The Tiger and the Snake

Eyes snapped open in the darkness.

Preston was wide awake. No grogginess at all. Adrenaline in spades though. Plenty of that.

He'd kept a dream journal for years. Sometimes it helped with his paintings. He switched on the light, sitting up. The covers fell away from his shirtless form as he wrote it all down. He underlined some things. He circled others. He put big huge question marks next to other things. 

He tossed it aside when he was done. In the normal course of things, the artist would have just...gone back to sleep.

Thirty minutes of aimless staring at his ceiling, though, in which he couldn't bring himself to turn off the light, prompted him up and out of bed. He'd heard the damned panther legend all his life. He knew where to go.

He rummaged in his closet, pulled on jeans instead of slacks, pulled on a collared shirt over that. Sneakers. Then he grabbed a few other supplies. Paper. Charcoal. 

This is barking insane. It's 4 in the morning.

He threw it all into a messenger bag, then got into his little Mazda. He drove to the bridge. He pulled his Coleman flashlight out of the back; a camping light that he used when he needed one because it stood upright. 

And then he knelt in the morning dew and pressed that paper to the stone remnant of the bridge, furiously taking a rubbing of the carvings.

Carvings

Circles, lines, twirls appeared on his paper. Thick as if their creator had been affected by a most extreme horror vacui; each sign and symbol containing more, smaller ones.

Familiar? They felt they belong in his dream; he could not, however, remind every single image of it. But, familiar, of course! He'd seen them many times, not unlike anyone in Sandsbridge. He knew the legend surrounding the old bridge; a legend involving a large feline, but, for what he could tell, no snake.

As he proceeded to rub additional portions of said carvings, he had to remove something from the stone surface. That 'something' being the dead bodies of three dragonflies.

"Ugh."

At first, Preston was inclined to just pluck up the dragonflies and fling them away. 

But it was a strange night, and he was doing strange things, and before he knew it he was using a small paint scraper to lift the dragonflies up. He laid them down on a sheet of paper, then dug in his bag. He had an empty baby food jar in there which he usually used for water when he worked in the watercolor medium. He slipped the bugs in there, grimacing at the entire exercise, capped the thing quickly and slipped it back into his bag. He exhaled, then went back to his rubbings.

Batshit. I'm acting batshit. 

He finished and looked at his work. It was all interesting, and perhaps he could incorporate them into his paintings. But why was he out here at 4 AM taking rubbings?

I could take rubbings at the maze, too?

Now, Preston? It will still be there after a bit of a coffee.

No. I'm going to do it now.

And now he was talking to himself. Well, it was early. He carefully folded the rubbings into his portfolio. Next, the maze.