The rain in Graycliff is never truly falling.
It seeps from the blackened soil, squeezes out from between the dense needles of the North American cedars, ultimately turning into an impenetrable, gray-green fog that tightly shrouds this primeval rainforest of the Pacific Northwest. Here, there are no seasons, only a muddy period of "raining" and "about to rain."
Lumberjack Miller's tall rubber boots sank heavily into the ankle-deep humus. Pulling them out, the mud made a sickeningly slurping sound. He spat out a mouthful of brown liquid mixed with chewed tobacco; due to the high humidity, the saliva barely flew out, sticking directly to the sawdust-covered zipper of his jacket.
"This forest is a cesspool," Miller panted heavily, swinging his machete and slicing through a thick, thorny vine blocking his path. A bitter, fishy sap oozed from the severed vine, dripping down his leather gloves.
Hank, walking behind him, didn't reply. He carried a STIHL heavy-duty chainsaw, the oily smell from the chain barely masking the pervasive stench of rotting wood. They were there to survey a new logging line. The Graycliff lumberyard had just acquired the logging rights to this area, known as "North Slope," a forbidden zone untouched for over a decade. In the 1970s, a utopian commune had once stood here, but bankruptcy and several mysterious fires had left it completely abandoned, leaving only piles of rotten wood and a few deep, abandoned silver mine shafts.
The deeper they went, the dimmer the light became. The canopy overhead formed an impenetrable dome, cutting the eight o'clock morning sunlight into a few weak, pale beams. Apart from the muffled thud of breaking branches underfoot, the forest was eerily quiet. There was no squirrel scurrying about, not even the sound of woodpeckers tapping on tree trunks.
Suddenly, a rapid flapping of wings ripped through the deathly silence.
A dozen or so large ravens burst from a dark thicket ahead, cawing harshly as they circled and swooped down into the canopy.
Hank stopped, gripping the chainsaw handle tightly, his palms clammy with sweat. Ravens scavenged. It was common knowledge in the rainforest.
"A dead deer?" Hank asked in a low voice.
Miller frowned and sniffed. The smell in the air had changed. Mixed with the fresh scents of rain, peat, and fir, there was a faint, sweet, fishy odor. It wasn't the sour smell of an animal carcass; it smelled more like freshly cut raw meat exposed to cold air.
The smell was coming from about ten meters ahead. There, a ring of rusty barbed wire lay sprawled on the ground, mostly snapped by rough ivy and ferns. That was abandoned mine shaft number 11. The townspeople called it "Blind Eye," a bottomless pit vertically downwards, leading straight to the bedrock.
Miller pulled out his powerful flashlight from his waist, his Adam's apple bobbing. "Let's go check it out. Maybe a black bear fell in."
The two cautiously approached the edge of the mine, their footsteps slipping on the moss. There was no fence; the ground had simply split open into a ten-foot-diameter black hole. The soil around the opening was dark red, covered with large patches of white lichen.
Miller leaned halfway out and switched on the flashlight.
The beam of light, like a yellowed blade, sliced through the viscous mist inside the shaft. Dust, raindrops, and countless tiny fungal spores, invisible to the naked eye, swirled wildly within the beam. The beam extended downwards for thirty feet, forty feet… finally striking a muddy, rocky bottom.
Hank leaned closer, his gaze following the beam down to the bottom of the shaft. The next second, his stomach acid gushed back down his esophagus.
"Damn." Hank gagged violently, staggering backward and slamming his back against a red pine tree.
It wasn't a dead deer, nor a black bear.
In the center of the bottomless mine, lay a person. Or rather, a body that had once been called human.
The person wore a conspicuously bright Gore-Tex fluorescent orange windproof hunting jacket, a jarring contrast against the grey-green rainforest like a festering sore. He lay sprawled on the gravel in a bizarre, backward-jointed position. His right shinbone was completely broken, the white bone spurs piercing his dark khaki overalls and exposed to the damp air. His left arm was twisted behind his back, his fingers digging deep into the mud.
Miller's hand, holding the flashlight, began to tremble uncontrollably, the beam swaying wildly at the bottom of the mine. He tried to move the beam away, but an instinctive fear compelled him to focus it on the dead man's head.
The deceased's face was plastered with mud and water. The impact of the fall had clearly caved in the side of his skull, and dark red blood mixed with the water, slowly spreading and being greedily absorbed by the bloodthirsty moss.
That was Julian.
The only son of the owner of the largest lumber mill in Graycliff, the former quarterback of the town's high school, and a star who was to marry the mayor's daughter next month. Even with his face covered in mud, Miller could immediately recognize the conspicuous Rolex gold watch on his wrist.
But that wasn't what chilled Miller to the bone. What truly stopped him in his tracks was the expression on Julian's face.
From such a height, a person should be filled with extreme pain and fear upon impact. But Julian wasn't.
In the blinding white beam of the flashlight, Julian's eyes bulged, his pupils dilated to their maximum. His blood-stained mouth was stretched taut upwards, the muscles in his cheeks rigid from extreme tension, creating an exaggerated, even ecstatic and bizarrely manic smile.
He felt no pain before he died. It was as if he had seen something extremely sacred or extremely terrifying in a hallucination, so much so that his face was permanently frozen in a nauseating smile as death descended.
The surroundings were eerily quiet, broken only by the "drip-drip" of raindrops on Julian's fluorescent jacket. Less than half a meter from the dead man, on a piece of decaying wood covered in green fuzz, several rare purple fungi swayed slightly in the dim light, completely oblivious to the human life that had just ended there.
Miller frantically pulled the walkie-talkie from his belt, his thumb turning white from the force of pressing the talk button.
"Dispatch center... This is North Slope, District 11. Calling the sheriff. Call the sheriff, fucking!" A crackling sound came through the radio, Miller's voice distorted, tinged with tears. "Something's happened. Young Master Julian is in the abandoned mine. His bones are broken... but he's fucking laughing!"
In less than an hour, the quiet town of Graycliff was utterly ripped apart by sirens.
Sheriff Brody drove his police 4WD Dodge, tires spinning wildly on the forest road, kicking up clouds of red mud. The windshield wipers were on full blast, lashing the windshield like madmen. In the passenger seat, young officer Fakin gripped the door handle tightly, his face deathly pale.
"Ten minutes ago, old Julian was drinking coffee in his mahogany office. Now he's in the town hospital on sedatives." Brody gritted his teeth, staring into the rain and fog where visibility was less than twenty meters. "Everyone in town knows Julian took a Remington hunting rifle to the north slope yesterday afternoon. That's off-limits."
The car stopped a hundred yards from the abandoned mine shaft. Blinding red and blue police lights flashed alternately in the dark forest, casting menacing shadows on the surrounding massive fir trunks.
Brody shoved open the car door roughly, stepping into the mud without even putting on a raincoat. Two town sheriffs who had arrived earlier had already cordoned off the area around the mine with yellow tape. Miller and Hank sat on a fallen log in the distance, Hank still shivering.
"How's the situation?" Brody stepped over a piece of rotten wood, his boots crushing a few clumps of mushrooms, and walked to the mine entrance.
"Aside from the loggers' footprints, no one else has come near," an officer handed him a powerful searchlight. "Sir, you'd better see for yourself. Something's fishy."
Brody took the searchlight, and a beam of light instantly pierced through dozens of feet of darkness, precisely illuminating the orange body at the bottom of the well.
When he saw the face with that eerie smile, even Brody, a Vietnam War veteran, felt a chill run down his spine. He didn't speak immediately, but slowly raised his head, carefully scanning the ground around the mine.
Mud. Dead leaves. Crushed ferns.
No signs of struggle. No dragging marks. No scattered shell casings. Even the bushes weren't violently broken. Everything was too clean, so clean it didn't seem like a murder, but rather like an adult calmly walking to the edge of an abyss and then leaping.
"Contact the state medical examiner, and have the search and rescue team bring pulleys to hoist the body up." Brody switched off his searchlight, raindrops dripping from his stubble-covered chin.
"Sheriff, do you think it was an accident?" Officer Falkin asked, shivering, from behind. "The roads are slippery in the rain, did he accidentally slip and fall?"
Brody didn't answer. He turned around, looked up, and gazed beyond the flashing police lights into the depths of the forest.
In that higher, foggier area, the framework of several dilapidated glass greenhouses could be vaguely seen, like the ribs of a giant beast lurking beneath the canopy. Those were the ruins of the Utopia Commune. Everyone in Graycliff knew that it was home not only to poisonous snakes, traps, and man-eating swamps, but also to a monster.
A woman abandoned in the 1970s, raised like a wild beast amidst mud and poisonous mushrooms; a "Forest Witch" who had never set foot in school, yet could render people mute with Native American herbs—Rowan.
Julian's territory lay in the town's pub and the girls' bedrooms. But he died on Rowan's territory.
Brody took a deep breath of the air, thick with the smell of decaying leaves. The air in his lungs felt like it was coated with ice. He knew this wasn't an accident. In this forest where even the weeds strangled each other for sunlight, there were never accidents. Nature didn't understand murder; it simply swallowed the dead silently and then bloomed anew.
"Seal off the entire north slope," Brody tossed his flashlight to Fakin, his voice cold and unyielding. "Take the men with shotguns. Go to the greenhouse. Find that woman."
As his words fell, a cold wind swept through the upper canopy, and the massive wooden structures sighed deeply. Billions of fungal spores silently spread in the wind, enveloping the entire mine.