The Stranger trips over his own shadow and it scatters out from under him.
I realize two things, then:
-I would never be able to do to the Stranger what the Stranger did to me. I don’t know why I thought I could.
-This is a stranger, but it is not the Stranger.
This man is younger, he has darker hair and a full set of teeth. He is not as tall or as thickly muscled. He has all the mannerisms of the Stranger and the same substantial shadow, but this is a different man.
The air cracks and a bullet buries itself in the trunk of a nearby tree. I’m buffeted by shards of dead pine, sucked dry by the vampire fern overhead. I scurry to the safety of thicker trees and my ankle lights up in pain. Falling, I feel the tendrils of the fairy fern tear out of my calf. There is another shot- one that likely would have found its mark if I had been standing.
I stay low to the ground, out of sight of the stranger and that much further from the predatory ferns. The man lets out a frustrated yelp and the canopy shakes as he fends off prying tendrils. There are bones in the treetops- I see them now that the light has changed.
“Throw out you gun,” the man says, “And step out here.”
My heart stops for a moment- the man assumes I was smart enough to bring a gun, that I would know how to use one if I had it.
“No,” I yell, crouching behind a thick stump, “You… throw down your gun.”
The man yelps again and yells- “Fucking plants!”
“They, uh, won’t stop until I tell them to…” I say.
“Fuck you,” he says, “I’m not an idiot.”
“Why are you here?”
“Same reason as you,” he says, and I hear him edging closer, picking his way across the underbrush, “The book, right?”
“Who told you to burn this place down?”
This stops him.
“Somebody already tried that,” I tell him, “Look what happened.”
“You a park ranger?” the man asks, taking another step closer.
“What?”
“A park ranger. Now’s the time to tell me if you are.”
“I’m not a park ranger.”
“Didn’t think so,” he says.
I take a breath, preparing to run, and the pick falls from my mouth. As it hits the ground, a tangled mass of fern and bone swings down from the trees, shuddering past me to the ground. The man is not more than a few feet behind me, but he is distracted by the sudden appearance of this ghoul and with that moment, I make a terrible decision.
I make finger guns at the man and yell: “Stop!”
And, against the odds, it works.
The stranger doesn’t wait to see if I have a real gun. He reaches down and seems to pull his shadow over himself and, with that, he is gone. I am left alone with the fairy fern and the hanging skeleton of an unlucky hunter.
I search the ground for the pick, for what was little more than pine mash when it fell, but it has vanished. The fairy fern attempts a lazy pursuit as I hike back to the road, but falters at the edge of its infestation.
My mind is elsewhere, replaying the events of the last year and wondering how many strangers I have passed without realizing there could be more than one.
-traveler
