That I can understand.
But nothing in nature takes a skeleton apart and lays it out like…”
He swallowed. “Like that.” “Like a message,” Anna whispered.
“That’s not instinct, Anna. That’s intention. A mind.” He turned.
“An alien one. But a mind.”
Maybe the creature left the knife and rope because it saw no value in them,
the way a magpie hoards shiny scraps. And Logan’s camera and diary?
Gone. Buried, thrown into a crevice.
Because a creature that clever and that territorial
would erase every foreign thing from its forest. Except the body itself.
Frank wasn’t finished.
If this thing had killed once, he reasoned, it had killed before.
For months he combed archives of missing persons across the southern Appalachians,
looking for three patterns: experienced victims.
Total disappearance with no gear or tracks.
And strange sounds or sensations that investigators ignored.
He found at least four cases. 
October 1988.
