The next morning I woke up to my normal 7:00AM alarm of Blue Sky by ELO. I slap my palm on my phone screen to turn it off and lay there for a second while the weather report and headlines bleed into the room.

  I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and stretch, my back and neck popping several times as I do so. Oh man that felt good. My muscles feel like a solid collection of knots I fail to work out before sighing and slumping forward, letting my head sag between my knees. My red hair spills forward, almost brushing the floor.

  I need a haircut.

  I mumble incoherent words to myself about nothing as I work up the energy to stand. I grab the pill bottle from my bedside and the bottle of water. Pop one of the capsules, wash it down. The water was warm and tasted a little metallic. Oh well.

  Work in about an hour. Breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast, washed down with coffee that was a little too hot from the pot. I almost trip over Manny's boots in the middle of the kitchen. I kick them aside and grumble into my mug. "It'd be great if he used the shoe rack I bought. It's right there. Like, touching distance." I really don't care where he keeps them honestly. His room, the rack, the bottom of the river. Just not the kitchen.

  I toss a jacket over my uniform polo and head out.

  First call of the day was the Science Center. Regular account. Monthly sweep, check the traps, log anything that needed logging. Manny worked there which meant I knew the layout better than most of the contractors on rotation. He'd texted me the week before about something scratching around in the back storage area so I saved it for last.

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  The storage room was cool and smelled like old cardboard and something underneath I could never quite name. Dust maybe. Or just the particular smell of things that had been sitting in the dark for a long time. I flicked the lights on and they hummed to life one at a time down the length of the room.

  I set a couple traps along the baseboard, noted some droppings near the far shelving unit, and started working my way through. Standard stuff.

  That's when I saw the case.

  Small. Wooden frame, glass front. The thing predated the current cataloguing system by a few decades at least. A label hand typed on yellowed card stock was stuck to the side.

  Folk artifact. Origin unknown. Date unknown.

  I didn't remember seeing it before. Which was probably just me not paying attention. Probably. Story of my life honestly. I forget what I'm doing in the middle of doing it sometimes. I turn away from the case and get back to work. Next on the mental list, check the shelving unit in the far corner. Manny mentioned the scratching was loudest near there.

  I scan the labels. A set of stones from China, a set of carving tools from a native American tribe in Iowa, and a few other random things. I just need to check the traps from last month.

  "Careful"

  I bend down and look. There was the trap, empty but set off. I grab it and freeze.

  "Who said that?"

  I stand up and look around. The room is empty. Has to be. The carving in the case shifted.

  I step back. My heel catches the edge of a folded tarp on the floor and I go backwards, grabbing at the nearest shelf instinctively. My hand catches the case instead. It topples. Hits the ground. The door swings open at my feet.

  I scrambled back another foot and just sat there on the cold storage floor catching my breath.

  Silence.

  Then from somewhere very close to my left shoe, something that sounded like three different people talking at once said:

  "...ey. Hey. HEY."

  It was roughly squirrel sized and looked like someone had carved it out of a particularly old piece of oak and then forgotten to make it not alive. The texture of its skin. Fur. Bark. Hard to say. The lines running across it looked both natural and intentional.

  "You ok there? Looks like you had a good fall."

  It didn't sound right. Like multiple voices bleeding into each other. I stumbled over my words and only managed to get out "what the FUCK?" before I lost consciousness.

  The wooden squirrel thing stood over my body.

  "Huh. Oops."