On the morning of November 5th, 2021, a joint task force from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency confirmed 2,587 dead in Signal Cove, a remote fishing village stuck between the turbulent North Pacific and some of Washington’s thickest Sitka spruce forest. This was extremely concerning for Lead Investigator Osbyrne Lynch, who had officialized the count, because nine days earlier the population of Signal Cove totaled a measly 412. Accounting for active tourist reservations at the Wyffles’ Waffle bed and breakfast did nothing to balance the tally. It barely added an extra hundred. Spring Valley High’s visiting football team and the caravan of parents who arrived for the 1B bracket playoff accounted for even fewer. Ten instant coffees, twenty-five hours[BF1] , and too many corpses later, Oz shut her laptop. Tossed the one-page briefing book. Chair legs on cheap tile echoed through the empty school cafeteria—her impromptu HQ—before she crashed through the red exit doors and puked in the mud.

Searching for scores of missing persons between the lines of spreadsheets had proved a fruitless endeavor. Wallowing over the discrepancy had become an exercise in do-it-yourself madness. The data were useless and would tell her nothing more beyond the fact that there were too many bodies with too few explanations, the rotten cherry atop a sundae of lesser mysteries. Strangeness was in the town’s DNA, a nearly tangible thing that had clotheslined her the moment she crossed county lines into Middle Mile Wood.

The force was unshakeable. Smothering. It hadn’t let her take a full breath since she emerged on the other side of the trees yesterday afternoon. Maybe it had something to do with the fog the sun would inevitably fail to burn off. The sun, after all, didn’t shine on hell, and so there were only clouds here.

Oz had drawn the cosmic short straw and was first to arrive on-scene, joined shortly by her partner dispatched from the Talache field office. Unable to see through the solid wall of mist, she’d ignored her colleague’s protests, walking down the dirt road to a ridge overlooking the village. Signal Cove was a terraced town, its cedar-shingled cottage and cabin residences rubbing elbows with metal warehouses on four tiers leading down to the docks. Stairs and steep roads connected buildings arranged in a horseshoe around a glassy gray bay festooned with old fishing boats. Doe’s Run—a skinny freshwater river—sliced the town in two, emptying into the ocean in a rush of rock-tumbled rapids. It could have been beautiful. Picturesque, even, if not for the silence. The emptiness.

The stench.

There’s a gravity to dread, isn’t there? How it draws you in. One more second, one more step, one last flash of sense before it evaporates in horror’s heat. You don’t know what’s waiting for you. You know it’s something terrible, something which can’t be unseen, but you keep holding your breath and gulping your spit and slowly moving forward. Oz hadn’t stopped chewing the thought since her arrival, though the gum had long lost its flavor. Dread had gravity, alright, and at its core, at the proverbial other end, was always, always regret.

Shuffling further down the road, Oz had noticed the river running red. A graveyard of toppled trees. Human shapes face down in the dirt. Iron. Sulphur. Raw, rotting meat.

And then she’d seen it. The something that can’t be unseen.