Until the Sasquatch

short story

Way back when the CBC was cool, I worked on a radio show about cryptids and the people obsessed with them. One fine summer day I found myself driving through the British Columbia interior with a lifelong Sasquatch hunter. What happened that day is a true tale I’ll leave for another time, but for now please enjoy the short story I wrote a few years later, inspired but by no means limited to real events.

After her first class, chemistry, Julie walked past her locker, past the office, out the front door of her high school and down the stairs. She stood on the sidewalk blinking in the sunshine. It was the beginning of the last month of grade 11. Julie had been skipping out of class once every few weeks or so since April. So far, nobody seemed to have noticed. Not even a single phone call home. Julie pivoted on her battered sneakers and continued down the street.

Home was the apartment over the laundromat her father had moved them to three years ago. “Just—temporary,” he’d mumbled, as Julie’s garbage bag of clothes landed on the cracked linoleum kitchen floor with a thump.

After school—or when she skipped school—Julie usually spent her time in what she and her best friend Zhi referred to as the ‘mat. Julie would pull out her homework and a paperback novel and sit in the corner, unnoticed in the thrumming stillness of the room. People would drift through, getting change, spilling soap, folding their underwear. Julie liked to think she was one of them: another listless straggler with a bag of dirty clothes.

Now, mid-morning, the ‘mat was empty. One machine was in use, a dryer in the back near the door to their upstairs apartment. Julie followed the humming sound and arrived just as the drier clicked loudly to announce the end of its cycle. She peered in. A single shirt flopped around the slowing drum. Weird. Most customers stuffed the washers and driers to their limits, trying to maximize their dwindling piles of change. Julie opened the door and stuck her hand in. She closed her fingers around warm worn flannel.

It was a shirt, thick blue with frayed cuffs. Julie pulled it over her oversized t-shirt. She felt the soft material against her forearms. The shirt draped almost to her knees.

Julie heard the screech of someone struggling to pry open the ‘mat’s heavy front door. Quickly she slipped behind the entrance to the apartment and locked it. Standing in the dark foyer, she heard heavy steps, the dryer door swinging open and closed. She held her breath. The still hot shirt was stifling. Droplets of sweat broke out on her upper lip.

Julie hunched over her desk ignoring the teacher’s droning lecture on the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead of notes, she doodled shaggy sasquatches talking on phones, typing on laptops, getting cash out of the ATM. It was Friday, first period, World History. Julie was wearing the shirt, the sleeves rolled up in thick cuffs pushed just past her wrists. In the breast pocket she’d found a tattered business card, the paper washed and dried, faded smooth. She pulled the card out of the middle of her binder. Paul Williams, the card said. Sasquatch Hunter.

When the bell rang, she shoved her textbook and binder in her backpack and headed for the side doors, no longer even bothering to check for lurking teachers or admins.

Free from school, Julie wandered all the way down to the lake. She rolled down the sleeves of the sasquatch shirt, let the cuffs fall over her hands. A plastic bag bobbed past. Julie thought of Zhi, best friend since third grade. Zhi was a shutterbug. Last year, Julie had helped her with a school project. They’d wandered the city taking pictures. Three smashed computer monitors lying on a pile of ripped open garbage bags in a back lane alley; a rusted grocery cart flung into the underbrush growing against the side of a building; Zhi snapping away with her camera, capturing the scene for a posterity nobody but them thought it deserved.

Then, over the summer, she’d gotten a boyfriend, Rob. He had tousled blonde hair and pre-ripped jeans. The two of them joined debate and yearbook and student council. Zhi started eating lunch with Rob and his friends. Julie brought a book to school, read it in the cafeteria, head down, long hair hiding her face.

Julie made her way to the public library. She pulled out her phone and checked the time. It was just after 11. If anyone had asked, she could say she had a spare before lunch. The only person who seemed to notice her was the elderly fellow, possibly homeless, who glanced up and grinned as she slipped in front of the open terminal next to him. Quickly averting her glance, Julie turned to her own monitor. She typed in the key words: Paul Williams; sasquatch hunter.

Back at home, Julie headed to her room, her sneakers squeaking on the scuffed linoleum.

“Julie,” she heard. “Is that you?”

It was her father, emerging from the kitchen. “Jul-lee,” he said slowly, weirdly, as if pondering some word he was having trouble comprehending.

“Hi?” He was never home at this hour. He was barely ever home at all.

“How was school?” he asked, seeming not to notice that she was home an hour early and draped in a ridiculously oversized men’s flannel shirt.

“Fine.”

“Liar,” her dad said jovially. “You can’t fool the fooler.” He laughed then, a high-pitched chortle.

She looked up at her dad. A crooked grin lolled across his face. He was wearing some kind of Hawaiian shirt she’d never seen before. His face was red like he’d been exercising. Fool the fooler? Was he on something? His smile widened.

“It isn’t funny,” Julie screamed suddenly. She ran past him to her room and tried to slam the door. The wood was warped and the door just barely closed.

Julie woke up early the next day. She slipped quietly into the laundromat and stayed there, reading and staring into space until the ‘mat started to fill with the centrifugal whirl of machines and their impatient patrons.

When she stepped outside, she found that the spring day had fallen cold and grey. The wind blew and Julie hunched over into the warmth of the faded sasquatch shirt. Aimlessly, she wandered into the nearby park, scraggly leafless trees, greenish grass and empty picnic tables.

A large man slipped out from behind a grove of blowzy pines. Julie sensed his burly presence and quickened her step. The man kept pace with her. They took a few steps like that, Julie walking, the man shadowing her. She wasn’t far from the street. A jogger loped past. She could scream or run. It was the middle of the day.

“Hey there,” the man said suddenly. Julie let out a pathetic little yelp and felt her face blush red. The man’s voice was rough, awkward, as if unused to itself. “Hey,” the man said again. “Wait up.”

Julie stopped and turned. At her father’s insistence she’d taken karate when she was nine.

The man was old, maybe sixty, barrel-chested, tall yet stooped. Grey hair was plastered against his broad ruddy forehead. Bushy eyebrows framed dark eyes. Julie had never seen him before.

“I think,” the man said slowly, “that you’re wearing my shirt.”

Instinctively Julie pulled at the shirt around her. It had started to rain, a light mist coating everything with slick dew.

“Well?” the man said.

Julie felt her cheeks burning.

“I’ll…” she said, hating her timid girl-voice. “You can have it. Back, I mean.”

Okay, the man said. He was still looking at her curiously. He seemed almost pleased with himself.

Julie swallowed and bunched her fists.

“Have you been following me?”

The big man half shrugged.

“How did you find me?”

It’s what I do, the man said.

Sasquatch hunter, Julie thought. She shivered.

“You’re cold,” the man said haltingly.

At the Squirrel Café he bought her a hot chocolate as if she was a little kid. “I drink coffee you know,” she said. The café was busy and conversations swirled around them. The sasquatch hunter, Paul Williams, stared at her intently. Julie blushed and picked up her drink.

“I wasn’t,” he finally said, clearing his throat. “I wasn’t following you.” He shifted uncomfortably, his bulk squeezed into a small chair. Since the disappearance of his shirt, he explained to Julie, he’d been staking out the laundromat. Waiting. Watching. “Then I saw you,” he said.

“How long were you going to wait?” she asked, tracing a crack in the table with a ragged nail. Paul Williams shrugged. She looked up at him. He seemed embarrassed now. She drank from her mug.

“Actually, I like hot chocolate.”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry I—” she stood suddenly and started to struggle out of the damp shirt.

“No, no,” the Sasquatch Hunter said loudly, his voice coursing through the small room. “I’ll get another.”

Julie quickly sat down. People were looking at them. She stared at the man’s weather-beaten face. She pulled the business card from its pocket.

“I found this,” Julie said.

The sasquatch hunter took the card and peered at the words as if they were written in another language.

“I don’t do that anymore,” he finally said, putting the card on the table.

Outside the rain lashed the streets. Julie laced her fingers around her cooling mug.

There were two weeks left of school. Julie hadn’t skipped since the encounter with her father. Liar. Can’t fool the fooler. He hadn’t even punished her. It was pathetic. He was pathetic. It was the end of another long, pointless, pathetic day. Julie hadn’t spoken to a single soul. At her locker, her backpack slung over one shoulder, Julie suddenly felt frozen in place. Everyone was moving. Soccer practice, debate club, tutoring. She’d heard Zhi and her boyfriend were taking a life guarding class.

Whatever. Julie thought of the sasquatch hunter. Some people live in the shadows, seem to leave no trace.

Go home, she told herself. Study for finals. Microwave a frozen lasagna.

She pictured her father, forking food into his mouth.

Go, she told herself.

She didn’t move.

“Are you okay?” Vice Principal Butler, a boyish-looking man in a white polo tee tucked into track-pants, peered at her curiously. “Julie, right?” She felt herself nod. The hall had emptied now. The Vice Principal leaned against the locker next to her. Julie grimaced and shrugged, trying to indicate to any would-be stragglers that this wasn’t her idea.

“So,” Vice Principal Butler said. “Almost done, huh?” Julie offered up a pained smile. “Well I certainly don’t see much of you in my office.” Julie had never been to Vice Principal Butler’s office. She’d never been to any school office. “That’s the way it is,” Vice Principal Butler said breezily. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?”

Julie stared straight ahead, not looking at him, not looking at anything. Is that the way it is?

“But if you ever want to talk about anything…”

It was a line her mother used when she called Julie on Sunday afternoons. …I’m always there for you, she would finish, the words crumbling into a static nothing of cross-town distance

“I skip school sometimes,” she heard herself say.

“Oh,” Vice Principal Butler said.” Okay.”

“Okay?” Julie wondered.

“There are worse things,” he said.

“I like to be alone,” Julie said.

Vice Principal Butler nodded, as if in agreement. “Well it’s almost summer,” he said brightly. “Right Julie?”

And summer stretched ahead of her. Her mom called and invited her to spend a week with her and her latest live-in, someone called Jesse. “I don’t know,” Julie said. “I’ve got a lot going on...”

“Oh, that’s okay hon,” her mom said too quickly.

Julie went down to the ’mat. She stood in the corner surveying the action. A Portuguese grandmother pushing a red buggy. A university student clutching a bulging garbage bag and a sociology textbook. Then, for the longest time, no one.

Feet up on a pile of last year’s magazines, safely ensconced in the ambient feedback of the ‘mat, she drew a sad sasquatch playing solitaire. She scrutinized its shaggy face and blunt paws before starting to carefully shade in the creature’s fur with tiny delicate lines. Crosshatching, a technique Zhi taught her last winter. She slammed the book shut and jumped up. She pulled out the business card. There was a number. And an address.

Julie took the subway, then waited for a bus to the outer suburbs. She flashed her transfer to the driver and chose a seat in the empty middle. The bus jerked out of the subway station and onto a wide road lined with strip-malls. There were many cars, but almost no people. Julie charted her progress on her phone, exiting after almost half an hour of stop-and-go lurching.

When she got off, she again consulted the map on her phone and found herself winding through winding side-streets lined by small, run down but well-kept homes. She didn’t see many residents, but those she did encounter, mowing lawns or washing their cars, stared at her as she went by. Finally she reached the address, 93 Sommerset. It was a corner lot, the house protected by tall, unkempt, bristly bushes. Bush fence, Julie thought absently. Bence? The house was a small, dark bungalow, yellowed shades drawn over the windows. Paint flaked from the shutters and Julie could see the tiles of the roof humped at odd angles. Quickly maturing dandelions had taken over the small patches of unkempt grass bisected by the crumbling front walk. Julie contemplated the weathered front door, but instead she lowered herself into the dark inside corner of the bush fence – Fush, she thought as her body sank into lawn’s tangled maze overgrowth.

Julie waited. The only sounds were the faint swoosh of cars going by and the occasional buzz of a fly or bee circumnavigating her head. She thought of the sasquatch hunter, all alone in his dark, empty, crumbling house. It was wrong, she wanted to tell him. It was all wrong. What they done to him.

That night, she called Zhi’s cell and to her surprise Zhi actually answered.

“Hi!” Zhi said airily. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Oh yeah?”

Apparently things weren’t going that well with Rob. Zhi’s summer internship was kind of lame too. A lot of filing, responding to emails with cut and paste answers and cleaning up the lunchroom.

“I’ve met someone,” Julie finally cut in.

“What? A guy! Who is it?”

Julie surprised herself by giggling. “I don’t know…” she said. “He’s not, I mean, it’s not what you think. He’s this old guy,” she blurted. “He’s a…I mean he used to be a… ” She let the words tumble out of her like relief. “I stole his shirt from a dryer in the ’mat and he followed me and then he took me out for coffee, and he let me keep the shirt so I looked him up online and it turns out that he used to be, like, famous for his sasquatch hunts. But then some college kids or something did this prank and put a fake footprint right where they knew he would find it and he found it and everyone thought he’d really found it and they were all excited until the kids who planted it put a video on YouTube showing it was just a trick and now he doesn’t look for sasquatch at all anymore which I think is really sad.”

There was silence on the line. Julie could hear herself -- breathing, then swallowing.

Julie helped a lady with a baby and three hampers of laundry do her folding. Then she sat and drew sasquatch sitting in his wooded compound strumming his banjo. In the late afternoon, with the sun streaming through the front window she fell asleep, her head leaning on the old, broken Ms. Pacman tabletop arcade game.

When she woke, blinking, confused, a man was standing over her. Julie looked up. Paul Williams, sasquatch hunter, stared down disapprovingly.

“Sleeping on the job?” he said.

Julie rubbed her eyes.

Paul Williams glanced warily around the laundromat.

“I got your note.”

Julie looked up at him. “I went to the library,” she said. “I read about you in the newspapers.”

Paul Williams sighed. Reluctantly, he wedged himself into the chair next to her. His smell—motor oil, stale coffee, cigarette smoke—engulfed her.

“I read about what happened,” Julie continued.

Paul Williams grimaced. He looked down at the grubby tiles underneath his boots.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

“I wanted to.”

Paul Williams didn’t answer.

Finally, as if he couldn’t take it anymore, he spoke. “When I first started I was—things were--different.”

He paused, and Julie was afraid he wouldn’t continue.

“What was different?”

The sasquatch hunter went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Alice, my girlfriend, she didn’t mind. She encouraged me. I only went out on the weekends. She would come along. She bought me a topographical map. She helped me mark the areas where sightings had occurred. We used different colored pins. We got married.”

Paul Williams stopped again.

“You got married?” Julie demanded.

“I let it…it got out of control. I stayed out longer and longer. I started taking days off work. I lost my job. Alice got on my case. I was up in the hills, always the hills. After a while, I stopped coming home.”

“Did you get divorced?”

The sasquatch hunter pondered the blank screen of the TV bolted to the wall across from them. Then he nodded. “I got a job as a night watchman. A factory up there, on the edge of hill country. I lived on the premises, in a trailer.”

“I want you to take me there,” Julie announced, her voice urgent. Take me there. Where it happened.”

Paul Williams sighed. He leaned over and with surprising grace delicately flicked a piece of laundry lint off his boot. The grey lint caught an updraft, floated near their faces and then started a slow descent.

They left at 5am. It was a four-and-a-half hour drive north to the mountains. Julie fell asleep in the sasquatch hunter’s ancient Land Rover. She blinked awake to find that the city was well behind them. They were steadily climbing the switchbacks that cut through the foothills. The dense forest on either side of them thinned only when they reached summits and filled in as soon as they dipped down again. For some reason, Julie thought of her father. She pictured him frying eggs, alone in his robe and underwear, cursing mildly when the butter spattered up and landed on his skinny, exposed chest.

They drove slowly, Paul Williams peering intently out of the window, both hands on the wheel. The truck’s engine strained and when they went down an incline it felt like the entire frame of the vehicle lurched forward, held on by nothing more than a handful of rusty screws. Gradually the forest pressed in until the road had transformed into an overgrown track, a dirt path running perilously close to a steep ridge. Below them, Julie caught a glimpse of a thin line of water.

“That’s the Winassauga,” Paul Williams said without taking his eyes off the truck’s perilous forward progress. “Named after the Winassaugan people, people of tall trees, they called themselves.” Silent for so long, Paul Williams’ voice cut urgently through the cab of the rover. “They tell the story of a little girl who becomes one of them. A legend. Once, a long time ago, a little girl didn’t listen to her people and wandered down to the river alone. She played in the shallows. When the people realized she was missing everyone looked for her. They couldn’t find her. Finally, just before sunset, someone spotted her. She was on the other side of the river. She was being led away into the bush. She was holding the hand of – it – one of them: what her people called -- ‘the dark creatures’. They searched all the night and all the next day, but nobody ever saw her again.”

Julie closed her eyes. The rush of the underbrush, the thin blue scrawl of the river below. Did he really believe that there were giant girl-snatching beasts living in the woods? Paul Williams took a sip from his mammoth travel mug of coffee. Cold, he muttered. He shook his shaggy head in bemused disappointment. The truck lurched up a steep grade, the engine straining. “That-a-girl,” Paul Williams said encouragingly. Julie heard the tenderness in his voice. His surly façade barely masked a deeper more profound emotion – the way she felt looking out over the lake at the bottom of the big city; the water stretching to meet an unfathomable horizon.

Julie dozed off again, and when she woke the heat of the day was seeping into the truck, the sun glinting through the trees. The track had narrowed even more, if that was possible, and Paul Williams, hunched over the steering wheel, drove so slowly that it felt to Julie as if she were riding on the back of a plodding reptile.

“When was the last time you were here?”

Paul Williams turned away from her, studying the green mosaic brushing past his driver’s seat window. “Not for a while,” he eventually said. Julie felt his voice inside her, an aching echo. The way the forest pulled at her. She closed her eyes.

When she next woke, she felt the truck picking up speed, rolling roughly downhill. Blearily, almost uncomprehendingly, she watched foliage whip by. Suddenly the truck veered off into the woods.

“Paul!” Julie screamed. “Shit!” Paul Williams yelled. He frantically spun the wheel. The Land Rover lurched over and through small trees and shrubs. “Hold on!” Paul Williams yelled. Julie shrunk back in her seat. Julie shut her eyes. She was thrown forward then wrenched back. The muffled sound of the windshield caving in. The truck came to a thudding stop. The motor died.

It was a beautiful, quiet, sunny afternoon. Paul Williams held the old rucksack he’d rescued from the Rover after helping Julie climb out with a gentleness of motion that lulled her from panic into a kind of trance.

They stood on the uneven cliff face contemplating the vehicle, stopped from plummeting into the river far below by a clump of straggly trees. “The steering column….must have….” Paul Williams shook his head grimly. Julie felt the ground moving under her. She looked at her sneakers. Her legs were trembling. “Come on,” the sasquatch hunter said.

They followed the path the Rover had carved through the hillside back to the rough road. From the truck the thick forest had seemed uniform, a great wall of green. But now she could see the many permutations, gaps and crawl spaces, uneven growth in uneven terrain, the struggle to the sun.

“Twenty-two years I’ve had that truck,” Paul Williams said. He sat heavily on a boulder. His chin lay on his big battered fist. It was afternoon now. Branches swayed up above. A horse fly circled. Creaking trunks, the abrupt caw of a bird she couldn’t see. Julie stared suspiciously into the woods. Her eyes caught a glimmer of something and she walked over to the edge of the forest. She bent down and saw a dirty piece of brown glass, remains of a stubby beer bottle. The piece of glass, rounded by the elements, reassured her; it fit in nicely with the odd sense she felt—that they had entered some bygone time, some long past era when sasquatch hunters plied the backroads while their wives back home smoked cigarettes and traded casserole recipes. Take a picture, she thought. It’ll last longer. But the picture she wanted to take, the picture she imagined silently offering to them, all of them—her mother, her father, Zhi, even “uncle” Jesse—was of the truck; the truck, poised to break through the trees and roll down to the river. “You see?” she’d say to them. “You see what you made me do?”

Julie leapt to her feet and stepped angrily down the road. Her soles crunched against hard packed dirt. She marched, counting her steps.

…31, 32, 33...

“Hey,” she finally heard Paul Williams call. “Where are you going?”

“Home!” Julie yelled.

“Home’s thataway,” Paul Williams said, jerking his thumb in the other direction.

“Well we might as well get, if you still want to,” the big man eventually said. Julie looked up from where she cross-legged in the middle of the rutted road, watching a trail of big black ants track through dappled sun. Paul Williams rose from his boulder. “We we’re just about there anyway.” The sasquatch hunter slung the rucksack on his back. “We’ll be alright. Everything we need is in here. They’ll come looking for us ‘ventually. Tomorrow. Or day after.”

Paul Williams shrugged.

“Who will?” Julie demanded.

“The society.”

“The society?”

“The hunters. What’s left of them, anyway. There are still a few.” Paul Williams shook his big head as if he was a horse being harassed by a biting fly. “I called in the trip. You always let someone know where you’re going. That’s how they — "Paul Williams stopped talking. He stared into the path of crushed forest that led to the wrecked truck. “Anyway,” he said gruffly. “You let them know. In case you don’t come back.”

They pushed through the woods. Julie panted and licked the sweat from her upper lip. Her legs, wrapped in khaki cargo pants, stewed. Branches and thorns snagged the fabric as they passed. The sasquatch hunter led the way, not once checking to see if she was following. They came to a spot where a thin stream ran off a jumble of lichen covered rocks, a waterfall in miniature. Paul Williams stopped, bent down, splashed his face. Julie’s calves itched, throbbed. Would her father be looking for her? Would he call her mother?

Paul Williams straightened, grunted a few words and stepped across the stream and into a maze of small, stunted pines.

Whatever, Julie said, mostly to herself. She followed him.

They emerged from the sloped pines into a dead-end clearing dwarfed by an overlooking cliff, the whole area set in shadow. Paul Williams mopped at his face with a dirty sleeve. Julie panted for breath. They’d been climbing for more than two hours. The sun drooped, slowly edging out of the sky. There were black holes five or six feet up that looked like gaping mouths. Caves, Julie realized. Cooling down quickly, she felt herself shudder.

Paul Williams drank then passed the canteen. Julie drank too, the water tasting of moss and old.

He took a few steps into the clearing then turned to the girl.

“You wanted to see it,” he said defiantly.

“See what?” she asked, confused.

“Right here. Right there.”

Julie stared down at the patch of rocky dirt he was pointing at.

“This is where I found it,” he said.

“It?”

Paul Williams didn’t respond.

Suddenly it dawned on Julie. “Oh! The footprint!”

Paul Williams spat on the dirt.

“Weren’t they clever. They left me a trail. Broken branches. Claw marks. They’d read the research, my past finds. They led me here.”

“And you thought—?” Julie gestured to the dark mouths of the caves.

Paul Williams, sasquatch hunter, nodded.

“I took out my gun and my camera. I’d been waiting for the day my whole life, and I still didn’t know which one I was going to use.”

Julie crouched down, put her dirty hand on the dirt, her fingers spread.

“That was mean,” she finally said. “What they did.”

The sasquatch hunter took the bag off his back and put it on the ground beside him.

“I fell for it.”

“Yeah, well. So what? I mean,” she went on hurriedly, not wanting to offend him, “everyone make mistakes, right? Get all caught up in things.”

Paul Williams crouched beside her on the patch of dry dirt and stringy grass.

“I’d been looking for a long time,” he eventually said.

“But you never found anything?”

“I found plenty. Signs. There are signs everywhere.”

Julie considered the small clearing. She imagined him coming here, all alone. Paul Williams raked at the dust with his fingers.

“I heard them once. In the middle of the night. I was asleep in my tent. It was a spot about four hours northwest of here. A sound woke me up. It was like nothing else. A moaning, a deep moan. I just lay there listening to it. There they were, just outside my tent. I couldn’t do anything about it.”

A loud crack sounded in the forest behind them. Julie gasped and jumped up. The sasquatch hunter held up his hand to quiet her. They waited. The noise receded.

“It’s nothing,” Paul Williams said.

Just then, Julie started to cry. She covered her eyes with her hands. Her tears tracked wet dirt down her face.

“Hey,” the sasquatch hunter said. “Hey there.”

Julie felt the cliff looming over her. What was she doing here? Soon the hills would be plunged into blackness. And what if it was true? What if there were – things? Julie willed herself to stop crying, to stop acting like a stupid little girl. She rubbed at her leaky nose with the worn shoulder of the shirt.

“The kids,” Paul Williams said softly, as if to himself. “The kids who – did it. They didn’t know me. They hid cameras. They put it all on their computers. They wanted everyone to see. Stumbling around like a great big idiot. Why? Why did they do that?”

Julie imagined them: Perfect blonde preppies like Zhi’s Rob – just having a laugh, no big deal, what’s the big deal?; or maybe greasy-haired headbangers, younger versions of her mom’s Jesse. None of the above, thought Julie, picturing zitty techie basement dwellers, Reddit kids poncing on about the dark web.

Don’t you know? How could he not know?

The wind blew from the east. Julie squeezed her arms around her, felt the heat of her body through the shirt. Paul Williams stared at a spot, somewhere, somewhere up ahead. Gloom settled over the hills. The caves darkened.