Martin couldn’t walk.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to: the spirit was more than willing, but the flesh, as has so often been the trouble with man, was weak. He could stand for short periods, as long as he braced himself against the table or had something to lean upon, but taking even so much as a step meant dealing with excruciating pain and the risk of bleeding. Hal watched from the far side of the cabin as Annie eased Martin back into his chair for the third time.
“He can’t come with us,” he said. “You know he can’t come with us. The smell of his wounds will attract the wendigo before we’ve made it back to the trees.”
“It didn’t attract the wendigo before, and it’s not as if he injured himself,” she snapped. “You were the one setting mantraps in the damned woods, like they’re your own private hunting ground. Did you even consider that you could catch an innocent?”
“A man has a right to defend himself,” said Hal.
“Sir—Miss Annie—please, stop,” said Martin. They turned to look at him. The young roustabout was leaning back in his chair, face pale from the attempt to walk. He shook his head. “He’s right, ma’am. I can’t walk yet. Maybe come morning, when the scabs have set, but for right now? Maybe if I were being chased, I could run. Anything short of that, I’d just be slowing you down. Sophia doesn’t deserve that. Your Adeline doesn’t deserve that. I’ll stay here and keep the fire going. That much I can do.”
“I hate the thought of leaving you alone,” Annie said reluctantly. “Are you sure…?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Martin nodded firmly. “Getting me back to the circus, well. That’s up one hill, and through a forest filled with monsters and such, and then down another hill to something that might well still be burning. Staying here seems the better choice for everyone, don’t you think?”
“You are a brave boy,” said Annie. Impulsively, she leaned in and kissed his forehead, leaving him scarlet cheeked and staring when she straightened up again. “We’ll find your Sophia, and we’ll bring her back to you.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, girl,” Hal said brusquely. “Are you ready?”
No, thought Annie, who suspected that she might never be ready to go back out into that night, where the darkness crept and crawled like a living thing. She retrieved her lantern from the table and turned to face the woodsman, who was standing by the door, impatience sketched into every line of him.
“I was waiting for you,” she said.
He snorted, faint amusement in his eyes—he knew that she was lying—and opened the door. Darkness seemed to flood into the cabin, going against the normal laws of light and shadow; it beat back the glow of Annie’s lantern and even the brighter, fiercer shine of the fire, pooling on the floor in great puddles of gray. Hal stepped out.
After one glance back at Martin, Annie followed.
The stars gleamed overhead, cold and cruel and immutable. They had seen worse nights than this, and worse days; they had seen everything that Oregon had to offer, and while they might not judge, they also did not forgive.
The moon was less understanding. It seemed to leer down on them, its light less a beacon and more a signal flare to whatever might be hunting through the trees, looking for manflesh to devour. Hal scowled at the moon before turning his attention on Annie’s lantern.
“The light’s going to attract all manner of damned thing,” he said.
“I can’t see without it,” she replied.
“I’m not asking you to. It took me years to learn to navigate these trees without a light to hand. If not for the fact that I can still fill my belly on rabbit and roots, I’d think I was half a wendigo myself.” His smile was bitter, wry, the twisted mouth of a man who had nothing left to serve as refuge from his life. “I just want you to be warned. You walk these woods lit up like that, you’re going to lure a lot more than moths to come and pay attention to your passage.”
“That’s a risk I’ll have to take.”
“That’s a risk I’m glad you’re taking.” Hal descended the narrow porch steps, leaving Annie with no choice but to follow him if she wanted to know where the traps were. He navigated the clearing like a dancer, stepping over one patch of ground, treading with absolute confidence upon the next.
Annie frowned as she did her best to emulate him. “I’m afraid I miss your meaning, sir.”
“If you attract the wendigo, there’s a chance you’ll attract my Poppy or my Marie,” he said, pausing at the edge of the trees, giving her time to catch up with him. “Fifteen years I’ve been seeking to lure them close enough to let me grant them peace. Fifteen years they’ve been avoiding me. I don’t know whether wendigo remember who they were before the hunger took them. They might be nothing more than beasts who used to be good, honest men and women, led astray by winter. But I think…”
He hesitated, long enough for Annie to wonder whether the seemingly limitless well of words that had opened when he’d found her and Martin wandering in his woods had finally run out. She’d met his like before, men who had resigned themselves to silence while making no pledges to that effect. They could talk the stars out of the sky, once they realized that someone in the world was willing to listen. Dangerous men, every one of them. It took something to shock a tongue to silence without a vow of same to keep it lying fallow.
Finally, he said, “I think they know. What they are; what’s become of them; what they’ve lost. I think they know, and that they mourn, in their own cold ways, because anything that has understanding of itself has understanding of right and wrong. They damned themselves in an instant. They can never be redeemed in this world. I think they avoid me because they are ashamed. True evil can’t exist without knowing what it is to be ashamed.”
Annie said nothing. There seemed to be nothing she could say. Instead, she followed the old man into the woods and waited for the wendigo.
The darkness here was the more familiar sort, the kind of shadow she had grown up with and was long accustomed to. If it still clung a bit more closely than was the norm, well, she had almost come to expect that in her short time in Oregon. This was not a state that yielded easily to the light.
Hal moved through the woods like he had been born to them, slipping easily through the space between trees, seemingly confident that she could keep up, despite her ignorance of the terrain. The silence fell into an easy rhythm, him leading, her following, neither one of them speaking, for fear that any intentional noise might bring the night down on their heads. The lantern was dim enough that Annie gave serious thought to throwing it aside, letting it light some other path. The wendigo might go after the light and leave her alone, if they thought that she was just another deer.
Another deer … “There was a man before,” she said abruptly, and flinched away from the sound of her own voice, which seemed to expand into a shout in the confined space beneath the trees.
Hal stopped walking. His shoulders tensed. He did not turn. “What man?” he asked.
“It was another clearing, like the one Martin and I were in when we met you. Not the same one.” She couldn’t imagine that it had been the same one. Even as dark as it was, there was no way she could have missed the poor man’s body if she’d come so close to it a second time.
(The alternative—that it had been the same clearing, but that the wendigo had come and carted him away while she’d been making her return trip to the circus—was not worth consideration. If they manipulated these woods so easily, first setting and then concealing the site of a slaughter, then there was no point in continuing their quest. Humanity had already lost the day, and would soon lose the night as well.)
“Go on,” said Hal.
“There was a dead man lying in the open, with his … his chest cracked open like an eggshell. I didn’t know him, either from the circus I travel with or from the town.”
“And have you been in town long enough to know every soul who lives there?”
Annie didn’t answer.
“I thought not. Let me tell you something about life in The Clearing, miss, something I wish had been said to me when I was young and innocent and still believed that Oregon was capable of kindness: it’s never fair.” Hal started walking again, forcing Annie to follow or be left behind. “The mayor’s not a wendigo—hard to run a settlement when you’re seven feet tall and made of starvation—but he might as well be. He’s a tick, feeding on the blood of those around him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No? The first year in a new land, it’s understandable that there might not be enough. No one’s had time to learn the land. Crops won’t grow right. Nothing seems to go the way it did back in Montana, or Maine, or whatever territory you’re from. Livestock is still struggling to get established. It’s reasonable, expected even, that you’ll lose half your people in your first winter. It’s almost suspect when you don’t.”
Annie, who had grown up hearing the stories of the settlement of Salt Lake, and the bodies her paradise had been built atop, said nothing.
“First few years, it’s still understandable. A new settlement is an uneasy thing. You’re always teetering on the edge of ‘enough.’ Is there enough grain to see you through the winter? Is there enough space to keep your people from going stir-crazy and tearing each other to pieces during the first big freeze? Is there, God help you, enough open land behind the church to bury the bodies properly, before the starving start to have the sort of thoughts that led to our current situation? It’s so damned delicate when it’s all new like that. It’s delicate, and it’s difficult, and it falls apart if you give it half a chance.”
“A circus is very similar,” said Annie.
Hal snorted. “A circus moves. That’s part of what makes it a circus. If you keep losing people, it’s because you never get the chance to know the land. You’re always at the mercy of the towns around you, and half of them will be new, or teetering, or already falling. A settlement should find its feet at some point. It should learn to be dependable. But The Clearing never has.”
“Never?”
Hal stepped over a protruding root, motioning for her to do the same, and shook his head. “Never. The mayor, he says every year that this year will be the year that things turn around, and to his credit, sometimes he keeps his word—they’ve had good years down there. Good harvests. Times when things went the way they were expected to. Marriages and babies and all the other things that come with being a healthy place.”
“But?”
“But they don’t outweigh the bad years, and they don’t outbalance the accidents. The healthy hunters who should be able to bring in enough to see them through the winter, who somehow wander into the wrong patch of wood and wind up split stem to stern. The blighted fields, the spoiled provisions. And you know who thrives throughout it all?”
“The mayor,” guessed Annie.
“And his family. They thrive while everything around them withers. They’re not wendigo. Doesn’t mean they don’t have something of the wendigo’s hunger in them, or that they wouldn’t eat your heart if they thought they could get away with it and still maintain their pretty faces.” Hal spat off to the side, like he was warding himself against the evil eye. “Bastards. Every damn one of them.”
Annie shivered, looking around. The trees closed in on all sides of them, and she realized, with some dismay, that she had no idea where they were. They could have been walking back toward town, or heading in a circle, or any number of other terrible things. She was alone in the woods with a strange, armed man, in the middle of the night, and she had a dreadful suspicion that if she were to scream, only the wendigo—assuming the wendigo were real and not the ravings of a madman—would be close enough to hear.
“Where are we going?” she asked gingerly.
“I suspected you wouldn’t believe me forever,” said Hal. “I know how I sound. I know how little proof I offered you. A man living on his own in the middle of nowhere, well. There can be reasons for that, and not many of them are likely to be good ones. So I brought you here to show you, once and for all, that I’m no liar. Come.”
He motioned her forward. Lacking any other options, Annie followed.
The trees thinned around them. The trees had been thinning for some time, she realized; it was only the darkness that made them seem so uniform and unrelenting. Carefully, they picked their way out of the wood and into a stretch of clear land. The curdled moon glared down, hateful as ever.
Hal continued to walk. Annie continued to follow. When he stopped, so did she, and raised her lantern to behold another bowl like the one that contained The Clearing, or his cabin. Such bowls seemed to be a feature of the local landscape, like the sandstone hills of Deseret.
Her light was not enough to drop more than a few feet below the lip of the bowl. Hal bent, picking up a dry branch. He held it out to the lantern, motioning for her to open the glass. She did, and he slipped the end of the branch inside. It must have been in the open for quite some time; the pitch caught fire with a crackle, filling the air with the smell of smoke and burning pine. It was pleasant after the living, hostile scent of the woods.
“Look,” said Hal, and hurled the branch, end over end, across the bowl. It flew in a long arc, burning as it went, until it fell like a star, illuminating everything around it.
The township it revealed might have been the one she’d walked away from, had anything lived there, or had there been a circus camped at the edge of the bowl. But there was nothing, only buildings sliding into decay and open ground grown choked with weeds. Annie gasped.
“A ghost town?” she whispered.
Hal nodded, expression grim. “They called it ‘The Clearing’ once, before the mayor misjudged how many people they could afford to lose in a single winter. According to the town records, the official maps of the area, this place never existed. Come with me.”
He offered her his hand. After a moment’s frozen hesitation, Annie took it.
Hal knew the route into the ghost town as well as he had known his way through the woods. He walked confidently, never hesitating or looking back, and Annie felt compelled to follow him the same way, setting her feet where his had been only a second before, letting him lead her down, down, down into the darkness. The shadows here were the ordinary kind, but steeped with a strange melancholy, like they understood the sacrifices that had been made in their name. She shivered, suddenly wishing that she had brought a second coat with her when she ran from the circus. Nathanial’s, perhaps.
Oh, Nathanial, will I ever see you again? she thought, and rather suspected that the answer would be a short and simple “no.” It hurt to contemplate. Not as much as it hurt to think that she might never find her daughter, but that was what made it a safe question to ask in the silence behind her eyes. Mr. Blackstone—Nathanial—however much she might love him, and however much she suspected she might have been able to allow herself to love him, had she been given time and the opportunity to do so, was expendable in the end. Her mother’s heart could afford to let him go. She could never do the same for Adeline.
Delly was everything she had. No one who was not a parent could understand how deep that little girl’s roots had sunk into her heart. If she lost her, there would be no more Annie. There would be nothing but a husk that walked like a woman. She might as well follow her captive corn stalker out into the fields and let it plant a scarecrow in her heart.
Annie shuddered, trying to clear away the unpleasant thoughts. When she lifted her head, she found Hal looking at her sympathetically.
“It’s easy to haunt yourself in this place,” he said. “Don’t need no ghosts when you’re standing inside one. Remember that whatever you left up above is still there, waiting for you to come and find it. Nothing you think you see here is true.”
“If this isn’t true, why did you bring me here?”
“Because it’s close enough to show you the things you’ll need to understand,” said Hal. “Come with me.” As before, he walked, and as before, she followed him. She had followed this far. At this point, it truly felt as if there was nothing else that she could do.
The ghost town looked so similar to the living town of The Clearing that every step closer to its outlying buildings made a scream rise higher in Annie’s throat, choking her. How had they been able to conceal this? How had the survivors of whatever tragedy had come here been able to turn their backs and walk away, as if abandoning an entire settlement was nothing?
She had seen ghost towns before. Some were sad things, dandelion fluff buildings and broken streets, starved to death by a change of fortune, drying slowly in the desert heat. They were a litany of dead wells and terrible illnesses, and even the circus orphans wouldn’t loot their rickety old structures for fear of waking the ghosts that haunted them. Others were terrifying in subtle ways, their walls riddled with bullets, their wells reeking with bodies that had never been laid to rest. Towns could die in an instant or over the course of years. Much like a person, she supposed. There were a million ways to die, if you weren’t careful.
This town, though …
This town hadn’t died of natural causes, or even been murdered. This town had been sacrificed, its throat slit by its own people in the name of placating some unspeakable and unspoken divinity. Walking through its streets was like stepping onto unholy ground. Her skin shivered until it felt as if it would fly off her body entirely, slithering away and becoming its own creature. The shadows were too dark. They were thin as normal shadows, but Annie half-thought that was only so they could creep up on a body without being seen until it was too late.
Glass still glittered in some of the windows of the houses around them. Not much—maybe every other pane—but still enough to tell her that they had left quickly, not taking any more than they could carry, and had never returned. Glass was precious. Here in the West, glass was a sign of comfort and civilization, a marker of wealth that few could afford to obtain, much less afford to leave behind. Glass meant having enough, not just to survive, but to put on airs again. Putting on airs was important. Having a Sunday dress, or a pot of white sugar, or a glass window, it meant that there was enough.
And these people had walked away, and they had left their glass windows behind.
“What happened here?” she asked. She didn’t mean to whisper, but she did so all the same, the darkness seeming to swallow her voice, until there was almost nothing left of it. Even the darkness here was hungry.
Hungry: yes. That was it. The woods, the shadows, even that damned curdled moon, they were all hungry in a way that she hadn’t been able to put her finger on until she’d heard her voice gulped down by the quiet. They wanted something she couldn’t give them, because if she started to give, they would take, and they wouldn’t stop taking until there was nothing left of her. This was a place with no concept of enough. Glass meant nothing here. The idea it defined was impossible.
“The stores ran out.” Hal walked beside her. He looked … resigned, like the hungry shadows had devoured so much of him that they had no power over what remained. He was a shadow himself, of the man he’d been before. “The mayor said that someone must have been stealing, that there had been enough when the winter started, and if we were running out in mid-January, it had to be because someone had decided that their family deserved to live in comfort while everyone else suffered. That was bullshit, pardon my French, ma’am, and everyone knew it. No one in the town was comfortable except for the mayor himself, him and his damned family.”
Annie, who had seen a great deal of bullshit lying by the side of the road during her time with the circus—and had, yes, seen her share of damnation as well—said nothing. Hal needed little prompting to start his stories. She was already coming to understand that it was best if she just let him go. She would learn what she needed to know, and that knowledge would lead her to Adeline.
If she’s still alive, whispered the voice of the hungry shadows all around her, and she shuddered, and was silent.
“Their boy was fat,” said Hal in a reflective tone, like he couldn’t believe the words. “Did I tell you that already? Cutest little thing you ever saw, not three years old and fat as a Christmas goose. He didn’t bruise when he fell down, just skinned up his palms and bounced right back to his feet. My Poppy, you could count her ribs through her dress, and she had every scrap that we could give her, and there’s the mayor, pointing fingers, saying that someone in town was stealing from the rest of us, someone in town was acting against the greater good. It wasn’t the boy’s fault. Children should be fat. That’s what gets them through the winter. But every time I saw him running, laughing, all bundled up in good furs and with his belly like a promise of seeing the spring, I near wanted to split his skull. I’d always known envy. A man can’t live in a hard world and not know envy once in a while, however much he might wish otherwise. I’d never known what it was to covet before.”
The buildings around them were changing as they walked, growing green with moss and speckled with the leering, poisonous caps of toadstools. Annie saw colors she would have sworn Nature didn’t understand, and she shivered again.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked. Surely not to see the mayor’s son: she’d seen him already, back in The Clearing, a strapping boy almost Martin’s age. He’d outgrown his boyish fatness and found a stout, well-fed handsomeness in his adulthood.
“The same place a man always takes a woman,” said Hal. His smile was a white slash in the night. “I’m taking you to church.”