Marcus Cole's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Back at camp, Marcus played the footage a fourth time. Three seconds of a pale shape in a black doorway. He turned up the brightness. The shape smeared into gray noise. He slowed it down. The blur only grew. His hands started to shake. No editor, no website, no skeptic would call this proof. They would call it a trick of the dark and a bad hand. He had crossed a swamp for this, and it was garbage. "It's ruined," Marcus said. "Look. You can't tell what it is." Dakota crouched by the fire, sharpening a knife on a stone. He didn't look up. "Cameras don't catch it clean. Never have. You can't film a thing that doesn't want to be seen." "Then how do I prove it?" Dakota jerked his chin toward the dark trees. "You don't. But someone might make it show itself." He led Marcus deeper into the reeds. They stopped at a crooked shack. Green symbols glowed on its walls. A cauldron boiled outside, coughing smoke into the black sky. An old woman stood over it, barefoot in the mud, stirring with a carved staff. Her shawl hung to her knees. She didn't turn when they came. "Mama Eshe," Dakota said, and the name sounded like a warning. "She's lived out here longer than anyone. She knows the thing in the house." The old woman tapped her staff once on the plank table. "You let it see your face," she said. Not a question. "Foolish boy. Now it owns a piece of you." Marcus held out the camera. "I filmed it. But the footage is useless. I need real proof." She finally looked at him. Her eyes were pale and steady. "Proof lives inside those walls. The thing keeps what it takes. Bones. Cameras. Faces." She dipped a rag in the cauldron and pressed it into his hand. It smelled of ash and roots. "Carry this. It won't save you. It will only let the walls hear you coming." "You're saying I have to go back in." "The clean picture is behind that door," Mama Eshe said. "Nowhere else. But the ones who fetch it don't fetch it twice." Marcus stared at the wet rag. His blurred footage was worthless. Every path forward ran through the plantation house. He looked at Dakota. Dakota shook his head, slow. "Don't," Dakota said. But Marcus was already thinking about the clear shot. The one no one could deny. He closed his fist around the rag. "I'm going in," he said. "Tomorrow. At first light." Mama Eshe went back to her stirring. "First light means nothing to that house," she said. "Inside, it is always night." Marcus zipped the ruined footage into his bag. It would stay there as a failure until he got something better. And the only place to get it was the one place people didn't walk out of.