In high school, Nate’s interest in writing and amateur sleuth tendencies had combined with Fisher’s short-lived aspirations to become a filmmaker, resulting in a series of unfinished shorts notable primarily for the number of times they yelled at Cal for not staying in character or flubbing his lines. Their aimless creativity had eventually found its perfect muse in the form of Jacob Twilley.

Jacob Twilley was a friend of Fisher’s older brother, Remy. That might be overstating it. He’d gone to high school with Remy, and by the time they met him, Remy occasionally bought weed from him. During one of these visits, Remy had allowed Nate and Fisher tag along, first promising to break their arms if they broke the “circle of trust” and told anyone about it, most especially if that anyone was Fisher’s parents. He needn’t have bothered. An illicit visit to a see a mysterious drug dealer? Nate had been born for this.

Jacob lived in ramshackle trailer park on what was then the outskirts of Arlington, on the edge of suburban sprawl and more or less dead in between the larger cities of Dallas and Fort Worth. The trailer park was off a country road sprouting new housing developments like crabgrass, across the street from a walled convent that had been there long before the first realtor sign appeared. Jacob lived with an older woman who was either his aunt, sister, or girlfriend, depending on who you asked, and nobody ever asked him.

Jacob had answered the door in pajama pants and a Speed Racer t-shirt streaked with blood. Nate assumed the blood was his, owing to the crimson-soaked tissue jammed into one nostril. After opening the door, his gaze went from Remy to Fisher to Nate, and then back to Remy. He then cocked his head toward the two younger boys and asked Remy, “The fuck, man?”

Remy had just shrugged, and apparently that had been explanation enough, because Remy stepped aside to let them in.

Inside, Jacob accepted a handful of cash from Remy and then sat down on a filthy couch before a filthy table to measure out Remy’s product. He talked loud and fast and changed topics before you could get a word in edgewise about the topic three topics back. Nate had sat agape, soaking in every crystalline detail of the beautiful degenerate white trash freak show in front of him, until Jacob had mentioned the time he’d taken a potshot at a Bigfoot in East Texas in 1992.

The details of that story had been sketchy, inconsistent, and ultimately unimportant, but it sparked the conversation that brought up the topic of his crytptozoology ‘zine. Nate was almost certainly the only kid in his high school at the time who knew what the hell either cryptozoology or a ‘zine was, but to encounter the two together, in the wild, on the lips of a bleeding drug dealer who’d once tried to kill Bigfoot…well, it was the beginning of something special. Or at least the beginning of Nate’s first paying job.

For the bulk of their junior and senior years, Nate and Fisher spent their weekend free time road-tripping back and forth across their home state in Fisher’s “molester mobile,” a windowless panel van that was perpetually on its last legs but never quite gave out entirely. They crisscrossed Texas and parts of Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas, hunting legends and reporting their adventures back to Jacob, who published the accounts in new issues of Bump in the Night Magazine whenever he’d accumulated enough spare drug money and actually remembered to take the pages to the printer.

They hunted the Goatman of White Rock Lake (unsuccessfully). They spent a cold winter night waiting for the Marfa lights to appear (they were headlights). They were almost mugged by a knife-wielding crackhead inside the long-abandoned Jefferson Davis Hospital outside of Houston (they ran).

It had stopped after the summer of 1995 — the summer of Miss Lechebnik. He still wasn’t sure why. It had just felt…finished.