The dingy windows let in enough midday sun to reveal the gun store's empty metal shelves and wooden counters. You weren't really hoping to find an arsenal here, but this place looks stripped bare. And from the Juul pods and condoms on the floor, you aren't the first person to go exploring. The store isn't big, and it takes you less than fifteen minutes to sweep the showroom, the garage/storage room, and the back office. Your haul: three losing scratch tickets from 2017, a few damp pages from American Handgunner magazine, and a key that unlocks the office desk (empty).
At first, you think the metal desk is bolted to the wall, but when you try to pull the key back out of the drawer, the desk slides with a hideous shriek across the concrete floor, and a Field Notes notebook plops onto the ground to land in a puddle of icy water. You pick it up even as the water soaks into the pages, making the ink run, and open to a random page.
—what we had to do. I will not call him a traitor, as he acted out of love for his art, and for the Three Families who guarded this land long before your birth, and who will guard it long after you're dead. The man you call "Mr. Heaney" was more than my friend; he was a poet with leather and flesh. That you should come to regard—
(A section already hopelessly illegible, then:)
—defense of Broad Brook, I've done what I can, but what can any of us do now? You and Linus should have acted years ago.
The next page is a hand-drawn, unfinished map of the Broad Brook area, with lines of defense sketched hastily around the periphery. It reminds you of last stands you saw in high school history textbooks.
The page after that is written in black pen, not blue. It looks like some kind of glyph or doodle. Jagged, labyrinthine lines cover most of the page. It takes you a moment to realize what you're looking at: one humped shape is a standing stone. It is, in fact, the standing stone you remember seeing at Broad Brook. And that arch is the large hillock…
It's a map of the swamp. And those jagged black lines reveal every patch of mud and water. It's not exactly to scale, but tiny notes count steps and warn you about sinkholes and other hazards. You can use this to follow the flies and the stink, and reach…
…reach whatever it is you're supposed to reach.
You go to sleep.
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