Keep Quiet - 4. The disappearing hand

The following morning, the first thing Charles and I did was look for tracks.

We found some suspicious indentations on the ground at the base of the tower, near the spot where I had seen the shape the night before. Although not completely identifiable as tracks, the marks did nevertheless lead out into the forest, at which point we lost the trail completely. We returned to the tower then, and closer examination of the rough and uneven stone wall revealed several places which had been either scuffed or rubbed as if by a scrabbling foot gaining a toehold.

The conclusion seemed inevitable. Last night, someone had climbed the tower, approached our tent, and then left the same way he had come – by scaling and descending the wall. Why he had done this we could not understand. If violence or crime had been his intent, why had he not stolen anything? If such were not the case, then what could have motivated a sane man to act so bizarrely in the middle of the night? And where had he come from? The Wentworth property was vast and fenced off. Other than the groundskeeper, nobody had any motivation whatsoever to enter, let alone permission. Why, then, had I seen what must have been a man the night before?

Charles interrogated me extensively, trying to glean more information where unfortunately I had no more data to offer. He wanted to know whether or not I might have hallucinated the entire episode, which would have admittedly been a comfortable explanation for what I had seen. Nevertheless, I was convinced that I had not imagined any of it. The discovery of the tracks leading away into the forest appeared to support my account, but Charles was quick to point out that scaling the sheer wall of the observation tower was a task quite impossible for most people unless they had come prepared and were experienced climbers. The intruder, Charles concluded, must have then perforce either been exceedingly stupid or exceedingly strong - the former by endangering his life through scaling such a treacherous wall in the dark, and the latter by the mere fact that he had managed to do it.

But why? Why had someone come, approached us, and left?

The entire incident did have its positive side, nevertheless. It provided a welcome distraction from the… events of the previous night and Charles and I did not mention them at all throughout the day. I managed to convince myself that Charles had suffered a nervous breakdown and his irrational and inappropriate advances had been merely a result of a crisis and nothing else. He appeared much more composed in the light of morning, and quickly outlined the objectives he wished to accomplish during the week we had planned to stay in the property. Of paramount importance to him was the careful mapping of the area surrounding the ground floor of what had once been the Wentworth Grand Hotel, since he planned to build his observatory on the same foundations. He mentioned that, next to the scientific building itself, there would be sleeping quarters both for himself, any assistants he may later half – and, as he said this, looked meaningfully in my direction –, a few rooms for the servants with essentials such as a kitchen, and of course the other, larger construction he had in mind: the transmission dish with which he intended to communicate with the stars.

This structure he planned to build in the ground itself, using the concave depression of the crater to simplify the process. He talked well into midday, explaining to me how he intended to generate electricity with which to power his contraption, as well as showing me schematics of the various apparatus with which he would both modulate the transmissions he would send out as well as interpret whichever transmissions he might receive. I must confess that I understood very little of this. Charles kept on making references to what he called radio waves – and, although I was somewhat familiar with Marconi’s experiments, concepts, and their subsequent implementation in various radio transmission stations around the country, I failed to see how he intended to generate electromagnetic waves so powerful as to travel far beyond the planet, or how he planned to create a listening device sensitive enough to both distinguish noise from meaningful information and to interpret it in a way which would be useful for human beings.

We began the process of surveying the area that very afternoon after a quick lunch. The day was hot, the sky cloudless, and the smell of growing things was everywhere – although, I noticed idly as we stepped out of the observation tower and onto the property grounds themselves, this smell was markedly different from the one I had received last night. It smelled like living things, not like rotting vegetable matter. It was wholesome and uplifting, unlike whatever my nostrils had picked up on the observation deck, which was an entirely different kind of chemical register, which triggered aversion in me at merely remembering it.

Carrying out Charles’s plans was hard work. Although a brilliant theoreticist and thinker, he was nevertheless woefully unprepared for the titanic task at hand. It fell to me to plan out the minutiae of our day-to-day activities such that we would be able to successfully map out the terrain around us and gather enough meaningful information as we required in only seven days. Several times I thought that the entire endeavor might have been much more efficiently carried out by a professional, but Charles appeared to want to keep his project as private as possible for as long as possible. Therefore it felt to us, or rather mostly to me, to do such things as record rough estimates of distances, make notes on the various plans Charles had for the main building in terms of distribution, and puzzle out a budget as we went.

Not much of what we did during that week, aside from Charles’s general ideas regarding the location of the large structures of the compound, was actually of any use to the small army of mostly foreign builders which he eventually ended up hiring to make his concept a reality. Both he and I were amateurs and knew very little of actual construction. However, the beginning of the week was not entirely spent in vain. We familiarized ourselves with the terrain, discussed just how the facility would operate once fully built, proposed several ways in which supplies for the compound might be procured in the future, and speculated wildly on the wealth of information that might be gleaned from the electromagnetic observation of space Charles had planned.

And, of course, we explored the crater.

We were naïve back then, unprepared, ignorant. That I could have at any point in my life voluntarily approached something that carried even the slightest hint of that… that thing we later found… I cannot comprehend. But perhaps this is why foresight was the one curse which failed to escape from Pandora’s box when it was opened. It is indeed the worst of them all – knowing our future and being unable to change it would be the most exquisitely perfect form of torture imaginable. Blind as we are to the events which are to come, however, our ignorance allows us to perform acts of great bravery – and acts of great stupidity.

Exploring the crater was one such example of the latter form of act. On the third day, very early in the morning, we walked to the edge of what had been the rather large and beautiful lake. The blackened ruins of the Great Hall, where so many people had died, stood nearby like a grotesque tombstone over a mass grave. It was unnerving, for me at least, to know I was in a place which had known such death and horror, but Charles appeared to pay it not the slightest amount of attention. Indeed, after his emotional breakdown during the first night, he appeared to be deliberately suppressing any outward shows of more emotion. His demeanor towards me was also slightly less open than before. It allowed the awkwardness of his rather perplexing attempt at… Whatever he had attempted to do in the tent that night, that attempt at physical closeness with me, to dissipate. As on the morning after, I was relieved, but part of me was also, inexplicably, disappointed. I would not have admitted it to myself back then, however. I was much too young, insecure, and confused. Instead, just like Charles, I directed most of my efforts that day towards the exploration of the crater and did my best to ignore the nagging questions regarding my emotional state when it came to thoughts of my best friend.

I did not have to try too hard to become enthralled by the crater. It was remarkable in every way. Even though I was no geologist, I had enough background knowledge of the natural sciences to understand that I was in the presence of the aftermath of a very remarkable event, one whose rarity and recent occurrence made it invaluable to understand the dynamics of objects from outer space when they entered the atmosphere of our vulnerable planet.

Immediately, the first thing that became apparent was that the object had not been just a bolide. The indentation on what had been the bottom of the lake was much too deep for a mere airborne explosion to have caused it. The scar on the ground was itself made of what appeared to be two craters. The first one, quite small but very deep, was centered around the lake bed. The second one, much wider and shallower, covered an area which I estimated around one square mile and which included parts of the forest and, of course, the Great Hall.

Through evening conversations with Charles, both of us later came to the conclusion that the impact had been caused by a complex body. Friction with the atmosphere was very likely to have caused it to fragment just a few hundred feet above the ground. Its smaller, denser core had then impacted on the lakebed, while its larger mass, ostensibly much less dense, had exploded before impact. The result was quite unique in that the extent of the destruction as a result of the two events together had been much greater than that of a single isolated event. It explained why the crater itself was so large and why the damage had been so extensive, while at the same time providing a clear foundation for understanding why the smaller crater at the center appeared to be so deep.

I still remember the first time my feet stepped on the abominable softness of the curious mold growth which covered the entirety of the surface of the larger, shallow crater. It was so minute and grew so close to the ground that at first I mistook it for ash or some other remnant of the explosion. However, my foot sank almost an inch into the ground as if I were treading on the softest possible carpet the world could offer. As the sun rose higher in the sky, I realized that the hue of the mold changed depending on my vantage point. It could either appear jet black in the shade or a deep emerald green when sunlight hit it from behind. It was quite beautiful, or so it seemed back then to my ignorant eyes. I remember pointing this out to Charles, could himself appeared quite mystified. He then asked aloud:

“Where is the water?”

He was as insightful as ever. Nevertheless, I have always been much slower in reaching his conclusions when I have managed to do so at all, and so it was several moments before I realized that his question was actually quite significant. The crater depression, though shallow, should at least have had a measure of stagnant water at the bottom. It had been raining recently and water had to have accumulated, yet it had not. There was also the fact that this crater had been in the same place for more than a decade – surely it would have refilled with water by then? Why hadn’t it? Why was it dry and devoid of anything but the thick and mysteriously even carpet of strange mold?

We made our way to the center, of course. This was the place which occupied us for most of the day and well into the afternoon. The smaller impact crater was unmistakable, with slightly uneven edges lining an elliptical depression in the ground which must have been around 300 feet in diameter. It was here that the mold grew thickest. However, by far the most interesting part about the impact site was the fact that it was hollow.

At its very center, there was a crack in the ground. Charles and I approached the area with care, since the mold made it impossible to see whether our feet would rest on solid ground or whether they would sink through into the hole that we saw in the spot where I would have expected to see a meteorite. There was a jagged chasm at the bottom of the erstwhile lake, as if whatever had crashed against the ground with terrible force had not only done so, but punctured the surface like paper, sinking deep into the earth. We carried no lights with us, but the sun was high overhead and by its light we could see that the depression lined with yet more mold appeared to be quite deep. The hole itself was maybe six feet wide at the most, uneven, and treacherous-looking. It was very mysterious, I must admit, since never had I seen, in books or otherwise, a crater quite like this one.

Charles and I both decided that further exploration of the hole was in order. I went back to the car and got out a length of sturdy rope that I’d had the foresight of packing. I also brought two battery-powered flashlights which Charles had brought from New York, and we set about using these tools to enable us to explore the depths of the hole. However, since the crater area offered no point of anchor for the rope, only one of us could go down at a time. Charles was shorter than I, and also less athletic, so he was the one who climbed down while I held the rope on the surface.

I was nervous as Charles disappeared under the lip of the jagged impact site. I had no idea how dangerous what we were doing really was, although now I know better, and realize we were very stupid indeed in thinking that a couple of amateurs like us, with no preparation whatsoever, could essentially go down and explore what turned out to be a rather large natural cave right under the surface of the lake. Later geological analyses of the area were able to provide a better picture of what had happened on the day of the impact. The lake itself had rested over this cave, separated from it by a narrow layer of impermeable rock which had been shattered by the meteorite. This had caused whatever water in the lake which had not been vaporized by the bolide explosion to drain down into the cave. It was the reason why, despite more than a decade of rains, the crater remained dry – rainwater simply trickled down into the vast underground chamber below our feet, the extension of which remained unknown for many years.

That first day, only Charles had the opportunity to descend. He came back up, quite excited, reporting that he had not been able to reach the bottom of the cave but had seen water not far below. It was a fascinating discovery, but further exploration was postponed until early morning the next day. We brought the car as close to the edge of the crater as we could then, tied the rope to it to secure it, and verified that we still had enough length for a descent, which we did. This done, I went down for the first time.

I still have nightmares of that place. Not because of what I saw that day, but because of what would later happen. At that time, however, nothing particularly out of the ordinary struck my fancy, other than the ever-present mold which I could not really explain. Dangling on the rope, in an extraordinarily stupid display of bravado, I made a point of descending further down than Charles had managed to do the day before. The first few feet of the descent were spent in complete darkness, with my feet scrabbling for purchase on the shaft which the meteorite impact had left behind. However, I soon broke through into the cave and the change in the air was immediately evident. It changed from the hot and moldy summertime scent which had been all around me to a much different, cooler, and somewhat mineral-laced atmosphere.

I had tied the rope around my midsection and was holding it with one hand for stability. The other hand grasped a flashlight which I now turned on. Looking around, I saw the water mirror perhaps six feet further down. The waters inside the cave were black and motionless. I was slightly anxious about the fact that I had now gone too far down to climb out on my own, and already I could feel the rope trembling under what was undoubtedly Charles’s waning strength. Despite the fact that the rope was secured to the car and that Charles could use the vehicle to easily drag me out, it was still unnerving to know that he was already feeling so weak simply from holding the rope steady. I felt a stab of anxiety – perhaps I should return. I could see absolutely no ledge or anything similar which might offer me a chance to land on and from there perhaps explore. I had no idea how deep the water was, and the fact that Charles and I were out on our own here, with the closest help being the taciturn groundskeeper several miles away, finally made the evident danger and idiocy of my course of action clear to me. I flicked off the flashlight and prepared to ascend.

That was when I saw the meteorite.

It was lying right below me, resting underneath less than a foot of shallow water, and only in the darkness could I have seen it, since it was glowing softly, its phosphorescent light rippling ever so slightly with minute disturbances on the water’s surface. Disbelieving, I hesitated. I could have done the prudent thing and climbed back out, told Charles about the discovery and subsequently planned a course of action. But I was young then, reckless.

I tugged on the rope three times, letting Charles know that he needed to give me some slack. It came immediately and I descended until my feet touched the water and then were immersed in it.

The water was very cold indeed, and when I was knee-deep in it I signaled for Charles to stop. I used my feet alone to explore beneath the surface until I found solid ground underneath. With great relief, I then rested my weight on this underwater ledge and signaled to Charles via more tugging, in the rough approximation of Morse code we had agreed to use, that he could relax.

I stashed the flashlight in my pocket and reached down into the frigid water with both hands. I fished out the meteorite with some difficulty, since although it was barely larger than a brick, it was far heavier than its size had implied. It was lumpy, although smooth, as if polished by great friction, which undoubtedly it had been. I could not make out too much detail since its phosphorescence died out the second it was out of the water. Puzzled, I looked at it for nearly a minute, expecting the yellowish-green glow to come back but it did not. The object was quite cold, colder in fact than the water had been, and it quickly became uncomfortable to hold it in my bare palms. Therefore, I awkwardly tied the rope more securely around my waist as fast as I could and then gave Charles the signal to start the car and drag me out.

Coming out into the light felt like waking up after a nightmare, although back then I could not have explained why it felt thus. Whatever worries or fears I might have had while down inside the cave were completely burned away by the warm light of the midday sun and by my own beaming curiosity, which was surpassed only by Charles’s own. Once on the surface of the moldy crater with my prize, Charles and I left everything where it was and hurried back to the observation tower to analyze the meteorite. I was excited, not because I expected my find to be worth anything monetarily, but simply because of the thrill of discovery. I was a scientist through and through, and my sense of curiosity was genuine back then. Things are different now, of course. My curiosity has been replaced by fear of the unknown. There are things in this world which should forever remain in darkness, undiscovered. And there are things beyond this world which only the blessed darkness of ignorance can protect us from.

But that day none of those thoughts even crossed my mind. Charles and I spent the entire afternoon analyzing the find. It was undoubtedly metallic. Although most of it was blackened by its violent impact, there was a section on top, the one which had presumably phosphoresced in the water, which was polished a bright silver as if the material were aluminum or perhaps platinum. Its incredible density suggested a much heavier element, however, and strongly hinted at the fact that we were in the presence of an exotic alloy which would not easily be found on Earth. The matter of its temperature was also quite puzzling. Despite the relative summer heat, the object remained stubbornly cold to the touch even after being set out in the sun for some time.

Charles and I were, needless to say, quite excited by the discovery. We were in the presence of material from beyond the stars, something which had traveled uncounted miles through the void only to reach us after a voyage which must have taken millions upon millions of years. The horrible circumstances surrounding its eventual arrival did not diminish my own wonder at being able to study something which no others had ever had a chance to study. As the day wore on, Charles and I carried out increasingly careful measurements of everything which occurred to us and which we had the equipment to do. Length, dimensions, and general outward appearance were carefully recorded in our notebooks. We estimated its weight and made sure to make note of its relatively high density as well as the temperature differential of its surface. The meteorite itself appeared to be quite resilient and hard, yet somewhat brittle, as we discovered to our dismay when I accidentally bumped the old worktable we had dragged from the bottom level of the observation tower, and on which our prize had been resting. The meteorite fell about four feet onto the stone floor of the observation deck and an inch-sized piece of it broke cleanly off. Horrified, I picked it up much more carefully this time and for the rest of the afternoon we made sure to watch our step. Charles pocketed the small broken fragment so it would not be lost, and we continued our observations with great fascination.

It was only when afternoon gave way to evening that the rumbling in my stomach reminded me that the larger part of the provisions we had brought with us were still in the car, which we had essentially abandoned on the crater. I offered to go relocate the car closer to the observation tower, as well as to bring some of the foodstuffs we had procured so we could eat something. Charles, distracted as he attempted to make rough measurements of reflectivity of the surface of the meteorite, gestured in the affirmative and I left rather hurriedly to finish my task and get back to this completely unexpected but very interesting development in our excursion.

Alas, I was gone for less than half an hour. But in that half an hour, something happened. Neither Charles nor I were ever really able to solve this particular mystery, but I am able to guess, and my conjectures are too horrible to mention. I will tell only of the facts as I saw them back then… Their interpretation will have to wait for that other, much greater horror, which manifested itself in the end.

The afternoon air was stifling as I drove the car as close to the observation tower as the dilapidated paths would allow me to. I got out of the vehicle gratefully and opened the trunk, stashing therein the rope which had served us so well and recovering from its depths a heavy wooden box which held some dry food, a jar of marmalade, and nuts of various sorts in a glass container with a tight lid. Having procured this, with hands full, I made my way to the entrance of the tower as the hot summer sun finally sank behind the mountain range to the west.

That was when I heard the horrible scream.

Startled, I hesitated. But the scream was followed by a deep thud, a frantic scraping, and some other faint sound which my damaged hearing could not fully make out.

Alarmed now, with the thought of the intruder from the previous night very fresh in my mind, I dropped everything I was carrying and rushed up the stairs as fast as I was able to go. I stumbled onto the observation deck just a few seconds later, but by then it was already too late. My eyes took in the entire scene in an instant.

Charles lay on the floor, face down. He was not moving. The large table we had been using was upturned on its side, very close to the edge of the deck as though it had somehow been thrown, which should not have been possible given its dimensions and heft. The meteorite was nowhere to be seen.

The most horrible thing, however, I only discovered after I rushed to Charles and gently turned him over to check if he had been injured by the assailant.

Charles was unconscious, and it was evident that he had been struck on the head with great force. His body was tense and rigid, and later he told me that all he remembered was being hit from behind – he had not heard the intruder coming. He said that his last memory was of turning around, trying to fight… But here, whether out of genuine memory loss or out of plain refusal to share whatever it was he had really seen, Charles never said. He just told me that he had tried to fight his attacker by grabbing him and that he had then blacked out.

That did not explain the thing I found still clasped in his rigid hands that afternoon. A cold shiver of dread snaked up my spine when I realized that Charles had somehow grabbed his attacker so forcefully that he had… he had ripped out the man’s right hand - a disembodied hand he now clutched.

I must have screamed. I was caught between revulsion at my discovery, utter disbelief, and my genuine worry for Charles. The latter won over a few moments later, and I managed to wake Charles up after some vigorous shaking of his shoulders. He was greatly agitated, and even more so when he realized what it was he held. He threw the ghastly hand as far away as he could, to a far end of the deck where the thing plopped down with a wet squelch which seemed somehow… wrong for what a normal human hand should sound like. I had not the slightest inclination to go and check it, though. I focused my attention on Charles, and on calming him down. As soon as I was sure that he had suffered no permanent damage, I looked all over for signs of an intruder but found nothing. Dusk was quickly settling over the land and the light was failing. Mosquitoes came out in great numbers, forcing us both to retreat back into the tent as the night before. There, by the light of the lamp, I told Charles that the meteorite had been stolen, for I had not found it anywhere. I asked him if he had seen who it had been that attacked him, but he said he did not remember. He appeared greatly disturbed and I did not push the issue any further. Neither of us wanted to mention the hand. Minutes of horrified silence and worry stretched out into hours and I felt as if trapped inside the tent, scared to stay inside but even more scared of leaving its shelter in case we were not alone. In the end, after what felt like a very long time, darkness and general exhaustion left us no choice but to sleep – although we did assign shifts so one of us would be awake at all times.

Thankfully, the night brought no more surprises. In the morning, however, we discovered that the hand which Charles had cast aside just a few hours earlier was nowhere to be seen. We looked at the place where it had lain and, aside from some faint moldy fuzz, there was nothing there anymore.

I did not know what to think, or how to explain it. Had the attacker come back in the night to retrieve it? But either Charles or I would have –

I believe this is when I realized that, although one of us had been awake at all times throughout the night, it was quite possible that Charles had failed to hear someone coming stealthily in the night. It might have also happened to me, although my own hearing loss was less severe. That meant that this person, this robber, could have come again in the darkness, within inches of our tent, while we were unaware of the danger.

But if that were the case, why hadn’t he attacked us? And why was the meteorite the only thing he had taken away? He had overpowered Charles easily, and yet he had not taken anything of value except for our very recent discovery. Why? What kind of a person would come in the night, attack people, and fail to steal anything to make it worth the trouble?

These questions echoed strangely in my mind, and it was only after some time that I realized that the reason for this was that they reminded me of the case I had seen in the newspapers a year ago with the dead hikers. That tragedy was still unexplained, but now that I thought about it, the events of last night had something in common with whatever had happened to those people. Something had terrified them enough to force them to leave their tents in a hurry, and yet none of their valuables had been taken at all.

I dismissed my worries as idle castrophizing back then. It was a mistake. Had I taken my instinct seriously, I may have discovered things earlier… I may have been able to save Charles in the end. But I did not, instead spending most of that day searching the terrain around the tower for signs of the intruder like the day before. It was all fruitless, and when nighttime approached, neither Charles nor I were any closer to understanding just who it had been or why this person, this intruder, had acted the way he had.

Charles wanted to return to the crater site to perhaps dig up another meteorite, but I’d had enough and told him so. I wanted to leave, the sooner the better. It did not take long to convince Charles that we had to go, although he was certainly disappointed. He grudgingly gave in eventually, nevertheless, and we returned to civilization much earlier than we had originally planned. I convinced Charles to hire professional surveyors to carry out whatever measurements and observations he still required in order to build his observatory. I also suggested strongly to perhaps notify the police, or whatever would be the competent authority, of the attacks we had suffered. This last thing I believe he never did. Instead, he merely hired two more groundskeepers, tough and ruthless men, as I would come to learn later, and gave them instructions on dealing with any trespassers to the property with any measure of violence they deemed necessary.

Not everything was lost, though, nor was our trip completely unfruitful. Charles sent me an excited letter a couple of days after our return to Albany explaining that he had rediscovered the fragment of meteorite he still carried in his pocket, and that he was busy analyzing it in a specialized laboratory at New York City. When he returned from that trip, I learned of his findings. The thing we had found was indeed a meteorite. There could be no doubt given that its composition was nearly 70% iridium, a metal which is exceedingly rare on the surface of the Earth. However, it had strange physical properties which the laboratory had been unable to fully analyze. There was no trace of either phosphorescence or abnormally low temperature on the fragment, but it appeared to be losing mass somehow. It also exhibited magnetic properties despite not containing ferromagnetic elements at all. The object was a complete mystery, and Charles received several offers from a couple of universities to donate his discovery to their respective geology departments, but he could not be persuaded to part with it and he carried that meteorite fragment with him at all times until the day he disappeared.

I wonder whether that is what singled him out.

I wonder whether that is why that thing found him in the end.

This would have been the end of the rather awful excursion and everything regarding it, but for something relatively small, the true implications of which I refused to truly comprehend back then. I had kept on receiving the Evening Herald regularly, as a source of cheap entertainment rather than verifiable news, and a few days after our return, there was a rather long article regarding the disappearance of the reporter Eoin Caine, who had a year previous covered the rather disturbing and still unexplained disappearance of the group of hikers near the Wentworth property. Apparently, Caine had become somewhat obsessed with the case, returning several times to the town of Tupper Lake to further investigate, or so he had claimed. The writer of the article I was reading had worked with Caine, and he mentioned that, before his disappearance, Caine had hinted at a fascinating story which would make its way across the entire country once he was done writing about it. There was evidence that Caine had returned on at least one occasion to the site where the hikers had established their camp, and he had planned on doing a second expedition around six months before Charles and I visited the region ourselves. From that point on, however, he had gone silent and his coworkers had been forced to admit that he had disappeared once the newspaper was sent an unpaid bill for a room which Caine had booked at the house of Tupper Lake’s minister, Rev. Dover.

The article ended with some idle speculation on the fate of such a zealous reporter as Caine. The entire last paragraph was filled with questions only, wondering whether the same horrible fate as had befallen the hikers had also met him at the end. It was a clear attempt by the writer to entice curiosity in the readers, but it was evident that he had no further information – and, in the following weeks, no other articles concerning Eoin Caine were ever published.

I know what happened to this man, or at least part of what happened to him. The rest I can only conjecture, but I am fairly certain that I have arrived at conclusions which are well within the realm of possibility.

Eoin Caine was but the next victim of the unspeakable gestating horror which hid in that accursed area of untamed wilderness which my life had the misfortune of being linked to. I was notified of his death just a few weeks after reading of his disappearance – by Charles, of all people. I received a hurried note that evening bearing his unmistakable handwriting, asking me to meet him at the mansion. It sounded urgent, and so I made a point of going as soon as I had finished helping my father with paperwork he needed to file and organize.

I met Charles in the library. He appeared agitated.

What is the matter? I gestured.

He handed me a letter by way of answering. I unfolded the paper and skimmed its contents. It appeared to be a report from one of his contracted surveyors, which he had promptly dispatched about two weeks earlier to finish analyzing the property so as to properly determine where Charles’s observatory would best be built.

On the second page of the letter, however, a note had been attached. It read:

Discovered a corpse this morning, southwestern edge of the property, a quarter-mile into the forest. Authorities have been notified. Body was found in bad shape, decomposed. Must have lain there for at least six months. Identity unrecognizable, but documents in pockets confirm the man as having been one Eoin Caine, from New York City.

Animal attack most likely cause of death. Body was missing a hand, probably torn off by the beast that killed him. Suggest preemptive legal action to avoid liability of any kind. Please let me know how to proceed.

Having read the note, I looked up at Charles. I did not need to say anything. I was certain we were both thinking the very same thing.

The assailant in the night, the unidentified person who had stolen the meteorite and attacked Charles… It could have been no other person, not given the description of the corpse which had been found.

Nevertheless. That corpse had been dead for at least six months. This piece of information was later confirmed by my father as part of the protective legal proceedings that took place after the discovery.

But, if that was the case… Who or what had crept up the wall of the observation tower in the night, leaving that unbearable stench in its wake? Who or what had attacked Charles that day? And how was it that this… Thing, or person, or whatever it had been; how was it that it had been strong enough to overpower my friend, yet fragile enough to have its own hand torn off from the rest of its flesh, like rotting meat torn off a bone?

What had it wanted? Why was it now dead? How long had it been dead?

And why did I feel the most terrible of shivers as I saw the pendant Charles now wore about his neck, a delicate silver chain from which dangled the small fragment of meteorite we had dug out from the frigid waters of the crater?