Turns out the company owner wants to try and drag the company closure to the end of the year before letting it be wrapped up. To benefit staff? To make people's lives better? Lol, no. It's because his biggest rival has gone bust and he doesn't want it to look like he goes bust straight after.

Truly, spite is the strongest force in the universe. That and me having to deal with him on what's meant to be a national holiday over here in the UK. I'm really tempted to just resign at this point, but it may also be hat he wants since if I quit I'm just out, whereas if the company closes then I'm owed redundancy pay.

Cover Art: Kirire

Chapter 114

There was a disturbing lack of panic among the campers. No one noticed the absence of the camp manager. It was still early, around seven, and the two of them had turned the camp upside down looking for her. Come the morning sun, they finally took the plunge and started to track outside the camp perimeter.

If she'd been abducted and taken by the anomaly, she was quite possibly dead now – and that might be the best she could hope for. There were worse fates.

"I'll check around the main entrance," said Jaune. "You loop to the back by the forest. I'll trust your instincts but radio in before you engage anything."

"Have we alerted the camp owners yet?" she asked.

"No. I don't want to panic them when she might just be going for a walk."

A walk in the middle of the night outside the safety of the camp? They both knew how unlikely that was but Blake nodded and went on her way, skirting the exterior fence toward the back of the forested area. The forest looked less intimidating in the daylight, and yet Grimm could sometimes hide easier in the day than the night due to their glowing red eyes. Blake kept her guard up and Gambol Shroud drawn, and walked slowly between the trees, scanning the ground for tracks.

It wasn't to be. Her scroll went off after less than ten minutes. Jaune's voice was flat.

"I've found her."

Blake knew it wouldn't be good from the way he said it but she still wasn't entirely prepared for the sheer quantity of blood scattered across the grass. The woman had been well and truly mauled, with her left arm torn off at the shoulder and her eyes glazed over in shock. It would have been quick, the blood loss, and that was the only good thing to be said about it.

Quick did not mean peaceful.

"Tooth marks all over her, not to mention she way she's been thrown around," said Jaune, not bothering to kneel or touch her. "The body was left and not eaten. This has all the hallmarks of a Grimm attack."

"Little wonder if she came outside in the night," Blake whispered. "But why would she? Did the anomaly draw her out?"

Jaune stepped past her to a gym bag laid on the ground. It was partially unzipped, with white cloth spooling out along with a few other odd things. He picked around inside it, speaking as he ran his hands over each item.

"A white shawl, a cape, a mask, superglue and some fairy lights." He let the string of little lights drape to the floor. "Quite the interesting mix."

"But why?"

"I have my suspicions." Jaune took the superglue and unscrewed the cap, then poured some out onto the grass. It turned shiny and sticky. Jaune even went so far as to touch it with his glove and stretch out a rubbery strand. "Look familiar?"

"The ectoplasm…" It dawned on her then. The manager spotting the ghost before she could and it being gone before she could look. The ectoplasm on the ground, the fact the manager had found it first, and how everything had lined up so conveniently. "It was fake, wasn't it? Everything."

"Probably." Jaune let the superglue splat onto the grass. "Certainly, this bit was fake, and possibly the creeper looking in through the window as well. The camp must have been doing poorly since the interest from ghost hunters dried up. When she found out you were here with your online following, she must have seen an opportunity to capture the limelight again. All she needed was for us to record and post some incredible evidence online and the ghost hunters and tourists would come pouring back in."

Hence the fairy lights, mask and cape – she must have been planning to string them up somewhere and then have Blake spot them later fluttering in the distance. A sighting of the ghost with eerie lights in the forest. Except that something else had found her first. The Grimm.

"Did we cause this by masquerading as influencers…?"

"No." Jaune shook his head. "If the camp was failing and she was this desperate then she'd have pulled some crazy plan. We still have the murder from before. It could have been committed by her…"

"That's a leap, Jaune. Yes, she was reckless enough to risk her own life for success but we can't assume she's a killer for the same reason."

"Exactly. Which means there's potentially still something out here. That or the killer was just one of the guests. Either way, we can't ignore the possibility of an anomaly being out here just because this sighting turned out to be false."

He had a point. Regrettably. "Then we're staying another night? What about her?"

Blake indicated the body.

"If we report this then the police will come and there'll be a panic. That would scare the anomaly away. I'll report this privately to Saphron and she'll deal with the site owners without alerting the authorities. It'll buy us a single day. You and I will have to masquerade as interim camp managers until then. Keep the place running."

Blake grimaced. "Sounds great. And the body? Do we bury it…?"

"It'd be a kindness." Jaune sighed and turned away. "I'll go check the camp building for a shovel."

/-/

It was around eight when they buried the woman and said some quiet words, an apology from Blake for not being there and a quiet prayer from Jaune for the afterlife. When she'd asked, he admitted he wasn't religious but that he also had no evidence there wouldn't be some anomaly that constituted an afterlife. It was oddly hopeful, though he quickly ruined that by saying there was just as much chance there was an anomaly which devoured and tortured their souls as well.

Rushing back to camp, Blake expected a panic – and there was one.

But only because breakfast wasn't available.

It was downright insulting that the camp guests didn't question her and Jaune introducing themselves as new camp managers due to the other being sick, especially since some of them must have seem them as guests the day before. The people just shrugged and accepted whatever nonsense would see them fed.

So, Blake and Jaune sprinted around a decently sized kitchen fumbling pastries into ovens and food out of fridges and freezers. While Blake rushed to serve, Jaune wielded a frying pan in one hand loaded with bacon and a wire basket with the other to deep fry hashbrowns. An industrial toaster beeped aggressively at them that it was being left on too long, and a child began crying outside because the soda machine was out of grape and Blake hadn't fixed it in the ten nanoseconds since its mother asked her to.

Give me a murderous anomaly! I beg you!

Anomalies she could fight (sometimes) and even the ones that couldn't be fought at least could be run away from. Blake picked up plates, faced complaints, pushed highchairs into place for babies, and restrained her fury as a woman pushed the food back and said the bacon wasn't cooked enough.

"What does she mean!?" Jaune cried when she told him. He looked ready to kill. "It's brown! Any more than this and it'll be burnt to a crisp!"

"She wants it crispy."

"I'll crisp her!" he threatened. "I'll serve her ash!"

A fresh plate ready and delivered by Blake, and the people finally started to go about their day – going to fish or swim or whatever it was they were here for. Blake carried the last stack of plates into the kitchen and dumped them into the sink. There was a sad crack as the ones on the bottom shattered under the weight but she couldn't find it in herself to care.

To hell with them.

"I want this anomaly found before lunch!" she hissed.

"It's ten already," Jaune replied, slouched back on a metal cooking bench and taking a break. "This took two hours and now there's only two more before they come back looking for more. How do people do this for a living? For terrible pay too!"

"Maybe they're the anomalies," Blake said. "And they keep smiling as well."

"Freaks," he agreed. "Damn it. One of us is going to have to stay here and field complaints from people while the other investigates the forest."

"I have aura."

"I have… I…" Jaune sighed. "Damn it."

Score. Blake cheered tiredly. A day roaming a forest filled with monsters was preferable to having to deal with entitled guests asking her to unclog toilets and fix common sense issues. Blake slapped a hand on Jaune's back.

"Good luck. I'll let you know what I find."

/-/

A fat lot of nothing turned out to be the sum total of Blake's day spent combing the forest – which was an entirely probably conclusion given a major possibility was that there wasn't an anomaly here at all. That the first murder had either been the manager or another guest, and that there'd never been anything here in the first place.

Jaune reported no unusual sightings during the day, but plenty of stupid requests, including a child sick after eating suspect berries that he'd had to dose with medicine, and a snake in a cabin which turned out to be an errant shoelace under one of the beds made larger and scarier via a child's imagination.

"About the only thing I can think of is an aura that makes camp managers hate guests," he joked, "but other than that I've no concrete evidence. You?"

"I saw Grimm tracks and killed two small Beowolves but nothing unusual." The Grimm were, of course, quite common and typical for this area, so nothing to be alarmed by. "Would have been more suspicious if I hadn't run into any. A least then I could say something got to them before I did. Were you able to find anything in her belongings?"

Jaune shook his head. "Sadly, she wasn't conscientious enough to leave a nice written diary of her every move, and when Coda broke into the computer it was just regular stuff. There were a lot of searches on you but looking back I also found evidence of her bosses accusing her of being at fault for dwindling guest numbers."

Blake grimaced. It would be just like unscrupulous employers to blame the person here for any wrong, and then pressure them into fixing it. The manager must have been so stressed she jumped at this reckless chance. Sadly, pressuring staff was not illegal and there'd never be any fallout for this. Her bosses would just shake their heads and wonder why she'd been so reckless, maybe even saying she handled the stress poorly and should have quit her job if it was so difficult.

"How long are we going to do this for?" she asked.

"Only tonight. If there's no indication of an anomaly then we'll call it off. I expect the place will be closed down for a while once the owners find out about the death anyway. We'll split up tonight. You stay in the lodge and I'll work from the main building here."

"Great! I'll just have a shower and—"

Jaune caught her by her wrist.

"Where do you think you're going? It's dinner time in one hour." The words had her ears wilting. "You're in the kitchen with me."

/-/

Blake was grateful for the warm shower after a gruelling mealtime. Breakfast had been easier on account of limited meal options, but they'd had to cook all sorts for dinner. Cooking was one of those things she'd never really learned. Kali would have taught her, but she'd gone and run away from her family to join the White Fang before her mom could, and they hadn't exactly had a lot of good food in the group. It was mostly meals cooked over a fire.

Microwave meals and sticking something in the oven for a set time was about the extent of Blake's culinary skills, and Jaune wasn't much better. They'd just about managed steak, though their sauce was apparently garbage and one man had criticised them for overcooking his, and pasta had been easy enough. The more complicated meals had all but broken them, especially since the guests kept sending them back if - or when, more realistically – they weren't good enough. They'd both been stuck working on them from online videos, fumbling along like a pair of overdressed and overpaid idiots.

"I'll never leave a restaurant without tipping again," she said to herself, throwing on a fresh change of clothes and padding to the lodge's table. There, the laptop was open showing various cameras. Blake swept her wet hair back, checked to make sure she was decent, and then opened a live chat to Jaune. A tiny video showed he was downing coffee to keep himself awake.

"All looks good on my end," he said. "I have a few cameras here that the manager set up. Not many, though. Just some wide shots of the camp, the entrance, and along the fence."

"That's good, then. We didn't put cameras on the fences."

"Hmmm." He took a drink. "I'll be able to see if anything moves onto the camp or leaves. If anything does."

"You think there isn't one, then? Come to think of it, was this your theory from the start?"

"Yes. I caught on when the manager asked too many questions about you and your following. It was obvious she was more interested in that than she was afraid of any ghost, even when it had potentially killed someone before. Who cares more about a guest's fame than their own life?"

It was a good point. Looking back, the clues had been there.

"I didn't expect her to fake it, though. Not and risk her life. I thought we'd end up catching her skulking around in a costume cartoon style and unmask her. She should have known better than anyone here the risks of leaving the camp."

Blake hummed and poured herself some thermos coffee as well. Like Jaune, she'd also seen those cartoons involving teens capturing fake ghosts – Grimmy Doo, she recalled. It even had a domesticated Grimm of all things. It would have been a far easier conclusion had they caught the manager in costume and solved the case that way.

They sat and chatted quietly as the hours ticked by. Intense focus was all well and good, but the conversation kept them awake, and eight hours spent in silence would feel like torture otherwise. Blake flicked between the various cameras she'd set up, many of them pointed at individual lodges, and Jaune did the same in the top right corner of her screen.

Several hours ticked by with nothing more than the occasional bat or insect flitting in front of the cameras and setting off the motion detectors. Blake refilled her coffee twice over. Jaune had given up and moved a portable kettle beside his borrowed keyboard.

And then Jaune's camera glitched and flicked off.

So did several lights in her cameras, the lights around camp. Blake's cameras stayed on thanks to batteries but the power everywhere else went off. Instantly, she had her scroll out. Jaune answered straight away.

"I'm fine," he said. "Looks like a power cut. I'm barricading the door. Come here immediately."

Anyone else would have asked why the extreme reaction but Blake would have been angrier if Jaune had played it off and said he was going to investigate on his own and without aura. The fact he could read the danger kept her calm as she pulled on her shoes and stepped out into the campground. Though the lights had gone off, little else had changed and no one woke up from it. Blake jogged quickly across the grass, her eyes picking out every little detail in the gloom.

The main building door was unlocked since it was a common area for restrooms and supplies. Blake peeked inside and crept in once she saw it was clear. The reception area led to the café on the left and a small waiting area with seats and tables on the right. Ahead were a set of stairs which she ascended to where the manager's office lay. Pressing flat with her back to it so as not to expose herself to attack, Blake rapped her fist on the door. "It's me."

"What's in Menagerie?" asked Jaune.

"A whole lot of a mess you and I don't want anyone to know about."

Jaune unlocked the door and stepped out. It was as good as a password. "See anything on the way here?"

"No. Nothing."

"It could be a normal thing. A place like this will run on a generator rather than a power grid, and it might just have been running out of dust. The manager might even have intended to refill it tonight and we didn't know."

"Could be," she agreed, not feeling all that confident on the fact. "Let's go check."

The power units were outside the main building inside a metal shed for which Jaune found the padlock unlocked and set to 1-1-1-1. It was hard to know if it had been cracked or if the manager had never bothered to lock it properly with that combination. Jaune opened the door and slipped in, turning on the scroll on his torch. Blake followed.

Inside, numerous circuit breakers on a wall were flicked and red, currently showing no power, while a large dust-powered generator stood at the base. To her surprise, it was turned off and out of dust.

"Huh." Even Jaune was surprised. "Maybe it was just bad luck on our parts. There's some dust here. I'll fill it up."

It took only a minute or so to refill it, and a few tugs of the ignition had it rumbling to life. The switches all turned green and a light came on above their heads with a tinny clicking sound. Outside, more lights flickered on as the power returned.

CLANG!

The door banged shut behind them, making Blake jump. What she assumed was the wind quickly turned to disbelief as she heard something latch over metal and then rotate with further, quieter clicking sounds. The padlock being attached and the combination scrambled. Blake's hand hit the doorhandle and rattled it but the door held still.

But it was just flimsy metal meant to keep kids and random people out. Blake drew her gun and aimed at where the padlock probably was, ready to keep shooting until it was a hunk of twisted and seared metal.

Jaune placed a hand on hers to stop her. "Wake everyone with gunshots and it'll cause a panic we'll never get under control," he said. "Let me."

He peeled off his glove and pressed his bare, molten hand to the metal. It took time for it to heat and turn a ruddy orange, but once it did, he was able to push his fingers through it and carve out a circular hole. Rather than melt the padlock, he pulled the bottom inside, set it back to 1-1-1-1 and clicked it open.

The perpetrator was long gone by that point.

"There's a camera facing this," Jaune said, pointing to it. "Let's check the footage rather than chase someone or something into the night."

It was a better plan than hers. They rushed back to the building's entrance and Blake took a moment to scan the area before following Jaune in. With the lights back on, she could see for a good distance. Nothing. The camp was as still as it always had been. So was the manager's old room. The computer was still running and undamaged, and she'd have expected it to be destroyed if this were someone looking to hide the evidence.

Then again, would an anomaly know how a padlock works? It had to be a person…

Blake stood behind Jaune as he sat and accessed the cameras, scrolling their recordings back until there was a long black section of nothing where the power had cut and the recording had stopped.

Pushing on from there, it came back to life with a flickering snap, the grainy black and white footage recording once more. In it, the door was open and they were inside, having just turned the power back on. That was when a figure – human – rushed in from below the camera, from the direction they would have come from, and slammed the door shut with their body. With feverish and almost panicked speed, the figure fumbled the lock into place and staggered back as if they'd just escaped death at her and Jaune's hands. As if they were the ones in danger and Jaune and Blake were the aggressors.

The person hadn't faced the camera yet, but they turned to do so for a moment, preparing to leave, and Jaune hit the pause button to freeze it on that frame.

"No way!" Blake hissed.

It was the manager.

"That's her," Jaune said, equally surprised. "No doubting it. Kathleen Crystal."

"But she's dead and buried!"

"Is she…?"

Blake and Jaune stared hard at one another.

Thirty minutes later, Jaune ran a hand over his sweaty brow and stabbed the shovel down into the dirt. Unearthing a grave they had dug not hours before was not a pleasant task, but it had been whole and undisturbed at the time. The body hadn't even had time to decompose – and there was still a body.

"Okay," he said, panting. "Yes, she's still dead and buried. Not a zombie situation. That's a relief."

"Does she have a twin?"

"No living family from what I read. Her emails didn't have any friends she really talked to either." Jaune began shovelling dirt back over her to give her some modicum of peace. "So, we have our anomaly. Either a body snatcher, shapeshifter, temporal anomaly or something along those lines. Echoes of her life, I don't know."

"A ghost?"

"Don't say ghost. That'll have you making assumptions based on what ghosts are and how they work in fiction. And remember, they're not real."

"This thing is real."

"But it's not a ghost. This woman is dead, rest her soul, and this is something taking her shape or making us see her."

"What do we do, then?"

"First things first, let's get all these campers out the way. I'm calling the authorities and reporting the death. Once they're out the way, we'll turn this place upside down to find the anomaly. It could be an object, something in the camp itself."

Jaune made the call while Blake evened out the grave they'd left behind. It was Saphron he reached out to, asking her to make sure the people sent would close the camp down and not hang around to ask too many questions. Given this was a job from her, the least she could do was handle the admin. Plus, she was in contact with the owners.

"I'll see it done," she said, on speaker so Blake could hear. "But don't hesitate to destroy the entire camp if you must. It can be rebuilt."

"We'll keep that as a last resort. Heading back now. How long will it take the authorities to arrive?"

"Around two hours. Keep the guests in the camp until then. Distract them if you can."

That shouldn't be too hard, what with the lot of them probably expecting breakfast around this time. Blake sighed at the thought of yet another morning cooking for all those people, but it would be the last time. That made it a little easier.

The last thing either of them expected was to arrive back to see the guests sat at tables eating and chatting.

Had they gotten tired and fed themselves?

Pushing into the kitchen painted a different picture. The manager, Kathleen Crystal, looked up from where she was working and smiled tiredly their way. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'll be with you in a moment. Just take a seat."

Blake's hand fell to her weapon.

Jaune's caught her wrist. "We'll wait by the bar," he said. "Thank you."

Outside, she drew close. "Jaune—"

"Play it cool," he whispered. "Two hours and every guest at the park will be evacuated, and then we get to the bottom of this. It's possible – though looking very unlikely – that the dead body outside was the anomaly and she's real."

"Then where the hell has she been!?"

"I said possible. Not likely. We'll corner it once the guests are out the way."

The two of them plastered friendly smiles onto their faces when the dead woman came out to take their order. Blake assured the woman she'd be making lots of videos today about the ghost, and the anomaly even managed to sound as annoying and pressing as the manager had. It was a convincing disguise, if it was a disguise at all, and it was all Blake could do to keep from freaking out when the woman kept chatting with her.

It felt so real but that couldn't be the case.

Because if this person was real, who the hell had they buried in the forest?

Next Chapter: 2nd September

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