Archive of Our Own ^beta

The rain was coming down hard now, a torrent of tiny projectiles that slapped, hard and wet, into the back of his neck.

Abe Sapien was breathing hard, wiping the way the water that poured into his eyes with the back of his mud-streaked, blue hand. The earth was slick and dangerous beneath his feet; with a thick bed of rotting leaves obscuring a wealth of unseen hazards and the last of the daylight overhead starting to fade, every step through the forest felt like with a date with broken bones or a month in traction.

Or worse.

There was a creak in the dark.

He reached out and steadied himself the weathered trunk of a nearby cedar, snapping his flashlight onto his vest. He’d need it soon enough; in about half an hour, keen eyes or not, he’d have no choice.

But to turn it on now, that would mean giving himself away.

“Abe.” The voice was soft and lilting. It didn’t sound like much of anything now; for a creature that could mimic any voice, assume any shape, it seemed to have little interest in deceiving him.

Or at least little conviction it would succeed. “Abe,” the soft voice continued. “Come back. Please.”

It was a convincing performance; a young woman scared and alone in the woods. Abe could believe that much of that fear was genuine. It was the girl’s mother that now lived wild in these forests, luring and devouring hikers and campers all; a living relic of Japanese ghost stories brought to the United States out of a misguided sense of familial obligation.

This woman had a name. She’d married. She’d had a child. For all the carnage it seemed her cannibalistic mother had wrought, Ayumi Cohen had seemed an ordinary girl set on an unremarkable, quiet life.

That was until she’d slid into Liz Sherman’s place on Abe’s hunting party and he’d found her standing, gun drawn, over the dead body of the bellicose local sheriff. Her face had been visibly contorted, her eyes coal-black and her bright lips drawn wide into a freakish Glasgow smile.

There’d be time to worry later, for Liz’s sake. With the darkness falling and his weapon lost to Ayumi’s sabotage, he couldn’t afford the time to grieve.

Abe released his hold on the tree and eased his way carefully down the muddy, sloped terrain toward what looked like a washed-out, dirt access road carved into the mountainside. Little remained of the missing rangers’ tracks; the storm had raged for long enough that the deep ruts their tires had gouged into the mud had been largely washed away.

Still, it was enough. He was on the right track and, right now, that was all he could hope to ask for.

He set down the access road at a run, moving as fast as the mud that sucked at his feet would allow him. The rangers’ truck sat abandoned on the side of the road and, closing the last of the distance in a sprint, he pulled open the driver’s side door. This deep in the woods, the rangers had apparently not concerned themselves with car thieves.

Abe slid into the front seat, soaking wet. The keys were nowhere to be found; still, with the road in this condition, even four-wheel drive wasn’t likely to get him far. The two-way radio, built into the dashboard and dependent on the truck’s battery, was dead.

Desperate, he pulled open the glove compartment and dumped its contents onto the passenger’s seat. He was pouring through the resultant mess when he spotted it, a chunky cellphone lost in the shadowed well of the seat.

He strained to reach the handset in the dark. Grabbing hold of the antennae, he looked it over.

A satphone.

Calls to Liz’s satphone went unanswered. He keyed in the number for the sheriff’s office. “Where’s Liz?”

“Agent Sapien?” Abe recognized the voice as Deputy Mitchell, the sheriff's second in command. He sounded characteristically confused. “That you? But Agent Sherman, she’s with you…”

“That wasn’t Agent Sherman.” Abe’s voice was tight. “Look, we’re dealing with two — I repeat, two — cannibalistic shape shifters. Liz was at the Cohen household this afternoon.” He took a breath, trying in vain to steady his nerves. “If she’s still alive, that’s likely where she’ll be.”

Mitchell swore. “Jesus Christ.”

“You’re telling me. I’m texting you my coordinates.” He scanned the trees. What little daylight was left was no longer enough the dislodge the long, dark shadows cast along the tree line. There was no telling what was out there. “These things can look like anyone and sound like anyone. “Tell your men not to trust their eyes.”

There was a flicker of movement outside the corner of Abe’s eye. He dropped the phone, slamming his hand down onto the lock of the driver’s side door. He hit the flashlight; the dark and terrifying figure of Ayumi Cohen was bearing down on him, her face contorted into something truly monstrous.

She slammed hard into the side of the truck. The whole vehicle shook on impact.

“I won’t let you!” She was clawing uselessly at the glass of the window with long, thin fingers. It chipped feebly beneath her nails. “Did you think I was going to let you hurt her, you son of a bitch?”

Abe lurched back, keeping his light trained on the monster’s face. She was a modern Medusa, her sleek black hair forming a living halo that writhed about her head. Her wide, inhuman smile was twisted into a murderous snarl.

The door handle jangled violently. The lock was holding, at least for now.

“Ayumi!” She was sweeping around the truck, her dark eyes wild. The speed at which she moved was incredible; at times, she seemed to be little more than a blur of black. “Ayumi, listen to me!”

It took him a split second to realize his mistake. The passenger’s side door opened with a soft click of betrayal.

He lunched across the truck, grabbing hold of the door handle and wrenching it back as the first of the slick black locks of wet hair slipped inside. He tried to brace himself, leveraging his weight as best he could, but closing the door was impossible. It took all the strength he had to hold the line.

The hair started to wind its way treacherously around his arm. The pressure was soft at first, a gentle tug intended to loosen his grip on the door handle, but he’d seen the mother’s cuts into the dead men’s wrists and ankles. The creature’s seething mass of black was her species’ primary means of restraining its prey; even individual strands could grip with sufficient force that they could cut through flesh like wire through clay.

Freeing up his other hand, he slid the heavy knife from its holster on its thigh and set to work sawing his arm free, even as the first of his own blood started to run streaming down his arm. Outside, Ayumi tensed and screamed — she’d felt the damage and the pain had provided enough distraction that he was able to pull the door closed.

Even as the door latched shut, Abe knew it was a stalling tactic and little else; locked doors and thin panes of glass wouldn’t keep her out for long.

He raised his voice, in an effort to make himself heard over the rain. “Your mother’s killed a lot of people. People with families. People with children.”

The creature was slumped in the mud, cradling the wounded hair like a broken child. She stared at him through soaked black hair, her eyes desperate. “She wouldn’t,” she said. “She wouldn’t do that!”

There was a flicker of something — something human — behind her eyes. Abe watched her, his own heart racing. the gambit was obvious, though dangerous — little better than taking a torch to a hornet’s nest. He scooped the phone from the floor and, breathing deeply, unlocked the door.

He kept his knife on hand as he eased the door open, clumsily dialling a phone number as he moved. Ayumi watched him advance, her eyes burning black and her face streaked with water — rain or tears, it wasn’t clear. In the dim glow of the flashlight, he could make out the shimmering line of her second mouth cut into the crown of her skull.

“She eats people, Ayumi,” Abe said. “She rips the flesh from their bones with her teeth and leaves their corpses to rot in the woods. But just because she’s a monster doesn’t mean you have to be.” He held out the phone before tossing the handset into her lap. “It’s for you.”

The worst of her monstrous features retreated at the sound of the voice, soft and burbling, in her lap. In an instant, she was small and shaken and all too human. “Hey, baby boy,” she murmured, sliding her hand across her pale, mud-smeared cheek as she wiped the rain from her eyes. “It’s okay, sweetie. Yeah, mommy’s coming home soon.”

Abe eased himself down into the mud, bone-weary with exhaustion.

When Ayumi looked up again some time later, the black, now starry skies had started to clear. Her eyes were dry. “What happens now?” she asked, her voice like brittle glass. She looked like she could break.

“Now,” Abe said grimly, holding her gaze. “We find your mother.”

*
When Liz Sherman and her team finally found them, the pair had taken shelter beneath a thick cluster of trees. They had found the missing rangers dead, their bodies mangled in what Abe recognized was the usual fashion, but it seemed their struggle with the yama-uba hadn’t been entirely in vain.

The old woman, her white hair limp and her face frozen into an inhuman smile, had succumbed to her injuries.