I'm thinking of writing a novel.

[Jonas]

Yeah that one was significantly better overall. There's also a hint of mysteries to come, which is a good way to keep people interested.

[chris the cynic]

Ok, so I had three days of very little progress for a different reason each day. I tried to make up for that today, depending on how long this thing will be I'm behind by anywhere from 559 words to 10,559 words. Here's the next section, in which I show how I can't write dialogue.

Bad Novel (Days 3-6)

I woke up with a cat on me. Once upon a time in a different town, they'd stack up rocks on you if you refused to cooperate with their literal witch trials. If you still refused they'd put more rocks on you. They'd keep it up until you were crushed to death if you didn't give in. When I imagine what that must have felt like, I imagine it was like having a cat on you. Only more so.

There are people who would throw the cat across the room. Such people do not depend on said cats for their housing. Plus it's not the nicest thing in the world to do. I considered slowly sliding the cat off me, but it seemed like too much work especially since I was laying on one of my arms. I resigned myself to laying there until the cat woke up and lost interest.

Then the phone rang. I got up without thinking about the cat. The impression I got is that he would have been sent flying if he hadn't got his claws in me first. I yelped in pain, he swore at me. When you live with a talking cat even getting the phone is a hassle. The same could be true of a non-talking cat I suppose.

I picked up the phone, Jonas went to eat food.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” it was Amy. “Are you doing anything right now?”

“Well, I was sleeping.”

“It's just about noon.”

I checked my watch, she was right, “Can you imagine a better time to sleep?”

“I suppose not. Now that you're awake how would you feel about hanging out and helping out with something?”

I had nothing better to do. All four of my friends were working. Hanging out and helping out apparently doing something outside in the cold. So I put on my coat and made sure to grab gloves. Jonas asked who had called, but not where I was going, I told him the strange one had called. I didn't tell him about what, or anything else, because he didn't ask.



The sun was out, the snow was blinding. I realized immediately that I should have brought sunglasses but my the apartment was on the third floor, and I don't actually use my corneas that much, so I squinted and endured. The sidewalks were mostly shoveled, I was not attacked by any ice.

Amy had not forgotten her sunglasses. In fact, other than a black backpack, she was dressed exactly as she had been before. When I got to her she shook my hand, “Thanks for coming. I've only been in town a couple weeks, if you'd turned me down I'd be on my own. We're going that way,” she pointed.

We started walking that way. I asked, “So what are we doing?”

“Photographing cryptids.”

“The New England Sea Serpent died more than a hundred years ago.”

“Closer to fifty - and there's no definitive evidence it died. It could have gone on to greener pastures. Anyway, we're after land based ones today.”

I considered pointing out that a sea serpent was unlikely to make use of a pasture, but dismissed that as unnecessarily literal. I considered asking Amy if she had ever considered the possibility she was chasing fairytales, but dismissed that as unnecessarily rude. I instead settled on, “How do you know where to look?”

“My dinger went off.”

I almost tripped at that. “Your dinger?”

“Yeah, it's a thing that goes ding.” She paused, perhaps considering that an adequate explanation. Several steeps later she expanded on it somewhat. “I've been walking all over. In the town, in the fields, in the woods, not one ding. Then, this morning, it went nuts. I had to put the power to make it stop.” It occurred to me that Amy's strangeness may have been greater than I initially imagined.

“What makes it-” we turned a corner and I was blinded. The problem with new fallen snow is, quite simply, that it is white as white can be. Which means that if you happen to be looking at from just the wrong angle you might as well be staring at the sun. Except that if you look at the sun you can simply look down and all is well, if you look up from the snow you risk having your eyes contact the actual sun. A lot of people don't think about it much, but I have fairly sensitive eyes. I closed my eyes and considered my options.

The best solution seemed to be to keep my more sensitive eye, my left eye, closed. Then I could squint with my right eye, and pray that we turned in another direction soon. I opened my eyes to find that Amy was holding sunglasses out in front of me. Not the ones she had been wearing, she was still wearing those.

“Well, take them.”

For a moment the feeling of bright white light searing into my eyes was forgotten. “You carry spare sunglasses?” I suppose it isn't really that strange.

“Always.” I put them on, they weren't the best fit, far from it, but they were much better than nothing. “That's better. We can't have you blind, we're nearly there.”

We started walking again. It took a little while, but I remembered what I had wanted to ask, “So, what makes the dinger ding?”

“A lot of things, I like to think of it as a Geiger counter for weirdness.”

“That's not an answer.”

She stopped, turned to me, smiled, said, “I know,” then pointed at a stretch of woods that had just come into view, “That's where we're going.” It was the same place I'd heard something following me that morning.

“There? Really?”

“What made you say that?”

“Nothing.”

“No, no, no. You don't do that for nothing. People don't look at a random place with no meaning and react with shock and disbelief.” I think shock and disbelief was overstating the matter. Mild surprise at most.

“It's just that I was there last night. Well, this morning actually.”

“That's great.” I have tried, and failed, to come up with an adequate way to describe the pure joy in her voice at this point. I imagine that if I'd told her she won the lottery she'd have a hart time being more enthusiastic. “Well within the right time frame. What happened?” I imagine that I had an odd look on my face, but for all I know I could have been without expression. “Oh, come on! Something must have happened to make it stand out. You didn't react that way to anywhere else and you must have been to all of those places too.”

That was true enough. Though it is worth pointing out that I didn't really pay attention to any of them. The truth was that I felt silly talking about hearing something in the woods. The woods are a place where you hear things. Also, her reaction had caught me off guard. “I think something in there was following me.”

“Did it look like a kangaroo with wings and antlers, by any chance?”

“What?” In retrospect perhaps that shouldn't have sounded strange given that we had earlier discussed sea serpents and dinging dingers. On the other hand, she asked me if I'd seen a kangaroo with wings and antlers.

“Nevermind. What did it look like?”

“I didn't really see it, I just heard it.”

“On the ground or in the trees?”

“On the ground.”

“I don't suppose you know how tall it was.”

“Not a chance.”

She took off her backpack, and started taking things out of it, “These are camera traps. An animal walks in front of them and they snap a photo.” She handed me two of them. One was clearly mass produced, it was a rectangular gray case with straps on one side, on the other side was a window with rows of lights behind it, the camera's lens and something else, probably the sensor. The other one had a case made out of wood and plexiglass and inside was what appeared to be a low end digital camera wired to another camera's removable flash, a large battery, a switch, and something else I didn't recognize, probably the sensor. The craftsmanship was pretty good, but it was clearly hand made. “Most people set up one trap and leave it at that. We're going to try for overkill. Which in this case means five.”

“Where?”

“Don't know, let's have a look.”

I suppose there are people who can look at a trees and say, “That's a maple, that's an oak,” I am not among them. With the exception of a white birch all trees look the same to me once the leaves come off. Well, all leafy trees. There weren't any evergreens in the area.

The snow had fallen off the branches creating a cratered surface. Any trace of whatever animal had been there before was gone. Not to say there were no footprints, but I was guessing the human ones belonged to Amy.

She told me to set up the ones she gave me wherever I saw fit. Which meant that I looked around a lot and never figured out where to put them. Amy chose where to set up the traps by standing against a tree and trying to get a feel for what the field of vision would be for the trap. One time she asked me to walk from on place to another so see if that would cross the path of the camera.

When she finished deciding where to put the three she had I got to work putting them up while she worked out where to put the other two. The first one looked like the mass produced one she'd handed me, except black and slightly larger. I wrapped the straps around the tree she'd picked for it and asked, “If something were living in town wouldn't we have seen it?”

“How long have you lived here?”

“All my life.” I tightened the straps, checked that it was secure, and moved on to the next trap.

“Have you ever seen a deer?”

“Yeah, one time.” I picked up the second trap, it was like a smaller version of the first. It looked like it had seen more life too, it had the kinds of scrapes and scuffs I'm used to seeing on my laptops. The kind of wear that makes technophiles think you're a horrible person. I tried to figure out the best height to put it at. The tree wasn't exactly uniform and if I put the trap in the wrong place it might end up pointed in a direction she hadn't expected.

“Was that time easily miss able?” I figured out the best place to put the trap. “Or was it tap-dancing on main street?” I started to work on strapping the trap onto the tree.

“Easy to miss.” It had just shown up on a side street while I was out for a walk, then gone away just as quickly. Not exactly the most exciting story ever. I finished installing the second trap.

“So say you had missed it, would you think there were no deer in town?”

“Probably. But I'd still think deer existed. People see them all the time.”

“You asked about in town. Anyway these haven't been in town long. And they weren't right here,” she gestured around, “until last night.”

“And what are these?”

“Don't know, something that goes ding.”

I got to work putting up the third trap. This one looked like it was home made as well, but out of a metal ammunition case instead of wood. If I had something, anything, worth doing with my time I would have considered what I was doing a waste of it. Instead I was faced with the fact that I was assisting someone in her search for things that go ding. Someone I really didn't know.

The problem wasn't just that it seemed she may well be insane, it was that she didn't even know what she was looking for.

“I'm just hoping the come back. Well that, and that they don't know what a camera looks like.” I finished with the third trap.

I walked over to where she was, she'd already installed one and was about to put up the wooden one. I helped. “How intelligent do you think these things are?”

She held the trap in place while I worked on the straps. “There's an old Tibetan – don't pull those too tight. This one's not the strongest. There's an old Tibetan proverb. Question and answer.” I finished attaching it to to the tree. “The question is, 'What's the most cunning animal?'” She stepped back, pulled at the straps, and apparently decided it was properly installed.

“And the answer?”

“One that man has never seen.” She switched it on. Then double checked and switched on the other four. We walked back to the street and she turned to face the woods. “Ok, looks like we're done here.” It occurred to me that anything capable of remaining undetected would probably smell our scents, or notice our footprints, and stay away. I thought it best not to bring that up.

She thanked me for keeping her company and helping her out, then we walked back the way we came. We discussed the life of a cryptozoologist. She found herself in the same position as myself, the not needing to work bit not the talking cat bit, and decided to fill the time doing what she loved. Which, on the one hand made it seem that she was light years ahead of me because she had direction. On the other hand that direction was chasing what I believed to be imaginary creatures.

When we got to where we'd met up I gave her her sunglasses back and we parted ways. She promised to tell me the results of the work we did.



Nicolae was waiting for me in my apartment. Startled me. He asked where I had been. When I told him I was with a cryptozoologist he said, “Loch Ness is three thousand miles that way.” And pointed. When explained to him that he was pointing north northwest he adjusted his direction and repeated, “That way.” Which I conceded was close enough.

He had come to ask about money. The specific question was, “If I needed cash how much could you loan me an how soon would you need it back?”

My response was, “You'd have to ask the cat.”

Apparently Nicolae had recently found out about a property on the market selling for far less than what it was worth, with the seller willing to finance it himself thus sidestepping the entire hydra like problem that was the credit market. The problem was the down payment.

Nicolae assured me that it was a beautiful brick building with store windows looking out onto a well walked street with an ideal floorspace for his purposes. He told me about nice hardwood floors and wide open spaces. He went on and on about the electrical system. Let me repeat that, he sang the praises of the building's electrical system.

My response was, “Talk to the cat.”

So he did.



While Jonas and Nicolae discussed financial concerns I ... well first I hooked up a laptop I have, which has no screen, to the TV. I sat down to play a game, and then realized that Christmas was coming fairly soon. And by fairly soon I mean before the end of the week. So I got the tree and assorted accoutrement.

I assembled the tree stand while Jonas and Nicolae discussed the terms of the financing agreement. In theory assembling the stand should have involved sticking a rod into an already assembled tripod and tightening three screw like things. Fiddling with the screws it was supposed to allow one to make sure it was perfectly vertical. That was all in theory. Unfortunately in practice two of the screws were out of alignment. That meant that I had to screw around with it a lot and was relieved when I got it to hold the thing, even though the angle meant that the tree would be tilted.

While Jonas and Nicolae discussed start up capital I put put the bottom of the tree on the stand and started the tedious project of straightening out the branches. Then I put the top on and did the same with it. It was an annoying long process, which would have made me long for an actual tree if I weren't aware of how truly painful it can be to be stabbed with real fir tree needles.

While Jonas and Nicolae talked about fixed costs I checked the Christmas lights, which naturally weren't working right. I found a strand that had some working bulbs used it to, one at a time, check the other bulbs. By shuffling things around I was able to get three working strands. Turned out I only needed two. That left me with about five nonfunctional spare parts strands. Anyway, I got to work putting on the lights, and the star.

With the lights on, I got out the tinsel while Jonas and Nicolae discussed return on investment. I started on the ornaments when they discussed inventory.

By the time I was finishing with the tree Nicolae and Jonas had reached an agreement. If Nicolae could get enough money elsewhere to be able to afford both the building and the business with Jonas' help Jonas would provide that help.

Nicolae went on his way, Jonas batted at some of the ornaments. It told him that if he broke one I'd throw him out the window, he said, “Then you'd have to get a job,” which was true. I said not to break them anyway.

I switched the tv back over to satellite programing and put on an educational channel. Jesus was on TV, an astronomer said the star, which he interpreted to be an alignment with astrological significance, was born on April 17th. One wonders how he feels about everyone celebrating his birthday at the wrong time. Or how he feels about the fact he's the only one who never gets any presents.

Jonas hopped into my lap, which was a lot less pleasant for me than it is for him. I asked him what he thought about someone looking for cryptids in the area. Jonas said it was absurd, which I thought was reasonable, but then went on to say, “Bigfoot never comes this far east,” which I thought was absurd.

“You believe in Bigfoot?”

“Why shouldn't I? You believe in things far more absurd.” I knew better than to ask for examples. I just pet the cat. I did think about the possibility that Bigfoot was less absurd than things I believed in. I dismissed the possibility. I was convinced that, while I might believe in strange things (though none came to mind), nothing I believed in was as strange as a ten foot tall 500 pound hominid wandering around America with no basis in the fossil record.

Of course I realized that the fact that I was disagreeing with a talking cat about the absurdity of my beliefs probably didn't speak very well about such things. I was forced to admit that, while my beliefs might not be absurd, my life was pretty clearly absurd already and, with the introduction of Amy, possibly getting more so.

[bobby 55]

I laughed out loud a few times reading this. You have a talent for putting absurdities into words. I also wait with bated breath to see what's in the woods.

[chris the cynic]

Of the group only one of us, Lori, was going to be spending Christmas with family. My family is living happily in the Sandwich Islands, and while the weather is nice and the volcano is beautiful a seventeen hour trip is not my idea of a good time. A seventeen hour trip, followed by a potentially disastrous meeting with my relatives at a time of year that seems to breed conflict followed by another seventeen hour trip certainly doesn't jump out at me as something desirable. It didn't do that at the time either.

Jacob was from away, where his family remained, and Isa's parents moved away. For whatever reason neither of them made the journey to be with their families. As for Nicolae, he doesn't talk about his family. I get the impression that there is no great story there, no epic feud or long hidden secret, he just doesn't bring them up and was, for whatever reason, not spending Christmas with them. My impression is disinterest to be honest.

So, I invited everyone over. I grabbed a ham, peeled some potatoes, and pulled out the slightly less cheap dishes. Jonas meowed. I dug out the Tom Lehrer records and made sure the turntable on my does-everything-but-reel-to-reel-and-eight-track audio thing was still turning. Jonas licked himself. I found a tablecloth, cloth napkins, and the slightly less cheap than normal silverware, then I set the table. Jonas went to sleep on the dryer. I tried not to make the building explode as I prepared food.

Lori was only going to be with her family for lunch, so we decided to eat together at supper, with the rest showing up earlier. Isa was the first to arrive, she brought with her more bad sci fi movies on DVD, four to a disk, and we put one on while waiting for more to arrive the discussion centered around potentially confounding factors in a theory of everything. And crows. Apparently there were a lot of crows in a nearby parking lot. But mostly it was the first thing. Which is almost impossible to describe to someone who isn't there at the time. Someone who has never had such a conversation would be well advised to have one.

The next in was Nicolae, who was still enraptured with the electrical system of the building he hoped to buy. Thankfully he didn't go on about it for two long, instead he produced a notebook full of plans, including not one but five drafts of a preliminary floorplan. One idea I found notable was that he was considering having a section labeled, "Evil," with a subheading of, "Know Your Enemy." In that section he would place evil things. Obviously the crown jewel of any evil section is Mein Kampf, for reasons best described by Michael Wayne Godwin, but Nicolae assured me that there was a wide selection of evil that was both in print and out of copyright so that one could study evil without contributing to it financially. That didn't even take into account the books documenting evil which were written by good people.

I found it notable, but not financially wise. Even among those who pay no heed to Nietzsche I doubted there would be that large of a market for gazing into the abyss. Gazing into a reflection of the abyss, yes. Gazing into a fictional abyss, or a fictional version of the real abyss, gazing into the abyss that could have been, even gazing into the actual abyss through the eyes of someone fighting it I could understand. But something written by the abyss itself, for the abyss in support of the abyss? I didn't see that as a good seller. On the other hand I did once read a really good book on Nazi propaganda that basically boiled down to the abyss annotated.

Also, I wasn't much of a reader.



Jacob came in, he had a soccer ball for no apparent reason. He plopped down on the couch, looked at the TV, by now we were on our third movie, and asked, "Godzilla?" while spinning the ball.

Isa and I said, "Gigantis," in unison.

Jacob leaned back and made himself comfortable. "Never seen that." He was silent for maybe three and a half seconds. "Why'd they change his name?"

I shrugged, Isa, mumbled, "Don't know," and Nicolae said, "Stupidity." Jason responded with an, "Ah," and turned his attention back to the screen.

Lori arrived before the movie was over. "I know, I'm later than I said I'd - Hey, Giagantis." She grabbed a chair from near the kitchen table and joined us. The movie ended the way it always does. For longer than I've been alive the movie has always ended the same way.

We migrated to the table. The ham was slightly overcooked. The potatoes were good. Jonas woke up, sauntered in, and asked for ham. Lori gave him some, and he left. Jonas can be unsociable at times.

An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer was on the turntable, Jacob controlled the direction of discussion. This was a good thing, there is something inherently cool about the idea of an iron clad with particle cannons. More or less all of Jacob's ideas were like that. Though, like the group as a whole, he was also interested in giant monsters. So discussion also touched on how no one ever seems to study giant monsters in the movies. Consider how strong Godzilla's bones must be to support his weight, or how strong his organs must be for him to fall without splashing. And yet we so rarely see teams of scientists looking over this stuff.

And that was pretty much how we spent Christmas. I ate too much, and ended up resting on the couch where I fell asleep looking at the patterns on the ceiling created by the blinking lights on the tree. After the others left, of course.



"Why do you even have a bed?" Jonas was standing on me. It was morning.

"Did you want something?" He just looked at me, in that way that cats look at people. I picked him up and set him on the floor. He immediately jumped back onto the couch, and then walked onto me, but I at least had enough time to sit up before I wound up with a cat on me again. "Did you want something?"

"An endless supply of tuna." He curled up.

"Did you want something attainable?"

"Guess." I pet the cat, he purred. I assumed that meant I had guessed correctly.

After a short time, I began to feel sad. It was a familiar feeling. When I don't have something to occupy my mind it happens. Sometimes thoughts slip into my mind, something stupid I said when I was 13 years old, a mistake I made at some point, a misunderstanding that should have been avoided. Things I would have hoped long gone that somehow snuck into an empty mind. Things I would have hoped would no longer have a hold on me, but yet could still leave me depressed.

Sometimes there was no clear cause. Sadness would seem to come from nowhere, as if it was seeping into me our of the air, or lifting out of the ground to envelop me. I'd wonder why it was happening, and have no clear reason. Just an increasing sense of unease, and a pressure on my eyes as tears prepared to push themselves out. I rarely cried at times like that, but I could always feel the tears, ready.

When such a thing happened I'd try to head it off, but never really could manage it. The most logical thing seemed to be filling up the time with something else. You'd think it would be as simple as popping in a DVD, but I'd find I was in the mood for nothing. The experience always seemed to be accompanied by a sort of decision paralysis anyway. I wouldn't be able to decide what to do, and so I'd do nothing. Trying to have something else, like a coin flip, make decisions for me was always useless in such cases, because I wouldn't be able to decide what to assign to heads or tails.

So the usual result was that I'd do nothing. Minutes would blur together, then hours, soon it would be afternoon, then time to sleep, and the days would fade one into the next, if something didn't jolt me out of it weeks could do the same. In particularly bad cases it could spread to months and years.

Which is how I spent my time in college.

As you can imagine, I wasn't exactly eager to repeat that experience. So when the phone rang I pretty much sprinted to it. Only to discover that it was a telemarketer. I supposed I should be grateful for caller id. I didn't want to sit back down, because I knew what that would mean. It would mean an entire day spent doing nothing but sitting there being depressed. At least. So I walked around the apartment trying to figure out what to do. Nothing came to mind, of course.

I looked through every movie I had, twice, none appealed to me. I dug through stuff in storage, nothing interested me. I looked through the movies three more times. I paced around the apartment in ever more erratic circles. Nothing. I broke a sweat just by walking in circles. I swore at the universe itself. Nothing happened. Jonas had long since disappeared from sight at this point. He remained unseen.

When the phone rang again I picked it up without checking the caller id. It was Amy, "You awake?"

I looked at my watch, it was 8:30 in the morning, what had Jonas been thinking waking me up so early. "Yes, unfortunately."

"Well could you come look at something with me? Same spot as before."

Some people wonder what salvation is. I don't. Salvation is someone asking you to hang out when you're on the verge of slipping into near catatonic depression and your only hope of stopping it is to walk in circles hoping for happiness to jump out at you. Of course I said yes.

This time I remembered my sunglasses.



I found Amy in the woods looking at what remained of her camera traps. The first I saw was the wooden one. It's strange to say, but I felt sorry for it. When last I saw it it had been a nice MacGyvered together bit of equipment. Now it was wood fragments and splinters. The camera was gone, the flash broken, the battery punctured, the plexiglass cracked. Much of it was still attached to the tree. The strap was the only part wholly intact. Two fragments of wood were still attached to it, the plexiglass hung, sideways, from one of those and various pieces of wood were still screwed into that. The flash had stayed inside what remained of the case, the battery hung from a cord.

"Look at this." Amy was pointing to the tree, slightly above the trap. There were parallel marks, scratched into the tree. "What do you make of those?"

My first thought was to quote the movie Airplane, 'I can make a hat, I can make a plane...' but dismissed it as a bad idea for two reasons, first it didn't apply. Second she was serious. A third reason also occurred to me, that being that I had no way knowing if she'd ever seen the movie Airplane. I gave a straightforward honest answer instead, "I have no idea."

"There's more, follow me." She led me to another of the traps. This one had been smashed open, the metal housing bent and battered. Amy pointed to one particular type of damage. There were three parallel scrapes that almost cut through the metal. Then she led me to where another trap had been. The entire thing was gone. "This is the best example." She pointed to where the strap had been cut. Then showed using her own fingers that the four deep gashes in the tree were spaced like fingers. "I'm guessing whatever did this didn't like flash photography. At least it was kind enough to leave some evidence."

I had nothing to add. This was in town, there were houses on the other side of the street. Ther wasn't supposed to be anything with big claws in town. Wildlife was supposed to stay outside, in the wild. That's what made it wild life and not city life.

"So, what do you think?"

Like I said, I had nothing to add. "I don't know."

She looked happy, "Well I'd say I found something. Now I just need to figure out what." She turned back to the scarred tree. "And you doubted me." I still did. My first thought was that I had to look up information on bears. Specifically whether this was within their range, and whether or not they'd be in hibernation at that time of year.

Then I started thinking about things not animal related. Like the fact she'd just lost her equipment. "How much do the camera traps cost?"

She was still facing away from me, acting out different ways an animal could have created a claw mark like the one on the tree. "Oh, about one to two hundred dollars, depending on the make."

"That sucks." I wished I had something better to say. "Merry Christmas yesterday, by the way."

She turned to me. "Thanks," she started to turn away, "You too." Then she turned back. "Newton Day." And offered absolutely no indication what that meant.

I think my lack of understanding was completely understandable, and the my response was more or less ideal given the situation, "What?"

"Someone once told me that December 25th is Newton Day, since it's Issac Newton's birthday." She shrugged.

"He was born on Christmas?"

"In the Julian calendar, which kind of defeats the point since today is December the 13th in the Julian Calender. But the point is to give atheists something to celebrate at this time of year."

I thought that was absurd. "Yeah, because when I think 'atheist' I think 'most famous alchemist and Bible code proponent of all time.'" Amy laughed. I took that as a sign that I had done something useful. That was important since so far I'd felt rather useless. All I'd done was look at claw marks.

That did change somewhat. Amy had me look to see if the animals had left any sign, but the snow had melted and the ground had frozen so there were no footprints, and the trees proved thoroughly useless in snatching fur or fiber. So I did save some time, but I did so by making the uselessness of the search become apparent more quickly.

Amy asked where the nearest hardware store was, and it turned out to be hard enough to describe that I ended up just leading her there. She bought wood, plexiglass, batteries, nails, screws and copper pipes. I had no idea why she got the copper pipes. The rest I guessed she was going to use to build new camera traps.



The next day Isa and Jacob invited me over again. Isa was in one of the chairs watching a movie from 1983 about random people being transported into a parallel dimension. Jacob was in the kitchen getting something for us to drink. I decided to tell them about the destroyed camera traps to see what they thought might have done it.

I sat on the floor, back against the couch. "You know the woods off Pine Street?"

Isa lowered herself off her chair, onto the floor, "I know not one of the trees is a pine."

"Well I met someone who thinks that an unknown species has taken up residence there."

Jacob came in with three glasses of orange juice and asked, "Who was this?" while giving me one of them.

"Cryptozoologist named Amy. Anyway, she set up cameras in the woods, yesterday she found they'd all been destroyed." Jacob set the other two glasses on the table and sat on the floor. I told them about the damage to the camera traps and claw marks on the trees. Then I asked them, "So what big things have claws around here?"

"You mean like a wolf?" Jacob asked.

Isa quickly shot down that idea, "The last wolf in this state died in 1908." She reached to take a glass from the table.

I asked, "How do you know these things?" Isa shrugged.

Jacob wasn't willing to let his idea die, "There are still wolf sightings."

"Speaking of sightings," she took a sip of juice, "the government commissioned a study two years ago to investigate the mountain lion sightings."

I didn't think wolves or mountain lions had destroyed the traps, I didn't think wolves or mountain lions were anywhere near us. I didn't think Isa thought that either, and I said so, "You don't honestly think there are mountain lions in town."

Isa shook her head, "No." She scratched her head. "How 'bout a bear?"

"That was the only thing I could think of, but have you ever heard of a bear in town?"

"Have you ever heard of anything in town?" was Jacob's answer. "I don't know the last time I heard someone talk about an animal that wasn't a skunk or a bird." He paused, drank his juice, then said, "I haven't heard of anything in town with big claws. I haven't heard of anything nearby with big claws, except maybe wild turkeys." Isa proposed a toast to wild turkeys, so we toasted wild turkeys.

After the toast the conversation turned to the movie, then we watched and discussed a silent film from the 1920s about an Italian guy doing good stuff in Hell, and after that discussion turned to strange geometries. It was interesting for a while, but mostly over my head. I eventually let myself out.

I considered walking home a different way. Whether what was in the woods was bear or mountain lion I didn't want to meet it. But the problem was that the area wasn't the best thought out part of town. The roads didn't go in straight lines, and since I didn't ever actually use them I couldn't really predict where I'd come out if I went down an unfamiliar one. So I just walked quickly and hoped that whatever had been there had been annoyed enough by the camera traps to decide to be elsewhere.

It hadn't gone.

I heard it run to the edge of the wood the moment I came near. As I walked it followed me. I walked faster. It walked faster. I ran, it ran. It stopped at the edge of the wood. I didn't. I kept going until I felt like my lungs would explode. I tried to tell myself any fear was irrational, that neither bears nor mountain lions would be in the town, but I remembered the tree with claw marks on it, and the fact that bark is harder to cut than human flesh.

When I reached my apartment my breathing had largely returned to normal. Jonas was near the refrigerator, head on the floor, staring intently at what appeared to be nothing.

I asked "What's up?"

He said, "There's a mouse in here," without looking up.

"Then kill it."

He slowly lifted himself off the ground, turned towards me, and made eye contact, "That's what I'm trying to do."

I said, "Carry on," and walked away. I think he may insulted me after I left the room, but I couldn't hear clearly. I went to sleep.

[chris the cynic]

This will almost certainly in not appear in this story. Its not that I don't like it, it is simply that it does not fit. I repeat, this is in no way whatsoever related to the story.

-

She got there before me, the door had been bricked in, probably years ago. For a moment she gave me a 'what now?' look, but then she stood very, very still except for her hands which she slowly raised. I turned around.

He had caught up to us.

I raised my hands, palms facing the man with the gun. "We don't want any-" on the positive side, he didn't use the gun. That really didn't make him shooting her with a taser any less traumatic. I turned to see her collapsing to the ground, and turned back to him, "What the fuck?! She was surrendering."

He spoke with a disdain I couldn't comprehend, "It's not a she. It's a monster. Take a look for yourself."

I turned around and looked at her. She was unconscious, I didn't think tasers were supposed to do that. She had changed. She definitely wasn't human. She wasn't a werewolf either.

The first thing I noticed were her legs. They might have looked like those of a large cat, if not for the lack of fur. In fact her whole body was now hairless. I knelt to get a closer look. I lifted one of the tentacles coming out of her side. It was coated in a clear viscous slime. It felt sickening and I wondered if it would wash off.

The tentacle I held hung limply, it was featureless. I moved on to another one, this one had suction cups that reminded me of an octopus'. I found that a third one had sharp claws, about as long as two joints of my little finger, in the center of each suction up.

I pushed the tentacles aside to get a closer look at something I glimpsed under them. Several slits, what I imagined were gills, ran along her ribs. They were covered in the slime.

I wiped off my hands on my pants and moved on to her arms. I lifted the left one and examined it closely. It had taken on a gray color, and was much more muscular than before. Her fingers were longer. They also remained separate all the way to her wrist. At the end of each finger, as well as on her thumb, was a long black claw, much like the ones I'd seen on the tentacle. I laid down her arm.

Her head resembled nothing so much as a harbor seal with some horrible skin disease. As I knelt there she came to. She was clearly afraid.

I stood up to get a better look at her as a whole. Then I spoke, without turning to face the man. Without taking my eyes off of her. "I see no monster here."

[bobby 55]

The second post is the story that you should try write a novel about imo. Not for the "one in a month", but later when you're over your writers block.

[chris the cynic]

I'm wondering if I should just start pming this to Bobby.

Anyway here is me falling even farther behind where I should theoretically be and still completely failing to show instead of tell. I give you all more exposition.

-

The next day was warm, 50 degrees at least. Fahrenheit, I mean. Kelvin is annoying to keep track of. It was a good day to go walking around with a crypotzoologist. With the camera traps destroyed Amy decided that it was time to do more to track them. Whatever they may be.

This involved a simple two step process. Step one was to look at a map of town to locate the perimeter of the woods. Step two was to walk it with her dinger. This meant that I saw the dinger for the first time. The dinger from the outside the dinger looked like a long wooden box with an antenna coming out of one side. For some reason it reminded me somewhat of a cellular phone. Not that any cell phone was ever that large. It was maybe a foot long, four inches wide and four inches tall. The antenna was as long as the box and looked like it could be extended farther.

One side of the box could be opened to check on the internal bits. The end opposite the antenna contained the power source, several D-cell batteries. Rechargeable ones. There were several pieces of circuit board about the right size to have come from phones or pocket calculators, one USB stick, and one thing that I thought was a vacuum tube. There were some other things I didn't recognize, and what looked like the inside of a wristwatch she later explained that it contained a tuning fork which kept perfect time 'except when things are weird.' All of these parts were connected by various wires, which eventually fed into bells that appeared to have been ripped off of an alarm clock.

As it turned out the woods extended through three different towns, so we knew it would be a long walk. Of course three towns where I live isn't the same as three towns elsewhere. There isn't really any clear way to tell where one town begins and another ends. In one spot there's an ordinary residential street where my town is on on side, and another town is on the other side. Walk across the street, cross the town line. I guess that's what happens when you put towns close together and wait a couple hundred years.

Regardless, it was a long walk. We started where we knew the things had been, that being the woods off Pine Street. She hooked up the dinger's power and sure enough it sounded like an alarm clock that was pissed off. She pulled the power and we started walking. After a while she plugged the power back in. The dinger did not go crazy. She left it on.

We talked about her work. She had yet to find a cryptid, but assured me she had come close several times and was confident in the reliability of her equipment. Which dinged moments after she said that. One time.

We looked around. Nothing was apparent. She extended the antenna, no more dings. She told me that had never happened before. We continued walking. I told her about Jacob's video game, and was interrupted by a ding. Once again it was a single ding only, no indication what had caused it. So we kept walking, and I kept talking about the game. About dragons and steam ships and nanotechnology, and another ding came. It had been a little over five minutes. This time she didn't stop to check anything, she just reset her watch and we walked on. About five minutes later another ding.

Amy concluded that there was some low level weirdness. She asked me if I was carrying anything. I didn't think I was, but I checked my pockets and found the amber. She took it and put it inside the dinger. We started walking again. When it dinged next she reset her watch. Three minutes and twenty eight seconds later it dinged again. And again three minutes and twenty eight seconds after that.

The conclusion was that the amber was mildly weird. I put it back in my pocket.

We kept on walking. I asked Amy what she thought we were chasing. She wouldn't answer, though she said she had some ideas. She said it had to be smart, and familiar with technology, because it went after the cameras, and left the flashes. I asked what that could be, and her response was, "Nothing known," which she said with a smile.

We kept walking, and talking, with intermittent dings. Around one in the afternoon the dings picked up, a lot. About one ding every five or six seconds. Amy figured that meant we found where they had entered the woods. She wanted to trace the trail back to where they had come from.

What followed was something like the dinging version of the game where you try to find something while someone who knows where it is says hotter as you approach and colder when you move away.

Actually it wasn't quite that bad. We had a trail, not a point. So it really involved walking perpendicular to what we assumed the trail was, dropping a marker, by which I mean one of several smooth stones Amy had with her, where the dinging was strongest, and then repeating farther down the trail. Once we had a few stones dropped we'd consider that a fairly good indication of where the trail was going.

If that sounds quick, it wasn't. The dings were at one every five seconds at the strongest. That meant taking a step, waiting for two dings so we could time the interval, taking a step forward, and repeating. It was very slow.

When we got an idea of the trail's direction we'd go that way until the ding frequency dropped, or we hit an obstacle. In the first case it meant going through the tedious task of figuring out the trail's direction again. In the second case it meant going around the obstacle and seeing where the trail came out the other side. Something that would have been somewhat easier if we didn't have the amber making one ding every five minutes regardless of whether or not we were anywhere near the trail.

Obstacles tended to that the form of private property. Apparently what we were following had no respect for that. Mostly back yards. This wouldn't have been quite so problematic if not for the fact that the streets followed no clear pattern. It seemed that people just cut a random road into the woods and then built houses along it. Which was probably what they had done.

While we were doing that, Amy told me about her experiences in upstate New York, rural Pennsylvania and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. She explained that usually she wasn't following a trail as old as this one. She told me about following a trail in the Adirondacks for miles upon miles only to realize she'd been going in the wrong direction and chasing a very fresh trail in New Jersey until it left the ground, searching for days to try to find where it touched down, and finally realizing that the thing she was chasing had tricked her into following a series of complex loops while it flew elsewhere. She didn't find where it touched down again.

The trail ended at a manhole. It smelled like a sewer, but it was actually a storm drain. A no dumping sign next to it indicated that it came out in the bay. Neither Amy nor I wanted to follow the trail through a sewer smelling storm drain, so it we went back to where we'd picked up the trail. From there we continued our walk around the woods.

I told Amy about spending time with Isa tracking pigeons and counting how many times each one pecked at food. And looking for patterns in the the angles of branches off a butternut tree. Just general Isa things.

Eventually we came full circle. It took most of the day. We didn't find another exit point. The obvious conclusion being that whatever was in the woods had not left. Amy decided that she'd camp out that night and see if she could see them. I wished her luck and invited her to see a movie with Isa, Jacob and I the next day.



The next day was ten degrees. And some people say there's nothing weird going on with the weather. Though, actually, all things considered the temperature dropping 40 degrees was downright normal when placed in the context of the overall wonkiness the weather had embraced in the past few years. I found Amy at the woods, looking cold, she had a larger backpack then when I'd seen her last and with a bed roll under it and, I assumed, a sleeping bag in it.

I walked with her to Jacob and Isa's place, where Lori's jeep was waiting in the driveway. Lori called it a 1996 Jeep Wrangler. That was a joke it took me years to get. Apparently Jeep didn't make a Wrangler that year. They stopped making one line in 1995, and started making another in 1997. The 1995 Wranglers sold in 1996 were already something of a hybrid with a 1997 bit here or there. Apparently whoever owned the Jeep before Lori had decided to continue that trend by replacing parts exclusively with those meant for later model Wranglers even when they didn't quite fit. For example the headlights were originally square, but the previous owner had bashed round ones from a later model into place.

Every oddity in the Jeep made Lori love it even more. She pointed out that it was unique, which is a rare thing for an automobile to be. The thing is, though a Jeep person might be able to tell it was different just by looking at it, to someone such as myself it just looked like a gray Jeep.

Jacob and Isa were waiting outside Jacob was wearing a gray winter coat, Isa appeared to be attempting to get frostbite. She was wearing a red t shirt and a blue sweater vest.

I prefer short introductions, so I pointed at, Jacob and said, "This is Jacob, future best selling video game creator," pointed at Isa and said, "This is Isa, future Nobel prize winning mathematician."

Amy said, "There is no Nobel prize for mathematics," which was true.

Isa and I said, "Economics," at the same time.

Apparently my style of introduction set me up for a trap because Amy asked, "So what about you? You're a future what?"

I shrugged, "I live in the now."

Jacob said, "He means he has no idea."

"Anyway, this is Amy," and before I could say, 'Future world renowned crypotzoologist,' Jacob shook her hand and interrupted.

"We've heard so much about you."

Once Jacob was out of the way Isa shook hands with Amy and added, "And by 'so much' we mean 'almost nothing.'"

Amy asked, "What have you heard?"

"Cryptozoologist," Jacob answered

"Something in the woods," Isa continued.

"Probably not a turkey," Jacob finished.

Amy laughed. "Almost certainly not a turkey. Though if I do find a giant four toed turkey that has something against cameras I won't be disappointed."

We piled in the Jeep. Amy and I in back, Isa had called shotgun, Jacob driving. Jacob assured us that if it was scratched, scraped, dented or dinged in any way Lori would kill him and he'd spend all of eternity haunting the rest of us. Then it was off to the movies.

The movie was enjoyable enough. Isa ate most of the popcorn, I drank most of the soda. Afterward we went back to Isa and Jacob's place where Jacob cooked spaghetti. Apparently Amy had never seen the original Godzilla, which Isa considered intolerable. So we watched the original Godzilla movie. Well, not quite the original. It was the Americanized version that was originally shown in the US, not the Japanese version. Isa's reasoning was twofold. First, Amy was an American. Second, Isa considered the line, "You have a responsibility no man has ever faced. You have your fear, which may become reality. And you have Godzilla, which is reality," the best line in any Godzilla movie.

Amy liked it.



This time avoiding walking home past the woods wouldn't have been an option even if I did know a decent way to get there. Amy was planning to spend another night there, so going passed there wasn't incidental, it was part of the itinerary. It was snowing again, which made staying outside seem even more insane, but Amy was Amy so I didn't question it.

When we came to the woods I once again heard something inside. As did Amy. She took my hand and pulled me back. We turned around and walked until the woods weren't in sight. Then she stopped and asked, "Do that do that every time you're here?" I nodded. "They never do it for me. I guess they like you."

"Or they think I'd taste good."

"Either way, this is good." I just looked at her. No words came to mind. "If you draw them out maybe I can get look at them." The truth was I had to go that way anyway, so it wasn't that hard to convince.

The plan, which was very ill defined, was basically for Amy to sneak into place, and then for me to walk by normally. The problems with such a plan are many and varied. I didn't get into them. I just gave a silent prayer to whatever gods may be that neither of us would get eaten, and went along with it. That meant walking around in circles for five minutes while Amy got into place.

Five minutes is a very long time. Snow collected on me. I left a circle of footprints in the middle of the street. I tried to concentrate on the way the streetlights caught the snow instead of thoughts of Amy being eaten by bears, or lions, or lion-bears. The lack of any sounds of struggle and screaming was not nearly as comforting as I would have liked.

When the five minutes passed I started on my way. This time it took a little longer than before for me to hear something in the woods. It seemed somewhat less enthusiastic. I thought it was moving a little more slowly, stepping more cautiously, and hanging back farther from the edge of the woods. As I walked by it kept pace with me. I reminded myself that I there was a plan, which running away might disrupt, and that lion-bears, even mountain lion-bears, don't exist.

I made it home all right, the running and the screaming never came.


[Edited to correct a rather odd mistake. For some reason I wrote "turkeys" where I meant "cameras".]

[bobby 55]

My interest continues. As for pm's, I don't know, because even though people don't comment, there are people viewing your work.

[Jaedar]

I'll probably read through it all when I'm bored at school sometime. I've never been good with consuming things in small episodes.

[chris the cynic]

Ok. New part wherein I make treading water seem like a living hell. Hopefully. I also show you my lack of ability to either progress the plot, or stall well. I fall short of arranging matches, but arranging glasses is ... I am eternally shamed.

[Added] And dialogue, I can't do that either. [/Added]

For the record, I consider the second full moon of a month to be a blue moon, as does (as far as I know) everyone else. That this terminology is based on a mistake is something that the narrator would know. Isa probably told him.

-

Jonas had yet to catch the mouse. This was aggravating. For all I knew Amy had been eaten by lion-bears. Not that I'm saying I believed in lion-bears. I'm saying that a total lack of information tends to make you consider things worse than rationality would usually allow. Images of blood and pain went through my head.

I read a poem. That actually helped for a little while. I got to thinking about the significance of no longer rhyming rhyming words. I was struck by the fact that war was rhymed with bar. While the simple solution was to say the poet fucked up, my take was that those words once rhymed. While I was wondering how those words were pronounced at that point in time I wasn't imagining Amy dying a horrible death.

It didn't last.

I put Beethoven's Ode to Joy, as played on wine glasses, on as loudly as my speakers would allow and paced around the apartment trying to find anything to think about. I rearranged the glasses in the cupboard. A surprising number of them were from the Coca Cola company. Some were made to imitate the old glass bottles. They had the same color, and the bottom half was the same shape, if not the same size. Others were the same clear green as the old bottles but in a simple bell shape. More were just bell shaped with the company name in white or red on the side. Which led to my favorite glasses. The uncola glasses. Produced by the 7up company they looked like an upside down Coca Cola bell shaped glass, with their company name, and "The Uncola", written in red on the side.

These were treasured by me, perhaps too much because I never used them. A film of dust had built up on the outside of each of them. So I washed them. Unfortunately this wasn't involving enough to keep my mind off Amy's possible demise. I considered going out there, of course, but the wood was too large. I'd have no way to know where she ended up. Also she might be at her home, wherever that was, in her bed by now

Clearly what was called for was information overload. I turned on the TV, started up a laptop, and put on the Brandenburg Concertos on record, because this was a job for vinyl. I made the unfortunate discovery that I had nothing to drink. By which I mean no beverages of any kind. I clearly had only myself to blame since Jonas certainly didn't finish any of it off. He can't even open the fridge. That left me with water from the tap, which I got. It seemed wasteful, or at least counter productive, to use one of the glasses I'd just finished organizing, so I grabbed a big stainless steel cup that I assumed was meant to be used for making milkshakes in a commercial setting.

I got into a nice position on the couch with the laptop on me, water to my left, the TV in plain view, and music blasting all around and started playing a game. I was not distracted. It reminded me of the feeling of depression creeping in, but with dread replacing sadness. It also reminded me of treading water. You're in the water and you're told that you have to do whatever. Tread water for two minutes while holding a brick, tread water for so long without using your hands. The truly hard one is without using your legs.

You start off and it seems easy, you're talking to the other people, all is well. Then time passes. You're lower in the water. Your head is tilted back to keep your mouth above the water, but the water is getting higher and higher up. You can't see anything but the sky. You don' know where the other people are, you don't know where the instructor is. Your surroundings are hidden in the darkness of the places your eyes can't see. And the water is getting higher. An inch away from your mouth. Then a centimeter. You thrash to keep from sinking, but your arms are tired. A little wave, you don't know where from, closes the gap. You try not to breath in the water, you spit it out and cough. You wonder how it is possible the time isn't up yet. You try to get higher in the water, but its no use.

The water takes you. It closes in around you. For a moment you've lost. Then, with energy you didn't know you had, you thrash and claw your way back to the surface. But you're limbs are weary, and the water is still all around you. Your mouth is so close to the surface that the smallest wave would flood your lungs. Your world has become small. The other campers don't exist, you don't know the last time you heard or saw them, the instructor is just a lingering hope that this will end. All that you really know is you and the water.

But you don't know what's in the water. You can't see the water. You feel it all around you, trying to swallow you, but you have no idea what it holds. If you sink will someone grab you and pull you up. You certainly hope so. But for all you know there's a water snake right below you thinking, "If he gets one inch closer I'm going to bite." Or sharks. Lake sharks, because by this point rationality is out the window. You're in a sea of uncertainty and right now if someone told you the Loch Ness monster was going to eat you you wouldn't be able to laugh it off. The distance between life and drowning is so small you couldn't measure it, and you're just getting more tired.

You're weary, you can feel yourself slipping downward, but you don't know what lies that way. If you try to look you'll drown, and the more you fight the sinking, the weaker you become, and the more inevitable the sinking feels. You can try not to think about it, but the water is right there, it's all around you, the slightest splash will bring it into your eyes. It goes up your nose and down your throat. It can't be fought, it can't be stopped, it always hovers there, right at the edge of your perception, waiting to swallow you.

That's what it felt like.

Except somewhat worse, because no matter how hard it got treading water I always knew I could simply use my legs. Or give up swim the short distance to the dock, and just hang off of it. There was no similar way to get away from the dread I was feeling about Amy. I didn't know where she was, and if I tried to find her I'd risk missing her. So I tried to distract myself, but the thought of something horrible having happened to Amy was never far from my mind. The fact that I didn't know what 'something horrible' was just made it that much worse.

The fact that I was doing a bad job of the game I was playing didn't help much either. Adding the frustration of being killed in a game by a rent a cop to the dread that a friend in real life might have been harmed or killed by an unknown thing is a recipe for unfun.

That I wound up doing nothing at all while slowly rocking back and forth probably doesn't speak highly of my mental well being. At least the record didn't make that, 'You've reached the end of the record now pick up the damn needle,' sound. The player was one of the ones where the needle automatically returned when the side was finished.

Around noon there was a knock on the door. It was Amy. The speed with which relief turned to incredulity was roughly equal to the amount of time it took her to say, "I found out what they are," pause for effect, and say, "werewolves."

"Werewolves as in..." and I just trailed off.

She nodded. "People who turn into wolves. Or wolves that turn into people, I'm not sure which. I'm not sure whether or not it matters either."

"That's impossible." In my defense, it really does sound impossible.

Amy took a step back, and looked about ask shocked as I can imagine someone looking. "Why?"

I may have had a similar look on my face as a result of that. It seemed obvious to me, though it turned out to be somewhat difficult to concisely put into words, "Shapeshifting would require- I mean you couldn't - it doesn't make sense for something to be able to change its shape like that."

"You have a talking cat!"

That was clearly wrong, and needed immediate correction. Werewolves were forgotten, "Have isn't the right word. I just live with him."

"That doesn't matter. You cohabitate with a talking cat. You've officially lost the right to dismiss things for not making sense." I had no response to that. The silence hung in the air for a time. Then she added, "Or for being unrealistic. Anyway, I've seen them. I saw one of them switch." She let that sink in, "I didn't get a picture of it, I didn't feel safe using flash, but I did get a shot of some tracks." She pulled out a camera, a light gray digital one with an LCD screen on the back. She showed me a shot of an animal footprint.

"It looks like a dog print." It did.

"You know there's no known test that can distinguish between werewolves and weredogs."

"Sarcasm."

"Yes." She smiled. Then she started skipping through the photos, "I took one with my foot next to one for scale." Sure enough, she came to a photo of her foot next to a print. The print was as wide as her shoe.

"A big dog print."

"There are werewolves in the woods in your town. Aren't you the least bit interested in what they're up to."

"I'm not convinced there are werewolves." I thought it over for a moment. "Giant bipedal wolves I could believe but-"

"Talking cat!"

Jonas must have thought he was being called, because the silence that followed that was broken when he walked in and asked, "What?"

I waved him off, "Nothing, she was using you to make a point."

Jonas asked, "About what?"

Amy ignored him, "Let me prove it to you. We'll go out there together and you can see them with your own eyes."

Jonas asked, "See what?"

I asked, "Tonight?"

"No. I heard it would rain tonight"

"Meaning we'd freeze to death."

"Yes, but tomorrow night should be fine, and it's going to be perfect."

Jonas and I asked, "Why?" in unison. The effect was somewhat freakish.

"It's a full moon."

"A blue moon. Now what are you talking about?" Jonas chimed in.

I turned to face Jonas, and tried not to sound like a kindergarten teacher who had just been told that the flashcard she was holding was the number P, "It's not actually a blue moon. The idea that blue moon means the second full moon in month is based on a mistake someone made in 1946. It's just the early winter moon."

"Also known as the Wolf Moon," Amy said. "Can you imagine a better time to look for werewolves?"

"Oh, werewolves," and with that Jonas walked away.

Images of being eaten by werewolves filtered through my consciousness. But, given I figured she'd do it without me if I said no, I found myself saying, "Ok, tomorrow night we hunt werewolves."

I didn't like the idea of another day spent imagining her dead, and given that I appeared to be the only friend she had in town it wouldn't have felt right to say, 'No,' anyway. Of course the fact that I'd traded thinking about her being dead for thinking about my approaching demise at the hands of giant biped but definitively non-werewolf wolves didn't make the decision the most pleasant one in the world. I didn't even have any good werewolf movies to watch in the interim.

Amy went off to do whatever it was that she did when I wasn't looking. Given that her life seemed to revolve around looking for things in the woods, and I didn't get the impression she was going back to the woods, I had no idea what she'd be doing. Possibly sleeping depending on whether or not she'd slept in the woods.



It was easier to keep my mind of me being eaten by werewolves at some point in the future than it had been to keep my mind off of Amy having been killed or injured already. I sat on the couch, picked up my laptop, and saved the world from aliens. Twice.

[bobby 55]

Hahahah, nice. I'm starting to like Amy, she has a directness about her I like in real people.

[Jonas]

That was a funny exchange. I approve.

[chris the cynic]

Part something in which I continue to lack description and introduce more characters who lack differentiation. There is a plot out there somewhere, I can almost feel it.

-

In order to prepare I had put on thicker socks than usual, made sure I brought gloves and the red flashlight, and worn a hat that covered my ears. In order to prepare Amy had reworked the dinger bypassing the bells and instead wiring the output through a new USB port she'd soldered in, found a long USB cable, and used that to attach the dinger to a tablet PC, which she'd rigged to interpret the output in the form of multiple graphs.

Both of us prepared, we met at the woods around dusk. It was the first time I'd been there in the dark when I didn't hear an animal in the woods. I figured it was just to early for them to be out. Amy explained the graphs to to me, very briefly. I believe her exact words were, "This means there's a lot of stuff right now. When it goes down there's less stuff, when it goes up there's more stuff." I monitored the laptop, she held the dinger.

We walked into the woods until the stuff graph went down. Then we walked the perimeter of the high-stuff area until we fount an outlet. That we followed, zigzagging from from one side to the other of what turned out to be a high stuff corridor. It narrowed into a sort of invisible path and we picked up the pace, running through the woods, jumping fallen branches and logs, and trying desperately to keep the cord from getting caught on anything.

I wasn't thinking about the fact that I didn't believe in werewolves, or that I believe the dinger was probably the silliest piece of technology I had ever encountered, or anything like that. It was fun. It was profoundly fun to be running through the woods chasing something's trail. I don't think I'd had that much fun since I was a child. My heart was pounding, I was overheating, I was running out of breath, but none of that mattered. The whole world was in tune, the full moon moon shone through the leafless trees and lit up the snow covered ground.

Then Amy stopped. The running caught up to me, I was bent over, supporting myself with my hands on my knees, considered the possibility that perhaps I should exercise more often while gasping for breath. Amy didn't say anything until I'd caught my breath, which I thought was nice.

She pointed out light in the woods, where there definitely shouldn't have been anything, and thought we should approach it more cautiously than we had been going. So we did. Bands of light and shadow radiated out from the orange source of the light, which turned out to be a fire. As we approached we saw that there were about half a dozen people standing around it. It was impossible to be sure, what with a fire being in the middle.

They were chanting something that sounded vaguely Russian. Definitely a Slavic language of some kind. Amy agreed. Then Amy proved once again that she is either brave or insane because she walked up to them and said, "Hi." I followed.

The chanting stopped.

Two of them broke off and approached us. One male, one female. The male seemed a good deal less happy to see us than the female. He tried to shout but didn't get beyond the first syllable, a "Wh-," before the female stopped him. She didn't shout over him, she just lifted her right hand and he stopped. He turned to her and for the briefest of moments I could see the look on his face, it showcased the most complete bewilderment I've ever seen. The female said, "They're fine."

The two walked until they were a few feet from us. The male stopped in front of Amy, the female in front of me. I still couldn't see them very well because they fire was behind them.

"Sorry to interrupt your," she looked past the male by leaning to her left until I looked like she was going to fall over, her right foot hung in the air as if it wasn't sure what to do, after she got a look she leaned back and continued, "fire which serves no apparent purpose. I was just wondering if you'd seen any-" and then she stopped. She looked a the female, the male, the others still standing around the fire. "You're the werewolves, aren't you?"

I said, "There's no such thing as-" the female changed. Her clothing seemed to melt into her and become fur, her ears expanded and moved to the top of her head, her face warped as a snout projected from it. Her posture changed as well, but that wasn't nearly as impressive. Even though I couldn't see her that clearly, it was obvious a werewolf was standing in front of me, close enough I could reach out and touch her. Then she changed back to human. I could only think of one thing to say: "I'm convinced."

"I told you," Amy said. I suppose I had it coming.

"What are you doing?" the male one asked.

"He's the one I told you about," the female said

"Wait, what? Told him what? Why?" And after a short pause I added, "When?"

"And why didn't I merit a mention?" Amy asked.

Thankfully getting the answers to these questions did not involve standing there looking at the dark sides of two werewolves in human form while a fire behind them made it impossible to see anything in the way of details.

The female, whose name was Felicia, had shoulder length brown hair and brown eyes, she was wearing what appeared to be buckskin coat. She led us to a log, sat us down, and spent about an hour telling us about a prophesy that I was able to sum up in nineteen words.

"So you're saying that you came here because a prophesy said that something of some kind of unstated significance would happen at some point around now-ish at a place around here-ish?"

"Well it didn't say where or when, we had to work that out ourselves."

I just looked at Amy, unable to put into words my reaction to that but hoping for a sign she was feeling the same thing. I didn't really get one. So I turned back to the werewolf and asked, "Why are you in the woods? It's not like there's a shortage of places to stay."

"Have you any idea how much an apartment costs around here?"

"I do. Good point." And all other options -hotels, motels, and the like- were, naturally, worse. Living in the woods was probably preferable to paying that kind of price. Of course whoever owned the woods, and someone almost certainly did, could probably have them kicked out for not paying rent. Which is why I put up with the talking cat.

The male, whose name was Fabian, approached us and said, "Besides, civilization is useless."

I looked at him, took in his somewhat disconcerting yellow eyes, his black hair, but more than that I took in the overall ... well I'm not sure what the proper term is, so I'm going to say the overall American of European descent look. "You can't be serious," I said.

"Yes I can," he said to me. "Now why does he matter?" he asked Felicia.

"Hang on." I turned to Felicia said, "But hold that thought because I want to know the answer too," and then turned back to Fabian, "Just look at yourself. Your ancestors came from Europe, you wouldn't even be here if it weren't for civilization."

"The same could be said of the Second World War. That doesn't mean I think it was a good thing."

I shook my head. This insanity could not be allowed to stand. The werewolf must be made to see reason. "I can prove that civilization isn't useless tomorr- no, tomorrow's a holiday. In two days I will prove to you that civilization isn't useless." Actually, as it turned out, the holiday wouldn't have been a problem unless it was somehow important I delivered my proof between nine and eleven pm, which it wasn't. I turned my attention back to Felicia. "Why do I matter?" I asked.

"Is it because he's the chosen one?" Amy asked, "Because if it is, that is incredibly unfair. He didn't even want to come here today."

Felicia laughed. "No. He isn't the chosen one. There is no chosen one. I don't know what's important about him, but something is. He's somehow connected to why we're here."

"The vague unspecified reason that you're here," I said.

"Yes," Felicia said. "Exactly. The fact that you showed up on this very night just as we were praying for something to happen only further convinces me that you're connected to the prophesy." She turned her attention to Amy, "That you're both connected. Which is why, I trusted both of you enough to show you what we are." With that sentence I concluded that Felicia was also insane. Not that I thought she was wrong, though I wasn't sure how Amy was going to feel about tracking down a cryptid only to have it trust her to not tell people about it, but the fact that she trusted us based on when we showed up seemed quite crazy to me. Crazy drunks with shotguns could have showed up. It was after dark on the night of new year's eve. In the middle of the woods.

Felicia elaborated a little on the prophesy. It did not make me become convinced of it's accuracy. I'm not saying I have anything against enlightened Polish-Lithuanian Americans who studied under Buddhist poets in Nova Scotia, but I didn't trust anyone to see the future. Furthermore I don't even think that Buddhism has a prophetic tradition. Not that I got the impression the prophet was a Buddhist. That said I'm a little hazy on the whole thing. The list of things I didn't understand included, but was not limited to, why the prophet's ancestry mattered, why he went to Nova Scotia, how studying under a poet, Buddhist or otherwise, would cause someone to achieve future-seeing enlightenment and what exactly it was he said would happen.

Felicia told Amy and I that she would be at the same place every night, and to come back at any point. Amy and I walked away. For a long time neither of us said anything. Then Amy stopped, looked, back, looked around, and when she found we were alone shouted, "Yes!" apparently to the entire universe. Or the trees.

"Happy?"

"I finally found one. I knew I could do it and I finally found one."

"Yeah, but you can't tell the world." I had a whole speech about how it would wrong to tell anyone about werewolves since we only definitively learned they were werewolves because they trusted us. I was going to touch on the moral implications of succeeding by betraying the very trust that allowed success to be possible. I got as far as, "You'd have-"

"Screw the world; I found werewolves." And apparently that was enough for her. I have to admit the concept was pretty cool.

[bobby 55]

I don't know if you find writing "easier" now, but the story seems to be, for want of a better word, flowing. Hehehe, werewolves...... what's not to like.

[chris the cynic]

I just remembered that my original plan was to have the response to the prophecy be somewhat different but forgot by the time it came time to write it out.

The original plan would have gone vaguely like this:

So this guy could see the future and he didn't say, "Sell when the Dow hits 14 thousand and buy at sixty four sixty nine." It wasn't, "Pick up a copy of the Star Trek Cookbook when it's selling for a dollar and ninety five cents because by the time the century turns they'll be selling for sixty four dollars each and you'll really want that apple omelet recipe." It wasn't even, "Call the authorities on this date and it'll save a lot of people," and there have been plenty of days when that would have been true. No. It was, "Be at this place at this time and something of some sort will happen."

Actually he never said where or when, we worked that out ourselves.