SO EP:713 The Bigfoot Journals: Part Four

at the rendezvous point Henri had designated. They had resupplied, successfully, trading with settlements along the Ohio River for fresh provisions, replacement equipment, and most importantly, horses. Will Harper's condition had not improved. If anything, he seemed worse, his eyes vacant, his hands constantly moving, as if sketching invisible images in the air. He draws them every night, Thomas told me, fills page after page with their faces. Won't sleep, barely eats.

I don't know how much longer he can survive like this. Despite Will's deterioration, spirits were high. We were nine men again, reunited after months apart, carrying enough supplies to see us through whatever lay ahead. The creatures had continued to watch us through our separation, and they watched us, still, dozens of them visible on the surrounding ridge lines, more than we had ever seen before. They're gathering, Sam observed, coming

from all directions. Something's happening. What I don't know, but whatever it is, we're about to be in the middle of it. We pressed deeper into the forbidden lands. The terrain grew more treacherous with every mile, narrow passes between sheer cliffs, river crossings that nearly drown two of our horses, Forests so dense that we had to hack through the

undergrowth with machetes that dulled after hours of use. And through it all, the creatures multiplied, fifty visible, now sixty, more, arriving every day, converging toward the heart of their territory from regions we couldn't imagine. Their behavior changed as well,

more agitated, more aggressive. The threat displays that had been infrequent became constant, screams and charges that stopped just feet from our position, chest beating that shook the air, rocks thrown close enough to feel the wind of their passage. We're too close to something, Henry said on the night of September eighth. His charming smile had long since faded. The man who faced me now was tired and afraid, and trying desperately not to show either. They don't want

us here, they don't want us anywhere. But they've let us come this far. The ones we've been traveling with. Yes, but look around you, captain. He gestured at the shapes on the ridge lines, the shadows moving between the trees. These aren't the same creatures, different groups, different territories, and I don't think they've agreed to tolerate us the way the others have.

September ninth. We had made camp in a hollow between two ridges, choosing a position that seemed defensible, high ground on three sides, a stream providing water, clear sight lines in the direction we'd come from. We didn't think about what might come from the other direction. The warning signs began at dusk. The creatures we'd been traveling with withdrew, all of them suddenly melting into the forest without a sound. The howls and knocks that had become background noise fell silent.

The forest itself seemed to hold its breath. Something's wrong, Sam said, his hand on his rifle, his eyes scanning the darkening forest. Something's very wrong. Then the screams began, not the screams we'd grown accustomed to, the territorial calls,

the threat displays. These were different, sharper, more urgent, like alarms, I realized, like warnings, but warnings of what They came out of the darkness, without warning, creatures we'd never seen before, Larger than the others, darker, moving with a speed that seemed impossible for their size. They hit our camp like a wave, scattering men and horses, overturning equipment, filling the night with chaos and terror. I fired my rifle into the dark. Heard the ball strike something solid, heard a

scream of rage that made my blood run cold. Muzzle flashes lit the clearing, Jim firing, Sam firing everyone, firing at shapes that were there and gone before we could aim properly, and then are screamed. God helped me. I can still hear it, that scream, that terrible desperate, hopeless scream. Something had him, something massive and dark, Its arms wrapped around his torso, dragging him backward into the darkness beyond

the firelight. I could see his face in the flickering light, white with terror, mouth, open, eyes showing whites all around. And then he was gone. I ran after him, so did Jim. We crashed through the underbrush, following the sounds of struggle, the sounds of screaming. The sounds of the sounds changed on re screams became something else, something worse, wet sounds, tearing sounds, crack of bone and the rip of flesh, and other things I cannot bring myself to describe.

Then silence. We found what remained of him at dawn. I will not describe it in detail. Some horrors are too profound for language, too terrible to commit to paper. I will say only this. Henri Beaumont, thirty three years old, voyageur guide friend Henri Beaumont was scattered across a clearing, in pieces so small that burial was impossible. Nothing was

left to bury, nothing was left at all. We stood in that clearing, those of us who had survived the night, and looked at what had been our friend, our companion, our brother in this impossible journey. Thomas vomited. Will Harper, who hadn't spoken coherently in weeks, began to laugh, high, hysterical laughter that went on and on until Solomon struck him unconscious. Jim loaded his rifle. I'm going to kill them, every last one of them. I'm going to no. Sam's

voice was quiet but absolute. Look around you, Jim. Look the creatures were back, the ones we'd been traveling with. The scarred elder, the females, the juveniles. They stood at the edges of the clearing, watching us with expressions I couldn't read. But they hadn't attacked us. The things that had killed Unri they were gone, retreated back into whatever territory they'd come from. The creatures surrounding us now were different.

I could see it in their posture, their behavior, the way they looked at the scattered remains of Aunri with something that might have been regret. Different groups, Sam said, echoing what Henry had told us the night before, Different territories. The ones we've been with they tolerate us. These others don't. Then why did they let us walk into a trap? I don't know. Maybe they didn't know. Maybe they couldn't stop it. Maybe he stopped, his weathered face twisting with

grief and confusion. Maybe they have rules we don't understand, boundaries they can't cross. I looked at the scarred elder. Those ancient eyes met mine, and I saw something in them that I couldn't name. Not guilt, I don't think they're capable of guilt, but something awareness, perhaps acknowledgment of what had happened, and maybe just maybe apology. But Henri was still dead and all the understanding in the world

couldn't bring him back. Marcus set down the journal. His hands were trembling so badly he could barely grip the leather binding Henri Beaumont, the charming French Canadian with the easy smile and the hidden secrets, gone torn apart in the darkness by creatures that didn't know or didn't care

about the fragile piece the expedition had built. He thought about his ancestor, standing in that clearing at dawn, looking at what remained of his friend, The horror of it, the futility, the terrible understanding that all their progress, all their exchanges, all their careful diplomacy had meant nothing to the creatures that lived in that hostile territory. Different groups, different rules, different tolerances. The creatures weren't a unified people.

They were competing territories, rival families, individual beings with individual temperaments. Some tolerated humans, others didn't, and there was no way to know which was which until it was too late. Marcus looked at the remaining journals. There was more to come. He knew that the second death Will Harper according to

his father's notes, and whatever came after. Part of him wanted to stop, to put the journals away, to walk out of this cabin and return to his ordinary life in Chicago, to pretend he'd never learned any of this. But he couldn't. The story had him now, and some stories once started, demand to be finished. He picked up the journal and kept reading. September tenth through thirtieth, seventeen ninety nine. We should have turned back. Every rational thought

demanded it. Henre was dead. Will Harper had descended into a madness from which there might be no return. Our supplies were dwindling, our morale was shattered, and the creatures, the ones that had killed Nri might attack again at any moment, but we didn't turn back. I don't know if it was courage or foolishness, or simply an inability to accept that everything we'd sacrificed had been for nothing. We had come so far, seen so much, lost so much. To turn back now felt like a betrayal of Henri's

memory of everything the expedition had meant. And something else drove us forward, something I couldn't name then and struggle to name now, a pull, a compulsion, a sense that the answers we sought lay just ahead, just beyond the next ridge, just through the next valley. The creatures seemed

to share this urgency. After Henri's death, they began guiding us more actively than before, showing us paths we never would have found on our own, leading us around the territories of hostile groups, leaving food more frequently larger quantities, as if trying to strengthen us for whatever lay ahead. Were they helping us? I still don't know. Perhaps they were, Perhaps they felt something like responsibility for what had happened to Henri, an obligation to see us safely through the

dangers that remained. Or perhaps they simply wanted us to reach our destination, wanted us to see what waited in the heart of their territory. Either way, we followed. Will Harper's condition deteriorated rapidly in the days that followed. He no longer spoke at all, not even the fragmented mutterings he'd been producing before. His sketch book was constantly in his hands, pages filling with images that none of us could bear to look at. I looked once, just once.

The drawing showed creatures that were almost right, but not quite. Bodies proportioned correctly, poses captured with remarkable skill, but the eyes were wrong, to human, to knowing, and their expressions. The creatures I had seen displayed no expression I could interpret. But Will's drawing showed something else, something that looked almost like hunger, or anticipation or desire. He's drawing what they show him, Thomas said quietly. The physician had lost all

pretense of scientific detachment. What remained was simply a frightened man trying to make sense of something that defied understanding or what he thinks they show him. His mind has created a dialogue where none exists. Is he dangerous to himself? Certainly to us. Thomas shook his head. I don't know. He barely seems aware of our existence. He's somewhere else, entirely somewhere we can't follow. I assigned someone to watch Will at all times. We couldn't spare the man power.

But we also couldn't risk him wandering off in the middle of the night, not here, not after what had happened to Henri. The terrain grew worse as we traveled, deeper mountains that seemed designed to kill, sheer cliffs with no paths, rivers that ran too fast to forward for us, so dense that even the creatures struggled to find ways through. We lost a horse to a fall, then another to

a river crossing gone wrong. Our supplies dwindled despite the creature's gifts, but they kept guiding us, kept leading us forward, kept drawing us towards something none of us could see, but all of us could feel. And then, on the last day of September, we found it. The canyon appeared out of nowhere, a crack in the mountain so well hidden that we would never have discovered it without the

creature's guidance. The entrance was narrow, barely wide enough for a horse to pass, with walls that rose sheer on either side for hundreds of feet, and stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see.

The passage took hours, the walls pressed close on either side, the sky reduced to a narrow strip of blue far above. The horses balked at first, their instinct screaming danger, but we coaxed them through. The creatures walked ahead and behind, their presence both comforting and terrified. And then the canyon

opened up. What I saw on the other side stopped me in my tracks, stopped all of us, eight men and seven horses, frozen at the edge of something impossible, A valley, vast and green, stretching for miles between mountain walls that rose like the sides of a bowl. A river ran through the center, glinting silver in the afternoon light. Forest covered the lower slopes, ancient forest, older than anything we'd seen before, giving way to meadows and clearings that

dotted the valley floor. And everywhere, everywhere there were creatures, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, moving through the forest, gathered by the river, visible on the slopes above. More than I had ever imagined could exist, more than I had thought possible, A hidden population, a secret stronghold, a place where these beings had lived and bred and survived for millennia, known to the human world. My God, Thomas whispered beside me. God has nothing to do with this place, I said,

and led my men into the valley. Marcus read the words again, trying to picture what his ancestor had seen. A valley full of creatures, hundreds of them, thousands, a hidden population that had survived in complete isolation from human contact for longer than recorded history. It should have been impossible,

but the journals were authentic. Marcus's historians training confirmed that, beyond doubt, whatever Elijah Stone had seen in that valley, he had seen something real something that still existed two hundred years later, something that his father had spent his life watching for. Marcus looked out the window of the cabin. The Blue Ridge Mountains rose in the darkness, their shapes barely visible against the night sky. Somewhere out there, not as far away as the valley Elijah had found, but

perhaps closer than Marcus had ever imagined. The creatures were still living, still watching, still waiting. He turned back to the journal. October one through fifteenth, seventeen ninety nine. We spent two weeks in the valley. Two weeks surrounded by creatures whose existence challenged everything we thought we knew about the natural world. Two weeks observing behaviors that revealed both the remarkable intelligence and the fundamental alienness of these beings.

Two weeks that would haunt me, haunt all of us for the rest of our lives. The valley was larger than it first appeared, perhaps twenty miles from end to end, with the mountains forming a natural barrier that kept it hidden from the outside world. A river ran through the center, fed by streams that tumbled down from the surrounding heights.

The forest was ancient, beyond measure, trees so old that their bark had hardened into something like stone, their branches interweaving into a canopy that blocked out the sky and everywhere the creatures. I attempted a census during our first

days in the valley, but quickly abandoned the effort. There were too many of them, hundreds at minimum, perhaps over a thousand, family groups, solitary individuals, juveniles, elders, a complete population living in complex social arrangements that defied easy categorization. They weren't a society exactly, not in any sense that humans would recognize. They had no visible government, no obvious

leaders beyond the oldest and most dominant individuals. They had no permanent structures, no evidence of agriculture or animal husbandry or any of the other hallmarks of civilization. But they weren't simply animals either. We observed them from a small clearing at the edge of the valley, never venturing far, always aware that we were guests or perhaps prisoners, in this place. The creatures tolerated our presence but made no

effort to welcome us. They watched us constantly, hundreds of eyes tracking our every movement, but they didn't approach except on their own terms. Thomas documented everything with feverish intensity, filling notebook after notebook with observations. They communicate somehow, he told me on the third day. Not language, nothing like language. But watch how they move together, how they coordinate without apparent signals. There's information passing between them. I just can't

figure out how I had observed the same thing. The creatures seemed to operate as a collective consciousness at times, dozens of individuals shifting positions simultaneously, responding to threats or opportunities before any human could have perceived them. But at other times they were clearly individuals with distinct personalities and behaviors. Some were curious, approaching our camp with what seemed like genuine interest. Others were aggressive, displaying at us when we

moved in directions they didn't approve of. Still others avoided us entirely, treating us as if we didn't exist. The caves were perhaps the most remarkable discovery. Dozens of them opened into the surrounding cliffs, Their entrances scattered across the valley walls like holes in a massive face. The creatures used them for shelter. We saw individuals and groups entering and leaving at all hours, but they seemed to serve

other purposes as well. Thomas spent a full day documenting the entrance to one particularly large cave, sketching the rock formations and the strange markings that covered the surrounding stone. These aren't natural, he said, showing me as drawings. They're carved deliberately. Look at the patterns. They repeat too consistently to be random erosion. What do they mean? I have no idea, but they've been here a long time, centuries at least maybe longer. The creatures let us observe, They

let us document. They even let us collect specimens, scat samples, hair caught on branches, stone tools they seemed to have discarded. But there were boundaries we couldn't cross, territories within the valley that were forbidden to us. When we approached certain areas, the creatures would appear suddenly, silently and make it clear through posture and vocalization that we should go no further. What were they protecting? We never found out. At night,

the creatures gathered, that's the only word for it. As darkness fell, they would congregate in clearings throughout the valley, dozens, sometimes hundreds of individuals in a single location. They would make sounds together, not speech, not song, something else. Low rumbles that seemed to come from the earth itself, high pitched cries that echoed off the valley walls, Rhythms that repeated and varied and repeated again, building into something that

was almost music, but wasn't quite. Bonding behaviors, Thomas speculated, like howler monkeys or humpback whales, they're reinforcing group identity,

establishing hierarchies, communicating membership in the population. Maybe he was right, But watching those gatherings, feeling the sound waves vibrating in my chest, hearing the harmonics that shouldn't be possible from living throats, I couldn't help thinking that something more was happening, something we couldn't understand because we lacked the senses to perceive it. Will Harper watched the gatherings with particular intensity. His madness seemed to quiet when the creature sang, if

singing was the right word. He would sit motionless for hours, his sketch book forgotten, his eyes fixed on the dark shapes moving in the firelight. They're praying, he said. Once it was the first coherent sentence he'd spoken in weeks, Praying to what, to everything, to the forest and the mountains in the sky, to themselves, to the world that was and the world that will be. He turned to look at me, and for just a moment, his eyes

were clear. They remember things we've forgotten, Captain, things we never knew. They'd been praying since before humans learned to speak. Then the clarity faded, and he was gone again, back into whatever private world his broken mind had created. But I couldn't forget what he'd said, couldn't shake the feeling that he'd seen something true in his madness, something the

rest of us were too sane to perceive. The creatures were old, older than we could imagine, and whatever they were doing in those nighttime gatherings, it was something they'd been doing since before human civilization began, something sacred, something we weren't meant to witness, but we witnessed it anyway. Marcus closed his eyes. The narrative was building towards something.

He could feel it. The deaths on Rhe's violent end and will Harper's still to come, the discoveries in the valley, the weight of knowledge that was changing the expedition members, breaking them in ways they didn't yet understand. His ancestor had seen things no human was meant to see, had learned things that challenged everything he'd believed about the world, and he'd spent the rest of his life guarding that knowledge, protecting it, waiting for a day when humanity might be

ready to hear the truth. That day had never come, or had it. Marcus opened his eyes and looked at the pendant hanging around his neck, the stone pendant his ancestor had worn, the one gray Owl had given him more than two centuries ago. They have marked you now, for good or ill you are marked? Was he marked? Had the creatures watched his father all those years? Were they watching him now? He walked to the window and looked out at the darkness. The mountains were black shapes

against a black sky. Nothing moved, nothing made a sound, but the feeling of being watched, that feeling he'd noticed since arriving at the cabin, was stronger than ever. He went back to the chair and picked up the journal. Will Harper was about to die, and Marcus needed to know how. October fifteenth through twenty fifth, seventeen ninety nine, the caves held secrets we were never meant to find. Thomas discovered the first evidence on our tenth day in

the valley. He had been examining one of the smaller caves. The creatures tolerated this, watching from a distance, but not interfering. When he emerged with a face the color of bone. You need to see this, he said. His voice was steady, but his hands were shaking.

a pile of bones, scattered broken old human bones. I recognized them immediately, the shape of the skull, the curve of the femur, the delicate bones of the hands. These had been people once, men are women, who had lived and breathed and loved. Now they were nothing but fragments in a cave. There's more, Thomas said. He pointed to the walls where something had been scratched into the stone, lines and curves that might have been symbols, might have

been decoration, or might have been something else entirely. What is this, Jim asked, His voice was rough, dangerous. Since Henri's death, something dark had been growing in him, something that made me watch him carefully. A burial sight, Solomon suggested, some kind of grave. Thomas shook his head. Look at the bones, really look at them. I did, and I saw what Thomas had already seen. Teeth on the larger bones, near the joints, evidence of gnawing, evidence of breaking form marrow.

These people hadn't been buried here, they'd been eaten. The cave felt smaller suddenly, the walls pressing in the weight of the mountain above, crushing down. I thought about the Shawnee stories, the Wyandot warnings, the generations of conflict, the warriors who went into the mountains and never returned. This was where they had ended up. This was where their lives had ended. The native stories weren't exaggeration, I said, my voice sounding strange in the enclosed space. They were truth.

The creatures had been eating humans for for how long? Thomas was already examining the bones, his scientific instincts overriding his horror. These are old, very old. The ones at the bottom of the pile are fossilized that takes centuries, perhaps millennia, But the ones on top caused lifting a fragment that still bore traces of dried tissue. These could be recent, within the last decade. The warriors, Sam said quietly,

the ones the Wyandot lost, the children stolen in the night. Yes, we found more bones in other caves, different ages, different states of preservation, evidence of conflict and consumption spanning centuries. The wars the natives had described were written here in fragments of bone and the scratches on cave walls. But we also found something else, tools, Not the crude stone

implements we'd seen. The creatures use, something finer, more sophisticated knives with edges as sharp as anything a European smithy could produce. Scrapers and awls and things we couldn't identify, all made from stone, but made with a skill that seemed impossible for beings who showed no other signs of material culture, and stay tuned for more sasquatch Otty se to be right back after these messages. They're not making

these now, Thomas observed, examining a particularly fine blade. I haven't seen any evidence of tool making in the valley. These must be artifacts from an earlier period, an earlier period of what. I don't know. Maybe they were more advanced once, maybe they had a culture. Maybe they lost it somehow. He set down the blade and looked at me with haunted eyes. Or maybe they're saving it, hiding their capabilities, showing us only what they want us to see.

That thought stayed with me. The creatures we'd observed seemed intelligent, but primitive. No language, no fire, no art or ceremony. But the tools suggested something else, something more. What if they were smarter than they appeared. What if everything we'd seen, the behaviors, the patterns, the apparent simplicity was a perform mormans, a mask worn to hide their true nature. What if

they knew exactly what they were doing with us? Solomon provided perspective that evening, as we sat around our small fire processing what we'd learned. My grandmother used to tell me about the forest people. He said quietly. His hands were busy with a new carving, a figure that looked almost human, but not quite. She said, they were kind, sometimes cruel, sometimes just like people, just like anything that lives. They eat human Solomon. They've been eating humans for centuries,

and we eat animals. We kill each other in wars. We take what we want and destroy what we can't use. He looked up from his carving, his dark eyes steady. You can't expect mercy from nature, Captain. Nature doesn't know what mercy means. Then what are we doing here? What's the point of any of this? Understanding that's all anyone can do. Understand it's real, even when it's terrible, especially

when it's terrible. He held up his carving, a creature standing upright, arms raised, as if in greeting or threat. My grandmother understood. That's why she told me the stories, not to frighten me, to prepare me. Prepare you for what? For this? He gestured at the valley around us, at the creature's visible on the ridge lines, at the caves that held their terrible secrets, For knowing that the world is bigger and stranger and more dangerous than we want

to believe, and for surviving that knowledge. I looked at the carving in his hands. The creature he'd rendered looked almost peaceful, almost gentle. But there was something in the posture, something in the proportions, that suggested power, violence, the capacity for terrible things, just like the real creatures, just like us. Marcus stared at the page. The creatures ate humans, not just killed them, not just defended their territory, ate them

for centuries, for millennia. He thought about his ancestors standing in that cave, looking at the scattered bones, understanding for the first time the true nature of what he'd been pursuing. The creatures weren't noble savages or misunderstood animals or anything else the romantic imagination might want them to be. They were apex predators. They had been preying on humans since before recorded history, and they were still out there, still watching,

still hungry. Marcus looked at the window, at the darkness beyond the mountains rose in the distance, black shapes against a black sky. How many creatures lived in those peaks? How many humans had disappeared into those forests over the years, written off as accidents or getting lost or simple bad luck. He didn't want to know, but he kept reading anyway. October twenty fifth through November one, seventeen ninety one, Will

Harper died on the night of October twenty ninth. I will record the circumstances as accurately as I can, though even now, years later, I am uncertain what truly happened. What I know is fragmentary, incomplete, filtered through the lens of a grief I still haven't fully processed. Will's mental state had continued to deteriorate in the days following our discovery of the bones. He barely ate, He barely slept.

His sketch book was never out of his hands, pages filling with images that none of us could bear to examine. When he spoke at all, it was in fragments, broken sentences about seeing, about understanding, about the creatures, showing him truths we couldn't perceive. He's lost, Thomas told me privately on the morning of the twenty ninth. His mind has retreated somewhere we can't follow. Even if we got him home tomorrow, I don't think he'd ever recover. Is he

dangerous to himself, certainly to us? Thomas hesitated. I don't think so, but I can't be sure of anything anymore. I made a decision that I've regretted ever since. We were shorthanded, exhausted, stretched thin by the demands of survival in this hostile place. I assigned Will tonight watch the easiest duty, the one that required the least active involvement. Just sit by the fire and wake someone if anything happened.

I should have known better, I should have seen the signs, but I was tired and worried and focused on one hundred other things. I let Will Harper take the watch, and sometime during the night, while the rest of us slept the deep sleep of exhaustion, Will Harper walked into the darkness and never came back. We discovered his absence

at dawn. His sketch book lay open on his bedroll, the pages covered with a single word, repeated over and over, see filling every available space, written so hard that the pencil had torn through the paper. And find him, I ordered.

Zeke found him. My nephew's scream, the second terrible scream I'd heard in these mountains, brought us running to a clearing in the densest part of the valley forest, a place where the trees grew so close together that the canopy formed a nearly solid ceiling, where the light was dim even at midday. Will Harper lay on his back in the center of the clearing. He was surrounded by creatures, a circle of them, perhaps a dozen, standing at the edge of the open space and looking down at his body.

Not aggressive, not curious, just present, bearing witness. I pushed through them. They parted to let me pass, and knelt beside the man I had led to his death. He was clearly dead. His eyes were open, staring at the canopy above, seeing nothing. His face was frozen in an expression I couldn't interpret, not terror exactly, though terror was part of it. Something else, wonder perhaps, or revelation, the look of a man who had finally seen what he'd

been seeking. There were no visible wounds, no signs of violence. His body was intact, his clothes undamaged. What happened, Jim demanded. He had his rifle raised, though there was nothing to shoot at. What did they do to him? I don't think they did anything, Thomas said quietly. He had joined me beside Will's body, his physician's hands automatically checking for pulse, for breath, for any sign of life. His heart simply stopped, as if something overwhelmed it, or as if he chose

to let go chose. I don't know how else to explain it. Thomas sat back on his heels, his face gray with exhaustion and grief. Look at his expression. That's not the face of a man who was murdered. That's the face of someone who saw something, something profound, something that broke whatever connection his mind still had to his body.

I looked at Will's face. Thomas was right. There was no terror in that frozen expression, no pain, just transcendence, the look of a man who had finally found what he was looking for, even if what he found had killed him. The creatures dispersed slowly as we examined the body. One by one, they turned and walked back into the forest, their great shapes disappearing into the fog. Until only the

scarred elder remained. He stood at the edge of the clearing, watching us with those ancient patient eyes.

We buried will Harper in the clearing where he died. It was the first proper burial we'd performed on Ree had left us nothing to bury, and we took our time with it. Dug a deep grave, wrapped his body in blankets, said words that felt inadequate, but where all we had his sketchbook went into the grave with him. None of us wanted to carry those images back to the civilized world. Let them stay here in this place

that had consumed him, Let them be forgotten. He saw too much Thomas said, as we filled in the grave. Some things aren't meant to be seen. Then what are we doing here? We've seen the same things. Why hasn't it killed us? Maybe it will eventually. Thomas's voice was barely audible. Maybe that's what we carry home with us, the thing that kills us, just slower, one piece at a time. I wanted to argue, wanted to tell him he was wrong, that we would survive this, that the

knowledge we carried would be worth all the sacrifice. But standing over will Harper's grave, I couldn't find the words. Two men dead. Eight remained when we entered this valley. Seven would leave it? How many would make it home? Marcus closed the journal and let his head fall back against the chair. Will Harper, the artist, the one who saw things others couldn't see, dead in a clearing, surrounded by creatures, his heart simply stopped. Overwhelmed by understanding, killed

by revelation. Marcus thought about his father, the long walks in the mountains, the strange silences, the expression he sometimes wore when he stared at the forest, the expression Marcus had never been able to name. Had his father seen something, had the creatures shown him what they'd shown Will Harper had it been killing him slowly, one piece at a time.

Marcus looked at the remaining journals. There was more to come, the expedition's return, the oath of secrecy, Elijah's final years guarding the knowledge that had cost so much to obtain, Marcus's own role in this story that stretched across two centuries. He picked up the journal and kept reading.