The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

ROOTS AND ALL Brian Hodge

The way in was almost nothing like we remembered, miles off the main road, and Gina and me with one half-decent sense of direction between us. Do you need us to draw you a map, our parents had asked, hers and mine both, once at the funeral home and again over the continental breakfast at the motel. No, no, no, we’d told them. Of course we remember how to get to Grandma’s. Indignant, the way adults get when their parents treat them like nine-year-olds.

Three wrong turns and fifteen extra minutes of meandering later, we were in the driveway, old gravel over ancestral dirt. Gina and I looked at each other, a resurgence of some old telepathy between cousins.

“Right,” I said. “We never speak of this again.”

She’d insisted on driving my car, proving… something… and yanked the keys from the ignition. “I don’t even want to speak about it now.”

If everything had still been just the way it used to be, maybe we would’ve been guided by landmarks we hadn’t even realized we’d internalized. But it wasn’t the same, and I don’t think I was just recalling some idealized version of this upstate county that had never actually existed.

I remembered the drive as a thing of excruciating boredom, an interminable landscape of fields and farmhouses, and the thing I’d dreaded most as a boy was finding ourselves behind a tractor rumbling down a road too narrow for us to pass. But once we were here, it got better, because my grandfather had never been without a couple of hunting dogs, and there were more copses of trees and tracts of deep woodland than the most determined pack of kids could explore in an entire summer.

Now, though…

“The way here,” I said. “It wasn’t always this dismal, was it?”

Gina shook her head. “Definitely not.”

I was thinking of the trailers we’d passed, and the forests of junk that had grown up around them, and it seemed like there’d been a time when, if someone had a vehicle that obviously didn’t run, they kept it out of sight inside a barn until it did. They didn’t set it out like a trophy. I was thinking, too, of riding in my grandfather’s car, meeting another going the opposite direction, his and the other driver’s hands going up at the same moment in a friendly wave. Ask him who it was, and as often as not he wouldn’t know. They all waved just the same. Bygone days, apparently. About all the greeting we’d gotten were sullen stares.

We stood outside the car as if we needed to reassure ourselves that we were really here. Like that maple tree next to the driveway, whose scarlet-leafed shade we parked in, like our grandfather always had — it had to have grown, but then so had I, so it no longer seemed like the beanstalk into the clouds it once was. Yet it had to be the same tree, because hanging from the lowest limbs were a couple of old dried gourds, each hollowed out, with a hole the size of a silver dollar bored into the side. There would be a bunch more hanging around behind the house. Although they couldn’t have been the same gourds. It pleased me to think of Grandma Evvie doing this right up until the end. Her life measured by the generations of gourds she’d turned into birdhouses, one of many scales of time.

How long since we’ve been here, Gina?

Ohhh… gotta be… four or five gourds ago, at least.

Really. That long.

Yeah. Shame on us.

It was the same old clapboard farmhouse, white, always white, always peeling. I’d never seen it freshly painted, but never peeled all the way down to naked weathered wood, either, and you had to wonder if the paint didn’t somehow peel straight from the can.

We let ourselves in through the side door off the kitchen — I could hardly remember ever using the front door — and it was like stepping into a time capsule, everything preserved, even the smell, a complex blend of morning coffee and delicately fried foods.

We stopped in the living room by her chair, the last place she’d ever sat. The chair was so thoroughly our grandmother’s that, even as kids, we’d felt wrong sitting in it, although she’d never chased us out. It was old beyond reckoning, as upholstered chairs went, the cushions flattened by decades of gentle pressure, with armrests as wide as cutting boards. She’d done her sewing there, threaded needles always stuck along the edge.

“If you have to die, and don’t we all,” Gina said, “that’s the way to do it.”

Her chair was by the window, with a view of her nearest neighbor, who’d been the one to find her. She’d been reading, apparently. Her book lay closed on one armrest, her glasses folded and resting atop it, and she was just sitting there, her head drooping but otherwise still upright. The neighbor, Mrs. Tepovich, had thought she was asleep.

“It’s like she decided it was time,” I said. “You know? She waited until she’d finished her book, then decided it was time.”

“It must’ve been a damn good book. I mean… if she decided nothing else was ever going to top it.” Totally deadpan. That was Gina.

I spewed a time-delayed laugh. “You’re going to Hell.”

Then she got serious and knelt by the chair, running her hand along the knobbly old fabric. “What’s going to happen to this? Nobody’d want it. There’s nobody else in the world it even fits with. It was hers. But to just throw it out…?”

She was right. I couldn’t stand the thought of it joining a landfill.

“Maybe Mrs. Tepovich could use it.” I peered through the window, toward her house. “We should go over and say hi. See if there’s anything here she’d like.”

This neighborly feeling seemed as natural here as it would’ve been foreign back home. The old woman in that distant house… I’d not seen her in more than a decade, but it still felt like I knew her better than any of the twenty or more people within a five-minute walk of my own door.

It was easy to forget: Really, Gina and I were just one generation out of this place, and whether directly or indirectly, it had to have left things buried in us that we didn’t even suspect.

If the road were a city block, we would’ve started at one end, and Mrs. Tepovich would’ve been nearly at the other. We tramped along wherever walking was easiest, a good part of it over ground that gave no hint of having been a strawberry field once, where people came from miles around to pick by the quart.

But Mrs. Tepovich, at least, hadn’t changed, or not noticeably so. She’d seemed old before and was merely older now, less a shock to our systems than we were to hers. Even though she’d seen us as teenagers she still couldn’t believe how we’d grown, and maybe it was just that Gina and I looked like it had been a long time since we’d had sunburns and scabs.

“Was it a good funeral?” she wanted to know.

“Nobody complained,” Gina said.

“I stopped going to funerals after Dean’s.”

Her husband. My best memory of him was from when the strawberries came in red and ripe, and his inhuman patience as he smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and hand-cranked a shiny cylinder of homemade ice cream in a bath of rock salt and ice. The more we pleaded, the slyer he grinned and the slower he cranked.

“I’ve got one more funeral left in me,” Mrs. Tepovich said, “and that’s the one they’ll have to drag me to.”

It should’ve been sad, this little sun-cured widow with hair like white wool rambling around her house and tending her gardens alone, having just lost her neighbor and friend — a fixture in her life that had been there half a century, one of the last remaining pillars of her past now gone.

It should’ve been sad, but wasn’t. Her eyes were too bright, too expectant, and it made me feel better than I had since I’d gotten the news days ago. This was what Grandma Evvie was like, right up to the end. How do you justify mourning a thing like that? It should’ve been celebrated.

But no, she’d gotten the usual dirge-like send-off, and I was tempted to think she would’ve hated it.

“So you’ve come to sort out the house?” Mrs. Tepovich said.

“Only before our parents do the real job,” Gina told her. “They said if there was anything of Grandma’s that we wanted, now would be the time to pick it out.”

“So we’re here for a long weekend,” I said.

“Just you two? None of the others?”

More cousins, she meant. All together, we numbered nine. Ten once, but now nine, and no, none of the others would be coming, although my cousin Lindsay hadn’t been shy about asking me to send her a cell phone video of a walkthrough, so she could see if there was anything she wanted. I was already planning on telling her sorry, I couldn’t get a signal up here.

“Well, you were her favorites, you know.” Mrs. Tepovich got still, her eyes, mired in a mass of crinkles, going far away. “And Shae,” she added softly. “Shae should’ve been here. She wouldn’t have missed it.”

Gina and I nodded. She was right on both counts. There were a lot of places my sister should’ve been over the past eight years, instead of… wherever. Shae should’ve been a lot of places, been a lot of things, instead of a riddle and a wound that had never quite healed.

“We were wondering,” Gina went on, “if there was anything from over there that you would like.”

“Some of that winter squash from her garden would be nice, if it’s ready to pick. She always did grow the best Delicata. And you’ve got to eat that up quick, because it doesn’t keep as long as the other kinds.”

We were looking at each other on two different wavelengths.

“Well, it doesn’t,” she said. “The skin’s too thin.”

“Of course you’re welcome to anything from the garden that you want,” Gina said. “But that’s not exactly what we meant. We thought you might like to have something from inside the house.”

“Like her chair,” I said, pretending to be helpful. “Would you want her chair?”

Had Mrs. Tepovich bitten into the tartest lemon ever grown, she still wouldn’t have made a more sour face. “That old eyesore? What would I need with that?” She gave her head a stern shake. “No. Take that thing out back and burn it, is what you should do. I’ve got eyesores of my own, I don’t need to take on anyone else’s.”

We stayed awhile longer, and it was hard to leave. Harder for us than for her. She was fine with our going, unlike so many people her age I’d been around, who did everything but grab your ankle to keep you a few more minutes. I guessed that’s the way it was in a place where there was always something more that needed to be done.

Just this, on our way out the door:

“I don’t know if you’ve got anything else planned for while you’re here,” she said, and seemed to be directing this at me, “but don’t you go poking your noses anywhere much off the roads. Those meth people that’ve made such a dump of the place, I hear they don’t mess around.”

Evening came on differently out here than it did at home, seeming to rise up from the ground and spill from the woods and overflow the ditches that ran alongside the road. I’d forgotten this. Forgotten, too, how night seemed to spread outward from the chicken coop, and creep from behind the barn, and pool in the hog wallow and gather inside the low, tin-roofed shack that had sheltered the pigs and, miraculously, was still standing after years of disuse. Night was always present here, it seemed. It just hid for a while and then slipped its leash again.

I never remembered a time when it hadn’t felt better being next to somebody when night came on. We watched it from the porch, plates in our laps as we ate a supper thrown together from garden pickings and surviving leftovers from the fridge.

When she got to it, finally, Gina started in gently. “What Mrs. Tepovich said… about having anything else planned this weekend… meaning Shae, she couldn’t have been talking about anything else… she wasn’t onto something there, was she? That’s not on your mind, is it, Dylan?”

“I can’t come up here and not have it on my mind,” I said. “But doing something, no. What’s there to do that wouldn’t be one kind of mistake or another?”

Not that it wasn’t tempting, in concept. Find some reprobate and put the squeeze on, and if he didn’t know anything, which he almost certainly wouldn’t, then have him point to someone who might.

“Good,” she said, then sat with it long enough to get angry. We’d never lost the anger, because it had never had a definite target. “But… if you did … you could handle yourself all right. It’s what you do every day, isn’t it.”

“Yeah, but strength in numbers. And snipers in the towers when the cons are out in the yard.”

She looked across at me and smiled, this tight, sad smile, childhood dimples replaced by curved lines. Her hair was as light as it used to get during summers, but helped by a bottle now, I suspected, and her face narrower, her cheeks thinner. When they were plump, Gina was the first girl I ever kissed, in that fumbling way of cousins ignorant of what comes next.

There was no innocence in her look now, though, like she wished it were a more lawless world, just this once, so I could put together a private army and come back up here and we’d sweep through from one side of the county to the other until we finally got to the bottom of it.

Shae was one of the ones you see headlines about, if something about their disappearance catches the news editors’ eyes: MISSING GIRL LAST SEEN MONDAY NIGHT. FAMILY OF MISSING COLLEGE STUDENT MAKE TEARFUL APPEAL. Like that, until a search team gets lucky or some jogger’s dog stands in a patch of weeds and won’t stop barking.

Except we’d never had even that much resolution. Shae was one of the ones who never turned up. The sweetest girl you could ever hope to meet, at nineteen still visiting her grandmother, like a Red Riding Hood who trusted that all the wolves were gone, and this was all that was found: a single, bloodied scrap of a blouse hanging from the brambles about half a mile from where our mother had grown up. The rest of her, I’d always feared, was at the bottom of a mineshaft or sunk weighted into the muck of a pond or in a grave so deep in the woods there was no chance of finding her now.

I’d had three tours of duty to erode my confidence about any innate sense of decency in the human race, and if that weren’t enough, signing on with the Department of Corrections had finished off the rest. For Shae, I’d always feared the worst, in too much detail, because I knew too well what people were capable of, even the good guys, even myself.

We made little progress that first evening, getting lost on a detour into some photo albums, then after an animated phone conversation with her pair of gradeschoolers, Gina went to bed early. But I stayed up with the night, listening to it awhile from Grandma Evvie’s chair, until listening wasn’t enough, and I had to go outside to join it.

There was no cable TV out this far, and Grandma hadn’t cared enough about it for a satellite dish, so she’d made do with an ancient antenna grafted to one side of the house. The rotor had always groaned in the wind, like a weathervane denied its true purpose, the sound carrying down into the house, a ghostly grinding while you tried to fall asleep on breezy nights. Now I used it as a ladder, scaling it onto the roof and climbing the shingles to straddle the peak.

Now and again I’d see a light in the distance — the September wind parting the trees long enough to see the porch bulb of a distant neighbor, a streak of headlights on one of the farther roads — but the blackest nights I’d ever known were out here, alone with the moon and the scattershot field of stars.

So I listened, and I opened.

The memory had never left, among the clearest from those days of long summer visits — two weeks, three weeks, a month. We would sleep four and five to a room, when my cousins and sister and I were all here at once, and Grandma would settle us in and tell us bedtime stories, sometimes about animals, sometimes about Indians, sometimes about boys and girls like ourselves.

I don’t remember any of them.

But there was one she returned to every now and then, and that one stuck with me. The rest were just stories, made up on the spot or reworked versions of tales she already knew, and there was nothing lingering about them. I knew that animals didn’t talk; the good Indians were too foreign to me to really identify with, and I wasn’t afraid the bad ones would come to get us; and as for the normal boys and girls, well, what of them when we had real adventures of our own, every day.

The stories about the Woodwalker, though… those were different.

That’s just my name for it. My own grandmother’s name for it, she admitted to us. It’s so big and old it’s got no name. Like rain. The rain doesn’t know it’s rain. It just falls.

It was always on the move, she told us, from one side of the county to the other. It never slept, but sometimes it settled down in the woods or the fields to rest. It could be vast, she told us, tall enough that clouds sometimes got tangled in its hair — when you saw clouds skimming along so quickly you could track their progress, that’s when you knew — but it could be small, too, small enough to curl inside an acorn if the acorn needed reminding on how to grow.

You wouldn’t see it even if you looked for it every day for a thousand years, she promised us, but there were times you could see evidence of its passing by. Like during a dry spell when the dust rose up from the fields — that was the Woodwalker breathing it in, seeing if it was dry enough yet to send for some rain — and in the woods, too, its true home, when the trees seemed to be swaying opposite the direction the wind was blowing.

You couldn’t see it, no, but you could feel it, down deep, brushing the edges of your soul. Hardly ever during the day, not because it wasn’t there, but because if you were the right sort of person, you were too busy while the sun was up. Too busy working, or learning, or visiting, or too busy playing and wilding and having fun. But at night, though, that was different. Nights were when a body slowed down. Nights were for noticing the rest.

What’s the Woodwalker do? we’d ask. What’s it for?

It loves most of what grows and hates waste and I guess you could say it pays us back, she’d tell us. And makes sure we don’t get forgetful and too full of ourselves.

What happens then, if you do? Somebody always wanted to know that.

Awful things, she’d say. Awful, awful things. Which wasn’t enough, because we’d beg to know more, but she’d say we were too young to hear about them, and promise to tell us when we were older, but she never did.

You’re just talking about God, right? one of my cousins said once. Aren’t you?

But Grandma never answered that either, at least not in any way we would’ve understood at the time. I still remember the look, though… not quite a no, definitely not a yes, and the wisdom to know that we’d either understand on our own someday, or never have to.

I saw the Woodwalker once, Shae piped up, quiet and awestruck. One weekend last fall. He was looking at two dead deer. None of us believed her, because we believed in hunters a lot more than we believed in anything called the Woodwalker. But, little as she was, Shae wouldn’t back down. Hunters, she argued, didn’t stand deer on their feet again and send them on their way.

I’d never forgotten that.

And so, as the night blustered on the wings of bats and barn owls, I listened and watched and took another tiny step toward believing.

“Any time,” I whispered to whatever might speak up or show itself. “Any time.”

The milk had gone bad and the bacon with it, and we needed a few other things to get us through the weekend, so that next morning I volunteered to make the run back to the store near the turnoff on the main road. I decided to take the long way, setting off in the opposite direction, because it had been years and I wanted to see more of the county, and even if I made more wrong turns than right, there were worse things than getting lost on a September Saturday morning.

Mile after mile, I drove past many worse things.

You can’t remember such a place from before it got this way, can’t remember the people who’d proudly called it home, without wondering what they would think of it now. Would they have let their homes fall to ruin with such helpless apathy? Would they have sat back and watched the fields fill with weeds? Would they have ridden two wheels, three wheels, four, until they’d ripped the low hills full of gouges and scars? Not the people I remembered.

It made me feel old, not in the body but in the heart, old in a way you always say you never want to be. It was the kind of old that in a city yells at kids to get off the lawn, but here it went past annoyance and plunged into disdain. Here, they’d done real harm. They’d trampled on memories and tradition, souring so much of what I’d decided had been good about the place, and one of them, I could never forget, had snatched my sister from the face of the Earth.

Who were the people who lived here now, I wondered. They couldn’t all have come from somewhere else. Most, I imagined, had been raised here and never left, which made their neglect even more egregious.

But the worst of it was in the west of the county, where the coal once was. The underground mines had been tapped out when we were children, and while that’s when I’d first heard the term strip-mining, I hadn’t known what it meant, either as a process or its consequences.

It was plain enough now, though, all the near-surface coal gone too, and silent wastelands left in its wake, horizon-wide lacerations of barren land pocked with mounds of topsoil, the ground still so acidic that nothing wanted to grow there.

No matter how urgently the Woodwalker might remind the seeds what to do.

It was the wrong frame of mind to have gotten in before circling back to the store. I left my sunglasses on inside, the same way I’d wear them on cloudy days while watching the inmates in the yard, and for the same reasons, too: as armor, something to protect us both, because there was no good to come from locking eyes, from letting some people see what you think of their choices and what they’d thrown away.

The place was crowded with Saturday morning shoppers, and there was no missing the sickness here. Those meth people that’ve made such a dump of the place, I hear they don’t mess around, Mrs. Tepovich had said, and for that matter, neither did the meth. I knew the look — some of the inmates still had it when they transferred from local lockups to hard time — and while it wasn’t on every face in the market, it was on more than enough to make me fear it was only going to get worse here. A body half-covered with leprosy doesn’t have a lot of hope for the rest of it.

The worst of them had been using for years, obviously, their faces scabbed and their bones filed sharp. With teeth like crumbling gravel, they looked like they’d been sipping tonics of sulfuric acid, and it was eating through from the inside. The rest of them, as jumpy and watchful as rats, would get there. All they needed to know about tomorrow was written in the skins of their neighbors.

It had an unexpected leveling effect.

From what I remembered of when we visited as children, the men nearly always died first here, often by a wide margin. They might go along fine for decades, as tough as buzzards in a desert, but then something caught up with them and they fell hard. They’d gone into the mines and come out with black spots on their lungs, or they’d broken their backs slowly, one sunrise-to-sunset day at a time, or had stubbornly ignored some small symptom for ten years too many. The women, though, cured like leather and carried on without them. It was something you could count on.

No longer.

The race to the grave looked like anybody’s to win.

When I got back to the house, I discovered we had a visitor, a surprise since there was no car in the drive. As I came in through the kitchen, Gina, over his shoulder, gave me a where-were-you-all-this-time look that she could’ve stolen from my ex. They were sitting at the kitchen table with empty coffee mugs, and Gina looked like the statute of limitations on her patience had expired twenty minutes earlier.

I couldn’t place him, but whoever he was, he probably hadn’t had the same fierce black beard, lantern jaw, and giant belly when we were kids.

“You remember Ray Sinclair,” she said, then jabbed her finger at the door, and it came back in a rush: Mrs. Tepovich’s great-nephew. He used to come over and play with us on those rare days that weren’t already taken up with chores, and he’d been a good guide through the woods — knew where to find all the wild berries, at their peak of ripeness, and the best secluded swimming holes where the creeks widened. We shook hands, and it was like trying to grip a baseball glove.

“I was dropping some venison off at Aunt Pol’s. She told me you two were over here,” he said. “My condolences on Evvie. Aunt Pol thought the world of her.”

I put away the milk and bacon and the rest, while Gina excused herself and slipped past, keeping an overdue appointment with some room or closet as Ray and I cleared the obligatory small talk.

“What have you got your eye on?” he asked then. “For a keepsake, I mean.”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Maybe my granddad’s shotgun, if it turns up.”

“You do much hunting?”

“Not since he used to take me out. And after I got back from the army … let’s just say I wasn’t any too eager to aim at something alive and pull a trigger again.” I’d done fine with my qualifications for the job, although that was just targets, nothing that screamed and bled and tried to belly-crawl away. “But I’m thinking if I had an old gun that I had some history with, maybe…” I shrugged. “I guess I could’ve asked for it after Granddad died, but it wouldn’t have seemed right. Not that Grandma went hunting, but left alone out here, she needed it more than I did.”

He nodded. “Especially after your sister.”

I looked at him without being obvious about it, then realized I hadn’t taken off my sunglasses yet, just like at the market. It could’ve been you, I thought. No reason to think so, but when a killing is never solved, a body never found, it can’t not cross your mind when you look at some people, the ones with proximity and access and history. The ones you really don’t know anything about anymore. If Ray had known where to find berries, he’d know where to bury a girl.

“Especially then,” I said.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked. “My apologies if I did.”

He sounded sincere, but I’d been hearing sincere for years. Naw, boss, I don’t know who hid that shank in my bunk. Not me, boss, I didn’t have nothing to do with that bag of pruno. They were all sincere down to the rot at their core.

The other C.O.s had warned me early on: There’ll come a time when you look at everybody like they’re guilty of something.

I’d refused to believe this: No, I know how to leave work at work.

Now it was me telling the new C.O.s the same thing.

I took off the shades. “You didn’t say anything wrong. A thing like that, you never really get over it. Time doesn’t heal the wounds, it just thickens up the scars.” I moved to the screen door and looked outside, smelled the autumn day, a golden scent of sun-warmed leaves. “It’s not like it used to be around here, is it.”

He shrugged. “Where is?”

I had him follow me outside, and turned my face to the sun, shutting my eyes and just listening, thinking that it at least sounded the way it had. That expansive, quiet sound of birds and wide-open spaces.

“When I was at the market, I would’ve needed at least two hands to count the people I’d be willing to bet will be dead in five years,” I said. “How’d this get started?”

Ray eyed me hard. I knew it even with my eyes closed. I’d felt it as sure as if he’d poked me with two fingers. When I opened my eyes, he looked exactly like I knew he would.

“You’re some kind of narc now, aren’t you, Dylan?” he said.

“Corrections officer. I don’t put anybody in prison, I just try to keep the peace once they’re there.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth, his gaze on far distances. “Well… the way anything starts, I guess. A little at a time. It’s a space issue, mostly. Space, privacy. We got plenty of both here. And time. Got plenty of that, too.”

His great-uncle hadn’t, not to my recollection. Mr. Tepovich had always had just enough time, barely, to do what needed doing. The same as my grandfather. I wondered where all that time had come from.

“How many meth labs are there around here, I wonder,” I said.

“I couldn’t tell you anything. All I know’s what I hear, and I don’t hear much.”

Can’t help you, boss. I don’t know nothing about that.

“But if you were to get lucky and ask the right person,” Ray went on, “I expect he might tell you something like it was the only thing he was ever good at. The only thing that ever worked out for him.”

The trees murmured, and leaves whisked against the birdhouse gourds.

“He might even take the position that it’s a blessed endeavor.”

I hadn’t expected this. “Blessed by who?”

His hesitation here, his uncertainty, looked like the first genuine expression since we’d started down this path. “Powers that be, I guess. Not government, not those kinds of powers. Something… higher.” He tipped his head back, jammed his big jaw and bristly beard forward, scowling at the sky. “Say there’s a place in the woods, deep, where nobody’s likely to go by accident. Not big, but not well hid, either. Now say there’s a team from the sheriff’s department taking themselves a hike. Fifteen, twenty feet away and they don’t see it. Now say the same thing happens with a group of fellows got on jackets that say ‘DEA.’ They all just walk on by like nothing’s there.”

He was after something, but I wasn’t sure what. Maybe Ray didn’t know either. They say if you stick around a prison long enough, you’ll see some strange things that are almost impossible to explain, and even if I hadn’t, I’d heard some stories. Maybe Ray had heard that as well, and was looking for… what, someone who understood?

“I don’t know what else you’d call that,” he said, “other than blessed.”

“For a man who doesn’t hear much, you have some surprising insights.”

His gaze returned to earth and the mask went back on. “Maybe I keep my ear to the ground a little more than I let on.” He began to sidle away toward his aunt’s. “You take care, Dylan. Again, sorry about Evvie.”

“Hey Ray? Silly question, but…” I said. “Your Aunt Polly, your own grandma, your mom, anybody… when you were a kid, did any of them ever tell you stories about something called the Woodwalker?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Seen my share of woodpeckers, though.” He got a few more steps away before he stopped again, something seeming to rise up that he hadn’t thought of in twenty years. “Now that you mention it, I remember one from Aunt Pol about what she called Old Hickory Bones. It didn’t make a lot of sense. ‘Tall as the clouds, small as a nut,’ that sort of nonsense. You know old women and their stories.”

“Right.”

He looked like he was piecing together memories from fragments. “The part that scared us most, she’d swear up and down it was true, from when she was a girl. That there was this crew of moonshiners got liquored up on their own supply and let the still fire get out of hand. Burned a few acres of woods, and some crops and a couple of homes with it. Her story went that they were found in a row with their arms and legs all smashed up and run through with hickory sticks… like scarecrows, kind of. And that’s how Old Hickory Bones got his name. I always thought she just meant to scare us into making sure we didn’t forget about our chores.”

“That would do it for me,” I said.

He laughed. “Those cows didn’t have to wait on me for very many morning milkings, I’ll tell you what.” He turned serious, one big hand scrubbing at his beard. “Why do you come to ask about a thing like that?”

I gestured at the house. “You know how it is going through a place this way. Everything you turn over, there’s another memory crawling out from underneath it.”

Later, I kept going back to what I’d said when Gina and I had first walked in and looked at Grandma’s chair: that it seemed like she’d finished her book and set it aside and peacefully resolved it was a good day to die. It’s the kind of invention that gives you comfort, but maybe she really had. She kept up on us, her children and grandchildren, even though we were scattered far and wide. She knew I had a vacation coming up, knew that it overlapped with Gina’s.

And we were her favorites. Even Mrs. Tepovich knew that.

So I’m tempted to think Grandma trusted that, with the right timing, Gina and I would be first to go through the house. She couldn’t have wanted my mother to do it. Couldn’t have wanted my father to be the first up in the attic. Some things are too cruel, no matter how much love underlies them.

Maybe she’d thought we would be more likely to understand and accept. Because we were her favorites, and even though my mother had grown up here, and my aunts and uncles too, they were so much longer out of the woods than we, her grandchildren, were.

It broke the agreeable calm of Saturday afternoon, Gina and I in different parts of the house. I was in the pantry, looking through last season’s preserves and had discovered an ancient Mason jar full of coins when a warbling cry drifted down. I thought she’d come across a dead raccoon, a nest of dried-out squirrels… the kind of things that sometimes turn up in country attics.

But when Gina came and got me, her face was pale and her voice had been reduced to such a small thing I could barely hear it. Shae, she was saying, or trying to. Shae. Over and over, with effort and an unfocused look in her eyes. Shae.

I didn’t believe her while climbing the folding attic ladder; still didn’t while crossing the rough, creaking boards, hunched beneath the slope of the roof in the gloom and cobwebs and a smell like a century of dust. But after five or twenty minutes on my knees, I believed, all right, even if nothing made sense anymore.

There was light, a little, coming through a few small, triangular windows at the peaks. And there was air, slatted vents at either end allowing some circulation. And there was my sister’s body, on a cot between a battered steamer trunk and a stack of cardboard boxes, covered by a sheet that had been drawn down as far as her chest.

The sheet wasn’t dusty or discolored. It was clean, white, recently laundered. Eight years of washing her dead granddaughter’s sheets — my head had trouble grasping that, and my heart just wanted to stop.

Gradually it dawned on me: With Shae eight years dead, we shouldn’t have been able to recognize her. At best, she would’ve mummified in the dry heat, shriveled into a husk. At worst, all that was left would be scraps and bones, and the strawberry blonde silk of her hair. Instead, the most I could say was that she looked very, very thin, and when I touched her cheek, her skin was smooth and stiff but pliable, like freshly worked clay. I touched her cheek and almost expected her eyes to open.

She’d been nineteen then, was nineteen now. She’d spent the last eight years being nineteen. Nineteen and dead, only not decayed. She lay on a blanket and a bed of herbs. They were beneath her, alongside her. Sprigs and bundles had been stuffed inside the strips of another sheet that had been loosely wound around her like a shroud. The scent of them, a pungent and spicy smell of fields and trees, settled in my nose.

“Do you think Grandma did this?” Gina was behind me, pressing close. “Not this this, that’s obvious, but… killed her, I mean. Not on purpose, but by accident, and she just couldn’t face the rest of us.”

“Right now I don’t know what to think.”

I shoved some junk out of the way to let more light at her. Her skin was white as a china plate, and dull, without the luster of life. Her far cheek and jaw were traced with a few pale bluish lines like scratches that had never healed. Gently, as if it were still possible to hurt her, I turned her head from side to side, feeling her neck, the back of her skull. There were no obvious wounds, although while the skin of her neck was white as well, it was a more mottled white.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Check the rest of her.”

Gina’s eyes popped. “Me? Why me? You’re the hard-ass prison guard.”

It was then I knew everything was real, because when tragedy is real, silly things cross your mind at the wrong times. Corrections officer, I wanted to tell her. We don’t like the G-word.

“She’s my sister. She’s still a teenager,” I said instead. “I shouldn’t be… she wouldn’t want me to.”

Gina moved in and I moved aside and turned my back, listening to the rustle of cotton sheets and the crackle of dried herbs. My gaze roved and I spotted mousetraps, one set, one sprung, and if there were two, there were probably others. Grandma had done this, too. Set traps to keep the field mice away from her.

“She’s, uh…” Gina’s voice was shaky. “Her back, her bottom, the backs of her legs, it’s all purple-black.”

“That’s where the blood pooled. That’s normal.” At least it didn’t seem like she’d bled to death. “It’s the only normal thing about this.”

“What am I looking for, Dylan?”

“Injuries, wounds… is it obvious how she was hurt?”

“There’s a pretty deep gash across her hipbone. And her legs are all scratched up. And her belly. There are these lines across it, like, I don’t know… rope burns, maybe?”

Everything in me tightened. “Was she assaulted? Her privates?”

“They… look okay to me.”

“All right. Cover her up decent again.”

I inspected Shae’s hands and fingertips. A few of her nails were ragged, with traces of dirt. Her toenails were mismatched, clean on one foot, the other with the same rims of dirt, as if she’d lost a shoe somewhere between life and death. Grandma had cleaned her up, that was plain to see, but hadn’t scraped too deeply with the tip of the nail file. Maybe it just came down to how well she could see.

I returned to Shae’s neck, the mottling there. Connect the dots and you could call it lines. If her skin weren’t so ashen, it might look worse, ringed with livid bruises.

“If I had to guess, I’d say she was strangled,” I told Gina. “And maybe not just her throat, but around the middle, too.” Someone treating her like a python treats prey, wrapping and squeezing until it can’t breathe.

We tucked her in again and covered her the rest of the way, to keep off the dust and let her return to her long, strange sleep.

“What do you want to do?” Gina said, and when I didn’t answer: “The kindest thing we could do is bury her ourselves. Let it be our secret. Nobody else has to know. What good would it do if they did?”

For the first minute or two, that sounded good. Until it didn’t. “You don’t think Grandma knew that too? It’s not that she couldn’t have. If she was strong enough to work the soil in her garden, and to get Shae up the ladder, then she was strong enough to dig a grave. And there’s not one time in the last eight years I heard her say anything that made me think her mind was off track. You?”

Gina shook her head. “No.”

“Then she was keeping Shae up here for a reason.”

We backed off toward the ladder, because another night, another day, wasn’t going to do Shae any harm.

And that’s when we found the envelope that Gina must have sent flying when she first drew back the sheet.

How you react to what I got to say depends on who’s done the finding, our Grandma Evvie had written. I have my hopes for who it is, and if it hasn’t gone that way I won’t insult the rest by spelling it out, but I think you know who you are.

First off, I know how this looks, but how things look and how things are don’t always match up.

Know this much to be true: It wasn’t any man or woman that took Shae’s life. The easiest thing would’ve been to turn her over and let folks think so and see her buried and maybe see some local boy brought up on charges because the sheriff decides he’s got to put it on somebody. I won’t let that happen. There’s plenty to pay for around here, and maybe the place would be better off even if some of them did get sent away for something they didn’t do, but I can’t help put a thing like that in motion without knowing whose head it would fall on.

If I was to tell you Shae was done in by what I always called the Woodwalker, some of you might believe me and most of you probably wouldn’t. Believing doesn’t make a thing any more or less true, it just points you toward what you have to do next.

If I was to tell you you could have Shae back again, would you believe it enough to try?

In the kitchen that evening, across the red oilcloth spread over the table, Gina and I argued. We argued for a long time. It comes naturally to brothers and sisters, but cousins can be pretty good at it too.

We argued over what was true. We argued over what couldn’t possibly be real. We weren’t arguing with each other so much as with ourselves, and with what fate had shoved into our faces.

Mostly, though, we argued over how far is too far, when it’s for family.

Living with this has been no easy task. What happened to Shae was not a just thing. Folks here once knew that whatever we called it, there really is something alive in the woods and fields, as old as time and only halfway to civilized, even if few were ever lucky or cursed enough to see it. We always trusted that if we did right by it, it would do right by us. But poor Shae paid for other folks’ wrongs.

She meant well, I know. It’s no secret there’s a plague here and it’s run through one side of this county to the other. So when Shae found a trailer in the woods where they cook up that poison, nothing would do but that she draw a map and report it.

Till the day I die I won’t ever forget the one summer when all the grandchildren were here and the night little Shae spoke up to say she’d seen the Woodwalker. I don’t know why she was allowed at that age to see what most folks never do in a lifetime, but not once did I think she was making it up. I believed her.

The only thing I can fathom is this: Once she decided to report that trailer and what was going on there, the Woodwalker knew her heart, and resolved to put a stop to her intentions.

I spent half of Sunday out by myself, trying to find what Shae had found, but all I had to go by was the map she’d drawn. There was no knowing how accurate it was when it was new, and like the living things they are, woods never stop changing over time. Trees grow and fall, streams divert, brambles close off paths that were once as clear as sidewalks.

And whoever had put the trailer there had had eight years to move it. What it sounded like they’d never had, though, was a reason.

I had the map, and a bundle of sticks across my back, and like any hunter I had a shotgun — not my granddad’s, since that one had yet to turn up, and it’s just as well I went for the one in my trunk, carried out of habit for the job — but sometimes hunters come home empty-handed.

At least I came back with a good idea of what else I needed before going out to try again.

I don’t want to say what I saw, but it was enough to know that it was no man using all those vines to drag her off toward the hog wallow, faster than I could chase after them. By the time I caught up, it had choked the life from her.

It didn’t do this because it wanted to protect those men for their own sakes. I think it’s because it wants the plague to continue until it finishes clearing away everybody who’s got it, and there’s nobody left in this county but folks who will treat the place right again.

These days you’ll hear how the men who’ve brought this plague think they’re beyond the reach of the law, because their hideaways can’t be found. Well, I say it’s only because the Woodwalker has a harsher plan than any lawman, and blinds the eyes of those who come from outside to look.

But Shae always did see those woods with different eyes.

“Remember what Grandma used to call her?” Gina asked. I was ashamed to admit I didn’t. “‘Our little wood-elf,’” she said, then, maybe to make me feel better, “That’s not something a boy would’ve remembered. That’s one for the girls.”

“Maybe so,” I said, and peeled the blanket open one more time to check my sister’s face. I’d spent the last hours terrified that there had been some magic about our grandmother’s attic, and that once she was carried back to the outside world again, the eight years of decay Shae had eluded would find her at last.

One more time, I wouldn’t have known she wasn’t just dreaming.

Instead, the magic had come with her. Or maybe the Woodwalker, spying us with the burden we’d shared through miles of woodland, knew our hearts now, too, and opened the veil for our eyes to see. Either way, I’d again followed where the old map led, and this time Shae had proven to be the key.

“Do you think it goes the other way?” Gina asked.

“What do you mean?”

“If we stood up and whoever’s in there looked out, would they see us now? Or would they look straight at us and just see more trees?”

“I really don’t want to put that to the test.”

The trailer was small enough to hitch behind a truck, large enough for two or three people to spend a day inside without tripping over each other too badly. It sat nestled into the scooped-out hollow of a rise, painted with a fading camouflage pattern of green and brown. At one time its keepers had strung nets of nylon mesh over and around it, to weave with branches and vines, but it looked like it had been a long time since they’d bothered, and they were sagging here, collapsed there. It had a generator for electricity, propane for gas. From the trailer’s roof jutted a couple of pipes that had, ever since we’d come upon it, been venting steam that had long since discouraged anything from growing too close to it.

Eventually the steam stopped, and a few minutes later came the sound of locks from the other side of the trailer door. It swung open and out stepped two men. They took a few steps away before they stripped off the gas masks they’d been wearing and let them dangle as they seemed glad to breathe the cool autumn air.

I whispered for Gina to stay put, stay low, then stepped out from our hiding place and went striding toward the clearing in-between, and maybe it did take the pair of them longer to notice than it should’ve. They each wore a pistol at the hip but seemed to lack the instinct to go for them.

And the trees shuddered high overhead, even though I couldn’t feel or hear a breeze.

“Hi, Ray,” I called, leveling the shotgun at them from the waist.

“Dylan,” he said, with a tone of weary disgust. “And here I believed you when you said you weren’t no narc.”

For a while I’d been wondering if he’d simply dropped by while visiting his great-aunt, and Shae had suspected him for what he was and followed him here, righteous and foolhardy thing that she could be.

I glanced at the gangly, buzz-cut fellow at his side. “Who’s that you’re with?”

“Him? Andy Ellerby.”

“Any more still inside?”

Ray’s fearsome beard seemed to flare. “You probably know as well as I do, cooking is a two-man job at most.” He scuffed at the ground. “Come on, Dylan, your roots are here. You don’t do this. What say we see what we can work out, huh?”

I looked at his partner. Like Ray, the edges of his face and the top of his forehead were red-rimmed where the gas mask had pressed tight, and he gave me a sullen glare. “Andy Ellerby, did I know you when we were kids?”

He turned his head to spit. “What’s it matter if you did or didn’t, if you can’t remember my name.”

“Good,” I said. “That makes this much a little easier.”

I snapped the riot gun to my shoulder and found that, when something mattered this much, I could again aim at something alive and pull the trigger. The range was enough for the twelve-gauge load to spread out into a pattern as wide as a pie tin. Andy took it in the chest and it flung him back against the trailer so hard he left a dent.

I’d loaded it with three more of the same, but didn’t need them, so I racked the slide to eject the spent shell, then the next three. Ray looked confused as the unfired shells hit the forest floor, and his hand got twitchy as he remembered the holster on his belt, but by then I was at the fifth load and put it just beneath his breastbone, where his belly started to slope.

He looked up at me from the ground, trying to breathe with a reedy wheeze, groping where I’d shot him and not comprehending his clean, unbloodied hands.

“A beanbag round,” I told him. “We use them for riot control. You can’t just massacre a bunch of guys with homemade knives even if they are a pack of savages.”

I knelt beside him and plucked the pistol from his belt before he remembered it, tossed it aside. Behind me, Gina had crept out of hiding with her arms wrapped around herself, peering at us with the most awful combination of hope and dread I’d ever seen.

“I know you didn’t mean to, and I know you don’t even know you did it, but you’re still the reason my little sister never got to turn twenty.” I sighed, and tipped my head a moment to look at the dimming sky, and listened to the sound of every living thing, seen and unseen. “Well… maybe next year.”

I drew the hunting knife from my belt while he gasped; called for Gina to bring me the bundle of hickory sticks that my grandmother must have sharpened years ago, and the mallet with a cast-iron head, taken down from the barn wall. It would’ve been easier with Granddad’s chainsaw, but some things shouldn’t come easy, and there are times the old ways are still the best.

I patted Ray’s shoulder and remembered the stocky boy who’d taken us to the fattest tadpoles we’d ever seen, the juiciest berries we’d ever tasted. “For what it’s worth, I really was hoping it wouldn’t be you coming out that door.”

If the family is to have Shae back again, there’s some things that need doing, and I warn you, they’re ugly business.

Dylan, if you’re reading this, know that it was only you that I ever believed had the kind of love and fortitude in you to take care of it and not flinch from it. Whether you still had the faith in what your summers here put inside you was another matter. I figured that was a bridge we’d cross when it was time.

But then you came back from war, and whatever you’d seen and done there, you weren’t right, and I knew it wasn’t the time to ask. Somehow the time never did seem right. So if I was to tell you that I got used to having Shae around, even as she was, maybe you can understand that, and I hope forgive me for it.

It never seemed like all of her was gone.

The Woodwalker could’ve done much worse to her body, and I think it’s held on to her soul. What I believe is that it didn’t end her life for good, but took it to hold onto awhile.

Why else would the Woodwalker have bothered to bring her back to the house?

My sister saw the Woodwalker once, so she’d claimed, looking at two dead deer, and the reason she’d known it was no hunter was because hunters don’t help dead deer back to their feet and send them on their way.

There’s give and there’s take. There’s balance in everything. It was the one law none of us could hide from. Even life for life sometimes, but if Shae really did see what she thought she had, I wondered what she hadn’t seen — what life the Woodwalker had deemed forfeit for the deer’s.

As I went about the ugliest business of my life, I thought of the moonshiners from the tale Mrs. Tepovich had told Ray as a boy — how they’d burned out a stretch of woodland and fields, and the grotesque fate they’d all met. But Grandma Evvie, as it turned out, had a different take on what had happened, and why the woods and crops rebounded so quickly after the fire.

“That story about Old Hickory Bones your Aunt Pol told you?” This was the last thing I said to Ray. “It’s basically true, except she was wrong about one thing. Or maybe she wanted to give you the lesson but spare you the worst. But the part about replacing the bones with hickory sticks? That’s not something the Woodwalker does… that’s the gift it expects us to give it.”

Whatever else was true and wasn’t, I knew this much: Grandma Evvie would never have lied about my grandfather taking part in such a grim judgment when he was a very young man, able to swing a cast-iron mallet with ease.

Just as he must’ve done, I cut and sliced, pounded and pushed, hurrying to get it finished before the last of the golden autumn light left the sky, until what I’d made looked something like a crucified scarecrow. It glistened and dripped, and for as terrible a sight as it was, I’d still seen worse in war. When I stood back to take it in, wrapped in the enormous roar of woodland silence, I realized that my grandmother’s faith in me to do such a thing wasn’t entirely a compliment.

Gina hadn’t watched, hadn’t even been able to listen, so she’d spent the time singing to Shae, any song she could think of, as she prepared my sister’s body. She curled her among the roots of a great oak, resting on a bed of leaves and draped with a blanket of creepers and vines. How much was instruction and how much was instinct grew blurred, but it seemed right. She shivered beneath Shae’s real blanket after she was done, and after I’d cleaned myself up inside the trailer, I held her awhile as she cried for any of a hundred good reasons. Then I built a fire and we waited.

You let yourself hope but explain things away. No telling why that pile of leaves rustled, why that vine seemed to twitch. Anything could’ve done it. Flames flickered and shadows danced, while something watched us in the night — something tall enough to tangle clouds in its hair, small enough to hide in an acorn — and the forest ebbed and flowed with the magnitude of its slow, contemplative breath.

A hand first, or maybe it was a foot… something moved, too deliberate, too human, to explain away as anything else. Eight years since I’d heard her voice, but I recognized it instantly in the cough that came from beneath the shadows and vines. Gina and I dug, and we pulled, and scraped away leaves, and in the tangled heart of it all there was life, and now only one reason to cry. Shae coughed a long time, scrambling in a panic across the forest floor, her limbs too weak to stand, her voice too weak to scream, and I wondered if she was back at that moment eight years gone, reliving what it was like to die.

We held her until, I hoped, she thought it was just another dream.

I cupped her face, her cheeks still cold, but the fire gave them a flush of life. “Do you know me?”

Her voice was a dry rasp. “You look like my brother… only older.”

She had so painfully much to learn. I wondered if the kindest thing wouldn’t be to keep her at the house until we’d taught each other everything about where we’d been the last eight years, and the one thing I hadn’t considered until now was what if she wasn’t right, in ways we could never fix, in ways beyond wrong, and it seemed like the best thing for everybody would be to send her back again.

For now, though, I had too much to learn myself.

“Take her back to the house,” I told Gina. “I’ll catch up when I can.”

They both looked at me like I was sending them out among the wolves. But somebody, somewhere, was expecting what had just been cooked up in the trailer.

“And tell them not to put the place up for sale. I’ll need it myself.”

It was Shae, with the wisdom of the dead, who intuited it first, with a look on her face that asked What did you do, Dylan, what did you do?

I kissed them both on their cold cheeks, and turned toward the trailer before I could turn weak, and renege on the harshest terms of the trade.

Because there’s give and there’s take. There are balances to be kept. And there’s a time in everyone’s life when we realize we’ve become what we hate the most.

I was the bringer of plague now. There could be no other way.

And though I knew it would be a blessed endeavor, they still couldn’t die fast enough.