Moth to a Lightbulb

The reporter had been been dead for two days. His body lay half buried in the sludge of the forest floor. The smell was abominable. Jessica held her jacket lapel over her mouth and nose as she picked the slimy leaves one by one off his face. There was no mistaking it. This was the reporter the Echo had sent into Varley woods. 

*

Two weeks prior, some individuals at the paper had picked up the scent on a potential scoop so huge it was bound to elevate the lowly rag to the annals of regional journalism fame. The disappearance of farm animals was of course, a fairly common occurrence all over England and at first the tip-off was met with indifferent shrugs from the top brass of the Filton Echo. It was just another small-town provincial rumour, surely. It would all boil down to a fox attack or some bored teenagers playing games again, they were sure. So sure in fact that they tried to shut down Jacob Smith's investigations pretty much as soon as he'd received the phone call and mentioned it around the water cooler. 

Such a parochial story was going to tarnish the reputation of the Echo, the editor told Jacob in his tired but ambitious office. Jacob's eyes wandered to the A2 prints of Daily Mail, Guardian and Times front pages which had been squashed into any available bit of wall space. There was even a New York Times feature on the conviction of Al Capone. Jacob raised his eyes. "Are you even listening to me Jake?" spat Michael, the editor. Jacob nodded wearily. He had thought he was onto something with this one. The call with the farmer had been very interesting. The particulars didn’t point towards your run of the mill case of cattle rustling. He decided then and there that this was the last time he was going to mention a lead with senior reporters around.

Effectively forbidden from investigating the disappearance of the livestock on work time, he did the next best thing that any self-respecting reporter with a glint in his eye would do. He packed up his laptop 45 minutes early and, citing a doctor's appointment that had snuck up on him, left the office and cycled the half-hour journey out to the village of Varley. When he arrived at the dilapidated farm, he was hot and sweaty. The late June day had been overcast but humid, and the farmer dutifully offered him a glass of water before showing him out to the pens where the cows had been kept. "You just made it in the nick of time," he said with a glance to his watch, "I'm supposed to be giving a talk to the men's group at seven. They don't like top be kept waiting you know."

"I won't take any more of your time than I need to," said Jacob apologetically as he pulled the tablet from his bag. He wondered why he was being made to feel like the difficult one here. "So, you said the two largest cows went missing a few days ago?"

"Tuesday", said the farmer bluntly, "And the bull."

"And the bull?"

"That's right. I came out to check on Ben doing the milking when I just saw him there, scratching his head like a fool". He indicated small paved area in between the pens and a large corrugated iron barn with a lazy nod of his large head. 

"What did... Ben?", Jacob queried. It was important to get all of the details.

"Ben Tucker... He's a good lad. Reliable. Comes up a bit short on the old brains side of things but he's a hard worker. Lives in the village."

"And did he see what happened?"

"Not at all," said the farmer, his voice nearly a chuckle. "He was fetching the old girls through for the milking when he realised there was nothing in the pen. Opened the gate and everything, the dozy sod. And the bull. We looked around the whole farm after that, Ben scratching his head the whole time. Nothing else out of place. Except...

"Except...?"

The farmer seemed to be warming up to the attention. With a quick look back over his shoulder he grimaced as if delighting in revealing a gristly truth.

"Except this. Let me show you."

The farmer strode off in the opposite direction from the corrugated barn and led him around the pens and into a small copse of trees. This was what had tipped the reporter from mild indifference to intrigue. It was important that he got the scoop. Jacob slid around on the mud in his flat-soled work shoes but he kept up well enough. Tenacity was not a quality Jacob, along with many other young reporters, lacked. The gates of the empty pens yawned open and unmoving in the drowsy air.

"Has this ever happened before?" He puffed as he rounded the corner of the pens and entered into the copse. "Animals going missing I mean".

The farmer pretended he hadn't heard. It was obvious he knew something Jacob didn't. He led him up to the gnarled stump of a great felled tree and stopped just short of it, gesturing towards it.

"Where did the rest of the tree go?" enquired Jacob, tapping away at his tablet.

The farmer laughed. It was a bitter laugh with not a drop of humour in it. Jacob looked at him for a second before stepping up to the stump. It's surface was mottled and greying. Like that of ancient tree trunk subject to decades, even centuries of rot and weathering from spring showers and winter freezes. "It appeared on Tuesday", said the farmer. "Same day as the cows went."

Jacob reached out towards it. The smell was dusty and dry. The surface crumbled under his touch and left white dust on his fingertips. It hadn't been a tree at all. It was covered in translucent scales, strung with tiny balls of something sticky which burst when he rubbed his hands together. He wiped his hands on his trousers. Inside was a pile of bones - the unmistakable skull of a proud bull - bleached as if by strong acid and left to waste. Something had been feasting.

*

Jessica recoiled as the she scraped off the mass of slimy leaves to reveal the unmistakable livid red of exposed flesh. The reporter's head had been torn off. She couldn't hold in her screams as she staggered backwards, falling onto her back, hands soaked in congealed blood and humus scrabbling on the damp earth. Immediately, she wished she hadn't peeled off from the rest of the search and rescue team when she had. All of the hints they had indicated that Jacob Smith would have remained within the area of Varley farm and so the rest of the team had focused their efforts on this area. Jessica's active imagination hadn't steered her wrong this time, just as it hadn't on a number of other occasions she didn’t care to mention.

Turning away from the remains of the body with a heavy lump in her stomach, she wiped her filthy hands on a tuft of course grass and reached for the airwave handset at her hip. She swallowed the saliva which pooled sickeningly at the back of her throat and sent a message. "Target found guys..." She sighed deeply. "Confirmed deceased. Requesting assistance and then let the cops do their thing and go home.“ The reply was nothing but cold static. "Hello? Anyone?” No response. She clipped the airwave back onto her fluorescent salopettes and stuck her hand down under the waistband. There was no dignified way to do this. 

She rummaged around with difficulty but eventually came out with her mobile in hand. They weren't really supposed to use personal phones when on a job, but there was clearly something wrong with the airwave. She opened up the casual S&R chat and began typing in her message. Her fingerprints smeared the screen. She was nearly ready to send when she realised her signal had dropped and strangely, GPS wasn't working either. “What a time for a signal outage”, she thought before starting to despair. No airwave and no data signals. What was going on? She rose to her feet and, eyes fixed on the little signal bars in the corner of her phone screen, began to walk back the way she came. Anything to keep her eyes from wandering back to the crime scene. She would have to get help the old fashioned way.

An hour passed and Jessica was hopelessly lost. She was sure she'd followed the channel of twisted roots cut out from the earth that had led her to the body. She’d just gone around behind the barn when she and the rest of the party had separated and found the copse. Her sense of direction was usually unshakeable, but... that butchery. To cap it all off, the airwave's batteries had died. She'd kept it on in the vain hope that they'd just been somewhere out of range while she was broadcasting her message but she'd heard nothing before the little red LED blinked out and she replaced the spent batteries with the nearly-drained ones from her head torch. Her night vision was pretty good.

Now it was starting to get dark in the forest. What little light remained from the overcast sky cast lengthening shadows of branches and tall grass across the forest floor. Jessica's imagination saw them as insectoid, segmented legs twitching in the throes of unceremonious death. She kept reminding herself of what her instructor had told her before she qualified. "Just follow the sun if you get lost. Forests are always broken up by farmland and you'll make your way out pretty quickly so long as you don't keep chasing your tail going around in circles” Jessica was trying her hardest but every time she seemed to crest a hillock, the setting sun warming her face, there would be a deep flowing stream for her to thread her way around. Dense tickets of precarious scrub and congealed masses of roots seemed to be twisting their way around her, forcing her to change direction whenever she tried to turn towards the sun. 

At the sight of a particularly carnivorous looking swathe of brambles backlit by last of the watery light, Jessica's eyes started to water. Her knees were actually knocking. She blinked away the tears furiously but the torrent kept coming. Not since she was a little girl had she allowed herself to cry like this. In spite of her heavy-duty clothing she felt naked and exposed but she had no choice other than to force herself head first into the thorns. They towered above her head like the horns of devils come together for a communion. She pushed and pushed, becoming so enveloped, so deep within the bloodthirsty vegetation that no light at all was able to penetrate. She thought of her friends, telling her how stupid she'd been to go off on her own. How she should have remembered the first rule of S&R. Don’t chase your tail. She felt ignorant and ashamed and, her imagination was kicking into overdrive, disturbing images forming on her light-starved retinas. The savaged reporter swam in front of her eyes, black blood vomiting out from the ragged hole in his neck. She pictured herself splayed across the brambles, picked apart like a shrew shredded alive by talons. 

The deeper she forced herself into the evil mass, the deeper her depressions became. The thorns lacerated the backs of her hands, cheeks and scalp as she continued to sob drily, a meagre whimper at the back of her throat. She stopped pushing to catch her breath, if only to be able to sob harder. The plants were strangling her. She panted, her heart heaving against her ribs. The airwave squawked with static. She yanked it to her ear, the back of her hand sticky with her own blood. "Hello," she called out into the void, "Thank god!" An answer came that she had to strain to hear through the static. Someone sharpening a knife? striking flint. Beneath it rose another sound. The amplified hum of a million tiny wings. Jessica's fingers groped at the tough plastic switch and the chk chk chk clicked away, replaced by the thumping of blood in her ears. But still the hum kept coming.

*

Michael slung his suit jacket over his shoulder and joined the growing throng of reporters who stared at their shoes and exchanged pleasantries. About the only time when his colleagues from the Echo had nothing to say was a funeral, he observed drily. He sidled a comparably lively group of interns who were stooping in the shade of a prim cedar. The weather had been unseasonably warm over the last few weeks and Michael had been extremely busy at the paper. His loose white shirt was sticking to him in all the wrong places. He covered his mouth to yawn when he was ambushed by a pair of interns close to completing their term and becoming fully-fledged reporters. They had been exchanging glances with each other all through the service, Michael had noticed, and when they addressed him the young woman, Sara he thought her name was, clearly struggling to conceal her excitement when she knew she should be sombre.

"Mr. Roberts.. erm... Hi. How are you.. erm.. holding up?" She was speaking with the air of someone who wanted to get the pleasantries out of the way quickly. "Sara, is it? Well I've just lost one of my best young reporters, not to mention good friend to unknown causes related to work... blah blah blah. Get the the point please." He hadn't meant to be so abrupt. The other intern chimed in, wringing his hands behind his back. "It's not like that Sir.. It's just. We've been tasked with reporting on it all. That search and rescue lady too. And the farmhouse. " Getting it out there seemed to relax them both. It was as if someone had let a bit of air out with a pin. Of course, Michael knew, noone else was willing to get involved in this whole thing since it blew up and the bodies were found, mutilated nearly beyond recognition and covered in those little... It didn't bear thinking about. The more senior reporters were desperately trying to deflect any accusations of wrongdoing away from the paper. It was their jobs on the line. The actual reporting unfortunately had be be left at the wayside, regurgitated by the newbies just to get enough content to fill the paper. 

"We were just wondering if you wouldn't mind telling us a little about him. Jacob - personally. You see we didn't know him very well and..." Michael grimaced in what he thought would pass as a softening smile. Sara perked up. "And obviously the paper's position is that he shouldn't have gone there alone. What with all the weird unknowns. He was definitely told not to go by a senior reporter right? You I mean. I thought we could help to... exonerate ourselves a bit. You know.. in the eyes of the readership.

The boy bit his lip. "What she means is... She doesn't mean it like that... but..." Michael nodded to cut through his stuttering. Get to what matters - the first rule of journalism.

"Are you asking whether I knew about what had happened to the farmhouse before Jacob went to investigate? Well the answer is no." Their faces dropped. "The... strange material... whatever it was... around the farmhouse didn't appear until after the S&R team had begun their search. I mean... I just thought the story was below us." The two interns gaped at him.

"So that's..." Sara started slowly as if trying to piece together the clues from what he was saying, both verbally and otherwise. "That's what you want us to say? In the... um... report?"

"No of course not!". He lowered his voice and backed through the hanging leaves of the cedar. The interns followed. "Blimey, we're not suicidal here. I mean times are hard but..." The pair nodded, catching his drift. At least the interns were being trained well, he thought.

"Okay well... we'll be in touch, about the interview," winked the boy, looking at his watch. "Sara... we need to be at the farm in 45 minutes to see the samples."

"Oh," she said as if woken up from a worrying dream, "No.. sorry they sent me an email earlier... I never got around to telling you." Michael couldn't help but raise an eyebrow. "They don't want us to come until later. You see... they hatched."