Chapter 2: Beasts O' Field Court

Chapter 2: Beasts O' Field Court

“Beasts O’ Field Court,” Liam Coleman read from the rusted sign, his voice flat with disbelief. He sat behind the wheel of his truck, its engine a rumbling intrusion in the dead quiet of the woods. He hadn’t wanted to come, had argued with Chloe for twenty minutes on the phone about the sheer idiocy of the plan, but the thought of her and her artsy friends heading into the middle of nowhere with a bag full of cash and a hand-drawn pirate map had been worse. “Sounds like a subdivision for werewolves. You sure this is it, Kian?”

Kian, buzzing with a nervous energy that was almost electric, leaned forward from the passenger seat, peering into the darkness beyond the sign. “The map is unambiguous. This is the place. The threshold of the theater!”

“It’s a dirt path, Kian,” Liam grumbled, but he eased the truck forward. The suspension groaned as the tires left the semblance of a road and rolled onto the overgrown track.

Branches scraped against the truck's sides like fingernails on a coffin lid. For a hundred yards, they were swallowed by the forest, the headlights barely penetrating the oppressive gloom. Then, abruptly, the trees just… stopped. They didn’t thin out or transition into scrubland; they formed a perfect, wall-like perimeter. Before them lay the impossible.

It was a cul-de-sac. A perfect circle of asphalt with a small, grassy roundabout in the center, plucked straight from a 1970s suburban dream and dropped into the heart of a trackless wilderness. Twelve houses, all slight variations of the same split-level design, stood in a silent, semi-circular court. Their paint—faded shades of avocado, harvest gold, and dusty rose—was peeling in long strips. Picture windows, dark and vacant, stared out like the eyes of the dead. Manicured lawns, now choked with weeds that grew unnaturally high, still held their neat, rectangular shapes.

Liam killed the engine. The silence that rushed in was absolute. It was a physical presence, a heavy blanket that smothered all sound. No crickets, no rustling leaves, not even the sigh of the wind.

“Whoa,” Chloe whispered from the back seat, her face pale in the gloom.

Elara felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach. As a filmmaker, her mind was trained to see composition, to understand how a scene was built. This scene was wrong. The lines were too clean, the decay too uniform. It didn't look like a place that had been abandoned; it looked like a stage that had been meticulously, artfully distressed. She instinctively framed a shot with her hands, a nervous habit, trying to force the impossible view into a neat, controllable rectangle.

“It’s perfect!” Kian breathed, his voice a reverent hiss. He was already out of the truck, turning in a slow circle, arms spread wide as if to embrace the eerie vista. “Perfectly curated decay! The liminal space between civilization and wilderness! The Patron has a genius eye for location!”

“She has a genius eye for trespassing, maybe,” Liam said, his hand resting on the door handle, his gaze sweeping the silent houses. His mechanic's mind wasn't seeing art; it was seeing problems. “This place isn’t on any map for a reason. Let’s get this over with.”

They piled out of the truck. The air was cold and still, carrying a faint, musty smell of damp concrete and rot. While Kian paced the roundabout, declaiming lines from his play to the empty houses, and Chloe stuck close to him, her fear a palpable aura, Liam’s practical gaze fell on something specific.

In the driveway of the nearest house—a mustard-yellow one with a single cracked window like a cataract—sat a car. It was a muscle car from the early seventies, its lines sleek and aggressive even under a thick blanket of dust and fallen leaves. Liam, who’d spent his life with his hands covered in grease, felt an immediate, professional curiosity that momentarily overrode his unease.

“Something’s not right with this,” he said, mostly to himself. Elara, camera now in hand, drifted over.

“What do you mean?” she asked, raising the camera to her eye. Through the lens, the car looked even stranger, a relic sealed under glass.

“Look. All this damp, all these years? There should be rust eating through the wheel wells. The chrome should be pitted. But it’s… clean.” He ran a hand over the fender, wiping away the grime. Underneath, the paint was pristine. He walked to the front, squinting at the grille. “And I’ve never seen this model before.”

He tried the driver’s side door. With a soft, dry click, it swung open. The interior smelled of stale vinyl and time. Liam leaned in, his eyes scanning the dashboard before popping open the glove compartment. He pulled out a slim, vinyl-bound booklet.

“Owner’s manual,” he announced.

Elara lowered her camera. “What’s it say?”

Liam stared at the cover, his brow furrowed in a deep, confused line. He held it out for her to see. The logo was Ford’s, the familiar blue oval, but the text below it was impossible.

1973 FORD CHIMERA

“Ford never made a Chimera,” Liam said, his voice low and certain. “Not a concept, not a prototype. It never existed.” He flipped it open. The pages were filled with meticulous diagrams and instructions for an engine configuration that defied physics. He leaned back in and looked at the vehicle identification number plate on the dash. It wasn't the standard seventeen-digit string of letters and numbers. It was a short line of symbols—spirals, jagged lines, and shapes like broken stars.

A shiver traced its way down Elara’s spine. The unnerving location, the strange Patron, the nonsensical jokes on the cards in Kian’s bag… they were all abstract anxieties. But this manual, this non-existent car, was a solid, tangible piece of wrongness. It was proof. They had stepped out of the world they knew.

“Kian!” Liam’s voice was sharp, cutting through Kian’s theatrical monologue. “You need to see this.”

Kian strode over, annoyed at the interruption. Liam explained, showing him the manual. Kian glanced at it, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes, before he tossed it onto the passenger seat with a dismissive laugh.

“A custom job! A kit car! Liam, you’re missing the point. It’s all part of the performance! The Patron is a genius of environmental storytelling. She’s created a mystery for us to inhabit!”

“This isn’t a story, Kian. This is real,” Liam shot back, his patience fraying. “And it’s not right.”

But the argument was useless. Kian was already lost in his artistic interpretation, and the twenty thousand dollars sitting in the truck’s lockbox was a powerful counter-argument to common sense. There was no leaving now. The bargain had been struck.

As dusk began to bleed through the trees, turning the sky a bruised purple, they gathered their gear. They built a campfire in the center of the grassy roundabout, directly in the middle of the court. The truck, with its precious cargo of money and their only means of escape, was parked beside them.

The flames crackled, the sound loud and lonely in the vast silence. The fire pushed back the darkness, but it only served to make the twelve houses loom larger, their dark windows reflecting the dancing light like a dozen pairs of unblinking eyes. They were on a stage, surrounded on all sides by their silent, unnerving audience.

Elara hugged her knees, the camera resting beside her. Chloe huddled under a blanket, her face a mask of anxiety. Liam stood guard, his big frame a tense silhouette against the fire.

Only Kian seemed at ease. He sat cross-legged, his face lit with a feverish glow. He reached into his bag and produced the black box from the Patron. With a flourish, he opened it and pulled out the deck of oversized cards.

“Well,” he said, his voice ringing out in the dead air, a director calling for action. “Shall we begin the performance?”