Chapter 1 The Inheritance

Dust, the fine, gritty kind that penetrates everything, mushroomed around the tires as Clara Vance put her meticulously maintained Subaru Outback in park and turned off the engine in front of her late Aunt Bea’s cabin.

Obsidian Creek lay somewhere beyond the screening aspens, its name echoing the dark, polished rocks her great-aunt was always eager to show her when she was a child. With each gift came the story of how the dark stones were blood from the land’s ancient heart.

Clara, a data analyst whose life in Denver was a symphony of spreadsheets and controlled variables, felt the immediate, jarring dissonance.

Her sensible hiking boots, still pristine from their box, seemed out of place on the uneven ground as she got out of the SUV. The air, thin and sharp, carried the scent of pine needles, damp earth, and something untamed. It was a stark contrast to the filtered, air-conditioned reality she inhabited.

The cabin itself was the postcard image of rustic defiance. Logs, darkened by age, formed its walls. A stone chimney leaned precariously. The porch, once vibrant green, had flaked in the high-altitude sun along with cycles of freezing and thawing, revealing bare wood beneath. Aunt Beatrice, reclusive botanist and environmentalist, had lived here for forty years, a ghost in the machine of Clara’s orderly family tree. Now, the cabin was hers.

Clara inhaled, her eyes scanning the dense tree line that hugged the open ground around the cabin. A prickle of unease snaked up her spine. It wasn’t just the isolation, though that was certainly a factor, but a peculiar sensation, like the gentle weight of an unseen gaze. She dismissed it as quickly as it arose. Cabin fever, she told herself, before it even had a chance to set in. Two weeks. That’s all she’d committed herself to. Two weeks to sort through Beatrice’s peculiar collection of oddities, arrange for an estate sale, and then, back to civilization.

The key, heavy and cold in her palm, turned with a groan in the lock. The door swung inward, revealing a cavern of shadows and dust motes dancing in the slivers of light. The air inside was thick, smelling of old paper, dried herbs, and something musky.

Beatrice’s life was on display: shelves crammed with specimen jars holding strange flora, pressed leaves taped into thick notebooks, stacks of books on geology, botany, and obscure environmental law. A taxidermied owl, its glass eyes fixed on eternity, perched on a high beam. Clara’s meticulously organized mind recoiled. This wasn’t just rustic; it was an archaeological dig of eccentricities.

She spent the first few minutes opening windows, letting the crisp mountain air flush out the stale air. Dust motes, disturbed, swirled like tiny galaxies. In the small, unkempt kitchen, a half-eaten jar of homemade jam, with a thick coating of mold on top, sat on a counter next to a used teacup. Beatrice’s presence, though gone, was overwhelmingly palpable. Clara felt like an intruder in a long-dormant ecosystem.

The unease persisted. Every creak of the old house, every rustle of dry leaves outside, seemed amplified. Twice, she peered out the grimy windows, convinced she’d glimpsed a movement in the dense underbrush near the creek. A deer, she rationalized. A bear, maybe. Probably just a deer. Anything but what the prickle up her spine suggested: a pair of eyes watching her.

As dusk painted the sky in shades of bruised purple and fiery orange, Clara built a small, hesitant fire in the stone hearth, having watched a tutorial on “how to build a fire” on her phone before starting. The crackling flames did little to chase away the chill that settled deeper than the air. She noted that the burners on the gas stove would not light and assumed that the gas had been shut off, though that was odd, since the electricity and water were still working. Instead of cooking dinner, she settled for eating a pre-packaged salad. While eating, she found herself constantly glancing at the darkened windows. The feeling of being observed was no longer dismissible. It was a cold, insistent hand on her neck.

The following morning, with a renewed sense of purpose, Clara began the arduous task of inventorying Beatrice’s belongings. The living room, dominated by a large, worn armchair and a cluttered desk, was her starting point. She found journals, their pages filled with Beatrice’s spidery handwriting, detailing observations of local flora and fauna, alongside increasingly worried notes about environmental degradation. There were maps, hand-drawn and annotated, marked with specific coordinates and cryptic symbols.

A sharp rap on the front door startled her so profoundly, she dropped the book. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She hadn’t heard a vehicle approach.

Taking a deep breath, Clara straightened her shoulders. "Hello?" she called out, her voice a reedy whisper.

"Ma'am? Heard you arrived. Just checking in." The voice was low, gravelly, and undeniably masculine.

She edged towards the door, peering through the worn curtains. A man stood on the porch. He was a man of average height, sporting a little extra around the middle, over which stretched a uniform shirt. Along with the shirt and a badge that clearly identified him as a deputy, he wore faded jeans and boots caked with mud.

Clara opened the door a crack. "Can I help you?" she asked, trying to sound more confident than she felt.

He offered a slight, almost imperceptible nod. "I’m Deputy Miller. Knew Beatrice. She, uh, she told me if anyone came to stay, I should make sure they were alright." His gaze swept over her, taking in her city clothes, her precise posture, then lingered on the cabin, a hint of something unreadable in his eyes.

"Oh. I’m Clara Vance. I’m her great-niece." She opened the door wider, allowing him a full view of the chaotic interior. "As you can see, I'm... settling in."

The deputy’s lips twitched slightly, a ghost of a smile. "Looks like Beatrice's spirit is still strong." His eyes caught on the ledger Clara had dropped. "Still collecting evidence, even in her absence."

Suddenly, the cryptid words in the note included with the key: be careful who you trust and don't let them get their hands on the evidence, which she had dismissed, attributing them to Aunt Bea's rather imaginitive mind and sinility no longer seemed as odd. Was there more to it than that?