– 3 –

They are taken too far out of you. They’re too distant now. All the things you could have done. There’s only where you are now. With the world closing in. Hunting you, and you become wraith, phantom, a mere notion and a smudge of night.

The next week, you visit the soup kitchen in town. But now it feels odd, like you don’t belong. Vision green-tinged for a time. A film you blame on the rain, and what might live in the rain. But you can’t be sure. Too many strangers. Too many factory workers who stare around them as if looking for something. You distrusted them already, for what they did. But now you distrust them for who they might be.

No one lives in the tunnel now except you. Where did they go? Where could they go? But you couldn’t follow, despite the danger. You couldn’t because of the salamander. Even with the pale men and the dark bird searching. The pale men have grown in number and then receded, as the dark bird kills them. Does it kill them because they failed or because they are sick?

You found the drone crumpled, spilling blood from a jagged gash, antennae still twitching. Nothing you could do for it, not even to risk killing it to kill its pain. Splayed out in a forest clearing like bait. No more drones will come, and that frightens you as once the drone frightened you. It means whatever the invasion is … it’s winning.

You hide the journal in a different place every day. Every night. Sneak glances at its pages as if it might give up its mysteries. But more that it might help you know what to do.

A dark, reptilian bird smudged like ash on one page. Dark and twisted. Hard to read. Sketches and a smattering of words you understand. A fable. Of a cruel father. Of a boy whose sanctuary had been turned into a hell.

A word you think is English, Nocturnalia, sketches that look like a reverie become dangerous. Creatures losing their minds. Swiggles and arrows like particles carried through the air. Nerve gas? Pollutant? But intentional. Some miasma in the air that makes creatures behave odd. Invisible. Or maybe you’re wrong and it describes something else.

No help at all.

You spend more time in a hidden hollow in the forest. Surrounded by the moss and lichen and pine straw. The soft cool spring of loam beneath your body. The forest mind running through the forest floor. Suppressing your cough. Staring up at the canopy, the woodpeckers and jays and warblers that stitch their way between. Waiting for the sound of the pale men. Waiting for the sound of the dark bird. Death seems like a dream, a puzzle you cannot solve. What will death be like in this maze?

Then the salamander creeps close and looks down into your hollow. Makes a low burbling sound. Turns to look back over its shoulder. Burbles again, facing you.