Len's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Len had drawn the creature forty times, and every drawing was a lie. She spread the sketches across the mortuary's back table, under the one lamp that still worked. Long claws in one. A hooked beak in another. Wide flat teeth in a third. She had never seen the thing clearly. She only had screams from the tree line and bodies she helped her family prepare downstairs. Tonight she meant to change that. Her plan was simple and stupid: she would find the one man who had faced the creature and lived, and she would make him tell her which drawing was true. Guessing wrong meant hunting the wrong weakness. Hunting the wrong weakness meant dying. She found the one-armed logger splitting wood behind his shed, working the axe with his single hand in short, angry strokes. His empty left sleeve was pinned to his shoulder. People in Pinehollow spoke his name low, the way they spoke of the tree line itself. He was the only survivor anyone could name. Len had crossed him off her list twice out of fear. Now she stood at his woodpile with her journal open. "You lost that arm to it," she said. "I need to know what it looks like." Jack Timber set the axe down. He looked at her jacket, at the silver crosses stitched into the canvas, and something in his face closed like a door. "Go home, girl." "Show me these." She held up the sketches, one after another. "Which one is right?" He stared past the drawings, past her, at the dark line of pines. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat. "None of them. You're all looking at the wrong end." He tapped his own chest with his stump. "It don't come at you with claws. It comes low. On its belly. The teeth are behind, small, in rows. You never see the front until it's got you." He lifted the pinned sleeve. "I only lived because I gave it my arm and ran." Len's hand shook as she wrote. Belly-crawler. Rear teeth. Not a beast that charges. A thing that waits and takes a piece of you. "There's soft skin under the throat," he added, quieter now. "Pale. Like a fish. That's the only place I ever saw give." Then he picked up his axe again. "But knowing don't help. Knowing is how you get close enough to die." Len closed the journal. She had her answer at last, and it was worse than not knowing. She had drawn a monster that stood and fought. The real one hid its weakness under its own body, an arm's length from her throat. Every silver cross on her jacket was aimed at the wrong part of the dark. She walked home past the mortuary's quiet front doors. Her old plan was dead. Now she needed a way to make a belly-crawler show her its throat.