For the last 4 years, my friends and I have set aside the first weekend of December for a 5-day hunting trip. When my parents died, they left behind a modest off-grid cabin in the hills of northern West Virginia. My sister had no interest in vacationing in a place with no electricity or running water, so now it’s home base for our trips. We all grew up in the panhandle, and while Dale and I stayed in West Virginia, Seth moved on to bigger things in Pennsylvania. As we plowed through our thirties acquiring wives, children, and careers, the logistics of taking a day away to simply “hang out” were unworkable. Eventually, we decided to take one weekend every year and indulge in the one interest we still shared after all these years. To be fair, I wasn’t much of a hunter anymore, and they knew it, but these trips weren’t about that.
Seth drove down Friday morning to wait at his mother’s house. She’s a few towns over from me, but it’s in the opposite direction of the cabin, so I picked up Seth first. We hadn’t seen each other in person since the previous trip, and after ten minutes on the road, we had caught up and were laughing like kids again. Familiar landmarks sped by, and we reminisced about each of them. The world seemed so big when we were kids. Seth and his wife, Lizzie, were expecting their third child. I only have one, a daughter. Joan and I always expected to have more…
When we finally hit the end of Dale’s long gravel driveway, a snowball hit my windshield, and I shrieked. Two more snowballs hit the window, and when I was finally able to park, Dale opened the passenger door and apologized for the barrage. He and his two boys had been having a snowball fight, and while he told them not to, the boys saw me as a fresh target and tried to see how many shots they could land on my windshield. I cracked my window and brushed away the snow stuck to my mirror as Dale kissed his wife, Dianne, goodbye. She and Joan had their own adventures planned for the weekend, so the guys and I squeezed in and hit the highway. Together again, we jogged down memory lane as the hours passed.
We left just after lunch and arrived just after sunset, bathing the cabin in the glow of headlights. A red haze clung to the horizon as the sun refused to die. While Seth and I went around back to check the well pump, a recent addition I hadn’t told my sister about, Dale went to the woods to get some wood for the initial fire. After we made sure the pipes weren’t frozen and the pump was operational, Seth and I grabbed our own axes and went out to help. The sun plummeted, and the world was black. We only needed enough wood to cook and warm the cabin for the first night, as Saturday morning would be spent chopping and stacking wood for the rest of the trip. Armed with flashlights, Seth and I stuck to the treeline and collected armfuls of the driest sticks and brush we could find. We heard the occasional sound of chopping in the distance, but we couldn’t figure out why Dale would go that far in the dark.
After unloading my third armful of kindling, we heard footsteps as Dale finally emerged from the woods. He kept glancing over his shoulder and frowning, looking confused. When we pressed him, Dale said he was checking out some kind of weird moss and ended up wandering farther than he intended. When asked about the moss, he said it was a deep plum color and clung to the brush like ice to the trees. I was skeptical, but I also have the Discovery Channel, so I’ve seen weirder stuff than purple moss. Dale said he would have brought some back, but he didn’t have a container and didn’t want to touch it with his bare hands. We all brushed it off and went inside to cook, drink, tell terrible jokes, and be thirteen again. By midnight, we were all scared shitless of the same campfire stories we’d heard a thousand times, and by two, we all stumbled to our rooms like we were back in college. This was the last time we all smiled together.
Around 4AM, I woke up to piss and saw a light coming from under Dale’s door. I paused for a moment, and when I thought I heard him panting, I knocked and asked if he was okay. He told me that he’d been having trouble breathing for about an hour, and he wheezed as he spoke. I asked if he needed a hospital, but he brushed it off as allergies and we said goodnight. When we all got up again at 6, he seemed fine, and we collectively dismissed his symptoms. Chainsaws and axes ready, we all set out in different directions to search for the best firewood. In terms of safety, you should have at least one other person present when you’re using a chainsaw, but we were burning daylight and didn’t care much for safety anyway.
I made my way to a small clearing where the canopy had kept the underbrush free of snow and ice and started knocking on dead trees that were still standing. As I went to shake a log to see if I could bring it down, I noticed something furry coming out of the cracks in the bark. Just as Dale said, it looked like plum-colored moss, but when I looked closer, I noticed that it seemed to be rippling and pulsing between the chunks of bark like some kind of living gel. I pulled my hand back to inspect it, and luckily nothing came with it. My eyes followed the purple veins down to the roots, where they fanned out in all directions into a web that split the earth in a 10 foot radius under the snow. There was a large patch of it on a piece of shale, and when I crouched down to study it more closely, I noticed that each leafy tendril was the exact same shape: like a capital J resting its dip on a stem.
I did my best to ignore the strange growth while I chopped logs into manageable pieces, but after a few minutes, I heard Seth and Dale calling my name. They sounded panicked, so I dropped my chainsaw and ran. When our paths crossed, I saw that Dale was holding his left hand in his right, and it was plastered with the weird purple moss. Apparently he’d tripped over a stump and caught himself on a tree that was completely overgrown with it. We all inspected Dale’s hand, careful not to spread the moss, and compared theories as it writhed and rippled down his fingers. Even as we stood there talking, we could see the purple cancer growing, creeping down Dale’s arm. He said his hand felt impossibly cold, cold to the bone as though he had frostbite. Looking even closer, I could see its progress. The untouched skin near the clawing tendrils darkened, and I could see Dale’s veins go bright lavender. After a moment, the outer skin seemed to blacken as fresh purple moss sprouted from the pores. It looked unpleasant if not painful. Eventually, we decided to try to wrap Dale’s forearm in garbage bags and duct tape in a desperate attempt to stop the spread while we got him to the emergency room.
I took a sprinting lead to start the truck and bring it back to the treeline, but when I arrived, I realized that my keys were still on the counter in the cabin. I spun and ran back to the cabin, throwing the door open and reaching the keys just as the back door opened. Seth was alone, and he looked frightened. Through deep panting, Seth explained that while he’d been helping Dale try to stay calm, Dale had some kind of episode and attacked him. I was skeptical, but the terror in his eyes didn’t lie. He continued that Dale had tried to choke him against a tree, and when Seth was able to stumble away, Dale ran at him with his axe. Seth shut and locked the door behind him, and I secured the front door. The world outside was silent.
As we compared theories, I noticed that bruises had started to form on Seth’s neck where Dale choked him. When I looked more closely, I saw that some of the purplish pooling wasn’t blood, but tiny purple hook-shaped fibers. I told Seth in a panic, and he began scratching at his neck. We were both thinking the same thing. Whatever was going on with Dale, the purple moss was involved. I checked my cell in vain, but signal had plummeted to zero for all of us about a mile from the cabin. Cell phones then weren’t what they are now. Desperate, I tried 9-1-1, and I was miraculously connected to another living human.
After a quick summary of the afternoon, dispatch told us they’d be sending two officers to check things out. I hung up and relayed the information to Seth. Neither of us knew what to do next, and when we eventually cracked the back door to see if Dale was still by the treeline, he was gone. There was only silence, but as we looked at each other, a chainsaw revved to life in the distance. I took the lead and slammed the door. Within half an hour, the sound of tires could be heard coming from out front. I slowly and carefully opened the front door, and there stood the two officers we were promised. My blood warmed a little as a small sense of safety enveloped us. Seth gave them a detailed description of what had happened with Dale in the woods, but it had all happened quite quickly with seemingly no cause.
The taller of the officers, last name Rhoades, pulled out his flashlight and sidearm and told the rest of us to remain inside for now. Since Dale didn’t have a firearm, Rhoades hoped to talk him down and bring him back to the cruiser, plus he was a big guy. The shorter, more soft-spoken cop, Grady, took more information about Dale, our trip, the property. Both officers were pretty blatantly unconvinced about the purple moss, but they said they’d look into it. After about ten minutes, Grady stepped out back to have a cigarette and do a sweep of the immediate area. The air was still. Feeling a little more at ease, I stepped out to have my own cigarette. I hadn’t noticed until trying to light it that my hands were shaking like a paint mixer. As Grady finished a lap of the cabin, almost on cue, we heard an awful high-pitched shriek from the woods. Grady drew his gun and a moment of silence passed before we heard Rhoades call out for him, then another blood-chilling scream.
Grady shook his head, and after a couple false starts, sprinted into the trees, disappearing into the dusk. I ran back inside, slamming and locking the door, as Seth dashed around the corner from the bathroom. I told him what had happened, and he filled me in on his condition. While we were outside, Seth had been watching in the mirror as the hook-like tendrils of the moss reached and spread like vines, piercing his pores and tightening his skin as the cold sunk its way in. Seth shivered as he spoke, and the moss looked as though it had spread down to his chest and up behind his right ear. He needed a hospital. Panic thickened the air around us as the silence outside gave way to more screaming, this time from multiple voices. We instinctively backed away from the door, dreading what might come through as we looked around for a solution. A gunshot rang out, more yelling, then two more shots. The night was silent again.
After about ten minutes, we heard the cracking of brush outside as someone stumbled out of the woods. Seth and I both went white, and I tried to speak, but I was cut off by the sound of fists hammering on the back door. It was Grady pleading to be let in. I hesitated but finally opened the door, and Grady spilled inside onto the floor. He crawled aside, and I slammed the door, locking it tight again. As Grady sat up with his back to the wall, my stomach flipped and rose into my throat. He was missing part of his right cheek and ear, and the eye had clearly been sliced. Its milky contents mixed with the blood curing on his face. He was coherent but clearly in shock, and the one thing he managed to repeat several times was, “Cut him up! He cut him all up!” My eyes followed the blood down Grady’s uniform until they found a huge gash running the length of his left hip. Some of the blood looked more purple than red.
As Seth grabbed dish towels to get Grady cleaned up, I ran to grab a belt, intending to use it as a tourniquet if the wound on his leg bled too much. When I returned, Grady was trying to slow the blood coming from his leg with one of the towels. When he peeled it away from the wound to inspect it, the raw flesh was slick with a sheen of bright purple. It wasn’t the moss. It looked more like some kind of lavender-colored slime, and it rippled as his body clenched in a wave of pain. Seth and I shared a panicked glance, and I noticed that the purple fuzz had grown its way around his face and jaw like a cowl. We were in trouble.
The trees outside were still, and the cabin sat in a cold vacuum. Grady was still in shock and effectively useless, sitting in the corner holding the crater where his face used to be. Seth softly remarked that Grady’s leg looked pretty useless, and I agreed. Whatever had torn him open had taken enough meat and blood to leave the leg below cold and dead at this point. The belt cinched around his thigh strained as he moved, and I saw that the slime in the wound was drying and fanning out into the hooked tendrils we’d seen all day. Seth took a dry dish towel and attempted to scrape some off, but Grady grunted in pain, and Seth’s arm went into spasms as he dropped the towel. His eyes closed, and he groaned like he’d just eaten something delicious. I calmly asked him what the fuck.
Seth shook his head, paused, picked up the towel, and wiped at the moss again. He exhaled sharply while Grady groaned. Seth’s other hand grabbed his own neck, his fingers entwining with the growing fur. With a bit more urgency, I repeated my inquiry. Instead of answering me, Seth threw the towel aside and plunged his clawed hand into Grady’s wound, his fingers scraping away wet flesh that became stuck in his fingernails. Grady howled, but that only seemed to encourage Seth. By the time Seth’s hand went from his own neck to Grady’s, I finally snapped out of it and dragged him away from the officer.
Seth swiped at me with his gory hand and managed to scratch my neck before I threw him down and straddled his torso. Pinning his arms, I angrily asked, again, what the fuck. While I hadn’t been present when Dale attacked Seth, I was beginning to understand that initial panic and terror in his eyes. He fought for a moment, then sank onto the hardwood. His eyes lost focus, and his eyelids fluttered as if he was fighting unconsciousness. He looked intoxicated, and his eyes focused on mine again as he smiled, saying only, “It’s warm.” Seth’s body went limp.
Thinking desperately for options, I decided to try to lock Seth in the pantry. It was a closet-sized room with no windows, so he had no escape. After retrieving a roll of duct tape from under the sink, I drug his unconscious body through the kitchen, depositing him on the floor of the pantry. I taped his hands together behind his back, then taped his ankles together. After managing to squeeze the folding doors closed, I wrapped yards of duct tape around the handles, tightly securing the doors to each other. When I went back to check on Grady, he was already dead. Between the damage Seth had done and the large wounds on his face, he’d lost too much blood. I stood up, hands on my head, completely at a loss. I slowly glanced around the cabin, and when my eyes found the living room window, my blood turned to ice. During the commotion of dealing with Seth, I hadn’t heard it break.
Every creak and groan of the house stripped away more of my nerve. It was a small cabin, but it was dark outside, and the lonely fireplace was my only source of light. I backed my way to the kitchen counter to grab my flashlight as fresh snow fluttered its way through the broken window. Every hair on my body stood on end as I heard Dale’s slow, wheezy drawl call out my name. He called again, more insistent. I fought to move, slowly reaching out to pick up my keys. The air crackled with potential energy. Dale was in the cabin somewhere, coiled like a snake waiting to strike. My hand closed around my keys, and their muffled jingle pierced the silence. I heard a chuckle from the other room, then running.
I leapt to the back door in a blind panic and managed to get it open as the sound of footfalls entered the kitchen. It was less than 100 yards to the treeline, and I sprinted to find some cover. I no longer heard footsteps behind me, but soon they were replaced with the sound of gunshots. Dale had grabbed the gun that never left Grady’s belt. Once the trees surrounded me, I ran another 50 yards before coming across a huge, jagged stump. I softly crouched among the roots, my back to the snowy trunk. It was pitch-black, and I felt fairly invisible. As I tried to calm my breathing, I heard Dale shouting my name. His voice was raspy and strained, not his own.
I don’t know how long I crouched there, waiting to run at a second’s notice. It felt like hours if not days, and I eventually decided that it would be better to die there in the snow than let Dale get his hands on me, even if I froze to death. My breathing was slow and shallow, drowned out by the distant breeze and snow hitting the canopy above. My eyes slowly adjusted, and I looked at my hands. They shook violently, and my key ring clung desperately to my knuckle. That’s when I saw the purple. It peppered my palms while strands of it overtook my wrists. I panicked and rubbed my hands against the roots around me, but that only caused a burning sensation. My fingertips were cold, too cold to be from the snowy night alone. I instinctively touched my neck and noticed a patch of moss under my chin. When the moonlight illuminated my surroundings a little better, I stood up and glanced around. All was still and silent as it had been for a while.
Over the next few minutes, I slowly crept my way back in the direction of the cabin. A shuffling nearby momentarily stopped my heart, but it turned out to be a squirrel. The trees thinned as I walked, and the moon shone brighter. Eventually I came across a dark wet patch in the snow. I expected to find more of the purple moss, but as I crouched down to have a closer look, I realized it wasn’t purple, but red. It was blood. I gasped and stepped backward, tripping over a log. When I thew my arm down to catch myself, it was met by something fairly soft and squishy, but when I righted myself and got up on my knees, I nearly vomited. Leaning against a tree was Rhoades, or at least part of him. His head had been removed at the jaw, leaving the neck and some bottom teeth behind. He’d also been bisected slightly above the waist, spilling his viscera, upon which I was currently kneeling.
I stumbled to my feet, stammering as I tried to wipe the pieces of Rhoades from my pants. Backing up, I took in the whole picture. The larger pieces of the officer that were still identifiable bore dozens of axe marks, while smaller pieces were evenly distributed across the scene like a macabre art project. Whatever had taken over Dale had made him into some kind of animal. Worse than an animal, it seemed like he was killing for no reason. I stood frozen in panic and felt a slow chill working its way into my jaw. The moss was spreading, and I took stock of what I knew, or thought I knew. It grows quickly, freezes what it covers, and makes you violent. No, it makes you more than violent. Seth almost looked like he was high. And the last thing he said, about being warm. I puzzled it over until a shot rang out near the cabin.
I stayed low and made my way to the treeline. Through the bare trunks, I saw a second police cruiser parked behind the first. A spark of hope ignited, and I hoped the bullet behind that bang was lodged somewhere inside Dale. Staying among the trees, I skirted the perimeter of the cabin, hopeful to hear a reassuring voice. Instead, I heard another gunshot, then a scream. It wasn’t Dale’s voice, and my spark of hope fizzled out. Another scream. The next voice was Dale’s, a shrill, mocking cry of, “Come on, boy! I came here to hunt!” That nearly put me over, and I struggled to stay on my feet.
One of my best friends from childhood was unconscious in my cabin, and the other was hunting policemen like wild game. I looked down at my hands. They weren’t yet fully covered, but it was only a matter of time. There was a deep crease in the moss where I’d clenched around my keys. I tentatively checked my chin and discovered that the moss had grown down onto my neck and around my mouth. There wasn’t time to explore my options before a figure came crawling around the side of the cabin. It was a new officer, who looked older than the first two, but I couldn’t tell. He looked weak as he drug himself around to the back yard through the snow. Still in the shadows, I got as close as I could, and I was sickened again by the officer’s condition. His left leg did most of the work pushing his body forward while the right dangled behind him, seemingly broken or even split in several places. Red followed him like the tail of a comet.
When I finally worked up the courage to move again, I was frozen on the spot at the sight of Dale lumbering around the cabin. He carried Grady’s gun in one hand and one of the axes in the other, and even in the darkness, I could tell he was smiling wildly. His prey had no chance of getting away, and Dale continued to taunt him. The officer cried out weakly and begged for his life, but that just seemed to encourage Dale. With a raspy call of, “Timber!” he swung the axe over his head and buried its edge in the cop’s back. What would have been a scream bubbled its way out of his mouth through the blood. I winced and held my stomach as Dale pulled the axe out with a wet cracking sound. He turned his attention to the woods, calling out to me like he was calling a dog: “Russ, Russ, Russ! Come on out, Russell!”
As quietly as humanly possible, I squatted and crouched my way through the trees, still taking the long way around the cabin. I had my keys, I just needed to get to my truck. I tried to block out the chopping sounds behind me as Dale dismantled the officer. As I slowly made my way around the cabin, one of the cruisers came fully into view, then the other, and finally my truck. My hope was crushed again when I saw the hood open. Dale had been messing with it and most certainly disabled it somehow. He knew I didn’t know shit about cars. The chopping continued out back as I finally made my way out of the trees and up to my truck. I didn’t want to risk alerting Dale by trying to start it, so I reached for my last hope: my rifle.
I don’t know how I managed to get it unpacked, set up, and loaded in silence, but I was finally armed as the chopping ceased. Even if I didn’t kill Dale, I had to stop him long enough to fix whatever he did to the truck and get Seth some help. The night was silent again, and while I expected Dale to flee once again, I heard nothing. I stayed close to the cabin, gun at the ready, slowly working my way around back. Instead of a madman waiting to attack, I found Dale kneeling in a pool of blood among the officer’s remains. I tightened the .22 against my shoulder knowing I couldn’t afford to miss or wing him. My voice shaky, I told Dale that this was over. He didn’t stand or turn, he just knelt there. From what had happened to Seth, I figured Dale was in some kind of haze. ,“It should have been you.” Dale spoke softly, his voice strained but nearly his own. I asked what he meant, and he continued. “All this mess, and I’m still cold. It should have been you in pieces.” He stood and turned, seeing the rifle but not registering any fear.
“Really?” He sneered. “You can barely shoot a rabbit.” He wasn’t wrong. While I had enjoyed hunting as a teen, it became less fun as I aged, and now these trips were mostly about hanging out with the guys. “You even make me and Seth gut them for you. The hell kind of man are you?” Dale smiled, an idea flickering across his face. He bobbed the axe’s weight in his hand. “Come here, I’ll show you how to gut something.” He dropped the gun and brought his free hand to the axe, ready for a heavy swing. My finger acted before my brain could catch up, and the shot made my ears ring. Dale stumbled back, but I could tell I hadn’t hit anything vital. He took a deep breath and his eyelids drooped, a smile forming on his face.
“That’s…good.” Dale shivered and re-shouldered the axe. Before he could take another step, I leveled my rifle and took another shot, this time hitting him squarely in the sternum. He dropped, the axe falling to the ground. Ready to fire again, I edged close enough to remove Grady’s gun and the axe from his reach. Dale didn’t seem to care because he was writhing in what could have been ecstasy or agony. At this point, they seemed to be indistinguishable for him.
“Oh, man,” he wheezed through a wild grin. Miraculously, Dale managed to roll onto his stomach and lift his torso. “You better do that again.” I couldn’t tell if he was begging or mocking. I lowered my rifle, screaming at him to tell me what the hell was going on. I pleaded for answers he didn’t have, and Dale only laughed. I was finally close enough to see how much of his body had been taken over by the moss. Most of his face was dark purple, and his bottom lip was curled down, pried open by the growth. One eye looked dead and grown over, and his nose looked like it had crumbled away like burnt incense.
“You better do that again,” he repeated, “because if I get up, I’m going to paint this cabin with you.” I took a step back, and he laughed again. “After that, I’m gonna go home and do it all over. Dianne, the boys, Seth’s mom, Joan, Liz-”
I don’t remember pulling the trigger. The second my wife’s name left Dale’s mouth, the crack of the shot echoed through the trees, and his forehead blossomed into a crimson fountain. He fell silent, a smile coming across his mangled face as he slumped dead in the snow. I stood frozen for what felt like an eternity. Eventually, I dropped the rifle and retrieved Grady’s gun. Crouching beside Dale’s body, I placed a hand on his shoulder. Through tears, I apologized before emptying Grady’s gun into the back of Dale’s head. It was over.
I was numb, both from the bitter cold and the moss choking me. I discarded the gun and slowly made my way back to the cabin, steadying myself on anything solid. The fire had gone out, and it was cold inside. In the dark, I could see Grady’s body, which had been completely overtaken by the moss. I set my keys on the table and looked around for a flashlight or lantern. Once I had light, I gathered what was left of my courage and tore the tape away from the pantry doors. I was ready for an attack, but none came. I aimed my flashlight at the floor and jumped. Seth was still where I left him, but every inch of his body was covered with a thick coat of the moss. I knelt down to look closer and saw that the fibers had hardened into a shell, making Seth look like a purple statue. I looked at my hand, which was now fully covered. With nothing to lose, I reached out slowly to touch Seth’s elbow. The moment I applied pressure, the mass below my fingers crumbled away like plaster.
I stood up in shock, bumping Seth’s legs as I did so. Like weightless shells, his legs cracked and crumbled beneath my feet. I could now see a cross section of Seth’s waist, where nothing human remained. His whole body had been eaten away by coarse webs of purple tentacles. Out of pure morbid curiosity, I nudged his shoulder, which buckled beneath my hand and released a plume of lavender particles. Shining my flashlight around, I saw that the air around me was thick with the same dust. There’s no telling how much I inhaled, but that seemed like the least of my worries. In the end, Seth was the lucky one.
I finally returned to the back yard with a flashlight to inspect the carnage. The snow was pink with diluted blood, and the pieces of the police officer were covered with a fresh layer of snow. Some of them had bite marks from local wildlife, which had wasted no time. Dale’s body was still there, cold and dead. The parts of his body that were fully covered had hardened and crumbled away like Seth, carried off by the wind. I moved on to my truck, hoping I could reverse whatever damage Dale had done. The second cruiser must have arrived around the time of his sabotage, because the only visible signs of damage were the disconnected battery leads. I reconnected them and, sure enough, the truck started right up. I turned it off and returned to the cabin to collect myself. Before I had much time to think, flashes of red and blue shone through the night.
After a brief standoff with three terrified new officers, I walked them through the house and showed them the back yard, giving them a version of what had occurred. As far as they knew, Dale tried to kill Seth and I. We fled into the woods, where Seth ran off and wasn’t seen again. Then Dale killed the two cops and tried to kill me before I shot him in self defense. I pointed out the moss but didn’t elaborate, and they were as mystified as we had been. I also didn’t have any answers regarding the pile of purple sand in the pantry. I reiterated those events to several other officers who arrived shortly after, and then to several more at the station. When there were no more questions to answer and no reason to keep me, I was finally allowed to return to the cabin, which was an active crime scene.
Joan, Dianne, and Lizzie were brought up to speed over the phone by the police. I gathered my belongings and was cleared to drive home. As instructed, I checked in with the local police department, but I never made it home. After everything that had happened, I couldn’t just go back to normal life. I knew I couldn’t face my own wife, let alone the guys’ wives. I stayed in a motel outside town for a while until I was allowed to return to my cabin, where I’ve lived ever since. Eventually, everyone stopped calling and showing up at my door, which was exactly what I wanted. I never formally separated from Joan, but I suspect she’s moved on. While I had expected a triple homicide fueled by purple fungus to be fairly big news, nothing ever came of it. From what I was told by the local police, the case had gone somewhere “up the chain” and disappeared. Even better.
In the years since, I’ve managed to keep the mysterious purple moss in check with a combination of kerosene and scraping. It hurts like a mother, but it also gives me this weird feeling akin to being completely stoned. Even if I could remove all of it from my skin, there’s no telling how much is inside me. My throat and jaw are permanently ice-cold, as are my fingers, and it only lets up when I’m in pain. When I cough, my mucus is flecked with purple. Sometimes I can feel my neck trying to solidify. When I feel my body grinding to a halt, sometimes the only thing that helps is finding an animal to torture, but I hate every second of it.
I’ll eat a bullet before I harm another person, but I have to know what’s behind all this. Had it been an isolated tragedy, I could have moved on in some capacity, but this is bigger than any of us knew that night. See, when I finally returned to my cabin after the local police had passed the buck, it was completely spotless. The bodies were obviously gone, but the window and doors had been replaced, and someone had cleaned up every last drop of blood. I didn’t see a single fiber of the purple moss anywhere, and any traces of it left on the trees had been burned away by something. However, the weirdest part was when I checked the pantry. The folding doors were gone, and the piles of purple dust had been cleared away. As I went to turn, something on the floor caught my eye, and I knelt down to inspect it. What I picked up was a small wooden object, like a talisman, which had been carved into the shape of the moss’ purple tendrils. My stomach dropped out of my body. Someone left this as a message, but I don’t know what it means or who left it.
