Skitter - Part 2

I Have An Anomaly Problem

Skitter Part 1

Skitter Part 3

Deer Skull: 6x6 Ink, Marker, Watercolour, by Skives

“I can’t control the world, so I tried to control myself. I wrote laws. Don’t use blue pens, you’re a black ink man. Instant coffee is for plebs, drink filter or go without. Fear of the dark is for idiots and children. I created a bubble of self-beliefs and lived happily in that bubble, but now something sharp has come along and popped it.”

I tend to over-write my journal entries, because the idea that someone might find them and fall in vicarious love with me appeals, but it’s not a helpful practice, scientifically-speaking. This place is changing and I need to change the way I document my time within it, so here is an unvarnished account of my morning: I stepped outside, tripped over a mouldering skull, and shrieked incoherently.

It began two weeks ago, when I woke up to find an anomaly in my cabin. The encounter was alarming, as they often are, but we both got through it unscathed. Anomalies can materialize anywhere and I chalked this near miss up to chance, a place is a place, there’s no greater meaning to it. Anomalies are random by nature.

After, I began to notice things. Feelings and impressions at first, the sort you keep to yourself or run the risk of sounding nuts. An empty space between two trees that felt like it was inhabited just before I looked at it, a sense that something silent was hovering close by, unseen. I put these heebie-jeebies down to the over-fertilized imagination that comes with prolonged isolation, and resolved to make the trek into town for a social battery charge. This was all in my mind, just another case of the deep woods yips. I pottered about as usual, keeping intrusive thoughts at arm’s length, pretending all was well. Around me, the air felt thicker.

As days passed, the weird feelings and prickled instincts became glimpsed sights and half-heard sounds. I saw leaves shimmy as though released by a covert observer, I heard gravel crunch and stones click, always behind me. The air grew thicker still, and the inexplicable clicks and swishes and bumps in the night became more frequent. In time, I had to admit this wasn’t the yips, I was being stalked. Something out there was growing in confidence, testing limits, getting closer every day. What the hell was it?

I considered the possibilities: A person lurking in the forest, just to fuck with me? Unlikely, no-one knows I’m here. An animal? Probably not. I’m running in failsafe mode, and predators only stalk prey they are allowed to eat. It could be Max, but skulking isn’t his style. Max favours a dramatic entrance, usually followed by an irritating instruction to stop doing something I enjoy and start doing something I dislike.

Could it be an anomaly? No chance. Anomalies don’t interact with humans, and I have never seen one exhibit behaviour that even hinted at sentience. Anomalies blip into existence, float around ethereally, then vanish. They are code-ghosts, wisps of unmoored data. Empty packets. The thing stalking me is not an anomaly, I’m certain of it. I’d stake my life on it.

That account of faulty reasoning, which will not appear in my journal, brings me to this morning when, sleepy-headed and in need of a cigarette, I opened the cabin door to find a rotting deer skull on my porch. The experience triggered a brief shrieking episode, about which I am unashamed, but once the shock had passed, I dropped to my haunches and examined the artefact more closely. The deer’s neck had been severed cleanly, just below the upper jaw. Most of the tissue and skin were gone, and the eye sockets were empty. I could see no sign that scavengers had gnawed at the skull, it seemed pristine, as though the animal had been killed and kept, and stranger still, ribbons of dirty red fabric had been crudely wrapped around and between the deer’s antlers. The skull looked as though it had been gift-wrapped by a very young child.

‘Hmm’ I thought to myself, standing up to light another smoke. The Zippo sparked, I raised my eyes to guide the tip of the cigarette into its flame, and saw the characteristic, bent-light shimmer of an anomaly. It floated above the border between the deep woods and the clearing around my cabin. And then it moved…

Skitter Part 1

Skitter Part 3

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Paid subscribers - click the link below the fold to download a high resolution 6X6 scan of the illustration in the story that you are welcome to print out and display (just don’t re-sell it please!)