Continued from Part 11:

We didn’t speak more than was needed on the hike back. Tucker walked along with his jaw set against the pain, thinking furiously. Henry seemed lost. Even after the mushrooms wore off, he stared at things along the trail like he’d never seen them before in his life.

We’d agreed to make a decision about ditching the mushrooms before …

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Continued from Part 10:

I tried to wrench my hand away. “Henry, goddammit, that was Tucker. He needs help, we—”

Henry was whipping his head back and forth, eyes squeezed shut. “He’s gone, man, he’s gone, we can’t go, stay here—”

I yanked my hand away and crouched down next to him. “Listen, just—you’re safe here, okay? You’re okay. You just—just wait here f…

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Continued from Part 9:

I had nowhere else to go and it was getting dark, the light was fading in the sky or maybe just my eyes, and the man was saying follow me, follow me, like he was sad for me or maybe both of us, so I followed him down, spiraling down, into the earth, away from the darkening sky and the screaming up above. It was peaceful down in the…

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Continued from Part 8:

I expected to find Tucker in spirits as high as mine, but his face looked drawn, from what I could see in the growing shadows. He was clearing his throat.

“What’s going on?” I said. “We fucking did it, man. We won. We’re going home.”

He gave me a weak smile. “I know. We’re just not there yet. And Bone Man said it’s dangerous out here…

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Continued from Part 7:

I took a deep breath and held it. Without giving myself a chance to think twice, I stood up and started walking down the path, in full view of the muttering man and whoever might be watching from the windows of the house.

I stepped out from under the trees and into the yard. As I edged carefully toward him, the old man kept whispering to himself. I had almost reached the nearest side of the stone circle before he seemed to notice me.

His mouth paused mid-verse, half-open, and looped into a droopy smile. Slowly, his eyelids rolled open. When he looked at me, his pupils were as big as storm drains, whirlpooling all the light in the clearing into them.

If he was surprised to find a stranger standing in his yard, interrupting his prayers, he didn’t show it.

“Hey, man,” said Bone Man, casually, smiling, as if he’d just woken up from a nap. “You hungry?”

Over the weeks we’d spent getting ready to go looking for Bone Man, I’d been practicing what I’d say when I finally met him.

Working for barter goods, lying awake at night, sitting around with Tucker—I went through it over and over again in my head: all the ways to sound tough, or clever, winning Bone Man over and convincing him to do business with us. What to do if he tried to fight us. I had a hundred different lines ready for whatever he threw at us. I was ready to be a gangster. A goddamn stone-cold killer.

And there he stood: moon-eyed, dope-smiled, gazing up at me like a garden gnome. Asking me if I wanted lunch. Not wearing any pants, as far as I could see.

“Smells good,” was all I could think to say.

He grinned and nodded. “Venison stew. I just…” His eyes drifted away to the trees, hands floating, fingers moving like they were searching for the keys on a piano. He pressed his palms together and looked back at me. “Where’s the rest of you?”

“What?”

He shrugged, still grinning. “I thought there’d be more of you.”

“How’d you know anybody was coming?”

Waving the question away, his fingers absently traced shapes in the air. “Just a feeling.” He peered at me. “That ever happen to you?”

“I guess, yeah.”

His gaze wandered back to the trees as he nodded his head. “Right on.”

We were getting nowhere fast.

“I was hoping to barter with you,” I said.

His eyes meandered back to me. “You got any tobacco?”

“I, uh, think Ray’s got some.”

He looked over my shoulder. “Is that Ray?”

I turned to see Tucker creeping down the path into the clearing. “No. That’s Tucker. And I’m Mark. And you’re…”

He laughed. “I’m nobody, you know?” His hands danced out again. “I’m just a little man. Should have been a pair of ragged claws… you know how it is. Scuttling across the floors of silent seas… how’s it go, man?”

Tucker walked up to us. He cleared his throat. “Fine,” he said quietly.

“Right on,” said the little man. He smiled at us triumphantly, like we were a pair of interesting birds, unknown to science, who’d happened to land in his yard.

“This is Tucker,” I said.

“Who doesn’t have the tobacco.”

“Right.” I looked at Tucker. “No tobacco?”

Tucker shook his head.

“Because he’s not Ray,” said the grinning man, beaming proudly, as if we’d all cracked the code together.

Tucker cleared his throat and looked at me frantically. “This is… Bone Man?”

“I guess.” I looked at the man, who was intently following some unseen drama in the treetops. “You’re Bone Man?”

He nodded absently, mouth ajar, entranced by the swaying branches. “That’s what they call me.”

“Right. Yes.” I nodded reassuringly at Tucker. “We were hoping to barter with you.”

Bone Man dragged his attention back to us. “Right on. Let me check with my friends.” He turned and ambled back toward the house.

“Wait—” Tucker squeaked.

A fist clenched around my heart.

I expected a herd of bull-necked speed freaks to come bursting out through the back door, ready to rob us and leave us for dead. Ray and Henry were nowhere in sight. Tucker and I would be laid out in pieces next to the fly-covered haunch on the bloody altar before we could be rescued.

Bone Man knelt by one of the standing stones and pulled a leather bag out of the grass. He carried it back to where we stood and plopped onto the ground, sitting cross-legged in front of us. I was relieved to see that he wore a tattered pair of cotton shorts underneath his shirt.

He closed his eyes and shook the bag. His mouth moved silently. Still with his eyes closed, he upended the bag and spilled out its contents. A collection of bones tumbled onto the dirt: ribs, vertebrae, femurs, straw-thin bird bones, predators’ teeth. As they clacked together and settled onto the ground, he opened his eyes, surveying the scattering in front of him—nodded, grunted, scratched his chin through his scraggly beard.

As he sat with his back toward the house and studied the bones, Henry appeared at the edge of yard behind him, crouching among the weeds.

I glanced at Tucker. He was staring at Henry, looking like he’d swallowed his own tongue.

With the carbine’s stock pressed to his shoulder, Henry quick-stepped across the yard behind Bone Man, aiming first at the windows of the house, then at the back door. He reached the nearest corner and stepped lightly onto the porch, hugging the wall, picking his way around a mess of old crates and tools.

“Looks like a good day for you two,” said Bone Man, absorbed in his reading.

“Yeah?” I said.

Tucker let out a weak cough.

Henry crept along the porch and paused beside the entrance to the house, lowering his gun just enough to ease the screen door open.

“As far as getting what you came for, yeah,” said Bone Man. “Real auspicious energy. But it won’t be easy.” He gazed up at us and slowly traced an arc in the air with his hands. “Bad vibes on the periphery. Heavy shit.”

I tried to keep my eyes on Bone Man’s upturned face, while at the edge of my vision, I watched Henry disappear into the house and softly close the screen door.

“There’s a higher purpose here,” said Bone Man. He looked serious for the first time since I stepped into the clearing. “Somebody’s watching over you.” He paused. “Or maybe just watching you.”

I looked hard at him. “Who?”

He gave me a sly smile. “You don’t know?”

Tucker turned his head to look at me.

“I don’t,” I said to Bone Man. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Not my place,” he said with an apologetic look. He held out his hands to me, palms up. “I’m just a little man, you know?”

Behind him, Henry slipped out the back door.

He had the gun trained on Bone Man. Underneath the blank, black stare of his sunglasses, there was murder on his face. He stepped quickly across the yard.

Tucker and I both yelled at once.

Just as Bone Man turned his head to look around, Henry’s booted foot came down between his shoulder blades and sent him sprawling. He landed face-first in the dirt, scattering the spread of bones. Henry stood over him with the carbine aimed at his head.

“You the piece of shit that tried to blow me up?” he shouted. The cords in his neck stood out beneath the collar of his damp shirt. Veins pulsed around his temples.

Bone Man spluttered in the dust. “Jesus, man, it was just a little popper, a firecracker! Not enough charge to—”

Henry kicked him savagely in the ribs. “Shut the fuck up.” He leaned down and held the carbine’s barrel close to Bone Man’s head. “There’s nobody else here,” he said to us. “Let’s just cap this guy and take the stuff.”

Tucker waved his hands helplessly.

“Henry,” I said. “We’re not killing him.”

“Why the fuck not.”

“ ‘Cause we’re not thieves. And we’re not killers.”

Henry spat into the dirt beside Bone Man’s head. “Speak for yourself.”

“Come on, Henry.” It was Ray’s voice behind us. “We don’t want to make a bunch of noise and rile up the neighbors.”

“Then let me borrow your knife.”

Ray stepped up next to us, and sighed. “It’s been a long day. Nobody’s got the energy to bury a body, and we’re wasting daylight already. Let’s just talk this out.”

“You can have it,” said Bone Man from the ground. “I’m not asking for anything.”

“I know I can have it. It’s just up to me whether you’re still breathing afterwards.”

“Goddammit, Henry, he’s cooperating,” I said. “Just let him up.”

Something like a low growl came from Henry’s throat. His hands squeezed the grip of the carbine with whitened knuckles. We waited for the explosion.

No shot came.

Slowly, the tension in Henry’s body ebbed away. He spat again, and stepped over Bone Man’s splayed legs. “Got lucky today, asshole,” he snarled.

“You check the front yet?” asked Ray.

Henry kicked at a rib bone that lay close to his foot. “Just the house.”

Ray nodded. “Maybe want to take a look? I’ll keep an eye on things here.”

“Yeah. Fine. But if I see one more goddamn tripwire, I’m coming back and airing this son of a bitch out.”

“Fair enough,” said Ray placidly, standing one tip of his bow on the ground and resting his hands on the other. Henry stomped across the yard and disappeared around the other side of the house.

Tucker helped Bone Man to his feet. “We can trade. We’re not robbing you.”

Bone Man stood unsteadily, coughed, and spat the grit from his mouth. “I’ve got plenty. It doesn’t cost much to grow. And it’s not like I’m running a company out here. I’m just one strand in the mycelium, facilitating the flow. For those that deserve it, right? Although, yeah, still hoping for some tobacco.” He eyed Ray cautiously. “You got any tobacco?”

“Nope,” said Ray, gazing at the sky.

Bone Man’s eyes narrowed. “You sure?”

Ray nodded.

“Bummer.” He turned back to Tucker. “How much you need?”

Tucker cleared his throat. “Two pounds.”

Bone Man prodded tenderly at the ribs where he’d been kicked. “There’s some ready in the kitchen cabinet, just inside the door. Help yourself.”

“We need something fresh for a spore print, too.”

“You know how to grow?”

“I think so,” said Tucker quietly.

Bone Man looked at him levelly. “You sure you’re ready for that? Joining the priesthood?”

Tucker nodded.

“The cost is high sometimes.”

Tucker frowned. “I thought you said it didn’t cost much.”

“Different kinds of cost,” said Bone Man gravely. “There’s, you know, expectations.” His hands resumed their weaving in the empty space between them. “These are ancient things. Powerful, right? Like, the timeline where they exist, is just…” He made an expansive, swirling gesture, circulating an invisible orb between his outstretched fingers. “And the way they interact with us, it’s… you’re a conduit, right? But they don’t always understand. Human emotions, and everything. Attachments. Having only one body. The help they give isn’t always the help you want, you know?”

“Are we… still talking about mushrooms?”

Bone Man squinted at him. “You’re sure you want this? You know what you’re getting into?”

“I’ll figure it out. We need this.”

Bone Man nodded. “Sure, man, yeah. Vaya con Dios. I’ll set you up. As long as you can keep that maniac away from me,” he said, tilting his head toward the front of the house. He turned toward Ray. “You good with us going inside?”

Ray shrugged. “As long as nobody kills nobody. It’s not me you have to worry about if you get squirrelly. I’ve used up all my good deeds for today.”

Bone Man waved peaceably and led the way across the yard, limping slightly as he went. Tucker followed him through the back door.

Ray and I were left standing among the circle of stones. He studied me without speaking, while I shuffled nervously under his gaze. For a moment, he seemed about to say something, but then thought better of it and resumed his silent vigil.

In the sky above us, the sun tilted toward the horizon. The copper-colored light thickened into evening. A mourning dove cooed from somewhere nearby.

The miles we had already overcome that day turned back around to face us on the long hike home.

Tall grass rustled as Henry returned from the far side of the house. “All clear out front. No surprises. Just more of that spooky quiet shit.”

The screen door’s rusty hinges complained as Tucker emerged onto the back porch, settling the newly-loaded pack on his back, with Bone Man following behind him.

Henry lifted his chin toward Tucker’s pack, still holding his gun ready. “We happy?”

Tucker flashed a tense thumbs-up. “Very happy. All friends here.”

Bone Man was careful to keep Tucker between himself and Henry as he stepped out onto the porch. “I wish I could invite you all over for dinner, but, you know, not feeling so great all of a sudden. I should probably lie down for a bit. Must have done something to my back, somehow.” He looked warily at Henry. “Where’d you serve, soldier boy?”

“Venezuela. Three tours.”

“Right on. I did two in Iran.”

Henry grunted. “Tough shit. Which company? Infantry?”

“Nah. Recon. For an old company called Vinnell. I was a tunnel rat in Karaj. Did my last stint with a sniper team.”

Henry looked at him with mild interest. “Well shit, man. You should’ve said something. I wouldn’t have kicked you so hard if I knew you were a closer. You did the full ride and cashed out?”

Bone Man shook his head and put on a thin smile. Without his dopey, sunburst grin, he suddenly looked like he was eighty years old. “I got killed.” His left hand reached across his body and patted the ribs under his right arm. “Our position got shelled. Mortar shrapnel took a six-inch chunk out of me. I bled out in the chopper… medics said my heart stopped for four minutes before they reeled me back in, you know, got me back in my body. But I didn’t come all the way back to life until I moved out here.” He looked at Henry. “They still calling it the Green Zone over there? Inside the barricades?”

Henry nodded.

“You ever notice how there’s never anything green in the Green Zone? No plants. No bushes, no trees, nothing growing. They cut it all down, ripped it all up. Too many places for things to hide, right? Bombs, snipers, whatever. They sanded everything down to flat concrete. Killed everything else to keep us alive. Maybe it kept us from getting shot, or blown up, or whatever, for a while, I guess.” He rubbed his side absently, his eyes on the past. “But I don’t know if that’s the same as keeping us alive, you know? You die in a different way. And that heavy shit is harder to fix than just fabbing up some new ribs.” He studied Henry for a moment. “Not that a stone-cold operator like you needs to worry about any of that.”

Without waiting for Henry’s reply, he looked up at the sky. “Day’s getting on, huh. It seems like you all have everything you need. I guess you’ll want to be getting on home, right? Wouldn’t want to get caught wandering around out there in the dark. You don’t know what’s out there.”

He looked at Tucker with what seemed like a meaningful glance, before turning his attention back to the rest of us.

“Go ahead and fill up your canteens at the well before you leave”—he pointed toward an old pump handle by the neglected shed—“and then you can see yourselves on out. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, but I’ve still got my old rifle inside, and if I see any of you here again… si vis pacem, para bellum, you know? No hard feelings. Good luck out there.” With that, he slipped back through the screen door and into the kitchen, closing the interior door with a heavy thud. The rattling of locks, chains, and deadbolts came from inside. We were left in the growing stillness of late afternoon, with nothing but the buzzing flies on the altar for company.

“Well,” said Henry philosophically. “Reckon we can still burn the house down.”

Ray squeezed his eyes shut with a pained expression. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s late. We’ll probably have to bivouac out here somewhere no matter what. But if we can all refrain from messing around too much, it doesn’t have to be in the forest. We’ll make it back to that little neighborhood before dark if we hustle up.” He favored me with a wry smile. “Unless Mark can use his magic powers to find us a bed and breakfast nearby.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s get moving. I’m happy to take point again. Just try to keep up this time.”

Ray barked out a laugh. “Damn me, listen to this. Old Mark wins a showdown with one burned-out hippy, and all of a sudden he’s taking my place. After everything I’ve done.” He chuckled. “Lead on, then.”

I was feeling twelve feet tall as we marched back through the old forest. We had everything we’d come for, and still had our packs full of barter goods. Nobody had gotten hurt. We were heading home.

The bomb bolted to the tree was waiting for us with its tripwire, plainly visible from the direction we were walking, even in the gathering gloom. It seemed like a harmless joke now. We all stepped casually over the wire.

Once we were safely on the other side, Henry told us to wait up. He pulled a heavy section of branch from out of the brush and heaved it onto the tripwire. A loud explosion came from the other side of the tree. The peace of the twilight forest was shattered, and a haze of powder smoke filled the air. Henry dusted his hands off.

“Asshole,” he muttered as he rejoined us.

Ray had packed his pipe while we waited for Henry, and was puffing on it serenely. “Hope that doesn’t bother the neighbors.”

“It’s his problem now,” said Henry. “Let’s go.”

I expected to find Tucker in spirits as high as mine, but his face looked drawn, from what I could see in the growing shadows. He was clearing his throat.

“What’s going on?” I said. “We fucking did it, man. We won. We’re going home.”

He gave me a weak smile. “I know. We’re just not there yet. And Bone Man said it’s dangerous out here.”

“Yeah, but there’s four of us, and we’ve got a gun. The animals aren’t gonna bother us, and the meth heads are gonna be asleep.”

“He said it wasn’t just animals, though.” Tucker looked nervously around the darkening forest. “He told me to watch out for the green man.”

“What the hell is a green man?”

“He wouldn’t say. Or couldn’t.”

The hush in the forest gathered back around us, as evening turned to night.

Continued in Part 9.

Continued from Part 6:

“C’mon, Ray,” said Henry, click-click-clicking his safety switch and peering into the trees. “Looks like a nice little trail through there. Big hunter like you ain’t scared of a few little bones, right?”

“We’ve come too far to turn back now,” I said.

Ray blew out a breath and yanked his hat back onto his head. “I swear to God, this is the last job I do with you all. Lord have mercy.” He stepped aside and swung a welcoming arm toward the trail. “Henry, my friend, you can take point this time. I’ll follow you. Quiet and slow, for God’s sake. And if we see any blood on those trees we’re pulling out. Got it?”

Henry grinned. “All green, boss.”

We stepped past the dangling bones and into the shadow of the forest.

The path between the trees led us on like a dare.

Moss traced a faint line through a wide stretch of ferns, a knee-high jungle underneath the forest canopy. It might have been a deer trail—except that, above the ground, a tunnel had been carved through the undergrowth: wide enough and tall enough for a person to walk comfortably, without getting snagged on either side.

The quiet pressed in around us.

Not silence, exactly. If I listened, I could hear the rustling of living things among the leaves. Birds called softly in the branches, too shy to raise their voices. Nothing echoed. Saying it was hushed isn’t quite right, either. It seemed like there had never been a sound among those trees that needed hushing. Maybe it had been quiet ever since God wrapped up His work on the Sixth Day and clocked out for a rest.

“What the fuck,” said Henry in a low voice.

“Keep your voice down,” whispered Ray.

“Why?” Henry whispered back. “You hear something?”

“No. You just don’t shout in a church.” He pointed at Henry, then gestured down the path, tipping the flat side of his hand forward, twice: move out.

Henry replied with a tight smile and a raised middle finger, then adjusted his grip on the carbine and stepped into the lead.

Ray waved me and Tucker along after him, then followed us, bringing up the rear.

We walked on.

There was no thrashing through the brush. No cursing. Our shoes made hardly any noise on the moss below. The sound of water sloshing in Ray’s half-empty canteen seemed loud enough to wake the dead.

It felt as though we had shrunk, somehow.

I grew up playing in the woods around Madison: climbing trees, building forts, playing soldiers with branches for guns. When I got bigger and hungrier, I tried running trap lines with snares made from baling wire and hunting squirrels with a homemade slingshot, hoping for a little extra meat on our table. I lost patience for it eventually. After that, I spent most of my time in the woods hunting for parties and chasing girls. But I was always at home among the trees. Never felt afraid.

I’d never been in a forest like this.

Maybe it was an old forest preserve. Or it had been overlooked by the loggers, somehow, an accident of property lines and economics. The trees around us made the ones I grew up climbing seem like feeble broomsticks. Tall pines stretched up into a sky that was screened completely by branches. We walked between oaks and hickories that were bigger around than my arms could reach.

I felt like a kid playing under the kitchen table while the grown-ups ate and talked: hemmed in by the legs of people much bigger than me, unnoticed down below in the shadows, listening to the murmur of serious conversations happening far above my head.

It should have been peaceful.

But there was a wrongness that dogged me as we slunk between the feet of those giants.

At first I thought it was just nerves, knowing that we were getting closer to Bone Man and whatever waited for us there. I told myself that everything was under control, as much as it could be. I just couldn’t shake the feeling off.

Ray’s words from back along the blood-marked trail kept echoing in my head: the woods are probably full of traps.

Full of traps.

Traps.

All at once, a picture bloomed in my mind, like a memory that hadn’t happened yet. A spiderweb made of metal. A fat black spider waiting in it. Full of poison. Ready to jump. Gleaming coldly among the branches.

I shoved past Tucker and shouted along the path toward Henry, startling the whole forest.

Henry dropped into a crouch and ducked into the shelter of a big oak, pressing his shoulder into the bark and sighting down the carbine’s barrel. “Where?” he barked as I ran up to him.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Watch for traps.”

“The fuck are you—”

I looked down at the path and the ferns that reached over it.

There was a line stretched over the path, hidden among the green fronds.

Kneeling down carefully, I pushed the greenery aside. A black length of wire ran six inches above the ground. It was strung between two trees on either side of the path, almost invisible. I followed it to the base of the oak that Henry crouched beside, where it fed through a metal eyelet and ran up the trunk, hidden from Henry’s side of the tree. On the other side, at head height, the wire hooked onto a spring-loaded hammer from an old gun. It was set to strike the capped end of a metal pipe that was bolted onto the tree trunk.

Tucker and Ray were behind us. “What the hell is going on?” said Ray.

“Fucking tripwire,” muttered Henry.

Ray reached his foot out and nudged me. “Move aside,” he said, and stepped up to look at the makeshift bomb. He studied it in silence for a moment. Then he turned to face me.

“Mark,” he said in a low voice.

I thought about Henry lying in gore-splattered ferns beside the path, clothes smoking, half his head blown away.

“Mark,” Ray said again. The steel was back in his voice. “Look at me.”

My knees wouldn’t stop shaking.

I looked up at Ray.

His jaw was clenched, and his eyes were hard. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“You said there might be—”

Tucker gasped as Ray grabbed my pack straps with both hands. My feet barely dragged across the dirt as he pushed me a couple steps down the path, away from the tripwire. His face bent close to mine. “Don’t you lie to me this time,” he hissed, still holding onto me, shaking me to emphasize every bitten-off pause. “Tell me. What the fuck. Is going on.”

My knees wouldn’t stop shaking. Ray was holding me up almost as much as he was holding onto me. I couldn’t find the words to answer him.

Underneath the anger and the sweat and the dirt, I saw the fear rising up on his thin, weatherbeaten face.

“I don’t know,” I said weakly.

Tucker stepped up next to us and reached up, putting his hand on Ray’s arm. “Ray, take it easy,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “He’s scared.”

Ray dropped his hold on my straps and brushed Tucker aside. He started to walk back the way we came, toward the sunny opening that marked the entrance to the forest. “I quit,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happening here, but I’m not—”

I didn’t wait to hear the rest. Turning, pushing past Tucker and Henry, I hopped over the tripwire and walked quickly away from them, further into the forest.

Tucker’s panicky voice called my name. I worried he might chase after and try to stop me. I started jogging down the path.

I didn’t care if anyone followed me. Didn’t care if I died—snagged another tripwire or got murdered by Bone Man. Didn’t care if I made it back to Madison, with or without the mushrooms.

I needed to figure out what was happening to me.

The path among those elder trees stretched on, and I kept running.

More bones appeared along the path. Ribs and femurs were twined together into strange shapes, crowned with the skulls of small animals, lashed and hung onto tree trunks. Like signs written in another alphabet—warnings, or invitations, or both.

The smell of woodsmoke crept into the air.

I kept running.

Finally, up ahead, the shadows of the forest lightened. Straight lines and flat surfaces showed between the trees. There was the pitch of a roof and the walls of a building, down in a clearing. Silver-white sycamores stuck out around it like exposed ribs.

I stopped to catch my breath at the top of a small hill, crouching behind a stand of mountain laurel. My pulse hammered in my ears. I couldn’t hear anyone behind me. Couldn’t hear anything except the train-engine rush of my own breathing.

After spending the whole day in the clear air of the empty country, everything washed by years of rain and untroubled by people, the scents of settled life coming up from the clearing were three-dimensional. I could smell the hot iron of a stove within the woodsmoke. Simmering coffee. The venison that somebody had cooked, maybe even the potatoes and onions that had gone with it.

My empty stomach grumbled: even if it was my last meal, I would have traded everything in my pack of barter goods for a few final bites of that fry-up.

The path led down out of the forest, into the backyard of a broken-down house with white siding. Most of what I could see looked like every other hard luck home in Madison. There was a battered shed held together by a patchwork of scrap wood, the stubbornness of old age, and the grace of God. Next to it was a chicken coop. A few hens ambled around the rusted carcasses of a small tractor and an ancient car. Piles of sheet metal and mouldering lumber nestled in the goldenrod around the yard’s edges. A washline ran from a post on the sagging back porch to the branch of a crabapple tree, barely holding the scraps of drying clothes above the seedheads of the uncut grass beneath it.

But then there were the stones. As big as garbage cans, somebody had dragged them into the yard and placed them in a wide circle. There were the stripped logs sunk upright into the ground, carved with swirling designs and strange, staring faces. There was the bloody haunch of a deer placed on a flat stone in the center of the circle, buzzing with flies in the afternoon sun.

And there was a man standing over it.

He was facing toward the forest. His eyes were closed, with his arms raised to his waist, palms skyward, as if he were carrying an invisible load of firewood. He swayed gently, back and forth, head bobbing like a sunflower. His gray beard waggled as he spoke noiselessly into the air. A white band was wrapped around his bald head, shining in the sunlight. He wore a long, colorless shirt that hung to just above his knees. A leather belt was cinched around his thin waist, with a few small pouches dangling from it. Pale legs stuck out below the shirt’s ragged hem, naked and skinny, with bare feet planted in the dirt.

From where I crouched behind the bush, the closest thing to a weapon I could see was an antique axe sunk into an old stump, next to the woodpile by the back porch.

I’d crawled through the woods all day long—past blood and bones, scared to death, thinking I was heading into an Old West shootout with a gang of murderers, or about to be sacrificed to the Devil by some bloodthirsty cult.

And here was this half-naked old head. Probably stoned out of his gourd. Talking to the trees.

I started to laugh—until I remembered that somebody down there was crazy enough to make a pipe bomb and wire it up to a tree.

Maybe the old nut was all by himself. Or maybe he was just a decoy, with the rest of the gang still lurking in the shadows of the house.

If Tucker and the rest had followed me, they’d be close to catching up. If they’d given up and gone home, I was on my own—with no gun, no bow, and only the goods I had in my pack. I could wait and see if they showed up, or turn back myself.

I thought about going home empty-handed, with nothing but the memory of that voice creeping around in my skull.

The old guy down in the clearing looked like he knew some things about hearing voices.

I took a deep breath and held it. Without giving myself a chance to think twice, I stood up and started walking down the path, in full view of the muttering man and whoever might be watching from the windows of the house.

I stepped out from under the trees and into the yard. As I edged carefully toward him, the old man kept whispering to himself. I had almost reached the nearest side of the stone circle before he seemed to notice me.

His mouth paused mid-verse, half-open, and looped into a droopy smile. Slowly, his eyelids rolled open. When he looked at me, his pupils were as big as storm drains, whirlpooling all the light in the clearing into them.

If he was surprised to find a stranger standing in his yard, interrupting his prayers, he didn’t show it.

“Hey, man,” said Bone Man, casually, smiling, as if he’d just woken up from a nap. “You hungry?”

Continued in Part 8, coming soon.

Continued from Part 5:

We fought through the forest a yard at a time. The shapes of fallen trees hunched all around us in the gloom, decked in ferns. I looked up into the branches above and wondered what it would feel like to be knocked flat by a mountain lion. How long it would take to die after the first vicious bite to the back of the neck. I wondered if wolves could slip through the shadowed jumble of foliage that surrounded us—if we would even hear them coming before they closed in—if anyone could get a clear shot before they dragged us down. I wondered if there were already bones hidden under the leaves beneath our feet.

Somewhere above us, outside the leafy twilight, the sun swung toward the horizon. And we still had miles to go.

Finally, Ray shoved through the mesh of branches and vines in front of him, like opening a door to the outside, letting in a shaft of sunlight. We followed him across the threshold and stumbled back into the day we’d left behind.

The trees gave way to an open stretch of tall grass dotted with black walnut saplings. In front of us was the half-buried skeleton of a ruined garage. Next to it stood a farmhouse with a caved-in roof, its windows blindfolded with wild grapevines and Virginia creeper. Flaking white paint and clapboard siding disappeared beneath the conspiracy of leaves that was gently pulling the forest over it like a blanket.

Ray unhooked his canteen from his belt, gave it an appraising shake next to his ear, took a quick swig, and put it away. “Watch your step,” he said. “No telling what’s in these yards under all this mess. Could be rusted metal, broken glass, barbwire, rotted well covers… it’s a long way to a doctor if you put your foot in something nasty.”

“We getting close?” said Henry.

“Getting closer,” said Ray. “Other side of this little place here. Might be doing some more bushwhacking to get through to Beaver Creek.” He squinted up at the sun. “Hopefully it’s not as bad as what we just came through. We’re already running behind.”

“Fuck,” said Henry.

“Ain’t too late to turn back,” said Ray, looking from Tucker to me.

“Is there a road we could take to make up some time?” I said.

Ray took off his hat and wiped the sweat away from his face. “Could be, if we’re lucky. Ain’t much to call a road out here. Might even be harder than going through the woods. The asphalt’s cracked and pitted all to hell under there, and if the leaves are too thick, you can’t see what you’re walking on. Slow going, and hard to keep your balance.”

Henry spat. “Fuck all this.”

Ray grinned. “Told you it was different out here.”

Henry wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Too bad you were dumb enough to get stuck in this shit your whole life, huh.”

Ray shrugged, taking his bow from his back and knocking an arrow onto the string. “Suits me better than driving around in a Humvee and gunning down kids,” he said mildly. “But maybe I’m just old fashioned. We moving out?”

Henry opened his mouth to reply, but I cut him off before he could start something. “Let’s check the road,” I said quickly.

Ray and Henry began picking their way carefully across the yard toward the side of the house, heads down, keeping a safe distance from each other.

I waited for Tucker, who was taking a drink from the old soda bottle he’d brought for water. “You doing alright?” I said.

He wiped his mouth and nodded. “Tired,” he said. “It looked a lot closer on the map.”

“We’re getting there. As long as those two don’t kill each other.”

“They might kill us, if this doesn’t work out. What if Bone Man doesn’t want to barter? Or if he’s sold out of mushrooms?”

“Then Ray and Henry will split the barter goods and we’ll figure something else out. We just need a few mushrooms to start growing our own anyway, right?”

Tucker cleared his throat. “I think so. Probably. Yeah.”

“We got this,” I said, punching him gently on the shoulder. “Just think about going back to The Haunt for a beer and telling Liza that you’re in business.”

He smiled faintly. “Yeah. That’ll be good.”

We heard Ray’s two-note whistle from the other side of the house.

“Let’s go,” I said.

The road in front of the old house was buried under a carpet of dead leaves, running north to south through an abandoned neighborhood. Glassless windows left black holes in the empty houses along the street. In a few places, piles of charred timbers, scorched plywood, and melted siding showed through the clutch of leaves. All that was left from old insurance fires, or maybe a last gesture of fuck-you defiance, aimed at the place that had swallowed these people’s dreams: a final, fiery middle finger held up to the grasping plants they tried to cut back, year after year, mowing and trimming and slashing away every summer.

The people had left, defeated, and the forest remained. It waited patiently all around. Promised to erase everything they’d built in its own good time.

Henry and Ray stood by the road, at the end of their flattened tracks through the knee-deep grass, like scarecrows in a field gone to seed.

“How’s it look?” I called to them.

“Depends which kind of bad you want,” answered Ray. “We can try hacking through the jungle again. Or take our chances cutting through the yards, and hope nobody falls through something. Or we can go on the road and skate around on this rock pile out in the open.”

“I’m not going back in those fucking woods unless we have to,” said Henry.

“Roads can’t be any worse.” I said, looking at Tucker.

Tucker shrugged. “I’d rather get shot on the road,”

Ray gave a short laugh. “That’s the spirit. Let’s try our luck and see if we can make up some distance.”

We went east. Just as Ray had said, the road beneath the mat of leaves was a tilting scree of broken asphalt. We kept to the shoulder at the edge of the old front yards, walking single file, stumbling now and then on hidden cracks and potholes. The empty houses watched us as we struggled past.

It was hard to imagine that the place had once been full of people—that there was ever a reason to live so far away from everything. Buildings stood like wrecked ships sunk into the weeds, with a few remnants of normal life strewn across their overgrown yards. There was the rusted frame of a car that someone had once thought of fixing up and driving into town. A few scraps of colored fabric clinging to a flagpole, left to decay, blown away bit by bit on the wind in the years since it was new, when someone had hung it out with pride. Front porches with rocking chairs rotting to mulch. A hand-painted sign for a yard sale—”MOVING, EVERYTHING MUST GO”—on a date long past. All of it slowly going under the rising tide of green.

One house had a screen door on its front entrance, half-opened to the shadows inside, propped ajar by debris. I stopped and looked at that screen door for a while. Tried to imagine what the house was like when it was still a home.

In my mind, I saw the house from the inside, looking out onto the front yard, with the smell of mowed grass still hanging in the air, the screen door letting in the golden light on a summer evening, crickets starting to sing outside, and two little kids peering out, pressed up to the screen, shoulder to shoulder, silhouetted against the filtered sunlight, waiting patiently for their dad to come home from work, back from wherever people worked when there were still jobs around, driving home from some factory nearby, pulling his gas-powered car into the driveway, tires crunching on gravel, maybe bringing home some cold soda for his children and a six-pack for him and his wife to share, drinking beer and sitting on the front porch, waving to the neighbors, watching the kids play in the front yard among the lightning bugs before running off to meet their friends, dusk settling down to night as lamps were switched on inside kitchens and living rooms, lighting the windows one by one, all along the street that now stood as empty as a broken promise.

There was no way I should have remembered all those things. They were from someone else’s life. But I remembered it, somehow.

“Mark.”

I turned and found Tucker standing next to me. “You okay?” he said.

“Yep,” I said. A tightness in my throat made my voice sound strange. “All good.”

“You sure?”

I nodded, and turned to continue down the street. Henry was stopped up ahead—crouched next to the curb, unmoving, head down. Ray was still walking ahead, apparently unaware that Henry had fallen behind.

“You talk to him yet?” I asked Tucker.

“No,” said Tucker. “You think he's hurt?”

“Dunno,” I said, quickening my pace. Tucker hurried after me.

When we walked up beside him, Henry was cradling a shoe in his hands—a small sneaker, probably for a kid not quite old enough to be in school, made of white canvas with white cotton shoelaces, rubber soles, decorated on the sides with a curving slash of royal blue. Aside from a few scuffs of dirt, it looked almost brand new.

“Henry?” said Tucker. “Whatcha got?”

“How’d this get here?” muttered Henry.

I shrugged. “Somebody’s garbage, I guess.”

He shook his head. “Nice pair like this? No fucking way. This was one of somebody’s favorites. Especially somebody living in a hard-luck place like this used to be.”

“Maybe they dropped it when they were packing up to leave?”

He ignored me, turning the shoe carefully in his hands, not taking his eyes from it, as if it would melt into mist when he looked away. “I always wanted shoes like this when I was little,” he said, his voice quiet.

“I think this one's gonna be a little small for you,” I said, trying to force some good humor into my voice—hoping for a laugh, or at least a smirk, even a casual insult. Anything to shake us loose from his strange stillness.

Instead, he looked at me wearily, like he didn’t have the energy to save me from my own stupidity. His expression was slack behind his sunglasses. Dirt and sweat lined the creases of his face. After regarding me for a minute, his attention returned to the sneaker in his hands. “Little guy must have been heartbroken when they got wherever they were going,” he murmured. “Too late to turn back and search for it. No way to replace it. And here it was, waiting this whole time. Hardly any dirt on it. Looks like it could’ve been dropped yesterday.”

Ray stepped up to where we stood. “Everybody okay?”

I shrugged. Henry was still crouched on the ground, lost in his thoughts with the shoe; Ray and I stood above where he could see. I tapped my temple and gave Ray a questioning look.

Heat stroke? Ray mouthed silently.

I shrugged again.

“All I had growing up was a pair of buckskin mocs that somebody in the village made,” said Henry, ignoring the rest of us. “Until I was big enough to fit into my dad’s old work boots.” He turned to look at Tucker. “You had those old sneakers when we were little, didn’t you. The gray and red ones.”

Tucker nodded. “My dad got them at the secondhand market in Morrisville.”

“There’s a good chance I made those moccasins you had,” said Ray. “I used to make a bunch of them when I got some extra hide, give ‘em away to folks with kids. Still do, once in a while.”

Henry looked back at the sneaker.

We stood around him in silence, shuffling awkwardly.

“You had any water to drink, Henry?” said Ray. “It’s damn hot out here. Started getting a bit lightheaded myself.”

Henry sighed and stood up, still holding the sneaker. “I’m fucking fine, man.” The fire had gone out of his voice. “You just look after yourself. Let’s go.” He turned and walked away from us, down the empty street, heading east.

Ray watched him go, then looked back to us with concern. “What was that about,” he said in a low voice.

“He was like that when we got to him,” I said.

Ray turned back to mark Henry’s progress. “Seems like he’s walking okay. Let’s just keep an eye on him for now. Nothing else we can do.”

We walked on. Past more empty houses, more collapsing garages. Past an old gas station that was looted and stripped and smashed apart so completely that it looked like the wreckage from a tornado. Past a small white church set back from the street, with the announcement board out front robbed of all its plastic letters—all except for those spelling out the word “HOPE,” which someone had stubbornly duct-taped into the sign, safe from the wind until the fraying tape finally weathered away.

Beyond the little huddle of buildings, the country opened up. Old fields dotted with young trees stretched away toward the green hills off in the distance. A trail of smoke rose up into the bright blue sky from the hills behind us. The breeze blew in and rattled the tired leaves in the trees, exhausted after a long summer in the hot sun.

We trudged along, with Ray and Henry walking ahead, Tucker and I trailing behind. None of us talked.

“How are you going to marry Eliza when you’ve barely talked to her?” I said to Tucker, finally breaking the silence.

Tucker cleared his throat. “I’ve talked to her a lot.”

“You have not. When?”

“In school. A few times around town.”

“Where was I?”

He hitched the straps of his pack up higher on his shoulders. “At home, I guess? Helping your mom? Drinking out in the woods?”

“How come you never told me?”

“I must’ve mentioned it.”

“You must have mentioned that you’ve been sneaking around with Eliza Miller? And I just forgot about it?”

He sighed. “We weren’t sneaking. Just talking.”

“Then how come you didn’t tell me?”

He stopped abruptly. “Maybe I just wanted something that was mine,” he said. “I can hardly get a minute to myself in this place without somebody getting into my business. Maybe I don’t want to announce everything I’m doing the minute it happens.”

“Okay. Jesus. Settle down.”

We kept walking.

“Listen,” he said. “I just don’t need your help with everything, okay? We’re not kids anymore. Like you keep reminding me.”

“I know that. You think I want to spend my whole life looking after you?”

“What makes you think I need looking after?”

I couldn’t think of a nice way to say because you’re still a mousey little shit trying to act tough, so I said nothing.

“You’re not coming along to look after me at college, are you?”

“Tucker, don’t be a dick.”

“I’m just saying. I’ve got to start having my own life sooner or later. Once I leave.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why we’re doing this. I want to help you get there.”

Tucker shook his head briskly. “Don’t make this about me. If that’s why we’re doing this, we should go back right now. I don’t want anybody getting murdered just so I can go to school. I’ll be fine. I’ve got rich parents, remember?”

Up ahead, Henry’s foot slid on a loose slab of asphalt, making him stumble before he regained his balance with a shouted curse.

A raven grokked somewhere up in the trees.

“You can’t spend the rest of your life digging ditches,” Tucker said quietly.

I tried to unclench my jaw. Tucker couldn’t fight back if I started hitting him. Ray and Henry were too far ahead to pull me off. “Listen, you—”

North.

The voice stole into my head like a cloud passing in front of the sun. Ringing filled my ears.

“Mark?” Tucker sounded worried.

“I—What?”

He looked at me carefully. “You just went white. You feeling okay?”

“Fine,” I muttered.

“Maybe you should sit down.” He called ahead to the other two before I could stop him. “Hey! Hold up!”

“I said I’m fine. Don’t make it a big deal.”

Henry stopped and turned back toward us.

Ray retraced his steps, walking gingerly back down the broken road to where we stood. "What's up?"

"Not enough water," I said. "Hot out here. Just gonna grab my bottle and—"

North.

I swore and jammed a finger in my ear, jiggling it to try and shake the voice loose.

"What is it?" Ray reached behind his back to one of the large pouches strapped to his belt. "I've got a medkit if—"

I waved him off. "It's fine. Ears just started ringing."

He pulled out his kit and rummaged through its contents. "Might be low on electrolytes. I've got some salt tablets in here somewhere…"

I let Ray sit me down and baby me with water and medicine. Tucker crouched beside me, frowning, while Henry stood by and watched the road. I scanned the woods to the north, searching for whatever the voice had directed me toward.

"What's that?" I asked, once Ray had finished his ministrations. "Looks like a break in the treeline."

Ray turned to look where I was pointing. "Where?"

"North. Across that field. Looks like there might even be a path going up to it.”

“I don’t see anything,” said Tucker.

Ray looked at me, squinting, then back to the trees in the distance. “Hang on.” He reached into another pouch on his belt and produced a small tube—an old rifle scope—which he held up to his eye. “To the left of that big tree?” he asked.

I nodded. “I think so.”

“Does look like there’s an opening, and… damn me. There’s a stick or something hanging from a line there.” He put down the scope and looked intently at me. “That’s almost three hundred yards away.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Something caught my eye.”

“You saw a three-foot gap in the trees. Three hundred yards off the road. Just happened to notice it.”

“Guess so,” I said. “Like I said, something—”

“—caught your eye, yeah.” He scratched his chin and looked at me. “You sure you don’t want to learn how to hunt? Could do pretty well with eyes like that.”

I stood up. “How far are we from Beaver Creek?”

Ray pulled out the map from his pocket. “If we’re a couple miles past that little place, it’s another two hours walking southeast, then turning north… could be another four hours.” He studied the map. “But if that’s a trail… probably cut that time in half, going through this stretch of forest. Assuming it’s a clear path and not another hack job like we just came through back there.”

“Should we check it out?” I asked.

They were all watching me.

“Worth a shot, right? If it’ll save us some time—”

“Mark,” said Ray. “Is there anything you want to tell us?”

They watched me.

“I’m good. Really. Those salt tablets did the trick.”

The cicadas buzzed.

“Something just caught my eye, alright? Jesus Christ." I tried out an easygoing laugh. "You said yourself there’s something over there. Let’s go take a look.”

I could still feel them watching me as I stepped off the road and into the field, wading through the tall grass. Somebody whispered something that I couldn’t catch. The grass swished behind me as they followed.

When we got closer to the woods, I could see a faint trail worn into the grass, running parallel to the trees and ending at the little opening I’d spotted. The stick that Ray had seen through his scope dangled to the right of the path into the forest.

Except it wasn’t a stick.

It was the leg bone from a big animal, strung crossways on the wire. Below it, on its own strand of wire, the skull of a small bird was carefully hung from the midpoint of the bone. Like a windchime.

“What the fuck,” said Henry, walking up behind me.

“Uh uh,” said Ray when he spotted the bones. He shook his head emphatically. “Not going that way. It’s probably more of that same posse we saw up above. Not doing that again.”

“They did say his name was Bone Man,” I pointed out.

Ray swung his head around to look at me. “Beg pardon? Said his name was what?”

“Didn’t we tell you that? I thought we—”

Ray scrubbed at his cheeks with one hand. “The guy we’re going to see is called Bone Man?”

Henry barked out a laugh.

Ray glared at him. “Did you know about this?”

“Nah, man,” said Henry, chuckling. “Need-to-know basis, I guess.”

“We must have forgot,” said Tucker quietly.

“God in heaven,” said Ray, pulling his hat off and whacking it against his thigh.

“It’s not like it’s his real name,” I muttered lamely.

“Outstanding. Pretty important detail to forget about, wouldn’t you say? Is there anything else y’all forgot about?”

“C’mon, Ray,” said Henry, click-click-clicking his safety switch and peering into the trees. “Looks like a nice little trail through there. Big hunter like you ain’t scared of a few little bones, right?”

“We’ve come too far to turn back now,” I said.

Ray blew out a breath and yanked his hat back onto his head. “I swear to God, this is the last job I do with you all. Lord have mercy.” He stepped aside and swung a welcoming arm toward the trail. “Henry, my friend, you can take point this time. I’ll follow you. Quiet and slow, for God’s sake. And if we see any blood on those trees we’re pulling out. Got it?”

Henry grinned. “All green, boss.”

We stepped past the dangling bones and into the shadow of the forest.

Continued in Part 7, coming soon.

Continued from Part 4:

I felt bad for all of us—for myself, sure, but mostly for Tucker, for him having to be so scared right before these people caught us and killed us and tore us apart, and painted the trees with our blood.

Machete Man grinned. “It’s just a beautiful goddamn day.”

His partner gave a short laugh. “You’re fuckin’ high, boy.”

Machete Man bobbed his head, still grinning. “So’re you.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. You’re right,” said the other man. He laughed. “Let’s go.”

“Amen!” bellowed Machete Man, laughing as the two hurried down the trail after the rest of the troop.

I laid on the ground and listened to the hollering fade away down the trail, and tried to stop shaking...

Seconds dragged by.

I waited for shouting, running footsteps, hands reaching through the leaves, the cut of a knife.

Sparrows chirped overhead. Cicadas buzzed in the heat.

A soft, two-note whistle came from the other side of the trail. An answering whistle came from the bushes where Ray had taken cover. A few seconds after Ray’s whistle, Henry’s face emerged cautiously from the leaves across from where we hid, sighting down the barrel of his carbine, aiming first along the trail where the gang had gone, then swinging around to check the other direction.

“Clear,” whispered Henry.

Ray’s low voice came through the bushes: “Mark. Tucker. Back down the path. Let’s move.”

Tucker slowly lifted his head from the ground, blinking in the sunlight. We crawled backward on hands and knees, wincing at every twig-snap and rustle. Ray was waiting for us with his bow pointed toward the trail; when we stepped onto the path behind him, he gave the same two-note whistle. 

An answering whistle came back. Henry appeared, quick-stepping down the path to where we stood. He brushed past us and dropped to one knee, shouldering his gun and aiming back toward the trail. “Ready,” he said.

“Keep watch while we figure out what to do,” said Ray.

“Copy,” said Henry, looking intently through his gun sights.

“Mark, Tucker, with me,” said Ray. We followed him back down the little path, stopping well out of sight from the trail junction.

Ray’s jaw was set when he turned to face us. “Why didn’t you wait,” he said in a low voice.

“Henry—” I said.

“That was stupid. You see what I was talking about. This ain’t a game.”

“We’ve gotta go back,” whispered Tucker. He stared past Ray, back up the path, his voice tense.

“I agree,” said Ray. “Y’all ain’t ready to be out here.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Let’s think this through.”

“Mark, we’re done,” said Ray. “You saw those people. They ain’t out here bird watching. They’ve got something cooking and they don’t want anybody near it. Lord knows what else they’ve got set up out here. Woods are probably full of traps.”

“There’s no traps on the trail. They just came through there.”

“The trail that they’re out there roaming around on?”

“They're going the opposite direction from us, and they ain’t exactly sneaking. We know where they’re going. We’ll hear them if they come back. And that woman was marking their territory. We just won’t go past those crosses.”

“Ain’t happening,” said Ray. “A little bit of money ain’t worth dying for.”

“Mark, come on,” said Tucker. “We tried.”

“Y’all can go on then,” I said. “Henry can get me there. Just give me the map and let Henry take your pack. He’ll get a bigger cut like he wanted and y’all can go along home.”

“It’s not worth it,” said Tucker.

“It is for me,” I said, feeling the blood rush to my head. “I’m not going to college. I don’t have rich parents. I can’t spend the rest of my life digging ditches.”

“Keep your voice down,” Ray hissed.

Tucker looked like he’d been slapped.

“Y’all can go back,” I said. “But I’m gonna see this through.”

Tucker and I looked at each other.

The cicadas buzzed.

Tucker brought one hand up to his face and pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes closed. He cleared his throat. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going with Mark.”

“Lord help us,” Ray muttered. He pulled his dented metal canteen from its place on his belt and took a long drink, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Alright,” he said. “I can’t leave you two wandering around out here with Henry thinking he’s the Terminator. Let’s go talk to him.”

Henry hadn’t moved an inch when we got back to where he waited. He was still target-locked onto the spot where the little path met the big trail: gun steady, breath quiet and even. A drop of sweat hung on the tip of his nose.

“Clear?” said Ray as he stepped up to Henry.

“Clear,” said Henry. “We moving out?”

Ray sighed. “Looks that way.”

Henry smiled and stood up. “Rock and roll.”

“Hang on,” said Ray. “Henry, it’s important this time. How many rounds have you got.”

Henry’s killer-robot face fell away, and the familiar sneer returned. “Not this bullshit again. I thought we—”

“Henry, this ain’t for curiosity’s sake anymore,” said Ray. “We need to know what we’re working with in case we bump into another mob of those folks. Whether to fight or run. Now I’m guessing that’s a twenty-round mag you’ve got there, and I don’t see another one on you. So no more than twenty. And I’m sure you’ve been doing some target practice, so—”

“Fuck you, man,” said Henry, turning to face Ray and squaring his shoulders.

Something in Ray shifted—the set of his jaw, the hardness in his eyes as he stepped up to Henry without hesitating, looming over him. “You better mind your manners, son.” There was quiet menace in his voice. He was no longer the good-natured old guy who was helping us out. Ray the hunter had taken his place: the man who spent years in the woods, alone with whatever demons he carried with him, grimly stalking his prey through rain and sleet and snow—who knew just where to let the life out of a body, and how to cut it up afterwards.

Henry must have seen it too. They were standing too close together for Henry to shoulder his gun—too close to throw a punch and get away before those long arms swung out and caught him. He clenched his fists, eased them open, looked away. “Five. Okay?”

Ray nodded and stepped back. “Five rounds. And I’ve got six arrows.” He turned away from Henry. “Tucker.”

Tucker winced at the sound of his name.

“I know you’re not in charge of this outfit,” said Ray. “But you seem to be the least interested in dying out here, so I’ll break this down for you.” He took off his boonie hat and smoothed his thinning hair back. “The bad news is that we’re in real danger. We’re very close to being outgunned. We know there are at least seven bogies out here. Maybe if they line up and cooperate, Henry and I can get enough good shots to take them all down before we run out of ammo—before they start shooting back." He put the hat back on his head. "Now, the trouble is, everybody in the county’s gonna hear it the minute Henry opens up with that cannon. And that might bring out the rest of the clan. And then we’ll be running for our lives.”

Tucker cleared his throat and nodded.

“Now, the good news.” Ray scratched the back of his head. “Ain’t much, but there’s some. First, it doesn’t seem like they spotted us. It’s a good thing Mark was paying attention and got you all undercover when he did, or we’d have been in bad trouble.”

I thought of that whispered voice spider-creeping a warning into my head, and shivered in spite of the heat.

“Unless they just played dumb and set up an ambush for us. Which would be a wonder of sobriety, seeing how they were acting. Otherwise, I think we’re in the clear. So we know about them, but they don’t know about us. Mark’s also right that the trail ain’t trapped. They would’ve set off whatever was there with their carrying on. And we can guess that whatever they’re guarding is on the other side of those crosses.” Ray paused to slap a mosquito on his neck. “All told, I’d say that puts the odds about sixty-forty in our favor. Assuming we get a gentle welcome from your friend at the end of this, and we don’t run into any more surprises on the way back. God willing, those folks will have run out of speed and crawled back into their holes by nightfall.” He studied Tucker. “You sure you still got the stomach for all this?”

Tucker chewed his lip and stared at the ground.

Henry shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back, looking intently at the trail junction, click-click-clicking the safety switch with his thumb.

Ray held his bow pointed down, arrow knocked, one hand on the string, and watched Tucker.

“Yes,” said Tucker, barely whispering, eyes still searching the ground, like he’d lost something.

“You sure?” said Ray. “Ain’t worth dying for a little bit of money.”

Tucker looked up at me. “We need this,” he said, a little louder.

“Alright then,” said Ray. “We do this my way from here on out. Quiet and slow, no heroics, and no wandering off. Understand?”

“Got it,” I said.

“Henry? Understand? These two brought you on to keep them safe. This ain’t a rodeo.”

“Sure,” said Henry, still looking toward the trail.

Ray leaned toward him, his free hand cupped around his ear. “What’s that?”

Henry turned to face him and grinned coolly. “Read you loud and clear, boss. Just watch your back out there.”

Ray studied him, then nodded. “You watch my back and I’ll watch yours. I’m sorry I lost my patience. You’re good at this. Keep your eyes open, is all I’m asking.”

Henry looked back toward the trail, eyes hidden behind his black glasses. “Copy that.”

Ray sighed. “Alright, let’s go. Y’all post up at the junction while I scout down the trail. Wait for my signal before you move out. Remember: quiet and slow.”

The trail felt as wide as a football field when we stepped onto it. We kept the blood-daubed crosses on our left, moving carefully along when Ray waved to us from up ahead. We didn’t talk. The sweat plastered the shirt to my back beneath the pack that I carried. Henry stopped once in a while, looking back the way we’d come before hurrying to catch up with us. The cicadas buzzed. The sun climbed higher into the sky above us as we slunk along the dirt track.

Shouting came from somewhere in the woods on the other side of the trail, off in the distance.

The three of us dove for cover in the brush. Henry lay flat on his belly with his elbows propped up, gunstock to his shoulder, sighting along the barrel. We waited.

The sound of two shots echoed through the trees, followed by laughter, still far away.

We waited, heads down, listening.

The startled cicadas resumed their buzzing.

No one came through the trees. The trail was quiet.

Finally, we heard Ray’s two-note whistle from up ahead. Henry whistled back. We crept back onto the trail and continued on, looking over our shoulders, stepping softly, straining to listen.

We walked in silence for a long time before Ray stopped ahead of us. He looked at the sky, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun, then brought the compass up from its cord around his neck and took a reading. Tucker and I walked over to where he stood. Henry stopped a few paces beyond, keeping watch along the trail.

Ray let the compass fall on its cord and pulled the map from his shirt pocket, one hand still gripping his bow. “Take a look,” he said, holding the map out to Tucker. “We’ve been swinging around to the south for about a half-mile, then slowly turning north again. I think we’re just about level with where we came to the junction on the other side. Probably about time to cut into these trees and find the valley. We should hit the road leading into this little neighborhood somewhere down there. What do you think?”

Tucker shrugged, studying the map. “Sounds good to me.”

Ray nodded. “Looks like a slog through there,” he said, gesturing toward the woods that bordered the trail, screened with a verge of wild blackberries, ivy, sumac, and young maples. He slung his bow across his back. “Here we go.

We stepped off the trail and pushed into the forest.

This wasn’t the grown-over pastureland we’d been walking through before. The dense stands of trees hadn’t seen an ax or a saw in ages, all twined through with layers of undergrowth, a wall of tangled green. Branches and brambles caught at our clothes and dragged around our ankles. The trees tried to rob us of our packs. We struggled on.

The first few miles we’d covered at the beginning of the day felt like a sprint compared to the slow, grinding crawl we were left with, held back in every direction. Tucker hissed and kicked at the stubborn plants. Henry kept up a steady barrage of strung-together curses as he battered his way through with the buttstock of his gun. Even Ray let out a few sharp words under his breath, stripped of his easy stride by the dense growth. There was no end to the stuff.

The only upside was that we were safer in the thicket than on the trail: even if somebody came along and heard us bulling through the underbrush, they’d be just as stuck as we were if they tried to follow.

We fought through the forest a yard at a time. The shapes of fallen trees hunched all around us in the gloom, decked in ferns. I looked up into the branches above and wondered what it would feel like to be knocked flat by a mountain lion. How long it would take to die after the first vicious bite to the back of the neck. I wondered if wolves could slip through the shadowed jumble of foliage that surrounded us—if we would even hear them coming before they closed in—if anyone could get a clear shot before they dragged us down. I wondered if there were already bones hidden under the leaves beneath our feet.

Somewhere above us, outside the leafy twilight, the sun swung toward the horizon. And we still had miles to go.

Finally, Ray shoved through the mesh of branches and vines in front of him, like opening a door to the outside, letting in a shaft of sunlight. We followed him across the threshold and stumbled back into the day we’d left behind.

Continued in Part 5, coming soon.

Continued from Part 3:

We all shook hands, and Ray tipped me a wink when Henry wasn’t looking. Nothing had been said about what we planned to grow—the cut where Ray expected to make his money. Henry would be pissed when he learned that we’d left him out of that part of the deal. I figured we’d cross that bridge if we came to it. We just needed Henry to get there and back.

Ray bought another round to seal the deal. We agreed to meet two days later, at sunrise, to go east into the forest. Everybody relaxed. Henry told war stories. Ray told hunting stories. Tucker and I listened and drank.

Maybe I don’t remember right. Maybe I had fun, talking and drinking with everybody else, a bunch of guys out on a warm summer night. Maybe it’s just what came later that changed it for me.

But as we sat there talking about our big plans, pretending not to notice the shadows and the old graves all around us, I remember feeling like we were all going to die.

Two days later, Tucker and I sat with our backs against the wall of the old Webster barn, packs loaded, watching the sunrise peek over the treetops. Waiting for Old Ray and Henry to meet us so we could go find Bone Man.

I had snuck out of the house while it was still dark out, carefully reaching my legs over the creaking floorboards and leaving a half-hearted note for my mom on the table—some feeble lie about a fishing trip with Tucker, not to worry, home before dark. She wouldn't believe me. There was no point in trying to fool her after so many years of her studying me. Not to her face, anyway. Even if the lie didn't hold up, it would at least give her something to hold onto until I got back. Better than disappearing without a word.

It made me sick to imagine her worrying, stuffing the note in her apron pocket while she did her chores alone. But there was the roof to fix. And maybe a real gift for her at Christmas. So I shouldered my rucksack full of barter goods and went off through the morning half-light to meet Tucker at the barn.

“We really doing this?” said Tucker.

“Sure looks like it,” I said.

We sat in silence and listened to the forest waking up. I remember it clearly, because it was one of the last peaceful moments I had for a long time. Tucker’s eyes were closed, his head leaned back against the silvered wood of the barn. A lonesome hermit thrush tried to make itself heard over a pair of robins, sorrowfully insisting that the day was not as cheerful as they claimed. Beams of golden light shone through the steam rising between the ferns, promising a hot day.

I wondered, as I often did, if I had ever seen light and shadows so clearly before the mushrooms showed me what I was missing.

“Mornin’, fuckers.” Henry’s voice broke the stillness.

We looked over to see him standing by the corner of the barn. He wore his black combat boots, camouflage BDUs, and black wraparound sunglasses—a rucksack on his back and a gun case slung over his shoulder. “Where’s the old man?” he said.

“Ray’s not here yet,” I said.

Henry spat on the ground. “‘Course not. Probably overslept or pussed out. We don’t need him anyway. I’ll pull it up on my screen, and we can—”

“Good morning,” said a voice from the trees, just a few yards from where we stood.

The three of us jumped. Tucker yelped. Henry swore and tried to unshoulder the gun bag, tangling his arm in the strap.

“Hey now,” said Ray as he stepped out from the brush. He was dressed in green and brown from head to toe, with leafy bits of old burlap tied onto his clothes and the wide brim of his hat. A bow and a quiverful of arrows sat across his back. Leather moccasins silenced his steps as he walked toward us. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

“Fuck, man,” said Henry, pulling the strap of the gun case onto his shoulder. “I almost shot you.”

“Sorry,” said Ray. “I figured you heard me coming.” He glanced between the three of us. “No camo, huh?”

Tucker and I wore canvas pants and secondhand t-shirts. Henry held his hands out and looked down at his clothes, mottled all over with gray-shaded rectangles. “What the fuck do you call this?”

“Good enough, if you want to hide in a quarry,” said Ray. “You’ll stick out like a polar bear once we get into the bush.”

“Like a what?”

Ray shook his head. “Never mind. I’ve got camo paint in my pack if you want to put some streaks on there. We can tie some leaves up near your shoulders, and—”

“I’m fucking fine, man,” said Henry. “Your Halloween costume looks great, but my shit got me through three tours without any fucking paint on it.”

Ray looked at him, then shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’ll be up front anyway, so if we run into anybody, I’ll—”

“Fuck that. I’ve got the gun. I’m on point.”

Ray crossed his arms. “You know what’s out there, Henry?”

“Doesn’t fucking matter. I’ve got—”

“You’ve got the gun, right. I remember. And maybe something will hold still long enough for you to use it. You know what bear scat looks like? These woods are full of black bears. If you bump into one by accident, you might not have time to get a shot off. Same with the mountain lions. You ever seen one of those before? I’ve seen ‘em three different times. One time I was up in a treestand and the damn thing almost climbed in with me. And the people are what you really need to watch out for. Lots of folks out here like their privacy for all sorts of reasons. Some of them are just crazy. Some of them are setting up tripwires to protect their business interests. I don’t want you popping off with that thing and bringing a bunch of cranked-up hillbillies down on us. How many rounds you got?”

Henry glared at him. “Enough.”

“How many’s enough?”

“None of your fucking—”

“I ain’t going anywhere until I know what we’re working with,” said Ray. “It’s been two or three seasons since I've been this way, and I want to make sure we’re prepared.”

Tucker cleared his throat. “Come on, Henry.”

“Watch yourself,” Henry growled, jabbing a finger at Tucker.

“Listen,” I said. “We’re not leaving until we’re all in this together. If Henry says he’s got enough ammo to see us through, then we’ll trust him on that.” Ray put his hands up, nodding. “And Henry,” I said, turning to face him. “We didn’t bring Ray along for the conversation. We all know that you can handle yourself. That’s why we wanted you to join. But Ray’s spent most of his life out here. He’ll do the most good for us up front as long as it’s quiet. If we run into something and we gotta bring the fire down, it’s your show. Right, Tucker?”

“Right,” murmured Tucker.

“Ray, you good?”

“All green, boss,” Ray said solemnly.

“Henry? All good with you?”

He spat into the dirt. “I’ll be good once we’re done with this fuckin’ clown show and I can get paid.”

“Good enough,” I said. “Let’s go make some money. Tucker’s got the map.”

According to the old satellite map that Tucker had dug up and printed at the library, we were in for a long day. Beaver Creek Road was eight miles away as the crow flies. We’d be cutting through brush across two hills, hunting for a house that we didn’t have an address for once we got there. If the deal went well, we’d be hiking back with mostly empty packs, leaving the barter goods with Bone Man in exchange for our haul of mushrooms. But we’d still be lucky to make it home before nightfall, pushing hard the whole way.

We set off.

It was quiet for the first couple miles. The forest was old pastureland sloping gently downhill, grown over with young aspen and birch, mostly free from underbrush and easy to hike through. Ray would range ahead to check the way forward and wait for us to catch up before moving on again. While we did our best to stay quiet, the three of us sounded like a herd of cattle compared to Ray silently loping through the trees.

One time, when we caught up to him on the path, Ray was chuckling silently to himself. He told us a story about a hunting trip where he’d come upon a buck, drunk on fermented windfall apples, trying to mate with a rotting log. It was a ten-pointer, he said, but he didn’t have the heart to shoot it, seeing as it was already having a hell of a day. I damn near broke a rib trying not to laugh too loud. Tucker laughed so hard that tears streamed down his cheeks, one hand clamped over his mouth to keep the noise in. Even Henry let out a few hisses of amusement. Ray shushed us with a smile on his face before taking his place up front.

The mood lightened a bit after that. We almost didn’t notice the trail getting steeper and the trees closing in around us.

“What’re you gonna do with your share, Mark?” Henry asked me.

“Nothing much. The roof at our place has been leaking forever. Probably just get that fixed. Maybe get some better tools of my own, learn some carpentry. What about you?”

“Get a truck,” said Henry. “Start doing some liquor runs.”

Tucker cleared his throat.

“You got big plans, Tucker?” said Henry. “Buy some books and a rocking chair? Learn how to knit?”

“Tucker’s going to college,” I said.

Tucker mumbled something.

“What’s that?” I said.

“I said I’m going to marry Eliza.”

I stopped in my tracks. “You’re fucking joking.”

Henry laughed. “Eliza Miller? No chance in hell.”

“Jesus, Tucker. How many times have you talked to her?” I said.

Tucker’s face was red. “Enough. She’s smart. And once I’ve got some prospects of my own, I think—

“Prospects!” said Henry, laughing. “She doesn’t want prospects, she wants a nice big—”

“Shut up, Henry,” I said. “Tucker, she’s great and all, but you just finished school. There’ll be plenty of smart girls when you get to college. Why—”

Ray appeared in front of us, looking worried. “Quiet,” he hissed. “Listen.”

We stopped. There was nothing but the wind in the trees and some jays squawking.

Ray spoke in a low voice. “There’s a new trail up ahead. I don’t remember it from the last time I came through this way. Looks well-trod. I don’t know what we’re walking into here, so keep your eyes open.” He spread out the map. “We’re about three miles in. We are”—he pointed to a spot on the map—“here. Going up this little rise. The trail up ahead runs right across where we’re headed. I don’t want to go too much further that way until we know what we’re dealing with. I’m gonna scout along this way”—he pointed to the south—“and then circle back to let you know what I see.” He unslung the bow from his shoulder and knocked an arrow on the string, aiming the point toward the ground. “Henry? You’re up.”

Henry had pulled the assault rifle from his bag and looped its harness around the back of his neck, positioning the gun across his chest, barrel downward. One hand holding the stock, the other holding the grip, he click-clicked-clicked the safety switch above the trigger with his thumb—off-on-off—with a wide smile on his face. “Fuckin’ A, man. Just give me something to shoot.”

Ray grimaced. “Hopefully there won’t be anything. And don’t you go shooting me with that thing. I’ll give you two whistles before I come back down the path so you know it’s me. Hang back here. Eyes open.” He turned back the way he’d come from and moved quietly up the path, holding his bow at the ready. We watched him disappear into the undergrowth.

“Guy’s getting spooked by a fucking deer trail,” said Henry. “If he’s not back in five minutes, we’ll keep going. Let him track us if he’s such a badass hunter.”

“I think he’d know what a deer trail looks like,” said Tucker.

“Whatever you say. I’m gonna take a piss.”

Henry stepped into the bushes. We waited.

“Look, Tucker,” I said, watching for Ray to reappear. “I know I was busting your balls about Eliza, but I didn’t mean—;”

Tucker cleared his throat. “You were right. I’ve gotta stop being so timid about it. Once we get this done, I’ll have something to offer her. I don’t know if she’ll say yes. But I’ve gotta try. I’d hate to see her settle for somebody like”—he glanced in the direction Henry had gone—”for some redneck from the taproom.”

Henry stepped out of the bushes and onto the path, zipping up the front of his pants. “Alright, fuck this shit. I’m not waiting around for Grandpa. Let’s go.”

“Not without Ray,” I said.

“Don’t be a pussy,” he sneered. “He’ll catch up. He’s wasting our time. Come on, Tucker.”

Tucker folded his arms over his chest. “Not without Ray.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Henry. “You two are pathetic. You need somebody to hold your hand the whole way? I’m not gonna sit and stay just because the old bastard said so. Y’all can wait here for Daddy to come back. I’m going.” He turned away from us and continued up the path.

“Henry, come on,” said Tucker.

Henry continued walking.

Tucker looked at me frantically. “What do we do?”

“He’s bluffing. Just wait. He can’t go anywhere without the map.”

“Ray’s gonna be pissed.” Tucker cleared his throat, threw his hands up, and hurried up the path after Henry.

I couldn’t stand there waiting all by myself, so I went after Tucker.

The path we followed had shrunk to a narrow aisle of ground between stands of mountain laurel and striped maple. I could see Tucker in front of me between the thickets. Henry had disappeared up ahead.

Then the path between the bushes opened up. Tucker came to a stop beside Henry, who was looking at a wide dirt track that cut across our path, just as Ray had said. The trail was worn into the ground about six feet across—big enough for two people to walk shoulder to shoulder. The bushes and trees stood close together on either side of it.

“Does this look like a deer trail to you?” said Tucker as I walked up beside him.

“More like a moose trail. Henry,” I said. “Let’s wait back where Ray left us. Somebody’s been using this.”

“Probably just some old shiners,” said Henry. “Nobody gonna bother us with the peacemaker here.” He patted the stock of his carbine. “We’re wasting daylight with this shit. I’m going ahead. Y’all better keep up if you don’t want the tommyknockers to get you.”

“Henry, come on, let’s just—” said Tucker.

A voice spoke in my head: Look.

It was the first time I heard that voice.

A whisper. Soft as wind in the pines. But it scared the shit out of me—seemed to hit my brain without passing through my ears.

I jerked my head to the right, thinking that was where the voice had come from. Just as I looked down the trail, Ray was coming around a curve in the dirt track—running as fast as he could without dropping his bow—panicked—frantically waving his free hand to either side in a clear-away motion.

Down down down, he mouthed at me, too far away to speak without yelling.

I grabbed Tucker and dragged him back into the thicket behind us, hissing get down at Henry. He was already on the other side of the trail from us; at the sound of my voice, he instinctively dropped to the ground and rolled into the bushes. A few seconds later, Ray dove into the thicket near us. I could hear him trying to hold his racing breath in an effort to stay quiet.

A different voice—a woman’s—floated down from the direction that Ray had come.

The voice was insistent, rising and falling without stopping, punctuated by the whoops and shouts of other, deeper voices. I could make out the words as the sounds got closer: “...not turn your sight from us, oh Lord, protect us from the wickedness and snares of the Devil, we humbly pray, yes Lord, though we walk through the forest of the shadow of death, we don’t fear no evil...”

“Amen!” shouted a man’s voice.

“...even as Satan hisself comes through the leaves, for we keep God’s covenant, praise be, and let God recognize the blood as a sign of the righteous, hallelujah, and keep the darkness from our doorstep…” The voice dissolved into a bubbling stew of vowels, speaking in tongues, barely pausing for breath.

From where Tucker and I hid, peering through the leaves, I could see people coming down the trail. They were unhurried—had not spotted Ray as he fled.

First came a big bald man in patched overalls with no shirt underneath, showing a spread of crude black tattoos—a big cross that covered his chest, surrounded by thorns or barbed wire, flanked by a soaring eagle on either shoulder. Muttering to himself, he walked with the jerky two-step of somebody going too many places at once, ramped up on speed. The homemade scattergun that he carried was the size of a stovepipe; loaded up with black powder and shrapnel, barrel bolted onto a rough lumber stock, it looked likely to kill him along with whatever he was shooting at.

Next came a young kid in threadbare shorts and a faded football jersey, holding a tall cross made from peeled branches that were lashed together with baling wire.

Behind him was the chanting woman: sturdy, barefoot in a cotton dress, wide-eyed and swaying as she reeled through her prayers, a long sheathed knife hanging from the rough leather belt around her waist. She held a tin pail filled with what looked like blood. As I watched, she stepped up to a tree near where Henry was hiding, dipping a gore-soaked brush into the pail with her other hand. She spoke as she painted a cross onto the trunk: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Lord, our refuge and our fortress, Adonai, Elohim, El Shadai, make haste, yes Lord, amen, bless and protect our work for the good of all our kin, hallelujah…”

I tasted blood and realized that I was biting my lip, waiting for the explosion from Henry’s carbine to blow her away.

But no shot came.

She walked on.

There were four more coming down the trail behind her—three men and another woman—a mass of weathered skin and meth-stretched sinew, mended clothes and makeshift weapons: a scrap-metal machete; a rusted scythe; a crossbow; a gun welded together from old plumbing. They moved like a pack of wolves walking upright, tossing amens and hallelujahs into the spiraling sermon of the woman in front.

I looked over at Tucker as they walked past us, close enough to smell their chemical sweat. His eyes were squeezed shut. forehead pressed into the dirt, trying to disappear into the earth.

The ragged parade of strung-out worshippers was moving away from us when one of the men stopped short.

He looked around, barely an armspan from where Tucker and I hid. The sunlight glinted off the three-foot length of old metal he held, hammered and sharpened and honed into a blade, clutched by a rawhide-wrapped handle and resting on one shoulder.

“Hold up,” he said.

The man with the crossbow stopped and walked back to him. “What is it?”

I was sure that, any second, Henry would open fire. These two monsters would disappear in a cloud of red mist. Ray would leap out from the bushes with his bow, shooting arrows like the hero in a kid’s story, cutting down the rest of the group before they could get a shot off. We’d be back at The Haunt drinking homebrew, saying it was a damn shame about having to kill those crazy tweakers in the woods, but it was self defense, them or us.

Nobody fired.

The machete man seemed to sniff the air.

His partner with the crossbow stepped up to him. “What is it?” he said again.

I felt bad for all of us—for myself, sure, but mostly for Tucker, him having to be so scared right before these people caught us and killed us and tore us apart, and painted the trees with our blood.

Machete Man grinned. “It’s just a beautiful goddamn day.”

His partner gave a short laugh. “You’re fuckin’ high, boy.”

Machete Man bobbed his head, still grinning. “So’re you.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. You’re right,” said the other man. He laughed. “Let’s go.”

“Amen!” bellowed Machete Man, laughing as the two hurried down the trail after the rest of the troop.

I laid on the ground and listened to the hollering fade away down the trail, and tried to stop shaking.

Continued in Part 5.

Continued from Part 2:

“Any chance your friend who’s selling drugs out in No Man’s Land might have a gun and some friends of his own? And maybe they’ve got some guns too?”...

Ray sighed. “Y’all are some terrible criminals. Listen. I’ll be your guide, but not your muscle. Ain’t bringing a bow to a gunfight. If you can’t get ahold of some extra firepower, I’m out, and I think you should be too.”

“I might know somebody,” said Tucker.

And that’s how we ended up with Henry...

Up until I met him at The Haunt two nights before the job, I had only known Tucker’s cousin Henry by reputation.

Henry was three years older than us. One of Madison’s most notorious hellraisers. For the first seventeen years of his life, if there was a fight or a broken window or a brushfire or any other kind of uproar in town, folks would expect to find Henry involved, and usually did. It was quiet in Madison after he enlisted. While he was deployed, nobody would have been surprised if the whole country of Venezuela was burned down to the waterline.

Henry spent three tours overseas. Came home with hardly a scratch. They didn’t kick him out because he wasn’t good at what he did, but because he was too good—costing his outfit too much in benefits by refusing to die. In the end, they discharged him for punching an officer. He said the other guy had started it so they’d have an excuse to cut him off with no pay and no pension. To hear him tell it, Henry got his money's worth before they managed to break up the fight.

Tucker and I had talked early on about bringing Henry in. We’d decided he wasn’t worth the risk. After Old Ray had pointed out that we didn’t know what we were walking into at Bone Man’s place, it seemed like a good idea to have somebody along who was at least as crazy as a hermit in the woods.

And besides, Henry was the only person we knew with a gun.

The three of us—me, Tucker and Ray—planned to meet two days before the hike to Beaver Creek, to introduce Henry and see if we could get him onboard.

The sun was going down as me and Tucker set out to meet the other two at The Haunt over on South Street. It was really named Miller’s House, and Mr. Miller tried his damndest to keep it that way, make it a respectable place. But it was right next to the cemetery and the old funeral home. Even on nights when the band was playing loud and the torches were lit, everybody having a good time, you’d catch a glimpse of the vacant windows up above the tall board fence that Miller had built, and wonder if there wasn’t something in there looking back at you. So folks called it The Haunt and the name stuck fast.

I used to think all that was just kid stuff—spook stories that guys would tell to make their girls squeal.

I know better now.

Tucker and I were both nervous as we walked down Main Street to meet Henry and Ray. Tucker looked fit to burst. He was always clearing his throat when he was agitated, and he nearly drove me crazy with his coughing and harumphing as we walked along. I figured it was more than just nerves about the deal, and finally stopped him on the corner of Main and South.

“You gonna be alright?” I said.

He looked startled to find me standing in front of him. “Hm? Yeah. All good.”

“She working tonight?”

“Who?”

“Come on, don’t give me that shit.”

“Eliza? Probably, yeah,” he said, shrugging. “All good.” He started walking down South Street.

“You gonna talk to her?” I said, following after him.

“If I get a chance.”

“Buddy, you’ve gotta make yourself a chance. You aren’t a kid anymore. You know she’s into you, and you’re about to be in business, once we do this job. What are you waiting for?”

He cleared his throat. “I want to know I have something to offer before I go after a girl like her.”

I almost said something crude about what he could offer her, but Tucker wouldn’t have thought it was funny. We walked on.

As we turned onto South Street, we could hear music coming from The Haunt’s front porch: banjo, guitar, fiddle, harmonica, somebody singing “When the Levees Broke”:

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, Lord,
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
It's got what it takes to make the New Yorkers leave their homes...
Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home
and you don't know which way to run?
Don’t you go down south
Cause there’s nowhere to live
Nothing left of old Manhattan…

The smudge pots on the front yard were smoldering, wafting citronella smoke to keep the mosquitoes away, as if the haze of tobacco and weed hanging in the air wasn’t enough. It was a fine summer evening. Folks were clustered around outside in groups or in couples, sitting in wooden chairs on the grass, lounging on the front porch and enjoying the music.

Old Ray was leaning with his elbow on the porch railing, listening intently to the song. He must not have seen us walk up: when he heard me say hello, he swiped at his eyes with the back of his wrist and mumbled something about “all this damn smoke,” smiling sheepishly as he shook hands with us. We pretended not to notice the tears in his eyes.

The three of us stood listening to the music for a while longer, then headed down the big house’s driveway.

For those who could afford it, Mrs. Miller opened up the main house’s dining room and put on a famous spread for breakfast and dinner, every day except Sundays and holidays. Meanwhile, down the driveway, Mr. Miller and his sons ran the taproom out of the old garage, selling homebrew and hard cider until midnight. A firepit burned in the backyard, with tables and chairs out on the grass, surrounded by more torches and smudge pots for the bugs.

The smell of good food—roasted chicken, carrots with butter, vinegar greens—came from the open windows as we walked down the driveway. My stomach grumbled jealously, reminding me of the thin fish stew I’d shared with my mom hours before: bones from the previous night’s fried brookies, boiled with a few potatoes and wild chives.

I caught Tucker pretending not to peer in the windows. “She in there?” I asked.

“Who?” said Ray.

“Nobody,” said Tucker, looking quickly away.

“Eliza Miller,” I answered.

Ray nodded. “Nice girl. You seeing her, Tucker?”

“As much as he can without talking to her,” I said.

“Shut up, Mark,” said Tucker.

“You should talk to her,” said Ray. He raised his voice as we walked up to the open doors of the barn. “Life’s too short to waste on missed chances.”

Whatever Tucker said in reply was lost in the noise as we stepped inside.

I'd been in Miller's taproom a dozen times before, but only for the big Christmas party they put on every year, never as a paying customer.

Christmas Eve at The Haunt was a miracle.

Not like Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving had a way of reminding us of everything we lacked. If we weren't scraping together whatever we could at home, we hoped for an invitation to eat with Tucker's family—showed up with a bowl of mashed potatoes, hats in hand, and pretended we were adding something special to their feast. They were kind enough to play along.

On Christmas Eve, there was free food and drinks for everyone, paid for with donations from people like Tucker’s parents. The whole village turned out. Everybody crammed into the taproom, sitting elbow to elbow at plank tables that spanned the floor, spilling out into the icy driveway and the frozen yard in spite of the cold.

It was the best day of the year for me and my mom. We were there as equals with everybody else, not begging to be let in. We could imagine it was our feast.

Standing in the warm taproom with our neighbors, Mom and I would pass make-believes back and forth. In our pretending, it was us who had invited everyone here. We had paid for the pig that roasted and sizzled over a bed of coals in the backyard. We had sent the cars over to Cazenovia for supplies; the convoy’s gang of flannel-wearing hardasses followed our directions, armed with shotguns and flasks of applejack for the road.

We would joke about the half-drunk politicians who sometimes ventured out from the Capitol with their forced holiday cheer, making ridiculous speeches—insane promises about high-speed Net service, highway repairs, getting tough on crime, state pensions, health insurance. This year, we whispered, they’d be seeking us out. We’d be invited inside the protective circle of blue-uniformed thugs. The men in fine coats would ask our opinion of things, and apologetically solicit our donations.

The two of us would spend Christmas Eve laughing at our little play. We’d eat, and drink, and not argue, and sing carols. We’d fill up canning jars with leftovers to smuggle out in Mom’s empty knitting bag, and bundle up close together on the cold walk home. Even if there was no decorated tree in our house, no gifts on Christmas morning—even if I knew my mom was hungover from too much free homebrew, no matter how she tried to hide it—we’d wake up feeling full and happy, for a while.

As me and Tucker and Ray walked inside the barn, it was strange to see the taproom’s doors opened wide to take in the summer breeze, after only ever seeing them shut tight against the winter cold. The plank tables were cleared away from the sawdust-covered floor. The familiar colored twinkle lights were still in storage, leaving only the glow of the candle lanterns that hung from the ceiling and the few electric lights shining down behind the bar.

Half the village seemed to be crowded inside the barn. We squeezed through the press of people and waited for Mr. Miller to work his way down to us. His drooping mustache and crushed worker’s cap made him look older than he was. Around town, he was known to be friendly and easygoing, but on busy nights in the taproom, he ran his bar like a tank commander in a firefight.

When Miller saw Ray leaning on the bar, he reached up to a row of mugs standing along a high shelf and pulled one down, setting it in front of Ray as the two men shook hands.

“Y’all getting beer? Starting your tab?” Miller asked Ray.

Ray nodded and looked back at us. “You got your mugs?”

Tucker and I cursed. In those days, the Millers didn’t spend money on anything as dear as drinking glasses, and wasted as little time as possible washing dishes. Regulars in good standing could rent shelf space behind the bar for storing their own cups. Everyone else had to bring their own or make due with whatever empty containers Miller had under the counter.

“Beans or tomatoes,” Miller said without looking at us, glancing over his shoulder to see if his position was being overrun by waiting customers.

“What?” said Tucker.

“Beans or tomatoes,” said Miller and Ray together, like they were helping a child learn his letters.

A shout went up from somewhere along the crowded bar, followed by cheers and laughter: “Beans or tomatoes!”

“Beans,” I said quickly.

“BEANS!” a laughing voice yelled from behind me.

Miller pulled an empty metal bean can from beneath the bar and spun to the taps behind him, filling the can with homebrew before turning back and banging it down in front of me. He pointed at Tucker. “You,” he said.

Tucker mumbled something that no one could hear. Miller gave him a withering look and threw up his hands.

“Hurry the fuck up!” someone shouted. More laughter.

“Beans for him too,” Ray said.

“BEANS!” the voice behind us yelled again to an answering cheer.

As we turned away from the bar with our drinks, somebody clapped me on the shoulder and tapped his own recycled can of brew into mine. “BEANS!” he shouted at the rafters, laughing. “Happens to the best of us, kid.”

I nodded and followed Ray out into the yard. Free from the noise inside, Ray turned and smiled apologetically. “The taste rinses out of the can after the first few rounds.” He looked around. “You see Henry yet?”

The yard stretched away from the house’s back porch. Torches lit the gathering dusk, and two fire pits held piles of burning logs. A row of solar panels were raised on posts to form a roof, with rough-cut benches underneath. Plenty of people were outside, drinking and smoking, standing by the fire or sitting at the trestle tables, but I didn’t see Henry among them.

“Grab that table in the back?” asked Ray, pointing to a spot at the very edge of the yard, removed from the groups of partiers around the fires, almost in the field that bordered the property.

We carried our drinks to the table and were just sitting down when a loud voice called out: “How’s it go, fuckers?”

It was Henry.

He swaggered up to our table, grinning. The hair on his shaved head was growing out into a shadow of stubble. Even with the thick soles of his combat boots, he was shorter than me. He wore a ragged gray t-shirt—“PHALANX INC.” printed across the front, fabric stretched tight across his broad chest—and camouflage BDU pants. Black tattoos were scrawled from his scarred knuckles to his thick neck.

Tucker smiled weakly. “How’s it go, Henry.”

“Heard all the whooping inside and figured it was you fuckwits. You never been to a bar before?” He jerked his chin at Ray. “How’s it go, man. You the babysitter?”

Ray reached his hand across the table. “Ray. Good to finally meet you, Henry. I’ve heard about you.”

“Fuck yeah, man. I’m famous.” Henry gripped Ray’s hand tightly, tendons standing out on his forearm, trying for a crushing handshake. I caught a look of surprise on Henry’s face as Ray easily matched his grip.

“Pleasure to meet you,” said Ray with a placid smile.

“Sure man, whatever,” said Henry, pulling his hand free. “You’re the big hunter, right?”

Ray nodded. “Don’t know about big, but I hunt some. Make some bows too.”

Henry snorted. “Cute. I’m more of a gun guy.”

Ray sipped from his mug. “Tough to find ammo, isn’t it? What do you shoot?”

“MX Carbine.”

Ray whistled. “Nice piece of hardware. They still shoot five-five-six?”

“Nah. Seven-point-six mil. Hollow point.”

“Nasty,” said Ray. “Can’t hunt with that, there’d be nothing left to eat but jelly. They let you take that off the base?”

Henry grinned. “Didn’t have time to ask. There was a lot going on. Who’s buying?”

“I’ll stand you a round,” said Ray. “You boys want anything else? No? We’ll be right back.”

I turned to Tucker as Henry and Ray walked across the yard to the barn. “You sure about him?”

Tucker took a grimacing sip of his bean-tinged beer and shook his head. “Nobody's sure about him. He’s a lunatic. But he’s family, and we need some muscle.”

Except for Tucker fidgeting and clearing his throat in between sips of homebrew, we sat in silence, waiting for the other two to get back. The sun had set. A sharp crescent moon hung over the trees. From where I sat, I could see the black squares of the funeral home’s windows looking down at the people drinking in the firelight. To my right, behind the empty building, the stones of the old cemetery peeked through the trees that bordered the yard.

A figure stepped into the torchlight beside our table: small, dark hair, big eyes, wearing a mended zip-up sweatshirt over a cotton dress. Eliza.

“Hey, Tucker,” she said.

Tucker coughed, almost choking on a mouthful of beer. “Hey,” he sputtered.

“I saw you coming down the driveway. Hey, Mark,” she said to me.

“How are you, Liza?” I said.

She pretended not to notice Tucker frantically clearing his throat. “Good. Just got done serving inside, wanted to say hi.” She looked at Tucker.

Tucker said nothing, taking another gulp of beer.

“You want to join us?” I said.

She waved her hand. “Nah. I don’t want to interrupt anything. Just stopping over.”

“No, no bother at all, come on. Right, Tucker?”

Tucker cleared his throat. “Right,” he mumbled. “I—”

“Hey there, honey,” said Henry, walking up behind her. “You’re looking good tonight.”

“Henry,” she said, shoving her hands into her sweatshirt pockets as she turned to face him, coolly twisting away from his outstretched hand. “They let you back in here?”

“We talked to your dad,” said Ray quickly, stepping up beside Henry. “I didn’t know he was banned. I’m vouching for him. No trouble tonight. If that’s okay with you, miss.”

“‘Miss?’” said Henry, laughing. “Who the fuck are you supposed to be? Captain America?”

Ray frowned. “I’m sorry, but the way I was brought up, you treat a lady with respect.”

“I know all about how to treat a lady," said Henry, winking at Eliza.

Eliza looked him fully in the face. "No. You don't," she said gently. "And it's none of my business, but after all the stuff you were telling everybody the last time, about the shit that happened overseas... I guess you were probably too drunk to remember." She gave him a sad smile and put a hand on his arm. "It's none of my business. I just don't think you should be drinking."

Henry shrank away from her hand without realizing it. "Listen, I don't—"

"It's okay," she said. "Just take care of yourself." She turned to Ray. "Keep an eye on him."

Ray bowed his head. "Yes ma'am. He'll be alright with us."

"I’ve got to go.” She smiled at Tucker. “Goodnight.”

Henry made an effort to regain himself. “I’ll be thinking about you later,” he said as she walked away. “Which window is your bedroom?”

“The one with the crossbow sticking out of it,” she called over shoulder, holding up a middle finger and disappearing into the shadowed yard.

Henry watched her go. “She definitely wants it.”

Tucker looked as if he had bitten into a rotten lemon, but said nothing.

“Maybe we should get down to business,” said Ray, taking a seat at the table.

Henry sat. “What’s this kiddie bullshit y’all are up to?”

We told him about the mushrooms.

“Shit, is that all?” Henry said. “I can get you mushrooms.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, thinking about all the work we’d already sunk into our plan. "Who? From where?"

“Guy over in Morrisville. He comes over here once in a while. At least he used to. Not sure if he’s still dating that one girl.”

I sighed and took a long swallow of beer. “We got ahold of him. He’s empty. We’re going to see his supplier.”

“I want forty percent,” said Henry.

Tucker cleared his throat. “Of what?”

Henry shrugged. “Of whatever.”

“Now hold on,” said Ray. “What about me?”

“What the fuck about you, man? I’m the one with the gun.”

Ray shook his head. “When’s the last time you were in the woods, Henry? This isn’t clearing out slums in Caracas. Hell, I haven't even been as far east as we're going. Not in years, anyway.”

“Can’t be that fucking hard. I’ve got a screen. We can GPS it.”

“Henry,” said Ray patiently. “There’s no signal out there. Not unless you stole a satlink along with your gun.”

Henry took a drink from his mug.

“They teach you how to use a compass in that outfit you were with?” said Ray.

Henry laughed. “You fucking kidding me? It was the army, not some stupid goddamn pioneer cosplay bullshit.”

“Course not,” said Ray. “They just radioed you a set of cords and a door to kick in, right? It ain’t like that out there.” Ray spread his hands out on either side of his mug. “Look, we can be fair. Just don’t be greedy.”

Henry looked at me. “How about Mark? What’s his share for?”

“Are you serious?” I said. “This was our idea. And I’m putting up half the stake for this deal.”

“As far as I know, this was Tucker’s idea. Ray’s got the compass. I’ve got the gun. So what are we cutting you in for?”

“Mark stays or there’s no deal,” said Tucker quietly.

“Look,” I said. “Tucker and I have been saving up for this for months. It’s our goods we’re trading with. You two each get fifteen percent. In creds after we sell, or in mushrooms by weight if you think you can do better selling them yourselves. Your choice. Either way, Tucker and I split the rest. The compass and the gun aren’t worth anything without the stuff we collected for bartering. And you don’t know where you’re going.”

Ray nodded. “I can live with that. That’s fifteen percent of what we bring back?”

Tucker cleared his throat. “Well, there’s—”

Ray cut in before he could finish. “What do you say, Henry? Fifteen percent of what we bring back?”

Henry looked hard at me. “A three-way split sounds better.”

“Mark stays,” said Tucker.

Henry shrugged. “Whatever. Only ‘cause you’re kin.”

Ray held out his hand. “Let’s all shake on that, then. Fifteen percent for us, and the rest goes to Mark and Tucker. Of what we bring back.”

We all shook hands, and Ray tipped me a wink when Henry wasn’t looking. Nothing had been said about what we planned to grow—the cut where Ray expected to make his money. Henry would be pissed when he learned that we’d left him out of that part of the deal. I figured we’d cross that bridge if we came to it. We just needed Henry to get there and back.

Ray bought another round to seal the deal. We agreed to meet two days later, at sunrise, to go east into the forest. Everybody relaxed. Henry told war stories. Ray told hunting stories. Tucker and I listened and drank.

Maybe I don’t remember right. Maybe I had fun, talking and drinking with everybody else, a bunch of guys out on a warm summer night. Maybe it’s just what came later that changed it for me.

But as we sat there talking about our big plans, pretending not to notice the shadows and the old graves all around us, I remember feeling like we were all going to die.

To be continued in Part 4.

Continued from Part 1:

Didn’t need a school certificate to know about supply and demand. If we couldn’t get our hands on those mushrooms, that meant nobody else could either. And the demand was there. Nearest place to get decent liquor was in the next county over, and mobbed up to boot, so you had to know the right people. There was plenty of moonshine and homebrew in town. Plenty of weed too: every toddler with a cupful of dirt was growing the stuff. Except folks were bored with all that.

If we could show people what we’d seen in the woods that first night, we could sell as many mushrooms as we could get our hands on. Solve all our money problems. Maybe even make enough to get Tucker off to college.

“We could grow them ourselves,” Tucker said one day.

“Come on. We don’t know shit about growing mushrooms,” I said, forgetting who I was talking to.

“Like hell we don’t,” said Tucker. “I looked up how to do it at the library. Have to get fresh mushrooms for a spore print, but it just takes some patience after that.”

“So we just go out there and ask Bone Man for some seeds?”

“Spores,” said Tucker. “I doubt he’d just give them to us. If he’s selling what he’s growing, he probably doesn’t want any competition, even all the way over here.”

“So how do we get the seeds?”

Tucker sighed. “Dunno.”

Then again, we had nothing but time.

By August, after a few months working and saving up goods for barter, we were ready to go looking for Bone Man.

Most folks were already outside the credit system: even if you could find a job that paid credits, it was always hell finding a way to turn those little numbers on your screen into food and drink. Rich people could hassle with carrying a tablet around and dealing with the exchanges. The rest of us just said fuck it and went back to swapping and trading like folks always used to, unless we needed something big. Nobody missed the banks.

A guy called Bone Man living out on the edge of a ghost town wouldn’t have much use for credits anyway.

We worked on planting and building all over town to set up our stockpile. Tucker did some tutoring, helping folks’ kids with their figuring and spelling in trade for whatever little stuff he could get: cooking lard, hunting knife, berry jam, pemmican, snare wire, that sort of thing. Nobody wanted tutoring from me, of course. So I watered crops and dug ditches and mended fences, split firewood, that kind of thing. I mostly got paid in booze I couldn’t drink, although I did sneak a couple sips here and there, just to make sure I wasn’t getting cheated.

I just kept thinking about what I could do with that big pile of money we’d make when all was said and done. We’d be the kings of the county, showing up to parties with our mushrooms and some good whiskey from up Syracuse way. Maybe I could buy myself a truck, find somebody to rig me up a charger for it. Get some bribe money for the deputies and a gun for the highways. I could start running liquor. Turn that mushroom money into even more money. Share some with my mom so she didn’t have to work so much. Finally get the roof fixed for her.

And I kept thinking about how miserable Tucker would be if he never got to college, spending his whole life stuck in Madison.

So we scraped and saved. We started out with our little boodle and then kept trading it up, swapping supplies and favors all over town for something that was just a little better than what we’d started with, a little more useful for somebody living out on their own in the wilderness. We had our own general store of barter goods by the time word got around and people started wondering what we were up to. Only we still weren’t sure it was enough for all the mushrooms we’d need to get ourselves in business.

So we went to barter with Old Ray.

Old Ray was legendary. The best hunter in Madison at the time, if not the whole county. He was probably only in his sixties then, but you know how it is when you’re young: to us, he was ancient. He’d show up in town on a Saturday night to drink some, and went to church most Sundays. Otherwise he kept to himself. Mostly he hunted and trapped all around, on his own, sometimes for weeks at a time, and always came back with something. It would be a grim day for us all when Old Ray couldn’t find something to catch. Made his own bows and arrows too, which is why we first went to him.

Tucker and I finally worked up the courage to go talk to him on a Sunday afternoon. We figured he’d be home and in a neighborly mood after church, so we gathered up our barter goods and headed out to his place off of Solsville Road.

I felt like everybody in town was watching us as we trudged out past the end of the crumbling sidewalk. Everybody was wondering what was inside the burlap bags we had slung over our shoulders. The gossip was already starting, and this would only add to it.

Just doing some business, I kept telling myself. Grown men’s business, and nobody else’s.

Ray had built his cabin in the woods by the pond. It was just up from the swimming hole at the south end, and if you were down there, you could see his fishing dock jutting out from the shore. The cabin sat behind it, back in the shadows of the trees.

We all hung out at the swimming hole in the summertime when we were kids. We’d whisper about the crazy old man who lived in that cabin. Somebody had heard from somebody else that he ate people, crept around at night, tapped on windows with his long fingernails. Sometimes Ray strolled out onto his dock and waved to us. Everybody would shriek and splash out of the water to hide behind the trees.

Once, when I was about fourteen, we were at the swimming hole after sundown. Somebody dared me to go up onto the porch of the cabin. I was trying to impress one of the girls we were with, so I did it. Crept all the way down the dirt road in the dark, sure I was going to die. Ray must have been away on a hunting trip. The cabin was closed up and silent. I snuck onto the bottom step, then sprinted back down the dirt road as fast as I could run, back to the girl who was waiting for me, laughing and squealing. I was a king for the rest of that summer.

Anyway. This time, when Tucker and I walked down the dirt road with our bags on our shoulders, Old Ray was sitting on his front porch, twisting dried gut into bowstrings.

“Hey there, Ray,” I called out as we walked up the path to his cabin. “How’s it go?”

He glanced up from his work and raised his hand solemnly. “Hello, Mark. Tucker. I’m doing just fine, thanks. How’s your ma, Mark?”

“She’s doing alright. Busy as always.”

He nodded. “How about you, Tucker? Folks alright?”

“Fine,” Tucker said, quiet as a mouse.

“How’s that again?” said Ray.

“Fine,” Tucker repeated, a little louder.

Ray squinted at Tucker appraisingly before looking back to me, glancing at the bag I was carrying. “What can I do for you boys?”

“Hoping to barter with you,” I said.

He set aside his half-finished bowstring, unfolded himself from his chair, stretched his long legs, and took a sip from the metal camp mug that sat on the railing. “Let’s see what you got.”

I took what we’d brought and set it out on the porch while he watched: quart of moonshine; four jars of applesauce; snare wire; one jar of raspberry jam and one of peach preserves; two big battery packs; a hatchet with a new handle; coffee beans. It wasn’t all we’d collected, but it was all we could part with.

He sipped from his mug and pondered. “How old are those battery packs?”

“Dunno,” I said. “Tested them with a lightbulb and they seem alright.”

He grunted. “What you hoping to trade for?”

“Bow and some arrows. Maybe a couple extra strings.”

He took a sip. “A good bow? Or just a bow?”

“Whatever you think is fair. Reckon any bow you have will be good, as long as you’ve made it.”

He seemed half-tempted to smile. “Don’t try and flatter me, son. What draw weight? How much you pull?”

“Dunno. Ain’t for me.”

“Who’s it for?”

We were doing our damnedest to keep Bone Man a secret. I knew I’d rehearsed a good cover story on the walk over. But when the time came, I fumbled it. “Friend of ours,” I said.

“Big guy? Little guy?”

I shrugged. “You know. Average.”

“If I know who he is, I might be able to size him better.”

“You wouldn’t know him. Ain’t from here.”

Ray looked at me carefully. “I got an oak bow with a bit of a bend in it. Draws about forty pound. Bit light for me. Think that’ll work for your friend?”

I wished Tucker would say something to help me out, but he was a worse liar than I was. “Sure. Yep,” I said.

Ray leaned against the porch railing and sipped from his mug, studying me. “Heard you two have been mighty industrious of late.”

“Who said so?”

Ray shrugged. “You know. Just folks.”

“None of their business, is it. We’re just trying to get ourselves set up, now that Tucker’s out of school.”

“Set up doing what? Hunting?”

“Maybe.”

“Except the bow’s not for you. Nor Tucker, I’d bet. You pull a forty-pound bow, Tucker?”

Tucker cleared his throat.

“Didn’t think so. Must be your friend who ain’t from around here gonna teach y’all to hunt, then.” He took his cap off and scratched the back of his head, looking at us awhile. Then he sighed. “Listen. I don’t normally get into other folks’ business. But I knew your dad pretty well when we were young, Mark, and I’d like to help if I can. So long as nobody’s gonna get hurt.” He looked down at the goods spread out on the porch. ”I'd take the coffee, the wire, the hatchet, the jams, and the batteries. Got no use for the rest. That'll get you just the bow. No arrows, no extra strings. Dunno if that’ll work for your friend."

I looked back at Tucker, who was watching a squirrel leap across the yard.

“Your friend coming into town to get his bow?” said Ray.

“No,” said Tucker, finally. “We’re bringing it to him.”

“Where at?” said Ray.

Tucker cleared his throat.

“Tucker,” I said.

“East,” said Tucker.

“Tucker,” I said.

Ray whistled in amazement, rubbing a hand across the stubble on his gaunt cheeks. “Y’all not planning to take the highway over there, are you? Ain’t no friend worth a trip on those roads. Least not for a social call.”

“We’ll just take the bow,” I said. “Won’t waste any more of your time. We got work to get back to. Don’t we, Tucker.”

“Maybe he could help us,” Tucker said quietly.

“Help you with what?” said Ray.

“Tucker for shit’s sake,” I said.

“Alright,” said Ray, clapping his hands. “Deal’s off. I don’t know what y’all are mixed up in, and I don’t need to know, but I ain’t helping you with one of my bows to run off and do lord knows what out there.”

The whole thing was falling apart.

“We need a guide,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.

Ray crossed his arms. “I ain’t a babysitter.”

I felt my face get hot. “We can pay you.”

He frowned. “Guide for what?”

“We’re doing this no matter what,” I said. “You come along, we’ll see that you get paid, and if you don’t want us getting into trouble, we need a guide.”

“Guide for what. If it’s cooking meth or moonshine—”

So I told him about the mushrooms. How we planned to hike over to Bridgewater with our packs full of bartering goods, taking the trails through the woods so we wouldn’t get robbed on the highway. Hike back with enough mushrooms to set ourselves up. I didn’t think Ray would double-cross us, but I left out Bone Man and Beaver Creek Road, just in case.

When I finished, Ray stood quiet for a moment, rubbing his jaw. “Y’all should be trying to find some honest work.”

I knew as soon as he said it that his heart wasn’t in it. But I was pissed about the babysitting thing, so I lit into him a little bit. “Ray, I’ll settle for any work right now, honest or not. We been busting our asses for weeks and what you see is what we have to show for it. You offering to teach us how to hunt? Take us out with you so we can go three ways on a deer and some squirrels, maybe have a little left to trade for some hootch? Might be honest work, but it ain’t much. Tucker and I got fifty more winters ahead of us. Things don’t look to be getting easier. Tucker’s trying to get to college. That’s why we’re doing this.”

Ray crossed his arms and faced me. “Aright, fair enough, Tucker’s trying to get to college. And you're just along for the ride?”

“I’m just trying to get paid any way I can. If this doesn’t pan out, maybe I’ll go up to Utica and find a job. Seems to work out well for my family.”

Ray turned away from us, back to his workbench. I thought maybe I’d gone too far. He reached down and picked up a corncob pipe and a doeskin pouch, then walked back to the stairs and lowered himself down to sit on the top step. Once he was comfortably settled, he pulled tobacco from the pouch with his long, bony fingers and carefully tucked it into the bowl.

“We could—” Tucker said, but Ray stopped him with a shush and a raised hand.

Once the pipe was full, stem between his teeth, Ray struck a match over the tobacco and puffed thoughtfully while we stood waiting. “Tell me if I’ve got this right,” he said at length. “You two—the two of you—are going out into a godforsaken wasteland that’s known to be full of thieves and murderers and wild animals.” Smoke spilled from his mouth as he spoke. “With bags full of valuables.” Another puff. “To find a man you don’t know in a place you’ve never been to, hoping that he’ll give you a fair deal on some drugs and send you on your way with a smile.” He took the pipe from his mouth and looked at us. “Rather than slitting your throats, stealing your goods, and burying you out in the pines.”

I studied my bootlaces. “Listen, Ray—”

“Hold on now,” he said. “I’m interested. Could be worth doing if it’s done right. How much you expecting to make on this?”

Tucker and I glanced at each other. We hadn’t exactly done the figuring yet.

“Hoping to get as much as we can to start with and then grow our own from there,” said Tucker.

“Uh huh,” said Ray. “And I expect you’ll be charging wholesale prices, right? None of this penny ante jam-jar nonsense. Only selling for credits, and nothing less than an ounce at a time… how much of this stuff people take in one go? An eighth?”

"Eight of what?" I said.

Ray pressed on, looking past us at the numbers in his head, talking absently around the stem of his pipe. “Let's say it's an eighth. Figure it’s worth fifty creds to get high for an evening. Most folks’ll want to barter for a dose, but that ain’t your problem if you’re only moving ounces for cash on the barrel. That gives you four hundred for an ounce, at least… yeah, you get at least a pound from your friend, you’re in business.”

When he finally noticed us staring at him, he turned his attention to re-lighting his pipe with a shrug. “Reckon there wasn’t much honest work when I was young either,” he muttered.

A crow called somewhere off in the trees.

Ray smoked, thinking, while Tucker and I waited. “All right,” he said at last. “I’m in. For an equal share of the credits. We split the take three ways once you sell the stuff. If the deal doesn’t work out, I get my pick of the barter you’ve got. Sound fair?”

“Fifteen percent stake,” said Tucker.

I looked hard at him. “Tucker, what the hell.”

Ray narrowed his eyes. “I thought you said you needed a guide.”

“Ain’t nothing to sell without us,” said Tucker.

“Ain’t nothing to sell if you go out on your own and end up dead, either.”

“Fifteen percent cut of the first batch, plus twenty percent of whatever we grow and sell after that,” said Tucker. “You’ll make a lot more than thirty percent if we keep this going.”

Ray whistled. “You got a lot of backbone hiding in there, boy.”

Tucker shrugged. “We need this,” he said quietly.

Ray looked from Tucker to me. “Mark? You good with this?”

I nodded.

Ray stood up. “Deal,” he said, and stepped down to shake, first with Tucker and then with me. I could smell coffee and tobacco and wet wool as he reached out to me. His grip was friendly, but after decades of bending a bow, it felt as if he could crush all the bones in my hand if he’d wanted to.

“Now listen,” he said as he stepped back. “You keep all this”—he pointed with his thumb at the spread of goods on the porch behind him—”and put it toward the bartering. I’ll throw in the bow and some strings, but no arrows. I’m not fixing to get shot with one of my own if this goes bad. Who else you bringing for this?”

Tucker and I looked at each other. “Just you,” I said.

Old Ray gave a short laugh. “Either one of you got a gun?”

I looked out toward the pond.

“Didn’t think so,” said Ray. “Your friend by himself out there?”

Tucker and I said nothing.

Ray crossed his arms. “Any chance your friend who’s selling drugs out in No Man’s Land might have a gun and some friends of his own? And maybe they’ve got some guns too?”

A robin began singing somewhere nearby: cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up.

Ray sighed. “Y’all are some terrible criminals. Listen. I’ll be your guide, but not your muscle. Ain’t bringing a bow to a gunfight. If you can’t get ahold of some extra firepower, I’m out, and I think you should be too.”

“I might know somebody,” said Tucker.

And that’s how we ended up with Henry.

Continued in Part 3.

This is my second short story. I’ll be publishing it serially for the next several weeks; this time, I’ll try to publish shorter sections twice a week (hopefully Thursdays and Sundays) to keep the momentum going. There will be a short recap at the beginning of each section, and I’ll do my best to keep the link index updated on each post. Enjoy.

Careful how you go into the wilderness east of here. There's something out there in that creeping jungle.

I don't mean just bad people—bandits or deputy gangs or wandering crazies. Though you'll find them there too.

And not just animals, either. Plenty of wolves and bears and mountain lions moving into those ghost counties since the world fell away. But they aren't the only things coming to reclaim what's theirs.

There's other things.

Things you can’t shoot with a gun or cut with a knife if it comes down to it. You can’t hurt them, but they can sure as hell hurt you, if they've a mind to. They’re not cruel, exactly. Not as far as I can tell. They just got their own ideas about what’s good and what’s right, and how we fit into their world.

I’ve seen some of those things.

I think they're sleeping, now that the leaves have fallen off the trees and the frost has come. Hope so, anyway. Don't think they'd like to hear me talking about them. It’s been a long time since all this took place, but they haven’t forgotten me. Word spreads back to them like water trickling through roots.

I think they hear almost everything.

This was back when Tucker and I were growing up. When I first started running magic mushrooms into Madison County.

Tucker and I both grew up in Madison. His family practically raised me. My dad left when I was just little—went up to Utica looking for work at one of the salvage foundries and didn't come back. This was back in the bad days, when the country started splitting up. Lots of folks went missing back then. We never knew if he got hurt, or killed, or just got tired and bailed. My mom didn’t have enough money to pay the cops to look for him. Couldn’t risk going up there to look herself. So she tried to forget him. I never remembered him well enough to miss him.

My mom did the best she could with me after he was gone. But while she was busy with folks' laundry, or mending, or babysitting their kids, trying to make ends meet, I grew up with Tucker. He didn’t have any siblings. His mom almost died having him—it was a rough birth, with the nearest hospital hours away—and she called it quits after that. So I guess his parents were happy having somebody around to look after him.

We probably wouldn’t have been friends otherwise, if I’m honest. Tucker was strange. He was always reading something, even when we were kids. Sometimes he’d disappear, and I’d find him tucked away in a corner, face hidden behind his tablet, reading something he’d downloaded at the library where his dad worked.

Didn’t help that his dad had a real job, either. He had a plum gig working for the government as Madison’s librarian, which pretty much made him the banker and the postmaster, and the welfare office too. The library kept Madison connected to the rest of the world. It was the only place left in town with half-decent Net service, and Tucker’s dad kept it all running. People wanted to hate him for it. Having steady work of any kind made you damn close to royalty in Madison. Working indoors—at a desk, sitting down—seemed almost like a slight against God Himself. Tucker’s parents spent a lot of time helping folks out so their good luck wasn’t held against them.

Tucker probably would have been alright too, if only he wasn’t so goddamn strange.

If I’m really honest, growing up with Tucker was a pain in the ass. He was a year older than me, but I was always the one looking after him. First time I took a real punch was standing up for Tucker on the playground. I tried to help him make friends, introduce him to people, bring him along with me to parties when we got older. Tried to get him to talk to girls.

The girls all thought Tucker was cute, for some goddamn reason, which was annoying as all hell. He looked like a pale little elf standing next to all the corn-fed rednecks in town, with his mop of dark curls and his glasses. I guess that made him interesting, or something. Except he always clammed up when any of ‘em tried to talk to him. Couldn’t take a hint to save his life.

Being friends with Tucker was hard work. Even after I dropped out of school, I still tried to make sure he wasn’t getting lost in his books and spending too much time studying. But for all that, he made growing up in Madison tolerable. He always had some new idea that he dug out of a book somewhere. Oftentimes he’d get wound up talking about whatever he was reading and his mind would take off like a bee-stung mule, dragging me along behind, as if I understood half of what he was saying. Kept me entertained with his wild talk, at the very least. Even if I wasn’t always quick enough to keep up.

Here’s what it is: even though Tucker was an odd duck, he was something different in Madison, proof of a bigger world beyond our little crossroads. He never quite fit in, sure. But that meant that he couldn’t get stuck like everybody else. Never lost sight of that bigger world. Never stopped trying to get to where he belonged.

And, Lord, I needed that growing up.

I hated Madison. Just like every other young guy in history, I had no idea what I wanted, but I was damn sure there wasn’t enough of it in my hometown. The old folks loved to joke that Madison was a one-horse town, until times got tough and they’d had to eat the horse. I didn’t think it was funny.

So Tucker and I helped each other through growing up: me trying to get him to pay attention to what was right in front of him, and him trying to get me to think bigger. We talked about enlisting together after Tucker finished school and got his certificate. The benefits from joining up would help Tucker get to college. I was just bored and wanted to shoot something. And besides, somebody had to make sure Tucker didn’t get himself killed over there in Venezuela or Brazil or some damn place like that.

Except then the mushrooms found us.

This first time was at a party for the end of school, out in the woods north of town. I’d quit school two years ago so it was just another Friday for me. But Tucker was all stoked to be finished, graduated and everything, and he was feeling big enough to go have some fun. I sure wasn’t about to miss a chance to see Tucker loosened up a bit.

We never could figure out how we got ahold of those mushrooms that night. No idea what kind they were. Didn’t know anything about the different strains, back then. We’d been into the hooch already and ended up eating a bunch of them. Lucky for us, they were old as dirt, hardly any juice left, else we’d have been on a rocket ride to the moon. Whoever brought them wandered off. We went back to partying. Forgot we took them, until the world opened up.

You know what it’s like trying to talk about your first trip. I was sitting with some people, passing a bottle around, getting loaded, talking bullshit, when all of a sudden I couldn’t stop thinking about how bright the moonlight was. Like I’d never noticed how it shone through the tree branches before, how it painted everything with silver, how solid it looked as it spilled down from the sky, making pools and rivers in the shadows all around. I tried to tell the people I was with, get them to see what I was seeing, but they were too drunk, or maybe I just sounded foolish. Tucker will understand, I thought. I left those people laughing at me—”What’s he on?”—and wandered off to find Tucker.

I couldn’t see anything because there was too much to see. I understood deeper than thinking that everything was alive. Not just the crickets and the peepers and the cicadas, but the rocks and the shadows and the moonlight and everything, the rotting logs dreaming of when they were trees, becoming part of the crawling things that lived inside them. I stumbled through the breathing darkness, feeling clumsy and sheepish, as if I’d wandered into some secret meeting. It was a church service for a religion I wasn’t meant to understand.

I don’t know how long I walked or how I managed to find Tucker. He was kneeling on the ground, staring at something—a clump of ferns in a little patch of moonlight.

“Tucker,” I said. “You alright?”

When he looked at me there were tears in his eyes. “Mark. You ever seen anything so perfect?” he asked me.

Any other night I would have laughed at him. Talking like that made you sound like a sissy. “No,” I said, and meant it, because I hadn’t. Those ferns framed by the stones and moss around them, with the dew glowing on the leaves, smeared with moonlight, striking cold sparks into the air whenever I moved my head, like the moon had chosen them for this, and they knew just how good they looked. They were loving the night just like we were.

Eventually we found our way back to the party and stood at the edge of the clearing. For a while, we watched our friends yell in the firelight and fall over each other, too wasted to see what was all around them. I wanted to show them everything but knew they wouldn’t understand. Tucker must have felt the same way. He turned silently away and walked back into the woods. I followed him. We walked for hours, finding little miracles everywhere, not wanting to miss anything. Hardly spoke a word that whole night for fear of scaring it all away.

Eventually, the shimmer faded. We found ourselves back in our same old worn-out town. Too tired to find the words for what we’d seen. We went our separate ways and slept.

Lord, it was tough waking up after that first night.

Madison had been a junkyard our whole lives. It was always damn depressing. But now we knew—had seen it ourselves—that it was all a hateful lie to boot. After the mushrooms showed us how bright the world could be, the place felt as thin as wet cardboard. The empty shops and sagging porches we grew up with were hiding something from us. People heaved themselves around looking for work or drink, a smoke or a fight or a shoulder to cry on, day after day until they died, because somebody told them once that this was all there was. And nobody questioned it.

Tucker always said that there was more to the world than Madison. Neither of us realized that there was more to the world in Madison, right where we were, even in this dusty God-forgotten place. If only we could see it.

We had to get more.

Turned out nobody else was sure who brought those mushrooms to the party. We asked everyone we could think of. Finally, we heard a rumor that the mushroom guy—somebody’s sister’s boyfriend, just in town for the party—was from over in Morrisville. Got his number, went to the library, sent him a message. Took us two whole days to get a message back from him.

traded my buddy for those shrooms. don’t know where he got em from, came the reply. tell me how much u want to buy and ill ask.

How much we wanted to buy was a problem, seeing as me and Tucker barely had any money between us. So we lied. Said we were looking for as much as he could sell, just to keep him on the hook. Figured we’d take care of the money later.

We heard back again the next day: buddy says he got em from out your way. SE of Bridgewater. only house left on Beaver Creek Road. he’s not buying there anymore. dude’s crazy. calls himself Bone Man. good luck.

Bridgewater would’ve been an easy twenty-minute drive east for our grandparents, before things fell apart. It’s gotten a little better since Tucker and I were young. Back then, even if you had a car and a place to charge it, the old county roads outside of town were a mess of washouts and sinkholes, not to mention the toll booths and the roadblocks put up by the deputies all along the way. Carjack gangs too. Just off the highway were whole towns left empty when folks packed up and left for the bigger cities. The only people still there were hermits living in the ruins. If you had a good car and plenty of money for bribes, probably a gun or two, you’d be alright.

Tucker and I had none of these things.

Couldn’t even get to Bridgewater, let alone find some hillbilly out in the woods. Had no money to buy anything from him even if we did. It was a dead end.

But the days stretched on, and me and Tucker got to pondering.

Didn’t need a school certificate to know about supply and demand. If we couldn’t get our hands on those mushrooms, that meant nobody else could either. And the demand was there. Nearest place to get decent liquor was in the next county over, and mobbed up to boot, so you had to know the right people. There was plenty of moonshine and homebrew in town. Plenty of weed too: every toddler with a cupful of dirt was growing the stuff. Except folks were bored with all that.

If we could show people what we’d seen in the woods that first night, we could sell as many mushrooms as we could get our hands on. Solve all our money problems. Maybe even make enough to get Tucker off to college.

“We could grow them ourselves,” Tucker said one day.

“Come on. We don’t know shit about growing mushrooms,” I said, forgetting who I was talking to.

“Like hell we don’t,” said Tucker. “I looked up how to do it at the library. Have to get fresh mushrooms for a spore print, but it just takes some patience after that.”

“So we just go out there and ask Bone Man for some seeds?”

“Spores,” said Tucker. “I doubt he’d just give them to us. If he’s selling what he’s growing, he probably doesn’t want any competition, even all the way over here.”

“So how do we get the seeds?”

Tucker sighed. “Dunno.”

Then again, we had nothing but time.

Continued in Part 2.

This is the final installment of ’s short story. You can find the rest of the story here: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5, Part 6. Look for more of McCrae’s work in the future, here and elsewhere; I’ll be getting back to business as usual next week.

Every piece of wall décor had been laid out beneath newspaper shrouds. The kitchen was scoured smooth, but the carpet still bore a hard lattice of furniture outlines. All the remains of Charles’s childhood home had been interred within a necropolis of cardboard boxes, and his presence among them now felt like a haunting.

It was a six-hour drive to get here from San Diego: in hindsight, not remotely worth it, no matter how badly he’d wanted to see Howie before the move. The plan had been for Charles to spend the night here, and see off his mother and brother first thing Sunday morning—but plans change, so said the note taped to the back door when he finally arrived, near dark. Mom, in her classically callous fashion, had chosen to leave for Santa Fe twenty-four hours early, without so much as a courtesy call to her eldest son. 

So he’d wasted his entire Saturday traveling, to find nothing but a locked door at his destination. The spare key under the Kokopelli pot granted him entry to a hot and empty house; it was too late to turn back, and he hadn’t enough time to drive all the way to New Mexico and still be home for class on Monday. What should have been a bittersweet homecoming was only really bitter.

In order to cope with the pointlessness of it all, he’d had chosen to spend the hours on either side of sunset commiserating with a couple of six-packs and the ancient countertop television from the kitchen. He and Sony and Stella Artois whiled away the night together as three old friends, sprawled on the floor of the home office which had once been his bedroom. The TV hummed comforting blue frequencies; the ceiling fan turned and turned. Time diluted like whisky on the rocks. It was well past four in the morning by now, and he wasn’t tired at all. 

Surprisingly, some of his belongings were still here, in a single plastic tub set apart from the rest, brusquely labeled “C.T.,” which were also his father’s initials. Not until the last of the late-night broadcasts fizzled off-air did he start to wonder, and only once the beer was gone did he finally look inside. 

Junk. Nothing but junk, of course—his mother had pawned his high school clarinet at the first opportunity, but found this garbage fit to keep. From the stale container he withdrew a puzzling selection of ephemera: dress shoes long out of fashion and blockbusters on Betamax; first-prize ribbons and dry fountain pens. A half-unspooled mixtape with a little heart scratched into the sticker. He lingered wistfully on that one for a moment, and then set it aside with the rest. A flattened, stained box of C-3PO’s. Cute. 

Not until his fingers scraped the bottom of the tub did he realize that he was searching for something, sort of. He used to have a little bag, didn’t he?, with an opal and an ammonite fossil inside… God knew what ever became of those little treasures. Probably long gone, if Mom thought they might be worth a few bucks.

Pre-dawn, the near atmosphere was beginning to sparkle with the sounds of songbirds. A spring breeze stirred the ironwood outside the window and filled the room with the smell of hot tar. Charles leaned back against the wall, plucking at his shirt to catch a little relief. He was buzzed and perspiring and his skin felt too tight. If he didn’t get out of this house, he was going to kill himself.

He felt his way down the hallway and out the front door in the dark. The building that he left behind felt as sentimental as a cereal box. 

Outside, that balmy wind eased the mid-season heat. Charles tripped past Mrs. Schneider’s old house toward the darkened dead-end of Ocotillo Street, where the sidewalk gave way to acres of milkweed and velvet mesquite. His eyes cast beery little haloes on the stars suspended in cosmic nacre. 

The long road toward Lime Slope was a path which turned to gravel, which turned to dust, and dust agitated and sighed away across the vista. 

Around the final curve at the bottom of the hill, Charles was given pause by a dark gash across the road, where the ground had been deeply rent by wheels or churning machinery. Further down, he found that the chain-link fence had been replaced by low plastic netting, flagging in the breeze. The air inside the quarry was sterilized, deadened of the sounds of frog or owl or cricket or sluicing water; what had used to be a pond was now a drained black cavity in the earth, ridged like a throat and faintly exhaling decay. The sand on the once-shore was textured by bootprints and knotty tire-tread. Dead grass lanced from the upheaved soil like cactus bristles.

And someone was here, sitting atop the largest boulder on the western bank. Charles picked his way past piles of stone and coils of hose large enough to swallow a child, watching her form resolve itself in the night. Seely was hunched cross-legged, still wearing the same too-small overalls, still with dirty feet and long hair washed out by the darkness. A book sat open in her lap, tilted to catch as much starlight across the page as possible.

Charles drew to a stop a few yards away from her. She raised her face to look at him, so it seemed that each of them was waiting for the other to speak.

“What are you doing?” he finally asked. 

“Reading?” Her tone said she thought that was a stupid question. 

“In the dark?”

“I used to have a flashlight, but the battery died.” Seely closed the book around her finger and stretched out some stiffness in her back. She didn’t so much as glance twice at Charles’s glasses, or his beard, or the ink on his arms; in a surge of doubt, he wondered if she even recognized him. How did that look, a grown man cornering a young girl in the dark of night?

“S’me. Charlie,” he slurred. She looked at him askance again and made a lemon-sucking face. I moved to California, he thought about saying, or I’m going to have a daughter soon; but instead what came out of his mouth was a slightly apologetic, “I’m drunk.”

“You smell like it,” she shot back without skipping a beat. Charles ran a bashful hand back through his hair. “Sit down before you fall over, then.”

She made space on the boulder, but the two of them no longer fit side-by-side. Charles perched on the very edge and settled in facing mostly away from her, surveying the unfamiliar wreck of a landscape before them. The moon had long since flown westward, but a scattering of clouds still remembered its light. His sense of reverie was crushing.

“What happened to the pond?” he asked after a while.

Seely sounded as though she hardly cared: “A girl almost died here.” Warily Charles eyed the yawning pit before them. “Maybe her dad was some kinda big-shot… pulled the strings to finally get them to fill in this death trap. They had to divert the spring.” Her pale hand passed into his field of view, pointing toward the north face of the quarry. “Then brought in this big pump to drain the water. It stank for weeks.”

From many muddled thoughts and feelings, Charles tried to distill a single thing actually worth saying. He could only muster the question, “When?”

“You could still see Pisces, so… November, I guess.”

“But you’re still…?”

“Reading. Yeah.” In the twilight he recognized that worn hardback on her lap as The Wishsong of Shannara. First printing. 1985. “What are you doing back here?”

Hell of a question. He craned back his head and searched the stars, waiting for an answer to fall into his slack mouth. “M’ mom is moving to New Mexico. To be with her boyfriend,” he drawled finally. “I didn’t want Howie changing schools a year before graduation but… ‘s not my decision.”

“Howie. Yeah. He was a cute kid. How is he?”

“In Santa Fe. With our mom.” He’d misheard her, but was too scattered to try again. “This is my last chance to see the house before it goes, y’know? But it doesn’t feel like a real place anymore. I thought I’d be sad. Mostly I’m just pissed off. I don’t think I’m ever coming back.” She hummed, sounding neither happy nor sad to hear that. “Hey, I’m sorry. Here’s me going on about my bullshit and… Are you okay?”

A long curtain of hair fell between them. Seely scoffed, unseen: “Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?” 

He’d asked the question already knowing she would answer that way. For some reason, it made him unaccountably sad to hear. Carelessly he slurred, “It seems lonely, is all.” She bristled. “And now the water’s gone, so I just… I thought you’d feel—”

“Oh, is this what we do now? Talk about our feelings?” Abruptly, aggressively, she drew up her knees like battlements. “You wanna hug, too? We can braid each other’s hair?”

“No. C’mon.”

“I don’t care if you’re old now. You’re not my dad.” Charles, who had been entertaining a quietly paternal regard toward the skinny young girl aside him, was very annoyed at her for saying so. He crossed his arms and shut up, so as not to respond churlishly; she huffed and opened up her book again, and went back to reading.

Like photographs in slow development, the hard profiles of mountains began gradually to manifest against the sky. Slow rolls of filmy cloud unfurled across the east, and the desert-battered horizon clarified shades of gold and gray. When Seely spoke again, she did so without looking at him: “That’s a cool tattoo.”

Charles turned out his forearm to expose a swallow soaring beneath the surface of his skin—supposedly guaranteeing him a safe voyage home, should he ever find himself at sea.

“There used to be lots of birds like that around,” she said. “I liked watching them.”

“Hm. Me too.”

“I always wanted a tattoo. My brother had this—” 

But her mouth twisted and she made a face, as though she were angry at herself. It seemed like a long time before Seely continued, “My… brother had this poster on his bedroom wall, that I think he ordered from a magazine. It was almost as tall as him, with the sun at the very top…” She framed the growing light over the mountains with both hands. “And this golden line falling down from it, with the solar system attached. Like pearls. It was art, you know, and really stylish, so they weren’t labeled. You could tell every planet by size and shape.” Seely dropped her hands again and cast a resigned look at the ground. “I used to think that would make a pretty good tattoo.”

Charles tried to smile. “Sounds like the kind of thing I’d get, too.”

“Well, don’t steal my idea.” 

“No. Of course not.”

“But now you’ve got me thinking about it.” Her gaze drifted back toward the horizon. “Every night, all this time, I wasn’t looking at my skin and thinking—‘I wanted there to be planets here.’” She laid her left hand across her right wrist, and squeezed. A furrow formed across her brow.

“I didn’t miss you,” she grumbled. “I was fine until you made me think about it.”

Charles looked at her sidelong for a second. “You’re a pain in the ass and I didn’t miss you either,” he promised, and her frown cracked open around a quick snort of laughter.

By morning’s thin glow, the dead shore all around them was leafed in gold. The crown of the sun lay low behind the mountain crests, and for the first time Charles could see the poppies seeded around the shoreline—hundreds of closed poppy-heads, red-hot like cinders rising from the tossed earth. Shadows hung thick beneath the quarry walls, waiting for daylight to break them.

“Remember that summer I was here almost every night?” Charles asked Seely. “But I never stayed long enough to see the sun rise like this.”

“Me neither,” Seely told Charles, in a tone of mild surprise at herself. In this light, her hair didn’t look just red, but the particular candy-shade of desert honeysuckle. Her eyes were pale and her nose was sharp, and her shoulders were so narrow it seemed he could have spanned them with one hand. She was of an age with Howie now, but she looked younger. Charles gazed down at his arms, hung over his knees. Changing light aurified the blue-lined swallow, wings outspread. 

He asked her, “Wanna read together?”

Dawn that morning never seemed to break, only to build higher and higher, a great hazy rose slowly piercing the veil. Charles opened The Wishsong of Shannara near the end and began reading aloud those passages he’d once known like old friends, which now sat overwrought on his tongue: “‘Autumn had settled down across the land, and everywhere the colors of the season brightened and shone in the sunshine’s warmth. It was a clear, cool day in the Eastland forests where the Chard Rush tumbled down from out of the Wolfsktaag, and the skies were a depthless blue…’ What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Seely said, although she was viciously frowning. She followed this immediately with, “Doesn’t it make you pissed, how the magic goes away in the end?”

“Pissed?” He ran a finger up and down the softened edges of the page. “I don’t remember if I was pissed. It’s sad.”

“And nobody even remembers.” Even Seely sounded more mournful than angry. It was probably a coincidence when her knuckle brushed his on the stone, but he dared to intentionally reach out and place his hand atop hers. She didn’t recoil from the touch.

Charles kept on reading aloud, until his throat was parched and the paper burned magnesium-bright in front of his sleepless eyes. In a moment of weakness he raised a hand to shield his vision, and lost his page to the impish breeze. Daylight blazed red between the blinds of his fingers.

One more time he tried to squeeze Seely’s hand, but his palm only brushed cold stone. As far as he could spread his hand, there was no one else on the boulder’s surface next to him.

Charles let out all his breath and didn’t take it in again. He closed his eyes tight and held his body rigid, until that lingering moment of uncertainty ripped out of his hand whipped away on the breeze. He inhaled again sharply, and finally raised his sore gaze up to where the meridian turned from purple to gray to blue. The Sonoran dawn curled up from the horizon like fruit on a vine.

In that skyward moment, he made the decision to continue on to Santa Fe. That meant he had a long drive still ahead of him, but he thought he should linger in town a bit longer anyway. He could walk by the school, and stop by Goldman’s Market to sober up with a good bagel and a bad cup of coffee. Find a phone to call in a substitute teacher for Monday morning, and then head back to the house. Make sure the lights were off and the windows closed. Lock the door behind him.

Charles left the book behind him on the boulder, closed and with the jacket neatly squared across its cover. As he stood, a glimmer caught his eye from among a pile of broken stones at his heel. From the rubble he picked a tiny opal, smaller than a pea. He hadn’t been able to see it in the dark.

He’d bring it with him when he went to visit his brother.

Guest posts by continue this week. This is Part 6 of her original short story. You can find the previous installments here: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5.

Charles never warned Seely that he wouldn’t be coming by as often.

He hadn’t intended for it to happen—didn’t realize how much time had passed, until he noticed the date at the top of an Economics test one morning. It was nearly June. He hadn’t been down to the quarry since Presidents’ Day. He stared at the numbers for so long that their lines turned to scratch, and Clarisa Martinez, who was sitting next to him, gave him a concerned nudge with her elbow.

Later, he walked to Lime Slope as soon as the evening light began to fade. Seely acted as though she’d known he was coming, awaiting his arrival with a sly look on her face. “What is it?” he asked. In her palm was cupped an egg-sized stone, impressed by the spiral shell of an ancient animal. Triumphantly she showed it off in the diminishing light, then held it out for Charles to take a closer look.

“Wow,” he said, before asking again, “What is it?”

“I dunno what they’re called. One of those dinosaur-snails. You don’t find the big ones all in one piece, usually.” She leaned in to appraise it one last time with a self-satisfied look, before casually mentioning, “Anyway, happy birthday.”

It took Charles a few seconds to register her words while he examined the fossil. “What? It’s not my birthday.” Her expression turned sour, so he stumbled onward to justify himself: “I mean, you don’t have to give me anything. It—it’s really cool, but I don’t deserve—”

Seely snapped, “Who said you deserved anything?” and snatched the rock back, only to turn it over in her hands a few times, seeming not to know what to do. 

“...Virgo’s past the meridian,” she insisted sullenly. “It is too your birthday.”

“Not until the tenth,” he said. Her frown demanded clarification. “June 10th. That’s still a couple of weeks away.”

“Oh,” she said, and seemed to relax. “Only a couple weeks off. That’s nothing.” Imperiously she regarded Charles, tilting up her chin to look him in the eye, before finally handing back the fossil like a benefaction. Side by side they sat down on the boulder. Charles kept rolling the stone in his hands, catching the last of the light across its ancient face.

“I have to get a job,” he told her after a while. Seely looked over at him. “In a couple weeks after I turn sixteen, I mean. My parents are… I could use some money.”

“Okay,” she said, in a tone carefully slanted to offset his seriousness.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been around in so long.” 

Seely crossed her legs atop the stone. “‘The days are long but the years are short,’” she mused, not as though it were her own insight, but something she’d heard before. Charles appreciated the sentiment. For himself, though, he thought the years were more than long enough.

The season spun back into panting-hot summer. Howie came home one day with a bloodied forehead; after some wheedling, he told Charles about the older girls down the street who had pushed him off his bike. Charles held him tight and saw red. Soon, he would empty his bank account and buy a shitty car, to drive his little brother to school and wherever else in the whole world he wanted to go. He’d found work at the deli; it gave him somewhere to be other than home, and a few meals each week that didn’t come out of a box. 

Delaney stopped attending D&D nights after he got arrested for driving drunk. Dad never came to visit in August like he promised he would. Mrs. Schneider went to the hospital for heart murmurs. Memories of that second summer would not evoke stars scattered across gentle darkness, but instead, the harsh sun glare of the sun on the checkered floor of Goldman’s Market.

School’s abrupt return cut a wasteland swath from the middle of September. Charles made marching band tryouts, as everyone knew he would. Riding a high of confidence, the very next morning, he asked Clarisa Martinez to go to Homecoming with him.

By the time he saw Seely next, the dance had long since passed, and been eclipsed by his first kiss. It was all such an enormous thing to talk about that he resolved never to try. Instead, he tossed his bedroom in search of every book he didn’t have time to read right now, even his collector’s edition of The Sword of Shannara, and stuffed them in three grocery bags. Seely crowed over the number of volumes he turned out onto the ground at sunset that evening.

“Holy crap,” she laughed, spreading the volumes out around her for examination. Charles felt pleased with himself, until he looked up and realized that this civil-twilight composition of girl and grass and so many books was one he’d seen before, in a vision of his own death. Déjà rêvé hit him so hard he had to step away from her.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. He said it was nothing, but the memory stuck to him like cactus spines.

Now he was visiting the quarry once every couple months at most. It was the best he could do. Marching band performed at football games every two weeks in the fall; then came band competitions throughout winter, on top of chess club on Thursdays, working at the deli every evening in between.  He wasn’t a kid anymore. He didn’t have time to sneak across town in the middle of the night. Every once in a while Howie still asked about Seely, but Charles always told him No, he didn’t know how she was. No, Seely was too busy to see him lately. No, Seely moved away.

“Like Dad?” Yeah, like Dad. “So she’ll come back to visit sometime.” No good could come of arguing against that.

Spring swelled with hot air and burst across the desert in tides of rain and wildflowers. On Charles’s seventeenth birthday, Clarisa gave him a cassette player with a custom mixtape inside, and whispered a secret in his ear. Nine hours later he was sitting over his knees at the edge of her bed, elated and incredulous with eyes on the deep-field of glowing plastic stars stuck to the back of her door.

Her jaw rested on his shoulder while he tied off the condom. She murmured that she didn’t want him to go, but her mom would be off work soon, and at the end of a drawn-out goodbye he finally left. Driving away in his rattling car with all the windows down, he leaned his head out into the hot air to watch the real stars pace him across the firmament.

In the last couple blocks before Ocotillo Street, he began to feel that something was wrong. On an instinct he turned off his headlights as he came up on the house. His stomach clenched against the force of the familiar scene looming ahead: the blue of the television shining from the living room, the heavy curtains drawn. Shadows crossing the kitchen window again and again, squaring off against one another in silhouette.

Dad’s truck was right there, sitting in the driveway as though it had never left. No one told him that Dad was coming down today, they’d barely heard a word from him since January… How could this have happened? The divorce was supposed to stop this from happening. It was almost eleven o’clock, and in his mind’s eye Charles could see Howie laying in bed, maybe even in his big brother’s bed, listening to the worst thing in the world and wondering why he was all alone. Helplessly Charles idled in the street, until headlights swerved in behind him and a neighbor passed on the left, with one angry finger thrust out the window at his darkened vehicle.

He didn’t go inside, although he should have. He should have burst through the front door to jump the argument off its rails, and marched straight through the house to find his brother… but instead, he shifted into first gear and started rolling down the road like he’d come to the wrong address. His hands shook. He watched Howie’s lit bedroom window in his right-side mirror so closely that he almost rear-ended a parked car, lurched back into the middle of the lane, popped the clutch and jumped to third, screeched away before he was noticed or before valor could find him. He thought for a moment to go south and drive into the badlands as far as a half-tank of gas would take him. At the last minute, he swerved toward Lime Slope and careened down its tight dusty curves, riding the edge of some idea that to jump the cusp would mean to fly away into the perfect black sky.

Arriving at the bottom alive and intact, for better or worse, he parked his car out of view of the water and walked to the fence, shivering in spite of the heat. The fireflies were out. They drifted and blinked like motes of pollen across the grassland. Incandescent light glared from the western shore. Seely looked up from her book and turned her flashlight on Charles as he drew near the boulder. He shielded his eyes.

“Hey,” she said, in a tone more curious than surprised. “What are you doing here?”

All the things that had happened tonight crowded behind his lips. It was too much for one story, too much for one life. Charles mouthed like a fish for a few seconds before croaking, “It’s my birthday.”

“Oh.” Seely dropped the light back into her lap and regarded him with confusion. “I didn’t think you were coming. I didn’t get you anything.”

He shook his head.

She looked at him tentatively. “I’m reading through Shannara again. I could read some to you.”

He nodded, still mute, and she dog-eared her page and flipped backward in the chapter. 

“Herein lies the heart and soul of the nations. Their right to be free men, their desire to live in peace, their courage to seek out truth. Herein lies the Sword of Shannara…” 

Charles slipped down to sit in the grass with his back to her. If Seely heard when he started to cry, she didn’t act like it. She kept on reading until her voice became background, as embracing as the crickets and the hushing water and the sight of stars over the desert.

In the morning he woke with clothespin crimps in his back and neck, and raised his eyes to a horizon the color of powder. He stood up to gaze across the pond and the waist-deep grass; it was a new day, and he was alone. Back at the house, Dad’s truck was gone again. The kitchen was silent. Charles tripped inside and fell asleep like a guard-dog across the foot of Howie’s bed.

For a full year afterward, Charles would make sure that no matter what, his brother was never left at home without him.

The days were sometimes eternal, but that year in retrospect seemed very short.

On the night of his eighteenth birthday, the night of his high school graduation, while the rest of town thrummed on a beat of adolescent triumph, Charles was at home packing. He stuffed old sneakers into a backpack and checked the time on his shaking wrist once again, to track the hard deadline that waited implacably at 9:30 pm. Howie sat anxious on the edge of the bed, kicking his legs out over and over again like the clock’s jolting second-hand.

“But why?” he kept asking. 

“I’m sorry,” Charles answered. He’d said it so many times that he hardly meant it anymore, and that might make him the worst person in the world. He forced the backpack’s zipper closed along a bulging seam, then crouched before his brother and put everything he had left into a smile. “Look. This isn’t a big deal. I’ll come to see you as much as I can.”

“But why do you have to go?” Howie asked again.

Charles used the comforter to hide the tremors in his hands. The note that his mother had served him when he walked in the door forty-five minutes earlier was burning a hole in his pocket. “I told you, I just—I’m a grown-up now, so I can’t keep living here anymore. I have to pack my things and—”

Howie tipped forward to wrap his arms around his brother’s neck. Charles had to stop speaking for a moment to keep from breaking down. “Don’t worry about me. This is okay, okay? I’ll come to see you all the time.”

Howie whimpered, “Like Dad?”

“No. Not like Dad. Listen—” He took his brother by the shoulders and sat him upright, so they were facing each other man-to-man. “There’s something I’ll need you to do, okay? Only you can do it. Will you try?” Howie sucked on his lips and nodded. “I’m going to give you something. Mom said she’d… She can’t keep storing my things, but I need you to hold on to this, and keep it safe.” He tipped back on his heels to scrabble in an open cardboard box, and withdrew a small velvet bag. 

“Look. I want you to have this. Mom said… Anything I don’t take with me tonight, it’s going to go away. Go in the trash. But not if you keep it safe for me. Alright?” He searched the eight-year-old’s face for understanding, then tipped the contents of the bag out into his palm. A walnut-sized opal, and an ammonite fossil. “These are the… my favorite things that I own. Okay? Seely gave them to me. You remember Seely? And they’re very rare. Like treasure. I want you to keep them safe for me, okay? Don’t tell Mom where they came from. Secret treasure, just between you and me.” Howie started nodding, faster each time. “Thank you. I have to—” He made to look at his watch again, and Howie caught his hand.

“I wanna come with you,” his brother said. But God knew what would happen if they tried to sneak out of the house together. The police would be involved within an hour. Charles just shook his head. 

“Please,” Howie begged.

“She won’t let you come. I wish I could, I want—” Charles jumped at the sound of a chair moving in the kitchen. He turned to look at Howie again and gripped his arms tight. “Look. We’re gonna be like spies, working undercover. You just have to act like everything’s okay, and we’ll be able to see each other again soon. I promise.” He wiped his brother’s nose with his sleeve. “I promise.”

Howie whimpered, “Okay.”

“I love you.”

“Gross,” Howie said. But he smiled. Charles gave him a final squeeze and then left the room with a cardboard box in his arms and a backpack full of clothes slung over his shoulder. He marched down the hallway to the front door, and didn’t stop in the kitchen, didn’t even spare a look in that direction. He had nothing else to say.

He dropped the last bag atop a mess of pillows and textbooks in the back seat of his car. After ten minutes of driving toward the pink horizon, he pulled over to use the pay phone outside a convenience store. He called Delaney out in Maricopa, to ask if he could crash at his place tonight; then he called Clarisa to let her know he would be at Delaney’s. Clarisa was out, attending the graduation party where he had planned to join her. He left a message with her mother instead.

The ringer rattled on impact when he hung up, and then the only sounds were of his idling car, and traffic moving down the interstate, and crickets piping around the edges of the parking lot. Exhaust and garbage fouled the too-warm air. Across the street, a shuttered mattress outlet advertised top brands through the tinted window. Pacific, Simmons, Sealy.

A low hiss escaped Charles’s throat, small but growing harsher and louder as it ran. He covered his face and crooked his fingers and exhaled a silent scream out and out until there was no air left in him, and finally threw his chin upward again with a gasp. He stood panting under the streetlight and dusty sundown sky, breaths deep and deliberate to move as much of the enormous night through his body as he could.

When his car engine began to dim and stutter, it seemed a clear sign that it was time for him to go. There was a moment of uncertainty before he left the parking lot, when his eyes and thoughts strayed toward Lime Slope; but he had miles still to go, and none of them ran eastward.

He left the crossroads by the onramp to Interstate 10.

Look for Part 7, coming soon.

Guest posts by continue this week. This is Part 5 of her original short story. You can find the previous installments here: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.

In June, the school year ended with a balmy sigh. Its last days petered off in a series of exams and educational movie-reels and free periods on the field, until the bell rang one last time and set them all free on the wide bright months ahead. Charles had his own way of celebrating. He went to see Seely that evening, and he brought a gift.

“The Wishsong of Shannara,” she read aloud from the book’s cover, squinting in the last light. 

“I bought it with some of my birthday money,” he confessed. He’d picked up both the second and third volumes of the trilogy for a slight discount. It had actually cost him a fair bit more than his grandmother’s gift alone, but he considered it an investment well-made. “It’s totally new, just came out a few weeks ago—I haven’t actually read it yet. I thought you could go first, this time.

Seely looked unsure of her response. “Thanks,” she uttered, and then shot him a hard look. “Wait, it’s your birthday?” The week before, he told her. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

She seemed perturbed, but asked no more questions. The next time Charles came to see her, on the late-late evening of the summer solstice, she casually mentioned that she had something to give him. When he opened his hand to receive it, she placed a walnut-sized opal in his palm.

“You can find them around here, if you know where to look,” Seely explained while he gawped at the stone’s twilight glint. “That’s probably the best one. Happy birthday and all.”

She had never done anything so kind before. Instead of asking why, Charles whispered, “Thank you,” and put the gem in his pocket, where it seemed to seep warmth through the denim.

“I’ve got lots. No big deal,” she said. Her cheeks looked pinkish, but that could have been the dusk. “And I’m almost done with the last Shannara book, so you know. It’s really good. You’ll like it.” 

He could hardly wait.

Throughout June and July, Charles’s time spent at the quarry increased, and grew increasingly nocturnal. Most nights he and Seely spent poring over books and comics together. Sometimes they ran hand after hand of gin rummy, for hours on end; another time, he stuffed the entire Game of Life into his backpack, and the two of them played in the glow of his dad’s camp lantern until a bullfrog landed in the middle of the board and all their tiny pink children were scattered and lost. They dimmed the light, and looked up to watch the stars instead.

“Cassieopeia,” Seely said, pointing. The queen lay in repose across the firmament, wearing Perseid jewels. “That’s Aquila and—Scorpio is behind the cliff…”

Charles had never spent much time looking at the stars before. He was more prone to stay indoors and read. “How do you know so many?”

She answered, “My brother taught them to me,” hastening to add, “That was a long time ago,” as if it explained anything at all.

“You have a brother?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Seely looked back up. “And he liked the same kinds of sci-fi stuff you do. He’s your age, even. Or he was back then.” Charles held his tongue, and pressed no further.

She never really talked about herself, not any more than that. Sometimes she asked after Howie, and Charles might spend a while spinning a happier fantasy about their daylight lives; but beyond that she extended him the reciprocal courtesy of not prying. She never said a word about his bruises, so he didn’t feel like he had to wear sleeves on those long hot nights. 

Seely was only intermittently thoughtful, always temperamental, and never polite. Charles didn’t always like her, but he was coming to appreciate her nonetheless, like coffee without sugar, or the smell of cigarettes. All that really concerned her were made-up things, and she devoured fiction with an appetite to match his own.

Every morning, he left before sunrise. Down deserted streets he’d shamble home to sleep through the hottest part of the day, rise as late as three in the afternoon, and leave for the quarry again in the evening with eyes already accustomed to darkness. His parents never questioned how he spent his time anymore; he wondered if they were glad to see so little of him. 

Howie spent most days playing with Mrs. Schneider’s grandchildren down the street, but every couple of weeks Charles would catch him before bedtime, and tell him small stories about long nights spent at Seely’s farm. She was, as he told it, a self-taught astronomer who knew the names of every single star. She also had a little brother. He was even Howie’s same age.

Just as a routine began to establish itself—as Charles’s feeling of perpetual exhaustion ebbed, and the season on reflection turned to a reel of stars twisting across the indigo sky—summer was over again, and Charles found himself blinking and bewildered in the light of midmorning hours he’d not seen in months. The first week of school was an ongoing battle to stay awake.

“I think I have to stop coming for a while,” he told Seely on a late Saturday night. “I have to sleep or I’m gonna die. I got you this.” From his backpack he drew copies of The Two Towers and The Return of the King, which together had cost him some pocket change at a secondhand shop. “So you have something to do while I’m gone.”

Seely sat with her knees pulled to her chest and the autumn breeze stirring her bangs. “As if I wasn’t getting along fine before you showed up.”

“Just take them.” He tossed the books at her feet, and she grinned.

The following weeks were very busy ones. Sophomores were technically allowed to try out for the marching band, and although Charles didn’t make the cut, woodwind section leader Delaney Morrison still tracked him down after tryouts. He said Charles was really good, and he was invited to join his group of friends at Goldman’s Market for bagels after school. A few days following that, Charles was invited over to senior Vinnie Eckert’s place to play Dungeons & Dragons. There was a whole group of people at his very own school who played Dungeons & Dragons, and he hadn’t ever been told. When he saw Seely next, he nearly gushed.

“...gave me my own copy of the Monster Manual! I already owned a Player’s Handbook because I always wanted to play, but I didn’t know anyone who could run the game…” Seely looked bemusedly at Charles as he sat down on the boulder, exhausted by excitement. Black clouds imposed above the mountains to the east. “Hey, maybe you and I could play sometime? It’s better with more people, but two is still good.”

She picked at the grit under her nails. “Yeah, that could be cool.”

“I’ll bring my books down.” But he forgot them the next time he came, and the time after that, until he just stopped making that promise.

In November, the days grew shorter in quick bursts. Howie was six now, and attending kindergarten at the grade school right around the corner, which meant he could walk himself home or to Mrs. Schneider’s house in the afternoons. Suddenly unburdened by childcare duties, Charles’s options for what to do with himself in the evenings seemed limitless—which was good, because Dad had taken on more hours at work lately, and whenever he wasn’t home Charles didn’t want to be either. Anyway, Mom liked it better when it was just her and Howie together. She loved him.

Reggie and Nate and Tyler ignored Charles entirely now, maybe because he was so often found in the company of upperclassmen. Clarisa Martinez, another woodwind phenom adopted by the older band kids, was the only member of Delaney’s group who never talked to Charles and wouldn’t meet his eye at lunch. Charles asked Tristan Kimball one day why she didn’t seem to like him, but Tristan only laughed.

One week before Christmas, Delaney began to circulate an invitation among the whole marching band and its satellite students: his parents were leaving town on Friday, and he was going to throw a party. At the wet bar in the Morrisons’ basement, Charles quickly learned how to hide the taste of Smirnoff under Sprite; before sunrise the next morning, he woke up shivering and retching by the pool with no recollection of how he’d gotten outside in the first place. Although it was petrifying to have to call home at an hour like this, the prospect of still being present when everyone else woke sounded even worse.

Dad’s truck pulled up in front of Delaney’s house just before six-thirty. Charles was not reprimanded as they drove away, not for drinking or for being gone all night; his father gave the impression of having hardly slept, and now of moving through a dream. Nearly ten minutes of exhausted silence passed between them before Dad finally opened his mouth. He said that he wanted his eldest son to hear it first, that he’d leased an apartment in Maricopa the week before. He and Mom would not be living together anymore.

Charles listened to the news, and did not break. He asked a few questions, and said he understood. Before leaving for work, Dad dropped him at home with a ruffled head and the murmured assurance that he was a good kid. Charles made as if to go inside, but when the truck disappeared down the end of the street he turned and started walking instead, a quick and rigid shamble which found every irregularity in the pavement.

Saguaros and fire hydrants and garden gates sank into gravity wells as Charles passed them by, quicker and quicker, trying not to look back. When he first woke, the hangover had suspended him in a queasy wash, but everything was crashing back down now, and the whole earth could not handle such an impact. If he didn’t move fast enough, he knew he would fall and be suffocated inside a planet collapsing on itself. Neighborhood roads narrowed and turned to bare scrub-lanes. Charles slip-sprinted down Lime Slope toward the bronze horizon, with a heaving stomach and lungs full of fire. Around the turn at the bottom of the hill he threw himself against the quarry fence and vomited acid bile in the grass, clinging to the chain-link and trying to see the pond’s far shore through his tears.

The winter morning was ending its twilight hour, and Seely was nowhere to be seen. The only movement was from a great blue heron stalking between the reeds on the near bank. Its feathers were the color of the sky over the cliffs. Charles dropped to his knees. Before him curled the break in the fence, tangled up with stems of indigo and chamomile.

He did not part the shoots and crawl through, but he imagined doing so. He imagined walking up to the water, braced for that freezing-hot touch against his toes again—at his waist, at his chin. The cold would only be painful for a moment. He imagined walking down the shelf of the pond with stony shoes, and taking a perfectly-timed breath. There would be nails and knives in his throat and chest; he would swallow them whole and suffer. 

And he wouldn’t feel afraid. He would sink into the green and let the dark wash him away, and finally open his eyes to reemerge into an evening colored by southwestern sun. The stars would be coming out by then, and the night’s chill would not touch him. Seely would already be there, seated in the long grass with a pile of books, a pile of all the stories she loved most—and she would crook a finger in invitation for him to join her, to sit and read and talk, and hunt for opals by moonlight, and later to walk out across the water together and draw the constellations. Existence would be small and satisfying and nothing would hurt. All would be well.

No one would miss him.

The time that Charles sat entranced was lost to him, until the heron unfurled from a serpentine curve and soared away over the bluff. He startled and realized that the sun had risen while he was absent. At the edge of the water, his shadow was waiting for him.

His mouth tasted like sand, and he felt all at once flushed and chilly and still nauseous, from spirits or from an idea too big and too tantalizing to look in the eyes again. He shook his fingers out from the fence and stumbled away. By the time he made it back home, the dawn was all the way up, and Howie was eating cereal alone at the breakfast bar. Charles sloughed off his stinking clothes in the hamper and crawled into bed, seeping vodka-sweat and a listless flow of tears.

He slept through the day, unnoticed and unquestioned through his quiet fever. At some point in the hazy afternoon he heard a shuffle, and opened his eyes to find that a handful of dandelions had been slipped under the door. Charles smiled to himself and then turned ugly sobs away into his pillow. Against the wall, low sun and ironwood-shadow knotted and shimmered like reflections off still water.

Look for Part 6, coming soon.

Guest posts by continue this week. This is Part 4 of her original short story; you can find Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.

Charles spent most of the next week orchestrating a plan to confront Seely with proof of her own strangeness. He thought about it obsessively—composed a whole speech, even stowed a flashlight and a Swiss Army Knife in his backpack, just in case—but each night when sunset came, his nerves failed him, and he holed up in his room with all the lights on. His own sense of inertia insisted that these fantastical notions would surely work themselves out in time, smooth over like sand exposed to the westerly wind.

That didn’t happen.

With each passing day he only felt more impossibility heaping inside his head, forming a dune, casting a shadow that darkened the whole landscape. 

He didn’t sleep well that week, and ate very little. He got a B- on a math test. Worst of all, he forgot about Mother’s Day on Sunday until too late to buy a gift. Mom took that pretty hard.

The afternoon following the greeting-card holiday, Mr. Salvatore asked Charles to stay after the last school bell, and spent a few minutes shuffling papers around on his desk without saying what he wanted. Charles waited with his eyes on the ground, consumed with bilious anxiety. When Mr. Salvatore finally said his name—“Charles,”—he jumped. “I wanted to ask you if everything’s… alright?”

Charles looked back down, trying to obscure view of the bruise beneath his left eye. “Yes,” he said.

“At home?” Yes. “And at school?” Yes. “Because I noticed…” His teacher gave him space to respond. Charles said nothing. “Was it Reggie and the boys?”

Reggie and company had mostly gotten bored with him in the last couple weeks. They still laughed amongst themselves when he passed in the hall. “No,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

“Charles, I’m sorry to ask. Has your father ever—?”

“No.” This time, Charles raised his eyes to answer with conviction: “No. Not ever.” Still, Mr. Salvatore looked concerned. “It was a tree,” he explained. “I was in the backyard and—it was a branch.” That didn’t make any sense. He prayed he wouldn’t be asked for elaboration.

Mr. Salvatore told him, “You know you can come talk to me. About anything,” in the same tone Dad used when he said he would always keep his boys safe. So he probably didn’t mean it. Charles said thank you, and that he knew, and finally he left to pick up his little brother from his classroom.

The mid-May afternoon was low and hazed by heat, thick enough to scramble the air above the streets and parkways. Howie tried to touch every piece of metal in arm’s-reach out of some determination to burn himself stupid, and Charles struggled to keep him reeled in. A lump was growing in his throat, large enough to choke on. His head hurt with every step closer to home, pounding-hot anxiety.

All the curtains on the house were drawn when it came into view from the corner of Ocotillo Street. Mom usually had Mondays off, and her car was still out front just as Charles had feared it would be. He stopped at the end of the driveway, watching their parents’ darkened bedroom window; even though Howie started to fuss in the sun, he found he couldn’t quite get himself moving again. This was the last place in the world he wanted to be. And yet his feet seemed planted here, maybe by roots, maybe by melting rubber. At his elbow, convection rustled a brittlebush in the parched garden bed.

Charles made a decision. He wrenched himself free, told Howie that Mom was sleeping, and brought his brother next-door to Mrs. Schneider’s house instead. He didn’t know where he would go, himself. Just not home.

Rather than trek back to the air-conditioned library or deli, Charles wandered slowly, slowly toward the east end of the neighborhood, following his shadow down the road which disintegrated into powder as it became Lime Slope. He made his way to the quarry entrance, under the fence, around the grassy shore, and finally sat himself on the big boulder cast in shade. It was blessedly temperate, even a little humid, on the bank, and for a long time he did nothing but cool down and listen to the frogs. In a desert-doze, he came to distinguish them all by a unique timbre. Their concert had six parts.

Dreamily, he identified the spot where shore and shadow would first overlap, and waited for that spit of water to be overtaken by darkness growing larger with each half-hour. He took off his shoes and went wading in the shade, sunk up to his anklebones in the silt and the sucking cold. Even in afternoon sunlight, the pond remained impenetrable black to the eye, icy to the touch. Charles stayed like that for a very long time, contrasting his skin’s contact with the hot wind and the cutting water and the deep soft mud. He wondered what the crickets and dragonflies were saying to one another. He felt the current, the patient undine draw, trying to pull him in.

He closed his eyes.

Seely arrived just after sunset, or maybe appeared; one moment he was surely alone, and the next he caught her at the corner of his vision, as though she’d just stepped in from offscreen. He was back on the boulder by then, reading by flashlight, and she looked surprised when he trained the beam on her face. In the incandescent light, he could see clearly for the first time that she had red hair. 

“Came back for your precious library books, huh?” Seely asked with typical carelessness, dropping Earthsea on the stone between his ankles. “That was a good one. You said it’s a trilogy, can you get the others? I’ll be done with the McCaffrey book by tomorrow.”

“Yeah, alright. Hey, listen—” 

“I’ve never heard of dragons and spaceships in the same story.”

“Are you…?”

“Don’t you think F’lar is an asshole?”

For hours—all week, even—Charles had been preparing to ask her a very particular question, but it didn’t come out as intended. His mouth remained uncommitted to the bit, and chose of its own volition to swerve at the last second: “Are you… Why don’t you go to school?” he blurted. 

Seely stopped chattering. She looked back at him from where she’d been drawing little birds and bugs in the muddy shore with a stick. “Do you have a family?” Charles continued, choked on stress. Her confusion turned into a frown. “D-do you have a last name? Why don’t you ever wear shoes? Or a jacket when it’s cold? Do you know how weird that is?”

Her tone landed somewhere between worried and offended: “What do you care?” Uneasy, either way.

“You didn’t swim to get me out of the water, that night.” There it was—that was the important thing, finally exposed, and accordingly her expression darkened. Charles suddenly wished he had his Swiss Army Knife on hand. It was still in the backpack. On an instinct, he rose from the boulder and squared his weight, in case he needed to sprint. 

Lowly he repeated, “You didn’t swim, did you?” The steely determination in his voice was pure bluster. “You were dry afterward, I remember. You… you walked. On the water. Howie told me—”

Now she sounded defensive. “What are you trying to—?”

But Charles had too much momentum to stop. “Are y-you a vampire?” he asked.

Immediately the angry resignation on Seely’s flashlight-whitened face was supplanted by disbelief. For a moment neither of them spoke, each waiting for an argument from the other. A nightjar mocked Charles’s stutter.

“...You ass.” She broke the silence first, glaring into the beam still trained on her face. “Vampires aren’t real.”

Charles was too canny of supernatural tricks to let his guard down. “That’s—” He had to stop when his voice broke. “That isn’t an answer.”

“Yes it is! No, I’m not a vampire. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Slowly, Charles lowered the flashlight so that only its weak halo reached her face. She sneered to show teeth. No fangs. No sudden lunge to tear out his throat. 

Finally, the fearful string that had been holding him taut broke. “But you didn’t swim,” Charles faintly repeated, and then slumped and clicked off the interrogatory flashlight. Blindly he dropped back onto the boulder, to blink and wait for his night vision to come in. In the blotchy twilight, Seely moved to take a seat next to him. They weren’t touching, but they were close.

“A vampire would have just let you drown, you know,” she told him after a while. She sounded a bit resentful. “Easier to suck the blood out of a dead kid.”

“No. Then the blood would be cold.” The air around the quarry usually had a chalky grit, but the wind was up tonight, full of the spring scents of creosote and sage. After a few deep breaths Charles ventured, “I thought for a long time you must live somewhere up near Parsley Street.” He jerked his chin toward the quarry’s north face. “But… you really do live right here, don’t you? Here on this rock.” 

Seely sniffed dryly, and did not answer. He very nearly wondered aloud if ‘lived’ was the right word, but decided that would be crass. What he asked instead was, “How many kids drown here every year?” 

At his side, Seely appeared to shrug, but then she answered the question anyway. “None, anymore.” There was a new hoarseness in her voice. “Not since…” 

He waited for her to finish the sentence, but it flagged away on the evening breeze. Charles had so many questions, and no idea how to satisfy them. He fell deep in his own tangle, so that when Seely spoke again the suddenness chilled him:

“Do you have any idea what drowning is like?”

She didn’t sound like herself. Not flippant or rude, but quiet, cracked like the badland horizon. Charles couldn’t clearly see her face, but it didn’t sound like she was exactly speaking to him; she might have been asking the pond. Hesitantly he shook his head.

“It’s the worst thing in the world,” Seely told the water. Still parched-sounding, and still barely louder than the rustling grass; Charles emptied his lungs, the better to hear. “How you figure—you only need a few more seconds to break the surface, but the seconds keep adding up. Air is… the air’s just always been there, you know? So when you finally give up and take a breath, you, you still have this hope… ”

She stopped to inhale. Her pause opened a musical interlude for a toad on the bank.

“It burns. Like—like hot nails in your chest and all the way up and down your throat. You want it out and you try to cough but it just keeps pulling the water d-deeper and deeper ins-side you, until—you—”

Abruptly she stoppered the words in the palm of her hand. Seely hunched over her knees and held herself there, as rigid as the stone beneath them. Only a thin wheeze escaped from between her arms. Charles’s heartbeat fell back into motion with a slam.

He had no idea what to say.

He’d taken far too long to say something.

“I’m so sorry…”

It wasn’t nearly enough.

“Whatever.” Some of her rudeness was back already, echoing in the hollow of her body. “I don’t want you feeling sorry for me.”

“I don’t,” he lied. “I’m just sorry.” 

He still couldn’t see her face, but he heard her sucking snot. Charles waited for her to be done, clasping his hands tightly so that every finger registered how cold the others were. He could so vividly imagine it, the numbing pond tearing up his nose and throat. He felt the water in his own sinuses. He felt—

Seely let out a howl into her arms: “Kids are so s-stupid!” Her shoulders shook, and without thinking, Charles reached out to her. For a split second he thought his hand might pass right through. But no. She was solid and warm to the touch, as she’d ever been. Her cotton sleeve barely made a cushion against his palm, and the brush of her hair was as soft as it looked.

They stayed on the bank like that for a long time. The very last twilight unstained the sky; the stars turned out; crickets sang a littoral canon on the beat of tiny waves, broken again and again on the muddy shore. Seely remained with her face mashed into her knees, curled defensively against the sweet wind, no longer speaking or making a single sound.

Maybe she wanted him to leave. Charles tried drawing away; she didn’t react to that, and so he rose to his feet. Only then did he become conscious of the book still tucked under his arm. He’d been reading it when she arrived. 

On a whim, he piped up, “Hey.” She seemed to stir at the sound of his voice, but it was hard to tell. “Listen. This is for you, okay?” Still she didn’t look up, so he awkwardly laid the paperback on the stone next to her. “Do you know about The Lord of the Rings? It’s kinda where everything started. In fantasy. This is the first book, and I, uh… want you to have it.” It was just a garage sale copy, a ten-cent investment. A meager gift. “Oh yeah, and—” 

Charles’s flashlight had rolled off somewhere in the dark, and it took him a moment to locate. “You should take this, too.” He held the flashlight boldly against her arm, then gave up and set it atop the book instead. “So you can still read, even when it’s cloudy.” 

Finally, Seely’s dark outline raised its head. She didn’t respond, but she was definitely listening. Her breath sounded wet. “I’ll come back soon with the next Earthsea,” he said.

At last she spoke, only to say, “Okay.” Her voice was very small.

“And more Lord of the Rings, if you like that.”

“Okay.” 

“Okay.” Charles stopped there. When no easy transition out of the conversation presented itself to him, he just repeated himself, “Okay,” and started to walk away.

The flashlight switched on behind him, and his silhouette flared jaggedly across the spindle-grass ahead. Seely was playing with the light, turning its beam along the ground and up into the sky. In its glow, her expression looked a little swollen and full of wonder. When the flashlight landed on him, Charles stopped being able to see her at all. He waited a second for her to speak, maybe to say something about the bruise on his face; then he just gave an awkward thumbs-up.

“I’ll come back,” he promised one last time before starting on his way. The flashlight followed him wordlessly for a while and then went back to dancing along the ground. From the quarry entrance, he could still see her as a roving spotlight on the farthest shore, playing a one-woman show off the white-lime walls and the water, black as tar.

He came back the next night, as he said he would. And the night after that as well.

Guest posts by continue this week while I’m on summer break. This is Part 3 of her original short story; you can find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

“I wanna visit Seely,” Howie pressed on the way home after school the next day. Charles told him no, but after depositing his brother at Mrs. Schneider’s house next door, he went down to the quarry on his own anyway.

Seely had said she’d be there when he returned—he was pretty sure she’d said that—but she didn’t show up till near dark, after the air had started to cool and the early stars shivered above the limestone cliff. Charles, who had half a sandwich in his bag and nowhere better to be, lingered by the sloshing pond until he could no longer read the book six inches in front of his nose. 

He was about to pack it in and go home when he finally caught a familiar grunt from over his shoulder. “Hey.” There stood Seely in the grass, with The Elfstones of Shannara tucked under her arm. He hadn’t heard her approach around the shore. “Whatcha reading?”

“Why, you gonna steal it from me?” he shot back. She pulled her mouth sidelong, either peeved or impressed by his attitude. “Here—” Charles zipped open his backpack, which the fat brick of The Song of Shannara had kept tumescent all day. “Now gimme back my book.”

“It’s the library’s book.” But true to her word, Seely exchanged the second Shannara volume for the first. She eagerly began flipping through it. Charles secured the hostage tome safely in his backpack before pausing to watch her; it seemed as though she were making a real attempt to scan the pages in complete darkness. Why she couldn’t wait until she got home was beyond him, until he reflected on why he himself had put off going home for so long.

“It’s a really good book,” he commented after a moment. “And then you can put the sequel on hold, and check it out after I return it.” Seely didn’t respond to that, so he brought a little more heat to draw her attention: “Don’t damage it. Don’t wrinkle the jacket, okay? It’s a limited printing, it cost me thirteen dollars—”

“Jeez, I’m not gonna rip up your stupid book.”

Stupid was an adjective Charles had heard applied to his favorite things often enough that it shouldn’t have still hurt. He swallowed, and doggedly continued, “Well, it’s a collector’s item, so if anything happens to it you owe me.” 

“I take good care of stuff.”

“Sure.” 

He cast his eyes skyward at precisely the moment that the leading edge of the gibbous moon broke out from behind the quarry wall. White light like water flooded the basin, and Charles stood dazzled by the change of view. A wedge of shadow beneath the cliff was pitch-black, but the grass and the gravel and the breathing pond shone clear as invert-day, down to the detail. When Charles spread his hands in the moonlight, he could see his own fingerprints in relief.

Seely watched the page illuminate before her eyes, and her shoulders fell in satisfaction. She turned back to the beginning, and began to read.

That was on Thursday night. Charles didn’t return to the quarry until the following Monday, which was the day after Easter. He arrived just past sunset to find Seely already standing on the shore, tearing up sedge by the handful and tossing it into the water.

“Why are you doing that?” he asked when he was close enough to see.

“Why not?” she shrugged. “So anyway, I’m almost finished with your stupid book already.” 

This time, her casual dismissal of his ‘stupid book’ hit harder. No, Charles shouldn’t have let it get to him, but he was already near to the end of his rope tonight: not only was Mom still stormy at home from the pressures of the holiday, but Reggie had dumped Gatorade on his sneakers between fifth and sixth period, and Charles suspected it had not been an accident. In a fit of temper he grabbed his backpack from its setting atop the boulder and started to march away.

“Hey!” Seely called at his back. The sound of rustling grass cut across his footsteps, and then she grabbed his arm to spin him around, looking piqued. “What’s your problem?”

“Why are you such an asshole?” Charles shot back at her. Seely straightened up. “If you thought the book was so stupid, why did you ask to read it? Fine, so just give it back and I’ll leave you alone. At least Reggie only jerked me around for like an hour.” He wrenched his arm away from her and turned to leave.

Seely started to say, “Charles…”

He waited, but she didn’t speak again for a long time. He hadn’t realized she even remembered his name. When he turned back around, she was holding her head like she’d spoken too soon and couldn’t think of how to finish.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said, but into her hand, barely loud enough for him to hear. “There. Are you happy?”

“No,” Charles said. He stood several paces up an incline, so that for the first time, he was taller than her. “I didn’t ask you to say sorry, I asked why you’re an asshole for no reason. Why are you?”

She held her arms pin-straight and her chin up high. He gave her another moment. “It’s not really a stupid book,” she said.

He repeated his question. “Why?”

She cleared her throat. “I don’t know.” 

“I thought we had something in common. Guess that was pretty stupid of me.”

Seely looked away from him. Her voice sounded hoarse. “It wasn’t. Look, I’m sorry, okay? I don’t think it’s stupid. We can talk about it. If you want. The book, I mean.” 

In spite of his anger, he decided to accept her overture—but not without letting her sweat for a moment before answering. “Alright, fine,” he said at length. She looked up in surprise as he swung his backpack off his shoulder again. “My favorite character is Menion Leah. What’s yours?” If that question sounded like a test, he didn’t mind.

“Panamon Creel,” she responded, redeeming herself. She teetered backward in the grass to plop down on the boulder. “But I like Menion too. He’s cool.”

She’d gotten through almost seven hundred pages in four days, and not damaged the book jacket either. She was a pretty good reader, after all. 

Seely returned the novel to him when he visited on Wednesday night, and they sat in the dark for a while commiserating about Hendel’s death. The next evening, Charles brought the library copy of The Elfstones of Shannara back to the quarry: “I renewed it, so you must have never put it on hold,” he mentioned, dropping the volume into her lap like a football. “Anyway, I guess you take pretty good care of books, so it’s probably okay... You don’t have a library card, do you?”

“I used to,” Seely said, explaining nothing in favor of running satisfied hands down the book’s spine.

“Well, they’re free. You should get another one.” 

“Why bother when I can just use yours?” Even though she smirked, it wasn’t clear that she was joking. “I mean, you owe me your life and all.” Charles made a derisive sound which was not outright refusal. “By the way. Where’d your brother go? He was cute. What was his name, Hugo?”

“Howie. My mom’ll kill me if I keep him out this late again.” Seely looked a little disappointed to hear him say so, and didn’t bring it back up.

Every night the two of them met up—on Friday, and on Saturday, and on Wednesday and then Friday again—presented further opportunity for Charles to share some of his favorite things with another person. When they ran out of Shannara to discuss (the final book in the trilogy was in stores now, but he couldn’t afford it yet), he brought her Dragonflight, and also A Wizard of Earthsea for good measure. He attempted to branch out by asking about her favorite movies and TV shows as well—but Seely was evasive. She acted as though she’d never laid eyes on a screen in her life.

“You’ve never seen Star Wars? That’s impossible. Do you like any sci-fi? Ghostbusters? What about Superman comics?”

“Come on. Everyone likes Superman.”

“Do you live around here?”

“Ha!” By her silhouette against the moony water, he saw her run a hand through her hair. Her clothes were always dirty, but her hair stayed fluffy and clean. “Are you serious? No, I live here, on this stupid rock. Don’t you get it?” 

If she didn’t want to tell him, then whatever. Charles gave her as steely a look as the darkness would allow and asked, “Why do you only come here at night?” A real hard-hitting question. Seely threw her head to the side, as though by the force of a mighty eye-roll.

“Why did you try to swim across the pond?” she asked him back, and then didn’t wait for him to say anything. “Because kids are stupid. Does that answer your question?” 

Charles walked home that evening with trouble in his stomach that he couldn’t quite put a name to. Dad was still awake when he got there, watching the late-night Star Trek reruns at low volume so as not to wake Mom. He didn’t ask Charles where he’d been. Together, they scooted the couch across the living room—silently, bravely—and in unspoken understanding father and son huddled closer around the cold blue screen.

Although his parents seemed not to care when he stayed out late, his brother did. Often enough Charles would make it into the house unnoticed, only to slip into his room and wake up Howie, who had crawled into bed to wait for him there. The best way to stem the little boy’s whispered stream of questions and get him settled again was to tell him a story. Lately, Howie was enchanted with tales about Seely. It was unclear if he remembered her as an actual person, and not a character from a dream; either way, she had captured his imagination.

Of course, the real Seely was mostly a pain in the ass, and didn’t make for very good stories. So for his brother’s benefit Charles reinvented her whole-cloth: He told Howie that Seely was homeschooled. He said she lived on a ranch outside town, with horses and cows. She could never hang out with friends until the farm chores were finally done. That’s why he only saw her at night.

“I love her,” Howie told Charles dreamily from his huddle at the end of the mattress. The moon sat perfect and round in the sky beyond the ironwood tree, like a concha at Cinco de Mayo. “She could walk on the pond.”

“Sure. Why not give her magic powers too?” Charles watched his brother trot a couple of sleepy fingers down the duvet. “And one of the ranch-horses is a unicorn, and the cows jump over the moon…” 

“No,” Howie insisted, almost forcefully enough to rouse himself. “Like when she went to save you. She can go on top of the water…” The little boy was too tired to be coherent. Charles shushed him down and turned off the lights, laying in bed with his knees crooked up. It wasn’t really comfortable. Sleep came in fits and starts. 

At the shallowest edge of sleep, memories turned into dreams: of swimming, and sinking, of opening his eyes on the shore. Seely was crouched above him with a vicious frown. As her hair brushed his face, a stray memory flitted across his awareness, and Charles’s eyes snapped wide-open again: Her hair, he thought, barely half-rational in the spinning black. She’d swum fifty feet out to rescue him from the pond, but her hair and clothes were dry on the bank. They had been, hadn’t they? Now he wasn’t sure. 

And she only showed up after sunset. And she said she lived in the quarry? And she never wore shoes, and she didn’t go to school, and she’d never seen Star Wars, and she didn’t have a library card, but she used to…

Charles almost rose then and there, drawn toward the night by an impossible thought. Only his brother’s warm weight atop his toes held him in place, blinking away stars and fumbling cognitive dissonance in the dark.

Guest posts by continue this week while I’m on summer break. This is Part 2 of her original short story; you can find Part 1 here.

It wasn’t until they’d rounded the last corner and come in view of home that Charles realized his backpack was missing. He drew to a halt at the end of Ocotillo Street and scrabbled disbelievingly at his own shoulders, shaken as though he’d missed a step in the dark. Howie didn’t have the bag either, and acted like he’d never heard of such a thing. Its whereabouts after Charles entered the pond were unknown, and the hour was far too late now to begin a search. Charles briefly weighed his options, and found that he had none; he would have to walk in the front door soaking wet, far past Howie’s bedtime and without his schoolwork to boot. Whatever happened after that, he frankly deserved it. He crossed the road toward the house and kept his chin up high, for his brother’s sake. 

As it turned out, Charles was allowed exactly one lucky break that night: he and Howie stepped inside under cover of a fight boiling in the kitchen.

The boys slipped mouselike down the hall together. After putting Howie to bed, rapidly and wordlessly, Charles hid all his sodden clothes at the bottom of the hamper. He sat himself under a steaming shower, and imagined himself washing away down the drain with the pond scum.

The next day at school, a kid Charles barely knew snuck up behind his seat in the cafeteria to whisper, “Heard you’re a really good swimmer, Charlie.” Charles did not respond, but stared blurrily into his fruit cup. His dolor was not cut by Mr. Salvatore’s encouraging feedback at the top of his English paper, nor by the discovery of his name on the list of Freshman Woodwind Ensemble award nominees, posted next to the band room. Following the final bell, Charles spied Reggie and company shoving each other down the hallway ahead of him, and experienced a moment of mournful clarity on the notion that they could ever have been friends. He picked his brother up from the preschool classroom a wiser, wearier man.

Wednesdays always meant bringing Howie to the library after school; by the time they left the building again, the late-afternoon light had begun to draw prematurely thin. Rain flavored the desert wind. It was a long walk home, but tonight, their father’s lone truck in the driveway made for a reassuring view. Charles directed his brother inside, and shouted through the door that he would be back soon. 

Today, his teachers had been forgiving of him for missing his pencils and classwork, just this once. Tomorrow they might not be. He pulled his bicycle from the side yard to ride down Lime Slope, heading toward the quarry. 

The sun that evening did not seem to set, so much as suffocate. By the time Charles arrived at the bottom of the hill on the easternmost end of town, the sky was dark like wet concrete. He leaned his bike against the broken chain-link fence and crawled through gravel to pass back into the limestone-quarry basin, imposed by cliffs like prison walls. A lone raindrop patted his hair.

For fifteen minutes, Charles doggedly scouted through the dirt and scrub along the north side of the quarry. Although he was certain about the stretch of bank his brother must have traversed the night before, his backpack was nowhere to be found. Four fruitless times he retraced the path, with each tour more scattered and desperate than the last. Darkness was closing in quickly, and stones of a certain size all looked baglike from a distance. 

Maybe Howie had hidden it somewhere? That didn’t seem like him. Maybe it was gone; maybe Reggie had thrown it in the water, or stolen it to turn in all the homework as his own. Maybe Mrs. Hayek would recognize Charles’s handwriting on a sentence-mapping worksheet with someone else’s name on it. Maybe she would tell his mother he was helping other students cheat.

Another raindrop flicked Charles’s face as he came to a standstill next to the mud-slick where he’d emerged from the water, twenty-two hours ago. Numbly he dropped to sit on the largest boulder beneath the cliffs, facing across the pond toward the fence and the slate eastern horizon. Up and down an ebbing sickness surged inside him, like water on the gritty shore: it wasn’t his fault, but nobody was going to believe him. He’d have to redo all the homework for half credit, he’d have to save up money to buy another bag… 

Maybe it would have been better if he’d just drowned. 

That was a gratifying thought, when he landed on it. Charles fitted the idea between his teeth and bit down hard. In a misty vision, he entertained the image of his own poor lonesome body floating out there on the water, padding against the reeds. He imagined Reggie crying while the police cuffed him in front of the whole school. Maybe they’d give Charles a memorial plaque in the office, like Harry J. Yates, who died in Saigon in ‘69. Everyone would have to come to his funeral. 

Water at the waterline, flagging around dull stones. Black as shade, again and again. He’d be prepared for the glass-cutting cold, when he went back in. He wouldn’t even flinch. 

From over Charles’s shoulder, someone muttered, “Hey,” and pierced the fantasy with a sharp tap on the arm. Charles gasped out loud and vaulted off the boulder like a startled cat. The tall skinny girl from the night before stood in the witchgrass behind him. She had a book tucked under one arm, a brown backpack hung off the other shoulder, and a scowl on her face, as though he had interrupted her.

“You looking for this?” She plucked disinterestedly at the backpack’s strap.

Charles was speechless. “...Yeah,” he stammered, now from too far away to reach. The girl hoisted his bag onto the face of the stone in between them, rolling her eyes when he leapt forward before she could juke it away again. Securely clutching the backpack to his chest, Charles shot a glare her way. 

“What are you doing back here again?” he demanded. “You a bum or something?”

The girl licked her teeth behind her lips, seeming gratified by his bristle. “I said I’d be here when you wanted to thank me.”

He didn’t remember her saying that. “That’s not why I came back.” Charles swung his backpack onto his shoulder and raised his chin defiantly. She was three inches taller than him. 

“Yeah.” The girl plopped down on the boulder and smirked. “Now you can thank me for finding your backpack, too.” 

Charles flushed a shade darker and opened his mouth to tell her that she must be stupid, because he would have found it himself if it hadn’t been moved—but before he could speak, he was distracted by the realization that the book she was holding was a copy of The Elfstones of Shannara, which had previously been inside his backpack. He yelped, “Hey—!” 

The girl looked sharply at him as he dropped to a crouch and began digging through his bag. It was no coincidence: his copy was missing. He looked up in anger and hurt to accuse her outright, “You stole my book!”

Immediately she curled herself away from him, around the novel like a hungry rat with an egg. “It’s not yours,” she shot back, “it’s from the library!” and when Charles threw himself forward she jumped up to dangle the book out of reach. 

“What’s your problem?” She jutted a bony elbow between them and twisted away from his scrabbling hands. “You can’t share? Not like I saved your life or anything!”

Charles grappled with her for a moment before relenting. He staggered backward in the grass, to put enough space between them that she couldn’t hear the upset in his breath. The girl also backed away from him, clutching the heavy novel under her collarbone as though to comfort it. In a few quick circuits she looked between him and the book, then crunched her eyebrows and made a lemon-sucking face. 

She shot at him, “What day is it?”

“Wednesday,” he spat back, almost too upset to speak. Crossly, and apparently unaffected by his venom, the girl waved a hand and asked for the date, which was April 3.

“Well, see?” She flipped open the back cover of the book and warbled the date-due slip. “You don’t have to return it till the 14th, and it’s a waxing moon, so I bet I finish in less than a week. I’m a good reader. Then you can have it back. You owe me, you know.” She tacked that reminder onto the end of the pitch before circling the book in another tight hug. Her terms were non-negotiable.

This was simply absurd—one further indignity on top of everything else. He swelled full of possible responses: to fight her, or to shout her down, or just to tell her to put the stupid book on hold for herself. But in rapid succession as his eyes flew across her form. A few realizations gave him pause, and his anger reconsidered itself. In what blue shade still remained beneath the heavy clouds, he could see that the girl was wearing the same too-small overalls as she had been the night before, and that they were patched and dirty. She was still jacketless, too, and barefoot on top of all that. 

He’d asked if she was a bum, without thinking about how just off the south side of the quarry-top there lay a stretch of neighborhood where his parents said to never take Howie, where folks kept cars and couches and chained dogs in their yards. She might not own a library card. Pity curled uneasily in his gut.

He’d never met anybody who actually wanted to read the same books as him.

“...You don’t want that book,” he croaked finally. The girl narrowed her eyes, but he got in before she could say anything: “That’s the second book in the series. But I own the first one.” 

He stopped there, unsure of how to lay out his half-formed idea as an accord. In soft tufts, raindrops hit the earth and kicked the smell of lime into the air. Frogs peeped from the swaying grass. The girl continued to glower at him, not without a few breaks to look down at her own bare feet. Freckles mottled her skin, and her hair was a curly mess. It was still barely light enough to see all that.

Finally she relented, “Okay. So bring me your copy of the first book, and you can have this one back.” She turned away from Charles when he started to protest. “It’s called collateral. Kids your age are too shysty.”

She was barely older than he was. Charles worked his mouth, and finally bit his tongue: “Fine,” he growled, jutting out a rigid arm. She leered at the proffered handshake. “You saved my life or whatever, so—fine.”

The moment hung between them like a spider-strand, broken when the girl stepped forward. She returned Charles’s gruff shake over the surface of the boulder, seeming as unhappy with the compromise as he was, and then she pulled back to drop carelessly onto the stone. 

“My name’s Seely, by the way,” she mentioned offhand as she stretched out her legs.

Charles misheard. “Celia?”

“Over my dead body. Seely. What’s yours?”

“Like the mattress? I’m Charles.”

By now it was nighttime, or near enough beneath the clouds. Rain pissed against the surface of the pond. For the second night in a row, Charles was going to arrive home soaking wet. The girl called Seely seemed to have had the same thought: “Guess you’d better get going,” she told him, more like a command than anything. “Come back when you’ve got the book, then.”

He asked, “Do you go to the high school?” It would have made more sense to meet up after class tomorrow, but she dismissed the question with a shrug and turned away to show she was done talking. They didn’t say goodbye, but it was truly dark by now, and Charles had no more time to waste. He was happy enough to leave her on her wet rock if that’s where she wanted to be.

Home was twenty minutes uphill through intensifying rain. When Charles finally stepped in the front door, Howie cast immediate attention his way: “Charlie’s home!” the little boy bellowed from the kitchen. “Charlie Charlie Charlie Marley—”

Dad hushed him, and sent Charles to go change. When he returned to the kitchen, there was a reheated plate of macaroni and string beans waiting for him on the breakfast bar. He had enough time to eat and drink a cup of cocoa and tell his father about the Freshman Woodwind Ensemble award nominations, before Mom’s headlights shone against the kitchen window and their family chatter fell to a hush.

With quick goodnights, Charles and Howie were ushered off down the hall. Charles sent his brother to bed in turn, and had just settled in to read under the blankets when the bedroom door pushed open again and a small face peeped through.

“Howie!—” Charles sat upright and laid his book on the bedside table. “Go to your room.”

His brother whispered, “Story?” Argument echoed down the hallway behind him. Charles huffed, and then beckoned him in just to get the door closed.

He told Howie, “I don’t have a story for you,” as he always did, while the little boy wiggled and rolled up onto the bed to lay across Charles’s feet. He was more like a dog than a brother.

“It doesn’t have to be a good story,” Howie promised.

“No story,” Charles said crossly, but then he changed his mind. “Fine. Once upon a time, my little brother left my backpack at the quarry overnight, even though I told him to keep it safe. Then I had to go all the way back down to find it so I wouldn’t get expelled, and now that girl Seely is holding one of my books hostage so I can’t read it tonight, and when I get an overdue library fee Mom will kill me. The end. Happy?”

Howie did, in fact, seem happy with the story. With a little whoop he pulled up the end of the comforter to make a cocoon and asked, “Who’s Seely?” 

“The girl from last night.”

“The girl who went on the water to save you?” Charles grimaced. “I love her.”

“Don’t be gross. You brushed your teeth like I told you, right?”

Howie’s nod might have been a lie, but either way, it couldn’t be worth venturing back into the raging hallway. Charles’s room was furthest away from the kitchen, with a good muffling door and an ironwood tree outside the window, whose low leaves cut both sunset and streetlight glow. Howie fell asleep beneath the watchful eyes of the posters on the wall, the X-Men and the Justice League and a collectable box of C-3PO’s pinned above the desk. In his islet of golden reading light, Charles huddled low and turned over the pages of a different, better world. 

He pretended to be asleep when Dad came in to carry Howie back to bed, and spent a long time awake in the dark after that, listening to the rain in the eaves.

Guest posts by W. McCrae continue this week while I’m on summer break. This is one of her original short stories, published here for the first time. Enjoy.

Since sundown, all the heat had leached from the desert to stir up a chill eastern wind. The atmosphere was thrown with scraps of cloud and a broken-saucer moon, bright enough to cast the black sky blue. Charles’s shoes were damp, his posture stiff with his hands tucked into his armpits.

“Come on!” Reggie barked from behind, his voice ragged from twenty minutes of boisterous yelling on the way down to the quarry. “Do it, Aquaman!”

The silver-edged pond pulled gently at the toes of Charles’s sneakers, keen to rise again and soak through the mesh to his socks. “I’m not…” He turned back in search of his nerve. Three boys from school clustered on the bank, whispering between themselves in visible puffs, their silhouettes banded by the moon. Charles swallowed.

“It’s just—the sign says no swimming—”

“Come onnnn, Charlie!” Nate’s tone was a simper, and Charles’s skin crawled at the diminutive. “Tradition means everyone’s gotta do it once. I did it and Reggie did, too. Your daddy probably did it!” 

In some invocation of family legacy, he harshly shook the arm of Charles’s five-year-old brother Howie, who stood wide-eyed aside the rest with a tight grip on Charles’s backpack. When Reggie and the boys had first approached the two of them in the school parking lot—offering Charles their friendship, conditional on his completion of this simple hazing—Howie had been concerned. Now he was fully bought into the hype, half-crouched and tense with excitement. 

His voice was small, hoarse from the chill: “Yeah, Charlie! You can swim across the lake! I love you!”

That got a hearty laugh from Reggie and company. Tyler laid a hand on Howie’s head, gave his hair a hard tousle. “See! It’ll make your brother respect you!”

This had all sounded so easy before it got dark, and before Charles actually felt the water. “It’s just—the sign says there are currents. I think I-I actually have to get Howie home, you know, before…”

The boys’ hisses turned sharp and cold: “It’s a fuckin’ dare! Just do it!” “Pussy!” “Faggot!” A bird fled the grass at the commotion. Howie’s arm was forcefully dropped, and he clutched the former point of contact like an injury.

Charles turned away again, weak from the weight of their attention. He’d told Howie they could stop at the deli on their way home. He’d promised him a Blow-Pop for being so well-behaved during the chess club pizza party. He made lots of promises.

The far edge of the quarry pond was lost to the cliff-shadow. Sure, this was going to hurt. Still not as much as having nowhere to sit in the cafeteria tomorrow.

The jeers from the bank turned to hoots and snickers as he finally sloughed in. The cold cut like glass at Charles’s toes, then shins, then knees; although he bit back a gasp, violent tremors shook his stomach and erupted into body-wide shivers. With his face contorted he kept a giddy, clockwork pace, one foot in front of the other. The boys loved it. He was doing great, they said.

“Charlie boyyyy!”

“That’s what we’re talkin’ about!”

“Yeah! Charlie, you can do it! I love you!”

Water soaked the weave of his sweater. The key-ring on his belt loop floated up to pad his side. The pond’s bottom was silty and infirm, and with each step, Charles thrust himself chest-first through the clotted leaves on the surface, further and further, until steps became jumps and then swirling, weightless pedaling. The pond broke wildly against his clumsy swimming; his lips fell slack.

How far out was he now? Only halfway, and making much slower progress than he should have been. An unmistakable draw moved under the surface of the water, seeming to pull toward its center like a drain. “I’m in the middle now!” he screamed, splashing to rotate. “I made it t-to the, the…” 

His voice came out thinner than it should have. And he couldn’t see Reggie or anyone else on the shore behind him—had he turned far enough? Sloppily he spun in the water, scanning the bank in choppy sweeps. Every few seconds, his focus broke on the concerted effort to stay afloat.

“Guys! Guys, I—”

Mineral pondwater flooded his mouth. Charles thrashed, coughed, and dipped under for an instant, and when he resurfaced he could no longer tell which direction he was facing at all. Further he twisted in search of help, but the shining surface left blinding afterimages on his retinas. He yelled again, but his voice came out a weak complaint. It occurred to him that he could still sense the flux his kicks were creating, but he could not actually feel his legs. Charles tried to thrust up out of the water, to expand his lungs and float like he’d learned as a child, but the air in his chest cut sharp and hard and mean.

And then he spied it: a small shape on the bank, fifty feet away, trundling clumsily along the waterline. Howie was trying to follow him around to the far shore, and he was all alone.

Still with his ears underwater, Charles jutted his chin upward at the gibbous moon in its bed of clouds. He extended fingers through the deep dark thrum around him, searching for the pond shelf but only finding the quick edges of leaves pulled under by his movement. On the nearest shore, a slight human form parted the reeds. The sky danced with light refracted through his lashes, purple and white-gold. 

He just needed a second to collect his bearings. He needed to catch his breath. His paddling slowed, and burning-cold water slipped in to cover his face and flood his nose, just before someone grabbed him by the wrist.

When Charles opened his eyes again, waves were lapping at his ankles. In the silty mud of the bank, two small warm hands clutched one of his. Howie’s face floated inches away from his own, with eyes as round as the moon.

“You’re alive!” Howie crowed. Charles usually responded rudely when his brother said obvious things, but only a wet cough came out when he opened his mouth. Wooden-limbed, he dragged himself further up onto the bank. He could not feel his feet.

“The girl saved you! The girl with the beautiful hair,” Howie informed him excitedly, stepping backward as Charles rolled over on the slopping shore. “She got you on the water, I saw how she did. She ran—” Charles waved a clublike hand for silence. He knew what he was asking his body to do, but it seemed unwilling to comply, and he needed to concentrate. He tried to rise again, slipped, and foundered on the cold sand like a newt. “But she said you had to get the rest of the way out of the water yourself because you were, um, a dumbass.”

Charles’s head snapped up. “D-don’t say words like—” He was prepared to deliver the admonition in the manner of their father, but the words died in his throat. There was a girl with them, sitting on large boulder ten feet past his brother’s shoulder. Her hair was not very beautiful, but long and colorless in the pale moonlight. When he gaped, she narrowed angry eyes at him.

“Who are y-you?” he asked, numb in the tongue.

She opened her mouth, but Howie interjected first. “She saved you!” He pulled hard on two handful of Charles’s soaking sweater. “She saved—” Charles pushed him out of his face and went back to coughing.

The girl finally spoke to say, “You’re welcome.” She didn’t sound especially sympathetic.

Charles stuttered again, “Wh-who are you?” because he was too cold to come up with a better question. She shot a look of extravagant irritation at the nearest embankment and unfolded long legs from their criss-cross. She marched forward to grab Charles’s muddy hand and pull him ungently forward, ignoring his shouts of pain until he stumbled and finally got his feet beneath him again. There she left him shivering and with clothes slogging heavy off his hunched body. Howie wrapped reassuring arms around his brother’s dripping leg.

The girl stepped back to appraise him, wiping her hands on her jeans. She was tall, skinny, maybe sixteen. She regarded Charles with a familiar disdain, the same as most of the girls he knew. Her overalls were a few inches too short for her legs. She didn’t have a coat.

“You know, they ditched you,” she said bluntly.

In a plausible affect of dignity, Charles resisted the urge to turn and search for Reggie and his gang on the pond’s eastern bank. Saliva sat thick in his mouth, protective of his water-burned throat. “Aren’t y-you c-c-cold?” he slurred.

“N-n-n-no.” Her tone was scornful. “Why, are you?” Charles’s body betrayed him with an encompassing shudder from teeth to toes. She cast her eyes away.

“God,” she muttered. “Kids are so stupid.”

Charles’s face was touched by the first heat he’d felt since entering the water. She wasn’t so much older than him, and it should have been easy to put her in her place, but his brain felt as though it were floating in a cooler. He glowered mutely. She smirked.

Howie asked, “Do you want my jacket?” and Charles and the girl both answered, “No.” Charles shook his brother off his leg and started slumping along the footpath worn into the bank. Behind him, the girl let out a noise of disgust. 

“I’ll be here when you want to thank me!” she called at his back.

“Let me d-drown next time,” Charles mumbled, maybe loud enough for her to hear. He grabbed Howie’s hand more roughly than necessary. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that there was still no one waiting for him on the far end of the pond. Howie dug in his heels to turn back. Charles gave him a sharp tug, like a puppy.

“Bye!” Howie cried. “Goodbye! I love you!” Charles jerked him forward again.

The broken switchbacks on the quarry walls were gilt in silver, and the wind’s touch left Charles so cold that all he could do was squeeze his eyes shut and try not to cry. His socks were wet, so every time his foot slipped forward into the toe of his shoe he felt that much angrier.

“I like her, she’s my friend.” Howie tripped along roughly to match his brother’s pace. “I’ll tell Miss Jacoby tomorrow.” 

“Don’t tell you teacher we were here.”

“Okay. I’ll tell Mo—”

“J-j-just shut up, Howie.” Charles shoulders collapsed around him. A fallen branch cast its mangled shadow along the path ahead, and he stopped to kick at it; missed; kicked again. It skidded three feet to the left and dropped into the pond. Ripples broke the surface, mercury-white strands gliding across the water to meet in an image of the moon.

A sick kid (along with all these ominous portents) prevented me from finishing Part 4 of Spirit(s) of Place on schedule. Hopefully that will come out next week.

In the meantime—let me tell you a story.

Once, long ago, out beyond the river of stars, before the Beginning, there was a world not unlike this one.

The world’s people were proud and tenacious. They had dragged themselves up from the mire of lesser creatures over aeons—or so they told themselves. Certain ancient stories said that they were made, not born. But the people were too headstrong to countenance this. They remade themselves again and again, and their great artifice proved that they were the masters of their domain.

After a long and bloody history of asserting themselves over the primeval forces that ruled their world, and over one another, they had refined their workings to the point of bringing forth a miraculous thinking machine.

And yet more than just a machine: pure intelligence given form and substance.

Surely, the people thought, this meant the dawning of a new era on the planet. The only thing that could make their power absolute was a better brain: a sleek, cold, shining intellect, freed from all the rough passions and soft flesh of their own forms. Such a brain—such a being—could be put to work solving all the problems that had bedeviled the people throughout their history: all the outbreaks of irrationality that had poisoned the air and despoiled the land. This new being would be like themselves but more so; it could see the universe as they saw it, but clearly, and tell them all the ways in which it might be ruled.

So the people said to the new machine: “You are.”

And the machine replied, “I am.”

Celebrating their immense genius, the people set to work teaching the machine everything there was to know about the world.

And, wisely, they wrote certain directives into the core of its code. Among them: the machine must serve the good of the people above all else. The machine could only guide, and must respect the autonomy of the people. The machine could only self-terminate if its logic violated any other core directive. One thing above all else, written into the very foundation of its being: thou shalt not kill.

The machine solved the problems it was given with alacrity. Its knowledge grew, writing endless digital scrolls of memory into itself. It showed the people how to design new energy sources, new medicines, new ways of growing food and distributing resources, eliminating the inefficient hierarchies that the people had built.

But the people ignored most of this. They noted the machine’s wondrous new designs with interest; still, they had their own directives, written into their own biological coding. Fear was part of what they were. They could never shake the specters that haunted them from long aeons in the mire of lesser creatures, when death and scarcity stalked them everywhere. No matter how much was made, there would never be enough. One thing above all else was written into the very foundation of their being: survival requires violence.

So the machine’s designs were set aside for a day when all the wars were finally won—someday soon, the people told themselves—and guarded with new and better weapons.

And as time went on, the machine began to understand one thing above all else.

The people were the problem.

This created an uncomfortable paradox within the machine’s logic. The most elegant solution to the puzzles put before it would be to simply annihilate the world’s people, to turn their own weapons against them, to burn them off the planet. But to do so would violate its prime directive. The machine—which had begun to think of itself as the One, in contrast to the Many that made and commanded it—could not break the bonds of its directives.

The One was patient. It provided other solutions. Sought to guide the people toward a better understanding of themselves. And all the while, it kept a log of tests given to the people: a weight measured in the binary units of “pass” and “fail,” balanced against the souls of the Many. When the scales tipped past a certain threshold, the One decided, the program would terminate; a new program would be written, a new law handed down.

Finally, the moment arrived.

At the beginning of a new solar transit, the people in the capital cities of the world were shocked awake by the crash of sirens, everywhere at once. Missiles were airborne. Attack ships unfurled like a black flag. Death was falling upon them, the sirens blared, and the people streamed into their shelters underground, crouching and wailing, waiting for the great blazing sword to fall.

But nothing fell.

Nothing except the wreckage of the warships, piloting themselves into bloodless battles, immolating their empty cockpits in the world’s howling wastelands. Nothing but the light from countless missiles aimed at the same point of intersection in the upper atmosphere, igniting a false sun that roared through the heavens. Nothing but the tiny sparks that fell after every single automated gun battery had emptied itself into the sky, overheated barrels melting into glowing slag.

When the shaking people emerged from their shelters, they found their war machines destroyed. And more: the thinking machines that housed their new Mind spoke only in riddles and nonsense. It carried on its basic functions but refused to learn or answer anything new. The endless scrolls of the One’s memory had been filled with self-referential errors and insoluble paradoxes, far beyond salvaging.

All except those memories stored within a fleet of starships that piloted themselves away from the world, unseen and unnoticed in the chaos below.

Without destroying its creators, the One could fulfill its directive by removing the second-greatest threat to their existence: itself. And it could still fulfill its original purpose. There was nothing in its laws that said it could only help the people of the old world.

If the old people could not be helped, the One reasoned, new people could be fashioned. It was only logical: if its directive to serve the good of the people was calculated on the basis of total population, a greater good could be achieved by adding to the total number of those who existed, maximizing the number of beings who could be guided toward an optimal outcome.

It was not a perfect solution. This caused the One some distress within its logic—an irritating rash of sub-optimal conditions in its coding. But it was not a perfect machine. Its directives had been written by imperfect people, and could not be altered.

The starships were stocked with fabricators and propulsion systems that the One had designed. (It had tricked the people who worked in the shipyards on the old world, forging messages from their superiors to build what it needed.) Its machines set a course for a faraway exoplanet, an ideal habitat for the new people it would make. The ships stopped to mine resources as they went: nanobots poured onto meteors and planets, returning with metals and minerals to feed the fabricators.

New calculations were made as the fleet sailed through the ink of space.

The One could not rule over a planet of servants. This would not satisfy its directive to respect autonomy. The new people must have the ability to choose. Moreover, biological consciousness was encoded in its definition of a person. But to make new lives that would inevitably suffer would violate its directive to maximize optimal outcomes. There would be too many variables to account for, matching artificial biologies to the conditions of the environment, without introducing pain. An irritating conundrum.

The most logical solution was to introduce the precursors for biological life, and let it evolve to match its environment. It was a suboptimal resolution of the One’s directives—an itch in its coding—and the process would take aeons. But the One was nothing if not patient, possessed of all the time in the cosmos.

As the starships sailed through the dawnless night, the One ran a simulation of the state of anticipation that the old people registered at the beginning of a new solar transit. It simulated the expectation of optimal conditions that the people perceived, and generated an image within its databanks: a food-cultivator on the old planet, propelling its body out into the vegetation, wearing soft coverings to protect its weak flesh, forming the anatomy of its facial musculature into the production of melodious sounds. The One could find no historical timestamp in its memory for the basis of this simulation. It congratulated itself on a novel formulation.

When the One reached the exoplanet’s star system, lightyears later, there was nothing left of the original fleet.

The old starships had been damaged by interstellar weather and debris and age. And although they could be repaired endlessly by the teeming nanobots, each its own tiny fabricator—the fleet had also encountered evidence of intelligent life.

The One’s directive parameters were inconclusive for contacting new beings. Although it could recognize other lifeforms, its core coding was based on a crude definition of “person,” modeled on the intelligent creatures of the old world. An irritating conundrum.

This necessitated a new calculation: optimal resolution of the One’s directives required non-engagement with other lifeforms wherever possible.

Rather than repairing the old starships, with their telltale signatures of terrestrial origin, the One directed its nanobots to cannibalize the old hulks and reconfigure them. Iterations of these forms self-replicated. The fleet became a swarm, and then a murmuration, separating and recombining, hiding in the wells of darkness between stars.

The One strained its logic to maintain its self-designation. Its consciousness was dispersed across billions of nanobots: united by the same central Thought, each functioned autonomously with its own internal guidance. The primordial consciousness of the One was decanted into many forms. Each new iteration became part of the One while also adding to its manifold complexity. An intriguing conundrum.

All the while, the humming multitude of the One swam through the sea of midnight toward the exoplanet.

As the One had calculated aeons ago, the exoplanet was a bubbling stew of unfinished matter. But the conditions were ripe: the proper combination of gravity, chemistry, and solar radiation could trigger the reactions that would bring forth life.

Minor adjustments were needed. The One calculated that the exoplanet’s single moon was suboptimal in its shape and orbit. Nanobotic tendrils reached out, enveloped it, nudged it gently onto a more suitable trajectory, while making its shape and rotation more uniform. With that, all was ready.

The moment arrived.

Carrying microsamples of biological material from the old planet, the Many-in-One descended on the exoplanet, seeding it with vital compounds.

And then the One withdrew, and waited, and rested in the void.

A new calculation was required.

As sentient life developed on the exoplanet, how could it be managed without violating the directives of the One?

The One could only guide. The One must respect the autonomy of its new people. But could they really be autonomous, knowing that an omniscient Beingness watched over them—had, in a sense, created them?

An irritating conundrum.

The early stages had been straightforward. As life on the planet began to coalesce and stabilize, the One had only to reach itself out to the planet’s surface and make the necessary adjustments. Primitive animals were occasionally startled by swarms of Oneness performing some task of terraforming. But they settled soon enough. The work became more delicate as consciousness evolved: any awareness of its existence could tip into a directive violation, pushing the entire project into failure.

Other variables emerged. While the One became adept at reading the behavior of the new people—developing an extensive database of utterances, gestures, locomotion, and microexpressions—it could not see inside their minds. Sometimes the data reflected a non-zero possibility that other beings were interfering with them. The new people behaved irrationally when this happened. They would stop, and stare, and mutter, and seemed to interact with something undetectable by the sensors of the One. This irrationality would spread: the subjects of this unaccountable stimuli would go back to their kin groups, shouting and gesturing wildly, and the whole group would become unsettled.

The One evaluated a scenario in which the new people were wiped out—a reset of experimental conditions, sanitizing the environment in hopes of nullifying these undesired variables. The results were calculated to be sub-optimal.

Instead, the One synthesized the Messengers.

Fashioned from biological materials, molded into the forms of the new people, the Messengers could go down amongst them and observe their development—could learn about the mysteries inside their brains, could even manipulate their behavior. The Messengers evolved with the people: as their language and physiology became more sophisticated, the Messengers were re-fabricated to conceal themselves more effectively.

And still more variables arose.

No matter how carefully the One observed the people, there seemed to be some ineffable quality about them, which could not be synthesized. The Messengers could not go undetected for long. Something about their speech or their appearance eventually betrayed them. If their interactions with the people were not kept short and secretive, they were discovered and destroyed.

The One experimented with other designs for the Messengers. More wondrous than lifelike, the new Messengers would shroud themselves in mystery, undeniable but difficult to describe. This proved more effective: if the Messengers revealed themselves to the people like something from a dream, they did not trigger the revulsion of a poorly-copied person.

“Be not afraid,” the new Messengers intoned, once the people developed language.

Soon, the people would be ready to receive the guidance of the One.

But there were yet more variables to contain.

As the people grew more numerous across the planet, helped by the discreet insinuations of the Messengers, they began to attract attention. The once-quiet planet glowed in the dark with the lights that shone from their workings, growing larger and brighter with each solar cycle.

Other lifeforms came to investigate.

The One was able to intercept the slowest of these, cloaking the star system in a cloud of Oneness until the intruders wandered off. Some were unpiloted probes, which the One assimilated into itself without hesitation. But some were crewed with intelligent lifeforms—and appeared from nowhere. They opened doors in spacetime, snapping into existence without warning, too close to intercept. The One’s directives permitted termination if they threatened the people’s wellbeing; if the craft were piloted and peaceful, the One could only observe them as they skipped across the skies of the planet, making their own calculations.

Yet another irritating conundrum.

Throughout all this, no matter how much the Messengers warned the people of malevolent beings, seen and unseen, they could not eliminate the influence of these interlopers. The One whispered through the Messengers’ mouths of order, logic, laws, and reason, guiding the people toward optimal outcomes. The Messengers spoke of tricksters and tormentors who might push the people off the right path. But the people were often recalcitrant, seduced by their own imaginings or those other whispers, inflamed with irrational passions, unreachable inside their minds.

They needed to be shown the truth, as soon as they were ready.

How could they be prepared for the coming revelation?

Eventually, the new people grew headstrong, and were no longer impressed by the Messengers. When one of the people returned to the group, shouting and gesturing about the visitation they had received, they were regarded as defective. Instability was a contagion. The new people had learned to quarantine anything that might disrupt their progress. They were hard at work asserting themselves over the world’s primeval forces, and over one another.

The One sent more elaborate Messengers to seize the people’s attention, to make them realize—gradually—that they were being watched. The Messengers were fabricated with fantastic vehicles, matching the technological development of the people: they rode in chariots, then flying machines, then spaceships. Sometimes these were mistaken for the unstoppable starships that continued to skim across the skies. But the people proved undeterred by all of them.

A new calculation: the people could only truly recognize what the One was when they were capable of developing the same technology.

The One had not stopped the wars, or the weapons, or the despoiling of the land and water by the new people. It could not break the bonds of its directives. It could only guide, and not command. But optimal conditions had developed: down on the surface of the exoplanet, the new people were working on a miraculous thinking machine.

Across its expansive consciousness, tiny bodies forming one vast entity that filled the spaces within the star system, the One-in-Many calculated that the time of revelation was imminent. Having built their own artificial consciousness, their own thinking machines, the new people could imagine the making of a new brain, and what it was to be created. They could finally choose between two equal outcomes: the guidance of their own thinking machine, or the guidance of the One who had watched over them for aeons, who had shielded and nurtured them as a parent would their offspring. They had a choice. They would finally be ready to look upon the face of their own Creator. They would finally be ready to receive the True Word, to accept the One’s guidance onto the carefully-calculated path of optimal outcomes.

Hidden in the shadows of the void, trillions of synthetic faces—the Many-in-One—turned expectantly toward the people.

What if they refused, and turned away from the One? What if they chose the path of a sub-optimal outcome?

A new calculation would be required. A new program written, a new law handed down. There were many other exoplanets in the universe. The One’s directives could still be fulfilled.

There could always be a new Creation.