Page 13 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

The silence that follows is thick. I can hear the hum of the laptop fan and the distant groan of the house settling. Wren stares at me, her mouth slightly open. She looks at my face, then down at my boots, then back to my eyes. I wait for the realization to hit. I wait for the fear, or the awe, or the frantic reaching for a camera.

Then, she laughs.

It’s not a small laugh. It’s a full, genuine peal of amusement that starts in her throat and shakes her shoulders. She leans forward, resting her elbows on the desk, her face glowing with a kind of delighted relief.

“Oh, that’s good,” she says, wiping a stray tear from the corner of her eye. “That is really, really good. God, Rowan, you had me there for a second. The dry delivery, the timing... you’re a natural.”

I don’t move. “I’m not joking, Wren.”

“I know, I know,” she says, waving a hand dismissively. “Stay in character. It’s better for the brand. Honestly, if Barnaby heard you say that, he’d probably faint, then try to sue you for emotional distress. It’s brilliant. ‘Local man goes full method to protect his woods’. I love it.”

I feel a strange, sharp sensation in my chest. Something close to bewilderment, mixed with a bruised sense of pride that I didn’t know I possessed. I have lived for centuries, and never in all that time have I been told I have good timing.

“I am seven feet and two inches tall,” I say, my voice dropping an octave. “I live in a house you cannot find. I have no birth certificate. I have no family. I tend to hives that have been in this valley longer than your lodge has had a roof. I am the reason your great-great-grandmother started the arrangement.”

Wren’s smile softens, but it doesn’t disappear. She looks at me with a warmth that is entirely wrong for the situation. It’s affectionate. It’s the way she looks at Marge when she brings her a fresh cup of coffee. It’s the look of someone who thinks they’ve found a secret ally in a world of nonsense.

“I get it,” she says quietly. “The commitment. You’ve been the ‘silent protector’ for so long you don’t know how to turn it off. And the shirt”—she gestures to the tacky fabric over my chest—“is a nice touch of irony. It’s a bit meta, isn’t it?”

“It is not meta,” I say. I don’t actually know what “meta” means, but I am certain it doesn’t apply to my life. “It is a shirt. I liked the slogan.”

“Of course you did,” she says. She stands up and walks around the desk. She stops just a few feet away from me. I could reach out and touch her. I could show her the bark-pattern of my skin, the way my eyes change when the influence drops. I could shift right here, in this cramped office, and let the sheer scale of my true form crack the ceiling joists.

But I don’t. Because as I look at her, I realize that she isn’t just disbelieving me. She’s protecting me. In her head, she has decided that I am an eccentric, lonely man who has built a life around a myth, and she is giving me the space to keep that myth alive. She thinks we’re playing the same game.

“Look, Rowan,” she says, her voice low and serious now. “I appreciate the bit. Truly. It makes this whole disaster feel a little less like a sinking ship and more like... a performance. But you don’t have to keep it up with me. I know you’re just a guy who cares about the mountain. A very tall, very grumpy guy, but just a guy.”

She pats my arm. It’s a brief contact, the palm of her hand landing on the bicep I usually keep hidden under heavy flannel. It’s warm. Impossibly warm. I can feel the pulse of her blood through her skin, a fast, frantic human rhythm that makes my own heart feel sluggish and heavy by comparison. I should pull away. I should correct her. I should be offended by the “just a guy” comment.

Instead, I find myself looking at her hand. It’s small, her skin pale against the dark blue of the shirt. She has a tiny scar on her index finger, probably from a kitchen knife or a slip of a pen. She is a collection of fragile, temporary details, and she’s standing there trying to make me feel better about my “commitment to the bit.”

“You are a very stubborn woman,” I say.

“Comes with the name,” she says, pulling her hand back and looking at me with that same frustratingly kind expression. She doesn’t seem to notice that she just touched a legend. “Now, if you’re done being the Forest King for the night, Marge left some cobbler in the kitchen. I think it’s peach. You should get some before the ‘investigators’ find it and start testing it for paranormal activity.”

She sits back down at the desk, the blue light reclaiming her face, and starts typing again. She’s already moved on. The truth has been delivered, inspected, and filed under performance art. I have never failed so spectacularly at being honest, but it’s exactly what I expected. I told the truth, and she chose not to believe it.

I walk out of the office and through the hallway. The lodge is quiet now, smelling of woodsmoke and Marge’s baking. I find the cobbler in the kitchen, a heavy stoneware dish sitting on the counter. I’m not hungry, but I take a piece anyway, because I don’t know what else to do with my hands. The peach is sweet, the crust buttery. It’s a human comfort, a small thing designed to make the dark feel less vast.

I walk back out the pantry door and into the night. I don’t head for my house immediately. I walk to the edge of the clearing, where the gravel ends and the forest begins. I stand there for a long time, eating peach cobbler in the dark, watching the light in the office window.

I am a Guardian. My purpose is to maintain the borders. To keep the world of humans from bleeding too far into the world of the high timber. I have spent three centuries being an absence, a ghost, a shadow in the corner of a hiker’s eye. I have been feared, I have been hunted, and I have been ignored.

I look down at the HIDE & SEEK WORLD CHAMPION shirt. It’s a caricature of a life I have lived in silence and service. Wren thinks it’s a joke. She thinks I’m a man wearing a costume of myself. And the worst part is, I found her laugh... pleasant. I liked the sound of it in the small room. I liked the way it filled the space where the silence usually sits.

This is a dangerous development. A Guardian who cares about the opinion of the weather is a Guardian who is going to get struck by lightning. I should be thinking about the documentary crew Barnaby mentioned. I should be thinking about the drones and the infrared cameras. I should be thinking about how to move the hives further up the ridge where the tourists won’t find them.

But as I finish the cobbler and set the dish on a stump to be collected in the morning, I find myself thinking about the smudge of ink on her thumb and how she leaned toward me, her eyes bright with an intelligence she doesn’t even realize she’s using. Wren is trying to save this lodge, this failing, creaking legacy, and she’s doing it with a ferocity that is entirely out of proportion to her lifespan.

She’s a smart woman, but a blind one. She sees the marketing and the debt. She sees the bit. She doesn’t see me at all. And for some reason, as I turn toward the deep woods, that realization stings more than the ring lights ever did.

I move into the trees, the influence taking hold, the world sliding around me until I am nothing but a shift in the wind. I will have to find another way if I want her to turn off the hotline. Perhaps if I tell her the details of the arrangement between me and her family… But no. If she didn’t believe me about what I was, she would have no reason to believe me about a centuries-old arrangement.

I will have to show her the truth.

The thought makes my skin itch, a deep, restless sensation beneath the human surface. To show her is to be seen. To be seen is to be known. And for my kind, to be known is the end of everything.

I reach the creek, the water rushing over the stones with a cold, insistent music. I stop and look back one last time. The lodge is a tiny spark of light in the vast, black sea of the Cascades. It looks fragile. Temporary. It looks like something I should be protecting, even if the person inside it thinks I’m just a very tall man with a hobby.