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The next morning, I began digging into the town’s history. Legends went back as far as anyone could remember, and even the natives told stories about the river, treating it with a certain fear and reverence. I found an eerily familiar description of a Native myth about the river. It was in the library’s archives and written by some Doctor Pengloss. It discussed mythology and folklore as a potential manifestation of something real.
The myth tells the tale of a young man who lived by the river. He had everything he ever wanted: a beautiful wife, a son, bountiful harvests, and a warm place to sleep. However, that all changed when he was overcome by a terrible sickness. That same sickness eventually spread to his wife and child. He recovered, but his family didn’t, and he was left alone.
He still had a warm bed at night and healthy crops, but he fell into a deep depression. Unsure of what to do with himself, he would wander the river’s edge for hours, silently hoping that one day he would fall in and be swept away from his troubles.
One evening, while pacing the riverbank, he heard his wife and child crying out for him. Frantic, he searched everywhere for the source of the voices. They began to tell him that they were living happily in the river now, enjoying life without him beneath the water’s surface. His family urged him to dive in and join them so that he too could live happily. Without a second thought, he jumped in only to drown, cold and alone.
Through further digging, I discovered a vast collection of native lore about the river. Many stories were similar to the one about the man who lost his family, but there were others that made everything seem much more complex. Many of them referenced some kind of god or spirit that the natives worshipped. There were a few different translations, but the most common one I found was “King Moss.” Some stories referred to him as a personification of the river itself, while others described him as a spirit with whom the people struggled.
However, one common theme was the existence of a sort of pact made between King Moss and the locals. Some stories made it sound like they sacrificed people to him in order to quell his rage, while others described a situation in which he was to be left alone in exchange for not actively hurting humans. A few even claimed that his “benevolence” towards humans was due to the fact that he was sleeping and would one day wake up and wreak havoc.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of the agreement that Moose and the others mentioned. I wondered if they had been referring something like the pact in the myths. I was still unsure about the whole King Moss thing. It seemed a little farfetched. But after everything that had happened, I was almost willing to believe anything.
After that, I decided to plot out all the disappearances and deaths that had occurred in the past few decades. What I found was pretty typical. Most reports were evenly distributed around the most dangerous parts of the river as well as the areas where the most people tended to gather. However, I noticed an unnerving trend. Reports in which there was no body recovered occurred almost exclusively in the areas around Badwater. In those areas, a body was only recovered about fifteen percent of the time. This was commonly attributed to the strong current there which supposedly carried them too far to be found. But I knew the truth. The hands got those people and dragged them to a watery grave.
However, while studying the disappearances, I noticed something even more intriguing. I used several different maps to plot out the disappearances and began to find inconsistencies between the two. Curious, I looked at a few more maps and discovered a similar pattern. They were all practically identical aside from a few changes due to creeks drying up and urbanization. However, there was one area deep in the forest west of Badwater that didn’t seem to match up on any of the maps. Some of them indicated nothing but forest there, while others showed a small lake. A few of the older maps even depicted a cave system.
I used Google Earth to examine the area, but something strange occurred. The picture was incredibly pixelated. Everything around it displayed clearly, but the image became blurry as soon as I toggled over the place where the maps were inconsistent. It was still somewhat visible, but I had difficulty discerning anything other than tree coverage and a strange dark mass that could have been anything.
I was surprised that I’d never been there before. I’d spent a lot of time wandering the forest, and I somehow never managed to stumble into that place. Oddly enough, it appeared to be in the dead center of those areas I frequented whilst out in the woods. Somehow, I had managed to circumvent it every time.
