The human mind will twist language into endless knots to obscure its atrocities, but mathematical figures do not lie. When a ledger strips away every moral pretense, what remains etched in the dried ink is the bare, skeletal frame of a brutal truth.
Mark walked out of The Black Ash tavern into a suffocating, absolute silence.
Silas remained slumped over the wooden counter, face buried in his hands, not daring to speak or raise his eyes to follow him for even a second. The old farmers lined around the room backed away to either side, clearing a narrow path as though Mark were carrying a lethal pathogen.
Stepping onto the snow-covered incline leading back toward the limestone mountain, Mark forced his gait to stay even, steady. Relying on his psychiatric background, he immediately activated his behavioral analysis training to dissect Silas’s sudden breakdown: a textbook case of lapsus linguae—a spontaneous slip of the subconscious tongue. When psychological defenses are relaxed by chemical stimulants, the truth a person or community works so desperately to bury will claw its way out through an overlooked detail.
He decided he would not venture down to the subterranean kitchen beneath the floorboards this afternoon. The bone fragment sitting in its plastic pouch and the sweet, greasy reek of congealed lard still hovered uncomfortably at the edge of his mind. Instead, he needed written evidence—the physical records Great-Grandfather Kaelen had left behind on the upper floor.
The two-story cabin emerged against the desolate gray dusk. Devoid of spring warmth, the muted twilight filtered through clouded windowpanes streaked with snowmelt, casting dull light over the heavy dust coating the floorboards.
Perched atop the sharp pitch of the roof, the flock of black crows perched motionless, dozens of icy, bead-like eyes tracking Mark’s every step as he crossed the porch.
In addition to the bedroom, the second floor housed a small chamber set deep at the end of the hallway—the space Great-Grandfather Kaelen had once used as a study and herbal dispensary.
Inside, the air was bone-dry and harsh with the bitter scent of decaying herbs. A cabriole-legged oak desk sat before a narrow window frame, flanked by rotted bookshelves covering the walls, stacked high with glass jars of dried roots and dozens of Arak-Na wooden masks carved with grotesque, twisted visages.
Mark approached the desk and began pulling open the dust-caked drawers.
At the very bottom drawer, an antique brass lock, heavy with rust, sealed the compartment shut. Without hesitation, Mark pulled a metal utility knife from his pocket, wedging the blade deep into the seam of the wooden frame and leveraging his weight against it.
Snap.
The dry-rotted wood gave way. Hidden within the drawer lay a box made of oiled, dark leather, entirely free of dust.
Mark lifted the leather box out and set it on the desktop. Unlatching the lid revealed several rolled parchment scrolls and a thick journal bound in sheepskin, its edges frayed and curled from generations of handling.
He ran a fingertip lightly across the opening page.
A bizarre sensation coursed up his finger: the parchment was ice-cold, faintly slick, and held a subtle sheen, as though every leaf in the ledger had been bathed in a coating of animal oil over the centuries to ward off rot and mildew.
The handwriting evolved across sections. The original Kaelen had kept his logs in an archaic English script interspersed with crude, geometric Arak-Na sigils—the byproduct of learning to write from a British missionary in the early eighteenth century. The subsequent pages shifted into the sharp, slanted penmanship of the generations that followed.
Mark flipped to the section labeled “Debits & Credits — Winter 1758–1760.”
As a modern intellectual, he pushed aside all emotional static to parse the ledger through the clinical lens of a financial auditor. Drawing a blank sheet of paper and pulling a marker from his breast pocket, he began drafting columns for logical cross-referencing.
The pace of his deduction quickened, hammering inside his head like a relentless algorithm.
First contradiction: Throughout the three years spanning 1758 to 1760—the peak of the Starvation Winter when British forces held the valley under siege—the Kaelen family’s "Food Procurement" column was completely empty. Not a single pound of barley. No wheat. No dried meats or rendered fats purchased from the nomadic traders beyond the ridge.
Second contradiction: Despite zero food purchases, the "Expenditures" column logged recurring purchases every two to three weeks for massive quantities of exceedingly strange supplies:
– Pure Salt: Measured in the hundreds of sacks.
– Beeswax: Dozens of dense yellow blocks.
– Strong Spirits: High-proof medical alcohol.
– Ice Blocks: Cut and hauled continuously from the frozen lake at the peak.
Mark’s hand stalled. His knuckles turned white around the marker.
Preservation. All of these items—pure salt, beeswax, high-proof spirits, and ice blocks—served a single, specialized purpose: preserving frozen flesh and preventing decomposition.
But the fatal question remained: What were they preserving?
When the entire valley lacked a single ear of corn or game animal, and the Arak-Na villagers were eating tree bark just to stave off death... what were the Kaelens using hundreds of sacks of pure salt and blocks of ice to preserve inside their subterranean kitchen?
Mark scratched numbers onto the paper in rapid succession, recalculating the average salt consumption against tissue mass again and again. His internal voice shrieked with hypotheses, yet his hands remained cold, logging the data like a machine.
He turned to the next page, casting his flashlight beam over the columns detailing the origin of the supplies.
Another anomaly surfaced: under "Salt Source," Kaelen had not written the name of any merchant or neighboring settlement. Instead, an archaic English phrase was repeated in bitter black ink:
“Their wagons.”
“Supplies... taken from their wagons...” Mark whispered to himself.
He scanned down to the "Inventory Received" column. Unlike standard provisions logged in "Pounds" or "Sacks," the inventory records during the winter of 1758 contained no commodity names whatsoever.
It recorded only stark, whole numbers:
– Nov 1758: Stocked: 8 (First fog encounter)
– Jan 1759: Stocked: 12 (Northern patrol unit)
– Mar 1759: Stocked: 12 (Southern patrol unit)
A total number was circled at the bottom of the page: 32. Beside the figure was a brief annotation in Arak-Na glyphs: “4 parties.”
Mark couldn't make sense of it. What did the number 32 represent? 32 sacks of salt? 32 ceramic jars? Or 32 units of raw material?
He pulled out his phone, hit record on his voice memo app, and spoke in a deliberate, monotone cadence: "Case note, Day Two. Financial ledger from 1758–1760 discovered. Anomaly recorded in pure salt and beeswax procurement figures. Intake logs record a total count of 32, divided across four entries. Nature of the intake goods remains unverified."
Thud... Thud... Thud...
A sudden gust of mountain wind slammed against the study’s wooden shutter, rattling the frame in rapid, violent thumps—like a pair of frantic hands beating against the glass from the outside.
Startled, Mark killed the recording. The room plunged back into heavy, oppressive quiet.
Night settled swiftly over the valley of Arak-Val.
Mark brewed a cup of instant coffee using water heated on his portable gas stove. Sitting alone at the desk, the bitter brew did nothing to dispel the deep, creeping cold invading his bones from the inside out.
He stared intently at the oiled, sheepskin-bound ledger open before him.
A cascade of fragmented childhood memories suddenly clicked into alignment with these financial entries:
– Thomas’s compulsion in New York, wiping every metal spoon three times with surgical alcohol...
– The thick beeswax seals pressed tight over hundreds of ceramic jars in the subterranean cellar...
– The sweet, greasy stench embedded deep within every timber of the cabin...
Mark held his right hand up to the dim glow of the oil lamp.
Suddenly, he noticed something strange: his hand was no longer shaking. The depersonalization that had tormented him for the past six months in Manhattan had vanished entirely. Standing inside Great-Grandfather Kaelen’s cabin, confronted by these pages steeped in the reek of old oil, Mark felt sharper, more present than he ever had before.
That clarity brought no comfort. It was the brutal, razor-sharp lucidity of a man stepping off the ledge into a hereditary nightmare.
Mark picked up the ledger and turned to the final page of the winter of 1759.
At the bottom margin of the parchment, beneath the calculations for consumed salt and beeswax, a single line of handwritten text was carved deep into the grain of the paper in dark, bitter ink—written in an aged, unyielding hand that bore a primal coldness:
“Salt supply must be doubled this month. Their meat is far too watery.”
Mark finished reading the line.
The world around him seemed to freeze solid. The cup of coffee in his hand had long since gone cold. He sat motionless, like a stone statue in the dark room, his hollow gaze locked onto those final two words inked cleanly across the ancient page:
Their meat.
