What baffled them was the skeleton.
The other bodies were weird, but they couldn’t figure out the fucking skeleton. Just bones, no soft tissue: Not one scrap of skin left. No sinews, no rotting brain, no nothing. The bones were arranged together, each one of the two hundred six in its place, a kneecap hidden by new fall leaves. Had the group resorted to cannibalism? It was one of the early guesses. But even that did not seem to fit. The bones wouldn’t be so clean, arranged perfectly, as if they belonged to a knocked-over classroom display, sans bolts. There were no scorch marks, no scratches or other signs of instruments, and surely any form of cannibalism that left such a pristine skeleton behind would have required at the very least a blade to peel the flesh. And besides, the group had been experienced hikers.
The coroners and first responders could make guesses about the state of the other bodies—animals, perhaps, though they had not observed wildlife in the area, had not even heard the flap of wings overhead or the crunching of leaves beneath a swift mammal’s paw—but this fucking set of bones. It was wrong to move them, the investigators thought, even as they placed them into the evidence bags, each bone lifting away like gravel, no tendons or fat to hold them together; like putting a complicated puzzle back in the box after hours spent piecing the cardboard together.
Was the skeleton from a decades-old death, some hunter who shot himself in the woods? That had been the second guess, that the dried bones belonged to another of the numerous missing persons from the surrounding area, but dental records confirmed that the immaculate set of bones belonged to Sylvia Burnett, a graduate student studying native plants and geology at the University of Kentucky. She’d been part of a research trip with another student, Clay Foster, and two climbers.
She had last been seen at a diner in Livingston, Kentucky, seven months prior with the other two hikers whose bodies they’d found, both bizarrely well preserved, and, like Sylvia’s skeleton, odd enough to keep the first responders who had packed them into vans and the coroners who autopsied them conjuring theory after theory
Had a squirrel plucked out Luke Woodhaven’s eyes, thinking them a rare breed of nut? But how had his tongue been removed, they wondered, staring into his decaying mouth, inhaling the worst case of halitosis. Their sense of wonder overrode their sense of smell as they examined, once again, the entirely too straight line that was the end of his tongue, terminating just beyond his last set of molars.
Had a coyote feasted on the intestines of Clay? But how had his rib cage come to be folded outward like cabinet doors, as if a set of hinges existed on either side of his body? And why was his blood missing? Had it evaporated? Why was he naked?
And where was the fourth hiker? Was she roaming the woods? Or had they simply not pressed far enough into the trees to discover her? All they had recovered of Dylan Prescott was a set of blood-soaked clothing at the abandoned campsite that raised further questions. The largest stains came back from forensics as unidentified and belonging to none of the four campers.
Their theorizing continued long after the morticians had pushed the bodies into the crematorium and placed the resulting remains in boxes. Each spare moment at work no longer spent idly scrolling their phones, but puzzling over the detailed logs and the thousands of photographs. It was not uncommon for the coroners to become so engrossed in this work that they would stay past their shifts, alerted to the passing time only by a buzzing in their pockets from spouses waiting at home with cold dinner plates.
But still they had zero plausible theories as to how Sylvia Burnett had entered the area in March and lost all of her skin, muscles, and organs by October of the same year. In their obsession, they’d even scoured the theories touted online, the lights of their phones burning their retinas late at night: drugs, cults, poisonous plant matter, wild animals. Cryptids. Cannibals. Murder.
Another odd piece of the puzzle was that one of the bodies had been found just one hundred yards from the road, nestled in autumn brush. How had the camper not heard the rush of trucks loaded to the brim with cargo roaring down the highway every forty seconds? Another coroner guess: delirium, brought on by exposure and dehydration.
Vloggers and content creators thought darker, theorizing that Dylan, the missing camper, had murdered the rest of them and was hiding out in the woods. This theory was pushed to its limits when skeptics asked, How would she have removed all of Sylvia’s flesh? How did she preserve Clay’s and her boyfriend Luke’s body? Why? Too many odd pieces that didn’t fit, more discovered every few nights as a detective or coroner or first responder sprang upright in bed, struck by another revelation.
But, above all, that fucking skeleton.
In the morgue, they had dubbed her Sylvia Skeleton. Sylvia Skeleton became legend. Forever tied to every medical oddity, every spooky anomaly, every story told in hushed tones around the campfire. She would become the subject of nearly seventy dissertations, at least eight medical journal publications, and several textbook chapters. Thousands of online conspiracies. Museums of medical oddities sent letters to the morgue, the police station, her nearly alma mater, and, once or twice, her poor parents, offering increasingly large sums for the bones, hoping to string them together, to make Sylvia Skeleton forever a sideshow display inside a glass cage. Wanting to find some utility in her death, her parents donated the bones to a university, which did, in fact, bolt them together inside a display case, taking them out only for special seminars.
The Livingston police department had received many reports of the missing party. Suspicion was not raised in friends or family for some weeks, as they knew that the group had trekked into a remote forest for research purposes with limited to no cellular service. The first reports came from Instagram users who detailed a peculiar livestream posted on the account of Dylan Prescott, a popular rock-climbing influencer with upwards of 50,000 followers. Users described it as showing her pensive face in the foreground and a pursuant man in a dark coat behind her. Authorities were not able to recover the video, and it remained a missing piece of cardboard to the coroner’s puzzle. The cell phones recovered from the scene either refused to boot or seemed to have been restored to factory settings. When Dylan had not posted in many days, multiple reports were submitted to local and national hotlines, all from users of the app, and eventually from sports reporters who wanted to know what had happened to the up-and-coming climber.
Though these reports had been made as early as April, a major search for the group was not launched until the two students—Clay Foster and Sylvia Burnett—missed their check-in deadline to update their advisor at the University of Kentucky. There was a day’s wait as the mentor of the project scoured his overstuffed inbox and understuffed mailbox for updates, requests for an extension, or notification of a delay. Only after he had made sure any communication hadn’t errantly made its way to his spam folder or other digital nooks and crannies did he reach out to their families, who also had not heard from the campers since they had begun their trip a few weeks prior. When both parties realized there had not been a peep since they left, they contacted the authorities in Rockcastle County.
And so the search began. Their cell phones must have been dead or out of range, as the closest cell towers had not received a single ping from them. In fact, the final pings from their phones were triangulated to the diner where the four had last been sighted, buying fried chicken and beer, another jagged, oblong puzzle piece that would wedge in the minds of investigators and remain there long after the case had been abandoned. How had the diner been the last ping when hundreds of users recalled Dylan livestreaming and posting to social media in the days afterward, when they were in the woods? An amateur scientist explained it away online, detailing how a strong magnetic field could interrupt cell towers’ signals as well as interfere with camera stabilization.
But then how had her posts changed, appearing to differ from those described by confused followers, who swore that she had posted images of herself climbing rock walls, and not the five photographs of leafy ground that appeared in the feed now—all dated March 12 or earlier? And how were more posts appearing on her feed when her phone had been discovered on the scene, battery long dead and the device reset to factory settings like the others?
After 185 days of fruitless searching, a stranded motorist discovered the hikers’ vehicle, brush tickling its belly. All the electronics in his own car had inexplicably gone dark, the crooning radio singer pulled off stage mid-note, the clock blinking out, even the gas gauge and speedometer becoming blank circles on the dashboard. He pulled over, his car dying almost as soon as he crossed onto the shoulder. The tow truck would take an hour to arrive at such a rural location. In the passing time, the motorist’s bladder filled, and he went into the trees to piss, where his golden stream grazed the Jeep Cherokee’s bumper, cleaning it of dirt. Its rust-colored paint was camouflaged by brush, dirt, and autumn leaves.
He peered into the windows. A crinkled receipt sat on the backseat. Long neck bottles of Ale-8 filled the cup holders. The shine of greasy foil winked on the floor. Then something underneath the seat twitched, like a finger, he later told authorities, and as he pressed his forehead against the window, as he squinted deeper, the Jeep’s exhaust pipe sputtered. That should be impossible, he said. He knew it should be impossible, but he had heard it, he had felt the vehicle shimmy on its shocks, smelled the sulfurous emissions. He reeled, like a cartoon skeleton jumping out of a skin suit, pacing backward into the woods. He picked a direction, aiming for the road but in fact heading farther into the trees, where he swore he saw a woman matching the description of Dylan Prescott, the still-missing climber, darting deeper into the woods. He called out to her, nearly tripping over a low-hanging chain bearing a no trespassing sign, before she vanished.
Had his ankle caught on the links, he would have fallen into a soft bed of leaves, his eyes parallel with a swollen foot. Instead, he skidded to a stop just in time, gagged at the sight of the body, and backtracked to the road. He dialed the local police, who arrived precisely thirteen minutes before the tow truck driver, who found the motorist’s vehicle functioning perfectly.
The foot belonged to Clay Foster, the leader of the study, now a dehydrated husk of leathery skin enfolding shriveled muscle, the guts rotted or eaten from the opened rib cage. A marvel of science that baffled the coroners nearly as much as Sylvia Skeleton, that his corpse was so fresh. The same was true of Luke Woodhaven, found deeper in the woods, the tongueless fellow, who was also missing his eyes, ears, fingers, and toes. Besides the missing digits, the body was undisturbed—too undisturbed. The skin was still smooth and pink, the nubs of his fingers and toes dried like jerky. Preserved. Both bodies were in similar states, as if the campers had succumbed in the freezing preserves of Mount Everest and not the humid summer and wet fall of Kentucky. Yet forensics determined they had, indeed, died closer to the start of summer than to the end of it.
Clay was the first to be discovered and catalogued, the closest to the car. Next was Luke, deeper into the woods, and finally Sylvia Skeleton, near the campsite. The first responders strung yellow plastic tape across the trees next to the road and parked their flashing lights at the shoulder, drawing more attention than if they had done nothing at all. They placed their little yellow plastic markers around the scenes, miles apart, one for every stray fiber that had made its way into the dirt, one for each quickdraw found nestled in the drying leaves, for each of the still-pitched, pristine tents surrounded by destroyed food canisters and an explosion of clothing and supplies, and one for the dribbles of dried urine on the bumper of the Jeep.
They took one million photographs. There were so many photographs that the high-resolution files filled up three terabyte drives. There were so many photographs that the forensic investigators had an ongoing project to mesh them together, to create a unified, 3D reconstruction of the grisly landscape. There were so many photographs that they wondered what would happen if they leaked one or two to the conspiracy nuts who managed to out-theorize them with no photographs at all.
And after they had taken their photographs and mulled around the corpses, assessing, smoking, constantly feeling a small hand tugging at their pant leg as if asking them to leave, they zipped the corpses into bags and stacked their little numbered markers back together and stuffed the tents and backpacks and dirty clothing into evidence bags and wheeled the bags to the van and checked one last time to see if they had missed anything, any tiny part of Sylvia Skeleton or a bloody blade or even a detailed journal that would make the puzzle whole, something other than the waterlogged notebooks at the campsite that had turned to pulp. Satisfied, they shut the doors of the van.
Then they left that wretched place forever.
Excerpted from This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer. Reprinted with permission from Quirk Books.
This Wretched Valley won’t be released until January 16, 2024, but you can pre-order it right now.
