Avery Toll's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

For six mornings, Avery Toll measured the same dead tree. It kept getting taller. She wrote the numbers in her ranger's logbook and laughed at herself each time, because tape measures don't lie and dead trees don't grow. She would find the mistake. Ghosts were stories drunk campers told. Proof was what she trusted, and proof was what she meant to get. So she came back at dawn on the seventh day. That was when the deer tracks stopped her cold. Fresh hoofprints ringed the base of the tree. She crouched and pressed her fingers into one. Sharp edges, damp soil. Made last night. She followed them with her flashlight, counting. Four steps. Five. Six. Then nothing. The seventh print pressed deep into the mud, mid-stride, toe dug in like the animal had lunged forward. After that, bare ground. No drag marks. No blood. No place a deer could have gone. Avery stood and turned in a slow circle. Trees close on every side. No cabin, no truck, no roof for a mile. If something came back tonight, she had nowhere to watch from. She could not see the tree through the dark and stay hidden too. She stopped pretending she wasn't scared and started solving it instead. By afternoon she had dragged fallen branches into a low blind, twenty feet off. She mounted her trail camera on a stump, lens fixed on the dead tree, and set it to fire on motion. Then she crawled into the branches with a thermos and waited. Hours passed. Her legs went numb. Near two in the morning, the camera clicked. Avery froze. A deer stood at the base of the tree. Its coat was pale brown, its antlers wide and clean. But its eyes were wrong. Hollow. Two dark pits with nothing behind them, catching no light from her lens. It did not graze. It stared at the tree as if listening. She held her breath and watched the trunk. Slowly, without a sound, the dead tree grew. Bark stretched. The top pushed up past the living branches around it. Six inches, then a foot. The deer lowered its head, one hollow eye turned toward her blind. Avery's hand shook, but she did not run. She pressed the shutter herself, again and again, until the deer stepped forward, mid-stride — and was gone. No sound. No motion. Just gone, the way the tracks had ended. Morning came gray. Avery climbed out stiff and cold and grabbed the camera with both hands. The screen glowed. Forty frames. The tree, taller in every one. And the deer, its hollow eyes staring straight into the lens. She had wanted proof. Now she held it. Her hands would not stop shaking, and the thing in her photos knew exactly where she had been hiding.