I Worked For National Geographic As A Field Photographer And Weird, Unexplainable Things Have Been Happening To Me

They fired me. For about five minutes. Ava chased me down and told me they changed their mind. She had vouched for me. She told the committee I was one of their best and hardest workers and I shouldn’t be punished so severely for a little transgression. So instead of getting fired, I was suspended from fieldwork and given a desk job in Chicago where I was to upload photos to the website. Ava came by to see me and get lunch whenever she was in town and I was thankful for everything that she had done, but I was slowly dying being in the office all the time.

I hadn’t talked to Sasha since we came home. After the hearing and the suspension, I had no desire to see her. She called and I didn’t pick up. She texted and I deleted them. I knew that it was a freak thing and I shouldn’t be angry, but there was a side of myself that was irrationally irate with her. While it wasn’t her fault that I was stuck in some shitty cubicle, it was totally her fault that I was stuck in some shitty cubicle.

The worst thing had happened: Guess who they transferred her under? Ava. So the girl I thought about all the time, and the girl who fucked everything up for me were now hanging out all the time. Probably awkwardly talking about me and how shitty it was that I was locked behind this desk. I could only imagine, and the more I did, the more distraught I became with every one of their feasible conversations.

After almost a whole year of sitting behind the desk, and months of not having any friendly visits, I got a knock on the side of my cubicle. It was Sasha. She smiled softly and asked to sit down. I nodded and she placed a folder on my desk as she sat. “So, I know that you’ve been kind of angry with me about this whole thing. I just wanted to take a second to talk to you, and try to make it right.”

She looked down at her lap, into the bottom stitching of her skirt, and back up at my eyes. “I put in my resignation from field work this morning. I’ve been drinking a little too much and need help getting back on track,” she smiled shyly. “So, I’m trying to get a desk job here and settle back. But they needed someone to take over my spot out there… and I requested that you take over for me. I said it was time to get you out of the office. And they agreed.”

She opened the folder she put on my desk. “This is your first mission back. I think you’ll like who you’re working with. Plus, she broke up with Mark. And since then, she probably talked as much about you, as you did about her.” A smile clung to her lips as I reached over the desk and wrapped my arms around her. As she held me tighter, she whispered, “Good luck.”

Three days later, Ava met me at the airport in Washington DC with a beaming grin. “Hey, nice to see you back on this side of the office,” she said.

I smiled nervously and gave her a quick hug. I forgot how good she smelled. How soft her hair was against the side of my face. As we walked through the airport she told me about how everything had fallen out with Mark. It didn’t sound like the prettiest of affairs, so I didn’t attempt to press and she seemed to be thankful. Lastly, she said that she liked Sasha and was really impressed I took the fall for her.

As we crossed the parking lot to her car, the sun was going down and she said, “Sasha told me a little something about you. You are really into these urban legends and ghost stories. So, I have a little present for you. You know, to make this trip a little more interesting.” My interest piqued and I smiled over at her. Her curls bounced as she walked and her eyes smiled playfully beyond her glasses.

I watched her drive for a while before falling asleep in the car. She was gentle and gorgeous in the driver’s seat, taking every turn with a quiet precision, making sure always to avoid the potholes. After a little more than an hours drive, for some of which I fell asleep through, she woke me up. We were parked on a desolate country lane in the middle of the woods. Dark blue swallowed the air around the car, and a chill had fallen into the wilderness. The moon hung high through the trees and streamed brilliantly across the windshield. She grabbed my arm and gestured for me to get out and follow her.

A little ways down the road was an odd kind of tunnel underneath a bridge. It appeared barely large enough for one car to fit through and about 50 yards long. Ava lead me over to it and began to tell this story. “So legend has it that near the turn of the century, there was a mass breakout from a mental hospital somewhere in this valley. All of the patients were rounded up, with the exception of one. They had no idea where he could have gone off. Over the next few months no one had seen him or knew where he was, but they began to find all of these bunnies completely gutted like fish.

“Around Halloween, there was a group of teens hanging out here under the bridge, doing what teens do, when they saw this man come out of the mist. He was tall, muscular, and wore this white bunny suit that was drenched and splattered with dry blood. They barely had time to see the axe in his hand before they were all murdered. In the morning, police officers found all of the kids bodies, completely dismembered and gutted.”

She slid into the shadows of the tunnel on the last word and seductively pressed her back against the wall. In a slightly scarier and sexier voice than she had before, she continued. “So, in the 70s and early 80s, a copycat killer started finishing his work. All around the county came in reports of this axe-wielding maniac wearing a bunny costume terrorizing and destroying people’s possessions. The most disturbing aspect is still associated with this bridge. Legend says that if a young couple is found in this tunnel, they will be hunted down by the bunny man until he guts them as well.”

I walked into the shadows with her. I could see the glint of her glasses in the shadows and the gleam of her teeth in the darkness. She reached out and grabbed my arm in the darkness. “So this goes against everything that the safe rational side of my brain thinks, but do you want to see how much truth there is to this legend?” And with that she pulled me in. Our lips met first, then my hand slid around her waist and we became engrossed in each other. Our tongues lashed furiously while our lips entangled like zipper teeth. Our hands roamed on each other’s bodies with ferocity that we didn’t know we possessed. We didn’t pull apart until we heard the car alarm go off.

Ava peeled her lips away from mine, and straightened her glasses. Slowly, she slid her hand down my arm and found my hand, entangling the fingers before moving off the wall. We walked out into the mouth of the tunnel and saw her car blinking furiously in the darkness. The panic and hazard lights rapidly blinked on and off as the doors flew open one at a time and the motion detection light inside flickered like a strobe. Ava reached into her pockets and pressed the button on the car keys. The beeping and flickering stopped. Silence clung back to everything once again.

“Maybe you bumped against it by accident,” she said quietly. I nodded in the darkness, thinking that was a completely plausible response. “But what about the doors…” I cut her off by grabbing her hand to pull her towards the car.

At the hotel, they were playing a documentary about Lizzie Borden.

In the morning, we had to set out to get on location. We were taking pictures of rare mountain lions in the hills and looking to provide evidence for a claim that there had been a Black Panther in the woods. For those of you who do not know, there is a great myth as to whether or not the North American Black Panther exists. Considered to be one of the most intelligent, powerful, and vicious animals in the kingdom, they would assuredly be the top of the food chain and a real destructive force to the overall food pyramid of an area. Since the finding of the Appalachian Mountains, people have claimed to see gigantic black cats in the wilderness; however, their real being is still highly speculated.

As we left the hotel, we noticed something in the parking lot behind our car. Yes, you guessed it. A bunny, cut from tail to nose, lain out like a rug, right behind our vehicle. It was not a good taxidermy in any sense, and sat in a wet pool of blood that created tributaries around the blacktop. Our eyes widened as we recognized what it was, and there was a long moment where we both gave each other quizzical looks, as if waiting for the other to crack and explain that it was their joke. But it was too messed up — neither of us was capable of it. And we had slept in the same bed, we would have noticed if the other person had gone out, murdered a rabbit, and left it on display.

We slowly got in the car, backed around it, and drove to the site. All throughout the trip, we had the peculiar feeling of being watched. We set up cameras and hiked through the dense forest, coming across dead rabbits every once in awhile. Some were draped over tree branches. Some lay on the ground. All of them had been hacked apart somehow. And if this all wasn’t disturbing enough, when we returned back to the car, all of the doors had mysteriously opened, and a bloody hatchet was sitting upright in the cup holder.

Ava cried out of fear, but quickly got another idea. She began to mutter angrily underneath her breath and talked to one of the other crewmen. I sat in the car and stared at the weapon with great intensity. I heard nothing of the conversation going outside. She came back a few minutes later, and told me “she hated this fucking town and the damn mountains.” I smiled and put my hand on hers, a gesture that comforted her enough to turn over and gently kiss me.

She brought me back to the tunnel that night. The moon sat high in the sky, and she shook with adrenaline as she stepped out of the car. I had been given a flashlight and a flare, while she rummaged in the back for something else. With the sound of success she pulled out a black case, opened it up, and extracted a large hunting rifle. I stared at her with amazement, as she held the weapon. She smiled at my flabbergasted expression and casually said, “Don’t worry. I have a license.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. And then everything happened. Way too fast.

I walked into the tunnel until I heard scuttling at the far end. As I walked I began to jokingly say, “Here bunny, bunny, bunny. Come here bunny, bunny, bunny.” Then when the scuttling began to faster, in what I assumed was a run, I put it in high gear. Following the directions I was given, I bolted the opposite direction and lit the flare. I tossed it to the side of the mouth so that it perfectly illuminated anything that could possibly come out. I ran towards the car, where Ava braced herself with the rifle. She steadied it against the trunk of the car and looked extremely focused.

And before I could even register, I heard a gunshot, a scream, a moan, and more scuttling. She dropped the rifle and we both chased after the sound, finding only one thing at the mouth of the tunnel. As I shined a flashlight down into the depths, I could have sworn I saw the twisted silhouette of something limping out the other end. I turned my attention over towards Ava, who sat on the ground, shivering. In her hands, she held one white felt ear from a homemade bunny costume.

When we finished the mission, she decided to take some personal time and go home. After kissing her goodbye at the airport, I got two texts from her that day. The first: “They played Donnie Darko on the flight. How is that even okay?” I laughed at it, not even thinking about the coincidence of the bunny character. The second was a picture message of her standing in her bedroom at home, holding up a crude bunny mask. A look of pure panic clung to her face as if she was realizing what you were realizing in real time: The bunny mask that had inexplicably ended up in her carry-on only had one felt ear.