Chapter 1 - The Man of Wind and Moss

Part One: The Zillennial Sigil

Marco will be forced to remember it more clearly, years later, when he’s covered in blood and his friends are screaming for help, but the first time he heard about the Man of Wind and Moss, he was sitting in English class with his best friend Sasha Heckler. It was their last semester at Florida State, and she had roped him into a course about folklore. Misguided, she had been hoping to learn about paganism and Wicca and North American fairy trails, but the course mainly consisted of Br’er Bear and Br’er Rabbit with a prolonged unit on Pecos Bill.

The day before, Marco had followed her through the back aisles of Strozier Library, glancing at his phone and reminding her every quarter hour that they had places to be. That their other friends were waiting. But Sasha proceeded undeterred. They had made a deal that for the last presentation of the semester, she’d do all the work so long as she could pick the topic. For Marco, it was a win-win. He had burned himself out on the other presentations, yapping at length about John Henry and Paul Bunyan and what they meant to hardworking men in the dawn of industrialization, blah blah blah. He pitched her the Mothman of West Virginia—just for kicks, something fun—but she rolled her eyes. Fine. If Sasha wanted to take the reins for this one, so be it.

When she pulled the book off the shelf, he knew something was wrong. The cover simply said Zaäper, and it was a first edition clothbound, and when she flipped through the foxing pages, showing ghastly illustrations and a formal typeset, the main sticking point was its publishing date. It wasn’t old enough. 1994. To Marco, this was off-putting because it suggested that the people that wrote and published it were probably still around, among them. It wasn’t like the buckle-hat authors from Ye Ol’ Witch Hunter tomes. It was more articulate and modern, deliberately occult in an age of science. In a word: spooky.

The next day in class she brought him up. The Man of Wind and Moss. Their professor shot it down and they ended up presenting on something else. Marco never thought about it again. Until that day when they were lost in the woods.