Subject Arthur Remains Unaware

CW: Violence, blood, gore

The moss on the river stones is too bright today. It’s an obnoxious green that makes the whole valley look flat. I focus on it because my hands won't stop shaking. The state forestry service doesn't pay people to have nerves. They pay for population maps, soil core depths, and logic. Unarguable facts. Numbers that don't lie. Which is why I'm trying to find a logical explanation for what I found in the briars this afternoon.

It’s roughly the size of a young doe, but the ribcage has been scraped entirely hollow. It’s too clean. Surgical. No teeth marks on the bone. No signs of a struggle in the mud. No trampled brush. My brain insists I’m looking at a pristine, stark white cage of ribs, but the smell doesn't match the sight. The smell is sweet and heavy, like freshly spilled blood that makes the back of my throat itch.

I reach to grab the pen in my shirt pocket, to log my findings in my journal, but my right-hand cramps violently. It’s a chronic nerve thing I’ve dealt with for years—if I grip a pen for more than five minutes, my fingers lock into a stiff, useless claw.

Usually, Ellie writes the field notes. She has a loose, effortless handwriting, but when she wants to, she can copy my stiff block lettering so perfectly you can’t tell where my ledger ends, and her pages begin, the same way she used to forge our father's signature on report cards.

The woods have quiet. Not a gradual silence, but a sudden, violent drop in sound, as if someone has cut the audio. The rustle of the dry oak leaves has stopped. It’s a silence that vibrates through the soles of my boots and turns my shins cold.

"Arthur." Ellie’s voice is behind me.

I spin around to see her leaning against an old sycamore. She’s wearing that heavy wool winter coat of hers—the dark gray one with the large horn buttons. I haven't seen that coat since the night she packed a suitcase, screamed that she was taking the first flight to Seattle, and slammed the door. Yet here she is, standing on a ridge in the middle of nowhere, her cheeks bright red like she’s been out in the frost.

"You left the gate unlatched," she says. She doesn't look at me. She just stares at the dirt on her boots.

"Ellie? What are you doing out here? You're supposed to be across the country." I try to keep my voice down, so I won't trigger one of her episodes. "How did you even find my camp?”

The fog is coming up from the gorge. It's getting freezing. Her fingers twist one of the horn buttons on her coat—click, thud, click, thud—and the rhythm is so loud I feel it bouncing inside my chest, against my ribs. "The gate is unlatched,” she repeats. “The gate under the roots that keeps the dark from spilling into the grass."

I look past her, down at the creek where the water is as flat as glass, reflecting the gray sky. When I see my own reflection in the deep pool, I’m not standing on the bank. I am sitting on a rotten log. My throat is slashed open from ear to ear. My eyes are cloudy and wide. Standing behind my reflection is a man in a sharp, charcoal-gray suit. His eyes are black. His long, bloodless fingers rest on my shoulders.

I close my eyes. I count to ten, waiting for the gray spots behind my eyelids to dissolve. When you spend weeks alone in the backcountry, the isolation tricks the eyes; the mind fills the quiet with whatever it's running from.

When I open my eyes, the creek is gone. The sycamore tree is gone. The sun has vanished, replaced by a pitch-black, freezing mountain night. I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor of my nylon tent. My field notebook is open on my knees, and I’m gripping my pen so hard my knuckles are white and aching. My hand is hovering over a page covered in frantic, messy handwriting.

I don't remember hiking back to camp. I don't remember pitching the tent or turning on the lantern that throws long, jerky shadows against yellow fabric walls. My boots are caked in fresh river mud, but my socks are bone-dry.

I force myself to look down at the paper. The words make no sense. The taxonomy of the shadow is complete, it says, over and over, until the ink smears into a solid black stain. But at the very bottom, under the mess, there is a single line written in a neat, trembling print: Subject Arthur remains unaware of the dissection.

I can’t catch my breath. The air inside the tent is sticky and hot, smelling of that same suffocating fresh-blood smell from the briars. I reach to turn off the lantern, but my knuckles hit something hard on the floor pad. A pile of horn buttons. Four of them, ripped off a heavy wool coat. They are still warm, and when I pick one up, my fingers come away sticky with a dark, wet film.

A scratching sound begins outside my tent. It’s soft and it scrapes, like a fingernail dragging slowly against the nylon. I know Ellie never made it to Seattle, because her text message, the message I left before I packed my truck for this valley, still sits unread on my phone screen.

The scraping noise is moving again. It’s circling the tent in a zigzag. The forest outside goes on for miles. It's completely black out there. I hear whatever is standing on the other side of the fabric slowing down its steps, timing them to match the rise and fall of my chest.

The tent zipper just slid open about an inch. Nobody has reached through yet, but that ugly green moss outside the flap is starting to pulse in the dark.

I reach to grab the zipper and lock it, but my arm won't cooperate. My fingers won't move. I sit here and watch a long, pale hand reach out from behind my own shoulder, mimicking my movement in slow motion. The skin is thin and translucent. Its fingernails are split and caked with river mud.

The zipper pulls down from the outside. The dark doesn't come in; instead, the walls of the tent dissolve outward, and suddenly I’m back on the rotten log by the deep pool of the river. It’s afternoon. The sun is high and blinding.

My neck feels as if a sharp winter wind is blowing through an open door in my throat, but I focus because the grid needs to be finished today. Since my own hand is completely frozen, I will have a lot of journaling to do with my sister's fingers.