“The Doom Statues” — Chapter 23

“No…fucking…way!” Emily insists, “No way! There’s just no fucking way that this was here before!”

“It does seem…rather unlikely,” Tony agrees with a chuckle, rubbing his chin as he stares down at the water’s greenish black surface.

“Well it had to have been!” Kay shouts, throwing her arms into the air, “I mean, what are you even suggesting? That this…pond…materialized out of nowhere, in the — what, half hour? — it took us to walk to the cemetery and back?”

Kay’s aware that her passion might be casting her in an unfavorable light, as far as Tony is concerned, and experiences a mild panicked twinge. But she can’t seem to stop, all the same. The sight is plenty strange on its own, to be sure, but Emily’s not helping matters any by insisting it just appeared out of thin air.

Their trajectory must just be ever so slightly off, is all, Kay theorizes. Returning from the cemetery, they walked up that strange abandoned road, a hundred yards or whatever, to the spot Tony had been smart enough to mark, that taped up asterisk. Entered the forest again in the space between those two trees, the only two trees near that asterisk, and then right over that first lip of shoulder, off of the road and past these trees, they immediately encountered…this.