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Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2017 12:44 am
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It didn't jump out at him for at least a week. Other things got in the way. School, work, his own forced free time that often devolved into one of the former. Old projects from the previous timeline that had been morphed into a familiar shade in this one. He no longer pursued ghost stories a majority of the time, because those didn't have to be proved any more. He knew things walked and crawled and lurched and oozed beyond his reckoning, and the people now whispered about it more. No, he needed more concrete threads to follow, and somehow that narrowing of the search field made his hobby equally harder and easier to continue. Easier because it meant he could cross off false leads from the get-go; harder because it meant he had less to obsess about.
So the articles about the state forest had been skimmed over and forgotten at first. Rotting trees weren't exactly the stuff of intrepid adventures, especially after the ones he had found himself stumbling into lately. But one Sunday morning, when he finally had worked out with his partner a deal to switch out shifts, Jack decided to hit that tab again in his sea of open links and read it over in full. The lack of explanation was as good as anything to look into; it meant leaving the apartment and ignoring his other problems as well, which was better.
There was something about walking around trees that soothed him. It reminded him of the old Michigan camps his family used to visit in his childhood. Like the plants, far older than him or his father or his father's father, knew something he didn't. Hell, he was pretty sure they did. Magic and all. In the state park, Jack and his trusty camera headed along one of the paths, diverging only when he saw some of the aforementioned rot ahead.
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Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2017 1:46 pm
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