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  I felt myself turn as red as the tomatoes on the kitchen counter as Mr. and Mrs. Churnley erupted into raucous laughter. Angie, Lauren, and I cleared our throats in an attempt to join in, before inching toward the door.

  “We’re just gonna go and rest a bit before lunch if that’s okay,” Angie said with a plastic smile.

  “Of course!” Mrs. Churnley replied, and the three of us swiftly took our leave. “It’ll be ready within the hour!”

  I let out a breath as we entered the narrow corridor. They were definitely an unusual couple. Apparently they used to live in the city, and worked as bankers before they got so burned out on metropolitan life that they had a midlife crisis and swung the other way—completely the other way. They bought this patch of land decades ago, and judging by the state of the house, they probably hadn’t renovated it since they moved in.

  We climbed the rickety staircase that led to the second floor, where the three of us shared a bedroom fitted with three single beds. Although the Churnleys had space for guests, it was quite obvious they weren’t used to having any. There were two other bedrooms on our level—one belonging to the old couple, and another that had fallen into disrepair. Angie suspected the latter had belonged to their only child, a boy who had died at the age of thirteen from a rare form of cancer.

  Angie’s grandmother was convinced they were terribly lonely, but would never admit to it, since they’d “rather rot” than go back to living like the rest of the world. So when she learned that Angie, Lauren, and I wanted to do something memorable this summer, she had been quick to think of her old friends, and had contacted them by snail mail.

  Lauren was the first to use the en-suite bathroom when we entered our musty-smelling room, while Angie and I flopped back on our creaky beds. The shower started, and we sniggered as Lauren stepped in and sighed to herself, “Ah, luxury.”

  It was kind of amazing the things you appreciated when everything got stripped from you. I imagined I’d feel utterly spoiled when I returned home in a month.

  Angie blew out softly, staring up at the bare wooden beams strutted across the cobwebbed ceiling. “I could have sworn I saw dudes there,” she mumbled.

  I smiled to myself. “It was an illusion, Angie,” I said in a dreamy voice. “A mirage… Where normal people would see an oasis of water in a desert, you would see an oasis of, well…” My tone dropped. “I do kind of worry what that says about you.”

  She chucked a pillow at me. “Shut up.”

  “Hey,” I said, changing the subject, “why don’t we go visit the creek this afternoon? After lunch, we can gather the herbs quickly, and then have the rest of the day free.”

  “Suits me,” she muttered. “We’ll see what Lauren thinks.”

  I stood up to stretch out my arms and, yawning, caught sight of myself in the stained mirror near the window. My brown hair was hardly in better condition than Lauren’s or Angie’s, even though I’d braided it and then wrapped it in a tight bun, and the corners of my blue eyes were tinged reddish—they were feeling a little irritated, come to think of it. I wasn’t used to being so close to nature.

  The shower stopped abruptly. Lauren emerged from the bathroom a moment later, clutching a towel around her bare body, her shoulder-length hair foaming with shampoo. “So, the water just stopped,” she announced, her toes curling on the wooden floor as water pooled around her feet.

  “Ah.” Angie threw her an amused, yet apologetic look. “Maybe—”

  Before we could hear her speculation, Mrs. Churnley’s voice boomed up from the bottom of the staircase. “You used too much water at one time, dear—whichever one of you was in the shower just now. I’ll have Mr. Churnley come up and show you how to manually work the pump—”

  “Oh, don’t bother, ma’am,” Lauren replied quickly. “I’m sure Mr. Churnley has enough to do.”

  She looked back at the two of us with tight lips, and I frowned, assessing our options. “Maybe we should just save our hair washing for the creek and use this bathroom only for quick showering—Angie and I were gonna suggest we go there this afternoon anyway.”

  Lauren blinked, taking a moment to process my suggestion. “Hair washing in the creek,” she repeated, almost robotically. “Right. Okay. So, I’ll just… wrap up this sticky slop of hair and wait then. That’s fine. No problem.”

  With that, she turned and marched stiffly back into the bathroom. Exchanging glances with Angie, I laughed. It seemed Lauren was getting past the stage of expecting things to work and surrendering to the experience. And that was good.

  It was the first step toward us all having a lot of fun.

  Chapter Two

  “So where is the creek exactly?” Angie asked Mrs. Churnley. We stood on the porch after eating as quick a lunch as we could manage, with the couple for company, and finishing our duties in the greenhouse.

  Mrs. Churnley prodded a chubby finger toward the tractor path that ran in front of the house. “Just take a right turn once you’re out of the gate and follow that track. It’ll lead you to the creek after about a thirty-minute walk. Do make sure you’re back before it’s dark, since there won’t be any lights to lead you.”

  “Sounds simple enough!” I said brightly.

  “Thanks, ma’am,” Lauren said, adjusting her towel-turban, beneath which the shampoo had mostly dried and turned her hair into a curious blend of stiff and sticky.

  As we turned to leave, passing the lounging dogs and heading down the steps, Mrs. Churnley added, “Oh, and watch out for leeches in the creek! Neither Mr. Churnley nor I have been down there since last summer, but they’re usually around at this time of year.”

  Lauren’s jaw tightened. “Thanks.”

  “Leeches beat snakes though, right?” Angie snickered as we stepped through the gate and began our journey along the track. Breathing in through her nose and setting her gaze straight ahead, Lauren chose not to comment on that.

  I was carrying a large bag stuffed with towels, two jumbo bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and enough drinking water (I’d made sure of it myself this time), and we all wore our bikinis beneath our clothes. Lauren, being Lauren, was also sporting green jelly shoes.

  “This place really is in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?” I remarked, both admiring and feeling kind of intimidated by the endless sprawl of no-man’s land that surrounded us. Having been brought up in the city and not traveled much in my life, the largest stretches of nature I was used to seeing were city parks. This was something else. It made me feel small and insignificant, like a tiny piece of a far greater existence that really didn’t care about my life plans or problems.

  “Ya know,” Angie said, her tone taking on a distant quality as she joined me in gazing out on our surroundings, “I wish we were here for longer than four weeks.”

  A melancholic silence fell between us. Even Lauren didn’t remark. None of us had to ask why Angie wished for that. Despite our proclamations that our friendship would stay the same in spite of the distance, deep down I was sure we were all doubtful about how the next stage of our lives would really affect it. If I was honest with myself, I didn’t see how our dynamic wouldn’t change. It seemed inevitable that we would drift apart, no matter how much we loved one another. We would meet new friends, be exposed to different ideas, and the little quirks we’d come to know each other for would change along with our habits.

  We would grow into different people; there was no escaping that. The friends Jean and Roger were closest to now, in their mid-forties, were not the same as those they’d had in high school.

  The thought made me feel insecure, but also all the more fiercely grateful that we had come to this place, so stupidly cut off from everything that could distract us from us.

  Glancing at my friends, whose eyes, like mine, had turned to the gravel crunching beneath our feet, a renewed determination rolled through me to make the most of the next four weeks that we possibly could.

  I allowed a toothy grin to spread across my face
as I set my gaze on the entrance to the woods, where the track was leading us.

  “Last one to the trees is a roach dropping,” I announced, before rocketing forward. Lauren yelped as I caught her arm and dragged her along with me, her jelly shoes slapping on the ground. Angie didn’t need an assisted head start—she might have been the shortest of the three of us, but she was the fittest. She quickly caught up with us, and it was, predictably, Lauren who earned the unfortunate title, Angie and I just about tying in first place.

  We skidded to a stop once we were over the woods’ threshold, and looked around. It was cooler and darker than I had expected it to be in here—I was surprised by how thick the trees were. Faint birdsong drifted down from the canopy of branches overhead, and the air was still, with very little breeze.

  “Kinda creepy,” Angie said in a hushed tone.

  “Beautiful creepy,” I replied, just as softly.

  We walked on in silence, and I relished the peace, the woods’ quiet energy thrumming around us. Direct sunlight touched our faces only intermittently as we followed the path straight ahead.

  Then Angie stopped abruptly. “Hey,” she whispered. “Do you hear that?”

  Lauren and I halted and listened. I was confused at first as to what exactly Angie was referring to, but then I heard it—a distant thunk, thunk, thunk. Like the sound of metal against wood.

  We met each other’s gazes, and I knew exactly what Angie was about to say from the triumphant gleam in her eyes before she said it.

  “Lumberjacks!” she whispered. “Maybe I wasn’t imagining them after all! They could’ve spotted my head above the crops and just rolled off the logs before I took the picture, or something…”

  Lauren frowned at Angie, looking dubious, but then shrugged. “I would’ve done the same if I noticed some perv watching me.”

  Ignoring Lauren’s comment, Angie strayed from the track and began to creep through the undergrowth toward the noise, leaving the two of us staring after her.

  Lauren’s thick eyebrows rose high above the rim of her glasses as she exhaled. “So, are we going dude hunting now, or to the creek? Because they’re in two opposite directions, and as much as I would—”

  Lauren faltered as Angie turned around and held a finger to her lips.

  The noise had stopped.

  There was a pregnant pause as we waited another thirty seconds to see if it would start again, and when it didn’t, Angie let out a sigh and ambled back to us.

  “Seems they’re shy,” she remarked with a droll smile.

  “Okay, let’s keep moving,” Lauren said firmly, taking the lead. “Some of us have crap to scrape off our heads.”

  As Mrs. Churnley had promised, the creek was easy to find. We heard gushing about five minutes before we reached it, and quickened our pace to arrive before a beautiful, gently flowing basin of water enclosed by stooping tree branches and bordered by bushes of white and purple wildflowers.

  “Well, this is nice,” Lauren admitted, her expression almost suspicious.

  We approached the bank, searching for the best place to set up. We found a little patch of grass, and I dumped the bag there before pulling out the items we needed. We stripped to our swimwear, examining the ground more cautiously now that we were barefooted, and then approached the water. It was surprisingly cold, but a welcome contrast to even the relatively cool forest air—we had all grown sticky during our walk.

  Goosebumps ran along my skin as I waded deeper, the soles of my feet slipping along the smooth stones of the riverbed. Our eyes darted around the murky water, searching for leeches. When the water was up to our waists and we’d spotted none, I bit the bullet and submerged myself all in one go—Lauren and Angie following suit.

  I billowed to the top, gasping for air. “Awesome!”

  Lauren quickly set about scrubbing all the dried and cakey shampoo off her hair, and I moved back to the bank to grab the shampoo and conditioner bottles. After the three of us had completed the ritual—which actually took less time than it would have in a regular shower or bath, due to the movement and volume of the water—we started frolicking about like graceless mermaids, and things soon descended into an all-out splashing war. We were only vaguely aware of the time passing from the amount of sunlight that trickled through the treetops, and by the time I pulled away to check my watch on the bank, we needed to start heading back, unless we wanted to get trapped in the woods after nightfall.

  “Oh, dang,” Lauren said as Angie and I were leaving the water. “Where’s the shampoo?”

  We whirled around to see her pointing toward a stone jutting out into the center of the creek, where we had set down the bottles while we swam. Angie and I had totally forgotten they were even there, and now only the conditioner bottle remained standing.

  “Oops, that sucks,” I said. “One of us must have knocked it accidentally. Looks like we’ll be stuck with Mrs. Churnley’s homemade shampoo for the rest of the trip…”

  With that prospect ringing in her ears, Lauren surged toward the stone, snatched up the conditioner and threw it to me. “You two get everything packed up,” she ordered. “I’m looking for that shampoo.”

  “Need your glasses?” Angie offered with a smirk.

  “Just pass me a long stick,” Lauren muttered, staring down.

  Angie and I left the water and hunted around for a broken tree branch until I found one that seemed thick and long enough to be useful. I chucked it toward Lauren, and then Angie and I turned away from the water and began drying off.

  Lauren’s shriek a minute later made us whip back around.

  “What the—” She swore.

  “What?” Angie and I called, staring at her as she splashed toward us, her eyes set on a patch of water about five feet away from the rock where we’d kept the bottles.

  “I dislodged something!” she panted, still backing away from whatever it was she’d spotted in the water.

  I was expecting it to be a leech, or a group of them, but then I saw it. Something was rising from the depths of the creek. A long, dark shadow at first, but as it broke the surface, it was… My eyes bugged. It took my brain several moments to put a name to what I saw.

  “A wing?” I blurted.

  It was a huge, black, shimmering thing—several feet across—with protruding veins and a startlingly pointed tip. It looked like… some kind of giant, prehistoric bat wing.

  Angie was already wading into the water for a closer look, passing Lauren and grabbing the stick. By the time she reached the thing, Lauren had climbed out of the water and snatched up her glasses so she could see in detail past more than a few feet. Angie used the stick to guide the wing to the bank, and once it was close enough, I wrapped the edges of my towel around my hands to act as gloves and kneeled over the edge. I gingerly got a hold of the edge of the wing and, in spite of how offputtingly heavy it was, managed to haul it up onto the grass. We gathered around it, our mouths hanging open.

  “It must’ve been stuck between some rocks on the riverbed,” Lauren breathed.

  “What is it?” Angie mused, bending down. She cautiously poked a bare finger against its leathery surface, and it gave way at her touch. Her nose wrinkled. “Ew… Feels supple.”

  I hesitated to ask why that might be. Was there some kind of rare bird species inhabiting this area that could have shed such a thing? If there was, I sure didn’t want to come face to face with it. Now that the thing was out of the water and I was looking closer, I could make out the reason the tip looked so sharp—there was a gnarly hook attached to it… It looked predatory.

  Our gazes slowly raised, in unison, to the treetops above the creek, as if expecting to suddenly spot the owner of the wing perched among the branches and glaring down at us with red demon eyes.

  Lauren gulped. “I, uh, think Mr. and Mrs. Churnley should see this.”

  “I agree,” Angie said, her voice slightly hoarse. “If there is some kind of weird animal living around here, they ought to know.”
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br />   Our eyes returned to the wing, and silence reigned once again. Judging by my friends’ expressions, it wasn’t just me who found the idea of lugging this back with us through the woods, bringing it back home, creepy.

  I cleared my throat, realizing we had wasted too much time already. Perhaps it was just my imagination, but the atmosphere suddenly seemed a lot darker than it had only a few minutes ago.

  “Let’s get going,” I mumbled.

  I slipped on my shorts and top over my dry-ish swimwear, and we hurried to pack up our things—Angie and Lauren not bothering to waste time drying off, just wrapping a towel around themselves. That left my towel and two of the other spare ones we’d brought with us to use in carrying the wing. We wrapped them around our hands to prevent direct contact. Angie lifted our bag over one shoulder, taking her turn to carry it, and we gingerly grabbed hold of the wing and started to tug it away from the creek.

  I knew I was stupid for getting spooked over this—there was probably some perfectly rational explanation for what the wing was—but somehow I couldn’t shake the feeling of eyes watching us as we trekked our way back home.

  Chapter Three

  “What on earth?” Mrs. Churnley gasped.

  We reached the house just as the last slivers of light were disappearing from the sky. Panting and sweating, we lugged the wing into the center of the kitchen/dining room and dropped it on the wooden floor. My hands were aching from having clutched the thing for so long; extra strain had been applied from squeezing tightly to keep the towel in place.

  “Yeah… We really don’t know,” Angie said, wiping her brow with a towel.

  Mr. and Mrs. Churnley rose from the table where they’d been sipping iced tea and hovered over the wing, their faces set in utter confusion.

  “Any clue what it is?” I prompted.

  “It looks like a giant bat wing!” Mr. Churnley exclaimed, voicing my initial impression of it, his eyes bugging with awe.