Chapter 510

The chill wind swept down from the Alps, carrying with it the scent of pine and the unspoken dread of the valley. It was late autumn, the time when shadows grow long and the nights hold a different kind of darkness.

The kind that seems to crawl under your skin and settle into your bones. Detective Alistair Finch adjusted his coat collar, his breath clouding in the cold.

He was standing on the old bridge overlooking the deep ravine, the same bridge where four people had taken an inexplicable fall in the past month. "Accidents," the local police called them.

Accidents with increasing consistency and similar results. But Alistair didn't believe in accidents when patterns emerged.

The worn wooden planks beneath his boots creaked in protest, and each step sounded too loud against the symphony of wind. The valley below looked bottomless.

There was something unnatural about its silence; almost as if it were waiting to devour any sound. His superior had said he was becoming obsessed, a "burden," as it were.

Alistair's apartment was filled with notes, sketches of the victims, and red string connecting their meager existences. Each victim of disparate lives somehow leading to this small, obscure location.

Here, on this bridge, above that deep crevasse. Alistair started walking, towards the other side of the bridge where it gently inclined downward.

A slow descent into the nearby town of Sankt Michael. He made a mental note of each weathered plank.

Each seemed more unsteady than the last, giving his stride more a dance between balance and the void. "Ludmilla Herzog," he murmured, reading the name on one of the witness statements he'd dug up.

An old woman, some called her the 'Witch of the Mountains', had supposedly witnessed a person slip over the bridge the past week. She was elderly, in her eighties.

According to those same statements, lived alone in a tiny cabin some way up into the hills on the south side of the village. Towards the pine woods that seemed to always hold dusk beneath their boughs.

It felt improbable, that she was responsible, yet everything he'd ever come to know about criminal behavior made her that kind of suspect he couldn't disregard. A lone, disaffected witness always at the wrong time.

An almost ethereal observer always near death or a deadly event. He walked slowly toward Sankt Michael.

Its cobblestone streets, narrow and twisting, were almost deserted. He passed the baker's shop, where they had already put up wooden shutters.

The quiet public house, the 'Grune Hirsch', which was just then kindling a weak light that fought against the onset of early night. He made a turn that he had been hoping for when he entered the town.

Headed to the north; Alistair had asked the locals to describe Ludmilla Herzog's location. Many pointed north as a way through the trees.

Then higher into the pines towards the east, up. He purchased supplies at a general store that was about to close.

Batteries, bread, water and chocolate, all mundane supplies for a most uncertain task he must perform. He walked the path the store clerk indicated.

Noting that even as the valley fell deeper in the dusk, the shadows here were denser and more deliberate. It was in those shadows he first started noticing that they had form.

Long, human shaped outlines that followed a line a small bit away from the actual form he made. Mimicking all his movements, even the hesitant way he would often step and falter before continuing on.

The woods started to close in, and even the sound of the breeze fell silent. A sense of disquiet began to gnaw at the edges of his reason.

It was that feeling he most loathed, because that feeling would always presage some unexplainable and deeply sinister set of circumstances; his intuition never faltered. His boot struck a loose stone.

As he made a sharp ascent, his legs burning with the incline. It rolled with a heavy rumble towards a ravine beside his trail.

When he shined his flashlight towards it the ravine was just an endless blackness. Sucking all the light, or so it seemed, into its darkness.

His phone made a feeble beep. No reception here, which wasn't at all unexpected.

The wind picked up again, making the pine trees sound like bones rubbing together. Every needle its own scream.

Up above the black canopy of pines and low-lying dark clouds, the moon, was just starting its crawl above them. Giving everything an odd sheen.

He passed a gnarled oak tree, its branches twisting towards the sky like tortured limbs. On the edge of its broad boughs he thought he noticed something staring down at him.

A shadow detached from anything else, an unnatural black form looking down with empty sockets from a branch too high for any person. He shook his head, blaming it on exhaustion and tension.

A rustle in the undergrowth, a swift shadow crossing the periphery, sent a cold shiver running down his spine. It gave his heart a painful lurch in his chest.

It became increasingly harder to find any of the markings that were described by the shopkeeper. Everything felt ancient and worn.

Like time had been slowly scrubbing every edge away in the intervening decades since those signs were made. He walked on, a slow but deliberate, up hill path.

The silence growing ever more oppressive until all he could hear was his heart pounding. It was too dark.

Even with his flashlight he felt blind. And there it was; an ancient looking wooden cabin with a thatched roof nestled in the clearing.

Its one small window was dark, like a sightless eye, watching his approach from up the hill. The whole building seemed almost like a cruel mockery of a child's picture of a home.

But he couldn't dismiss it or look past how out of place it seemed; no chimney with smoke, no light in its one lonely window. Alistair reached the wooden door.

Even his touch on its frame felt somehow invasive. The door creaked open with a terrible groan and a soft rustling.

The house smelled like wet earth and dust, ancient scents. "Hello?" Alistair asked, but his voice sounded small, timid.

Nothing. His flashlight revealed a single, mostly barren room; there was a table with three chairs.

A simple stone hearth, and some shelves laden with dusty jars. There was no sound besides his boots on the dirt and pine floors.

The very silence made his hairs raise and his blood begin a painful rush in his veins. As his light landed on the single object on the table, Alistair sucked a gasp into his chest.

It was a child's small hand crafted boat, with dried herbs sticking out the top. Looking almost like a small grave on the aged wooden table.

He walked closer to the small effigy, noticing that each tiny mark seemed almost perfect for how crude the craft was made. A faint sound came from the far side of the house.

It was soft and almost imperceptible, yet it seemed to make all the other noises stop. Or at least hide in the house.

He slowly approached the other door. "Hello? Ms. Herzog?" He said again, each syllable pushing him into dread and suspicion.

He stopped before that old door, the soft scratching had seemed to halt too. It gave no light through any gap.

Alistair carefully pushed it open, revealing a small dark stairwell. He felt a hand touch his back, something cold and slick.

When he turned quickly he saw nothing behind him, not a thing, just more of the empty house. He held his hand out for the next moment.

Feeling as he did for a similar presence in the air and still there was nothing but stale and cold currents. Alistair made his descent into the darkness.

The steps were unsteady and the air grew heavier, it now felt almost damp. A strange sweet scent seemed to permeate every breath he took.

He couldn't place it. The stairwell emptied into a dirt-walled cellar with the single, pale lantern hanging above.

His light revealed shelves stacked with oddities: dried herbs, bones, small hand-carved figures made of what he didn't wish to identify. Rows of empty jars with curious sigils etched into the sides.

He ran his fingers over a jar's strange writing, the glyphs somehow familiar to his senses in a terrifying way. They weren't ancient letters from any culture or tongue that he'd ever come to learn.

But rather they seemed like half finished thoughts made with his very own fingers. It chilled him.

In the center of the room, sitting in a worn rocking chair was an elderly woman, her face mostly obscured by shadow. Just her small nose poking out of her hood that stretched past the ends of her shoulders.

She stared at him, not speaking or moving. "Ms. Herzog?" Alistair spoke cautiously, his voice catching a bit.

"You should not have come," her voice was soft, gravelly. He tried to locate its tone, to find some semblance of understanding or reasoning for what would become.

"I'm Detective Alistair Finch, I'm looking into the accidents at the bridge." He knew that seemed idiotic at this juncture.

It also seemed pointless, like attempting to explain geometry to a hungry animal. She let out a slow, dry chuckle, "Accidents?"

Her head cocked almost uncomfortably towards him. Her head tilted the other way now.

The movement didn't seem natural; her shoulders remained unmoving in this unnerving observation, only her neck was giving him this display. "Such... a curious term you all employ."

Alistair could only watch. He felt strangely disarmed, as if he could feel all his movements in a detached form outside of him.

He could tell them but could not change how they felt. She rose slowly from the rocking chair; she wasn't at all like what he had expected.

This old woman, stood a tall and commanding six-feet tall. As her head rose, he noticed her eyes; cold, calculating.

There was something truly empty in them. She began to walk.

"They came like you did, Detective." she kept her voice to a nearly audible soft croak. Her hood still obscuring all of her face, other than her cold black eyes.

"So very... persistent, aren't you?" she added in some strange, playful jest. Alistair tensed, pulling out his pistol; something seemed amiss, unnatural about the scene.

Her movements and her size. She wasn't frail like he had seen reported and his sense of the situation gave no more information other than his body becoming frozen.

He hated it. She paused, "Your concern is admirable, I must admit," she said.

"But so terribly unnecessary; all in time, it will come for all of us... Even you" The sweet scent he had caught earlier seemed to deepen.

Something else started coming, from just above it. An odor of iron.

He thought he might have found it there, now. It wasn't on her skin but emanated as an essence that she wore around her, like an oily film.

Alistair pointed his gun. He hadn't ever held the weapon and looked down at it with what seemed like detachment.

"Stop, right there" he said as if reading it from some script, his body no longer completely his own. "I have questions," he was doing it, again.

It wasn't what he had intended or chosen to be. He had so much to understand, to say.

It had felt almost personal to him to solve it, yet this form felt almost too small to accomplish that feat. That final step to a victory that he had begun working for so long.

She did stop and paused her approach as if he hadn't noticed that they were only moments away from him. Her presence looming just inches away now.

Her hand slowly, almost painfully extended towards him. Her nails, blackened and curled.

And her grin, what seemed to cut up from her unseen lips, sent that strange detachment spiraling downward and out from any understanding. He understood and he did not.

A new experience he wished he had never experienced. "Do you really believe," she said in her soft raspy cadence, "That your world is not like mine?"

It was a question with nothing beyond her need for his attention to it. She began walking forward, once more, with a pace neither slow or quick.

"We exist together," she whispered, as her blackened nails grazed his cheek and sunk through it like through old butter. Alistair tried to yell but his throat would only produce a wet sound.

All too like that of an open wound and fresh blood, a gurgle he wished he could remove from the sounds and experiences of his own failing form. His slowly and steadily departing self.

He saw something terrible; his arm holding his pistol went still and straight up into the air. Her movements grew ever more and unnatural.

As he tried to raise his free hand to pry away her grasp that had begun burrowing more and more into his face. Her black nails becoming thin sharp blades sinking deep.

He felt like a doll. She reached into the side of her hood and drew a small glass vial.

It pulsed with some viscous and vile black liquid, thick and full with what was to be. Alistair saw an infinite field of other black eyes like her's.

They seemed to all whisper back and forth to one another. All with that strange smile that did not seem human, something terrible.

They watched with the detached glee he'd felt on her, but now was truly and honestly his. "You may become... more," She was starting to put the viscous black fluid over her thin fingers.

Coating her skin with its putrid depths, the stench of iron all the more profound now and filling his now mostly still, unmoving being. "But you... need to give something away in return"

She said, her voice like a terrible chant in some alien language he could almost understand but just simply failed. It was a promise she wouldn't ask if he could abide to; not a question.

She shoved his still, empty face back into his body. "Just a little," She cooed, and tilted the vial up.

Pushing it directly into his ruined cheek. Alistair's world dissolved, the darkness growing all too strong.

That dark liquid poured, filling every crevasse of his fading self and quickly pushing all of his remaining memories far away from anything he could retain. Alistair felt it then; her world.

It was all here in his. He tried to scream but it sounded all the same as the blood bubbling out and pooling on his chin.

It was coming. The old woman laughed, the sound like nails scratching on a coffin.

"Not a gift, this is not a gift," her form had morphed more; a long face, gaunt and with huge eyes. A grin that no human face was supposed to form, or had done before it.

She reached to the floor now and, when she grabbed it, Alistair felt that it was all over now. It was all but impossible.

"This is so very very different, for me" the being finished with something just a little louder than that soft, croaking voice. It felt cold now.

Very cold. He didn't see the wooden mallet come down as the strange thing broke him open.

The first of many steps it needed to finish to be like her. His own, now strange, empty black eyes watched it collect him in small jars.

Arranging them neatly on the shelves as if his parts were always supposed to be a new arrangement here. On those small dusty wooden slats that reeked of his own demise and transformation into something beyond life itself.