The first time I saw it, we were rattling down a country road toward the town of Sycamore. Well, technically not the first, but the first time in years.

Steve and Terry were arguing in the back. After a token resistance, I’d retired to the passenger seat and surrendered the wheel to David. Four harbingers of science and logic hurtling after their next paycheck in a bone-white van.

As the leader, I claim dominance over the reins of our steed. Usually. The last few nights had been lacking in sleep. After nearly running into a tree a few miles back when my eyelids drooped, David had put his foot down.

Now I was stuck staring out the passenger side window, watching a dense forest in all its autumn colors slide by. My vision blurred as fatigue took its toll.

That’s when it happened.

Something appeared, keeping pace with spindly limbs too long in the back, too short in the front. To my eyes, it was little more than a grey blur with a bulbous head. It slid between the almost non-existent shoulder of the road, flailing in an off-kilter gait.

The vestiges of lucidity tried to make it into a man racing on all fours. The small, insane voice, born of the space in between waking and sleep, giggled. That’s not a man. They don’t really know what people are supposed to look like, but they try.

The not-a-man’s head turned.

I jerked upright with a shout.

David echoed me, yanking on the wheel as he jumped.

For a second, my heart stopped. The van skidded sideways on the loose gravel. My brain grappled with the idea of getting smeared on a tree as the utter wrongness of what I’d seen in the running man’s face faded like the afterimage of a camera flash.

My pulse hammered to life again. David wrestled the van back where it belonged, and the sleep-addled imprint melted away.

A string of curses came from all three of my team.

“Seriously, Michelle? Are you trying to get us killed today?” David said through gritted teeth.

My face grew hot. “Sorry. Bad dreams.”

“Don’t you have meds for that?” Terry asked from behind me. I could practically hear the sneer.

“No, Terry. My therapist and I both agreed to try without them for a couple of weeks. I haven’t had issues in a long time.”

“Except, apparently, when you’re not on your meds. I think all of us would appreciate not having heart attacks every time you have a scary dream.”

I didn’t grace her with a response. My therapist had assured me the first week would be rough, but so help me, I was going to push through. I’d just had my thirty-second birthday, for god’s sake. Time to learn how not to be afraid of imaginary things.

“You try the meditation track I sent you?”

Ah, Steve. The mom of the group. I’d certainly pushed his patience over the last few days, yet his temper remained unflappable.

I patted the phone in my jeans pocket. “Sure did. Helped me get to sleep. It’s just the after that’s still rough.”

“Hmm.” He went quiet, no doubt percolating a new plan to soothe his toddler of a teammate.

“It’s the after that’s rough for us, too,” Terry said.

I sighed and returned to watching the now running-man-free scenic view out my window.

*****

The outer edge of Sycamore had an odd sight of its own. Tents. A dozen in sight and probably more nestled further out in the forest. Each tent had at least one vehicle nearby, all haphazardly splayed out among the trees.

“Like pilgrims coming to a holy site,” David said with a shake of his head.

I scoffed. “More like flies to a corpse.”

“Or four,” Terry added with far more enthusiasm than necessary.

I shrugged. “Either way, looks like our timing is right.”

“Well, everyone knows supernaturals and extraterrestrials fear the light,” Steve said, before pointing over my shoulder. Two police trucks flanked the road to Sycamore. A pair of police officers stood beside each vehicle, the early morning sun glinting off of their guns. “The police, on the other hand, probably enjoy the easier targeting.”

“Fair. David, drive up slow. They look kind of on edge.”

We didn’t get much farther before four pistols pointed in our direction. David slammed on the brakes and threw his hands in the air.

“Hey, is that legal?” Terry said.

I snorted, exuding bravado to cover up the jump in my breathing as I reached for the door handle. “Will it matter when we’re full of holes?” Much to the dismay of my teammates, I slipped out of the van and pointed my own hands toward the sky. “Michelle Moore, from Fact Hunters. We had an appointment, I believe?”

I tried to keep my voice loud enough to cover the forty feet between us and the cops, but also level, a hard thing to do when you’re one trigger pull away from dead.

One cop lowered his gun and grinned. “Ms. Moore! Sorry, I didn’t recognize you at first! I really need to get new contacts.” He holstered his weapon and motioned for his buddies to do the same. “Relax, these guys are here to help.”

Their grimaces as they put their pistols away told me they weren’t so sure. If I wanted the job to go well, I needed to change that. I dropped my hands, squared my shoulders, plastered on my best professional smile, and marched up to them like I dealt with this kind of thing all the time. If I was honest, I did.

I pointed toward the tent city at their border. “Looks like you’ve got squatters. Happens a lot with unexplained cases, especially when they happen in clusters.”

A policewoman, who looked capable of chewing nails, glared at me. “Fantastic. If you’re here to help, I assume you’re going to get rid of them.”

“That’s exactly what I intend to do, Officer….”

She filled the space with more glaring.

I coughed. “Yes. As I was saying, I intend to do just that. My team and I are here to prove once and for all that nothing paranormal or extraterrestrial happened to your people.”

“Your team, the ones still in the van?”

I glanced back. Sure enough, no one had moved. I sighed. “Yes, them. They’re a little gun shy.”

Officer Nails frowned.

The wispy policeman next to her chuckled. “Apologies, Ms. Moore. We’ve had a lot of problems with our new guests. So obsessed with the supernatural, they’ve got no respect for the dead.”

“Or the living,” Nails growled.

The cop who had grinned at me stepped up, getting awfully close to my personal bubble. He was still grinning. “Don’t mind them, they don’t know what you’re capable of. I do, though.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m a huge fan, Ms. Moore. I’ve watched all of Fact Hunters at least a dozen times.”

My eyes widened. “A… dozen? Wow.”

After struggling in its first couple of years, our show had gained a number of dedicated watchers. Still, the idea of it having so avid a fan took me by surprise.

He puffed out his chest and stuck out his hand. “Officer Nichols, at your service.”

I shook his hand, giving him a conspiratorial look. “Am I to assume you’re the reason we’re here?”

“You assume correct. The Chief officially hired you, but I knew just who to call after the loonies showed up.”

“Hey, the Chief wants to talk to them.” The fourth cop, who had slipped away while I was preoccupied, waved from the out the window of a police truck.

“Oh, right! This way, ma’am.” Nichols’ grin warped, pulling the corners of his mouth up, up, up, crawling along his cheekbones as gums gave way to bone.

My breath caught, and it was gone. No bone, no overstretched mouth. Just a young cop with a giddy expression.

I let out a nervous giggle. A hallucination brought on by stress and lack of sleep, nothing more. Suddenly, I regretted not bringing my pills. “Uh, can I get the rest of my team, or am I the only one invited?”

Nichols blushed. “Oh, no, not just you. By all means… uh… bring your van, too. We’ll let it through. You’ll need all your stuff, anyway.”

“Yes, I will.”

I turned and walked off, forcing my legs to stay below a run as my professional facade threatened to drop. His twisted face stayed clear in my mind. I’d taken the last of my pills right before I got a call from Sycamore’s Chief of Police, and I’d refused a refill knowing I’d take them if given half the chance. If I’d known about this job beforehand, I’d have never stopped.

*****

After a painfully dull time spent going over what we were and were not allowed to do, as well as a brief burst of excitement as we convinced Terry that insulting the police Chief was a terrible idea, Officer Nichols led us to the first place of death.

It happened in a ranch house near the center of town. Its occupant, a single, moderately wealthy artist, had fled city life a few years prior.

Sycamore’s middle-of-nowhere aesthetic had ‘pulled her in like a magnet,’ or so Nichols told us.

Looking inside her home, I had to wonder when she lamented her decision.

The smell hit first, acrid and coppery, the air heavy with a dash of decay and salt. Remnants of her old life remained. Bright paintings on the wall, cherry-wood desks on top of lush, blue carpet. Then came the sights.

Used up candles of myriad colors littered nearly every inch of floor space. How the house hadn’t burned down, I couldn’t fathom. Circles of salt, now smudged into oblong messes, worked their way from the living room, down the hallway, and into the bathroom.

I paused at the threshold, a curtain of dread falling over me. Leave, the primal part of my brain demanded. Some things are better left alone.

I ignored it. It was hardly the first time I’d felt trepidation on a case.

“These cameras aren’t light, you know.”

David’s voice startled the hesitation out of me. I moved aside, muttering an apology.

Terry and Steve followed with more gear. Laptops, recorders, EMF gauges, microphones. To anyone who didn’t know us, they’d think we were more ghost hunters looking to capitalize on Sycamore’s misfortune. But sometimes you had to fight fire with fire.

I’d grown a career from taking all the tricks of paranormal investigators and turning them on their creators. Where they saw souls in pictures, I proved backscatter. Where they saw floating apparitions, I proved smoke and mirrors.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

My team was a streamlined machine. They scattered with little input from me, setting up equipment in obvious hotspots.

I turned to Officer Nichols, who stood nearby, gazing at me with puppy-dog eyes. “The victim, Ms. Campbell, passed away in the bathroom, correct?”

He’d filled us in on the way over, but I preferred hearing it at the scene itself.

“Yes. Lying, fully clothed, in the bathtub.” He frowned. “It looked like she’d taken a nap. Peaceful, hands at her sides. Had a horrible grin on her face, though.”

I tensed. “A grin?”

“A Cheshire Cat looking one. According to Theo, her jaw was clenched so tight, some of her teeth broke. He said it had to do with rigor mortis. Either way, it didn’t look right.”

“I see.” I relaxed a little. Muscle spasms after death did odd things to bodies. Completely normal. “Theo is Sycamore’s coroner?”

“Yes. He’s been here since I was a kid.”

Which meant at least fifteen years. Surely a man capable of invaluable insight. “I’ll have to make sure to speak with him tomorrow. For now, I’d like to check out that bathroom.”

“Oh, of course.” Nichols motioned for me to go first. “Don’t worry about the salt and stuff. We’ve catalogued what we need, and the loonies have already messed up a lot, anyway.”

Even with his okay, I tiptoed around as much as I could. It just seemed right. “I’m surprised the enthusiasts haven’t taken all of this for their collections.” A common act among the fanatics, and Officer Nails had responded like she’d been dealing with fanatics.

“Oh, they’ve taken a lot. There was just so much to start.”

“When did Ms. Campbell become interested in the occult?”

“Well, the week before her death, although ‘interested’ isn’t the word I’d use.”

“What word would you use?”

“Terrified. She called the station every night, claimed shadows were stalking her.”

Blood rushed to my ears as I entered the bathroom, drowning out his voice. The world shrank to the thing before me.

Long, black tendrils rose from the bathtub, whipping in the air as an overwhelming smell of death emanated from it. They spun and sucked downward, disappearing down the drain with the sound of a hundred insect legs.

“We looked multiple times—”

I motioned for Nichols to stop talking, not daring to take my eyes off the drain. “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“In the tub.” My brain ran circles, trying to pin down a rational reason for what I’d seen. Three hallucinations in a matter of hours was a new record, even for me. “Are there rodents here, or bugs?”

“Probably. We live next to a forest.” Nichols eased himself past me, hand covering his mouth and nose as he entered the bathroom. “I don’t see anything. I’d like to know what you think about that, though.” He pointed at the floor.

I dragged my mind back to the job at hand, vowing to call my therapist as soon as I could.

Dried blood sketched a pentacle across tan tiles, a single point facing toward the door, two points facing the bathtub in the back. Each line was immaculate. Roughly half an inch thick, each edge looked sharp enough to cut. A perfect crimson circle contained the star, while a thin strip of ragged cloth lay in the center.

Not a smudge of dirt blemished the rest of the floor.

“What kind of blood is that?”

Nichols shrugged before retreating into the hallway. “Don’t know. Our lab couldn’t tell us. We had some sent out of town, but the results won’t be back for a few more days.”

I stepped out of the bathroom. The smell fell away, returning to the more mild burn and death of the rest of the place. Strange. I’d have to give the room special attention. “It’s probably a mixture of different animals’ blood. That can throw off tests.”

“Yeah, I suppose so. What do you think of that star, though?”

“The pentacle? Could mean a lot of things, although the blood makes me think of darker intentions. At first glance? I’d say either Ms. Campbell desperately wanted attention, or someone played a horrible trick on her.”

Nichols’ eyes narrowed, his demeanor morphing from star-struck guide to skeptical law enforcement. “Ms. Moore, there’s no evidence of homicide, and dying seems an odd way to get attention.”

“Many originally ‘unexplained’ deaths are accidental consequences of desperate acts.” I marched back toward the living room as the logical explanations of what really could have happened solidified in my mind.

I gestured grandly to the candles littering the floor, gaining a sidelong look from David as he appeared from the kitchen. “For instance, these candles all create carbon monoxide. A few won’t do harm, but a truckload? That’s a recipe for disaster.”

I took a deep breath, ready to launch into my next scenario.

A woman burst through the front door, a ragged scarf flapping around her neck and a patchwork jacket two sizes too large hanging from her slight frame.

She moved with unexpected speed, closing the distance between us so quickly, I found myself staring into her wild, bloodshot eyes before I could blink. My stomach dropped.

“She saw, she believed. They all did.” Her breath washed over me, a caustic mix of tooth decay and hard liquor. “If you believe, you must know. Better to not believe, than die.”

Nichols imposed an arm between me and the new arrival, pushing her to a more comfortable distance. “Margaret, you’ve been drinking again.” He pitched his voice as if talking to a child. “You’re an adult, and allowed to, but please stop accosting people while you’re at it.”

Margaret sidestepped Nichols with a grace unseen in the inebriated. I locked eyes with her a second time, my confidence failing me as the situation stirred an eerily similar memory.

A towering, crazed lady, her height exaggerated to my eight-year-old self. I’d cowered behind my mother, tears streaming down my face, as my father held the lady back. Her antics drove the horror of the previous day’s ordeal to new peaks.

“You see, you believe!” she’d cried, jabbing a bony finger toward me. “You must know! If you don’t, they do. They come in the in-between. They hunt, they take.”

I was no longer eight, my trial nearly two decades behind me, yet still I trembled under Margaret’s stare.

“They know, they know! Why don’t you?” she cried.

After threats from Nichols, and a descent into even more incoherent rambling from Margaret, she blustered out of the house, leaving me to shiver.

“You okay?” Steve put his hand on my shoulder.

All of my team had gathered to see the show as their boss got harassed by the local drunk.

I took a deep breath, fought the urge to gag on the thick air, and demanded my body to stop shaking like a chihuahua. “Yes. I’m fine, Steve.”

I pushed his hand away and stepped out of the house. I’d come here to debunk the crap happening in the town, not get wrapped up in the hype. Currently, I was failing. I told myself my sour mood was because of my poor work performance, yet it did nothing to dull the feeling that all I wanted was to finish the job and leave.

*****

The second mysterious death in the town of Sycamore involved a teenage resident who’d gone out to purchase groceries. He’d left at five in the evening.

A church-goer had found him two days later in the church courtyard, draped over a rock mound which hadn’t existed the day before. They described him as looking ‘peacefully asleep’. Stranger still, he’d only been wearing an old, ragged, business suit that wasn’t his. His clothes, and undergarments, had vanished. No fingerprints, no blood, nothing to suggest murder or a cause of death beyond the fact he no longer lived.

The suit caught my eye, but I kept my hunch to myself until I viewed the last scene of death.

That one involved human blood, and a lot of it. According to another resident, an elderly couple had decided to take a walk on the banks of the town’s creek. Odd all by itself, Nichols assured me, since the creek stood a mile away from their residence, and both had back problems. Normally, they rarely left their house at all.

Still, the witness claimed to watch them walk off spritely enough and had thought little else of it.

A child had stumbled onto the remains. I couldn’t still the roiling in my gut as I looked across the blood-soaked leaves gathered along the riverbank.

Nichols told me the couple were already dead when the child spotted them, but were they really? I could envision another child walking into a bloody scene, watching in horror as a man succumbed to a fate so twisted, so wrong, not even deep hypnosis could tease the truth from the depth of the child’s fractured mind.

I swallowed the bile in the back of my throat, glad I hadn’t stopped for lunch. “This looks like a crime scene.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll set up the perimeter,” Terry said as she tiptoed around the macabre splatter painted across a large swath of the riverbank. “I just got new shoes.”

Steve and David grumbled about being forced further into the mess. I couldn’t blame them. Blood covered the area, but that wasn’t all.

Chunks of matter peeked from above and below leaves and detritus, filling the air with the smell of rotting flesh.

I cocked my head, studying the scene. Other than the bustle of my team, it was quiet, still. In another time and place, it would have been tranquil. Here, it sent a chill up my spine. “Why aren’t there any signs of animals? Where are the insects, the flies?”

I cast my question at Nichols, who had taken up vigil about twenty feet away. The sour look on his face he’d adopted since arriving at the scene deepened. “Don’t know. It’s all… uh… from Mr. and Mrs. Lancaster. We collected the… bigger remains, but didn’t have a good way of cleaning the rest. Figured the forest critters would help, but….”

There had to be a logical explanation. I tapped my chin. There was always a logical explanation. “Chemicals.”

“Ms. Moore?”

“Were the remains tested for chemicals? Maybe someone sprayed the area to keep animals away.”

“Nothing came up, same as everything else. There’s no unaccounted for blood, and no signs of a struggle.”

I raised an eyebrow. “How could you tell?”

Nichols went pale. “Theo said it was all self-inflicted.”

“Exactly what was self-inflicted?”

“The… cuts. Both sliced bits off their arms and legs, all the way to the bone.” His pallor gained a green tinge. “I don’t know how they lived long enough to do it, then they showed up dead, looking like they’d laid down to sleep.”

“Thank you, that’s enough.”

He looked about to pass out, and I wasn’t sure I wanted the only person around with a weapon to be incapacitated. Still, there was one thing I had to know. “What about their clothes? Did they still have theirs?”

“Clothes? Uh… yeah. They had them, but they were laid on top of their bodies like blankets, and they were off.”

I latched onto the word, a tiny voice in the back of my mind equal parts intrigued and appalled.

“Parts were bigger than they should be, or smaller. Mr. Lancaster’s left sleeve wasn’t big enough for a kid, yet his left pant leg could have fit two of him. Mrs. Lancaster’s dress was worse. It looked crumpled, but when I looked closer, it was because some threads were tiny, some were huge.”

The tiny voice lost its intrigue and cried in alarm. I tamped it down. “Anything else? Anything that wasn’t theirs?”

“A… a hat. At least, I think it was supposed to be a hat. Found it right in the center of it all, clean as a whistle. Looked like it’d been made from really old, torn up cloth, just big enough for a doll.”

My mind snapped to a particular person, one who was practically a walking storefront for ragged, torn clothing. “Did all the victims talk to Margaret before their accidents?”

“Probably.”

The nonchalance in his tone caught me off-guard. “And you don’t find it odd that you found ragged bits of clothing near every victim, and these victims also talked to Margaret?”

Nichols shook his head. “I understand how it looks to an outsider, but everyone in this town talks, or at least is talked to, by Margaret pretty much every day. It’s like saying they all died from eating.”

“You don’t find the clothes strange at all?”

“Oh, I find them plenty strange. But nothing’s turned up on any of them. Not even a hair.”

Something flickered at the edge of my sight. I turned toward it. A camera stood on a tripod on the other side of the splattered ground. A large shadow moved behind it. I tried to make it into Terry, Steve or David.

As if spurred on by my attention, it leaned out, staring at me as I stared at it.

Wrong was the first thought to form. The thing stood on two mismatched legs, a crooked, bloated torso balanced precariously on top. Its arms and head were no less off. Its features shifted and distorted as if looking into a cruel funhouse mirror.

One of its eyes bulged from its misshapen head, growing in size until it appeared on the verge of popping. It opened swollen lips, mouthing silent words which burrowed into my being.

You see. You believe.

Ice rushed through my veins. I was back in my place of birth, a small country town with a crazy lady of its own and a series of mysterious deaths.

My eight-year-old self, stumbling upon a shadow as it towered over a writhing man. The man contorting, shifting, screaming in agony until all that remained was the wrongness.

“Ms. Moore, are you okay? You’re a bit pale.”

Nichols’ words cut through my panic, the shadow from my past and present gone.

“I….” My heart hammered against my breastbone, a light whine in my ears. A quick glance showed Nichols wasn’t the only person looking at me with concern.

My teammates’ eyes bore into me. Terry’s in particular seemed to scream ‘I told you so.’ Going off my meds had been a terrible idea. Refusing to carry extra, doubly so.

“Ms. Moore?”

“No, Officer Nichols, I’m not.” A weight descended at the admission, threatening to crush me. “I think it would be best if I postponed my investigation.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Terry said from my left. “We came all the way out to the middle of nowhere, spent half the day setting up, and now you’re quitting?”

I grimaced. “I’m not saying we’re quitting. Just give me a couple of days. I trust you guys to gather data while I’m… indisposed. When I’m ready, I’ll parse the data all day and night if you want.”

“No!” Terry jabbed a finger at me. “We’ve seen enough of you off sleep. Go get your head on straight. We’ll pick up your slack.”

After an awkward conversation with Nichols, during which I could see his remaining awe for me shrivel and die, and an equally awkward conversation with Steve about how he was glad I was putting my health first, Steve and I arrived at our lodging.

With no such thing as an inn in Sycamore, we’d been given the only empty house in living condition. It was also the home of the late Mr. and Mrs. Lancaster. Originally, I’d been thrilled. Lodging in the house of two of the victims gave me more time to debunk the alien and paranormal fanatics' ridiculous notions.

Now, as Steve pulled out of the gravel driveway, leaving me alone in the front of the red brick two-story house, all I could feel was deep unease. If a townsperson had jumped out and said boo, I’d have died of fright. As it stood, the block was eerily still.

So it stayed into the cozy living room, up the well-dusted stairs, and into the perfectly kept guest room.

Here I am, in an old-fashioned chair at an old-fashioned writing desk. I intended to call my doctor immediately upon getting here, yet now that I’m settled, I find the package of sleeping pills Steve gave me calling my name.

“A good nap might do you some good,” he’d said.

He’s right, I think. Even if the ‘nap’ must be brought on with sedatives.

I down two small white pills with a glass of water, then add a third for good measure.

They kick in faster than expected.

I’m barely on the bed before the room tilts and fuzzes at the edges, soft but unwelcoming.

The silk inside a coffin.

A giggle sounds at the reaches of my hearing. Or is it? There’s something off about it.

Some wrongness.

Am I asleep? I can’t tell.

Shadows now, congregating around the bed.

Shadows? People?

They watch, they stare, coming almost in focus, then back out again. Not unlike the morphing of their features.

No, not people.

More giggles, inside out.

Mouths grin, backwards.

You see, you believe! You see, you believe! They chant in silence as their arms stretch toward me.

Not people, not people, the mad voice in my head squeals. They don’t know what people look like, but they try.