Speaker 1: I found out my father had died through a terse
legal email from a firm I didn't recognize, no condolences,
just the subject line that read notice of deceased estate
transfer Urgent response required. Attached were two PDFs, one listing
my name as contact details and next of kin, and
another outlining the property I was set to inherit, a
single address in rural Kentucky, a parcel of land just
shy of sixty acres and a two story house that
had been last appraised in the early two thousands. Beneath
that was a line I re read three times before
I fully registered workshop restricted access outbuilding number one, contents
presumed hazardous Consalt County Code forty three B. I hadn't
spoken to my father in nearly twenty years. We hadn't
fought exactly, just drifted gradually and inevitably, until the silence
between us became the only thing either of us seemed
willing to maintain. Even when my mother died, he hadn't called.
The funeral passed without a word from him, and I'd
learned long ago not to expect anything more. He had
his work, and whatever that work became over time, it
had consumed him. The drive into the hills brought it
all back, that thick, dark stretch of Kentucky forest. The
way the road narrowed the further you got from anything
with a proper ZIP code. The GPS cut out an
hour before I reached the property line. By then, the
trees had thickened into walls on either side of the
gravel road, and the shadows between that was so dense
it looked more like dusk than early afternoon. I slowed
the car almost unconsciously, listening to the crunch of tires
on stone, aware that I hadn't seen another vehicle for miles.
The house stood at the edge of the clearing, tucked
into the tree line, as if it now not to
intrude too far. It looked the way I remembered it,
tall and tired, with flaking white paint and a porch
that sagged in the middle. Ivy had begun its slow,
deliberate crawl at one side, wrapping the windows with curling vines.
A faded private property sign hung crookedly from a nail
by the door, the lettering half obscured by dirt and
weather stains. Inside, the air smelled of dust, The furniture
was all intact, though covered in white sheets, the way
the old houses tend to be in movies and not
so often in real life. His taxidermy tools were still
hanging in the hallway, lined up with almost surgical precision,
bone saws, fine wire, curved needles, all clean, all in
their place. The fireplace was filled with ash that looked recent,
and a mug still sat by the chair in the study,
ringed with a brown residue of long evaporated coffee. I
didn't go into the workshop right away after the warning
in the letter. I was apprehensive of what I'd find. Still,
I walked out to the building, stared at the door,
tested the handle, and found it locked. A heavy chain
had been run through the bolted latch, the keyhole rusted
but not broken. A single weather tag hung from the handle,
tied in place with red thread, written in a deady hand,
the words a simple keep it shut. It didn't surprise me.
My father had always treated that space as sacred. When
I was thirteen, he let me watch him mount of fox, hand,
steady voice, quiet like a priest and a shrine. I
remember the way he stitched the skin back together, humming
low under his breath, When I asked why he spent
so much time making dead things look alive again, he said,
without looking up, preserving something is the only way to
save it from the mountain. At the time, I thought
it was a metaphor, a poeticism from a man who
saw art in dead things. But there was no mistaking
the gravity in his voice when he said it, nor
the way he stared at the wall afterward, as if
he were listening for something behind it. The town was
a twenty minute drive along winding roads, tucked low between
the hills. A gas station, a grocery store, a diner,
not much else. When I walked into the grocery store,
the woman in the counter looked up, did a double take,
and then went completely still. Her expression smoothed out into politeness,
but it wasn't the kind born of courtesy. I felt,
practiced hesitant. You're Elijah's boy, she said after a moment.
Though I hadn't given her a name. I nodded, unsure
of the tone in a voice. She gave a faint smile,
glanced toward the rear of the store, then quickly added,
let me know if you need anything. As I walked
the aisles, I caught another customer pausing near the produce,
eyes tracking me without subtlety, I noticed the man outside
the window cross himself once before quickly turning away. It
was a quiet reaction, almost instinctive, but it lingered in
my head the rest of the day. I didn't think
much of it. I assumed it was the kind of
tight knit community awkwardness small towns specialized in. Outsiders were
always observed, sometimes resented. I'd forgotten how strange it felt
to be somewhere everyone remembered your last name. But it
wasn't hostility, I felt in those glances. It was something else,
something closer to wariness or maybe reverence. And behind it
all I could sense a strange question in how they
watched me and didn't speak of my father at all.
The house creaked with age every time I stepped across
the warped floorboards. Though it had been built to last,
it hadn't been lived improperly for years, and the weight
of silence pressed against the walls harder than any storm
ever could. There were signs that my father had lived
here until the very end, an old kettle still resting
on the stove, slippers placed neatly beside his worn recliner,
but there was no warmth left in the rooms, just residue.
The mounts were the first thing that started to unsettle me.
He'd always surrounded himself with his work, and the living
room was no exception. Head stared out from the walls,
a red fox with matted fur, a hawk frozen in
mid screech, A dozen squirrels with arched backs and glassy
frozen tension in their limbs. A bobcat pose on the mantle,
one poor extended mouth drawn back in a snarl, but
the expression didn't read as predatory. It looked surprised, almost embarrassed.
Each of the eyes had the same strange quality I
remembered from when I was young, too reflective and focused,
as if the gaze followed even when you turned your back.
Some of the animals weren't posed for realism at all.
Her possum on the corner shelf was sitting upright in
a child's chair, dressed in a doll's clothing, paws folded
in its lap. A raccoon and the bookshelf had spectacles
resting on its snout, and a tiny copy of Walden
glued into its paws. My father had often done this
kind of thing, treated his taxidermy as preservation and storytelling.
Used to joke that animals deserve to be remembered not
for how they died, but for who they could have been.
I hadn't laff the last time he said it. I
wasn't sure if it was meant to be comforting or
a warning. I didn't find the key until that evening,
when I was thumbing through the shelves in his study.
Most of the books were what you'd expect, anatomy manuals,
wildlife field guides, a few volumes on mortuary science. But
which between two copies of a leather bound Family Bible
was a much older edition, heavy and dry with age.
I instinctively opened it and found a hollow carved out
in the middle. Nestled inside was a single iron key,
wrapped in cloth. On the opposite page, the entire section
of Leviticus had been torn out, not cut, not carefully removed,
ripped by hand, as if in anger or urgency. Outside,
the grass was knee high, wild and overgrown, thick with
seed heads. Beyond the rusting garden gate stood the workshop.
It was taller than I remembered, with a pitched roof
and windowless walls wrapped in thick ivy. Every nail, every
board seemed carefully placed. It had the look of something
that had been built slowly, with enormous patience, and no
intention of ever being abandoned. The lock on the door
was old brass, darkened from years of weather. I had
already found the chain earlier, looped tight and secured with
a keyed padlock. My father had always guarded his workspace,
but now it felt more like a warning than a barrier.
I didn't wait until morning. The key fit the padlock perfectly,
and the chain fell away. The door opened easier, and
the others that felled the disrepair, revealing a darkness that
smelled of cedar wood dust and the faintest trace of
chemical sweetness. I reached for the light and found the
pole cord, which snapped down with a metallic click. Fluorescent
lights buzzed to life overhead, flickering once before settling. The
space was much larger than I remembered. The walls were
lined with shells of labeled jars and plastic storage tubs.
At the far end stood an industrial grade work bench
with a leather stool beside it tools arranged above with
obsessive precision. There were bones on the shelves, tiny skulls,
preserved eyes, threads, needles, bottles of tanning solution, wires, and
foam molds. His entire world was kept in perfect order.
But what caught my attention was the covered form. It
was shrouded in beige drop cloths, still and absent, but
I could see the suggestion of limbs beneath the fabric,
arms folded across chest, legs slightly bent, the outlines of
heads that seemed too round, too soft. I pulled the
cover off. Beneath it was a figure human, shaped about
the size of an adolescent child, though thinner, with elongated
limbs and a narrowed waist. The skin was stitched tight
over the form, pale and patchworked, with subtle shifts in
color and texture that told me it had not come
from one source. The hands were too small, the feet
are too broad. But what freaked me out was what
it looked to be made of. Animal parts were cobbled
together to make the amount clamation of shapes. The torso
was seamless, but the shoulders looked animal, slightly hunched, ridged
beneath the surface The face was calm, serene, even eyes open,
mouth parted just enough to suggest breath. It was an abomination,
a sick imitation of human life. The eyes were glass,
of course, they weren't the mass produced kind you ordered
from a taxidermy supplier. They looked custom too real. I
couldn't explain it beyond a gut reaction. I'd seen hundreds
of mounted animals in my life, and I even helped
preserve a few, but this was something else. I stared
at it longer than I meant to, trying to make
sense of the proportions, the materials, the reason. It had
to be some artistic experiment, a commission, maybe something for
a gallery or a private collector with odd tastes. My
father had always flirted with art as much as science. Still,
I dropped the cloth back over the figure before leaving
the workshop, and when I turned off the light, I
could have sworn it had shifted slightly in the dark.
I found her at the bar on the edge of town,
the one with a rusted juke box and a pool
table that hadn't seen a straight cue in twenty years.
It was early afternoon and the place was empty except
for a few old men nursing long warmed beer and
the woman behind the counter. She looked up when I
walked in, eyes narrowing briefly before recognition softened her expression.
You are Elijaus boy, she said, wiping her hand on
a towel. I didn't think he'd ever show. I wasn't
planning to, I replied, But here I am. She gestured
to a stool and poured me something amber without asking.
I took it. Her name was Ruth, I remembered her
now in pieces. She'd been older than me when we
were kids, maybe eight or nine years older, and had
worked in this bar. Even back then. She still wore
her dark hair tied up, and there was a silver
ring on her nose that looked recent. Her eyes held
a mixture of curiosity and caution. We talked about nothing
for a while, weather power outages and a storm that
had rolled through the valley a week before. She asked
about the house, and I told her it was just
as I remembered. We didn't talk about my father, not
at first. It hung bet tween us, though, thick and obvious. Eventually,
after a second cigarette and my third drink, i'd asked
the question I'd been holding in since I arrived. What
was my father really doing up there? She exhaled slowly,
eyes flicking to the window. A wind pushed the curtain
of dust across the empty parking lot. She didn't answer
at first. She just pulled out another cigarette and lit
it with a match that she struck against the bar's
metal edge. You ever hear about the missing children, she asked,
and shook my head. They don't talk about it anymore,
not officially, but people remember. She looked past me now,
her voice steady but low. Used to be. Every couple
of months a kid would vanish, no struggle, no noise,
just gone. Folk explained the woods, wild animals running away,
But they never found bodies, not one, just toys left
in the fields, shoes by the river banks. I listened,
feeling the chill settle into my spine. Town almost up
and left. But then your great grandfather showed up, she continued.
Stranger back then, didn't belong here, but he built the
house and set up a shop, started doing odd jobs
for the town, kept himself mostly. Then around the time
he finished that workshop of his, the disappearances stopped. What
does that have to do with me, I asked, though
the answer was starting to form. Your family's never really
been part of us, not in the normal way. But
when things got quiet, people let it be. No more
missing kids, no more mothers waking up to empty cribs,
and the ones who remembered just told their children and
their children's children to stay away from the ridge. I
frowned the ridge. Ruth stubbed out a cigarette and finally
looked at me. He never went up there as a kid,
did you, No, I said, slowly. My father wouldn't let me.
That much is true. I remember the day I had
asked about it. I was ten. It had been the
end of summer, the air sticky and still, and I
had wandered too far past the tree line behind the house.
When I got back, my father had been waiting, not
even angry in the usual way, but the way his
face had looked white, hollow, terrified that stuck with me
more than any punishment ever could. He grabbed my arm,
pulled me into the workshop and told me to never
go beyond the ridge again, not alone, not at dusk.
His voice had cracked when he said it. It can
smell grief, he whispered, like it was a fact of nature.
That's what it waits for. At the time, I thought
he was talking about a bear, or maybe something more metaphorical,
unlessening coping with loss, or how sadness leaves you vulnerable.
But now I wasn't so sure. Ruth poured another drink
and leaned on the bar. Your grandfather took over after
your great grandfather died, then your father after him. The
house isn't just a house. That workshop isn't just a studio.
They were preservers. That's what they were called, though not
out loud. You were either born into it or you weren't,
and your family always was preservers. Of what I asked,
She didn't answer at first, just shook her head. Whatever's
out there, she finally said, whatever your family was holding
at bay. I laughed, but it came out thin and strained.
You really believe that. I don't need to believe it,
she said. I just remember what happened the one time
there wasn't a preserver. Your father left for a year
after your mother passed. Do you remember that. I shook
my head, but asked her to continue. There were two
kids taken in that gap, and when your father returned,
reopened the workshop and started working again, they stopped. I
didn't know what to say to that, didn't know how
to process it. It sounded absurd, but then again, so
did the figure in the workshop, the child, the seams,
the glass eyes. People won't say it out loud, she continued,
but they're watching you because you're elijahs Son. I drained
the rest of my drink and sat in silence, the
taste lingering at my tongue. My gosh. By the third day,
I started making a checklist. There were utility companies that
call property records to the transfer, and a dozen minor
errands I hadn't anticipated. The sooner everything was handled, the
sooner I could get the house listed and gone. That
was the plan, No need to stay longer than necessary.
I returned to the town with a folder of documents
tugged under one arm and a list of questions in
my phone, hoping for a few straightforward conversations. What I
found instead was more of that quiet, sidelong energy I
couldn't quite pin down. It was in the way people
greeted me with soft smiles that didn't reach their eyes,
of the way conversations seemed to pause when I stepped
too close at the county Clerk's office. I asked about
transferring the property. The woman behind the desk was pleasant,
but vague. There's a few steps, she said, flipping through
the binder. Looked older than she was. You'll need to
file locally, probably have to wait on county sign off.
How long does that usually take? She blinked, depends on what.
She offered another smile and glanced toward the hallway behind her.
Lots of things, but we'll do our best to help,
don't you worry. It wasn't refusal, yet it didn't feel
like a straight answer either. The whole conversation felt padded
with something too soft to push through. At the utility office,
I tried to disconnect the water in electricity. The man
behind the glass told me the system was in a backlog.
When I pressed for details, he shrugged and said I
might be better off waiting a bit before I filed. The
grocery store was no better. The same worn from earlier
still remembered my name and still asked about the house again.
There was a cautious distance behind a tone. She offered
me a discount at the register I hadn't asked for.
The man behind me muttered something I didn't catch and
she gave him a quick glare. No one spoke after that.
I drove back to the house with the windows down,
trying to shake off the feeling. Maybe it was just
royal bureaucracy. Maybe small towns really were this aw good
around outsiders, and I had forgotten what he was like
to be watched for nothing more than showing up. Still,
the sense of being surrounded by people who were waiting
for something I hadn't agreed to kept crawling back in.
I didn't know what they expected. I wasn't staying. I
had a job, a life, a home far from here.
All I wanted was to get things in all and
move on. As I sat on the porch nursing a
warm beer that evening, a man pulled into the drive.
He stepped out of an old pick up, moved slowly
and deliberately, with a kind of confidence that comes from
being part of a place for too long to question it.
He introduced himself as Vernon Mott. Said he was part
of the local historical Society, though the way he said
it gave the impression that his title was more about
tradition than any real bureaucracy. His shirt was clean, tucked
into faded jeans, and he wore a black belt with
a silver buckle that had been worn smooth from decades
of use. He had the kind of face that looked
older than it probably was, all deep lines in Windburn.
We talked politely for a few minutes. He asked how
I was settling in, whether I needed anything. I told
him I appreciated the help, but what I really needed
was information, namely how to speed up the paperwork, how
to get the utilities handled. Why everyone seemed to stall
When I mentioned selling the place, his mouth twitched. Not
a smile, not quite more of a sigh escaped his lips.
I can't speak for everyone, he said. They mean, well,
it's just not easy. Not easy to what I asked,
Let go of the house, deal with outsiders. He looked
down at his boots, then back up at me. They're
not afraid of you, he said, they're afraid you won't stay.
I didn't answer, not right away. His words hit with
more weight than I expected. This wasn't suspicion. This was
something closer to resignation, the town bracing for something they
feared might happen again. I'm not planning to stay I admitted,
I never was, and I figured. He said, you've got
that look, saying one your father had when he left
the first time. I stared at him. I'm not judging,
he added, but I know what happens when the house
goes empty. I've seen it. He paused, then glanced toward
the tree line beyond the yard. His tone changed. I
won't ask you to believe anything, not yet, but I'll
ask you this. Come meet me at the ridge past
the tree line just after sunset. For what I asked.
He didn't answer right away, Just step back toward his
truck to understand, he said, finally, nothing more. Then he left,
no good bye, no pressure, just the sound of his
tires grinding down the gravel road until they disappeared into
the dark. The sun had already begun to dip when
I found Vernon waiting just beyond the split rail fence
at the edge of the property. As I approached, he
gave a silent, shallow nod and turned toward the woods.
I followed without a word. The only sound between us
the crunch of dried leaves under foot and the rasp
of wind filtering through the canopy. The trees thick and
quickly pressing in from both sides. Paths were marked out here.
Whatever trail we followed was made through memory alone, worn
by years of footfall, rather than signs or blazes. Brambles
reached toward us, snagging at our sleeves. A low fog
coiled near the roots, carrying the damp scent of moss
and iron. After fifteen minutes of walking in silence, Vernon
raised one hand to hold me. His voice was quiet
but heavy. From here on, you must not speak, don't
even breathe too loudly. If it hears us, it may
not understand. I nodded once, not trusting myself to ask
what he meant. We moved slower after that, picking our
way through the thickets of ferns and roots slick with decay.
The light dimmed rapidly. The woods grew still, no birds,
no insects, just the sound of my own breath and
the occasional crack of twigs under foot. Eventually the forest
opened into a clearing. It was not shaped naturally. The
trees along the edges had bowed inward, their branches reaching
toward each other overhead, like the ribs of a collapse.
Long and the center of the clearing sat something I
had no words for. At first I thought it was
part of the forest, a massive shape hunched low, covered
in layers of bark and moss. But then it shifted
and I saw the seams. The movement was slow, almost graceful,
and entirely wrong. It was enormous, crouched in the clearing,
like a thing too large for the world around it.
Its body was a patchwork of flesh and hide, stitched
together by time and instinct. Some parts moved with the
weight of muscle beneath skin, while others creaked, like dry
branches being bent too far. Its shape was loosely human
in structure, but walked by growth and time and some
fundamental misunderstanding of form. Its shoulders were broad, sloping downward
into arms that ended in elongated hands, each finger tipped
with a different claw or hoof. Tufts of hair sprouted
along its back. A jaw protruded from beneath one's shoulder,
mismatched and slack. But it was the way it held
the thing in its arms that froze me in place.
It was cradling something, a figure roughly the size of
a child, though lumpy and slumped in strange ways, as
if its limbs had softened or rotted inward. The skin
was pale and patchy, its arms wrapped tight around its
mid section. I could see stitches unraveling across its neck,
the head lolling at an angle that suggested it might
not be fully attached anymore. The creature stroked the figure gently,
its oversized fingers, adjusting an arm, tucking a loose flap
of skin back into place. It rocked the child slowly, rhythmically,
with the soft urgency of something that did not understand time,
but felt it slipping away. I could not move, could
not look away. The thing it held reminded me too
much of what I had found in the workshop, the
same glassy stillness, the same two long limbs and sagging expression.
But this one was older, broken down, handled too much.
It looked like it had been played with for far
too long. Vernon leaning close, barely breathing, and whispered into
the edge of my ear. We call it the parent.
It's its ear and plays with its child. And it's
almost done with that one. I turned my head slightly,
eyes still locked on the clearing. What happens when it finishes?
I mouthed, He didn't answer, but I saw his throat titan,
his jaw shift, the kind of lock people give when
they think of graves. Then the parent paused, his fingers
stopped moving. The head turned just a little, and though
its face was a tangle of parts I couldn't quite interpret,
I knew it was listening. One massive arm lifted, held
there mid air, suspended with uncanny stillness. Vernon did not move,
neither did I. Something passed between the trees behind us,
a breeze or a shadow, I could not say, But
the parent shifted again, returning his attention to the thing
in its arms. He resumed its motion, rocking once more.
Vernon tapped my wrist and began to back away, one
step at a time. I mirrored him, keeping my eyes low,
careful not to snap a single twig. It took us
nearly twenty minutes to reach the edge of the woods again.
Only once we were back in the open air of
the field did he speak. It doesn't find children anymore,
he said, his voice was rough, almost hoarse. Not when
it has one, not when the illusion holds. I didn't
say anything. But when the body breaks down, when the
seams go soft, or the smell fades, it starts the wonder,
and it doesn't know what it's looking for, only that
something is missing. We stood in silence, the stars beginning
to emerge overhead. I eventually found my words. Why why
don't you leave, Just get out of here, away from
that thing? I asked. Vernon looked at me bluntly. You
think we can just pick up our houses carry them
to the next valley over Yours is probably the first
new car people have seen in years. And besides that,
the parent hasn't been an issue for decades, not since
your great grandfather moved here, he answered. But that will
change soon. The things your father made were built to last,
he said, humans don't. Once it starts, it won't stop.
I looked back toward the woods, the trees still and dark.
And you think that thing I found in the workshop
it was the last one your father made. He must
have known he was wearing down, That's why he was
working on another. I nodded, though I felt nothing in
that moment but the rising pulse of dread. It's waiting,
Vernon said, And if it finishes with that one before
another is ready, it will start to search again, same
as it always had He left me standing in the field,
saying nothing more. I watched him go, then looked back
at the tree line once more, wondering how much time
we had left. I lay in bed that night, staring
at the ceiling, long after the darkness had settled over
the house. The blankets were pulled tight around me, but
there was no warmth. My mind circled endlessly around what
I had seen in the clearing, The way the creature
had cradled with that broken thing in its arms, the
tenderness of its movements, the way its massive body had
tensed when it heard us. For parent, that was what
Vernon had called it, for the word didn't feel sufficient.
Parents are human, They protect, they nurture, They know when
to let go. This thing did none of those things.
It only held on. I turned unto my side and
tried to breathe deeply, but every breath caught to my throat.
My father had lived with that knowledge. He had known
what was out there and chose to stay. He made
those things with his own hands again and again to
keep the creature from wandering. He built them as decoys,
or offerings, or something stranger. I still didn't understand, and
now it had been months, maybe longer, since the last
one had begun to unravel. It would come again, that
much was clear, but not for me. I wasn't my father.
I hadn't asked for this, and I hadn't agreed to
carry it. I had come here to settle in the state,
not Inherit a burden that pressed against the edge of reason.
There was still time. I could sell the property, leave
the workshop locked, and peek on before it ever came
too close. I told myself this again and again until
it stopped sounding like cowardice. The next morning, I drove
back into town and made a show of visiting the
grocery store and post office. I stopped at the county
clerk's office with a fake smile and asked about the
remaining paperwork. I spoke carefully, hinting that I was still
thinking things over and might not leave right away after all.
The clerk, an older woman with tired eyes, nodded along
with me, but when I asked about the property transfer again,
she sighed and flipped through a ledger with exaggerated patience,
still waiting on a couple signatures. She said, you know
how it is, takes time, and nodded pretending not to
see the way she avoided me to my gaze. It
was a stall tactic, the same kind I had seen
in all the others. They weren't blocking me outright, they
were just hoping I'd changed my mind. Fine, I thought
I could play the same game. I pretended to explore
the idea of staying. I asked questions at the diner,
I chatted with Verner when I saw him outside the library.
I kept my tone neutral, polite, and even curious. I
wanted to believe I was fooling them, but part of
me suspected they saw through it. They had watched my
father play this role his whole life. They would know
the difference between someone preparing to stay and someone buying
time to run. Still, I gave myself a deadline three
more days. By then the form should be clear and
I could list the property officially. I would pack my things,
drop off the keys, and drive back to a life that,
while unremarkable, was blissfully mundane. Two mornings later, I heard shouting.
When I reached the town. It echoed from the road,
where a group had gathered near the general store. I
walked down, heart already sinking, and pushed through the loose
crowd of neighbors and passerbys. Vernon was there, standing beside
a woman I didn't recognize. She was trembling, holding a
child's shoe in both hands. Her face was hollow, blank.
Her lips moved, but no sound came out. Vernon rubbed
her shoulder, speaking gently, trying to steady her. The sheriff
stood near by, his expression unreadable. He held a radio
but didn't seem to be using it. The townsfolk watched
me as I approached. No one said my name, no
one called me over, but I could feel the weight
of their eyes. I looked down at the woman and
realized she was mouthing the same phrase repeatedly. He was
just in the yard. My stomach twisted. I didn't need
to ask what had happened. The absence was already there,
sharp and undeniable. A child was gone. My first instinct
was to turn away, to leave before someone tried to
explain it, but I didn't. I stepped closer. Vernon met
my gaze, and I saw something worse than judgment in
his eyes. I saw relief, thin and brittle but real.
They had expected this, maybe not this week, maybe not
this child. But the moment I arrived and did nothing,
they must have known it would come again. Later, the
search party formed and scattered into the woods. I sat
with the mother on the stor's porch. I brought her
a cup of water, but she didn't drink. She never
looked at me directly, but I heard a whisper to
no one in particular. They said it wouldn't come back.
They said he kept it away. I left her there,
the weight of her voice pressing into my chest with
each step. Back at the house, I sat in the kitchen,
staring at my hands. I could no longer pretend I
was just a visitor. I had been the one who
could do something and had chosen not to. I had
seen the unraveling child in that thing's arms. I had
known what it meant, and still I waited. I thought
I'd bought myself time. Instead, I had cost them a child.
I found Vernon sitting alone on the church steps that evening,
staring out across the empty road. He had a cigarette
between his fingers, burned halfway down, and he barely glanced
at me. When I approached that missing kid, my voice
was hoarse. I could have stopped it if I had
just done something. Vernon took a long trag from the
cigarette and exhaled through his nose. Your father stopped the
deaths for decades, he said, Not because he was chosen,
not because he was brave. He stopped them because he
knew how to make them strong, He knew how to
make them last. I didn't reply. There wasn't anything to say.
We both knew what had happened and what needed to
happen next. The sun was sinking behind the trees when
I returned to the house. The light was thin and golden,
cutting through the windows in long slats, thus drifted in
the air, turning slowly in place. I walked through the kitchen,
past the old recliner, and out the back door toward
the workshop. The key was still in my pocket. The
chain still lay coiled beside the threshold, untouched since the
day I had opened it. I stepped inside and closed
the door behind me. It was cooler in the workshop,
the air dense with a smell of cured leather, dried herbs,
and the faint chemical bite of old preservatives. The lights
flickered to life, humming softly overhead. The unfinished child lay
where I had left it still covered in a thin
sheet of muslin. I pulled the cloth back and studied
it in the harsh light. Most of the work had
already been done. The form was assembled, the skin stitched
into place, the limbs structured with wire and padding. But
the joints were too loose and the seams were still
raw at the edges. The eyes were unset, and the
face had not been shaped. It was a blank, waiting
for identity. I stared at it for a long time.
I remembered standing beside my father's work bench when I
was a boy, watching him pull thread through squirrel hide,
his hands steady, his concentration unbroken. He never tred the
process as grotesque. There was a reverence in every movement.
Care He would murmur instructions as he worked, whether to
me or to himself. I was never sure. Back then,
I thought he was just eccentric. Now I understood it
was more than that. It was a ritual. Precision was everything.
I found his old toolkit beneath the bench, bone needles, sinew,
thread and steel all. I rolled up my sleeves and began.
The work was slow, my hands were clumsy. I had
done some of this before, long ago, but never at
this scale, never with this weight behind it. I reinforced
the joints, first, binding them tight with wire and sealing
the sockets with resin. I packed the limbs with additional padding,
adjusting the balance of the form so that it could
hold still under pressure. The skin had begun to dry
at the edges, but was still pliable enough to seal.
I traced the seams with wax and pressed them flat.
For the eyes, I selected two from a velvet lined case,
deep brown with flecks of amber, and set them gently
into the sockets, adjusting the eyelids to meet the gaze.
The face was the hardest. I needed to create something
that could pass under the gaze of a thing that
did not fully understand what it was seeing. It didn't
matter about symmetry or expression. It was about suggestion, something
that would not be questioned. I shaped the features with
careful hands, smoothing the lips, hollowing the cheeks, and curling
the mouth's edge into a faint, unreadable smile. By the
time I finished, my back ate and my fingers were stiff.
I stepped away from the table, wiped my hands on
a cloth, and looked down at what I had made.
It was no longer unfinished, But it wasn't alive, not
in the way things are meant to be alive. It
existed in that strange space between presence and absence, between
memory and mimicry. I did not know what to do next,
so I left it where it lay. That night, I
did not sleep easily. I lay in bed, every creak
of the old house stirring my nerves. At one point
I heard something shift outside, a series of wooden groans,
as though the deck boards were being tested by careful weight.
Then the workshop door opened, followed by a soft scuttling
in the grass. I heard it clearly, the latch clicking,
hinges straining. I held my breath, straining to hear more.
But the night had fallen still again. I did not rise,
I did not check. I stayed beneath the cover's eyes
fixed on the ceiling, heart hammering in my chest. Morning
brought no clarity, just quiet. I stepped outside the dew,
still clinging to the grass, and crossed the yard to
the workshop. The door was wide open. Inside, the light
was off. I pulled the chain and let the glows
settle over the room. The child was gone. The muslin
stayed folded neatly beside the workbench. The tools were untouched.
There were no signs of struggle, no mess, no trace
of violence, only a single trail of footprints, small and
spaced evenly, leading out through the open door. I checked
the lock. It was unbroken. The mechanism was still functional.
Whatever had taken the child had not forced its way in.
The door had been opened from the inside. I didn't
tell anyone what had happened that night, not about the sounds,
not about the workshop door, not about the empty table
or the footprints leading away into the grass. I thought
about speaking to Vernon, maybe asking what it meant, but
every time I opened my mouth, the words caught somewhere
deep in my chest. It turned out I didn't need
to say anything. The town knew, not all at once,
not with celebration or parade, but in quiet acknowledgments that
began to collect round me. When I walked into the
grocery store, the woman at the counter smiled with real warmth.
She asked how I was settling in, then handed me
a small basket of preserves and dried herbs without wringing
them up for the house. She said, helps with the
damp and the diner. A man I'd never spoken to
offered to come by and fix the port trailing. Another
brought roofing nails and climbed up without asking, patching the
shingles where the leaks had started to form. A basket
of eggs appeared on my front step. A quart of
firewood was stacked by the fence. My cupboards filled faster
than I could empty them. No one said anything about payment,
No one hinted at obligation. They simply helped. When I
walked through the town, people met my eyes, some nodded,
some smiled, but none of them looked through me any more.
I was no longer a stranger. I was something else.
One afternoon, I sat with Vernon outside the hardware store,
watching the cars drift past on the road. He handed
me a bottle of something cold and home brewed, and
leaned back against the bench with a sigh. Your father
never needed to ask for help, he said. We always
made sure he had what he needed. The same goes
for you. I nodded and sure of what to say.
That night, two men I barely knew came to my
house carrying a canvas sack. Inside were animal parts, not
whole specimens, but selections. A deer's leg, a fox's tail,
the turtle's broken shell, still slick with sweat. One man
tipped his hat and said, more where that came from?
You just tell us what to find. I stood there,
the sack in my hands, the faint smell of blood
and fur rising to meet me. Something shifted in my chest,
not fear, something closer to acceptance. Back in the city,
I had worked in an office without windows. H had
a nameplate on a desk and a phone that never rang.
No one invited me out after hours. I ate lunch alone.
On birthdays. The same email would go around, a template
sent by a secretary who never made eye contact. Here,
I woke to fresh bread and stew left on my porch. Here,
people knocked my door to see how I was doing. Here,
I mattered. I found myself thinking less about leaving. The
workshop had become a place I entered without hesitation. I
cleaned the tools, labeled the drawers. I unpacked the sack
on the worktable, sorting the parts by size and condition.
Someone near cleaning others could be used immediately. The fox's
tail was in excellent shape, and the fur was still
glossy under the right light. The deer's leg would need reinforcement.
I made a note of it in the margins of
my father's old supply ledger. I sat alone in the workshop,
lit by a single bulb, surrounded by the tool and
materials of a life I had never chosen, and yet
somehow felt drawn to. There was a strange piece in it,
the rhythm of preparation, the quiet of acceptance. I was
becoming someone here, not because I wanted to be, not
because I had been called, but because the town had
already decided that I was. My skills were not up
to par. There was so much I needed to learn. Luckily,
there were a plethora of journals in the workshop, stacked
neatly at the back. The journals were written in a looping,
meticulous hand, most abounding crack leather or worn cloth. The
page is brittle at the corners, filled with diagrams and
cross sections drawn in pencil. My father's handwriting threaded through them,
sometimes formal and scientific, other times disjointed, as though written
during a moment of sudden realization or emotional strain. Some
other books were older than he was. The ink had
faded into sepia, and the pages smelled of mildew and camphor.
I found dates scrolled in margins that reached back nearly
a century. There were records, instructions passed down, not from teachers,
but from fathers and grandfathers, a private language of stitching,
sealing and arranging, notes and what worked and what failed.
One entry read too stiff, no warmth, refused it. Another
legs proportioned poorly. Wondering began within two nights. Some were
practical notes on joint placement, stitch integrity, preservatives, and the
shelf life lives. Others were less so, reflections on the process, theories,
speculation on what made the parent respond to one figure
and not another. He had written about failure too, of
a child that fell apart too quickly, of how the
parent had grown confused, then angry, tearing through the woods
until it could be coaxed back with something new. The
message was clear. It needed consistency, stability, familiarity, something he
could return to over and over without doubt. I began
to understand the weight of the task and the responsibility
of presence. It was not the figure alone that mattered,
It was the care behind it, the belief that someone
was still watching, still tending, still willing. I read them
every night, se at the workbench with a mug of
black coffee and a blanket pulled over my shoulders. I
studied the diagrams, copied the methods into a fresh note book,
and sketched what I could from memory. I practiced on
scraps of fur and left over skulls, testing placement, balance,
and posture. The details I could handle. The stitching was slow,
but improving. I had already sealed one mock up figure
and placed it on the side table for observation. It
lasted a week before it sagged inward and began to
split around the joints. It wasn't enough. Each guide, whether
written by my father or one of the ancestors before him,
began the same way, before the diagrams, before the measurements,
A heading written in careful script across the top of
the page, sauce body. That was where it all started.
No further explanation, just a silhouette sketched in rough pencil,
and a list of qualities stability, freshness, youth, familiarity. I
didn't understand. I'd assumed the base was a form wood
resin and mannequin shaped and padded to resemble a child's body.
But none of the materials matched the density or movement
I had seen in the finished figures. Even the best
taxidermy foam couldn't mimic the softness or subtle give I
remembered from the one the parent had been holding. I
flipped through book after book looking for clearer guidance. Finally
I found it in a tattered volume tucked into the
back of the shelf. The passage was short, between a
supply list and a stitch drawing of a child's hand.
It was nearly buried beneath the notes in margins, but
the sentence was underlined three times, and the pressure of
the pen had nearly torn through the page. No taxidermy
child will last unless it's rooted in truth. Memory alone
is not enough. It must have been real. I read
it again, then a third time. It must have been real.
The words echoed in my chest with a sickening clarity.
The base was not an object. It was not foam,
wire or wood. It was a body, a real one,
a child. The reverence made sense now. The strange silence
that fell over the town when I arrived. No one
ever spoke directly about what my father had done, only
what it had prevented. It explained the grief, the acceptance,
and the carefully managed rituals, the cost of one soul
to save many. The materials the townspeople brought me those
were supplementary finishing touches. The actual child had to come
from somewhere, someone real, someone once whole. I started from
the bench, the journal still open in front of me.
My hands felt cold. My father had not hunted them,
he not stolen them from how revered he was. That
much was clear. But the cost had always been paid.
But how the careful inkstrokes mapping out show old alignment
hip angle's eye placement. Then came the knock. It was quiet,
just three short taps against the wood of the workshop door.
I hesitated. The hour was late. No one came to
the house at this time, not without reason. I stepped
at the door and unlocked it. The old handle cooled
beneath my fingers. Outside stood Vernon. I've brought the volunteer,
he stated casually. Beside him, a boy of maybe ten
or eleven. He wore her wool sweater too large for
his frame, and boots caked in dry mud. His hair
was dark, and his eyes were steady. What shocked me
was that he didn't try. Tremble didn't cry. There was
no way. He didn't know what he was here for.
Yet he showed no signs of hesitation. His hand was
in Vernon's, but he let go. As I opened the door.
I looked down at him, looking for fear, for confusion,
the implication of all this was deafening, but there was none.
He only stood there, breathing softly, a slight crease between
his brows, the kind of look you see in someone
waiting to be given a task. He knew what he
was here for. He was ready. But was I do