indridcolds:

Duck’s always known that Kepler’s a weird town.

As a child, it’s just the constant warnings from his mother to not stay outside late and to, under no circumstances, wander off the paths in the forest that tip him off.

And while those are pretty regular warnings, something every decent parent would say to a child, there’s a certain edge to his mother’s voice; an underlying worry about something that Duck doesn’t quite understand.

He never asks why she’s so insistent, but her tight grip on his arm as she’s scolding him – infinitely more scared than it could ever be as angry as she’s trying to act – the one time he loses track of time and comes home after dark is enough to make Duck listen to her warnings.

As he gets older, Duck starts noticing more and more strange things.

For a few weeks when he’s thirteen, Duck could swear that the shadows in town break. During the day, they never seem to be placed exactly right; and at night, they shift and move, almost like something’s jumping from one shadow to the other quickly and warping them by doing so.

And then it stops. Suddenly and without explanation.

It takes almost an entire year for something weird like that to happen again, and by then, Duck’s mostly forgotten the event with the shadows.

That all comes back to him when the tree seems to bend down and very deliberately hit and injure one of his friends.

They’re not gravely injured or anything, barely a twisted ankle and a few bruises, and it’s brushed off as a freak accident; but he knows better.

Duck’s pretty sure everyone knows better.

After that, Duck starts paying more attention.

It’s mostly small things: the wind being too cold for the summer and making him feel tingly; people at school claiming to have seen strange beings stalking the woods, ranging from tiny fairy-like creatures to Bigfoot; distant gunshots in the night months away from hunting season and not always coming from the forest.

It doesn’t take long for Duck to take notice of all the odd injuries and freak accidents that happen way too often.

Kepler’s a small town;  but not small enough for Duck to know everyone. He knows everyone at his school though, even if only in passing, and once he starts seeking out weird things specifically; Duck hears many many things.

There’s Dylan’s little brother who burnt his arm by standing too close to the fireplace – but the kid swears the fire reached out towards him with a huge human-like arm; there’s Jo’s aunt who’s a nurse at the clinic who’s had a huge amount of cases of animal attacks by people who claim to have seen a strange creature that isn’t really a bear but is around the same size – they decide to blame the heat and panic for what people thought they saw, it’s oddly hot for this late in August; and then there’s Dan’s strange injury with the electricity, and Juno’s father’s from the knife that flew across the room somehow, and, and, and then there’s…

The death shakes the entire town.

It’s not that people don’t die from accidents in Kepler; every couple of years, Duck hears whispers of a car crash, or something else; something that, while tragic, is just one of those things that happens in the world sometimes.

The death, the accident, whatever they’re calling it, it’s something else. Duck knows it, and he knows his mother does too.

She has to with the way she hugged him when Duck told her he knew the guy, that he was in his math class. She does it the same way she held him that time he stayed outside way past his curfew.

It’s that – his mother’s embrace, and the obvious fear of what could happen to Duck that comes with it – that makes him decide to stop looking for weird things, to scrap the notes he’s slowly been gathering for the passed year, to stop looking for gossip, to clear his mind of all the things that are obviously wrong with Kepler.

Sometimes, it’s better to just not know.

Duck’s always known that Kepler’s a weird town.

He just never realised how scary that made it.