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"Even you have to realize how ridiculous this is, Mulder." Scully passed her flashlight around the room, illuminating empty bed frames and bare shelves. Everything, from the cabin's walls to the smallest piece of furniture that filled it, was made from the same style of worn wood. Cobwebs decorated the corners and bits of dust floated across the air. "Kids will say anything to try and scare each other."
She'd certainly spun some spooky yarns of her own when she'd gone to Girl Scout camp. That didn't mean that Cabin Twenty-Seven really was haunted or that a half-boar, half-man creature actually roamed the woods. Her fellow campers, save for the especially skittish younger girls, had understood as much. It didn't matter if the phantoms they whispered about really existed. All they had cared about was making sure that they weren't the first girl to start shrieking and covering her ears.
"It wasn't kids who asked us to come here, Scully."
Scully had to close her eyes to keep from rolling them. Pleasant as Ms. Feldman was - her brownies were worth their weight in gold - she was hardly a reliable witness. Whiskey or nerves, maybe even a bit of both, were the easiest explanations for what she'd supposedly witnessed while checking cabins the night prior. Yet she'd spoken so fiercely when she'd told the two about the girl with pitch black eyes and deer horns growing out of her head that she'd claimed to have seen. Scully couldn't decide if it was a good thing or not that it wasn't the weirdest thing she'd heard about that week.
Without kids around, the cabin looked desolate. The fact that it was the middle of November didn't help. Summer was just a memory now.
There was a sharp creak from the opposite side of the room. Scully turned, clutching her flashlight tighter.
"It seems," Scully said, meeting the gaze of the pudgy raccoon that stood ten feet from her, "that we're not the only investigators that were called out here tonight."
The raccoon blinked, then just as quickly scurried back into a corner. By the time that Scully had her flashlight pointed in its direction, she could only see the tip of its tail as it disappeared into a hole in the wall.
"Kids did report seeing this figure, too." Mulder said. "One of the locals I interviewed this morning who goes here every year claims to have seen her on an evening hike."
"Kids will say anything to get an adult's approval, Mulder, especially if it's something that they think a scary man in a suit will want to hear."
"Can you at least consider the possibility of this? We have multiple eyewitness reports! Do you really think that they're all wrong?"
"A lot of people," Scully scoffed, "would have sworn on their death beds that the sun revolved around the earth. I'd say that they were all wrong."
Mulder shook his head. "Let's keep looking."
What did he expect to find, their so-called monster cowering in the storage closet? Scully swallowed a sigh and ran her flashlight over the dusty floor. The only tracks she saw were Mulder's own.
"She said it was this cabin," Mulder said, scratching the side of his head.
"Well, I don't see anything. You're welcome to go check the other cabins while I go see if our little monster girl tried to steal any of the leftover brownies. Deal?"