The oak came up on her left for the third time, and Elara Fenwick eased her foot off the gas.
She knew it was the third time because she had begun counting on the second. The trunk gaped open from crown to root, the two halves leaning apart at the angle of a woman bending to listen, and the heartwood inside had gone black as a struck match. She had seen it once, and told herself it was a curiosity. She had seen it again at the next bend, and her grip on the steering wheel had tightened. Now it had come around a third time, its split silhouette sliding past her window like a face she could not quite place.
The wipers beat their two-note rhythm. The rental's headlights threw pale cones into a mist that would not commit to being rain.
Elara tapped the phone propped against the dash. The map was frozen on a junction she had supposedly passed forty minutes ago. No signal. The little arrow at the top of the screen had become a paperweight. She watched the battery indicator drop from forty-one percent to thirty-eight, though the cigarette lighter was feeding the phone a steady current. The math did not add up.
She had left the university town at four in the morning, before the labs filled, before the questions. Her sister's face had not been in any photograph for eleven months, and the postal clerk who had handed her the letter that morning had been careful, very careful, to use both hands. The envelope had smelled of cedar and something older. Briarwake, North Carolina, population something. The letter had been short. Three lines and a signature she had not seen in sixteen years.
Come home. We need to talk about what your sister found.
She had booked the rental at the airport. She had driven north, then west, then up. The mountain roads were not what her atlas had suggested. They were narrower, older, carved along ridges that did not appear on any printout. The asphalt had narrowed to a single lane in places, and the guardrails, where they existed, had rusted to the color of dried blood. She had been driving for what her watch said was an hour and what the road said was forever.
The oak appeared again.
This time, Elara pulled to the shoulder and let the engine idle. The car ticked softly. The mist gathered on the windshield in slow beads that she watched with the absent attention of someone trying not to think.
She counted, under her breath. "One. Two. Three."
The oak stood perhaps thirty yards ahead, leaning slightly west, the split in its trunk yawning wide enough to walk through. Lightning had done that, years ago, and the scar had never healed. Moss climbed the southern face in a felted green. The northern face was raw and silver where the bark had peeled away. A single crow sat on the uppermost branch, regarding her with the patience of something that had been there all afternoon.
Elara turned off the wipers. The windshield cleared in patches. Beyond the oak, the road curved away into a stand of pines so close together they made a wall.
She had taken no turns. She was certain of it. The road had curved, yes, but it had curved consistently, a long slow arc up the mountainside. She had not crossed her own path. She had watched for it. She had watched for the skid marks she had left on the first pass, the churned gravel at the shoulder's edge, any sign of a previous crossing.
And yet.
She put the car back in drive and rolled forward, slowly, watching her mirrors. The rearview showed only the wet road unwinding behind her, unmarked. She passed the oak. The crow flapped once, resettled. Its black eye caught the headlight and threw it back as a small bright coin.
The road curved. The pines thickened. A creek appeared on her right, running fast and brown, with a sound like someone dragging a branch across gravel. Then the creek vanished. The pines thinned. The road straightened, then curved again, and the cold that had been creeping in through the car's seams reached her fingers where they lay on the wheel.
The oak came up on her left.
Elara stopped the car in the middle of the lane and sat with both hands on the wheel, breathing through her nose. The steering wheel was cold enough to ache. She could feel the bones of her own wrists against the leather.
The letter was in her coat pocket. She could feel the edge of the envelope against her ribs, a thin hard line of pressure. Come home. The signature had been her mother's, or someone using her mother's hand. The handwriting was the same, the same deliberate slope, but the ink had been wrong. Too brown. Cedar smoke, maybe.
She had not been home in sixteen years. She had told herself it was a choice. She had told herself many things. She had told herself that the plant pathology department needed her, that her research on fungal pathogens in old-growth Appalachian canopies could not wait, that the samples she had been culturing would die if she left. The samples had been an excuse. She had known that at the time. She knew it now, sitting in a rental car on a road that did not know how to behave, with the letter pressing against her ribs like a small insistent hand.
The crow lifted from the branch and flew, with three slow wingbeats, into the mist.
Elara put the car in park and sat for a long moment. Then she took the phone off the dash and held it up, turning it slowly, searching for a single bar of signal. Nothing. The battery, she noted, had dropped to twenty-two percent. The number felt like a warning.
She got out of the car.
The cold came up off the ground in a way she had not expected, sliding over the tops of her shoes and into her ankles. It smelled of pine resin and wet stone and something underneath, something vegetal and dark, the way a greenhouse smells after the heat has been turned off and the plants have begun to take the room back. She buttoned her coat to her throat and walked a few steps down the road in the direction she had been traveling.
The asphalt was slick. Her shoes, the flat black ones she had chosen for driving, had no tread left. Behind her, the oaks began again, and ahead, the pines, and the road curved away between them, and there was no intersection. There was no crossroad. There was no place where a road bent back on itself, and yet the oak had come around three times.
She walked back to the car.
That was when she noticed the light.
A single yellow square, far down the road ahead, on the right side. A porch light, or a station lamp. She squinted against the mist. The light did not move. There was a shape beneath it, low and rectangular, that could have been a building, or a wide truck, or a barn. The shape did not resolve no matter how she angled her head.
She got back in the car and drove toward it.
It took her eleven minutes. She knew because she watched the minute hand on her watch, and because the road, for those eleven minutes, did not curve at all. It ran straight as a cut, and the trees on either side stood like witnesses with their branches held inward, and the oak did not appear again. The wipers pushed the mist off in slow arcs. The heater threw a thin sour breath into the car, and the vents rattled faintly with each bump.
The building resolved into a gas station. A single pump stood in front of it, the kind with a round dial on top, the kind that belonged in another decade. The paint on the pump had faded to a color that was no longer a color. A wooden sign above the office door read GAS in letters that had lost their second coat. Beneath the sign, in smaller letters, someone had hand-painted BAIT, then crossed it out, then painted BAIT again, in slightly different paint.
The porch light was on. A man sat on the porch in a wooden chair, one boot heel hooked on the railing, a paper cup in his hand. He was watching the road when she turned in, or he had been watching the road until she arrived, and the difference between those two things seemed important to her for a reason she could not name.
Elara parked in front of the pump and let the engine idle. She sat for a moment, listening to the tick of the cooling block. Then she turned off the car, opened the door, and stepped out into air that had a smell she could not place, somewhere between cold creek water and something sweet that had begun to rot.
The man on the porch did not stand. He turned his head a fraction, the way a bird does, and regarded her with one eye that caught the light and one that did not.
"Evening," he said. His voice was rough and unhurried, and the word had two syllables where most people would have put one.
Elara zipped her coat higher. "Evening. I think I've taken a wrong turn somewhere. My GPS lost signal about an hour ago."
The man sipped from his cup. Whatever was in it made no sound against the paper.
"GPS," he said, as if tasting the word. "That's the thing in the phone that tells you where you're going."
"That's the one."
"Mm." He was quiet for a moment, his gaze drifting past her to the road, then back. "You're heading up the mountain."
"I'm trying to get to Briarwake."
He nodded, slow, the nod of a man who already knew.
"Most folks," he said, "when they say Briarwake, they say it like they're asking permission."
Elara felt the edge of the envelope press against her ribs again. She did not answer immediately, and when she did, her voice had gone flat and professional, the voice she used with graduate students who had brought her the wrong sample.
"I'm not most folks. I'm trying to get there before dark."
The man looked at the sky. The sky was already the color of a bruise.
"Ain't going to make that," he said, mild. "But you can get there before full dark, if you don't stop."
"I don't intend to stop."
He looked at her then, properly, for the first time. His eyes were pale and small in his weathered face, and the look he gave her was the look of a man taking inventory. She resisted the urge to explain herself, to produce the letter, to give him reasons. The letter was hers. Her reasons were hers.
"There's a road," he said, after a moment, "that bends back on itself, just past the old oak. You seen the old oak."
"Yes," Elara said.
"Mm." He nodded again. "That road. If you take the left fork, you'll come back down into the holler and end up in Dalton by morning. If you take the right fork, you'll come into Briarwake from the south side, by the cemetery."
"I don't remember seeing a fork."
"No," he agreed. "You wouldn't."
He took another sip from his cup, and this time she heard the faintest clink of ice against paper.
"There's a fork," he said, "and then there's the road that wants you to think there's a fork. They're two different things."
Elara stared at him. Her hands had gone cold in her pockets. "Which one do I want?"
The man considered this as if she had asked him something personal.
"That depends," he said, "on what you came back for."
The mist thickened between them. The porch light buzzed, very faintly, the way a fluorescent tube buzzes before it goes. Somewhere behind the station, out of sight, something dripped steadily onto metal, and the sound was the only other sound in the world.
Elara kept her eyes on his. "I came back to find my sister."
The man nodded, slow, and set his cup down on the porch railing.
"Well," he said. "That decides a thing or two."
He stood, and the chair creaked behind him, and he walked to the edge of the porch and looked down the road she had come in on, as if he could see the oak from there, as if he had been watching her drive the same stretch of asphalt for an hour and had decided to let her.
He turned back to her, and the look on his face was not unkind.
"You go straight on past the oak," he said. "Don't take either fork. The road will give you a third one, and that one will be the real one.
She nodded once, tucking the directions into the place behind her ribs where she had been keeping them for nineteen years, and she walked back down the steps. The wood groaned under her weight in a way that sounded almost like speech, and she did not look back at him because she understood, on some level beneath language, that looking back was the wrong thing to do.
The mist had not lifted. If anything it had thickened, settling into the curves of the car, into the weave of her coat, into the small spaces between her fingers when she gripped the steering wheel. She started the engine. The dashboard clock read 7:41. She had been driving for nearly four hours. She had covered, by her best guess, perhaps forty miles.
The pump sat beneath its rusted awning like a patient animal. The dial behind the glass was a milky yellow with age, the numerals worn almost smooth. A faded sticker on the side of the housing advertised a brand of motor oil that had not been manufactured in over a decade. The nozzle was crusted with the residue of ten thousand fill-ups, and when she lifted it from its cradle the metal was cold enough to sting her palm.
She squeezed the handle. Nothing happened. The pump's throat made a thin clicking sound, like a tired heart, but the numbers on the dial did not move.
She tried again. The same hollow click.
A window slid open somewhere to the left of the station, and the attendant was leaning out of it, a ledger open in front of him, a pen tucked behind one ear. He had moved faster than a man his age should have been able to. She had not heard the door.
"Pump's off," he said.
"I can see that."
"Been off since Wednesday."
She stared at him. "Wednesday?"
"Last Wednesday, or the one before. Time blurs out here." He scratched the back of his neck with the end of the pen. "Could be the one before that, too. Hard to say. Days run together when you're counting pump cycles and nothing else."
"I need fuel."
"Yes," he agreed, as if she had said something both obvious and interesting. "I imagine you do."
He closed the ledger with a soft thump and came out through the side door, locking it behind him with a key that looked older than her. He crossed the lot toward her with that same unhurried gait, his boots whispering against the wet asphalt, and when he reached the pump he laid one hand against its side, almost affectionately, the way a man touches the flank of a horse he has known since it was a colt.
"Not selling fuel today," he said.
"I'm not asking for a discount."
"No," he said. "I know you aren't."
The mist moved between them, slow and deliberate, as if it were listening. Somewhere in the trees a bird called once and then thought better of it.
Elara kept her hand on the nozzle. The metal was beginning to warm against her skin from the heat of her grip. "Why won't you sell me fuel?"
The man looked at her, and she saw again those eyes, the milk-blue irises clouded with what she had first taken for cataracts but was beginning to suspect was something else. He smiled, very slightly, and the smile did not quite reach those eyes. It stopped at the mouth and went no further.
"Because," he said, and leaned in, and his voice dropped to a whisper that was barely more than a breath, "she doesn't want you there yet, girl."
The word girl landed on her like a hand on her shoulder. She had not been called girl since she was a girl. Her mother had used it. Her sister had used it, teasing, at the kitchen table in the house they no longer owned.
"Who doesn't want me there?"
The man straightened. The smile had gone, and the warmth that had lived in the lines of his face had gone with it. He was suddenly a much older man, and the lot felt much emptier, and the mist felt much closer.
"You know who," he said. "You came all this way, you know who."
"I came because my sister is missing."
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe that, too."
He turned away from her then, and walked back toward the side door, and she watched him go, and her throat had closed around something she did not have a name for. The key turned in the lock. The window slid shut.
She stood at the pump with the dead nozzle in her hand for a long moment. The mist had begun to bead on her eyelashes, small and cold, and when she blinked she tasted salt.
She put the nozzle back in its cradle with more force than she had intended, and the metal clanged against the housing, and the sound went out across the empty lot and was swallowed by the trees without an echo.
There was, she noticed for the first time, a cooler on the porch beside the door, the kind you might find outside a bait shop, faded blue with a rusted latch. A hand-lettered sign was taped to the front of it, the words barely legible through the condensation on the plastic lid. Cold drinks. Dollar each. Honor box.
She walked over and crouched, and the cold from the concrete came up through the knees of her jeans. The latch clicked open. Inside, packed in a slurry of half-melted ice, were cans of soda she had not seen in years, brands she remembered from her childhood, and a water bottle, and a single can of beer with a ring pull that had begun to oxidize. She took the water bottle and left a five-dollar bill folded once under the corner of the cooler lid, and she drank half of it standing there, the water tasting of minerals and something faintly green, and the cold of it ran down her throat and into her chest and for a moment made her feel almost human.
She had maybe an eighth of a tank. The road sign at the edge of the lot had said Briarwake was fourteen miles. Her car might make eight of those on fumes, if she kept the speed below forty and did not run the heater and did not use the headlights except as flash.
She turned the key in the ignition. The engine caught on the second try, and the fuel gauge needle dipped below the quarter mark and continued, very gently, to fall.
She eased out of the lot and onto the road.
The oak had been, she now realized, only the first marker. There was a second, and then a third. Three trees in a row along the right side of the road, each of them wider than the one before, and then the third oak gave way to a stretch of low stone wall that had not been there on her way in, or that she had not seen, which amounted to the same thing out here.
The road curved gently to the left, then straightened, then curved again. The mist was not so much a weather as a feature of the place, like the rocks, like the soil, like the way the trees leaned slightly inward over the asphalt as if listening for what was coming. The pavement itself was in better repair than she had expected, free of the frost heaves and root breaks that plagued rural roads in winter, and she began to suspect that whatever authority kept this stretch of blacktop whole was not the county.
She passed a faded billboard at what she took to be the ten-mile mark, the wood so weathered the message had become an impressionist smear of green and brown. She slowed enough to read it, and what she read was, in letters that must once have been red, WELCOME TO BRIARWAKE. EST. 1851. The bottom edge of the board had rotted away, and the date, along with whatever slogan had once accompanied it, had fallen into the undergrowth.
She kept driving.
At what the odometer told her was the eight-mile mark, she began to feel the first tremor in the steering wheel. Not a mechanical tremor. Something else. As if the road beneath her tires were breathing. As if it were exhaling, slowly, and the car were a leaf being lifted on the breath of it.
She lifted her foot from the accelerator. The car coasted. The tremor did not stop. It intensified, slightly, then settled into a rhythm that she could almost count.
She thought of the Briar Mother.
She thought of her sister.
She thought of the man at the pump, and the way he had said girl, and the way the mist had tasted of salt.
The road curved again. Through the trees, far ahead, she could see what looked like the first suggestion of a town. A spire, perhaps. A cluster of rooftops. A wisp of smoke, or what might have been smoke.
Her fuel gauge touched the empty line.
She drove on.
The road took one last bend and the suggestion of town resolved itself into absence. A church spire, yes, but the wood of it was dark with rot, and the cross at its peak had tilted south as though trying to look away from whatever lay below. A cluster of rooftops, yes, but no lights behind any of them. The wisp of smoke she had seen was not smoke; it was mist, drawn up from the valley floor and climbing the hill behind the town like a slow gray hand.
She did not stop to examine it. She could not. The fuel gauge had given up its argument with the empty line and was now resting against the peg with the resignation of a thing that had made its point. The engine coughed once, twice, and she guided the car to the verge of the road with what felt like the last of her own reserves. The tires sank slightly into the soft shoulder. The engine died with a small, polite shudder, like a horse that had carried its rider faithfully to the doorstep and was now asking to be let go.
Elara sat for a moment with her hands still on the wheel. The leather was warm where her palms had been. The night pressed against the windows, and the mist was already beginning to gather at the edges of the headlights, which still burned, still refused to acknowledge that the engine had stopped.
She turned them off.
The dark that followed was not absolute. There was the moon, somewhere behind the cloud, throwing a diffuse and grudging silver across the valley. There was the mist itself, which seemed faintly luminous in places, as though it carried some attenuated memory of daylight. There were the shapes of trees along the road, black against the lesser black of the sky, and somewhere ahead, set back from the road behind a sweep of overgrown lawn, the bulk of Blackthorn Hall.
She knew it before she could see it clearly. She knew the way she knew the pitch of her own voice in a shout. The house had been in her peripheral awareness for the entire drive, the way a door you have passed a hundred times still registers as a door even when you are not looking at it. Her sister had been born in that house. Elara had been raised in it, more or less, until the family fractures that no one outside the family ever spoke of had widened enough to send her away.
She had not been back in nine years.
She opened the driver's door and the mist came in to meet her. It tasted, again, of salt. Of brine. Of something older than the sea. She swallowed against it and stepped out onto the verge, and the ground gave under her heel with a soft, fibrous sound, like the skin of a fruit left too long in a bowl.
Her legs were unsteady. She had been driving for nearly seven hours, and she had not eaten since a gas station pastry somewhere in West Virginia that had tasted of nothing in particular. She locked the car out of habit, then realized the habit was absurd. Whatever was in Blackthorn Hall, a locked door was not going to keep it out. Whatever was in Blackthorn Hall had been waiting for her since before she had decided to come.
She began to walk.
The lawn was a field of old grass that had gone to seed, the stalks brushing her knees with a dry whisper. In the moonlight she could see that what she had taken for lawn was, in places, not lawn at all. Bramble had crept in from the edges of the property and formed low hummocks that her feet kept catching on. Once she stumbled and put her hand down to steady herself, and the bramble caught the back of her wrist and held her for a moment with a prick that was almost affectionate.
She pulled free. A bead of blood welled up, dark in the moonlight. She wiped it on her coat and kept walking.
The gravel of the drive began under her feet, the stones loose and sharp, and the crunch of them was the loudest sound in the world. Or so it seemed. She had the sudden, vivid impression that anything listening from within the house would be able to count her steps. That anything waiting there had been counting for a long time.
The house came into view.
It was larger than she remembered. Or perhaps she had been smaller. Both things could be true. The central block was three stories of gray stone darkened with weather and lichen, and from it sprouted the lower wings that had been added in the nineteenth century by a Blackthorn ancestor who had wanted, it was said, to be able to walk from his study to his greenhouse without going outside. The windows were dark. Every one of them. The glass caught the moonlight in flat, fish-scale patches, but behind them there was nothing. No movement. No lamp left burning by a servant who had long since stopped coming.
What she had come for stood at the head of the drive: the gates.
They were wrought iron, black with rust, and they had been handsome once. The scrollwork was intricate, the bars thick as her wrist, the central motif a blackthorn tree in bloom, each flower rendered in iron with a fidelity that someone had paid for in long winter evenings. The gates stood open, both of them, leaning slightly inward as though the hinges had given up the argument with gravity sometime in the last decade. Beyond them, the drive curved up toward the front door, lined with what had once been topiary and was now just shapes of green gone wild.
On the left gatepost sat a crow. On the right gatepost sat a crow. Both were perfectly still. Both were facing in her direction.
She stopped.
She had the sudden, irrational conviction that she should not look directly at them. That the looking was what they were waiting for. That the first one to blink, human or bird, would lose something that could not be recovered.
She looked anyway.
The crow on the left turned its head. Slowly. With the precise, mechanical deliberation of a thing testing a hinge. It fixed her with one eye, a wet black bead that did not reflect the moonlight so much as swallow it. The crow on the right did the same, at the same speed, to the same degree. They stared at her in unison. Not the loose, scattered attention of birds interrupted at roost, but a single, coordinated regard, as though the two of them were the left and right eye of some larger thing that had no body she could see.
She did not move.
The crows did not move.
Somewhere in the bramble, something small rustled and went still.
She thought of the man at the pump. Girl, he had said. And then, after a pause that had felt like the space between two heartbeats, You go careful up there. She had thought at the time that he was warning her about the road. Now, standing between the two crows with the iron tree above her and the dark house beyond, she understood that he had been warning her about the house. About what lived in it. About what she was walking toward with her empty tank and her bleeding wrist and the name of her sister still caught in her teeth like a seed.
She had not said the name aloud since she had left the university. She had not been able to. The consonants of it had thickened in her mouth each time she had tried, until the word became unrecognizable, became a thing she could not push past her own lips. Adelaide. The name was Adelaide. Her sister was Adelaide Blackthorn, and Adelaide Blackthorn had been missing for eleven months, and no one in this town had bothered to look for her except, apparently, Elara.
The crows tilted their heads. The motion was synchronized to the fraction of a second. She could hear, now, a sound she had not noticed before: a low, throaty clicking, coming from one of them, or both, or from somewhere in the trees behind the gate, a sound like a tongue being worked against the roof of a mouth.
A third crow dropped from somewhere above and landed on the top bar of the left gate, between the iron flowers. Then a fourth, on the right. Then a fifth, on the central tree. They came in ones and twos, settling on the scrollwork with a series of small, precise impacts, until the top of the gate was lined with them, fifteen, twenty, more, every one of them turned to face her, every one of them still.
The clicking grew louder.
Elara breathed in. The air was cold and tasted of the salt mist and of something else now, something green and astringent, the smell of blackthorn bark cut in spring. She had not smelled that smell since she was a girl. She had not known she remembered it.
She took a step forward.
The gate, already open, offered no resistance. The iron of it was cold under her hand when she touched it for balance, and the rust came away on her palm in a fine orange dust. The crows watched her pass between them. Not one of them stirred. Not one of them made a sound. The clicking had stopped. The silence they left behind it was worse.
She crossed the threshold of the gate and stepped onto the drive that led up to Blackthorn Hall, and she did not look back at the birds. She did not look back because she knew, with the certainty of a thing grown in the soil of her, that if she looked back they would no longer be birds. Or that they would be, and that would be worse. That whatever they were when she was not watching them, she was not yet ready to see.
She walked up the drive. The bramble caught at her coat. The mist thickened around her ankles. Ahead of her, in the central block of the house, a single window on the second floor lit from within with a pale, steady glow, as though someone had been waiting there all this time, lamp in hand, patient as stone, watching the road for the shape of a car that had finally arrived.