too unfamiliar to him.

Colton slumped back from the tense lean he’d drifted into, as if he’d been no more than a hair’s breath away from lurching up and making a dash across the cluttered yard and back into the forest. Ridiculous. Even if Yarrow and their family were dangerous unknowns who might end up suspecting Colton of killing one of their own and violently assaulting another with the intent to kill, they were his best bet to navigating the whole new world he had been introduced to.

And, he reminded himself, if Yarrow had wanted to kill him, they already had the chance. He’d been unconscious in the backwoods quite a ways from where anyone would go and had clearly suffered a bad fall. If Yarrow had wanted to, they could have just done to him what he had tried to do to them.

But they hadn’t, and that probably said something.

Plus, to accuse him of killing their grandmother, they had to think their grandmother was dead to begin with, something which they seemed to believe was impossible.

Colton wasn’t as optimistic. He knew Yarrow’s family was weird weird, way weirder than the type of weirdness he could read on internet threads, so maybe there was viable reason to believe their grandmother was out there, riding around on a broom and cackling as she hunted down whoever had ransacked her house. The real question then was whose burnt body was tied up in the backyard.

Uneasily, Colton cycled back to the idea that Yarrow’s family was maybe not his safest bet. What if the old lady had done a kidnapping, and the house had gotten torn up in the victim’s attempted escape, and then the poor soul had become prey to some weird satanic ritual or something? What if she had killed someone, and they had just stumbled on the crime scene? What if Yarrow had figured that out, and that was why they had acted so calmly? What if they had sent him out to wait on the front step while they prepared for murder round two?

What was it they had said? Flesh sacrifices?

And who better to sacrifice than the person that had cracked open their skull twice? Who better than the guy being possessed by evil forest blood thirst?

Colton glanced towards the tree line again, gnawing on the inside of his cheek in nervous contemplation, brain buzzing with sudden panic.

Before he could second guess himself, he lurched to his feet.

For a moment he froze, half expecting Yarrow to burst out of the door and hit him with a bolt of magical lightning or something.

Nothing happened. No one shrieked and cackled and dropped out of the sky and told him he was going into the fire. Nothing.

Slowly he took a step forward, breath caught in his chest, heart thundering.

Nothing continued to happen.

Eyes wide, Colton decided that it was do or very possibly die. Like a spooked rabbit, he booked it for the edge of the forest and the trail they had come up on, vision narrowing and he’s ears roaring with a sudden rush of adrenaline.

Except that it was not the roar of adrenaline in his ears. It was the sound of a dirt bike, and just as he was clearing the last heaped up pile of scrap, a dirt bike ridden by a hulking, black-clad figure roared with sputtering, aggressive fervour into the clearing.

Immediately, Colton froze, considering whether swerving into the trees or turning back and maybe hiding behind the piles of junk was the best strategy. His hesitation cost him though, and the wavering momentum with nowhere to go instead sent him tripping over his own feet and skidding painfully across the rough terrain.

He winced, and tried to crawl away, tumbling backwards into an awkward crab walk that didn’t do anything for his speed or his injured hand, which had begun to pulse with a sharp and angry pain.

The dirt bike and its massive rider did not stop, charging towards him with a cloud of dust kicking up behind it. Just when he thought he was about to become roadkill, the rider slammed on the brakes so hard that the back tire kicked out to the side.

Colton stared at the scant inch between him and a painful collision with the vehicle, his brain still caught in a stuttering panic.

“Who the hell are you?”

He was not given much of a chance to answer as the rider swung off of their ride and kicked the stand into place in one fluid movement. While he was trying to remember how to form words and what the least incriminating thing to say to a person who had seen him running from the scene of a murder would be, they reached down, grabbed his shirt in a massively meaty fist that was covered in a dizzying array of black markings, and hauled him into the air.He dangled there in a stupor, staring at his own reflection in their sunglasses.

They shook him. “Whoever you are, you aren’t supposed to be here,” they snarled. Their face was well-defined, with a strong, heavy jaw, cheekbones like cliffs, and a nose that looked like it had been met with a blunt object one too many times. Their lips were painted a deep red and were peeled back to reveal teeth that were jagged and triangular like a shark’s. It was at once striking and spine-chilling.

Colton tried very hard not to whimper.

They shook him once, like a very large dog shaking a toy. He could practically feel his teeth rattle inside his own skull. The leather of their jacket creaked as their muscles flexed in what seemed like barely restrained fury. And then, horrifyingly, they stopped and sniffed. They leaned back from him, head tilting up to catch the wind, and inhaled long and deep of the pungent smoke which still meandered through the yard.

Colton’s heart sank even as they slowly angled their face back down towards him.

“Wanna tell me why I smell burning meat? Burning people meat?”

Normal people did not refer to burning bodies as people meat.

If Yarrow flipping out and having a rant while kicking him had shaken Colton, this was worse in a way that he could feel actively shaving years off of his life. By comparison, they hadn’t even done anything to him. Their tone alone threatened violence. Never mind how they were slinging him around like a chew toy. Also, Yarrow looked like the average hipster college student, and was easily shorter and slighter than Colton. This person looked like a pro-wrestler jumped up on steroids and a bone to pick with the world.

And teeth that could tear out a person’s jugular.

Quickly, Colton tried to deescalate the situation. “I’m so sorry—,"

Not good. The stranger’s head cocked to the side, and their leather jacket creaked ominously again. To Colton’s increasing horror, they crouched low, grip on his shirt unrelenting, and then abruptly launched across the lawn towards the door of the house like they were a massive wild cat.

Colton’s shirt jerked tight around his throat, cutting into his windpipe and making him gag from the force of it. His necked throbbed from the sudden whiplash, and his head spun. His vision danced with black spots as the mountain of muscle and aggression hauled him bodily through the house, not caring even a little if he collided with walls or furniture along the way.

He was pretty sure he could hear a weird rattling in their chest, not quite a growl, but something closer to how he thought dinosaurs would have sounded.

They barely stopped to take in the state of the ransacked back room, moving with a keen focus towards the door, which they hauled open with such force it was a wonder they didn’t take it completely off its hinges.

For a second, there was a dreadful, horrible silence. He tried to speak, to explain, but his breath was still being cut off. Hesitantly, he reached up, hoping to tap out, to get their attention.

Before he could even lay a hand on them, they heaved him up through the air and hurled him into a wall.

He crashed into it and pain exploded through his head and across his back. White sparks joined the blooms of black in his vision. Whatever breath he might have been able to draw with it no longer being choked out of him was knocked from his lungs, leaving him a gaping fish on the floor.

They turned towards him with a mechanical sort of motion that was so controlled, and so minute it somehow ended up being just as horrifying as their big threatening actions had been.

“What. Did. You. Do?” Each word was punctuated by the creaking of their jacket, and their heavy boots thudding on the floor.

Frantically, Colton tried to inhale faster, to talk faster. He twitched his body, torn between trying to lie very still and get some much needed oxygen, or to curl up into a very small and pathetic ball.

The light from the back door was blocked out as the looming, irate individual stopped in front of him. “You had better start praying to every single saint at the back door to hell that your answers are satisfactory. Because if they aren’t, what I’m about to do to you will seem like a blessing. You hear?”

“Please,” he tried mouthing, voice a near unintelligible rasp. “Please.” Where was Yarrow? Colton could have used a bit of that undying meat shield just then. Where were they?

Then again, why would they help him? Immortal or not, if it was Colton, he would take one look at the furious stranger and he’d stay the hell out of their warpath. Yarrow had more than a few screws loose, but they’d definitely know enough to keep their head down until the dust settled. Maybe they were already scrambling out of one of the upstairs portholes and making a break for it.

The irate stranger crouched down and grabbed him by his hair, tilting it back sharply. “You look human. And you smell…” they inhaled deeply. “You smell foul. You smell like blood. You smell like graves. You smell like—“

“Hey! Smell this, lizard-face!” With an almighty holler, Yarrow, standing bold as brass at the base of the stairs, hurled a glass paperweight at the stranger.

It only just managed to clip the side of their head as they whipped around to look toward the voice. It knocked their glasses askew, and Colton was horrified to find that their eyes were also a bloody red. Not just the iris, but the sclera as well. Their pupils were tiny slivers of black in a sea of red and they narrowed even further the minute they caught sight of Yarrow.

“You,” they hissed, and if Colton thought they had been enraged before, he’d been wrong. Now they were enraged. He could hear the venomous enmity in their voice bubbling to the surface. They let go of Colton with a flick of their hand, like he was an insignificant bit of trash, and slowly rose to their feet, rotating on their heel to face Yarrow as they did. “What are you doing here?”

“Run!” Yarrow shrieked, eyes going wide as they connected with Colton’s, and then they spun and raced out of the room.

Without so much as a backwards glance, the stranger gave pursuit with agonizingly deliberate steps.

Colton wasted no time in taking Yarrow’s advice. Rather than head for the front door, which would have meant following after the other two, he bolted for the already open back door. It might have meant getting closer to the burnt body, but it seemed like the better option in terms of not joining the current tally of the dead.

He crashed out into the backyard, chest still heaving as he gasped for air, the fear barely obscuring the way his whole body protested.

Inside the house, he heard a sound that made his blood run cold. Again, the closest he could liken it to was a roar, but no roar he could think of echoed or rattled in such a way. It was followed very closely by Yarrow’s name being bellowed like a curse, and Yarrow’s slightly more familiar voice shouting something indistinct back.

Colton did not linger to observe. He rounded the side of the house almost faster than his feet could take him, using his good hand to catch on the wall and keep him upright, although it made his ragged palm sting.

He was part way across the clearing when he heard Yarrow shout for him to start the bike.

His instincts said to keep going because the thought of slowing for even a brief moment seemed like a death sentence, but some small barely there voice of rationality told him under no circumstances was he getting out of there on foot while the stranger had a vehicle. Never mind that he had firsthand experience of the way they’d cleared the entire yard in one jump.

His hands fumbled as he tried to figure out how to get the dirt bike running, frantically scrambling to find the button before realizing it had a kick start. His experience with dirt bikes was limited at best, and it’d be a wonder if he could even drive it. He couldn’t think about that. He just needed to go, and to do so as fast as he could.

Yarrow collided with him, having made it across the yard in the time it had taken, and they smacked his hand out of the way and shoved onto it. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, we gotta go, she’s going to kill me!”

Colton didn’t argue, eyes darting against his will towards the gaping door of the house, where he could just see the enormous figure stumbling crookedly in their direction, hand on their head. He didn’t know what Yarrow had done to such a mass of murderous intent, but he wasn’t going to stop and ask. He simply clutched onto the back of Yarrow’s jacket as they revved the engine with a shriek of protesting metal and gunned it out of there.

—

It didn’t take very long for Colton to realize that Yarrow didn’t really know what they were doing driving the dirt bike, either. They roared through the forest, lurching over the trail like they were astride a bull at a rodeo, and Colton clung on for dear life while shouting for Yarrow to be careful. Even despite that, they managed to swerve the bike off the trail, collide with a fallen log, and send the both of them hurtling over the handlebars of the bike in alarmingly short order.

Colton groaned, levering himself out of the dirt unsteadily. It was a wonder that he hadn’t broken a rib, or a leg, or every other bone in his body. He was, however, covered in scratches that were a little closer to gouges filled with dirt and forest debris than he would have liked. His splinted wrist was not so splinted anymore, and he really didn’t want to think about what kind of state the bone was in. If he made it back to the real world and a normal life, he was certain the injury would haunt him for years to come.

“Hey,” he tried, curled in on himself like a feeble senior. “Hey, what was that?” He turned to find the source of their accident.

Yarrow lay in a heap on the ground, not moving.

Colton’s heart leapt with joy. Immediately he felt control beginning to slip like someone was gently pulling a blanket up over him, tucking him in to nap while it or they, or whatever, handled the rest.

Frantically, Colton scrabbled through the dirt for his temporary amulet, realizing that it had fallen loose when they had crashed. The loss of control sped up, and he kept getting distracted by the hungry need to go and wring that scrawny little freak’s neck. Just to make sure.

And maybe if he dismembered them, they wouldn’t come back. Or he could try fire.

His fingers flexed angrily in the dirt against his will, and he winced as they caught on the rough piece of shale attached to the string of bones with enough force to scrape his scabbed up palm. Just like that, he felt the tide of intent begin to recede, leaving him blessedly in control of his own thoughts.

He looped the macabre improvised amulet around his neck like a priest with a rosary.

Yarrow groaned where they lay in the dirt, apparently not dead after all. Colton watched, unimpressed, as they sat up gingerly to look around.

“Damn,” they said. “That was wild. I hate driving.”

“We don’t have time for that. Whoever that was could catch up any second now. Did you see what they could do? They were like some sort of superhuman. We need to go!”

Yarrow grunted and began dusting their clothes off and inspecting their body for other injuries. “Nah, don’t worry about it. She’s probably still back at the house, calling up the rest of the family.”

Colton’s frantic scramble to get their collapse bike upright stuttered to a halt. “Wait, what?”

“Yeah, Hollis is a bit hotheaded, and it’s a good thing we got out of there, but she’ll cool her head off now. She probably won’t think we’re high priority. And she hates me. She’d definitely rather deal with that corpse back there and finding my grandmother.”

Colton was confused, mind still reeling from the fact that he had almost been killed. Twice. Once by accident, sure, but still he had been uncomfortably close to death an unwarranted number of times. In fact, his tally of near-death experiences was creeping up on Yarrow’s own, and that was without any sort of invulnerability protecting him.

“Hold on… You knew her?”

“Oh yeah. That was my cousin.”

“That was your cousin?” Colton ignored the way his voice cracked in favour of contemplating doing the evil forest a favour and strangling Yarrow of his own volition.

“Sure. From my Ma’s side of the family technically, but we’re all Hursts. Just how it works when you join the old family tree.”

“How the hell was that your cousin? That was… that was a monster or something.”

“You’re telling me,” Yarrow laughed. “And they used to get her to dress up as the Easter Bunny. Let me tell you, getting the eggs from her was a nightmare. Probably a good thing I can take a javelin or two without going down. Well. Permanently.”

None of those words made any sense in the order that they had been presented to him, so Colton chose to ignore them entirely. “Why are they like that and you’re…” he waved his hands and Yarrow pointedly. “Like this?”

Yarrow blinked at Colton dumbly. “What do you mean?”

They said it with such bafflement that somehow Colton felt liked he’s asked something very stupid. “Never mind. Actually, why didn’t you do anything? You could have explained what was going on! Maybe we could have gotten some help?”

“Oh. Well,” Yarrow started, and then began to pull a sheet of paper out of their jacket. “Hollis is what you would probably call the family fixer. Sort of. They clean up messes, along with some of our other cousins. They’ve all got their own specialties. Hollis’ specialty involves hunting people down and then making sure that said people can’t be found by anyone else ever again. You know how it is. They take their job pretty seriously and for now you’re quite the liability. Once they found out about your whole deal and this forest, they’d take the obvious path. Which I am pretty certain you would not like very much.”

Colton’s belief that Yarrow’s family was not the benevolent solution to all his problems was immediately affirmed. Any family that had fixers whose entire responsibilities involved erasing anyone on their bad side was not to be trusted. “The… obvious path?” He asked, despite being fairly certain he knew what that meant.

“Sure. Turns out Gramma had notes on what this thing she had sealed all the way up here is. The seal got broken when she left, I guess, so it needs to get redone. We already knew this, which is why we went to go find her. Problem is; this thing has, like, I dunno, latched on to you. Thus, the easiest way to deal with this would be to toss you in the cave where it originates, and then seal you both in. Obviously not great for your well being and daily life.”

Colton breathed in slowly and then exhaled just as slowly. He did this a few more times, realized it was doing nothing to alleviate the anxiety building behind his sternum, and promptly sat himself down on the ground and buried his face in his hands. A moment later, he felt a consoling pat on his back that did nothing to help calm him down or make him feel better.

“So you’re saying I’m…I guess patient zero? There’s nothing you can do but quarantine me and forget about me?”

“Bad metaphor.” Yarrow chirped. “That’s not really how quarantine works. It’s more like you’re contaminated medical waste that isn’t good for anything, so we bury you where no one can get harmed by you and then forget about you.”

“Great. Just great.”

“Hey, relax. I said I’d help, didn’t I? Sure, you don’t know me, and yes, things have been rough and maybe I don’t have a great track record, but I did say we would sort this all out. I think I’ve got a solution.”

Yarrow did not have a great track record. Yarrow was a train wreck. A loose cannon ball. Yarrow also seemed less immediately inclined to murder Colton than Hollis was, and had even gone up against their murderous tyrannosaurus of a cousin to get him out of there mostly intact.

Colton squinted at Yarrow suspiciously. “Does it involve moving to another country and never leaving my house in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of freaky bone chimes?”

“No. I hadn’t thought of that. I guess I could commission some for you if you want and we could do that? Do you have money for that sort of thing?”

“No.” Colton worked at a motel and took stray college courses where he could. His family was a victim of an economy that kept the working class firmly beneath its boot, and the only prospects he had was to work until the day he died and hope that his health held up, or he dropped dead of a heart attack on the spot because he probably wouldn’t get to retire.

“So we’re sticking to my plan, then.” Yarrow patted him on the back again. “Trust me, it’ll be fine. All we gotta do is roll up to the cave, have a bit of chat, and then get you to kill me. I mean, that’s all stuff we’ve pretty much done, so it won’t be hard.”

“I’m sorry. Run that by me again?”

“Yeah!” Yarrow shifted so that they were seated in front of Colton and began to draw with their finger in the dirt. “This is how I understand it. See this ring here? This is the cave and the area directly around it. And this,” they drew a much larger circle around the smaller ring, “is the forest where the seals are, right?”

Having no idea where Yarrow was going with this, Colton just nodded.

“Anything within the smaller circle is in the ‘infection range’, to use your metaphor. That’s the cave, or the spring where you had that weird experience. Because you got too close to it, it infected you. But, because of the seals in the forest, once you left its immediate reach, it couldn’t control you anymore.”

“Wait, infect me how?”

“How does anyone get infected by anything? It’s in the air, on surfaces and so on. But only within a certain proximity. I presume that before grandma sealed it, its range was the entire forest.”

“So… you’re saying it’s the medical waste that your grandmother contained and disposed of?”

“Eh,” Yarrow see-sawed their hand through the air. “You could say that. I guess. If you had to.”

“But… why? What does it want?”

“Want? Who can say?” Yarrow shrugged. “You’d have to ask it. Maybe this is just its biological imperative. Well, I will say it's probably been trying to kill me because it senses I’m related to Gramma. Us Hursts are a bit conspicuous. Presumably, if it was here all along, minding its own business, infecting people, luring them into its reach and then, I don’t know, consuming them or something, but Gramma sealed it away? It's probably feeling pretty spiteful.”

There were still a lot of things that Colton had questions about. “So why do we need to go talk to it? And why do I need to kill you?”

“Well, my thinking is this: you’re carrying its virus around. That’s how it can control you now that the seals are down. Normally we’d just throw you away like the aforementioned medical waste to so you couldn’t cause any damage. But we—“ Yarrow pointed at their chest, and then at Colton, “—don’t want that. Obviously. Therefore, the best thing to do would be to make it so you don’t have its germs on you anymore.”

“So you want to cure me?”

“Well, not quite. This is where the metaphor breaks down. Normally to heal a sickness we’d have to give you medicine, or antibiotics, or a vaccine or whatever. Kill the infection, stimulate the immune response, or something to that effect. I don’t know how to do that. I’m not a doctor, or scientist or pharmacist. And quite frankly, it would take a lot of time and effort when the obvious solutions would be to… you know,” Yarrow drew their finger across their neck in a visceral display of the easiest solution. “Do away with you. But! What if we could just convince the germs to go to someone else? And then, since they have a super special awesome mega powerful immune system, they could fight it for you?”

Truthfully, Yarrow’s unhelpful allegories were only muddying the waters. “Um, couldn’t I just get infected again by being there?”

“You’re really love to nit-pick, don’t you? This is where the conversation comes in. It’s just a matter of word play. A little skulduggery, as they say. We offer it a trade. A sturdy individual like yours truly to do its bidding and give it a grand tour beyond its nexus point, and in exchange, you get to go free. Obviously, we don’t tell it the part where you kill me and thus trigger my secret dandelion powers, wiping it out in the process.”

Yarrow seemed entirely convinced they could communicate with this thing. Colton wasn’t so sure, but conceded that he had less expertise on the matter. Still, there was a point of doubt he couldn’t just let go of. “So, so let me get this right: you’re going to sacrifice yourself to make a deal with it?”

“I mean, it’ll suck, but it's not really a sacrifice on my part, is it?”

It wasn’t really for Colton to say whether that was true or not, and anyway, he had another question. “Are you sure that’ll work? I don’t see how you killing its… germs is going to solve the issue?”

“I’m chopping off one of its limbs. And then we can reseal it following these instructions I borrowed from Gramma without worrying about it giving up on its main body and taking over your body entirely.”

That had been a fear of Colton’s the minute he had first realized he was being moved against his own will. He’d done his best to ignore the possibility that he would never get his autonomy back, and that he’d be a prisoner in his own head eternally, or eventually that’d he’d be overwritten entirely. “I’m sorry? Did you just say it was going to take over my body? Like, completely?”

“Yeah. You know, give up on its main core and start over with you. That’s why Hollis would have dumped you in there and sealed you with it. It's like if a salamander lost a limb, but instead of regenerating the limb, it just regenerated its whole body from the lost limb instead, and let the old body die. Or whatever. Maybe it wouldn’t die, it’d just have a shared consciousness and it could hop around between the bodies. But that’s beside the point. We are not letting that happen. We’re going to torch the limb so it has no choice but to stay in its body, and then we’re pulling a fast one on it while it is confused.”

“So why hasn’t it done that before? Transfer consciousness or whatever? Actually, why hasn’t it just left? If the seal is broken? Couldn’t it just go?”

The look Yarrow gave Colton made him feel both stupid and angry that he felt stupid.

“Obviously, it couldn’t because of the seal. And obviously, it can’t just get up and walk away. And why would it want to? That’s like asking you why you don’t just leave your body behind and find one that doesn’t want to kill me.” They provided no further justification for their certainty.

Colton waited for his irritation to subside, and in its wake, he found himself turning those words over in his head. “Are you saying the cave is like its body?”

“Yeah, pretty much. And the forest was like its hunting grounds. A clam upon a rock, eating anything within reach.” Yarrow shrugged as if this was all a matter of nature and the circle of life.

And, in a way, Colton supposed it was. Unfortunately, that did not make him feel sympathetic to the things’ situation, and he sure as hell wasn’t inclined to cooperate for that reason alone, not if it meant turning into some mind controlled puppet. “So weird,” he muttered under his breath.

Yarrow nodded. “Yeah. I’ll tell you what my father told me when I was a kid: don’t try to fit it into a box of mortal reason and logic. It’ll only make your head hurt. Sometimes you’ve just gotta accept that things work the way they do, even if it doesn’t make sense to you.”

Basically, don’t think about it too much. Well, Colton was sleep deprived, mortally afraid for his life and bodily autonomy, and his everything hurt. He’d been in a brawl, chased by zombie animals, rolled off a cliff, hiked through the woods while injured, been assaulted by what he had concluded was a dinosaur trapped in a woman’s flesh, and then been in a crash. Yarrow’s plan seemed like a shot in the dark, a fool’s hope, but, according to them, it was that or death.

In the end, turning off his brain was surprisingly easy. “Alright,” he said, bewildered but resigned. “Let’s go… give it a try?”

Yarrow beamed at him radiantly, as if he’d just agreed to go to a concert with them, and not as if he wasn’t putting his life and well-being in their hands. “Excellent choice! You won’t regret this, I promise!”

—

If Colton had been expecting a battle against all the zombies and minions of the entity which had thrown his life so far off course, à la video game standards, before at last facing off against the final boss, that wasn’t what he got.

Yarrow insisted that it was because it was still daytime, and even supernatural brain control beings needed rest, but that only made Colton eye the deepening shadows of the forest with unease. By the time they navigated their way down the mountain trail and he took them back to where he remembered that strange spring had been, it was approaching suppertime. With the end of summer and the shortening days, the shift in daylight was obvious. In no time at all twilight and its gloom would darken the forest again.

Ironically, the place they ended was very picturesque. It was still rugged, as was typical, but the trees were older and more spread out, the moss on the ground was thick and vibrant, and the general undergrowth was not quite as inclined towards ripping people’s flesh off of their calves.

That area of the forest was eerily hushed, however, as if every forest creature had long since learned to avoid this spot. Colton had not noticed how ominous this felt before, back when he’s hiked along with out a single clue. Then again, he’d probably been listening to music, or his job trying to find and clear a decent hiking trail had kept him from noticing. And later, when it had been too late, he had been so completely out of it that his memories were still a blur even weeks later.

“Alright,” Yarrow whispered from where they had pressed their back against a tree to peer around it at the crevice in the rock and its gentle trickle of fresh water. “Alright. You remember the plan?”

As if they hadn’t been going over the plan the entire way back. As if Colton hadn’t frantically dwelt on this plan, certain it was going to go horribly wrong immediately, and that things would not to end well for either of them. “What if it just traps us both here forever, and I just keep killing you over and over and over again until I die?”

Yarrow glanced over at him, eyebrows rising high incredulously. “Dude, that would be so messed up.” They glanced back to peer at the spring as if that was that.

Of all people for Colton to have ended up relying on, he wished that it had not been this one.

Then again, this far into the game, there really was no point in going back.

Nervously, he fumbled with the amulet around his neck. He’d tied it there even more intensely than it had been, but he still found himself nervous that it would suddenly stop working. He was afraid it would be overpowered by his proximity to the thing, or the string would snap, fall away and leave his mind to the mercies of an entity that saw him as little more than a tool.

If it even thought of him at all.

He wasn’t sure how he felt that thing which had used him for its own violent purpose might not even really be aware of him. What if it didn’t know or think of him as someone with thoughts, a life? If it had been hostile, if it had looked down on him, that would have been one thing. But if Colton was less than an afterthought, nothing more than a matter of convenience, something to be otherwise apathetic towards… if it couldn’t conceive of his rage and indignation and fear? What then?

“Hey? You ready?” Yarrow hissed, pulling him out of his thoughts.

“Oh. Um. No.”

Yarrow blinked and stared with an expression Colton found rather condescending. “Oh. Should I wait?”

The sigh that escaped Colton was exhausted, and in the space it left behind in his chest, he felt the vague urge to cry. “No. What would be the point? Let’s just get this over with.”

“Okey-dokey,” Yarrow confirmed, and swung dramatically out from behind the tree. “WE COME IN PEACE!” They shouted at the top of their lungs, making Colton jump from the abruptness of it.

Again, Colton did not know what he had been expecting. Maybe he had thought the ground would begin to rumble and shake, that the rock face would split open and an army of zombies would burst forth. Maybe he had thought some impossible to comprehend vision would manifest before them and it would come down to the flip of a coin whether he could keep his mind from fracturing into a million and one little pieces.

This was not what happened.

There was a long moment of silence, and eventually Yarrow caved and called out again. “Hello? We come to negotiate!”

At this, the horrible, mangled squirrel from the night before appeared on top of the rock face. Only, in the light of day, it just seemed sort of gross and pathetic.

“Oh,” Yarrow commented. “Hello.”

The squirrel tilted its head to the side inquiringly, and that was apparently all the signal Yarrow needed to begin.

“Greetings,” they declared once more, and then said something in a bunch of different languages. “So basically,” they said, switching back to English, “I came to make a deal with you. This guy is just a normal fellow. Bit squeamish. Very boring. Small town guy, with big dreams of making it as a star in the big city. Low key kinda wants you to leave him alone.”

That wasn’t true. Colton had never said anything about wanting to be a star. Yarrow had mentioned something to the effect of lying to the creature to coerce it into going along with their plan, but Colton didn’t see how painting him as a guy out of an eighties feel-good film was necessary. Nor did he see the need for the commentary on his personality.

“He can’t have murder on his record, you know? And I can’t have you hunting down anyone else related to me. There’s already one innocent person burnt to a crisp up at Gramma’s house. So I propose we find a solution. Compromise. Work out a deal that leaves us both satisfied.”

The squirrel clacked its jaw and fumbled its tiny, horrible little paws.

“That wasn’t you?” Yarrow reiterated. “Good to know. I didn’t think it was. Didn’t seem like your MO.”

The creature shuffled and twitched.

“No, no, no. Don't celebrate yet. You’re probably mistaken. That wasn’t her. But don’t worry. My cousin is here, so they’ll figure all that out in no time.”

The squirrel stood erect, holding still and alert.

“What? Nah, relax! We didn’t tell her anything. No reason to drag other people into this, am I right? And trust me, you don’t want to test her. She’s not as open to conversation as I am.”

The squirrel flicked its filthy, bedraggled tail through the air.

“Yeah, I promise. This is between you and me. And Colton. But he’s just kinda here to look miserable and evoke sympathy from you.”

The squirrel canted its head to the side again.

“The terms? Well, I’m glad you asked. In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t die. Convenient, isn’t it? You send your least undead soldier to murder me and I just keep getting back up. But it shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, I’m related to the very woman who got you in this situation. And you probably know what our family is like.”

Was the squirrel using telepathy or something? Colton glanced back and forth between Yarrow and the decomposing critter in bafflement.

Yarrow continued. “And you can’t just make me your puppet on account of that. Got those good genetics going for me. But! What if I told you I was willing to chauffeur you around a bit? Let you take a peek at the outside world. I was on a bit of a backpacking trip myself, before you waylaid me. I don’t mind picking up a companion. We can take in the sights, get some fresh air, work out a meal plan, whatever you’re looking for, all in exchange for this one measly human’s release.”

It was hard for Colton to tell how things were going when he could only understand one side of the conversation. All he could do was wait, which was a challenge.

He wanted very much to say something. Beg, maybe? Do whatever he could to plead his case, to demand a justification for why his life had to get turned into a horror story? But he was, as Yarrow had said, just some normal guy. What did he know? The last thing he needed was to make the whole situation turn against them by opening his mouth. He might not have liked it, but he had agreed to let Yarrow handle the negotiating. His job was to shut up and not draw attention to himself until it was his turn.

“What? No way! Too good to be true? You gotta learn to trust people a little. Yes, okay, alright, I know my Gramma came in and ruined your whole spot, but that wasn’t me. I’ll have you know, I’m the troublemaker of the family. New ideas for a new generation, you know how it is. I really think we can work something out. Blood feuds across the ages are so passé these days—no! No, I’m not saying your feelings aren’t valid. I’m just saying, what’s it really getting you? You’ve been skulking around in these woods when you could be making up for lost time. And who knows when this chance might come again. My Gramma doesn’t leave home very often.”

There was a long stretch of silence where Yarrow and the squirrel made a freakish amount of eye contact and Yarrow nodded their head occasionally. Colton continued waiting on tenterhooks for the verdict, startling at every twitch either of them made.

Eventually, Yarrow clapped their hands, apparently having reached some kind of conclusion. Colton flinched.

“Alright,” Yarrow proclaimed. “It’s a deal. Things are back to business for you here. But also you get to hitch a ride with me instead of Colton, and he goes back to living a boring, average life. Everyone wins.” They glanced at him and winked.

He wished they hadn’t. “We’re good?” He questioned disbelievingly, trying not to look at the squirrel too much in case his expression betrayed him.

Yarrow nodded enthusiastically. “Yup. Things are shaping up nicely. We’ll have you back to normal in no time at all.”

For someone making a ridiculously dangerous gamble, Yarrow sure did not seem particularly anxious. Rather than having the effect of inspiring similar confidence in Colton, he only grew more nervous in the face of their flippancy. He swallowed dryly and lowered his eyes. “So. What now?” He asked, voice barely a croak at the back of his throat.

Yarrow patted him on the shoulder. “We’re going to go up there, get closer. It’s gonna work its magic. And then,” they shrugged. “Shazam!”

“That’s, uh, a little vague.”

“Right. Well, I’m not entirely sure what this is going to look like.” Yarrow glanced over their shoulder towards the squirrel. “Things might get a little… funky town.”

“Funky town? What do you mean? Why? What’s going to happen? What do I do then?”

“Chill. I’m just saying I’ve never done this before. It is hard to say how the entire process will end up going down. If things get wild… I dunno. You do your thing, and if you can’t, clear out. The family will probably figure it out if things go bottoms up. Hollis is nearby too.”

“The one who will kill me and shove me into that whole as a solution?” He glanced at the crevice in the rock, which was small enough that he would have to be turned into little tiny chunks to fit into it.

Yarrow lifted one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “By that point, I’m sure you won’t have to worry about it.”

“You say that, but what if they’re like, super mad? Like, so mad. As in, I’m going to use my freakishly sharp teeth to tear your face off, and I’m going to pry your ribs open with my bare hands and make origami out of your entrails mad?”

“You’re exaggerating,” Yarrow laughed. The pitch and length of their laugh was not reassuring, but before Colton could press them any further, they grabbed his arm and began dragging him up to the rock face and the squirrel.

The dreadful creature darted down the jagged edge of the rock so that it perched at eye level with them where they stood in the cold run off of the mountain spring. It twitched and jittered and up close it was even more disgusting to look at, with ribs poking out and its flesh saggy and dry on its frame, and all the bugs writhing under its skin, chewing it down to a skeleton.

Colton ducked his head, eyes focusing on the burble of the spring water, on the rapid fire beating of his heart, on the shaking of his hands and the staccato rhythm of his breath. He felt like a puppet in his own skin, and not because any unfathomable entity was controlling him, but because the suspense was building to a ringing crescendo in his ears and muting out every thought in his head.

Yarrow made eye contact with him and smiled, wide and relaxed. And then they head butted him and his vision flared in time with the jolt of pain that crested over his head.

Only the pain did not fade.

It ruptured.

It exploded like a pustule of oozing sick and washed down over him, hot and nauseating.

Colton’s stomach seized, and he dropped to his knees and retched, even as he wanted to scream.

There were wasps in his head. He hadn’t realized before, but they were angry and buzzing and tearing open his skull.

He collapsed even further, falling into the water, barely managing to keep his face clear of it. It was too cold and too hot all at once and it felt like knives against his skin. His vision danced in doubles, the colours seeped of any saturation.

In black and white, he watched Yarrow’s face and neck and chest twist and tear and morph into the gnarled branches of a tree. Only the tree was not right. It was made of tears in reality and human sinew, and it was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The branches grew even as he watched and he thought he could hear screaming following in their wake, horrified wails that split through the air in unspeakable lament.

Colton couldn’t think. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Every part of him quailed and whimpered and shrunk in on itself. He squeezed his eyes shut, at the mercy of the pain and the chaos.

And then he realized rather abruptly he had gone deaf. There was a hollow ringing in his ears, but he could no longer hear the horrible voices, or anything else for that matter.

He couldn’t feel anything either. Maybe the pain had fried his nerves.

He blinked open his eyes and saw that the world was as it should be, as he had known it all along, except that Yarrow was standing in a daze, staring wide eyed up into the forest canopy.

Slowly, Colton shifted. He coughed and gasped, and dragged himself to his knees, and then to his feet, using the sheer rocks to hold himself up.

What was he supposed to be doing again? Oh. Right. He had to kill Yarrow. He had to end it. What was he supposed to use as a weapon? How was he supposed to kill them? He glanced at the wall of rock underneath his hand and then back at Yarrow’s motionless, unresponsive face. They were the one who had come up with the plan, Colton assured himself, before grabbing the back of their head.

Did he even have the strength left?

He smashed their head into the rock again, and again, and again. In the silence, all he could hear was the ringing in his ears and the horrific sound of their skull cracking and caving once more, the most sickening beat he’d probably ever hear.

Distantly, he wondered if this was some kind of messed up fate.

Eventually he pulled his hands, sticky with gore, out of their hair and watched them drop into the water, limp.

Was he supposed to have felt something?

And then came the shaking and rumbling. The rock face split open with an almighty crack that broke through the quietness blanketing his ears. The trees shook, groaned, and toppled as the water surged and bubbled, smashing out onto the banks of the brook, where the forest debris vibrated and jumped along the forest floor.

Colton stumbled, staggering away from Yarrow and the sight of the upheaval. He staggered and tumbled to the ground, but didn’t stop. He dragged himself backwards as far as he could get, narrowly avoiding getting crushed by a heavy branch as it crashed down where he had been seconds prior.

And then, abruptly, it all came to a stop. The world went still and quiet again. Not the same quiet as before. Just a normal sort of silence. The only sound that really disturbed it was the sound of his panting, panicked breaths.

��

He wasn’t sure how long he stayed like that, but eventually he realized it was getting dark; shadows shifting from the softer shades of evening into something gloomier. With it came an unforgiving chill that picked at his sodden clothes and settled obtrusively against his bones.

The real question was how long he was supposed to wait, or how he was supposed to know what to do next. Was this the part where he got up and walked away and left it all for Yarrow or their cousin to handle?

Had he just killed someone who was supposed to be undying?

“Holy shit!” Yarrow surged out of the water with a suddenness that broke through the pensive lull.

Colton screamed.

Yarrow screamed.

Colton screamed louder. At some point, he could no longer tell if he was screaming, cursing, crying, or laughing.

“What the hell?” Yarrow shouted. “Why’d you leave me face down in the water? That sucked!” They stood up and sloshed towards Colton, heedless of the scene of destruction which lay all around them.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Colton yowled as he scuttled away. “What the hell happened? Did it work? What the fuck was all that?”

Yarrow stopped. “You know,” they sniffled, swiping bloody wet hair off of their forehead, “honestly I’m not even sure what happened. One minute you’re shaking in your boots and the squirrel is saying all kinds of crazy stuff about what it’ll do to me if I screw it over, and the next thing I know, I’m this close to drowning.” They held up their hand, thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “

“That’s it?” Colton asked, unable to believe they could not recall anything of the unadulterated mayhem their actions had caused.

“Well, there was a weird bit in between. I swear I was playing a game of twister with some sort of weird spider crab ghost thing, only it was made out of the prettiest crystals you have ever seen. Do you have any idea how messed up it is to play twister with a crab?”

(To Be Continued)

[uncannyinthegrove]

[uncannyinthegrove]

Chapter Five: No Way It Gets Worse, Right?

Table of Contents

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Chapter One

(Content Warning For Violent Imagery! See Info for specifics!)

Perched like an unhappy crow on the edge of a small clearing cluttered with ramshackle sheds and work stations of near indiscernible purpose, sat a sizable A-frame house. It lacked the many large windows of a modern home designed similarly. Instead, mismatching portholes dotted its exterior, which created the feeling of a patchwork tribute to a variety of long forgotten sea-faring vessels. This was a jarring sight to behold in the middle of a forest decently removed from the coast, where such decor might have been more common. 

The air surrounding the building was noxious with a foul smelling smoke, ashy blue and thick. It wafted up from somewhere behind the house, where a veranda overlooked the much smaller clearing that made up the backyard.

In their youth, Yarrow and their parents had spent more than a few late summer evenings back there for fires beneath the looming evergreens. They’d roasted marshmallows while their ma turned hers into flaming torches that dripped and slid off her stick onto the pine needles below, and their grandma clicked her tongue in the background. Their mom had lounged on a lawn chair on the deck, perusing scientific periodicals with Yarrow's father, and idly warned her wife and child not to light the entire forest on fire.

They’d stayed out long after the sun went down and listened to their grandmother tell tales of the old days—days of witch hunts and fires used for much viler purposes. She’d talked about the time malevolent townsfolk captured her and tried to burn away her sins. She recounted how all of hell's devils tried to lure her into a deal with them just to escape the pain of her own organs roasting and turning to goo like the marshmallows littering the area around the fire pit.

She’d smiled with too many teeth, her eyes glinting crow black and beady, staring into the light of the fire as if she was still there, all stubborn pride and fury sharp as a poison-slick knife. In the wind her bone chimes clattered and her old house, built by her own gnarled hands, creaked and groaned. She'd creaked and groaned too as she’d leaned forward to prod at the embers, daring the flames a little higher.

When Yarrow was very young, they had always wanted to know more. What happened next? What had she said to the devils? How did she escape? They begged to know every of gory detail, badgered and pestered with enthusiasm. As they grew older, they got tired of hearing the same story over and over, of asking the same questions and getting the same answer, but their father would stare at them long and hard, as if he could tell what was going through their mind.

“Yarrow,” he’d said. “This is not about you. It’s not some fairy tale to her. Let her speak.”

So Yarrow sat and stared mutely into the flames with their grandmother. They sat there until the embers grew cold, and she stood with a popping and crackling of joints, offering them an idle glance as if she’d entirely forgotten they were there.

“Well?” she’d asked, jolting them back awake as they drifted from one strange, twisted dream to the next, not quite awake but not asleep either; hypnotized by the flames and the rustling trees.

“Well what?” Yarrow would retort, the first few times legitimately confused and then the times after that, simply performing a familiar routine.

And their grandma scoffed and shook her head and went inside. As was typical of her owlish schedule, no one would see her again until late afternoon the next day.

That same time of day was drawing near when Yarrow and Colton finally broke through the tree line into her front yard, but not quite. Yarrow anticipated a great deal of aggravation when they disturbed her routine. It’d have been one thing if they’d shown up on their own and just crashed on the couch with some snacks until she was ready to get up and deal with their unexpected intrusion. However, they were about to wake her up with a stranger accompanying them, word of bizarre zombies infesting the area that had tried to kill them, and her defunct totems.

She was going to be so unimpressed.

Colton had been morosely quiet and on edge for most of the journey, and had jumped at every stray sound as they hiked together through the woods. The only time he said anything was to express baffled surprise when Yarrow revealed the trail that led up through the foothills to their grandmother’s house. He insisted that he'd never seen it before, despite the months he’d spent scouring the local area for a decent hiking trail.

Yarrow had been quite happy to explain (never mind that they didn’t really have the qualifications to do so), but when Colton took to staring at them with a glazed over expression only three minutes into their clarification, and asked them what the hell they were getting on with, they lost interest.

Further attempts at conversations were met with similar reactions, and while Yarrow was not opposed to filling the quiet on their own, the lack of sleep and persistent physical exertion were catching up with them. They hadn’t eaten recently either, and that brought their mood toward the cantankerous side of things.

After that, they had trudged onward in strained silence.

However, when the two broke through the tree-line, Colton audibly exclaimed.

Yarrow stopped and looked at him expectantly. “Well? What d’ya think? This is it.” Much like a tour guide, or perhaps a proud presenter at a museum or gallery, Yarrow spun with their arms at their out, and backed into the yard with a couple of jaunty hops. However, they regretted their theatrical display fairly quickly when their exhaustion made their head swim.

Nothing seemed as if it would be sweeter than dumping responsibility for the mess they had found themselves in on an proper adult and sleeping the rest of the day away. Yarrow was itching to throw themselves on the mercy of a bed and assume unconsciousness for multiple hours on end.

Colton stopped gawking at the yard and stared at Yarrow in disbelief. “It’s not what I expected. It looks… well, it looks like a scrap yard?”

“Yeah!” Yarrow agreed. “I guess it is. Gramma likes to collect stuff. She says you never know what could be useful.”

Colton grimaced. “What, is she a hoarder?”

“Huh? No way.” Yarrow said, crinkling their nose in disdain and turning away. Colton clearly did not understand the benefit of having multiple projects in the works at once, with all the supplies needed right at hand, or the interesting paraphernalia one could find when they lived a life like Yarrow's grandma did.

“Forewarning. She’s won’t be excited that I brought you here. Don’t take it personally. After what happened with the witch-hunts, she doesn’t take kindly to folks like you.”

“Folks like me? What does that mean?” Colton asked, already looking uncomfortable. “Wait, did you say the witch-hunts?”

“I mean folks who aren’t familiar with this kinda stuff. You're more likely to make a big deal out of things and then bam, someone’s kicking down your door and tying you to a stake.”

Colton stuttered unintelligibly for a moment before his face clouded over with resignation, and he snapped his jaw shut with an audible clatter.

Yarrow waited for the rest of the questions, for Colton to cycle back to the whole witch-hunt thing, but eventually realized that he wouldn't be doing any of that. Apparently, he had remembered none of it would matter once his memory was wiped. Unfortunate really. Yarrow might have been tired, but there was something fun about teaching a newbie the ways of the real world. “Alrighty then. No more questions? Let’s go meet Gramma.”

They were expecting the silence that met their firm knocking so they creaked the door open and stepped into the quiet entrance without waiting. Colton stepped in behind them gingerly, face pinched with discomfort.

“Not to fear,” Yarrow assuaged, patting him on the shoulder comfortingly. “Despite all events potentially suggesting the contrary, this won’t turn into in a Hansel and Gretel situation, or whatever it is that you’re imagining.”

With a slow, measured exhale, Colton nodded. He still didn’t look as if he’d entirely let go of whatever fear was on his mind, but he was weird and jumpy from the moment Yarrow met him, so that was no surprise.

They couldn’t help but grin. “Just don’t mention how big her ears or teeth are,” they said with a sly wink.

The blood drained from Colton’s face with astonishing speed. As Yarrow trotted easily into the house, he hesitated to follow, as if the front porch and his proximity to an exit were a safety blanket that might protect him from another monster. However, when Yarrow darted into the kitchen in search of something to drink and out of sight, they heard him quickly scramble to join them.

The kitchen was in an uncharacteristic disarray. Though Yarrow was so focused on getting some water that they might have overlooked the disorder, or even simply written it off, it was hard to ignore the stench of rotting food.

Colton pulled to a stop at the entrance to the kitchen like he had hit a wall and his face scrunched in disgust. “Um, not to be rude, but is it always like this?” he asked while eyeing the sink full of cold water and half washed dishes, to the pot of coffee partially evaporated and filmed over, the blackened frying pan of scraps singed beyond recognition sitting on an alarmingly hot element, and the dish of unidentifiable meat soaking in a marinade and the beginnings of a mildewy coating.

Yarrow stood amidst it all, trying to figure out why they had a sinking feeling in their stomach, and hoped it was just nausea brought on by the foul aroma.

“Well,” they said after a moment. “She is pretty old. Maybe she’s having a hard time taking care of the place on her own?” Never mind that their grandma’s age wasn’t ever going to hamper her independent life.

“Riiight,” Colton rocked back on his heels to peer down the hall into the rest of the house.

“I should check on her,” Yarrow decided after some internal dithering, and made for the stairs that would lead to the next floor and her room.

They drew up short, however, when they discovered that the sitting room at the back of the house was also in wild disarray, and the door that opened into the backyard was ajar.

Colton followed them into the room, hovering so close at their heels that when they froze on the fringes of the hall, he nearly tripped over his own feet. “Not for nothing,” he said, voice low and shaken, “but I’m getting a really bad feeling about this.”

Yarrow tossed their shoulders back confidently and flicked a dismissive hand at him. “Relax, that’s just, like, the trauma talking or whatever. Your brain’s stuck in survival mode. I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. My grandma is, y’know—"

“Weird? A witch?”

Yarrow clicked their tongue and made towards the open door, where the smell of smoke wafted, sharp and pungent, on a chilly draft. It didn’t smell like normal wood smoke. It was acrid in a way that made Yarrow's throat sting and his eyes water. “She’s got her oddities, sure. Listen, there’s a bunch of perfectly good reasons for this. Life can get a little wild and wacky when you’re in my family. Stuff happens. You know how it is.”

“I super don’t,” Colton argued, the floor creaking as he continued his especially timid shadow routine in Yarrow's wake. “Man, and I thought the kitchen smelled bad. Hey, uh, is... Is that paint?”

Yarrow hadn’t noticed the sticky mess on the handle of the door, a dark reddish brown that flaked off the metal where it was slowly drying. “Nope, that’s probably blood,” they observed, and reached out to scratch at it with their finger nail. “Yep, definitely blood.’

“You sound, um, super chill about that?”

“Ah, well. Probably she just had to, like, butcher a pig for whatever she’s getting up to. She’s not as dexterous with a knife as she used to be, so it could’ve gotten kinda messy.” Yarrow flicked the blood off of their finger and reached out to pull the door open the rest of the way.

“Wait! Hold up!” By now, Colton was easing back, giving up the dubious security of proximity in favour of leaning away like he was about to make a very quick exit. “Why’s the door just open like that? And why is the room… you know,” Colton bit his lip anxiously and then continued, “I don’t care what you say. It looks like there was a fight.”

Yarrow sucked in an aggravated breath as they turned to face Colton, setting their hands impatiently on their hips for added emphasis. “No way! Probably she just didn’t click it shut behind her properly, what with having super bloody hands. Blood and flesh sacrifices can be time sensitive, y’know? Or maybe she had to wrestle an angry inter-dimensional summon and now she’s out barbecuing it for supper because sometimes you’ve gotta eat your enemies. Like I said, there’s a million perfectly normal reasons for this. I am sure she’s fine. My Gramma deals with stuff you can’t even imagine before her morning calisthenics.”

“What!? Actually what? Flesh sacrifices!” At first Colton’s voice rang with outrage, but it quickly quelled into the equally familiar disbelief. “No way. You gotta know you’re being way, way too normal about this after everything that's happened. Thinking like that gets you killed!”

“Sure, but you already know I’d pop right back up again. Can you imagine? Someone tries to kill me, but nope! There I am again! Like a dandelion. What a riot. Oh wait. You can imagine that.” Yarrow scoffed at Colton with as much derision as they could summon, which was not insignificant.

“Yeah? Well I, at least, can still die! So sorry if I think maybe we should be just a little more careful!”

Yarrow struggled to keep their face straight. “Yeah. Sure. Fine. Whatever you say.”

“What? What was that? That tone?” Colton's face twisted with suspicious fervour.

“Nothing. Never mind. Look, I’ll be careful. But either way, we need to find Gramma. So let’s go. If anything happens, I swear on pain of death, or whatever, I’ll get you out, alright? I’ve been told that I make a great meat shield.”

“You swear?”

“Yes, cross my heart, hope to die.” Yarrow did not roll their eyes as much as they might have wanted to, and they considered that a win.

Colton frowned doubtfully and inhaled, eyes squeezed shut. Yarrow could almost make out the sounds of his quick, muttered count to three as he tried to steel his nerves. “Right. Okay. Let’s go.”

The door swung open, and a moment ticked slowly by as Yarrow, half a step out the door already, tried to process what exactly they were seeing.

Colton caught on quicker and retched violently, collapsing to the side of the door so that he could brace himself against the wall. He swore breathlessly, a long string of curses that broke down into wet gagging as he glanced back up to reconfirm what he’d seen.

Yarrow blinked curiously, and then eventually let out a long, admittedly confused whistle. “Well that’s pretty weird.”

Dominating the centre of the backyard was a macabre execution site. A pillar of burnt wood speared out of a scorched and ashy ground, singular within the small confines of the yard. What hung from it was only barely recognizable as something that might have once resembled a human. Most of the flesh was gone, the softer external bits roasted away until they were nothing more than dust, leaving only the charcoal cinders of the interior that had not been wholly consumed by fire.

“It’s horrific!” Colton said, grabbing Yarrow by the shoulder to haul them backwards into the shelter of the house, and then slamming the door shut on the devastating scene. “What was that? What the hell is going on here?”

Yarrow winced as Colton shook them back and forth, pummelling them with his own panic. “Wait, stop, I don’t know. Could you just—," They wrenched themselves free and stepped away from Colton, arm raised defensively. "Give me a moment!”

The logical thing to assume was that they had been horribly wrong, and that their grandmother had been the victim of some sick attack.

But Yarrow knew better. Yarrow knew that there was no way, no way at all, that their grandmother would let herself end up like that. However, that begged the question of whose corpse hung in a gory display before them, and why it was there at all. The obvious person to go to was still their grandmother, but Yarrow was beginning to believe that their grandmother would not get found so easily.

“Just. Just go sit out front,” Yarrow tried to grab Colton’s face and make him come back from whatever latest spiral of weakening sanity he was on. “Try to calm down. I’m going to look around a bit. Try to piece together what happened.”

Colton’s expression had grown slack, his eyes somewhat unfocused. Not in the "I’m about to start trying to cave your skull in" kind of way, but in a, "I’m in shock and should probably not be on my own" kind of way.

Yarrow reached for the nearest throw blanket, slung across the back of a toppled armchair, and pulled it tight around Colton’s shoulders. “Go on then. Go sit on the front step and try to breathe. Put it out of your mind.” Really, Yarrow had to wonder at how astoundingly sensitive to dead bodies Colton was. This one probably wasn’t even anyone he knew. “It’s gonna be fine. We’re all, you know. Tough. I’m sure we’re safe here. Safe as houses and so on, so forth.”

When Yarrow didn’t get a response right away, they waved a hand in front of the stunned young man’s face a couple times, and then lightly patted him on the cheek and shook him back and forth a few times. Eventually he blinked, turned and stumbled back down the haul in surprisingly close reenactment of the previous night’s zombies.

Hopefully, they wouldn’t find him passed out in the dirt when they went to get him. That wasn't their biggest concern at the moment, though. They had answers to find, and the cavalry to call.

Next

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[uncannyinthegrove]

doing some work on the chapter art that's available over on my ko-fi, but I really want to share this one openly!!!

[uncannyinthegrove]

Uncanny in the Grove Chapter Four: When the Going Gets Tough

Table of Contents

Previous

First Chapter

(Content Warnings for Violent Imagery, see info for specifics)

Before Colton woke up and either had an emotional meltdown for trying to kill Yarrow again, or continued with the whole murder schtick, they needed to be prepared.

In their heart of hearts, Yarrow wished they had a decent length of rope, or even more ideally a chain to tie him up with. They would have been happy with even just some duct tape, at least until they knew whether they were dealing with a murder zombie, a murder ghost possessing a misfortunate victim, or simply a jumpy desk clerk with a guilty conscience.

Unfortunately, they had nothing on hand. Instead, they opted for the brilliant solution of tying Colton’s jacket sleeves together, stretching them as best as they could to get the length needed for a decent enough knot. Then, for good measure, they savagely tied together his shoe laces with all the fervour of a small child being given their first puppet, or a cat being unleashed upon a basket full of yarn. By the time they were done, it would have been at least ten minutes of work to get the shoes off, never mind untangled.

In the process, they also realized that if Colton had needed a doctor before, then that need had only doubled, if not tripled. It was no wonder, given he had gone careening off a cliff just like they had. And although he did not appear to be dead, which said a lot about his own resilience, he was in undeniably awful shape.

Yarrow grimaced as they straightened, feeling their own leftover aches protest how much they were moving about. It’d take more than a few minutes for that kind of damage to ease completely and in an ideal world Yarrow would get to spend the rest of the day either in bed, or bundled up on a couch being provided with sweets and cider and being pampered.

They were far from home and such comforts, though. The best they could do was limp their way up to their grandmother’s and hope things did not escalate into an even bigger raucous.

If there was a whole epidemic of walking dead plaguing the area, it needed to be handled, and Yarrow’s curiosity had been very much cooled by the threat of getting mauled at every turn. It was time to turn the matter over to someone else who actually knew what they were doing, while Yarrow waited it all out by napping.

Traipsing into the woods with the would-be-killer who they had already bested and was clearly reluctant on the murder part was very different from diabolical rotting bears and coyotes and moose. Their ghost hunt seemed like less of a whimsical little adventure that they could tell stories about later, and more of a cold, painful hassle. One murder was one thing, but two? With the chances of more looking rather high? No thanks. Better just to turn the whole mess over to their grandma. She’d know what to do.

Briefly, Yarrow thought about calling their mom again. She’d also know what to do. They just had to say the word and their parents would be in the car and on the way to Pinefort before Yarrow had a chance to sneeze.

It wasn’t like their parents weren’t going to find out that they’d run away from school, anyway. There wasn’t much point in putting it off. And yet the thought made them sag with exhaustion. At least their grandma wouldn’t badger them with questions about all that. She’d be a lot more concerned with the zombies. Once that was out of the way, maybe Yarrow could convince her to help explain things to their parents in a way that would not end with Yarrow back at the house, unable to leave again for fear their bad luck would invite further catastrophe.

Of course, to get to their grandma’s, they needed to know where they were. However, with a glance, Yarrow came to understand their situation pretty quickly—they had no idea where they were.

There was the drop that they’d fallen over not too far away, and in the burgeoning light of day, it looked innocuous and offensively innocent. Yarrow had never had to feel resentful towards a hill before, but suddenly a pointed bitterness towards the ridge filled them. Below it was the place where they had landed, a shallow brook of water that chuckled along over a rocky streambed and seeped into the surrounding area to create a bed of mud and densely packed alders. Beyond that was a repetitive view of trees and brambles without even so much as a bit of trail marker tape to indicate whether they were close to a known trail.

Typical of the unpopular and largely avoided foothills surrounding Pinefort, Yarrow knew. Still, that didn’t keep them from feeling a brilliant surge of frustration born on wings of an underlying distress.

Although venturing to the top of the ridge that they had fallen from would have surely given them the advantage of the high ground, Yarrow couldn’t bring themself to haul their aching body up its steep slope. They told themself it wouldn’t have really mattered in the end. They’d probably still just see trees. At least if they stuck to the little brook, then they might encounter a deer trail of some kind.

What good that would do, they weren’t sure, but it had to be better than nothing.

Ideally, they’d be able to orient themselves based on the fact that they’d almost returned to Pinefort before the dead squirrel incident. But even then, they’d only been following Colton with no actual sense for where they were in relation to anywhere else. Their blind run through the woods after that had stolen whatever chances they may have had.

Colton continued to lie bound and unconscious in the mud, and Yarrow couldn’t keep from being aware of his still form even as they meandered further away along the wet ground. After all, both times they’d left his sight since meeting him, he’d switched over into murder mode. The last thing they wanted was for him to sneak up on them with another blunt force weapon.

Eventually, however, he stopped being in their line of sight.

It wasn’t easy going. Yarrow was far more used to the spacious fields of their family property, and the forest beyond that had not been so dense and gnarled. By comparison, the ground they trekked over felt actively hostile, with its surges of rocky climbs tricking them with mossy crevasses that threatened to snare their feet. The area directly around the small stream was okay only for a little while, but the alder bushes and other brambles quickly grew too dense and they had to loop away from the bank into parts of the forest that became a craggy sea of tricky walking.

At one point the wet moss turned into a slide that sent their heart hammering in their throat as they slipped and slid back down along a ridge in startling repeat of their fall from the night before, and they only managed to catch themself with the tearing of their palms along the unkind branch of a conifer.

They hung there, legs akimbo like a fawn learning to walk, eyes wide and hands in a white knuckled grip on their wooden lifeline, and seriously debated just turning back and finding another path.

Overhead, a crow cawed, startling them enough to jerk their head toward the sound with an audible crick from their neck. However, no mess of decayed flesh and ragged feathers torpedoed itself at them even after several moments of tense silence.

Yarrow sighed with gusto and slowly began to straighten, careful not to fall back into another slide, ears straining for any further evidence of wildlife, particularly the undead and hostile sort.

At first, their heart sank when they picked up the sound of a dull rattle. With a creaking dread, they turned to stare, already picturing a horrific, boney swarm of broken bodies clawing its way towards them from between the trees. A graveyard made manifest to tear and gnaw at them.

But there was nothing.

Somehow, Yarrow found this to be worse. Worse in the way that it was worse to lose sight of a spider in the room than to see it scuttling along the ceiling.

They listened again closely, trying to pinpoint the origin of the sound, their eyes stinging from their refusal to blink.

What ended up catching their eye was a familiar style of ornament.

The wind chime didn’t look to be made of bone at first glance, but an aged, dark stained wood. However, when Yarrow scrambled precariously over to where it hung from an angled old tree and stretched to scrutinize it, they saw that the maker had clearly harvested the tubing from a small animal. The string was wiry braided hair, not unlike horsetail, and the clapper and ring piece were both jagged pieces of chipped shale. Most distinctly was the burned etching carved deeply and darkly into every surface of the handicraft.

Yarrow had never been so comforted to discover one of their grandma’s totems in their life, and they clutched it like a lifeline.

Thoughts already sparking with new theories, they scanned the undergrowth once more, their eyes wide and seeking.

—

When Colton finally woke up, he did so with such a sudden jerk that it made Yarrow jump in surprise, despite the distance between them.

He didn’t seem to notice them at first, groaning with confused pain as he tried to twist around and get himself upright, still not awake enough to understand why his hands and feet weren’t working properly. He jerked and flopped about through the mud like a fish on land for several moments until the predicament he was in finally seemed to dawn on him. When it did, his breathing grew harsher and more panicked, his flailing becoming even wilder.

Yarrow winced, knowing that the dirty, injured young man was probably in no position to be thrashing about so much and that once the blind fear wore off, the pain from his injuries would become more obvious and be that much worse for the struggle.

“Hey, uh,” they started, trying to draw the desk clerk’s attention to them so they could explain. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem entirely aware of his surroundings, and it took Yarrow several more repetitions at increasing volume before he finally managed to get Colton to stop and pay attention.

His chest heaved with exertion, and face pale from the hours spent wet, cold, and victim of a night comparable to a horror film. “What? You?” He finally gasped at them. “What happened?”

“Well. What do you remember? Because there’s a lot to cover. Murder most foul, zombies, a high stakes chase scene, a dramatic fall off a cliff, more murder most foul.” Yarrow hopped off the rock they’d perched on and circled warily closer to Colton. “More importantly though, I’ve got clues! And also I think maybe I’ve got a temporary solution to your… problem. With the trying to turn my skull in a broken bone bowl of brain slurry. Maybe. How are you feeling, by the way? Like yourself? Or like the brainwashed minion of our murderous whatever?”

“I, uh, sorry?”

Yarrow struggled not to click their tongue the way their mother did when she found one of her samples had deteriorated. Unlike Yarrow, who’d had time for a morning hike and a subsequent scavenger hunt, Colton had only just woken up. He also was probably at least a little concussed and, unlike Yarrow, hadn’t managed to shake off the brain fog yet. They had to be patient.

“Did I try to kill you again?” Colton finally managed after a round of confused babbling and sentences broken by his own scramble to get his thoughts in order.

Yarrow nodded fervently. “You sure did. It really, really, and I mean really sucked. I don’t think it was, like, your fault technically, but still. Super not fun.”

To their horror, in the clear light of day, they saw the exact moment Colton’s expression cracked, and he started to cry. “Oh god, oh I am so sorry. This is awful. I can remember your face. I can remember the blood. I can remember… I can remember how it sounded. I just kept hitting you. Over and over and over again. Or. I dreamt I did? You’re…”

Yarrow blinked and cleared their throat uncomfortably. “Yes, well. Here we are. It wasn’t as bad as all that. So chin up.”

Colton was staring, face frozen in shock. “Oh god. You’re a ghost, aren’t you?”

“What?!” Yarrow gasped, hands smacking against the solidness of their own chest in instinctual need to check. “I am not!”

“You have to be,” Colton protested with a voice that sounded near tortured. “There’s no other explanation. Never mind the fact that you’re up and moving around, you look totally fine. That’s impossible. You’ve died and now you’re haunting me, your killer.”

“Wanna tell me who tied you up then,” Yarrow scoffed, ambling ever closer with their growing certainty that they had the guilty, fragile, deeply confused desk clerk back as opposed to the one that wanted them dead.

That seemed to stump Colton enough for him to fall silent, although he did go back to weakly tugging at his sleeves in an effort to get his hands free. It didn’t really work.

“Just listen for a second, ok?” Yarrow continued, crouching down next to Colton. “And stop struggling. Your hand is gong to be so busted.”

“Alright, okay. I’m… I’m listening.” The ragged young man grimaced and held still, gingerly letting his hands rest on his chest as if he’d just become aware of the state he was in. His eyes didn’t leave Yarrow though, as if staring for long enough would somehow reveal a faint transparency or some other indication that he was right and Yarrow really was just a grim spectre.

“First things first, there’s this,” Yarrow began. They reached out and lifted a string with bits of bone and shale attached to it away from where it looped like a macabre necklace around Colton’s throat. “This should, if I am right, keep you from trying to kill me. At least for a little while.”

“What? What is it?”

Yarrow tugged the repurposed totem so that the carvings were more visible to Colton. “It’s Gramma’s. I found a bunch of them hanging around the area. I can’t really say I’m an expert, but these should be totems of binding. They’re kinda defunct, but I’m thinking it should help a little bit, so long as you’ve got it on you.”

It wasn’t really a surprise when Colton gazed with acute incomprehension at the object. “Like… it’s magic?”

“You literally just accused me of being a ghost. I don’t know why you keep getting hung up on this stuff. What’s a little witchcraft to a forest of zombie animals trying to kill us?”

“Right,” Colton agreed, bafflement thick in his voice. “Just, I’m getting whiplash from all the weird shit you keep saying. Every five words you say to me sound like nonsense, but I can’t even argue, so forgive me if it takes a second for me to adjust my world view a bit.”

Yarrow sighed, but nodded. They gave it a moment, and then continued on, hoping Colton was done with his whole crisis. “Right, anyway, so there were a bunch of these hanging around. That’s the part about the clues I mentioned before. I think my grandma had trapped something here in these woods, but somehow the wards got messed up. Look, see how the engraving is all singed? That’s how I know it broke. You mentioned you’d been doing some work out here, right? Have you ever seen any of these before?”

“Yeah, I have, but I’ve never seen something like this. It’s… really weird. Is that hair? It’s not human, is it?”

“Not so far as I can tell. Might be horse. Maybe.”

“Weird.”

“Not really. And you’re sure that you have never seen anything like this? Not even that time you fell asleep out here or whatever?”

“I didn’t know, but I wasn’t really looking?”

Yarrow frowned and turned it over in their hands a couple more times. “Huh. Well. Do you maybe recognize where we are? I guess it could have just been a different part of the forest.”

Colton craned his neck up, eyes darting around the area for a moment, before he let it flop back onto the ground with a wet smack. “Not sure. We’re near a stream, right? Could be the one that runs out before you get to Pinefort from the east. You know, there’s that bridge about fifteen minutes before the turnoff? I guess that could put us close to the spring? It does run into the brook. But also we could be anywhere alongside it. It goes right up into the mountains.”

That wasn’t particularly helpful, and Yarrow was left with no further answers. “Still,” they grumbled after staring speculatively into the trees, “we can’t have run too far. I’d wager we’re close. And either way, what’s important is that Gramma should know what’s going on. I say we make her place the priority. She’ll get you sorted out, and then she can fix whatever is making the forest so hostile.”

“She can help me?”

“Sure. I’m not sure what she was dealing with here, but it seems like she had it well in hand. I might have, you know, gotten in over my head a little or whatever.” Yarrow licked their lips and shrugged. “But Grandma has been around since forever. She’s dealt with all kinds of weird stuff before.”

“She’s not gonna, like, hex me or anything? For trying to kill you?”

“Right, but it wasn’t you. You said that yourself. And I’ve seen enough at this point that I’m pretty inclined to agree, even if it’s not ghosts possessing you and using you as their puppet. I mean, it still could be. Just that now I’m concerned it’s an entire army of them running around possessing anybody they can get their hands on. Here’s hoping it’s not that, and just some old necromancer’s version of a landmine, or a forest spirit’s curse or something.”

“God, I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone or something.”

“You’ll get to used to it,” Yarrow scoffed. “Anyway, if you’re done, we should get going. Like I said; that totem is pretty worn out, so I’d rather not dally, ya know?”

“Dally?” Colton scrunched his brows together, his expression somehow managing to look confused, irritated, and a little sheepish despite himself. Weakly, he lifted his tied hands off of his chest, gesturing with his knotted sleeves pointedly. “Ugh, do you mind undoing this, then?”

“Ah. Right.”

—

Before they did anything, they had to figure out where they were. With Colton awake and struggling alongside of Yarrow through the forest, they weren’t moving very fast, but at least they had a better sense of what direction to head in. Colton suggested the same thing that Yarrow had done earlier, that they follow the brook. As long as they went downstream, they’d end up either at the place where the spring merged with the brook, or they’d get to the road. Either way, from there Colton could orientate them towards the motel, and from there they could go to Yarrow’s grandmother’s.

It was almost as if they were right back where they had been the night before until they were attacked.

The daylight helped however, and although they both remained on guard, they didn’t encounter any more horrible abominations. By the time they hit the highway, Yarrow was feeling quite at ease. Colton, not so much, despite their efforts to convince him that obviously the daylight was keeping the horrors at bay.

He rather rudely pointed out that Yarrow seemed to have a lot of theories, but was clearly just guessing, and that he wasn’t going to feel better until after he got back from meeting their grandmother, quit his job, fully moved away from the entire area and went back to living a normal life.

“You’re going to quit?” Yarrow peered at Colton, letting the desk clerk limp on the more even side of the road, while they ambled along where the shoulder of the asphalt gave way to gravel and rolled into a steep, overgrown ditch. “Gramma will sort this all out though, and you should be fine to keep making money or whatever without any issues?”

“Yeah, except I’m going to need so much therapy after this—except how the hell am I supposed to explain that I think I got brainwashed by some sort of evil magic that made me attempt to kill a person. Twice. Only they somehow didn’t die and recruited me to go meet their witch grandmother living in the woods.” Colton’s voice gained an edge to it, rough like granite and acrimonious. “I can’t. No way. Never mind that I’m not gonna have money for that. So instead I’m going to do what any normal dude living on minimum wage would do—I’m going to get the hell away from here and repress any memory I have of this entire situation so I can move the hell on with my life.”

“Wait, are you gonna forget about me too?”

“Especially—look, don’t take it personally, but this has been probably the worst night of my life. And that’s saying something. I still don’t even know what you are. You’re definitely not normal, or else you would have died the first time I attacked you. Yeah, don’t think I haven’t noticed you avoiding that topic. Sturdy? There’s sturdy and then there’s apparently immortal.”

Yarrow coughed, pretending to clear their throat. “Not immortal. That’s a whole other can of worms. If I was immortal, do you really think I’d be so freaked out by whatever is going on here?”

Colton dragged to a halt and glowered, waiting until Yarrow reluctantly stopped and turned to face him. “So what is your deal? You know all this impossible stuff, your grandmother’s a witch or something, and you don’t die. We’re still quite a way from the motel, so you might as well explain it.”

Yarrow shrugged. “I could, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Blanching and swaying where he stood, Colton looked one step away from turning and fleeing int he opposite direction.

Yarrow raised their hands, palms out like they were approaching a feral kitten. “Sorry, bad joke. Didn’t mean it. I mean, probably you’re not supposed to know all this, but it’s not your fault. And you’re right, there isn’t really anyone you could talk to right now. I guess if you made enough noise, we’d have to do something about you, but there’ are plenty of methods to make this all go away.”

“You wanna tell me what you mean by that too? Because that isn’t making me feel any better.”

“I mean, if you’re down for forgetting any of this ever happened, it’d be easy enough to wipe your memory of one night. Temporary amnesia after a nasty fall isn’t super uncommon. It isn’t something we like to do for unwilling parties, since they usually end up subconsciously seeking out the missing memories and coming to all kinds of weird conclusions. But if you consent to it fully, a memory wipe is not a bad solution.”

Never mind that yarrow thought it was a pretty lame response.

Colton cupped both his hands over his face and for a moment it seemed like maybe he’d started crying again, but no, instead what came from between his fingers was more hysterical, disbelieving laughter as he tilted his head back and rocked on his heels.

Yarrow waited it out, smiling awkwardly into the ditch, not entirely sure what to do with their face. “I know, right?” They chuckled stiffly. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“What the hell?” Colton gasped between dying cackles, eventually letting his hands fall away from his face to reveal a smile with too much tooth but that didn’t reach his eyes at all. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s just go with that.”

They walked in silence for a few more metres when he spoke again. “So, taking my memories? That’s witchcraft stuff your grandma can do too? What about you? Is that… like, a spell you can just, like, make happen?”

“Hm,” Yarrow contemplated briefly, unsure of where to start. “So, it kinda depends on who you go to. For example; if it’s grandma, it’s more that she would put a barrier around the memories so you can’t access them. However, if it was my mom, she’d probably just drug you and induce amnesia that way. Less precise, but also tends to hold up in this day and age better. So ‘taking’ isn’t really the right word to use, though there are folks out there who’ll do that too. Ah, but don’t ask me to do it.”

“You don’t know how?”

“It’d be like asking you to perform a lobotomy. Which I assume you can’t do. Maybe that was presumptive. Who am I to say what your surgical skills are?”

Colton sighed, making no effort to hide the pained expression on his face. “Right. So what I’m getting from this is that there is a whole other, secret world where impossible magical stuff is real?”

“I can promise you, it isn’t whatever you’re thinking,” Yarrow sniggered. They cleared their throat and continued. “And secret is a strong word. Some folks keep to themselves, some don’t. Kinda like social media, I guess. You can participate, but how much is up to you. How far you go depends on the individual. And sometimes what you get from it is, you know. Really bad. A computer virus. Some weird stalker who doxes you to the world. You might end up on a forum with a group of people you thought were into crotchet but it turns out they were fate weavers, and then wham, you’ve insulted their doily pattern and they’re trying to incinerate your lifeline.”

The face that the bewildered murderer turned maybe accomplice was making at Yarrow was hard to read but might have embodied his dwindling certainty in reality.

Yarrow nodded seriously. “Really. You’ve gotta be careful these days. Although I guess if you’re lucky, you might find a nice little community to share your hobbies with, or somehow make a ton of money off your niche video essays. It all depends on you.”

“This has to be the weirdest metaphor I’ve ever heard.”

“Seriously? I didn’t think it was that bad. And anyway, what does this all matter to you? You dipped your toe in, and it didn’t go great, so now we’re wiping your search history and uninstalling the program or whatever.”

“But what if something like this happens again?”

Up ahead, the squat shape of Pinefort came into view at last, looking even more ramshackle in the light of day.

Leftover water from the previous night’s deluge sputtered out of the gutters still, creating streams of water running off into the forest. Grimy puddles dotted the parking lot, and one dated minivan and a small silver car decorated with a number of rude bumper stickers lingered, but it was otherwise barren.

Yarrow grinned and hopped forward. “Dunno! Guess you’ll have to cross that bridge when you get to it, huh?”

—

“I’m pretty sure your coworker thinks I took you out to the woods and killed you,” Yarrow greeted Colton as they pushed open the door to their motel room.

Colton glanced up from his spot on the end of the bed where he was gingerly towel drying his hair with one hand. The other lay limply in his lap, still waiting for any sort of medical attention. He’d taken a shower while Yarrow had been downstairs, nervously dodging the prying glower of a pre-retiree motel worker, and he looked both better and worse for it. While on one hand he no longer looked like a swamp monster, the myriad of bruises and scrapes littering his face and arms were now plain to see without the layer of mud hiding them.

“Wait, what?” He questioned.

“Yeah, no, if the cops don’t show up it will only be because she’s winning big on her casino game.” Yarrow tossed the small, overstuffed first aid kit they’d requisitioned onto the bed next to their companion, and began searching through their bag for fresh clothes.

Colton rolled his eyes. “Great. Well, I’m glad I know where I rank on her list of priorities then. Right below her gambling addiction.” He dropped the towel to the side and tugged his sweater on over his t-shirt, grimacing at its filthy state. “At least that works out well for us.”

“I know, right? Thought the jig was up the way she was staring at me.” Yarrow shivered. “I don’t want to be rude about your coworker, but I think I’d take the zombies over her.”

Colton scoffed. “You would. Marg isn’t… bad. She’s just, you know.” He shrugged as if that explained anything.

“You say that, but you were the one who said it’d be better for me to go in there and lie about going on an early morning walk and having a fall rather than you explaining why you skipped off work and look like the survivor of a zombie apocalypse.” Yarrow quipped while they headed towards the bathroom, intent on having their own shower.

“I am the survivor of a zombie apocalypse,” they heard Colton grouch under his breath just before the door clicked shut.

They’d barely managed to get the last of the dried up blood out of their hair when they heard a nervous rap at the bathroom door.

“Don’t wanna take too long,” Colton grumbled from the other side. “You’re the one who said you didn’t know how long this… totem thing would last.”

Yarrow huffed and glared at the cracked linoleum wall, but heeded the warning anyway. Partly because what Colton had said was true, but also because check out was surely fast approaching, and the last thing either of them needed was someone rocking up to clean the room and asking questions about why Colton was there and not downstairs in the office making excuses for vanishing from work the night before.

Even if maybe that would have been the courteous thing to do.

But Colton insisted that he was never working another night at Pinefort, and it didn’t matter to him if he got fired and never received his last pay cheque. Something about how near-death experiences tended to make references on his resume seem like a low priority.

When Yarrow stepped out of the bathroom, Colton was already hovering by the door, with the impatient expression of a large dog that really needed to go out for its morning walk. His arm was in a sling, and there were several bandages on his faces and neck.

“Did you really have to dry your hair?” Colton snarked, scowling as Yarrow took their time buttoning up their sweater and shoving their clothes back into their bag.

“Hey, I am hurrying, y’know? It took five minutes. And anyway, I, for one, would rather not catch a cold or draw too much attention to ourselves. Acting like we’ve got something to hide, isn’t it. You should know this, Mister ‘I check phones of murder victims because that’s what the movies said’. By the way, don’t forget to put your hood up. I get the feeling Marg is going to be watching to make sure I’m not leaving here with a body bag. Can’t have her picking a fight with you for ditching her.”

He glared at Yarrow, but Colton flicked his hood up and tugged on it so it covered as much of his face as it could all the same. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here. I’m so ready for this to all be over.”

“Might wanna hold your horses. It’s still a long walk to Gramma’s. This ain’t over yet.”

“Right. Here’s to hoping we make it before we get swarmed by a pack of murder racoons or whatever else wants us dead.”

Yarrow beamed back at Colton confidently. “We’ve got nothing to worry about. I told you that we were clearly safe while the sun is up. We didn’t get attacked once on the way here, did we?”

“Yeah. Sorry if I’m not feeling all that optimistic,” Colton snipped, though some of the tension in his shoulders did visibly ease. He inhaled deeply and then shoved the door open. “Okay. Let’s go then.”

Yarrow nodded, glancing back to offer the comfortable and miserably unused bed they’d paid for a longing glance before dragging themselves out after Colton for another long walk through the forest.

(Next Chapter)

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[uncannyinthegrove]

Uncanny in the Grove Chapter Four: When the Going Gets Tough is live on my ko-fi for supporters! It'll be available here for free in three weeks.

"The wind chime didn’t look to be made of bone at first glance, but an aged, dark stained wood. However, when Yarrow scrambled precariously over to where it hung from an angled old tree and stretched to scrutinize it, they saw that the maker had clearly harvested the tubing from a small animal. The string was wiry braided hair, not unlike horsetail, and the clapper and ring piece were both jagged pieces of chipped shale. Most distinctly was the burned etching carved deeply and darkly into every surface of the handicraft."

[uncannyinthegrove]

Uncanny in the Grove Chapter Three: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Table of Contents

Previous

Chapter One

(Content Warnings for Violence and Disturbing Imagery)

“So,” Yarrow began after a long stretch of silence that had only been punctuated by the ambient audio of their trek through the undergrowth. “You come here often?”

The desk clerk stumbled, one foot catching in the other in a manner that sent him awkwardly hopping forward as he tried to reestablish his balance. He caught a branch to the face for his clumsiness and his groan of frustration was laced with both pain and what Yarrow assumed had to be embarrassment.

It was honestly a wonder that this sad, scruffy young fellow had at one point been a threat. Yarrow couldn’t help but liken him to a deflated, chastised puppy or something equally unthreatening.

They patted him on the back pityingly and ignored the way he flinched back from them like they’d wronged him somehow. It was deeply unfair given he’d just been trying to keep from getting buried alive. He’d started it.

Or the ghost possessing him had. Either way, Yarrow felt entitled to a little self-defence, though they did feel bad about his hand—still cradled against his chest protectively. That might have been a bit much. Still, it’d probably keep him from swinging any hammers at unsuspecting skulls or dragging any bodies around. So maybe it’d not been that unwarranted after all.

“Watch your step,” Yarrow cautioned, choosing not to pick a fight about how twitchy the desk clerk was. “Can’t have you getting too beat up!” They smiled winsomely, if not a little sarcastically.

The desk clerk tugged a branch out of his hair in frustration and sighed. “Sorry.”

Yarrow shrugged and patted them on the shoulder again. “What are you apologizing for? Accidents happen!”

The desk clerk’s face twisted, and he blinked uncertainly at the ground, refusing to make eye contact. “Right,” he agreed and looked a breath away from apologizing again, but chose to continue onwards instead.

Yarrow chased after him for a bit before they cleared their throat. “So. Do you?”

“What?” This time he didn’t trip, but the desk clerk did turn to peer through the gloom at Yarrow with a constipated expression that made Yarrow wonder if their question was a very difficult thing to answer, or deeply offensive for some reason.

“Do you come here often?” Yarrow took care to speak slowly and emphasize their words pointedly, their eyebrows rising in pointed expectation.

The desk clerk squinted. “I… work here?”

“Well, sure. But is it a recent gig? You local? Or did you move nearby recently? My family comes through these parts pretty often to visit Gramma, and I don’t recognize you.”

The desk clerk stared for a moment longer, before exhaling slowly through his teeth and turning back to face forwards. “Well, I am. Local, that is. Haven’t worked at Pinefort before though, so I guess that’s new.”

“Huh.” Yarrow peered at the desk clerk’s back suspiciously. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’re you working at Pinefort?”

Now the desk clerk’s voice was certainly laden with confusion. “Why? What do you mean, why? I needed a job.”

“Hm.”

They both continued forward a few steps, stumbling over roots bulging forth from the ground, and ducking by the low-hanging branches in suspended tension before the desk clerk drew to a stop once more. He sucked in a breath in a clear attempt to wind himself up, and Yarrow ambled to a halt behind him, idly snapping off a twig from a briar when it caught on their sweater and flicked it into the distance while they waited.

“Alright, what are you getting at? You’re acting… well, I dunno. Weird. Why else would I be working here? Do you think I’m… hiding something? Is this because you still think I’m part of a cult?” The desk clerk finally blurted, turning to face Yarrow as he did. He still didn't manage to make eye contact. He directed his face anywhere but towards Yarrow’s own.

“Are you?” They rebutted.

“No!”

“Well, good then. But I was just trying to get to know you a bit. I need clues if I’m to solve this mystery! For all we know these are the embittered ghosts of your ancestors calling to you across the veil of time to act as their sword of vengeance.”

The desk clerk stared in frozen bewilderment for a moment and then turned back around and hurriedly continued walking. “I…that seems a little far-fetched. It's not like this is some Hollywood thriller”

Yarrow clicked their tongue and shoved their hands deeper into the pockets of their sweater. “Far-fetched? You’re saying that at this stage in the game?” Even though the desk clerk couldn’t see it, Yarrow shook their head pityingly. “You need to get your story straight. Oh, wait! I should have asked your name first!”

The beam of the flashlight the desk clerk was holding lowered slightly, sagging towards the forest floor in a way that expressed the emotions obscured by his turned back.

Yarrow pressed onwards all the same until they were aligned with the desk clerk, leaning around to peer into his face. “C’mon. What if you die? It’ll suck so bad if I have to tell the police that 'the desk clerk from the motel' died without even being able to give your name! And maybe using your name will help if you go all crazed killer on me again? That kinda thing does seem to happen in the movies and books quite often. You know, like it is an anchor, or whatever. My father always said that there’s power in names and it sounds weird, sure, but there is no guarantee it wouldn’t help. Probably nicer than another fistfight, for sure!”

The desk clerk cringed back from Yarrow partway through the explanation, shifting so that there was more space between the two of them and the moment he got a chance to cut Yarrow off, he did. “Okay, I get it! Yes, alright. I’m Colton. Buckley.” He shrugged, the motion dull, bordering on listless. “Happy?”

“Nice to meet you! Officially, anyhow. Nothing like a little attempted murder to get to know a person, am I right?” Yarrow joked. “I’m Yarrow. They/them if you would.”

Colton grunted. "Oh., yeah. um. He/him for me?" He said hesitantly. "Wait, nevermind that. I know who you are. I checked you in. And I,” he paused to clear his throat, “went through your phone.”

“What? When? Wait, no, when I was out of it, right? Why’d you do that? Where is it? Give it back!”

“I mean, mostly I was focussed on getting rid of you, but I just kinda… you know, figured it might be good to know who you were. And make sure…” Colton trailed off and shrugged. “You know. It all happened so fast and I was so out of it but, well, it seemed like something I should do. I, um, I got rid of it though.”

“Dude, how’d you even get into it?”

The desk clerk shrugged. “They’ve all got fingerprint scanners or face recognition. It’s not like you were in a position to stop me.”

At this, Yarrow squinted. “Are you sure you’ve never done this before?”

“No! I mean yes. I’m sure. But it's not like I’ve never watched a mystery or crime show, so that much is basic knowledge, right?”

“Huh. Maybe you’re just cut out for this kind of thing after all,” Yarrow mused and gestured for Colton to continue leading the way back.

Yarrow’s assailant did not have anything to say to their accusation, so silence settled over them again.

A cold gust snaked through the trees, and Yarrow shivered. They wiped at the layer of water that had been building on their face, swiping a hand across their eyes to clear their vision as they peered up through the forest canopy at the pre-dawn sky. Daylight was a long way off yet, though at least the rain had begun to subside to a meagre drizzle. Still, it was far too late to spare them from being soaked to the bone, never mind the mud that was smeared all over them from their fight with this odd Colton fellow.

At least it was serving to keep the blood from drying where it streaked down over the side of their face, and down their neck and chest. There’d likely be no saving of their sweater or shirt, but at least they wouldn’t have to spend an hour trying to get the gore to wash off. Then again, the thought of a warm shower after such a dreadful and involuntary venture into the woods was a welcome one. If they had been chilled when they arrived at the old motel earlier that evening, they were now completely frozen.

Of course, that begged the question of what they should do about the desk clerk in the interim. For all they knew he’d go all blood-crazed homicidal maniac and try to cave their skull in again without supervision, regardless of his injuries. He certainly hadn’t shown much of a reaction to pain when he’d been possessed before.

At the very least, Yarrow would much prefer not to be caught unawares again. If he was injured, regardless of evil spirits taking control of him, Yarrow could get clear if they weren’t taken by surprise.

Probably the best thing to do was let Colton do something about his hand and then tie him to a chair or something. Prevention, their mother had always said, was the best medicine.

Granted, he probably wouldn’t take all that kindly to Yarrow’s suggestion, which meant they were going to have to remind him again that they were a victim of unwarranted violence which would have typically been resoundingly traumatic, if not fatal. For the sake of their sense of security, the least he could do was comply.

Still, it would probably best to spring that on him when they weren’t in the middle of the forest.

Yarrow glanced up from where they’d been watching the uneven terrain, as if Colton’s dark silhouette in the woods could offer some insight as to how badly he was going to react to getting restrained, when something skittered out from the undergrowth into the path of his flashlight, startling the both of them enough that they jerked to a halt.

Staring back at them, seemingly as startled as they were, was a small rodent, spotlit by the glare of the flashlight, staring at them in frozen disbelief.

It twitched and shuddered slightly, but didn’t run off, even as the beat of surprise passed.

Colton cleared his throat and chuckled nervously. “Just a squirrel. They can be so brazen.” He stepped forward.

The squirrel twitched, its bedraggled tail spasming like a rattlesnake’s, but it didn’t run away.

Colton drew to a halt again.

Yarrow maneuvered up behind Colton, smirking slyly at his remarkable skittishness. “Is this your great evil in the woods? A gutsy squirrel? Pretty cute. But my fingers are about to freeze off, so if you wanna get going—“

The squirrel jerked upright, standing at attention when their voice crested out into the wilderness, allowing them to see for the first time that it was a mangled little thing. It had torn ears, its fur was matted, and one of its limbs was little more than matchstick thin bones dragging through the dirt.

Yarrow squinted in bewilderment. “Is that normal for wildlife in these parts?” Even as they said it, the squirrel’s skin heaved with a mass of small bugs living under its rotting skin.

“Uh, n-no,” Colton replied, voice rasping quietly against the unease in his throat.

Yarrow nodded. “Figures. Oh well. What’s it going to do? Bite us? One good kick should do.”

“After you then,” Colton muttered back.

Yarrow sighed, and took a step forward, toward the squirrel, which continued to strain to stand upright. Something that might have been a chittering sound at one point escaped its hollowed-out face. “Sorry, little guy, but despite whatever’s going on, you should have just stayed dead.” Honestly, it was a little pathetic how easy it was to send it flying back into the brambles of the woods with a quick flick of their foot.

“Gross,” they whined, peering down at the toe of their shoe to see if any bits were still stuck to it, feeling at once sad and very weirded out.

Colton was staring off into the woods where the body of the squirrel had gone, his face a picture of discomfort. “What the hell was that?”

It seemed rather obvious to Yarrow what it had been, but they figured Colton hadn’t been exposed to the same influences as they had during their childhood. Colton, it would appear, had learned things like checking the phone of one’s victim and disposing of it, or how to fake a power outage to lure innocent and well-meaning individuals out in the woods for a little attempted murder. Yarrow, however, knew the undead when they saw them. “Zombie Squirrel,” they offered with a shrug. “Not the most effectual type of corpse to use, but everything has to start somewhere, right?”

“I’m sorry, did you just say a zombie squirrel?”

“Sure. Can’t think of anything else it could have been. I mean, I guess a ghost could have possessed it. Maybe that’s where your ghost went when it stopped possessing you—nearest available corpse-type deal.”

“What? That’s so gross. This is awful. What the hell is even going on here?”

“I know. Pretty stupid, possessing a squirrel, of all things. And a dead one too! Had to be better pickings out here in these woods. But I’ll actually take that over the first option. Zombie plagues are the worst.”

Finally, Colton met Yarrow’s eyes, staring with a slack-jawed sort of awe that Yarrow had a sudden intuition would turn to full-on distress in seconds. They were right.

“This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. You’re crazy. I’m crazy! I tried to kill you! And you keep going on about ghosts and zombies like it’s all real! This is insane! We need to call the cops. Or the ambulance. Jesus, I thought you were dead. Like for real, actual dead. I checked your pulse! You, your brains were leaking out. I killed you. And now you’re acting like this is some kind of supernatural ghost story and it's impossible and I-I-I c-can’t—”

Yarrow grimaced as Colton started to hyperventilate, rocking back on their heels as they tried to wait out the hysteria. They didn’t wait very long though, because Colton swayed on his feet, one hand—the one holding the flashlight—flailing out blindly to catch his balance as his uneven breathing short-circuited his brain. It sent a pale beam of light spinning into the dark mist, glancing off of wet bark and leaves like the worst strobe light of all time.

“Woah woah woah,” they exclaimed, stepping forward to catch the panicked young man before he collapsed. “Hey, this is good for you. If it’s ghosts, then we don’t have to ship you off to court for attempted murder. And I don’t have to call my family and explain why I also have to go to court and testify. And then they don’t have to get all freaked out and come here and deal with you. Although I guess we could just skip the police part and go straight to the 'take care of' part.”

“What?” Colton would have shrieked if he’d been able to breathe deep enough for that. As it was, his words were shallow pools of alarm crackling in the cold like thin ice. “Are you part of a gang or something?”

Yarrow wrinkled their nose. “No. Ew. What about this said crime ring to you?”

Colton couldn’t answer as he gaped like a fish suffocating on land.

Yarrow shifted awkwardly from one foot to the next, unsure of how to proceed. It was hardly as if they had a paper bag on hand, and trying to get him to breathe through their damp, filthy sweater would have probably been the equivalent of a war crime. Beyond that didn’t know what else to do to get their terribly skittish and fragile assailant to settle down. Managing emotional distress wasn’t their forte.

Belatedly, they realized there was another solution, and reached out to offer Colton a few reassuring pats on the back. This did not go over well, as he tripped over himself to get away from them, eyes wide as he collapsed back into a tangle of underbrush.

Behind Yarrow came a wet scraping, dragging sound and they stiffened. Colton, from his prone position on the forest floor, looked even more panicked. He pressed a forearm over his own face as he tried to muffle his erratic breathing, the whites of his eyes showing like he was a panicked dog being taken to the vet.

Yarrow slowly turned to look back at the source of the sound.

The deer could hardly be called that anymore. Its head lolled on its slender, broken neck, and its ribs were a hollowed-out cavity where scavengers had torn free its insides. its back legs barely functioned so that it had to pull itself forward in a horrific mimicry of seal-like movements.

Colton retched, and even Yarrow pressed a delicate hand over their mouth in disgust.

“Oh dear,” they quipped. “Or, deer, as it were. Your ghosts have terrible taste. If they’re trying to kill me, you’d think…” Yarrow shook their head. “Well, I can’t kick that one away, but I imagine we could outrun…”

Their words got cut off when a small bird, far too small to be out and about during the depths of the night, plummeted out of the branches above and smacked into the earth with a faint crunching sound. It did not still though, no. Instead, its wings weakly flapped against the earth as it tried to heave itself closer to Yarrow.

They were pretty sure they heard the desk clerk whimper.

“That,” they observed needlessly, “is probably not so good.”

Behind them there was a flurry of motion as Colton sprang to his feet, a string of curse words rupturing out of his mouth as he suddenly jerked towards Yarrow’s side and away from another bundle of bones and dried, mummified flesh that appeared from the undergrowth next to him.

“Huh. Maybe it is a zombie plague after all,” Yarrow pondered, quietly reaching out to start tugging Colton away from the slowly expanding hoard of animated corpses.

Another creature plummeted out of the air, bouncing off tree boughs as it dropped towards them, nearly landing at Yarrow’s feet had they not hopped back a step in time.

Whipping his flashlight between one shuddering, staggering creature and the next with enough fervour to induce a seizure, Colton asked, “What do we do?”

“Run probably. That motel is starting to look even nicer—“

The bugs descended on them, a thick cloud of tattered wings, hard shells, and tiny squirming bodies. It was a swarm of undead detritus that caught indiscriminately in their hair and clothes, crawling for their noses, mouths and ears.

They could hear the other creatures closing in, and there were more sickening thumps as things tumbled out of the air. Most of them missed, but not all of them. Feathers and talons crashed into Yarrow as they tried to bat at the air and shield their face.

It was nearly impossible to see, and the only real landmark they had was the weak flicker of the flashlight through the swarm—it was on the ground, dropped in the chaos. That, and the flailing body next to them, the sounds of his distress muffled as he tried to avoid inhaling the swarms of insects.

Blindly, Yarrow reached out a hand, snagging their fingers into Colton’s jacket, and then with an all mighty heave dragged him after them as they let their feet carry them through the trees. They had no target, and couldn’t have navigated their way through the forest without light and a trail at the best of times, never mind with a hoard of dead things trying to smother and pummel them to death.

A wet crunching sound came from where their foot fell, and the feeling of something giving made Yarrow flashback to when they’d stomped on Colton’s hand, but they knew in this instance that wasn’t what it was. They didn’t stop, continuing to pull Colton after them, heedless of the branches snapping against their face, their heart hammering in their chest. They surged away from the swarm, even as it clicked and buzzed after them, sounding like static in their ears.

A larger shape lumbered through the trees towards them, filling the air with a stench so putrid that even the cold mist couldn’t soften it, and Yarrow yelped in surprise at the speed it was moving with, clearly in better condition than the other creatures which had been thrown at them so far.

They swerved to the side, their feet skidding on the wet leaves as they went, nearly sending them crashing to the ground. It was only by luck that Colton managed to reach out and grab their elbow in a grip that was iron-tight and made something pop painfully.

The undergrowth ahead heaved around them, the dead leaves and needles, the soil and the dirt roiling with bones and decaying matter that wouldn’t still.

It was really no surprise that eventually their blind flight through the dark woods would be brought to an end one way or another. Even as Yarrow jerked them both away from the unnatural heaving mass, something in their head was telling them that this was all wrong, that they were being corralled. Shepherded.

And then, as they tripped and blundered passed a fallen tree, slipping over the rain-slicked moss that cascaded out from it, they came to a steep slope that surged down into the darkness. Their momentum tugged them forward, even as they dug their heels into the soft earth for purchase. But Colton, staggering along behind them, kept going. He was blind to the pitfall ahead, and he tipped them both over the edge with a strangled cry of realization that came far too late.

Abruptly they were falling, tumbling, their feet going too fast to stay under them until they were rocketing down over the drop, bouncing off rocks and roots and barrelling into branches and bushes. It was only by luck that Yarrow managed to twist their body in such a way that it sent them careening away from a tree that likely would have broken their fall by also breaking most of their bones.

And then they reached the bottom, tossed over the edge of a rocky ledge before dropping several feet down into cold, shallow water that did nothing to cushion their landing.

For a moment Yarrow lay there, the breath stolen from their lungs, their mind wailing in panic and shock. The pain took a moment to set in, but when it did Yarrow gurgled a choked moan of abject agony. It almost felt worse than having their skull smashed in, and that said something. They had definitely broken something. Multiple things, even.

Dazedly, they thought they needed to move. There were zombie animals after them, and Yarrow hadn’t a clue how much worse their night could get after being assailed by a hoard of undead creatures, but they figured it’d certainly be even worse.

They peeked an eye open, waiting.

Eventually, they realized the dead things weren’t coming for them. No swarms of insect shells, no ominous shapes surging out of the trees, no birds crashing out of the sky like tiny, disgusting meteors of rotting meat.

With a groan, they shut their eyes again and waited for their body to stop rebelling. The water they had landed in was doing a pretty good job of making it all go numb.

Distantly, Yarrow realized that they were forgetting something.

Desk clerk, they remembered in a sudden burst of clarity.

They didn’t know what happened to Colton. They’d lost him pretty much the moment they’d gone over the edge.

Briefly, they struggled to sit up, but they gave up on that pretty quickly and flopped back into the water with a small splash.

“H-hey,” they tried to call out, their voice wheezing quietly. “Hey!” They tried again, louder, though their chest ached just from inhaling. “You there?”

Nothing.

“Did'yah die?” Yarrow slurred, staring blankly up into the sky overhead and straining to hear any sort of answer, even if it was just a whimper of pain.

Still nothing.

Yarrow’s eyes slid shut in resignation. Either he was unconscious, which they couldn’t do anything about at the moment, or he was dead. Humans were terribly fragile, after all.

“Shit,” they swore, and waited for the pain to ease, for their body to right itself. It took a long time. They lay in the icy water, waiting for the white-hot pinpricks of pain dancing under their skin and along their bones to subside, attention snapping to every errant sound in the surrounding woods, wondering if it was the desk clerk, wondering if it was zombie animals come to trample them or smother them or whatever it was they would try to do. In their more delirious moments they thought it was their Gramma there to help, dragged out into the woods by the unnatural disturbance.

Eventually, after they’d either blacked out and had a weird dream, or a tree had informed them that hypothermia was setting in, they realized the sky was beginning to lighten. Just barely. Its deep black was easing into a dull denim colour with a gradualness that Yarrow hadn’t noticed until it suddenly wasn’t as deep and endlessly dark anymore.

That was also when a bloody and bruised Colton staggered into view, staring blankly down at them. He almost looked as bad as the zombie animals, his nose broken, and blood smeared all down over the bottom of his face, while ugly red-purple bruises ringed his eyes.

He’d lost his hat, Yarrow noticed blearily, before noting the rock he had picked up in the interim.

They groaned and struggled to push themselves up. However, there was no rapid fire lurching to their feet this time, no lighting quick turning of the tables. They flailed, not unlike the bird that had crashed to the forest floor, breaking itself against the ground and then struggling to move with shattered wings.

For a moment Colton swayed, and it seemed like he might have been too weak to do much either. Except there was that same wooden expression on his face that went beyond a case of shock or a concussion. He dropped to his knees, one crashing into Yarrow's ribs and sending a fresh wave of pain washing through them as he weighed them down.

Yarrow got the chance to see him robotically lift the rock over his head before they squeezed their eyes shut in automatic rejection of what came next.

They just hoped they’d be lucky enough to once again wake up before he managed to bury them again.

—

Yarrow had always had a tumultuous relationship with luck. This time, it showed them mercy. They came to right where they had been. This time they were feeling marginally better than the last time they’d had their brains beaten out, though the bright sunlight filtering down through the trees was blinding and stung their eyes.

When they managed to sit up, they found Colton in the mud not too far from them, bloody rock close at hand. He was so still and pale it seemed likely that he was dead. They’d almost thought that when he’d appeared after the fall, another zombie dragged into action by some unknown cause, but hadn’t had a chance to formulate the idea before he’d tried to kill them. Again.

“Told you,” Yarrow huffed, between the chattering of their teeth. “I’m pretty… pretty damn sturdy.” They dragged themself over to his still form and collapsed down next to him, sitting with their arms on their knees, their head bowed as they tried to figure out what to do next.

Fortunately, Colton had unwittingly given them a hint earlier that night.

They fished through his pockets for his phone.

“Salut?” Their mother answered on what was nearly the last ring, voice fogged by sleep.

Yarrow opened their mouth to answer, but the words caught on sudden emotion.

“Hello?” she asked again. And then, after a moment, “Yarrow?”

They blinked back sudden tears, and quickly fumbled the phone away from their ear, mashing a thumb against the button to hang up. For several minutes afterwards, they stared at it, half expecting it to start ringing. It did not.

The moment stretched. They sighed.

The desk clerk groaned, his eyes fluttering, and they lurched away from him like a crab, scuttling backwards on their hands until they were well out of his reach.

He didn’t move and after several more moments of tense waiting, they hesitantly scooted closer again. They tapped him with the toe of one soggy boot, but he didn’t react. So they did it again, harder. This time he exhaled sharply, and his eyes fluttered again.

“Great,” they snarked into the space between them. “Looks like I’m not the only sturdy one. Dammit.”

(Next)

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[uncannyinthegrove]

Just a heads up that Chapter Three of Uncanny in the Grove will be delayed by one week! So instead of updating on November 28th, it will go up on the fifth of December! Thank you for your patience!

[uncannyinthegrove]

Made this because I got excited about posting chapter two of my strange fiction project which you can find here, or on my kofi where I will also be posting exclusive art.

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Uncanny in the Grove Chapter Two: The Dead Meet Their Dealer

Table of Contents and Content Warnings

First Chapter

(Sensitive Content typical of Horror/Strange Fiction Genre, Violence)

Yarrow woke up feeling like death warmed over.

They felt terrible, downright miserable even. Their head hurt something awful, like it was wrapped in too many rubber bands and about to pop in the manner of an overripe gourd—all chunks of broken husk and gooey insides leaking out with a wet crunch. That wasn’t all though. There was an unhappy roiling in their stomach that sent acid back up into their throat and burned there like they had swallowed an ember.

It was because of this, that they just laid still in stunned agony for a moment, trying to collect themselves before they even thought of registering their surroundings.

Eventually they became aware of the rain that was washing over their face, cold and a welcome relief to the pain. After that they registered the stick poking into their back, and the rock digging into their hip. Still outdoors then, they concluded, and flexed their fingers into the wet earth beneath them.

The movement was slow and sluggish, a delay in signals that would likely take some time to ease. They stilled, redirecting their attention back to focussing on their breathing and figuring out what was going on.

Somewhere not too far away they could hear a scraping sound. At first they couldn’t identify what it was, their disjointed thoughts offering up all sorts of unhelpful suggestions from butter being spread over toast to memories of dragging a sled up over the hill behind their house when they were a child. The one that lead them to the truth was that the scrapping sound seemed awfully familiar to the time they spent with their Grandpappy Jonquil in his greenhouse.

It sounded like digging.

The thought had them snapping their eyes open with a rapid fire speed, though they had to shut them again just as fast and turn their head away from the deluge of cold rainwater that splattered into their eyes.

In that amount of time, Yarrow had already reached a conclusion about the current predicament they were in. It was not a very comforting conclusion.

Apparently Mister-Jumpy-Desk-Clerk was planning to bury them alive. Well, there was a high chance that he did not know Yarrow was still alive, but that was even more grim on account of the fact that it would mean he’d been trying to kill Yarrow.

Yarrow squinted an eye open to peer through the rain at their would-be murderer to confirm if this was the case despite the sinking certainty in their gut.

They weren’t by the shed anymore. It seemed the desk clerk had brought them deeper into the woods, far off the beaten track. There was a large flashlight sitting on the ground, casting a feeble pale light through the rain to spotlight the drenched figure up to his knees in mud, furiously scraping and gouging at the ground.

Yarrow blinked the water droplets out of their eyes and watched, observing the scruffy young man who had been so awkward and agitated from the minute they had shown up to the minute he had clocked Yarrow over the head. After all, it wasn’t every day one had a run-in with a murderer.

Noticeably, he was moving with a sort of fixated fervour that bordered on robotic. He didn’t pause or flinch, even as the mud he gored from the ground sloughed back into the shallow grave, or his shovel stuttered against a stone. He was turned so that Yarrow could only see him in profile, and with the darkness and rain his expression was beyond discernment.

Okay, Yarrow thought. Okay. Alright.

Carefully, they flexed their hands into the dirt again, and began to do the same with their feet, trying to regain sensation and normal mobility. It still wasn’t quite right, and one of their calves cramped unhappily. They had to grit their teeth to keep from reacting to the uncomfortable sensation, forcing the hiss of displeasure to suffocate in their throat.

After all, it wouldn’t do to go and throw away the element of surprise.

The cold was starting to sink in though, and it was getting harder and harder not to shiver from the chill. They didn’t know how long they had been lying there, but it had been late already when they’d arrived at the motel. Now it was surely approaching the dead of night, and with it came the loss of any faint warmth there might have been to the dreary day. By this point their clothes were soaked entirely through, and the rain was beginning to feel like needles of ice pummelling into their skin.

However Yarrow planned to turn the situation in their favour, they would have to do it soon. Before the desk clerk inevitably realized that they were still awake.

As if he had heard their thoughts, the deranged assailant drew to a jerky halt, like an animatronic that had just been shut off.

Automatically Yarrow snapped their eyes shut again, and tried to go as limp as possible.

There was a crunch of litterfall and dirt that heralding the attacker’s approach, the wet scuffing of dead leaves and needles growing closer and closer until it stopped right next to Yarrow’s ear.

With a rustling of cloth, the desk clerk sank down next to them, the sudden proximity of his breathing giving away his nearness. He sighed raggedly, and it was the sound of punctured bellows.

Yarrow held their breath in expectation. Had they been found out, or was it simply that their grave had been dug and all that remained was to bury them in it?

Quite frankly, getting buried alive was not on their list of goals. It seemed by far one of the more miserable things to endure. By that turn, Yarrow wondered if the time to make their move wasn’t upon them.

Indecision snared them, and in a moment that felt at once too fast and too slow they weighed their choices.

Running through the dark woods, over unfamiliar and uneven terrain without any light or knowledge of where they were in relation to anything else seemed impossible. And that was even if they managed to get up and away before their assailant realized what was happening.

That left two options. They could go the confrontational route, or could try and wait it out, hope against hope they could keep their would-be killer deceived and then just dig their way back to the surface. One was probably the more prudent of choices, though it’d surely be the more irritating to suffer through, while the other was liable to fall into the category of “reckless” and “ill-advised”.

Put that way, the choice was obvious.

With a lurch, Yarrow rolled up and over. The way they moved was far from graceful, or even particularly fast. The world spun around them as their wounded head protested the motion and the disconnect between intent and action left them acting like a cheap haunted house zombie. However, the desk clerk was caught off guard and that afforded Yarrow just the advantage they needed to tackle him back into the dirt.

It would have been nice had they been in possession of a weapon, as they knew they were far from an imposing figure and distinctly not designed for brawling in the undergrowth. They’d always had to go the sneaky route when playing with their cousins as a child, all of whom seemed to tower over Yarrow. Still, their ma had taught them a thing or two about self defence, and bereft of weapons they still had viciousness.

It was this viciousness that had them scrabbling for their would-be murderer’s neck, their hands seizing with adrenaline packed aggression.

“What the hell?” Yarrow shrieked. “What the hell, what the hell!”

The desk clerk sprawled back into the dirt, his hands clawing messily at Yarrow’s wrists in an effort to pry them away from his throat.

For all that, his expression remained frozen. It was hard to see clearly amidst the wash of shadows and the constant drizzle, but in a series of snapshot glimpses amidst the chaos of flailing limbs Yarrow could see that his eyes were unfocused, shuttered against his own actions.

Snarling and caterwauling like a banshee, Yarrow lashed out and smacked a hand against the side of his head.

For a moment they thought they’d gotten him, but then he gave up entirely on trying to wrestle their hands away from his throat. He reached up and knotted one hand into Yarrow’s hair, tugging like he was trying to loosen their scalp from their skull, and then he began cracking the knuckles of his other hand into Yarrow’s face, once, twice, a third time. Each blow felt like a firecracker, the pain hot and bright and making Yarrow’s vision dance with dark spots.

Yarrow lost their balance and collapsed to the side, but the belligerent went with them, not letting go of the grip he had on them. He shoved their face into the dirt as though he was trying to crack open a particularly stubborn clam, his fingers like iron.

There was a ringing in their ears that even the thundering in their veins couldn’t drown out, and while they tried to cry out they weren’t sure if they had, too deafened to hear their own voice.

Certainly the desk clerk didn’t react, entirely wooden, wholly ruthless.

Yarrow shoved their hands through the dirt, looking for something that might give them an edge, their skin tearing on the forest debris as they grasped for something, anything, just so long as it was sharp.

The best they got was a stick, but they curled their finger around it and jabbed awkwardly backwards towards the desk-clerk anyway. their shoulder protested the unnatural twist with a flare of pain. It was worth it though, as the pressure on Yarrow’s skull loosened enough for them to lurch free.

They twisted, and snarled at their adversary, crouched across from him like some sort of feral, mud covered, forest goblin. Before he had a chance to rally, they pushed forward snapping their teeth fully willing to tear out his throat if they had to.

He swatted at them but this time luck was on their side, and he slipped on the wet forest floor. his attack went wide as he flailed through the air.

Yarrow jabbed their fingers into his throat, capitalizing on the opening, and swung a foot out in a sharp kick at his knee that sent him crashing to the floor. And then, for good measure, they hauled off and rammed their foot into his centre of mass. He crumpled, coughing into the dirt and instinctively curled around his ribs, arms going up to shield his head.

Yarrow kicked him a couple more times for good measure.

“What is wrong with you?!” Yarrow heaved the declamation between gasps of exertion, swiping their hair back out of their face. They staggered as they tried to stretch a pained kink out of their back, and angrily flicked dirt into the desk-clerk’s face with their boot.

He whimpered like he hadn’t just tried to kill a person and dispose of their body in the woods during the middle of the night.

Yarrow grimaced, and spat blood out of their mouth, pausing to stare in dismay when they realized that a tooth had gone with it. “Well, damn. At least I’ve got good dental.” They trailed off into a breathless string of guffaws, caught in disbelief and the tug and pull of unspent tension.

Just in time, Yarrow noticed one of the desk clerk's hands inching towards a rock in the dirt and stepped down on the offending limb. They let the heel of their boot dig into the back of his palm, making him groan into the dirt as his fingers curled like a dying insect.

Gone was that eerie, driven and robot-like behaviour. The desk clerk flinched and shuddered and whined, slapping one hand ineffectually against Yarrow’s ankle.

“Seriously, what did I even do to you? Or are you just, like, super blood thirsty? What? Are you some fledgling serial killer? Some amateur horror movie antagonist? Were you thinking you’d get Pinefort haunted after all? Draw in a few tourists? ‘Cause that was my idea! You can’t use me as your main attraction!” Yarrow’s voice crested into a register that was incomparable to the shrillness of a train whistle and they stomped their foot like a toddler throwing a tantrum. This only made the desk-clerk cry out at the sound of an ugly crunch from his hand.

Yarrow paused and then gingerly lifted their foot. It was hard to see how much damage they had done in the dark. “Uh, is that… broken?”

The desk clerk retracted his hand back towards his chest where he cradled it gently.

It was at this point that Yarrow realized Mister “Let me try to knock your brains out with hammer” was crying.

“No! No, no, no! You attacked me! What are you acting all pathetic for? What? Are you sad your plan didn’t work? Not having so much fun now you’re the one in the dirt?”

“I—I’m sorry,” the desk clerk snivelled.

“Sorry? You’re sorry?” What was Yarrow even supposed to do with that? Did this person really think that an apology made up for trying to kill someone? Really?

“Well…well good. Fine. Tell me why you did it and maybe I’ll forgive you.”

“I had to! I dunno, I had to. I’m sorry!”

Yarrow inhaled deeply and squatted down next to their weepy assailant. “You had to? What, are you in some kinda murder cult? Someone holding your family hostage or something?”

The desk clerk shook his head frantically, smearing even more mud across the side of his face where it continued to rest on the forest floor. “No, no, not that, I can’t explain it. I don’t know. You just had to die.”

Yarrow rocked back on their heels a bit and glared skeptically at the scruffy young man. They’d always had a tremulous relationship with luck, so maybe this was something they should have expected when they’d packed up their bags and decided to hitch-hike along the back roads without so much as a by-your-leave. Still, just because their general fortunes tended towards the persistently questionable, it felt excessively unfair that they should be confronted with a poor quality, motive-less murder attempt.

Maybe they’d have to mention it to their grandmother when they saw her. She’d probably have a solution to balance the scales towards something if not favourable, at least neutral.

“How are you not dead?” The desk clerk asked blearily, staring at Yarrow with the sort of expression that truly made it seem like he was the victim.

Yarrow grimaced, and touched the spot on their head that still hurt and was matted with more than just mud. “Just count your lucky stars that I'm not. Do you know what kinda trouble you’d be in if you’d gone and killed me? A lot. That’s how much. I don’t know much about murder myself, but what were you even thinking?”

The desk clerk closed his eyes in defeat. “It doesn’t even matter anymore. Just get out of here. Get away. Get far away. If you stay here you really will die this time.”

“I’m really not sure where you’re getting the confidence to still be making threats,” Yarrow commented idly, reaching out to jab at the back of the desk clerk’s head with an unfriendly finger.

The scruffy young man struggled so he was lying on his back, staring up into the rain with his mangled hand clutched close to them. “It’s not,” he uttered, voice crackling on the end of it. “Not a threat. I dunno. There’s… listen you gotta believe me, there’s something wrong here.”

“You mean something beyond this?” Yarrow flung their hand through the air in an all encompassing gesture.

“Yes, yes. Somethings so, so wrong. I don’t.. I don’t understand this but it’s bad.”

Yarrow considered this, rocking back on their heels to turn their gaze up at the same pitch sky as the desk clerk. It hung over them like a funeral shroud, the deluge raining from its dark depths an ongoing flood of tears that seemed to have no intent of relenting anytime soon. The light of the flashlight which still lay next to the shallow grave that nearly had cradled them was a milky, futile radiance that shed no more light on its surroundings than the desk clerk’s unsatisfying babbling did to the situation.

For all that, Yarrow was starting to feel an inkling unfurl in the back of their mind, like a spider that had been hiding slowly stretching its fine little legs out over the trembling strands of a web.

“This is about ghosts, isn’t it?”

“What? No! Maybe. I dunno. Listen, please, these woods, or—or something in them, it wants people to die. It wants you to die.”

Yarrow clicked their tongue. “Weird. Very weird. I’ve never had this problem before—we visit pretty regularly you know. And Gramma has been here for ages and never said anything about these woods being all actively lethal.”

The desk clerk deemed to deflate, a thread of tension that had been running through him almost visibly snapping in a way that made him suddenly seem much more fragile where he lay. “Please,” he whispered, his voice weak like he didn’t want it to be heard at all. “Please, it wants you dead. You’ve gotta—you’ve gotta die. No. No no no. You’ve gotta go.” He shuddered and dragged a forearm up over his eyes, shielding them from view.

Yarrow reached out and pinched the young man’s sleeve between his thumb and forefinger like it was a banana peel or something else vaguely distasteful, and lifted his arm off of his face. They peered into his eyes curiously, chewing on the inside of their lip as they considered the way he flinched and glanced away furtively.

“Two seconds ago you were trying to turn my head into a bad piñata, so I can't say I'm ready to just believe this kicked puppy routine. But...but say I did," here Yarrow struggled to keep their face a mask of seriousness, "why'd you take it upon yourself to go offing folks just because the woods are weird? I’m telling you, it's ghosts. If this wasn't you just being super mean and horrible of your own accord, or because of a brainwashing murder cult, then you’re probably possessed.”

The desk clerk squeezed his eyes shut like he hoped that would somehow make everything, Yarrow included, go away. “Maybe. Maybe that’s it. But why is it me? Why couldn’t it just leave me alone? I don’t wanna kill anyone. I don’t.”

To this, Yarrow hummed noncommittally. It was hardly as if they knew this random person so it wasn't like they could tell what his usual level of unwarranted violence was. Given how seemingly contrite he was acting though, they rather thought he'd be grateful for the excuse to blame a malevolent forest spook.

“How noble,” they offered. “Can you think of anything that might have gotten you haunted? Walked on any graves lately? Inherited any weird heirlooms?”

“Are you one kind of ghost enthusiast or something? Is that why you keep doing this?” The desk clerk snapped back, voice like an unstable firework, one eye squinting open to glare at Yarrow, who only raised an eyebrow back. He sighed. “Sorry. Sorry, no, none of that.”

“Lame,” Yarrow groaned as they straightened up again. “Love a good possessed heirloom. My uncle collects them, you know?”

Somewhere in the forest an animal cried out, the sound curdling in the night.

The desk clerk sat up and stared off in the direction of the sound. “That’s it! Listen. A while back I was out hiking. The bosses are paying me to find a decent walking trail that we can clear. Try and lure in a few customers, make it safer then just letting them go off into the wilderness, you know?”

Yarrow pursed their lips, refraining from pointing out that this already felt like a terribly obvious story.

The desk clerk grimaced. “I know. But listen, see, I was out there one afternoon and I guess I got a bit dehydrated or something. Blood sugar dropped or I was tired maybe. Been staying up late on night shifts and stuff. Whatever the reason, I got really woozy. I had to sit down for a bit, take a break, eat something, you know? I guess I drifted off. When I woke up, it was getting late out. So I started to head back down, but it was… I dunno. Something wasn’t right.”

“Something wasn’t right. Okay. Sure. Could you maybe be a bit more specific? ‘Cause that could mean anything. Did you catch a cold, or were you surrounded by a nighttime parade of ghosts?”

“I mean, I thought maybe I was coming down with something. No wonder, falling asleep out there like that. I was all sluggish. Kept getting confused. Turned around. Started going in circles. There was this, like, old cave. Not even really a cave, it's just a crevice in the rocks with a bit of a spring coming out of it. I kept winding up back there. I dunno, I was freaking out but that’s because I thought I’d like, gotten addled from exposure or whatever. They had to come out and get me. I was laid up for days.”

“Did you drink it?”

“What?”

“The water from the spring. Did you drink it. Mighta been contaminated,” Yarrow mused aloud, theatrically stroking their fingers against their chin. "Contaminated with ghosts. Ghost water. Definitely could happen"

“Look, You’re the one who asked me if there was something that could have done this. That’s all I got. It’s that or I’m, like, having a mental break and trying to off people because I think the forest wants me to sacrifice you to it or something.” The desk clerk shook his head in frustration. "This isn't like me."

“I mean, I wouldn't know,” Yarrow disagreed. “Whelp, I guess we should check it out anyway.”

“Check…check it out? What? The spring?”

“Sure! You haven’t really given me any other leads, and if I’m going to get jumped by some motel desk clerk in the middle of nowhere, I think it’d be nice to find out why. You ever heard of, you know, closure, or whatever? And, I mean, knowing if I’m trying to kill people because its a secret repressed desire of mine, or I’m being possessed by nasty forest ghosts would be something I’d really want figure out if I was you.”

“Right,” the desk clerk uttered. “But, um. Maybe I should stay here? I’m… I’m still on the clock, you know. Should probably get back to the front desk.”

This did not seem like a valid priority to Yarrow given the circumstances.

“Psh! You said yourself you aren't the only person working tonight. I’m sure it’ll be fine. This is,” Yarrow stopped to tumble their words over in their head, scanning for the right one like they were panning for gold amidst silt. “Important. For me and also your well being. Besides I don’t even know where to go. C’mon, you tried to kill me. This is the least you could do.”

The desk clerk sagged at the reminder. “Right. Yeah. I—I still don’t understand. I swore you were..." he trailed off awkwardly, but Yarrow filled in the empty space that his hesitation had left.

“Dead.”

“Right. Yeah. That.” But still, even with the truth of what he had done stated so clearly, the scruffy desk clerk continued to hesitate. His eyes fell away from Yarrow like a rat scurrying along the edge of a room, and he fidgeted uncomfortably with his injured hand.

Yarrow smirked and shrugged. “I told you, I’m pretty sturdy. Still,” here they leaned forward so that they loomed as ominously as they could muster over their new and unlikely companion. “What you did hurt me. And now I’m going out on a limb here, trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. Don’t you feel sorry at all?”

Something fluttered across the desk clerk's face, an emotion not quite realized. He stared with eyes as pitch as the surrounding woods for a long, guilty moment, as though he was seeing Yarrow as they had been; seemingly dead with blood on their face, still and ready to be cast into an unmarked grave.

“At least,” Yarrow pushed further, setting the nails of obligation deep, “it was me. At least I lived. It could have been anyone.” They let that thought linger. Waited for the realization to blossom across the desk clerk’s conscience. He had done something that normally couldn’t be taken back, and it was only by the grace of chance that it had not been an irreversible sin. More importantly, there was no guarantee that it would have ended with just Yarrow. What yawned before the desk clerk, regardless of the reason, was pit of blood deeper than he could know, and Yarrow was offering him a chance to crawl out of it before he sank too deep.

“Alright,” he conceded at last. “Alright. Yeah, I’ll show you where it is. But maybe we should wait until morning? Hopefully the rain will have let up by then. And even if it hasn’t, at least it’ll be brighter.”

He was probably right. All the same, Yarrow was dissatisfied. The dark forest waited unremittingly, some unforeseen intent supposedly lurking in its depths, a baleful something that wanted to try and snatch away Yarrow’s life. It was right here, and all they had to do was go, and seek it. Pry it out of its shadows, and dig their fingers into its intentions. They wouldn’t be able to think about anything else until they had figured it out, their thoughts as bent on it as it seemed to be on having them dead.

Alas, the desk clerk did seem to be in rough shape, and even despite their curiosity Yarrow didn’t fancy continuing to slog through the relentlessly bad weather in the dark. Without the distraction of the violent skirmish in the undergrowth, they could feel the cold that had made its home in their body like an infestation. The shivers they were trying to ignore for the sake of intimidating their would-be killer weren’t going to go away. The desk clerk didn’t seem to be faring much better despite being dressed more aptly for the evening’s rough escapades. Though, admittedly, the shivers might have been from the fear.

It was likely he would do better from the courage that morning tended to give people.

Yarrow sniffed and swiped at their nose. “Ugh. Fine. Alright. Let’s go back to the motel for now. They still need someone to get the stupid generator up and running anyway.”

“Oh. That,” the desk clerk remembered. “I mean, it wasn’t a big deal. Actually I’d just flipped the circuit breaker. Needed an excuse to get you away. Coworker probably already noticed and flipped it back.”

Yarrow sagged mournfully. “What the hell,” they complained. “That’s so messed up.”

The desk clerk grimaced as he staggered to his feet. “You’re telling me.”

(To Be Continued in Chapter Three)

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[uncannyinthegrove]

Info:

Genre: Strange Fiction, Adventure, Horror

About:

Yarrow Hurst is unexpectedly murdered. Or, at least, they would have been if murder was something that could be done to them. As it stands Colton, the would-be killer, has his own problems and murder isn't really up his lane. In the face of this unwelcome encounter, a most alarming adventure begins."

An off the wall, maybe horror, and definitely strange fiction tale about two individuals on the weirdest road trip of all time ever in the history of the universe. Probably.

Sensitive Content/Content Warnings: violence, coarse language, horror elements such as monsters, ghosts etc. death, dying, being bodily controlled/compelled by supernatural forces in a way that interferes with autonomy, dead animals, decaying bodies, burnt human bodies (will update as I go)

Table of Contents:

Chapter One: What Happens at Pinefort

Chapter Two: The Dead Meet Their Dealer

Chapter Three: Something Wicked this Way Comes

Chapter Four: When the Going Gets Tough

Chapter Five: No Way It Can Get Worse Right?

Chapter Six: No fun For Party Crashers

~Part One Fin~

Chapter Seven: In Progress

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Chapter One: What Happens at Pinefort...

Table of Contents and Content Warnings

(Sensitive Content typical of Horror/Strange Fiction Genre)

Yarrow was not sure who was more happy to see the blocky, neon sign of the motel: them, or their ever more sullen ride.

“Pinefort Inn,” the sign declared, the lurid pink glow glinting among the rivulets of rain that ran in thick, overwhelming streams down the windshield. The deluge was so strong it was actually quite the wonder anything was visible, and spoke to the obstinacy with which the remote motel wanted to be noticed.

Up until that point the man driving the old pickup truck—Sweeney, as he’d introduced himself, had been little more than a pair of dark eyes beneath eyebrows like steel wool, and a grimly set mouth half obscured behind a matching beard. The tension in his expression had only deepened over the course of the passed three hours, and Yarrow had been impressed to see the degree of severity and determination Sweeney had levelled at the blurry, near-flooded highway. There would have been no shame if he had decided to pull over until the worst of the weather had let up, but the man had been determined to get them both to their destination with no delay.

Hitchhiking was always a risky business, but Sweeney had been a terribly lucky encounter. His foot might have been a bit heavy on the gas pedal—especially during the last two hours, and he might have been risking hydroplaning into the ditch, but the man clearly understood his own abilities as a masterful driver.

Now, with the hunched and gangly silhouette of the motel coming into view, dark beneath the dingy, navy skies of a quickly approaching autumn twilight, the older man’s face seemed to ease somewhat.

Yarrow smiled with a sense of camaraderie that been blossoming in their chest over the course the evening that they had spent crammed into the small cab with the stranger. Their father had always told them that near death experiences really tended to bring people together and, sure enough, Yarrow felt endeared towards the deeply carved wrinkles on the man’s face and his absolute refusal to participate in a conversation.

What did it matter that the man had been turning up the volume of the radio by a few notches every so often, despite it only producing token phrases drowned in sharp and crackling static? What did it matter if his knuckles had turned such a pale shade of white from his grip on the steering wheel that it made him look a little crazy? What did it matter that the speedometer had been lunging towards criminal numbers for the last forty minutes? He’d done it.

They’d done it. Together.

It was a sentiment Yarrow felt compelled to voice out loud, and with a delighted, enthusiastic clap to the older man’s shoulder, they did just that. “We’ve made it,” they crowed, and it felt so good to say, they did so twice more, letting it evolve into something a little singsongy.

The older man grinned back. It wasn’t a very nice smile—all bared teeth and wide eyes. It seemed likely he wasn’t in the habit of smiling often though, so Yarrow didn’t hold it against him.

“Yes,” he growled out, with the type of voice that was only ever a growl in the way that belied the amount of nicotine which had infected his life. “Yes, we did. We really fucking made it.”

The last bit got a bit intense as the words were shoved out between his gritted teeth.

Yarrow beamed at him. “You know, Sweeney, we’ve only just met but I’m going to miss you. I’ve hitch hiked with a lot of people, but you? You’re something special.”

“Jesus Christ.”

So maybe they had been a bit too forward in their enthusiasm, Yarrow realized belatedly. Sweeney seemed like the kind of man who wasn’t really down for the whole “talk about one’s feelings” business. He seemed much more like the type to stoically nod at you from distance, and offer up the occasional grunt of approval. The strong, silent type. All rough edges on the outside and gooey brownie batter on the inside.

Yarrow chuckled indulgently, and patted the man on the shoulder again. “I really mean it though. You’re great Sweeney. Just great. And honestly? If we had flipped off the road and been crushed by crumpled steel, or had our throats slit by shattered glass, or had our necks snapped, or even if we’d been blown up, well, it’d have been an honour to have known you and I wouldn’t have wanted to change anything for the world—“

The man jerked the steering wheel to the side, turning the car into the parking lot of the motel without even really slowing down.

“Of course, I’d try to save you. I wouldn’t just let you die there like that. Not that there would any guarantees I could, you know. Not much I can do if I’m unconscious. Or trapped by a crushed vehicle. Anyway, I’m just saying. Hypothetically, if this had all gone really badly, I wouldn’t have regretted meeting you today.”

When Sweeney jammed on the breaks, he did so with such abruptness that it sent Yarrow lurching forward against a suddenly tight seat belt. The force of it nearly winded them, and their words got cut off in their throat, half formed sentiment put to the guillotine just like that.

“Whelp, we’re here. You’ve got all your stuff right? Nothing in the back? Ready to go?” Sweeney demanded, reaching over to help Yarrow with their seat belt.

“Sure do! It’s just me and my bag.” Yarrow confirmed, hoisting their small duffle bag out from where it had been stuffed between their feet. “But hey, didn’t you say that you were planning on staying here too? You could probably park right there. You don’t have to just drop me off at the door.”

“No worries about that,” the old driver insisted as he leaned over the cab and swung the door open for Yarrow. “Get on with you.”

Hesitantly, Yarrow slid out of the truck and landed with a small splash.

The moment their shoes hit the pavement, possibly before, they heard to sound of a car door slam and the rev of an engine.

It was actually alarming how quickly Sweeney cleared the parking lot. There was a small pothole right at the entrance back onto the highway, and he hit it with such speed that Yarrow was certain the car had achieved a measure of actual air time. It swerved as it veered out onto the main road, great plumes of water gushing up from its wheels as Sweeney barrelled away, around a bend and out of sight.

Yarrow stood in shocked silence for a moment, the rain pummelling down on them and quickly soaking through the thin cotton of their jacket, and plastering their hair to their forehead in seconds.

Then, with a shrug, they turned and faced the entrance of the old motel.

—

Pinefort Inn was not a place people intentionally sought out with any great frequency. It sat, a hunched and blocky two-story building at the side of a long stretch of back road cutting through a provincial park. The stretch of neglected road offered little other in the way of amenities than the occasional dilapidated roadside pullout, and on either side loomed a forest largely dominated by dark evergreens and craggy, uneven terrain that eventually pulled its way up into old mountains.

While the park was a hot spot for nature enthusiasts and avid hikers with penchant for self punishment, there were other more accessible places for them to set up camp than old Pinefort. A number of small towns that survived on tourism sprawled around the shores of the many lakes, or closer to junctions where the branching roads met the highway. By comparison, the small little motel squat deep in the woods, isolated and without many other attractions to summon forth traffic—even the hiking was bad in the area, a result of too many accidents and missing persons who thought to traverse the treacherous foothills at its back.

And yet, it lingered on, a welcome haven to travellers who’d over estimated their energy, truckers who couldn’t be bothered to pay the higher tourist fees but did want a space away from their rigs, and the occasional victim of poor navigation.

The style of it might have been described as retro by those feeling charitable, but most would have described it as old and shabby. At some point there had been an effort to spruce it up with new siding, but the project had been only partially done, leaving it half clad in white siding in some parts, and a faded minty sort of blue that had started to yellow from the sun in others. The windowsills were a startling shade of orange, though the paint peeled in some places, long flaky strands of it pulling back to reveal grey wood underneath. The doors had been painted to match, all except for one. The office door was a clean, fresh white and windowed--though the glasses was protected by a metal grill.

It swung open on heavy, protesting hinges, and the sound of a bell clanging halfheartedly jeered at Yarrow’s entrance.

The first thing that drew the eye was the front desk protruding like a stubborn lip out of the wall. It was bathed in the light of more than one desk lamp, and the same effervescent pink glow emanating from the parking lot. It was decorated with a wide array of knickknacks that seemed to offer no coherency as far as theme. They sat half obscured by the evening’s gloom, and cast strange shadows across the check-in area.

The spectacle was not helped by the dimness of the overhead light, layered as it was in dust and fly corpses and utterly failing at reaching its glow to the shadowy corner where the desk lurked.

The only other source of light was the familiar pale glint of the computer, sitting front and centre among the array of baubles. It lit up the face of the young man tending to the desk. He was dressed in the manner of most people local to the area, from the ragged pair of jeans, to the old band shirt, and even the plaid flannel thrown over the top of that. He looked scruffy, with a toque was shoved down over dark, out grown hair and sporting thin, ungroomed facial hair. His tar pit eyes reflected little pale squares of light, open wide in a stare that did not waver for several long, protracted moments.

Yarrow stared back briefly. It was reminiscent of the staring contests they used to have with their childhood cat. But, as it had gone with the cat, they ended up breaking the prolonged eye contact first and swaggered on forward into the room. As they went, they shook themselves like a dog shaking its fur so that their wet hair slapped against their cheeks and forehead.

By this point the young man behind the desk had pushed himself to his feet, the cheap old chair he’d been sitting on letting out a squeak at the abruptness of his movement. His foot thunked closely against the base of the desk, the jolt making several of the knickknacks clatter against each other and threaten to fall off their elevated perch altogether. He fumbled for them before they fell, letting out a scratchy exclamation as he did so—his gaze finally broken.

Yarrow took the opportunity to set their bag down at their feet, and reached out to scoop one such bauble off of the desk before it catapulted itself to the linoleum far beneath it. They turned it over in their hand, admiring the bizarreness of it. It looked as if it was supposed to have been a horse, and might have at one point had a coat of glossy brown velvet. Except the velvet had been so worn away by age that it revealed the thin, milky plastic beneath, as if the horse had been raised by a necromancer into some sort of equine zombie. Jauntily attached to its neck was a small blue crocheted tie—clearly a later addition.

How horrendous, Yarrow thought, and set it back down on the counter with a fond pat.

When they glanced back up, the desk clerk was gingerly pressing himself back into his chair, eyes fixated on the small horse likeness, his brow furrowed and lips pressed into a thin line.

“Can I help you?” His voice crackled over the question, and hung in graceless suspension amidst the otherwise deep quiet of the office. The sound of the rain pelting against the pavement and the water sputtering through the gutter outside attempted to soften the edge in his voice where he had failed but did little other than add a static ambience.

Not daunted by the failing of the usual courtesy offered by folk in the service industry, Yarrow beamed as if they were trying to manifest sunlight where there was none. “Sure can! Looking for a room!”

“Just for the evening?” The desk clerk’s hand spasmed, jerking across the desk towards the side before abruptly flinching down upon the mouse of the computer like a cat’s paw snapping down on the back of a mouse.

Yarrow blinked down at the poor device in surprise. They were starting to think whoever this unfortunate soul working the late shift was, they were perhaps not cut out for jobs with a heavy social aspect, or were running on a little too much caffeine to keep them alert for the long hours. “Mm, yup,” they intoned. And then, completely unprompted, decided to explain the reason for their visit. “I’m here to visit my grandma.”

“Here?” The desk clerk hissed, as though they weren’t very sure if they wanted the words to escape and were making a last ditch effort to catch them before they got too far out of reach.

“Well, no. Not here in this building. She’s up in the woods. I’ll walk up there tomorrow. But it’s getting pretty late and I’ve been on the go for quite a few days. Could really do with a break. And a hot bath.” To accentuate their point, the last of Yarrow’s sentence was accompanied by a sneeze that nearly lifted them off their feet.

There came a sharp crack as the desk chair shot back against the wall. The desk clerk was staring at Yarrow again, his hand white knuckled around the arms of the chair.

“Haha, you’re acting like you’ve been jumped by a ghost,” Yarrow brayed, and cast a conspiratorial look around the small room when all they got was a shuddering inhale in response. “Wait, is that it? This place ended up getting haunted after all? For real? What a riot!”

“No, no. No. Nothing… nothing like that,” the young man returned in answer, slowly rolling himself back toward the desk.

Yarrow clicked their tongue, disappointed. “Shoulda known, I guess. But it’d make a good story, right? All those missing person’s cases? Everyone says its because they got lost hiking in the hills, but personally I think it’d make more sense if they all got dragged here and locked in the basement or something.”

“Smoking or no smoking?”

“Huh? oh—“ Yarrow glanced back down at the desk clerk, their speculations cut off. The desk clerk was staring, face rigid, at the computer screen. “Doesn’t matter. Ground floor would be good though.”

“Right. Credit?”

“Cash. Hey, I wasn’t serious. This place probably doesn’t even have a basement. I doubt you’ve got any ghosts here, or bodies in the under the floor. Or anywhere else, I guess. And you’re kinda off, but you don’t seem the murdering type.” That didn’t mean anything. Some folks did seem the murdering type, and others didn’t. Yarrow believed it was best not to make assumptions. Life was like a box of chocolates, or so people often said. Except that most boxes of chocolate came with some sort of guide, but the idea still stood. Some people were mint chocolate, some people had the misfortune of being praline.

“Right,” the desk clerk worked out, before telling Yarrow the total for their stay and the check out time.

Satisfied that they had made it abundantly clear they were not accusing anybody of murder, Yarrow passed over the dwindling remains of their finances, and accepted the key to their room. “It would be good for business though—if you guys were haunted. Well, I guess you could just lie about that. Lots of places do it. Draws in the curious crowd. I mean, who doesn’t like to imagine they're sleeping with the dead all around them, right? One single breath away from death. Or at least having their life changed forever as they peer beyond the veil that keeps them safe and snug.”

“I’ll, uh, I’ll tell that to the owners,” this was accompanied by a fleeting chuckle like a falling leaf, dry and with a sort of wispiness that made it sound flat. As it crumbled through the air, the desk clerk straightened from his desk, and edged around the desk with quick, tight steps. He circled wide around Yarrow, who rotated to watch him without moving from their spot, to the door.

“There you are. Just to your right,” the young man offered, teeth flashing in his first attempt at a smile that evening.

He clearly needed practice, Yarrow felt, if that was his customer service face. Still, the cold of their damp clothes was starting to set in and the scruffy faced worker probably wanted to get back to watching Netflix or whatever it was he had been doing before they showed up.

“Alrighty, well, thanks a bunch,” they said as they scooped up their bag once more. “Say, do you guys do breakfast or anything? The last thing I ate was a gas station egg salad. It’d be great if I could grab a bite to eat before I head out tomorrow. It’s gonna be a long walk.”

“A-A long walk?”

“Sure. Gramma lives up in the woods. Regular old recluse living off the grid. Not even a road going up there. Just an old track—doubt even a quad or dirt bike could make it up there. Mostly she walks. Mom keeps saying she should come live with the rest of us, but she insists on staying out there in the middle of nowhere.”

“Nobody— I mean, I didn’t think anyone lived out there. It’s… what if something happened?”

Yarrow shrugged. “Like what? Trust me, my grandma can handle anything. It’d be more convenient if she lived closer but I get it, you know? She likes her space. Absolutely hates nosiness. And noisiness. And surprises, so we’ll see how ticked off she gets when I show up on her doorstep!” Counter to their words, Yarrow did not sound particularly concerned by the prospect of what might have been awaiting them.

The desk clerk straightened, shifting his hold on the door, still pushed ajar so that the sound of pattering rain intensified in the space between them. “She’s not expecting you? Does anyone know you’re heading up there tomorrow?”

“Ha, no way!” Yarrow informed, feeling confident. “The fam thinks I’m still at school. But that shit got lame, you know? There I was chilling in my dorm with, like, due dates and stuff hanging over me, and some asshole next-door playing reruns of Survivor at full volume all night long. And all I could think was that I coulda been literally anywhere else. So I left. Been hoofing it all over for the last… like, month?”

“You… left? And didn’t tell anyone?” The light distorted his features, playing a game of twister with the shadows in a way that made it harder to determine what his expression was.

It was, quite frankly, rather surprising the desk clerk was choosing that moment to start getting chatty. The cool, damp night air was washing over the two of them as the wind picked up, shifting into biting gusts that foretold the approaching end of summer. It was late, and a proper storm seemed to have been brewing.

“No need to worry about me,” Yarrow assured, not one to be put off by engagement, abrupt or otherwise. “I’m pretty sturdy. And hey, you know now!”

“That’s… not how that works.” The desk clerk sighed. “I’m—“ he cut himself off, his head turning out toward the parking lot and beyond that, the highway, just as a large gravel truck thundered passed. “Whatever,” he bit out, pressing a fist into his temple, like he was plagued by a persistent migraine. “Good night.”

“To you too!” Yarrow returned. “And don’t let the ghosts get you,” they tacked on as they stepped outside, waggling their eyebrows in dramatic communication of irony.

—

The first thing Yarrow did was clamber into a hot shower. Blisteringly hot, though that was more a matter of the plumbing than any real agency of their own. Pinefort seemed to only offer either so cold as to freeze even the marrow of one’s bones, or so hot as to strip the flesh from one’s bones—with water pressure to match, of course. It felt similar to being blasted with small molten fragments of glass.

The drain glugged and gurgled and threatened to regurgitate the deluge back, and Yarrow watched with nervous anticipation of what things might spill over its rust speckled maw. Fortunately, nothing came, and beyond the damage to their epidermis they left the shower incident free and much warmer than they had been.

When they stepped out, the sight that greeted them was the small rectangular mirror hanging over the sink. Rust streamed like rivulets of dried blood from the mirror clips keeping it affixed to the chintzy tiles, and pulled along the seam between wall and the porcelain of the sink, the result of many years of condensation. Their silhouette was blurry and indistinct in the steamy glass—more a lanky spectre than any proper reflection of them.

Yarrow pressed a thumb to the singular round scar that rested in the hollow where their collarbone met their shoulder, conscious of it even without the sight of it. It itched, as it often did when they were not otherwise distracted and they reached for their bag of toiletries and the moisturizer they kept inside for just such instances, when their phone chirped is energetic greeting.

“‘Mom,” They greeted, after a mad scramble into their night clothes that had nearly resulted in them tripping back into the shower. “Sorry. Hey. Hi! How are you?”

There was brief pause, a hiccup of silence over the line that was quickly followed by a sigh. “Sweetling. Ça va?” She asked, prompting the conversation to slip into French. “It has been awhile since we’ve heard anything from you. Marjolein was half a mind to drive out and visit you this weekend.”

Yarrow had been on their way out of the bathroom, intent on finding the thermostat to chase off the chill that haunted the small motel room, but at their mother’s words they panicked and slammed their foot into the corner of the doorway. The string of curses that followed was loud, and they half expected it to beckon forth some reprimand from their neighbours—but when none occurred they slumped in relief. Perhaps the plague of vacancy which beset Pinefort was not such a misfortune.

“What was that?” Yarrow’s mother asked, a sting of disapproval biting into her words.

“Sorry mom,” Yarrow muttered automatically, entirely used to this song and dance. Their mother had a thing about crude language.

In return they could hear the sound of her clicking her tongue in admonishment. “I suppose you come by it honestly.

They grimaced and flopped down onto the edge of the bed, massaging their throbbing appendage. “So, uh, is ma coming here?” Here, of course being the distant university which Yarrow was most assuredly not at. “Because the semester’s almost over, and it’s pretty busy with exams and what not. And I’ll be home soon for the break anyway.”

Their mother hummed in reply. “As I told her. And then we’ll all get to see you. It’ll be nice to celebrate all together. We’re very proud. Your father insists on me playing any sort of documentary about your dinosaurs so he can discuss it with you.”

A dangerous prospect frankly. If Yarrow knew one thing about their father, it was that any interest in long dead creatures was liable to end in an intense obsession. It was a miracle that he had not already shown an interest in the topic before hand, given his proclivity for lost things.

Of course, more dangerous was what would happen when Yarrow’s parents discovered their child’s truancy—it would happen inevitably. But Yarrow wasn’t quite ready to give up the charade and face the fallout all the same.

“I’ll look forward to it. Maybe I can bring something back. Any preferences?”

“Non, though I’m sure anything Marjolein will want ought to be soaked in oil. More of those rosette’s we got the last time we saw you. She seemed quite fond of them.”

“I can do that,” Yarrow agreed, though they wondered if they’d be able to find them anywhere between Pinefort and the family home. Maybe they could make the dessert? But it didn’t seem like it’d be all that simple to make, and Yarrow had been warned off large receptacles of hot oil, or any other liquid for that matter.

“Please,” Yarrow mother affirmed. “How do your courses go? How are you feeling about things?”

Yarrow was saved from answering by a sudden loss of light that swept down over the room with such abruptness that it left spots dancing across their vision. The room grew quiet as the hum of machinery that filled the air with a negligible ambience cut short. The only source of sound or light came from their phone. Even the stream of pink that had been weaseling it’s way in passed the crack in the curtains had cut out.

“Yarrow,” their mother asked, picking up on their startled pause.

“Sorry about that,” Yarrow said, voice dropping to a softer note automatically. “My, uh, my roommate needs me for something. Do you mind if I message you back later?”

“Your roommate?”

Yarrow winced. They knew their mother’s tone of disbelief anywhere. She had always had a knack for picking up on things.

“Yeah. You know. We’ve, uh, we’ve bonded. They’re helping me… edit. Essays. The boring stuff. They’re better at sitting still and reading the same thing six million times.”

“You’ve bonded?”

Yarrow tried not to feel offended at the clear mark of incredulity increasing in their mother’s voice.

“Of course! We live together now. Might as well be family.”

“Well I’m glad, then” she answered, her voice still coloured by doubt. “They seemed rather… intolerant when we encountered them. Standoffish.”

“No way. I think they were just shy. Quiet. Awkward. But you know what they say: Opposites attract. We get on like flies on sh-“

“Yes. Yes, thank you. I understand. I am happy for you. I will let you go so that you may… attend to whatever it is that they need.”

“Alright mom. Bye. Talk to you later.”

“Take care. Study hard. We love you!”

“You too mom.”

“And text your ma. She’ll sulk that she missed you.”

“I will,” Yarrow agreed, before hanging up the call. For a brief moment they luxuriated in the feeling that they had just dodged a bullet—the longer they had to maintain the farce that they remained the dutiful student for their mother, the more likely she was to catch on.

Then they got to their feet, the light of their phone a beacon as they hunted for their duffle bag and an extra sweater to account for the chill now that the heater had ceased to function, even if only temporarily. The wind rattled against the windowpane in a way that convinced Yarrow of a chill more than they actually felt, and with their hair still damp it was bound to settle into their bones long before they got a chance to dry it properly.

They were just pulling on their cardigan—a light, fluffy thing that put one in mind of candy, icing and flowers—when the sound of a few erratic, hesitant knocks came from their motel room door.

Surprised, Yarrow straightened and spent a prolonged moment staring at the door in blank wonderment.

Knock, knock, knock… knock.

The rapping sound came again, quietly, as if the person making it wasn’t wholly committed to disturbing the room’s occupant. The final knock was a bit louder, but Yarrow felt that they could almost hear the uncertain question mark attached to the end of it.

The question of who could be at the door and what they wanted begged answering, but that meant actually responding. For a second Yarrow hesitated, feeling a a surge of reluctance in their gut as they stood there in the dimness.

When they finally opened the door, they were internally bemoaning their own insatiable curiosity.

“Oh. Uh—hi. Again.” The scruffy faced desk clerk greeted, hand lifting to shield his eyes from the glare of Yarrow’s phone, the flashlight beaming directly into his eyes.

“Hey,” Yarrow chimed in return, and then leaned out around the door frame to peer first left down the walkway, and then to the right as if they might find some clue as to why the young man was upon their doorstep, or as if there might be some surprise waiting for them. Nothing appeared.

“Um, so, I’m sorry to disturb you like this, but this is about the, uh, the power outage.” Despite the snarl of the wind as it whistled down over the foothills and through the forest and the steady crush of the rain, the desk clerk spoke lowly.

“Oh! That! Sorry, that wasn’t me,” Yarrow had no such compunctions and spoke at their typical volume.

“What? What’s that supposed—No, no that’s not what I meant. Look, could you lower your light a bit?” The last part was said closer to a begrudging hiss as the young man tried to crane his head around the pursuing glare of light.

Obligingly, Yarrow lowered their phone to a more polite angle.

“Thanks. Look, it’s no big deal. Probably just a line down or something. We’ve got a back up generator that we’ll run in the meantime. But I’d appreciate it if someone could come with. You know. Hold the light for me. Make sure I don’t slip and crack my head open in these conditions or jam my hand in the machine or anything?” His voice crept up a note as he trailed off, eyes skittering to the side.

“Yeah, neat, I can see how that’d be nice!”

“Thanks so much, seriously, I don’t know why the owners have the generator out in a shed so far from the main building. It’s a huge hassle anytime something like this happens.”

If Yarrow had been thinking at all, they might have spared both of them some embarrassment. Unfortunately Yarrow had not been thinking and it took a moment for the actual intention behind the desk clerk’s words to sink in. When it finally did, they blurted out the first thing that crossed their mind rather than casually play along.

“Hm? Oh! Oh, you meant me!” They clarified.

The young man twitched at the sudden exclamation that broke out over the walkway. His body pulled away in surprise at first, and then he lurched forward as he automatically hushed Yarrow. One hand lifted in a jerky indication for quiet.

“Sh! Yes! Who did you think I was talking about?”

Yarrow shrugged. “Don’t you have anyone else here? I thought you were just, you know, trying to keep the guests from losing their minds or whatever. You know.”

“She’s manning the desk while I’m gone. In case people need help or have any questions. Better than waking them up for nothing. And anyway, she’s, like, bad. With the dark. And uneven ground. Bad hip, or something. Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but will you help a guy out?”

“It’s because of the ghost thing, isn’t it?”

“What?”

Yarrow nodded sagely. “Definitely the ghost thing. Alright, alright fine, out of the goodness of my heart I’ll help.” They stepped forward, crowding into the desk clerk’s space in a way that forced him back a step. “Lead the way.”

“Right. Um. You… don’t you want to put on some shoes? At least?”

Yarrow blinked and glanced down at their bare feet. “Oh, right. Good point.”

—

Behind the motel was something of a picnic space and outdoor grill area. What this really meant was there was a large square of old concrete, cracked and plagued by persistent weeds. There were a collection of old wooden picnic tables, scarred by weather and vandalizing hands peppered around, and in the centre was a sunken fire pit that never saw use anymore—fire bans had become all too common in the passed decade. By each picnic table were small iron boxes mounted on poles to allow guests the option of a nice barbecue if they felt so inclined.

At one point it might have been a lovely spot, with garden lights strung along the high fences, and the occasional pot of brightly coloured flowers to liven it up. However, the fence sagged in one corner, and the party lights were all gone. What remained of the flower pots were heaps of scattered cigarette butts that joined the rest of refuse littering the area.

In the heavy rain and the dark of night, little of this was clear. What could be seen was only odd, incomprehensible shapes lit by the brief flickers of the two phones. It created a disorienting snapshot of the area behind the motel, and beyond that there was nothing but a pitch black so deep it might as well have been a wall of tar.

It was towards this that the young man lead them, affixing a tool belt to his waist as he went. They didn’t need to go too far, he assured. The generator was kept in the shed just on the other side of the small picnic area.

There was a bit of an awkward scramble down over a small ditch where the public grounds of the motel fell away into rough property that squeezed in under the encroaching edges of the forest. Yarrow’s feet nearly slipped out from under them on the muddy, spruce needle strewn path but the desk clerk remained sure footed, like he was used to the terrain. He caught them by the arm easily, his grip iron tight in a way that would likely bruise.

“Ouch! Damn! Thanks, but you’re gonna break my arm!” Yarrow chuckled breathlessly, heart hammering from the surge of adrenaline, and twisted slightly, trying to get free.

For a moment it almost felt like his grip tightened, but then the desk clerk let go and lurched back several steps. “Right. Sorry. Careful.”

The two strangers trudged on in the rain silently for a moment, the lights of their phones bouncing off of the thick, low-slung branches of the spruce trees, and the undergrowth threatening to swallow the little trail they were on.

Yarrow shivered. “Hoo boy. Maybe it’s because the rain is making it extra gloomy, but this place sure is creepy, huh? Puts a chill in your bones.” They paused to angle the light of their phone under their chin in a way they knew would distort their features and waggled their eyebrows dramatically.

“Right,” the desk clerk answered, wiping rain out of their eyes, and squinting into the darkness over Yarrow’s shoulder. He paused and glance backwards, towards the motel, which was nothing but a hulking silhouette. “Think they could hear us?” He murmured quietly enough that Yarrow nearly couldn’t catch it.

“What, scream?”

“No! Well yes. In case something happens.”

Yarrow squinted hard at him through the downpour. “You realize that you sound so sketchy right now, yeah?”

The desk clerk shrugged, his shoulders hunching high up around his neck. “You were the one who kept bringing up ghosts. Can you blame me?”

Well, that was a reasonably fair point, Yarrow decided. And if there was one thing they knew about this new found acquaintance, it was that he seemed like quite the jumpy fellow. And he was weird, but Yarrow tried not to hold that against people.

Before they could be accosted by any ghost summoned with the power of their words, the glint of the shed came into view, the light flashing against its metallic hide.

“Here we are,” the young man mumbled. “Door’s to the side,” he added as he pocketed his phone and began to fumble through his tool bag, stepping aside to allow Yarrow ahead first.

Yarrow ambled forward around the side of the shed. Their light clipped over a sign warning intruders that the inside was forbidden, vandalism was forbidden, smoking was forbidden, and caution was recommended, before it landed on the heavy padlock keeping the door sealed to outsiders.

Behind them, the desk clerk released a shaky sigh.

“What?” Yarrow asked, turning, “don’t tell me that you forgot the keys—“

And that was when the hammer cracked into the side of their skull.

(To Be Continued in Chapter Two)

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