Chapter 1

My grandfather passed away in the spring, and left me his property out deep in the woods of Washington, no neighbors close enough to see so I am completely isolated.

It’s about twenty minutes from the nearest small town if you don't mind gravel, dirt, and half paved roads for half of it. I hadn't been out there since I was a kid. My relationship had just recently ended (I guess not everything is supposed to work out), and I realized I didn't have a single real reason to stay where I was. No job tying me down, no lease, nothing. So I packed up and moved out here about a month ago with my dog Otis.

The cabin itself is a small two bed one bath. The living room and the kitchen are separated only by a little bar area. Everything creaks. There’s a visible layer of dust on the surface of most everything. My grandfather, I suppose in his old age hadn’t managed to do a lot of upkeep so I've basically got a full restoration project ahead of me. New wiring in at least one room, a water heater that sounds like it's dying, a porch that needs to be torn out and redone before someone puts a foot through it. I don't mind the work, honestly. Gives me something to do with my hands and my time, which I have a lot of right now.

The first couple weeks were unremarkable, mostly just me and a truck full of hardware store trips, checking out different areas in town. Everyone here seems to be lovely and it seems a few of them knew my grandfather. I love the smell of the woods mixed with rain. Everything felt like a perfect new start, but a couple things I have noticed and just don’t sit right with me.

Otis will not go near the tree line at the back of the property. He doesn’t bark, not aggressive, just refuses. Plants his feet and looks at me like I'm the unreasonable one for asking. He'll run right up to a certain point along the back edge of the property and just stop, every single time, like there's an invisible fence. It’s unusual for Otis because he’s never been like that, he’s a blue heeler after all, running is in his nature.

And twice now I've heard something outside late at night that I initially assumed was a deer or elk moving through brush, except the rhythm was off. It sounded as if it was changing its gate or standing at times and crouching at others. I can't describe it much better than that, and I know how it sounds written down.

I was clearing out a closet in the second bedroom yesterday, the one I hadn't touched yet, mostly full of my grandfather's old coats and boxes of paperwork I assumed were tax documents and property records, boring shit that will probably just end up in the trash bin. Behind a stack of those boxes, wrapped in an old flannel shirt like someone had deliberately tried to keep it hidden or protected, I found a journal. Leather cover, no title, clearly old and the pages have that brittle, browned look.

I haven't read the whole thing yet. It's dense, his handwriting is rough in places, and honestly some pages are hard to make out. But tucked into the back of it was a hand drawn map of the property and the woods behind it, way more detailed than any survey map would be, with markings I don't understand yet. Just some small symbols at specific points in the woods, a few areas circled, and dates written next to some of them. A lot of dates, actually, going back further than I would've guessed given how long my grandfather actually lived out here.

I don't know what any of it means yet. Could be just an old man's hobby, maybe something with his hunting and trapping, who knows. But finding it hidden the way it was, combined with the other stuff happening, is making it hard for me to write this off as nothing.

I'm going to spend some time actually reading through it properly instead of just skimming, and see if I can make sense of the map. If it's genuinely nothing, I'll probably feel a little silly for this whole post. But if it's not nothing, I'd rather have this written down somewhere before I convince myself I imagined all of it.