Chapter 3 - Shadow of the Ancestor
Noah touched the face in the picture, feeling the brittle paper beneath his fingers.
It was impossible, yet there it was—a perfect mirror image of himself in a photograph taken eighty years before he was born.
The name written in faint cursive beneath the man was Samuel Carter.
Samuel had been Black Pine’s first constable, a man who mysteriously vanished in 1910.
Noah’s phone buzzed on the desk, breaking the oppressive silence of the archive room.
It was a text message from a blocked number containing only GPS coordinates.
The coordinates pointed to an ironwood grove three miles deep inside the forest, far off any mapped trail.
Noah checked his service revolver, chambered a round, and grabbed a heavy-duty tactical flashlight.
As he walked out to his truck, he noticed a fresh streak of black ink on his driver’s side window.
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It formed a crude hourglass with the sand running upward.
He started the engine and drove into the black heart of the woods.
