The soil gave up its final, gruesome secret with reluctance. Laura pulled so hard that she wasn't prepared for the sudden release, and toppled over backwards. Behind her, X groaned, but she had no mind for him, only for what came out of the earth, which, after regaining her balance, she seized in her hands, and held up reverently before her, like a priest with a chalice, only this was not the body of Christ, not the blood of the redeemer, only her friend, her Bobby, the place where his mind and his smile had once lived, where lips had been that had once kissed her, where…

She froze, staring at the thing in her hands, eyes wide with incomprehension. She saw an elongated jawbone, pointed snout, eye sockets that were in the wrong place, thick, flat, grinding teeth that jutted out from a profound under bite.

Horns.

No, not horns. Short, stubby antlers.

And then, it dawned upon her.

This was not Bobby.

This was another cruel trick.

And behind her, with a slow and rising glee, came a sound.

Laughter.

30.

Afterwards, she would tell the Police that she didn’t know the gun was loaded, which was the truth. She would also tell them that the man she killed had attacked her first, which wasn’t. Her statement was long, and given in several stages. Her leg had indeed become infected in the forest, and she had a prolonged hospital stay- first while they treated her body, and then while they treated her mind, which did the best it could to stay strong, but eventually, collapsed in on itself. Laura spent many days in an induced fog, painkillers and tranquilisers and mood stabilisers gradually erasing the details of her crime, but later she would find out that she had become the thing she feared the most: a murderer. X was dead, and by her hand. She was, after all that had happened, no better than he.

His real name was Stanley, Stanley Aston. He was a known sex-offender, and his name was featured on an awful lot of lists. It soon featured on an awful lot of television screens and newspapers, too, alongside a dated mugshot. Stanley, it seemed, had kept a lot of secrets with him out in the woods. And now, those secrets were unearthed, thanks to Laura.

The Police used Laura’s map and letters to find Stanley’s camp, and there they discovered his body, right where she had left it: splayed out on a discarded couch, a single bullet hole in his head, brain matter baked onto the faux leather beneath his skull, teeth and nose broken from her earlier, violent assault.

They found the animal remains that had been buried at the base of the tree, and forensic examination later confirmed that they belonged to a Reeves’s muntjac deer.

Then, they searched Stanley’s tent.

And found Bobby. Or, what was left of him, at least. His skull. Sitting on an old tapestry cushion balanced on top of a folding camp table, garlanded with a crown of ferns and moss. A large, worn, laminated photo of him was propped up behind. Candle stubs had congealed around its base in a large, molten mess.