Chapter 1: The Sweet Song of Decay

The joint burned between James's fingers like a tiny beacon in the gathering dusk, its cherry glow painting shadows across his pale face. He took another drag, holding the smoke in his lungs until they burned, then exhaled slowly into the humid Appalachian air. Beside him, Kenny sprawled against a fallen log, his athletic frame loose and relaxed for the first time in weeks.

"Sixteen, man," Kenny said, his voice already taking on that lazy quality that came with being properly stoned. "Can you believe it? We're officially ancient."

James snorted, passing the joint over. "Speak for yourself. I feel like I've been sixteen forever." He did, too. Their shared birthday had always felt more like a burden than a celebration—born on the same day to sisters who'd grown up in this same suffocating mountain town, destined to follow the same narrow paths their parents had walked.

The woods around their grandparents' house stretched in all directions, dense with oak and maple that blocked out most of the dying sunlight. They'd snuck out here after the awkward family dinner, claiming they needed air. What they'd really needed was distance from the oppressive cheerfulness of birthday cake and forced smiles.

"At least we got some decent weed out of it," Kenny said, examining the joint with the critical eye of someone who'd become something of a connoisseur over the past year. "Your cousin Mark really came through."

"Don't call him my cousin. He's our cousin." James leaned back against a tree trunk, feeling the bark rough against his hoodie. The marijuana was hitting him in waves now, making everything feel slightly unreal, like he was watching his life through a television screen. "And yeah, he did. I was expecting some of that dirt weed he usually gets."

They fell into comfortable silence, the kind that came from years of friendship built on shared misery and small-town boredom. Somewhere in the distance, a whippoorwill called, its voice echoing off the hills that penned them all in like prison walls.

That's when they heard it.

The sound drifted through the trees like something from a half-remembered dream—a simple, tinkling melody that belonged to childhood summers and suburban streets. An ice cream truck's jingle, but wrong somehow. Distorted. The notes seemed to hang in the air longer than they should, creating an odd harmony with themselves.

"You hear that?" James asked, sitting up straighter. The paranoia that sometimes came with being high was creeping up his spine like cold fingers.

Kenny was already on his feet, swaying slightly. "Ice cream truck? Out here?" He laughed, but it sounded forced. "That's weird as hell, man."

The melody continued, neither getting closer nor fading away. If anything, it seemed to be circling them, moving through the trees in a pattern that made no sense. There were no roads out here, just deer trails and the remnants of old logging paths that hadn't been used in decades.

"Maybe it's on the county road," James said, but even as the words left his mouth, he knew they were wrong. The county road was at least two miles away, and the sound was coming from deeper in the forest, where no vehicle should be able to go.

"Come on," Kenny said, and James recognized that tone. It was the same voice Kenny used when he was about to do something spectacularly stupid, like jumping off Miller's Bridge or trying to pet that rabid-looking dog that had wandered into town last spring. "Let's check it out."

"Are you insane?" James scrambled to his feet, his head spinning from the sudden movement. "We're high, it's getting dark, and there's no way an ice cream truck is driving around in the middle of the woods."

But Kenny was already walking, following the sound with the single-minded determination that had gotten them both into trouble more times than James could count. "That's exactly why we need to see it," he called over his shoulder. "When's the last time anything interesting happened in this shithole town?"

James wanted to argue, wanted to grab his cousin and drag him back toward the house where their grandmother was probably wondering where they'd gone. Instead, he found himself following, drawn by the same morbid curiosity that made people slow down to look at car accidents.

The jingle grew louder as they pushed deeper into the woods, though it still seemed to maintain that same odd distance. James kept expecting to see lights through the trees, or to hear the rumble of an engine, but there was nothing except that hypnotic melody weaving between the branches overhead.

"This is so fucked up," James muttered, stumbling over a root. The marijuana wasn't helping his coordination, and every shadow looked like it was moving in his peripheral vision. "Kenny, we should go back."

"Look," Kenny whispered, grabbing James's arm and pointing ahead.

Through a gap in the trees, they could see it: a pristine white ice cream truck, its cheerful paint job somehow managing to gleam even in the dim forest light. It sat in a small clearing, completely still except for the speaker on its roof, which continued to play that haunting melody.

"How the hell did it get there?" James asked, his voice barely audible. The clearing was surrounded by trees so thick he could barely see how they'd managed to walk through them, let alone drive a vehicle.

The Ice Cream Man stood beside his truck, and even from their hiding spot behind a cluster of saplings, James could see that something was wrong with him. He was too tall, too perfectly pressed in his white uniform. His movements were mechanical, precise, like someone following a script they'd memorized but didn't understand.

"We should go," James said again, tugging at Kenny's sleeve. Every instinct he had was screaming danger, but Kenny shook him off, crouching lower to get a better view.

The Ice Cream Man suddenly stopped moving. For a long moment, he stood perfectly still, his head tilted at an unnatural angle. Then, without warning, he collapsed.

Not fell—collapsed. Like a marionette with its strings cut, he simply folded in on himself and hit the ground in a heap of pristine white fabric.

"Holy shit," Kenny breathed. "Is he dead?"

James opened his mouth to answer, but the words died in his throat as something began to move beneath the Ice Cream Man's uniform. Something large, shifting and writhing under the fabric like a bag full of angry cats.

The back of the man's jacket began to tear, slowly at first, then with increasing violence. What emerged made James's bladder clench and his vision tunnel. It was pink and wet and covered in what looked like tumors, each one pulsing with its own rhythm. Spider-like legs unfolded from its sides—not eight like a normal spider, but dozens, each one ending in a sharp point that clicked against the ground.

The thing was easily the size of a small dog, maybe larger. It moved with horrible purpose, scuttling across the clearing on those needle-sharp legs, leaving dark stains on the earth wherever it touched. Its surface glistened with some kind of mucus that caught the last rays of sunlight filtering through the canopy.

James wanted to scream, wanted to run, wanted to do anything except stand there and watch as the creature disappeared into the underbrush on the far side of the clearing. But his body wasn't obeying him anymore. The marijuana, the shock, the sheer impossibility of what he was seeing—it all combined to root him in place like one of the ancient oaks surrounding them.

The Ice Cream Man sat up.

He moved with the same mechanical precision as before, brushing dirt and leaves from his uniform with careful, measured gestures. Within moments, he looked exactly as he had before his collapse—pristine, perfect, and completely wrong.

He walked back to his truck, climbed into the driver's seat, and drove away. Just like that. As if nothing had happened. As if James and Kenny hadn't just watched something tear itself from his back and scuttle away into the darkness.

The jingle faded into the distance, leaving behind only the natural sounds of the forest and the rapid beating of James's heart.

"Did you see that?" Kenny's voice was high and strained, barely recognizable. "Please tell me you saw that too."

James nodded, not trusting his voice. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely light the cigarette he'd somehow pulled from his pocket. The normalcy of the action—fumbling for his lighter, cupping his hands against the non-existent breeze—felt like grasping at sanity.

"What the fuck was that thing?" Kenny asked, finally standing up on unsteady legs. "What the actual fuck was that?"

"I don't know," James managed, taking a deep drag that did nothing to calm his nerves. "I don't know, and I don't want to know."

But even as he said it, he knew it was too late. The image was burned into his memory now—that wet, pulsing mass of flesh emerging from what should have been a human being, those clicking legs carrying it away into the darkness where it could be anywhere, could be watching them right now.

They stumbled back through the woods in silence, each lost in their own thoughts, their shared birthday celebration forgotten. The house lights ahead looked warm and welcoming, but James couldn't shake the feeling that safety was an illusion now, that something fundamental had changed in those few horrifying minutes.

As they reached the back porch, Kenny grabbed his arm.

"We can't tell anyone," he said, his eyes wild in the yellow porch light. "Who would believe us?"

James nodded, but he was already wondering if believing it himself might be the real problem. Maybe the weed had been laced with something. Maybe they'd both had some kind of shared hallucination.

But deep down, in the part of his mind that still remembered childhood nightmares and monster movies, he knew what they'd seen was real. And worse than that, he had the terrible feeling that it was just the beginning.