Matt

It's probably just an old line shack.

He said it like he wanted it to be true.

Miguel ducked through the doorway first, flashlight already in hand even though enough light filtered through the gaps in the roof to see.

It was cooler inside.

The air smelled like dust and something else, something faintly sour, like old sweat or animal musk.

The interior was simple, packed dirt floor, a low wooden platform along one wall that might have served as a bed, a rusted stove in the corner, its pipe bent and broken where it used to go through the roof, a few cracked ceramic bowls on a makeshift shelf, and on the wall opposite the door, scratched into the dried mud between timbers, was a cymbal.

I don't know how else to describe it except that it looked wrong.

It wasn't anything complicated.

Just a circle, with four lines crossing through it at odd angles, not quite symmetrical.

But the lines had been carved deep, over and over, like someone with all the time in the world had traced the same shape again and again until their hand bled.

Dried, reddish-brown streaks around the grooves suggested that might not be a metaphor.

Oh, hell no, Miguel muttered.

This is how every found footage movie starts.

There were other marks, too.

Words carved in English, and another language I didn't recognize.

Some of the English ones had been partially scratched out, but a few phrases were still readable.

Don't listen.

It knows names.

stay out of the wash what the actual i started ryan shined his light toward the bed platform something glinted guys he said you're gonna wanna see this on the platform half buried under a threadbare blanket was a small pile of objects trinkets almost

A couple of Polaroid photos, curled with age.