Framed by tangled forest and a rusted dead car sunk in the dirt, vines erupting from the carriage, and, beyond, the plumes from smokestacks of the factory. Smoke that curls into the sky above the tree line is not half so white as this man. His clothes glint or sheen or move. Catch what dappled light comes through the branches. He stands still, but not still, face so gaunt you can read it from afar. An intent that reads like search or journey.

He’s not real to you. He’s like a hallucination or a thought you had that’s still inside your mind. Still far away. Until another like him appears beside him. Then he’s real. Then, amplified, he frightens you.

You’re hunched low and slunk. In the cool hollow of a berm overgrown with ferns. Wrens scold in the underbrush. Nothing else much moves or even seems to breathe. The two men are indistinct, wavering, through the bushes, as if they could move without moving. Or like you remain still but they’re disappearing and reappearing again, in not quite the same place. Yet: the same place.

A sentinel quality, curled a bit like ferns as they survey the ground. Sense of a search. But they’re not looking for you. Except they are. Because you have the journal. Because you’ve seen the salamander. They just don’t know who you are yet. Or who you might become.

When the third appears, bone-stark against forest greens, the pale man becomes unreal again. Suspended in the sunshine, in the glittering dust of his own stillness.

This third, the way he holds himself, the flicker of light on his eyes. You recognize pain when you see it, once you’ve plunged past the strangeness. They are sick, in pain. Reluctant, for that reason. But still they search, as if someone makes them search.

A smell of foul burning needles your nostrils, and you think they must be burning in the sun, melting, the mist or spray that reaches them. But then you realize it is just a new smell from the factory. The smell gains a weight and misdirection, like rusted iron soaked in honeysuckle. Devolves into a disgusting swill of hot asphalt and raw liver. With an aftertaste that is pungent. Makes it hard to tell the poison from the pain.

When the three pale men are roving distant again, you head back to the tunnel.