Marcus Sted's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Marcus Sted parked his truck on the dirt shoulder and looked at the house that had eaten four people. It sat where the road in Creote Flat ran out, half-built into the rock like someone had tried to seal a cave with a roof and a door. Moss hung off the stones. The doorway was black. A kid had gone in on a dare and never come out. Then a cop. Then a reporter whose last note said the place smelled burned. Marcus meant to be the fifth man in and the first one back. He stepped past the truck and stopped. A tent stood twenty feet from the door, yellow canvas streaked with dust, a lantern still hooked inside. The flap was open. A sleeping bag lay rolled on the pad, neat, waiting for someone to come back to it. Marcus crouched and lifted the corner of the bag. Dry. No blood. No struggle. Whoever pitched the tent had walked to the house on his own feet and never walked back. Marcus had told the town he needed nothing but a flashlight and a knife. He had said it at the diner and he had said it at the gas pump and nobody had argued because nobody wanted him to win. He pulled the knife from his belt and checked the edge. He clicked the flashlight on, then off. Then he went back to the truck and opened the glove box. The handgun inside was compact and clean, grip checkered, finish worn at the slide. He had bought it the night before and told no one. He weighed it in his palm and thought about the tent. He thought about the reporter writing in the dark about a smell. He thought about a cop who carried a service weapon and still did not come out. A gun had not saved the cop. But the cop had walked in thinking a gun was enough, the way Marcus had walked up thinking a knife was enough. Four men had each brought what they trusted and each had been wrong. Marcus did not know what waited inside. That was the problem he could not solve from the shoulder of the road. He could only refuse to walk in the way the others had. He tucked the handgun into his waistband and pulled his shirt over it. He left the tent where it stood. At the doorway the air pushed out at him, warm and sour, like old ash. He set one boot on the threshold and stopped. The dark inside did not move. He had come to prove he was the brave one. Standing there, knife in one hand, flashlight in the other, gun against his back, he understood he had already made the same first choice every dead man before him had made. He stepped through anyway.