Marcus Phoenix's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Dawn gave Marcus light but no answers. From the cabin window he had watched the Wendigo slip into the pines on the right. Now he stood at the treeline and could not find where the descending path began. Brush choked the slope. Roots and fallen limbs hid any trail. He circled the clearing twice, boots slick on wet leaves. The sun climbed. Every hour lost meant tracking the creature's den in the dark, and he would not risk that. He pushed into the brush where he thought the shape had vanished. Branches raked his arms. The ground fell away, then leveled into thicket with no clear line down. He backtracked, marked a tree with his knife, and tried again from a different angle. Same wall of green. His shirt clung to his back. He checked his watch and cursed. Half the morning gone, and he stood no closer to the mouth of the trail. "You're looking wrong." Marcus spun. The barefoot girl stood behind him, the same child who had spoken at the manager's cabin the day he arrived. Her dress hung faded and thin. Her hair fell in two loose braids. She watched him with a flat, still face, as if she had grown here among the roots. He had not heard her approach. "You know this slope?" Marcus asked. He kept his voice easy. His heart pounded. She pointed past him, not at the brush, but at a gray stone half-sunk in the dirt. "The old man walks it there. Behind the rock. You have to go under." Marcus knelt by the stone. He had passed it twice. Behind it, hidden by a curtain of vine, the ground dropped into a narrow cut. Cold air breathed out of it. Faint tracks pressed the mud below—long feet, one dragging. The Wendigo's. The trail did not start at the treeline. It started under the rock, and only a body that knew it could find the way. "Why help me?" he asked. The girl tilted her head. "He walks all of them. But nobody walks back up." She said it without fear, the way she might report the weather. Then she turned and walked into the pines. When Marcus looked again, she was gone. He tore the vine away and widened the gap. The cut sloped down into shadow, steep but clear. He pulled his notebook out and drew the true mouth of the trail—behind the stone, not the treeline. His map now had its second line, and it pointed straight into the ground. Marcus checked his pack, tightened the straps, and stepped down through the gap. Damp closed around him. Above, daylight shrank to a bright slit. The dragging tracks ran ahead of him into the dark. He had found the path. Now it would take him to the den, and the thing that made those tracks had his scent.