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The titles say: Part 7 - I Don't Exist But I Do Love

The camera watches Jacob open a spiral notebook, flip a few pages. Most of them are nothing but entries crossed out with large X's, "3 1/2 lbs, straight, yellow tint," "3 lbs, rough bottom three points," "3/4 lbs, pecos diamond, pale red."

"We convened back at the office with what was found in Shadwell." Jacob's voice says, pages still turning. "The samples I had analyzed by a friend at the Westminster College geology lab. I expected it to be a while, but he got back with results the same day. Quartz crystal. Completely ordinary, except for the black color, which isn't even unheard of."

"Most of the notebook, the first part, proved to all be listings of different samples of quartz. Presumably that was what he was keeping in the storage bin. And presumably he was doing something specific with them, or trying to, because as each proved unacceptable he crossed it out."

"It's definitely Leo's handwriting," pronounces the Fox. "I coached him through enough homework to know it anywhere."

"Man. Just imagining him fiddling every day with these crystals, in that dingy apartment, alone..." Cameron rubs his muzzle with one paw. "Well, there are things I wish it didn't remind me of."

"The list ends," Jacob returns, "with the single entry that isn't crossed out." The camera shows it, circled, as he reads, "Six ¾ lbs, single chunk, clear."

"And then the next page is different. It looks like I'm reading half of a conversation."

The camera cuts in close to the page as Jacob reads, cutting to each new line, sometimes each new word as he says it:

"I can always hear you.

What you want me to be.

If you want me to be.

If you want me to be.

I want you. I want to be with you and in you and around you and within you and have you and fill you and hold you and (can't hear what it's saying, just noise till it trails off)

Would never hurt you. I love you.

I am not. It begot me but I am yours.

I love you.

Because I love you.

Don't need to understand.

You wanted me to love you. I love you.

NO (real loud hurt my ears)

Not much time with you. Want more time with you.

World's too thin here. Can't find the hum.

You gave me enough hum to see you.

Need better ground.

Come back to Echo. Please. It's so easy to be there.

Plenty of hum in the ground.

I can be all the time.

I'll be with you all the time.

Leo please. Please just come back. I miss you so much. Every day.

I'll stop wandering. I'll protect you. I'll get rid of distractions.

Just please come back.

I love you."

"On the bottom of the last page," Jacob looks up from the notebook, "there's a note: 'The crystal broke. Pieces were steaming. It's gone.'"

"It sounds like," the raccoon's thick brows lower, "he was talking to that tulpa-thing? Never mind how, why would he do that?"

"Oh [bleep]ing hell wolfboy, no!" The gila buries his face in his hands, takes a deep breath. "Don't [bleep]ing listen to that thing! [bleep], please, tell me he's not stupid-horny enough to go crawling back to [bleep]ing Echo for some shadow parasite [bleep] just cause it happens to look like [bleep]!"

"If that's where he's been all this time you'll never catch me giving a shit about him again, I'm [bleep]ing done, I swear."

"Ok, I know I'm not an expert," the ram bites his lip, "but that sounds like a real toxic relationship."

"What I wanna know," Micha says "is if he's having this conversation, why bother to write it down?"

"I can see why he'd write it out." Cameron muses, "In the moment, when you're first trying some other mode of consciousness, it can all seem perfectly normal. It maybe doesn't occur to you that something weird is happening, something that might be important to remember later. You don't start to question it till the moment starts to pass. I can absolutely see him jotting it down, especially if he already had the notebook and pen, so he'd have something to prove to himself, yeah, this really happened. It wasn't a dream. You can't dismiss it."

"But if I'd known what I was gonna step on in there," the coyote frowns, "I would've worn boots."

"It's fairly easy to speculate what he was doing." Jacob slides the notebook into a file folder. "He learns the presence of quartz is a factor, so he introduces quartz until he finds some that works. From the exchange he apparently had, there's a certain critical mass that's necessary for these kinds of entities to manifest or emerge from non-ordinary reality. It almost sounds like it was saying in Echo there's enough that it could manifest permanently, which presumably it had been doing there. But this sample seems to have been, well, burned out? Used up?"

"Presumably the discoloration on the wall was the result of the crack opening. Or closing. Some part of the process."

"And yes, I am making a lot of assumptions." Jacob raises his eyebrows. "As soon as you can find me another person haunted by a psychically parasitic doppelganger of their estranged lover, willing to try and reproduce the exercise under controlled conditions, I'll be first in line to test them."

"The only other thing in the notebook is a list of locations. Jacob looks them up, they're all known quartz deposits." Micha says. "Only one of them isn't crossed off: Melakwa Lake. So we've got a destination again."

"Melakwa lake," Devon explains, "turns out to be up in the mountains east of Seattle. Ski country, in the winter, but the trail is in a pocket of the mountains, you hike under the interstate and then up a creekbed, you can't drive there."

"I looked it up on the drive." Cam chimes in, "It's a notable source of amethyst, for hobbyists. One part of the trail is known as 'Rockhound Gulch.' So there is quartz there."

"It was a real pretty hike, actually." Devon smiles.

"First thing I tried," Micha says, "Before we even got there, was to call the impound lots, give them Leo's license plate number, see if they had seen his truck. They wouldn't talk to me. What the hell, it doesn't always work."

"But when we get to the top of the trail, we have better luck, which we damn well deserved because that walk was a hard slog. Which is good: you want clues to be somewhere it's hard to get to so nobody comes along and [bleep]s them up."

"The end of the trail is this lake." Cameron says. "Devon had to haul me up the last bit, but not because I was out of shape! Well, not only. I was starting to get something, something weird, like... not a presence, but like the feeling when, after you've gotten hurt, and you've healed, there's that soreness. That kinda spongy feeling, where the place you were hurt is still tender. That's all around, like the whole landscape is just... complaining. Made me feel unsteady on my feet."

Micha pulls himself to his full height on the couch. "It doesn't take long to find some clues. A discarded sleeping bag. I can't exactly compare it to the faded spot on his mattress in Shadwell, but it looks close enough. There's a couple sheets of soft plastic packing foam, like you use to wrap stuff in to mail it."

"There's a shirt. The same kind we found a few of in the laundry hamper."

"Now, at this point I'm thinking the worst. A guy standing on the edge of a lake going 'I don't need my sleeping bag or shirt anymore' isn't a story that looks like it's going anywhere good. But then Cam points something out."

"On some of the rocks right at the water's edge," Cameron says, "there's this weird black crust. You know when you're making a grilled cheese sandwich, or a quesadilla, and some of the melted cheese leaks out and sits on the bottom of the pan? It bubbles and melts into that kinda hard crust? Imagine that, but made of rock." The camera shows a picture. A black substance has dripped down the sides of several stones, like tar or candle wax. Embedded in it are some kind of string and some twisted, partially melted metal. "It's maybe darker than the shards from the apartment, but it's the same color. So I think I know what he tried to do here."

"But that's all we find." Micha leans forward, glares at a point a thousand yards through the camera. "That's all that's left. No clues about the place to try. No further addresses to check out. Leo Alvarez came here, I'm sure of it, but where he went from here I have no idea."

"I talk with Jacob about tipping off somebody, forest rangers maybe? To check the bottom of the lake. But he wants to get in touch with the clients first. See what they want to do."

"While he's doing that," the camera gets close to the bat's face. "A package arrives."

The screen goes dark. First there is a confusion of light and darkness as the camera struggles to adjust, and the sound of paws scrabbling against the mic as it's set into position. Then with a clunk it resolves. Rocky lakeshore, smooth water, steep gravel hills with dense low pines hugging them all the way down to the water's edge, and behind them snowy peaks painted gold by the afternoon sun.

Squatting on his haunches in front of the camera, is a red wolf. Haggard, fur unkempt, doesn't look like he's slept well in years. He stares deep into the camera, as if trying to look through it and confirm that someone is watching the recording. "Alright. Enough waiting, yeah? Let's give this a try." He looks up, across the water's surface. "Beautiful place for it. Wish I coulda seen it with you, otter. But! Either this works, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then I guess nobody's ever gonna watch this, and you can all quit worrying, forget about me, and go live your lives. If it does," he closes his eyes, heaves a deep breath. "Then it'll all have been worth it. And I'll see you soon."

The wolf sets down a canvas backpack, pulls out something wrapped in soft polyfoam packing sheets that look uncannily like the snowpack above, held together with bungee cords. He tosses aside the wrapping, reveals a massive chunk of faintly orange quartz. Sandstone chunks adhere to the base.

He takes a seat by the water, with the crystal between his legs. The camera doesn't have a good angle, but after he lays his hands on it, wraps them around it several times, he seems to begin stroking it, suggestively. His lips are moving, but the mic picks up only the sound of wind in the trees and water over the rocks. Time passes, the snow covered peaks turn from gold to crimson, at some point he tosses aside his shirt.

And the lake blisters, peels, and finally cracks away.

It looks as if the world were painted on a flat surface, and just above where the water meets the shore, that surface has had a hole punched through it, as if with a spike driven into bedrock by a sledgehammer. The light coming through the cracks around it is wrong, in a way that can't be put into words.

Leo doesn't move.

A figure rises out of the hole, dripping. The audio distorts into static and feedback wine as it moves toward the wolf. It could, given generous enough interpretation, be called an otter, though it's more as if some tarry pliant substance had been molded into a rough approximation of an otter. It can't seem to manage to have a face.

Leo doesn't start back, doesn't appear shocked. He raises welcoming hands, bare arms, smiles warmly at it.

As he rises to his feet and backs, cautiously, evenly, a step or two away from the shore and the crystal resting there.

The thing leans toward him, unfolding long, long arms to wrap around the smiling wolf.

Then the static whine sharpens and amplifies painfully. It looks like the thing has tripped. But as it pulls itself upright on hands that have turned to claws, the camera gets its first clear look. Its legs are gone. It's emerging, now, like a bubble being blown, from the quartz. There's some kind of rope or string wrapped around the smooth rock, and the faint glint of metal attached to that, possibly in the shape of a fishhook or a cross.

It's only visible a moment, then it vanishes behind Leo's pads and swinging backpack as he grabs the camera.

There's a few frames of the thing, claws dragging through the gravel as it tries to drag itself from the boiling surface of the quartz. It turns a baleful, enraged, and furiously heartbroken snarl toward the camera, which is now between it and the lake.

And then there's a strange vertigo. As if the camera, and the wolf presumably holding it, are suddenly weightless. The lake, the trees, mountains, and evening sky beyond are all on the other side of a crack-edged hole in the air, irising smaller like the end of an old cartoon as the camera falls away from it. For a moment there is an infinity of stars in every direction, and the silhouette of a wolf's awestruck face.

But only for a moment. Static and distortion devour the image, it freezes, and then there is only a blank screen.