ACCOUNT II — The Lost Traveler

There is a particular trouble with old warnings: we are remarkably good at remembering the words and equally good at forgetting why they were spoken.

Such is the case, I have discovered, with the Gloam Cat.

Following my previous account, I began asking anyone willing to entertain the question why, precisely, one ought not follow them.

I received eleven answers.

None were the same.

Of those eleven, only one produced anything resembling a lead. Such is the way of beings belonging to The Wood.

It required a bit of digging, but I believe I have found the man at the center of the rumored account: Elias Thorne.

According to the story, Mr. Thorne became lost in The Wood some years ago, with a Gloam Cat following close behind.

An interesting conundrum, as the warning specifically instructs one not to follow the Gloam Cat, but says nothing of what one ought to do should a Gloam Cat follow you.

I first heard the tale from a patron of The Wayward Lantern, a natural place for stories to accumulate. The account had reached him second-, or perhaps third-hand.

There’s a man who got turned around in The Wood some years ago. Claims he saw the same Gloam Cat three times, following him.

As it happened, Thorne was a tradesman who frequently passed through, often stopping at The Wayward Lantern along the way. By some considerable stroke of luck, he was expected again that very day.

So I lingered like a bee looking for pollen, nervously tapping the end of my quill on the leather face of my notebook.

Five separate patrons questioned what I was waiting for before Mr. Thorne actually showed up.

Mr. Thorne was older than I had expected. Or, rather, he looked older. An unkempt beard, dark but well peppered with gray, hung from a face weathered by years spent on the road. His eyes were bloodshot and tired. I would have placed him well into his sixties had I not known better; I suspect the road had contributed a decade or so of its own.

I approached as he relieved himself of a worn leather pack and placed it upon the bar.

“Mister Thorne? I wonder if I might have a word?”

He had been about to speak to the barkeep. Instead, he slowly turned and looked me over.

His expression offered me nothing.

He exchanged a glance with the barkeep, then patted the stool beside him.

I took that as permission.

I decided not to open with an explanation of my investigation.

This was not, I confess, some carefully considered method of interrogation. I had intended to ask him quite plainly about the Gloam Cat.

But having spent the better part of the last week around the Inn, I had seen how its patrons reacted whenever I mentioned the Cats—superstition, discomfort, a sudden change of subject, and, on occasion, outright irritation.

I hesitated.

Mr. Thorne was different from the others. If the story was true, he had not merely heard of a Gloam Cat. He had encountered one.

I was not particularly eager to frighten off the only first-hand account I had managed to find.

So I asked about the road instead.

“How far have you come?” I asked.

Mr. Thorne glanced at me, perhaps surprised by the mundanity of the question.

“Far enough.”

This, I quickly discovered, was characteristic of Mr. Thorne’s conversational style.

Much of the remaining interaction, I can only equate to what it must feel like for a horse to have its teeth pulled out by those massive iron forceps.

Not that I would know.

I don’t have a horse.

“I’m sorry, Miss, but who are you?” Mr. Thorne asked, then.

It was the most words he had spoken in a single response, and I froze for it.

After a moment of recovery, I replied, “Rowan... Mr. Thorne.”

“Well, Miss Rowan, please do us both a service and get to the point. What do you want?”

Well.

I supposed then that he was tired of beating around the bush.

“I want to know what happened to you in The Wood.”

He raised a pair of bushy eyebrows. “Many things happen in The Wood.”

I maintained my composure.

The eyes inside my mind did not.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” he continued.

I drew a breath through my nose.

“The Cat, Mr. Thorne.”

For the first time since I had taken the seat beside him, his expression changed.

I had his attention.

“I want to know about the Gloam Cat.”

“You ought to leave that alone.”

“You are not the first person to offer me that advice this week, Mr. Thorne. If I intended to heed it, I wouldn’t be sitting here. Respectfully.”

Elias Thorne truly looked at me in that moment before shaking his head and grumbling into his mug.

“You Mythkeepers are all the same, you know.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“I didn’t take it as such.”

And I hadn’t. There is a reason many Mythkeepers prefer documenting the creatures of The Wood. Creatures rarely object to being observed.

Humans, I have found, are another matter entirely.

Mr. Thorne demonstrated this rather neatly when his gaze fell upon my open notebook.

“You going to write down what I tell you?”

“If you’ll permit it.”

“And if I don’t?”

I closed the notebook.

“Then I will listen.”

I had not considered that he might allow me to hear his story without allowing me to keep it. But it was the correct move. The edges of his eyes softened at my response.

What followed was the longest Mr. Thorne spoke to me that afternoon.

It is also, regrettably, the portion of our conversation for which I possess the fewest exact words, having closed my notebook and severed its connection to my quill.

I had given him my word that I would listen, and so I did.

What follows, therefore, is not a transcription of Mr. Thorne’s account, but my recollection of it, as faithfully as I am able to give it. I cannot promise the precision ordinarily afforded by my pen. Any errors in its telling are therefore my own.

Mr. Thorne’s account began six years earlier, in the latter weeks of autumn.

He was quite insistent upon one detail from the start:

He had not been lost.

Curious, as the report I had received from the patron at the Inn had said otherwise.

Though perhaps I should not have been surprised. Second-hand accounts have an unfortunate tendency to become first-hand memories when repeated often enough.

He recalled taking a well-paying job from a local producer, bringing batches of their goods into town to be sold at market.

Among the goods were several tins of barley sweets from a confectioner whose name I unfortunately cannot recall. Mr. Thorne remembered them rather distinctly, however, and remarked that he had eaten the same kind as a boy. In his explanation of this, it was the warmest his expression had been throughout the whole conversation.

He offered nothing further on the subject, and at the time, I found the detail rather inconsequential.

It was during his third or fourth journey that Mr. Thorne first encountered the Cat.

He did not follow it.

Indeed, according to Mr. Thorne, he hardly afforded the creature enough importance at the time to consider doing so, stating that he’d come across many creatures in The Wood, and the Cat was nothing special. He did, however, distinctly remember an eerie feeling, which he attributed simply to the Cat’s appearance.

As I recall his description, it was quite dark in form, with glowing eyes and some unnatural, smoke-like material shifting around it.

It sat some distance from the road among the roots of a rowan tree and watched him pass.

Or so he believed.

Several journeys later, Mr. Thorne found himself sharing a fire with a gentleman he had encountered twice before along the route. The two had developed what I gather to be the particular sort of friendship afforded to travelers: familiar enough to share a bottle, but not familiar enough to ask where the other went once the road divided.

He admitted that one evening, he had told his traveling companion of the Cat.

Mr. Thorne could not recall precisely how the subject arose. He told me that mead had been involved, which I suspect explains the deficiency.

He remembered the gentleman’s response considerably better.

Do not follow it.

Mr. Thorne remembered laughing at the warning. He had not followed the creature the first time, nor had he any intention of doing so should he encounter it again.

Then he encountered it again.

Mr. Thorne recalled that the day itself had been otherwise unremarkable. He had taken one of the barley sweets from his delivery sometime that morning and was still working it between his teeth when he encountered the second Cat.

This time, it sat directly upon the path.

Mr. Thorne remembered the warning and chose another route.

Several hours later, he encountered it again, again deciding on a different route.

This, I realized, was where the story I had heard at the Wayward Lantern had acquired its shape.

Elias Thorne had become lost in the Wood, with a Gloam Cat following close behind.

Except Mr. Thorne maintained that neither was true.

He knew where he was. There are many routes through The Wood, and a skilled tradesman knows them all. More importantly, he did not believe the Cat had been following him at all. He believed the three Cats he encountered to be separate creatures.

They had appeared three times, certainly. But on the final encounter, Mr. Thorne noticed something he had apparently failed to notice before.

The creature was not looking directly at him.

Its head was tilted slightly, its gaze fixed somewhere along the road behind him. Curious, Mr. Thorne shifted toward the edge of the path.

The Cat’s eyes did not follow.

He looked behind him to see what had held its attention.

There was nothing there.

I confess, I did not know what to make of this.

Yet it was not Mr. Thorne’s final encounter that ultimately provided my next lead. It was a detail he mentioned in passing about the gentleman with whom he had shared the campfire.

The gentleman had seen a Gloam Cat before.

When he was a child.

And this gentleman, quite thankfully, was measurably easier to find.