Pietro jostled in his seat as the van rumbled and shook down the narrowing dirt road. The world outside was black, a starless night cloaked further by a thick curtain of trees. Pietro wasn't one to be easily spooked, but he'd been feeling a growing, claustrophobic sort of dread for the entire hour-long drive, and found himself unable to suppress his nervous energy any further. He decided to speak.

  "Excuse me," Pietro coughed, cleared the cobwebs from his voice, and spoke again, clearer, directing his comments to the mostly unseen driver ahead of him. "Pardon. Do you know how much farther the drive will be?"

  A tired pair of eyes flicked his way in the rearview mirror. The driver paused for a few moments before replying. "Fifteen more minutes. Maybe a little more."

  "Thank you. That's all." Pietro nodded, eager and compliant, before realizing with some regret that that wasn't, in fact, all, and that the burning disquiet in his gut had yet to be settled. "Sorry. To keep talking. But, I just, I wonder… Do you know if management is angry with me?"

  The eyes in the mirror narrowed. "How the hell would I know? I'm a Mover."

  "Right, yes, of course, but I only assume- I was under the assumption that Movers took direct orders from management, that you were usually in contact directly preceding a Move. My- our manager, how did he seem? Temperament-wise?"

  "Shit, man. I don't know."

  "Did he allude to the complication I ran into on my last job?"

  "We didn't talk about you. Water cooler gossip isn't really a perk of this gig."

  "Of course. I should have assumed. Thank you."

  Pietro managed another two minutes of silence before, almost uncontrollably, he found himself talking again. "I only ask because it feels as if I might be being punished?"

  "Is that a question?"

  "It's just- Have you ever been assigned anything like this before?" Pietro gestured at the black woods trundling past. "An outdoor Mop job, in the middle of the night? I never have."

  "Not my business when and where they want things cleaned up," the Mover replied.

  "Yes. Sorry. Of course." Pietro wilted. "I'll be quiet now."

  The Mover made a pained sort of grunt, the sound of a meager helping of sympathy leaking out of someone uncomfortable with the emotion. "I'll say, and this is just a gut feeling, guy, but if our bosses were really mad at you, you'd be a stain on a wall somewhere. You'd be a job for our coworkers. M Corp wants someone punished, I don't think they need to go this far out of their way to do it. I think chances are they just had a runner, and they nabbed him farther from town than they would've liked, and now they need the scene clear before hikers or hunters or whatever the hell trip over the mess."

  Pietro bobbed his head, fidgeting, feeling himself calm a fraction. He knew all of this intuitively, too, but it was comforting to hear it said out loud. "That follows. Thank you. I think you're probably right."

  "I will say, though, and I don't know what you did to fuck up last time, but if I were you?" The eyes in the mirror darted back from the road to meet his. "If you're already feeling this jumpy about it, there's probably a good reason. I'd be extra sure not to fuck up again."

  Pietro's mouth felt dry. "Yes. Yes, I was thinking the same thing."

  The Mover dropped him off at a seemingly random point in the road a few minutes later, and handed him a sealed enveloped with directions to the worksite. By the time Pietro had hoisted his duffel and clicked his headlamp on, the van was already halfway out of sight, leaving him in a rapidly darkening pocket of silent woodland.

  Extremely silent. Pietro spent very little time outside of urban areas, so he couldn't be sure, but he flagged the silence as unusual. He felt he should be hearing frogs, or the nocturnal chirping of insects, but all he could make out was the faintest whisper of leaves in a weak breeze. He set off down the road, light from his headlamp a will-o-the-wisp bobbing ahead in his vision, the crunch of his usually silent footfalls deafening.

  He followed the directions, detailed down to the approximate number of paces, and found himself delivered to a small clearing, the remnants of what might have once been a campsite. He scanned his lamp over the grass and saw the night's work laid out for him.

  Blood spattered the ground in the center of the clearing, dappled on grass and soil. Bits of debris littered the radius of the campsite, chunks of metal and plastic that, on a cursory inspection, seemed to be the remnants of a car battery, or several car batteries. This didn't strike Pietro as unusual; he'd been cleaning up inexplicable shards of batteries for most of his career now, and had long since learned not to question their presence. There were rags of fabric, too, remnants of clothing. Different than the usual denim or cloth, though, much of this fabric was a uniform scarlet, and thick, maybe woolen.

  He took stock of the mess and made a practiced mental calculation before retrieving a satellite phone from his duffel. He punched in a message: "expected job time: 2.5-3 hours."

  He got an immediate text in reply: "Pickup time scheduled for 5:15 AM. Please meet your Mover at the agreed-upon coordinates."

  Pietro stowed the phone and masked up, retrieving a collapsible rake and roll of bags. He'd collect most of the spattered vegetation and debris in trash bags before going about disinfecting and cleaning the blood from the trees and rocks. He was half an hour into this process when he first began to feel that he was being watched.

  Pietro dismissed the sensation as idle paranoia at first, a remnant of his queasy car ride, but the feeling congealed into something more present and pressing and real every time he turned from the treeline and back to his work. He found himself losing valuable time, interrupting his bagging and raking to suddenly dart his light toward the woods around him.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  Until he saw her.

  On maybe the tenth glance over his shoulder in as many minutes, Pietro spotted a woman leaning out from behind a tree, smiling at him. He yelped and tripped backwards, dropping his bag, only to scramble to his feet and find the space the woman had occupied empty.

  His chest heaved as he caught his breath, eyes darting at every shifting shadow in their periphery. The woman was gone. There had never been a woman.

  He forced himself to check, knowing that if he didn't get a hold of himself now, he'd miss his pickup window, and he'd have to arrange a way back without blowing his cover, a task that filled him with dread. He made himself hustle over to the tree he'd seen the woman by and inspected the ground, found them free of prints. He let out a tentative, quiet "hello," that was swallowed by the gaping silence of the woods the instant it left his lips. He sent out another, louder, and heard no response.

  Pietro calmed a fraction and returned to his work, threw himself into it doubletime to make up for his foolish lapse. He'd filled only one more bag with debris with another feeling, even weightier and more awful than before, settled on his heart with a grave certainty.

  Somehow, he knew, that if he turned and looked behind him, the woman would be back.

  Pietro suppressed this feeling with a shudder and kept his head down, focused on raking the bloody grass and dirt into the trash bag.

  The feeling doubled, tripled in weight. It clamped on his mind. The woman was there. He knew it as certainly as he knew his own name. She was standing in the dark, watching him, waiting for him to turn around.

  Pietro straightened, eyes still cast downward, breath coming in ragged gulps. He felt seized by a sort of nightmare logic. A speedily weakinging logical voice insisted that he was just scared, spooked by the woods and the silence and the blood, and that he was only slowing himself down.

  A deeper, older, more certain voice assured him that the woman was waiting for him to turn around and meet her black gaze. It told him that he would do so, in mere moments, and that he was helpless not to.

  The older voice was right.

  The woman was tall. Almost impossibly tall. The kind of height that, while not technically superhuman, makes the mind stutter and double-take at the sight of it. Close to seven feet.

  She stood silent, eyes hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat, body cloaked in a long, flowing sundress that moldered where its hem brushed the ground. Her skin was so pale that it seemed to glow. Her body was so rigid and motionless that the breezy woods flowed and shifted around her, like gentle waves breaking against a pier. The vegetation around her feet was dead.

  Pietro was suddenly, irrationally sure that the woman was the source of the woods' silence. That the crickets and frogs were holding their tongues so as not to alert her to their presences. He envied them.

  Protocol should have demanded that he pretend to be a park ranger in order to get the woman to leave, and that, if she resisted or appeared dubious, he should notify Management and intervene. Again. The memory of the young man at the previous job, his lips flecked with froth as he breathed his last breath, briefly surfaced above his simmering terror with a wave of shame.

  He knew that he wouldn't be able to follow protocol here. The primeval part of his brain dedicated to recognizing a predator told him that any attempt he made to exert any force over this woman would be met with fatal and savage violence.

  Pietro had never been so afraid.

  "Hello," the woman finally spoke. Her voice was paper-thin, flutelike. "Did you see me? Before?"

  Pietro's throat had closed. He wouldn't have been able to respond if he'd tried. He couldn't move. The woman tilted her head, smiling wide, amused. She lurched forward, walking with a loping, stiltlike gait that covered maybe five feet in a stride. She moved soundlessly, silent in a way that even Pietro could never have hoped to be.

  Where her bare feet met the vegetation, she left behind black footprints of dead grass.

  Soon she was looming over him. Pietro trembled, consumed by twin urges to flee and collapse into the fetal position, urges that cancelled themselves out.

  "You saw me," the woman cooed. "You saw me before you saw me. Isn't that right?"

  Pietro gazed past the woman, at the road snaking away into the darkness, through the woods. He wondered how easily she'd be able to outrun him, if he could outpace her superior stride with sheer panic. The woman followed his gaze and tutted, placed an ice-cold hand on his cheek, to redirect his gaze to her black eyes.

  "You don't need to be afraid. I just need an answer to that question. A few minutes ago, you thought you saw me, by the tree. That's why you walked over to it and looked around, right?"

  The hand on his chin was as solid as a vice, an iron clamp that could be applied but hadn't yet. Pietro had no choice but to speak. "I did. I thought I made it up at first."

  The woman laughed delightedly. It was a fractured, crystalline sound, like some sort of unearthly birdsong. "That's the wonderful thing. You did. Because I hadn't gone there, not yet. You saw it early. You peeked!"

  The woman released his face and patted his shoulder. "You peeked through a veil. I know the feeling well. Oh, what fun, to talk with someone similarly inclined. How gratifying. I'm so glad I found you here, Pietro."

  It felt completely natural that this apparition would know his name. "Are you…" Pietro croaked. "Are you going to kill me?"

  The woman cocked her head again. He hated when she did that, how the gesture went just a few degrees too far to seem natural. "Why do you ask? Are you scared? Does that idea scare you?"

  Pietro nodded miserably, a chided schoolboy. There was that beautiful, awful laugh again, and the woman had bent down to meet him, face-to-face. Her breath was floral, with a faint, funereal undertone of rot.

  "You shouldn't be afraid to die, my child."

  The words hung in the air, and Pietro felt a curious, dreamy sort of resignation. He felt sure that he would soon be dead.

  "But the time for that is not tonight, I'm sorry to say. You'll have to go without your reward longer than most." The woman straightened, then finally, mercifully, looked elsewhere, back at the road. "I wanted to get a glimpse of you tonight, that's all. I wanted to confirm what I already knew, about your gifts. And mine. And I wanted to introduce myself, because that's only polite."

  The woman clasped his hand in hers, her palm dwarfing his own, her fingers slender and pointed. "My name is Yelena, and I am so pleased to finally meet you, Pietro."

  Pietro nodded along with her, dazed and still convinced of his imminent death.

  "I should leave you to your work. But know that this won't be the last you see of me," the woman beamed down at him. "I'll be back for you soon. I have great plans for you."

  The woman turned and walked back into the forest, leaving a trail of dead flora in her wake.

  Pietro was left shivering in place for a good five minutes, before he finally turned and vomited. He managed to get up, to finish his work in time for his pickup, but only through a force of effort so immense that he passed out almost instantly upon climbing back into the retrieval van.

  When he slept, he dreamed of the woman's face, empty and porcelain as a doll's, staring up at him from beneath a sea of rot.