The universe hummed—a low and constant vibration that nobody seemed to notice, and nobody knew its significance. People are too busy drowning in their own babble: there is so much noise, everybody jeering into echo chambers, fighting and killing each other over things that won’t matter in ten years—maybe not even next year.

 

     But I’m not writing to complain about any of that. I’m here to leave behind an account of the things I have seen. I also feel the need to leave a confession. A true accounting of what I’ve done. And what I am about to do.

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...

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    My grandmother went missing in the fall of 1981. I was two years old, so I don’t remember her, but I grew up under the shadow of her mystery. The question of what happened to her became a ghost that haunted our home—and it was the thing that hurt my grandpa the most.

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     As he told it, Nana Sylvie was “beautiful, fiery, and more than a little unpredictable”—except when it came to knitting, foraging, and her big game: mushrooms. Those things were clockwork. She was a hunter-gatherer and a willing servant to the seasons. Grandpa used to say she was like one of those die-hard basketball fans who couldn’t bear to miss a single game.

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     Every free day during the rainy season was reserved for tracking down Lobster mushrooms, Dyer’s Polypores, or the “Dog Turd” fungus she delighted in mentioning by name—even in polite conversation. (They really do look like dog shit.) She knew things about mushrooms: not just where to find them, but also their manifold uses—for eating, for healing, for making pigments and for the occasional cosmic revelation. A mushroom whisperer, if ever there was one.

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     Sometimes she even talked about mushrooms as if they were thinking beings. And, after what I’ve seen, I think perhaps they are.

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     And so it was, that when Mill Creek was blessed with its annual autumn rains, Sylvie Dess would be ass-up in the middle of a forest clearing, scrunched between the conifers, and summoning Magic Johnson, on her forest court, leading the Lakers to victory as she lobbed Red Cortinarius mushrooms, one after another into her basket, from the free throw line.

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     Sylvie could extract brilliant colorfast dyes from them, and that was the great pursuit of her life. And Grandpa knew her passions well—he met her when they were just kids, literally, in junior high school—and they had stayed together… they had something beautiful. And Sylvie, she was at the forefront of a craft that most people had never heard of, it was a niche so small that only one or two books even existed on the subject, and no crafting communities had sprung up for her to learn from. 

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     But Sylvie’s curiosity was thick on the ground and she was real keen on her budding scientific disciplines, with chemistry chief among them. Judging by all the pictures I've seen from that time period. She had clusters of antique canning jars, and she was using them as beakers, they covered the top of every flat surface in the house. Each jar was its own experiment, every one had a different species of fungi in a different stage of decay, and flaunting nearly every hue of her favorite color, which was rainbow.

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     “Nana Sylvie was always fascinated by the world around her," he would say. And he supported her in everything, he loved her so much, though he’d often threatened to build furniture with slanted tops just to keep her dye tests from taking the place over.

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     On Saturday, November 21st, 1981, those billowy Oregon clouds let go of their burden, and Sylvie Dess darted to the forest, with her favorite basket swinging at her side. 

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     She didn’t come home.

 

     A few days later, they found her car parked at a forest service gate. Grandpa had no leads. A week of brutal rain washed away any trace of her path through the woods. Today’s news would have called it an atmospheric river, it was a storm system that would keep battering the coast until that January.

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     Four miles from where Sylvie's car was found, a landslide swallowed a car, a house, and the four members of the Ellison family. It was assumed that she, along with Jack and Hayley, and their kids, Jordan and Bobbie Ellison, were swallowed up by the Pacific Ocean in a massive mudslide. 

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     Their bodies were never found.

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     Grandpa just didn't believe that she would've hiked the four miles. She had her regular spots, and she usually stayed within a mile or so of where she parked. He knew this because he followed her around with his camera through most of her wayfaring, and he knew her style. This spot was one of the gems in her collection, one that Sylvie said was precious to her because, "it’s quieter here than any other place in the forest."

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     Grandpa said that she used to be an avid hiker, though, and that "a scent on the wind might have carried her away to a new hunting ground." We just don't know for sure, what happened. And... there were many other things that could have happened. Mill Creek had a history, and it wasn't clear how much of that history was actually in the past.

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     In the fall of 1983, every set of speakers, every boom box, blasted "Every Breath You Take" by The Police. And the whole world held its breath as the Cold War threatened to escalate—Russia had just shot down a fully loaded passenger plane, Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

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     In Mill Creek, two lovebirds from Silver Branch High School went camping in a clearing just above the North Fork of the river. A few days after they didn’t come home, some elk hunters set out on Route Fourteen—bow hunting season had just opened the day before. Silas Crowe and Jed Baker followed the old Senoka Path, which links up with the Sitka Ridge trail system.

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     After a half-hour hike, the bow hunters found the boy’s body strung between two pines—on display, as it were—near the outskirts of Rosmere, twenty miles away. Seventeen-year-old Josh Strunk had been stripped naked, his body carved and bled-out like game.

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     There was no sign of the girl. Not then.

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     It wasn’t until years later that her skull was found under an aging bigleaf maple tree, its roots deeply invested in the bank of the South Fork of the Silver Branch River. The locals all knew that tree as Speechless Steward. For generations, it had been the place where local kids would go to drink shitty beer or get high on homegrown grass. I’m pretty sure every town has a place like that.

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     My friends boasted about their first kisses beneath those giant leaves—and later, bragged about getting laid under the Steward’s arms. Ninety percent of that was probably adolescent bullshit boy-talk, but some of it was true. After all, I made out with Liz Caldwell on that bank when I was just thirteen. I can remember the taste of her lips… and the sound of her heartbeat overtook the rush of the river. The air was different there. Like it amplified certain harmonics, it made everything feel surreal—like the land itself was holding its breath. Something about the acoustics in that place was... off. As if the sound waves weren’t sure what surfaces to bounce off of and which to leave alone. Anyway, most folks in town have a fond story or two about Speechless Steward. You could ask around. But after that discovery, no one really lingers there for long.

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     Oh, and in 1991, when I was twelve, Doug Hollis—the sheriff’s brother—gave his life defending his family from a home intruder. A hooded man broke in through their back door and swung a hammer at Doug's wife, Dot. Doug grabbed a pair of his wife’s sewing scissors and stabbed the man in the stomach. The man yanked the scissors out, staggered backward over the threshold, and ran. Dot said Doug froze for a second, then bolted after him while she fumbled for the phone to call the sheriff. Blood pooled on the kitchen floor, but Doug didn’t stop.

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     He ran. Barefoot.

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     Dot watched him disappear into the dark, chasing the intruder down the hill toward Hasting Creek.

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     That week, The Mariner’s Journal reported that the suspect’s identity was withheld because he was a minor. But in Mill Creek, everyone knew his name: Eddy Garrett.

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     When a kid disappears, well… that kind of news spreads fast.

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     Rumors raced faster than the morning light climbing the ridges of the Coast Range. 

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     And with every retelling, the story turned darker.

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     By the time the news reached the last house in town, it wasn’t just about Doug Hollis stabbing and chasing Eddy Garrett. It was about how neither of them came back. How the police followed Eddy's trail of blood from Hollis’s farm to the edge of Hasting Creek.

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     And how, there, it vanished.