I can't explain it, but the butterflies seem to know where the bodies are.
I've been a park ranger since I was eighteen, and after five years, I really can't imagine doing anything else. I was in the scouts when I was younger, and I've been an avid hiker all my life. Time spent in the woods is time well spent, and the ability to work there every day is honestly a dream come true.
Being a park ranger, you see your fair share of bodies in the woods. People come out here to hike and swim and forget that there are things here that will kill you. They run afoul of animals, they get sucked under in the rapids, they don't pack enough food or water, or they just get lost and aren't found till someone chances upon them.
Spring two thousand twenty-three was the year that we got some help from the butterflies.
It started with the death of Angel Myers, but it certainly didn't end there.
Angel Myers was what you would call a minimalistic camper. She would come in with a few essentials and a blanket, just kind of camp wherever she decided to drop down. She knew which plants would kill her and which ones would nourish her, which was good. She also knew which plants would get her higher than airplane wings, which was bad. We had called the police on Angel several times, but they always cut her loose after a few months, and the rangers refused to toss her a lifetime ban from the park so she just kept coming back.
When a pair of hikers told us they had found a body in an area we knew as The Meadow, we supposed this would be the last time we called the police for her.
She was naked, and it wasn't the first time any of us had seen her in this state. She wasn't bad to look at, but it was always a little weird to find someone stark naked in the elements. She was splayed out, spread eagle, in the flowers that grew in the meadows, and her eyes and tongue were missing. That wasn't terribly uncommon either, not with all the varments in the park, but the little black growths on her skin were definitely something I had never seen before. She had three rows of perfect little spikes, each of them about three inches long and each line about nine spikes long.
Other than the spikes, the strangest part of the whole scene were the butterflies.
They were not a species I was familiar with, and they were bone white with light black patterns on the wings. They were thick over the body, and I assumed they had been what had drawn the hikers. They were circling in a thick cloud, the whites easily seen against the green canopy around them, and I was as amazed by them as I was the weird protrusions on her skin.
"What the hell are these?" I asked, reaching out a finger to test if they were sharp, but finding them squishy and full of green liquid.
"Pallida mors," said Rico, one of the rangers who worked with me.
"One more time in English, for the rest of us," I said.
"Pale Death," he said, pointing to the butterflies, "They're rare, I don't think I've seen one in the flesh. They're supposed to live in the deep woods, and they only come out once every few years to lay eggs."
I pointed to the little row of black spikes running up her thigh, "On corpses?"
Rico nodded, "That's why they call them Palida Mors. They lay their eggs on corpses, though it's usually of animals. I have heard of them laying eggs on human bodies, but it's rare. I guess they found the corpse before we did."
The hikers said the same when we questioned them. They had been hiking to the meadow, his fiance wanting to see it in spring, and as they came to the end of the trail, she had noticed the swarm of pale butterflies and wanted a closer look. She had thought they were so pretty, but as they came closer, they had seen the body and realized what they were swarming around it.
We called the station and got some guys from the coroner's office down to pick her up.
We hoped she would somehow be the last body we found that spring, but I think, even then, I knew this wouldn't be the last body I saw taken from the park that year.
The next one was a hiker named Marcus Dray, and his death was truly terrible.
Some campers had gone fishing in the Conusquat River, the waterway that runs through the park, and as they chased the trout who were beginning their journey to the spawning grounds, one of their kids came across a grizzly sight. He said it looked like a scaled claw was sticking out of the river, and he ran to get his mother, thinking it was a monster. She had expected a rock formation or maybe a stick with some moss on it, but what they found was an arm covered in the black spike pods the butterflies left behind.
"They looked like scales," the mother had said, still a little shaken by the experience, "and I could understand why he thought it was a monster hand. It wasn't until I got closer that I realized it was an arm jutting up from the foam."
At first, we thought the guy had just fallen into the river and gotten stuck between the rocks after drowning. When we pulled him out, however, we got a better idea of the extent of the damage. Something forced him into the small space between the two rocks, and they hadn't done it gently. His shoulders were broken, like snapped in the middle and just folded up. He was crumpled up like a suit coat in the hole, and that wasn't all.
Something had eaten his face.
Not like Angel, where her eyes and tongue were missing. They had eaten his entire face off, down to the skull, and there was nothing left but ragged flesh and scored white bone. If it hadn't been for the arm sticking up, we might have never found him until someone panning for minerals found a finger or a skull.
The butterflies, the Pale Death, presided over the whole thing as we managed to get him onto the shore.
After that, we found four more bodies in a month.
One was left on a mountainside, its hands missing and its nose and lips chewed off. He had been climbing the low-grade mountain we have on the grounds, and when he'd gone missing we thought it might be a small avalanche due to snow melt. When a fisherman found him laid out on the lowest peak of the mountain, however, we knew it was something much worse.
The second was a woman who'd gone into the woods to relieve herself during a picnic and was found in the low branches of a tree, well, half of her was. The other half was high up in the tree, and something had eaten her legs. The husband had to be hospitalized after he identified the top half of his wife, and I felt bad for her kids. They had been here to enjoy a picnic in the park, and something had taken that away from them.
The third was, unfortunately, a child named Kaitlyn Mills. Kaitlyn would have been six in July, but she never got the opportunity. Kaitlyn was the strangest and also the easiest to identify. Kaitlyn had left her parents campsite in the night, but it appeared that whatever had found her had taken an interest in her. Something had taken care of her in the woods. Something had fed her, something had changed her clothes, something had made sure she drank clean water, and then, unfortunately, its care had lapsed. Kaitlyn hadn't died because her face had been eaten off, she had died because her skull had connected with the ground and cracked. It was pretty clear she had fallen out of a tree, but the coroner said she would have needed to fall from a pretty steep height. She was stretched out too, as if something had made her comfortable as she lay dying.
The fourth was the worst, and the reason for what came after.
The fourth was Ranger Franklin Carpenter, and he had gone missing after going to check one of the pump stations. We had six pump stations, things we used to bring clean water to the campgrounds, and he had been responding to a call about a malfunction in station four. He had gone out before lunch, and we found what was left of him the next day after he never came back. If he hadn't died wearing his name tag then we wouldn't have known who it was. His arms and legs were missing and believed to have been eaten. His face was gone, as was the top of his skull and what lay within. Something had gnawed his chest, eaten his buttocks, and chewed his genitals off for good measure. He was just a torso and part of a head when we found him on the edge of the woods, and a lot of us got pretty scared after losing one of our own like that.
Over all four bodies, the butterflies held sway, and their eggs were in evidence.
I expected a visit from the Head Ranger, but when he arrived with a man in a dark suit the next day, we should have known something was about to happen. He had a few other men in similar attire, and Rico lifted an eyebrow as we took our seats at briefing. None of these guys were dressed for more than a slow stroll over concrete paths, but I doubted that was their intention.
"Agent Lee has been gracious enough to come and help us with our little problem. We will be splitting all of you into groups so you can canvas the woods. We need to find whatever is doing this before summer starts, especially with one of our own being a recent casualty. We have a lot of ground to cover, so, Rangers will be splitting off with two of Agent Lee's boys to show them the trails and help them bring this to a close."
So, that's how I found myself in the woods with Agents Fiest and Agent Martin. Agent Lee might have looked like an investment banker, but these two had traded their Brooks Brothers suits for camo and assault rifles. We had broken out the shotguns that we used for putting off angry wildlife to supplement the firepower the Agents had brought, and the three of us proceeded through the woods. Agent Fiest wasn't a big talker, but Agent Martin made up for it by asking questions about what we had seen. I told him about the bodies, the parts that had been eaten, and the butterflies that seemed to hover around everything.
"Butterflies?" Fiest said, and it was probably the only thing I had heard him say in the hour we had been walking.
"Yeah, Rico calls them something in Latin that basically means Pale Death. They show up around the bodies and just kind of mark where they are."
Fiest gave Martin a look and the two nodded knowingly.
"Have you seen anything near the sights? Footprints or scales maybe? Stuff like insect skin?"
I shook my head, "No, mostly just dead people."
I was preparing to ask them what they thought we were looking for since they clearly knew something, when we came through a dense stand of trees and into an open space that was anything but open. It seemed invested with the pale butterflies, and as we stalked in, they fluttered around us almost gladly. The two Agents took this as a good sign but I wasn't sure what to think. These things had been a pretty foul omen in the last few months, and finding a huge number of them now seemed less than ideal.
As we moved into the cloud of butterflies, it also seemed like something was stalking us. Through the thick wave of insects, there was a large shadow that stalked us. It almost appeared human-sized, but the longer I watched it flit through the swarm, it seemed to grow. It may have had as few as two arms, or as many as eight, but the wings I saw stir its smaller kin were what worried me.
They were tall and white, just like the others, and it seemed to be using them as a blind as it lured us deeper.
"It's close," Martin whispered.
"Steady," Fiest said. "If we spook him, he might fly away before we can take him out."
"What?" I half whispered, talking too loud, but too scared to care.
Fiest looked at Martin, shrugging at something in the other's face.
"You've heard of the moth man? Well, there are counterparts to that thing. The people of Joplin talk about how many of their children were saved from a tornado by these "butterfly people," but they assume those who were lost were taken by said tornado, and not the same creatures who saved them. We call them Lycaenidae Bipedus, and they are extremely," but he never got to finish.
Suddenly the cloud of butterflies enveloped us, their small bodies clinging to us as they struck. Our vision was cut off, and as the automatic weapon chattered, I hit my belly and started crawling. I wanted to get out of the swarm, to get away from the wild bark of the gun, and as I crawled, I heard people yelling. The wet sound of something being torn cut off some of the screaming, but the gunfire persisted as I kept making my way out of the cloud of insects.
I kept crawling until I made it out of the clearing, and once I was no longer being buffeted by butterflies, I got up and started running.
I could still hear the gunfire behind me, but I knew that what I wanted was to live.
I knew that if I stayed, I'd be dead, and I still very much wanted to live.
I ran until someone yelled at me to stop and shoved a gun in my face.
It was another one of the Agents, and as they all coalesced, I was ordered to take them back to the spot where I had left Agent Fiest.
As little as I wanted to go back, I agreed.
By the time I found it again, Fiest was sitting on something he had covered with a tarp. Fiest's left arm was hanging uselessly at his side, his clothes were ripped to shreds, but he was grinning like a big game hunter who's bagged the big one.
"Get it to the truck. Tell the boys back at base I had no choice but to kill it. It refused to come peacefully and forced my hand."
Martin was dead, his body covered in a slew of crushed butterflies. I saw him before they could tarp him as well. Something had torn his thrown out, and I assumed it was whatever was under the big tarp that Fiest was guarding. They took both the tarped bodies away, and when Fiest came towards me, I was worried he would be angry that I had fled.
He put a hand on my shoulder instead and nodded in understanding.
"Don't feel bad, kid. I would have run too if I'd had the choice. Both Agent Martin and I knew what we were getting into. You got us here, that's what counts."
They took it away, and the murders stopped.
We lost two more hikers that year, but they were both killed by the elements.
The butterflies left that same day, never (hopefully) to return.
I can’t help but think about that spring again as winter abates and the season gets warmer.
I tell you one thing, I’ll be keeping an eye peeled for butterflies from now on.
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