Work Text:
Sam didn't believe in superstitions.
Which, in hindsight, was probably why he was one of the only rangers willing to take the night shifts every day of the week. Stories about visitors vanishing mysteriously while you escorted them out of the park at closing times were all too common in the staff room.
“I'm pretty sure that's a Japanese superstition,” he'd told his coworker Connor after listening to him ramble on about it. “Taxi drivers who swear they’d had ghost passengers after a tsunami.”
“Exactly why there's a chance it could be happening here,” Connor refuted. “People used to die in this park all the time, Sam, it's that damn demon…”
Ah, yes. The Demon of Dee Park. One of the most prominent reasons for Sam's biggest headache; night visitors. People who snuck in or tried to stick around past closing in an attempt to catch some sightings of the legendary demonic presence that supposedly haunted the park.
Sam was half tempted to tell Connor that it was the old park rangers that had come up with that story.
“Put your uniform back on,” he said instead, sneering at the Sonic-themed outfit his coworker had adorned for today's shift.
“No way, my creative ways will not be restricted.”
“It's a T-shirt, Connor, just put it on top of the onesie.”
“Come on!” A voice from farther back in the cabin shouts—Ant's teasing lilt. “Don't you have those search parties tomorrow to worry about instead of a Sonic onesie?”
Sam opens his mouth to argue, well aware his coworkers are blatantly deflecting, but then closes it soon enough. Deflection or not, Ant’s right.
“We’re not done with this conversation,” he grumbles instead.
“Sure,” Connor drawls. “Hey, anyway, do you think any of those theories about what happened were true? You were there.”
Sam blinks, freezing in the middle of turning away. “What theo—What theories, Connor?”
It seemed straightforward enough to him. Eret had come to the park, rescued the kid and dropped him off in a strange good samaritan act. Perhaps there were holes in that idea, but it wasn’t Sam’s job to wonder. He had more important things to deal with, like making sure a full-blown missing person search went well.
Connor raises an eyebrow. “Well,” he responds, “Some people are arguing Eret’s the Demon. Which is bullshit, honestly, I think he just came in and rescued the kid, must’ve come back from wherever he ran off to seeing as he’s clearly alive. Nah, the main theory—people are saying the kid is right.”
Sam scoffs sharply. “Uh-huh. Well when you put it that way…”
Connor waves his hands wildly. “No, no, not the—not the Eret’s the Demon thing. They’re saying the Demon saved that kid.”
Sam finally makes the full turn around to stare at Connor, voice dripping with sarcasm and exasperation. “Really? You and the others with that Demon stuff was bad enough, but now letting it get in the way of an investigation like this—”
“Sam.” Connor’s voice cuts in. It’s… shockingly serious, enough to make Sam stop in bewilderment as Connor continues, eyes wide and earnest. “Have you seen the clearing by the Memington House?”
“I… Yeah. You mean recently?”
“Today.”
Sam furrows his brows. “Well, I wasn’t exactly in the interest of interrupting the authorities, Connor.”
“Well, they’re gone. And I looked. And—Sam, they’re saying it’s natural decay, maybe some weird disease in the plants—Sam… It’s—It’s not natural, man.”
Sam feels his body go still. “What? No—What? Connor, I don’t have time for this, I have to—”
“Sam.” Despite the crazy theories, despite the superstitious beliefs that Sam can’t possibly believe are true, there’s something in Connor’s expression that is genuine, and he can’t help the slight chill that goes through him.
“I… I guess I can go check it out. It’s a short walk.”
Besides, he thinks, not wanting to rile up more of Connor’s ridiculous little theories, if it’s really as bad as Connor says, we might need to deal with the plants before the disease spreads.
—---—---—
Sam wasn’t lying when he said it was a short walk. It takes him all of 15 minutes to get there, and despite his better judgment, Connor’s words lead him to thoughts of the night only a few days prior.
(“What happened, kid? Who brought you—Are you in danger right now?”
The kid in question shook his head and signed enthusiastically, the latter so much so that Sam almost mistook one of the words for his own imagination.
“A nice monster saved me, Mr. Park Ranger! They beat up the bad guys and used their powers to scare them off!”
The kid then holds up an oversized mushroom, showing it off to Sam like it’s his most prized possession and like Sam isn’t still reeling from his first sentence. “They gave this to me! His name is B-O-B.” He paused, thinking. “I wanna give him a name in sign, can you help me?”
Sam shook his head. “Sorry, could you just answer a few questions for me first, kid? Did you say monster? ”
The kid nodded, put off by Sam’s change in topic and visibly pouting. “Yeah? The one that lives here.”
Ah, Sam realizes, trying to keep the flat, annoyed expression from appearing on his face. He means the Demon. Of course he does.
“Well,” Sam presses, putting off his concerns about whatever fable the kid came up with about his rescuer and the potential dangers that rescuer could cause, “Could you describe who gave that mushroom to you?”
The kid stimmed excitedly, kicking his feet as he signed. “He was tall, and had really curly hair, and a SUPER deep voice!” The kid took on a sadder look. “And she had a big boo-boo around her neck… She didn’t want my bandaids, so I guess it wasn’t as bad as it looks? My B-O-O says head boo-boos are like that.”
“Did this person with a boo-boo bring you back?”
“Yeah! But they didn’t want to come with me for some reason.”
Sam feels a cold chill run down his spine, ignored by the kid as he continues on his tangent.
“He’s really cool, Mr. Park Ranger! He can scare bad guys with his disappearing, and he can destroy stuff and make it all dead, and he can change how he looks! I think he changed because he didn’t want to scare me, but I think he looked really cool.”
“Make things… dead?” Sam was starting to feel slightly ill.
“Yeah! He made the trees all black and weird.”
“Uh-huh. Where did they go after they dropped you off?”
“Left, I think? But they’re really good at disappearing.”
“We’ll see,” Sam retorts, fighting down mild horror at whatever truth was hidden behind these tall tales the kid was spouting, and he reached for his phone to dial 911.)
The only issue is, the kid’s stories don’t sound as much like tall tales anymore.
Sam places a hand on the closest tree, trailing his fingers down the rotted, blackened bark.
“Weird,” the kid had called it. Sam is thinking of stronger words.
Creepy. Grotesque. Horrific.
He hesitates to say supernatural, but the fact that it’s even remotely close to the tip of his tongue disturbs him.
Despite his growing horror, however, Sam continues into the woods, his determination to figure out this intricate web of mystery he’s found himself in far greater than his fear. As he walks, the grass and trees continue to darken unnaturally with every step, and, slowly but surely, the once-familiar path to the Memington House distorts into something that Sam can barely even recognize.
“Connor wasn’t lying about it changing, that’s for sure,” Sam murmurs to himself, eyeing a tree whose thin trunk had caved in and collapsed entirely.
It doesn’t look like any kind of plant disease Sam’s ever seen, and he can’t help but think back to the kid’s descriptions.
Destroy stuff. Make things dead. Blacken the trees.
He’d thought the kid was just repeating back those ridiculous stories people would tell about the Demon just like Connor did, but the abrupt appearance of the very destruction the kid had described is a little too well-timed, a little too sudden, a little too supernatural.
And the kid said Eret did this. The Eret who gave him the mushroom, who brought him back, who makes trees decay and wither like it’s nothing.
Then Sam finally approaches the clearing, sees the epicenter, sees the mass of blackened scorched earth and the scraps of police tape, and he has only a moment for his breath to catch in horror before he sees something very distinctly out of place.
The park regular, staring at him with their mouth ajar, looking like a deer caught in the headlights.
There’s a logical conclusion to this, Sam is sure.
“What are you doing here?”
They start. If their eyes weren’t hidden behind dark lenses, he would’ve guessed they were looking around in a panic.
“W-A-L-K-I-N-G,” they fingerspell after a moment. They’ve been learning. The ASL paper Sam gave them is tucked into their pocket, and Sam can’t help but think about the crinkling of paper on that recording the police released, nor the words Michael had about his rescuer’s appearance.
(“He was tall, and had really curly hair, and a SUPER deep voice!”)
Sam narrows his eyes. They must be nearly 6’3. Their curly hair doesn’t stir in the wind. But they don’t speak.
“You know there could’ve been an active police investigation here?”
“O-V-E-R.” They frown. Their scarf shifts in the breeze.
(The kid took on a sadder look. “And she had a big boo-boo around her neck… )
(A fallen scarf, a flash of brown hair as they spun around, and the glimpse of something on their neck before curly hair and a scarred hand slapped over it.)
He meets their eyes through their glasses, trying to stare into that inky darkness and see what’s underneath, but the stalwart lenses give away nothing.
(The hair, the neck, the height, the timing. They never seem to leave. They always seem to just disappear.)
Still, he tries, and he keeps his gaze locked as he continues. He nods casually and continues his point, thoughts tumultuous as he tries to connect the dots. “Still, you should be more careful.”
(Eret Brine, the Demon. A rescuer, a monster, described by a child as one in the same, but that didn’t make any sense. How could a 49 year old runaway and a demonic presence 30 years old be one in the same?)
(Sam is a skeptic, and he pulls at his own argument and watches it fall apart, how tenuous the connection between Eret and the Demon really is, how little he knows, and how all he’s sure about is that this person in front of him is dangerous. And so Sam thinks, and he plans, and he speaks his warning.)
“You never know. They say there’s a Demon out there that did this.”
The park regular tenses sharply, horror in every inch of their body. There’s a distant buzzing that grows louder and louder, humming to ringing to roaring and filling the clearing, and Sam looks down in shock to see it’s coming from his radio.
He shuts it off. He doesn’t remember turning it on.
Sam looks up, and the Demon of Dee Park is gone.