Movement in the dark gray of our peripheries is universally fearful. No matter how awful, no matter how truly terrible the source of that movement is, there is some comfort when the veil is lifted and the thing moves again in plain sight. For a sneaking thing to slip it must exist in our world, in the world where strange agendas do not excuse a thing from mistakes.
For all the time I’ve spent staring at Autumn by the Wayside, it has not moved an inch.
But now… a slip.
‘If there is any magic left in tales of the pirate’s black spot, ‘The Fairy Forest’ may be the source. It is a standing massacre of trees, a plague that spirals outward from the char of some distant fire as though ritually summoned and left to sow chaos. The culprit is the ‘Fairy Fern,’ a lush parasite that masks the scene of its crime with bright green fronds. Even seasoned travelers may find themselves in the heart of the infestation before they realize it is not life that surrounds them, but death.’
This entry was different in the old copy of Autumn by the Wayside. It is familiar enough that I doubted myself but, looking back over my own writings, I see that things have changed. Has the book quietly changed between print runs or has it quietly changed in my pack, shifting itself like ‘Mazzy’s’ maze?
The way to ‘The Fairy Forest’ is familiar enough, a left where I once took an errant right, a confident press through shrubs that obscure the path. I clamber over a tree and feel a sharp prick in my shoulder, a second shortly after. I turn to find I am an ivy marionette, the twirling roots of the fairy fern having reached down from above grasp my jacket.
Despite the warning in Shitholes, I have stumbled into the infestation.
I leave my jacket hanging and press on, careful to swipe away the curious tendrils as I pass. Before long I find the site of the Stranger’s fire, a column of fairy fern that ascends into the trees and spreads across the canopy like an atom bomb.
This is where it started, where our paths first crossed.
There is a circle of sunlight near the column, a place where the fairy fern has accidentally fallen a tree and not yet had time to patch the hole in its cover.
I sit and I wait and I move as the sun does so that I am always facing in the direction of my should-be shadow. I imagine that the Stranger will arrive quietly, folding himself out from the dark of some tree or simply appearing in a place that was previously empty.
When he comes, he is walking. He wipes a thin trickle of blood from his neck with the back of his hand, the same hand that he uses to brandish his pistol at the creeping ferns. The Stranger walks in a line toward me, as though held to an invisible path, and he is only ten feet away when his eyes meet mine.
He tries to run.
-traveler
