The Hollow Season: What Quill Wont Say

The fluorescent tube above the basement stairwell buzzed at a frequency that set Maren Holloway's back teeth on edge. She descended the concrete steps anyway, each footfall echoing off cinder-block walls painted the color of old mustard. The Historical Society building squatted on the town square like a dog refusing to move, and she had not set foot inside it in eleven years.

At the bottom of the stairs, a wooden door hung half open on rusted hinges. Maren pushed it inward with her shoulder and the hinges sang a thin metallic note.

Simeon Quill dangled from a ceiling pipe in the center of the archive room, his shoes three inches above the concrete floor. A noose of hemp cord circled his throat, the other end knotted around a rusted steam pipe that had not seen steam in decades. His head rested at an angle against his left shoulder. His eyes were closed. His hands hung loose at his sides, palms open, as if he had been mid-applause when the lights went out.

Maren did not scream. She did not run. She stood in the doorway and let the sight of him replace the air in her lungs with something colder.

A stack of manila folders lay scattered beneath his feet, the contents of a toppled file box spilled across the floor. The documents themselves had not been disturbed, only displaced, and the pattern of their fall suggested the box had been kicked, not dropped.

She approached the body slowly, her boots loud on the concrete. Up close, the smell reached her: old wool, lamp oil, and beneath both, the copper-sweet note of recent death. Quill had been a heavy man in life, broad-shouldered and slow-moving, but in death he had the stillness of a snapped instrument.

Her eyes went to the noose.

She crouched, knees protesting against the cold floor. The knot was neat. Too neat. Quill had been a methodical man in life, but he had never been a sailor. There were no boats on the river anymore; there had not been since the dam went in.

The knot was a bowline. Specifically, a bowline tied with the left-over-right, rabbit-around-the-hole variation she had taught to one other person in her life.

Her former partner. The one who had disappeared three years ago. The one whose name she had stopped saying aloud because the town had ways of listening.

Maren stood. She did not touch the body. She did not touch the rope.

Instead, she turned and looked at the archive room itself: the steel shelving along two walls, the rolled maps in their labeled tubes, the glass-fronted cabinet where the oldest ledgers stood in rows like hymnals. Quill had kept the written memory of every family in the hollow, and now he was the most recent entry in it.

A wooden desk occupied the far corner, its surface buried under papers. A mug of cold tea sat beside a transistor radio. The radio was on, tuned to a frequency that should have carried nothing but static, yet a faint murmur leaked from its single speaker. The sound resolved as Maren stepped closer: a male voice, slow and gravelly, the syllables dissolving at their edges into a soft crackle.

She knew that voice.

Maren reached for the radio and turned the volume up. The voice belonged to a man no longer living, and yet here it was, threading through the hiss like a hand extended through fog.

"...told you the river takes what it wants. Told you it gives back what it owes. Neither of us was listening, Maren. Neither of us was ever listening. You were always so busy watching the banks for something that wasn't coming home."

Her father. Wyatt Calloway. Dead six years now, felled by a heart attack in the cab of his pickup truck, and yet speaking into the archive basement as if he had walked down the stairs only minutes ahead of her.

She did not turn the radio off. She stood with her hand on the dial and let the recording play, and the archive room contracted around the sound of him.

Quill had kept recordings. She had not known that. She had not known what he had been keeping at all.

"...so if you're hearing this, girl, I'm already gone, and Simeon's already done what they asked him to do. Don't blame him. He was tired. He was tired before any of us were. And the river..."

The recording dissolved into static. Maren turned the dial. The static thinned, thickened, thinned again. Her father's voice did not return.

She stepped back from the desk. On its surface, beneath a stack of tax records from the 1980s, a single envelope lay face down. The address on the back read, in Quill's small precise hand: Holloway, M. To be delivered in the event of my absence.

The handwriting was dated three weeks prior.

Maren slid the envelope into the inside pocket of her jacket. She did not open it. Not yet. Not here.

Upstairs, a door opened. Footsteps crossed the floorboards overhead, heavy and deliberate, and then a voice called down the stairwell.

"Holloway? That you down there? Cora sent me. Said you'd want to know about the basement door standing open."

It was Della Roth, the postmaster's widow, and her tone carried the particular flatness of a woman who had long ago decided that surprises were a tax she refused to pay.

"It's me," Maren called back. "Tell Cora I'll be up in a minute."

Della's footsteps paused. Then retreated. Then stopped.

"You want me to send Calder?" Della asked, and the name Calder arrived in the stairwell like a small stone dropped into a well.

Maren looked once more at the body of Simeon Quill, swinging gently in a draft she could not feel, his face turned away from her as if in conversation with someone only he could see.

"No," she said. "Don't send Calder. Don't send anyone."

She climbed the stairs. At the top, Della stood with her arms folded across a lavender cardigan, the posture of a woman who had opinions she intended to ration out one per week.

"He hung himself," Della said. It was not a question.

"Yes," Maren said.

"You believe that."

It was not a question either, and Maren did not dignify it with an answer. She stepped past Della, through the front door of the Historical Society, and into the gray afternoon.

The town square lay empty under a low sky. The fountain in its center had not run since August. The bandstand held a single folded chair, and the chair held a single folded newspaper, and the newspaper held a date from the previous week. Beyond the square, Main Street stretched in both directions, lined with brick facades and plate glass, and every storefront window reflected the clouds back at the sky.

Cora Brake waited at the corner of Main and Vine, leaning against the rusted fender of a pickup truck that had not moved under its own power since the previous administration. Cora was a small woman with a wide mouth and watchful eyes, and she had been watching Maren since Maren was old enough to be watched.

"So," Cora said. "You saw him."

"I saw him."

"And?"

Maren did not answer. She walked to the passenger side of the pickup and opened the door. The hinges groaned, and the sound joined the small catalog of noises she had begun collecting since her return.

"Get in," she said. "We're going to the church."

Cora's face did not change. "The church is empty."

"The basement isn't."

Cora looked at Maren for a long moment. Then she walked around the front of the truck, climbed into the driver's seat, and started the engine. It caught on the third try, as it always did, and they pulled away from the curb without further conversation.

The streets of the hollow rolled past the windows. The Baptist church stood at the end of Mulberry Lane, its steeple listing slightly to the east, its stained glass long since replaced with plywood. Cora parked in the gravel lot and cut the engine, and for a minute neither of them moved.

"You didn't open the envelope," Cora said.

"No."

"You'll have to."

"I know."

They got out. The gravel crunched beneath their feet, and the sound reminded Maren of something she could not place. The church doors were unlocked. They had always been unlocked; the hollow had never locked its churches.

Inside, the sanctuary smelled of dust and candle wax. Pews stood in rows beneath a ceiling where swallows had nested for generations, and the droppings fell in soft pale drifts along the aisle. The altar at the front held a cloth of indeterminate color, and above it a hung Christ hung on a hung cross, both painted by a hand that had not understood anatomy.

Cora led the way to the side door, down a narrow stairwell, and into the basement.

The basement of the Baptist church had not been a classroom or a fellowship hall. It had been a meeting room, and it had been a meeting room for as long as Maren could remember. A long oak table occupied the center, surrounded by straight-backed chairs. A podium stood at one end. Candles in iron brackets lined the walls, unlit now, and the air held the ghost of old smoke.

Cora lit three of the candles with a match she produced from her cardigan pocket. The flames steadied themselves and the shadows retreated to the corners.

"Sit down," Cora said, and gestured to the chair at the head of the table.

Maren sat. The wood was cold through her jeans. Cora took the chair at the opposite end, folded her hands on the table, and waited.

"The knot," Maren said. "It was a bowline."

Cora did not blink. "Quill was a careful man."

"Quill was not a sailor."

"No," Cora said. "He was not."

The candles flickered. Somewhere above them, in the sanctuary, a board creaked, and the sound traveled down through the floorboards as if the church itself were listening.

"Who taught him?" Maren asked.

"I did not."

"Cora."

"I did not teach Simeon Quill any knots, Maren. I have not set foot in the Historical Society in three months. I have not spoken to Simeon Quill in longer than that. Whatever knot he tied, he tied from memory, or he was shown by someone who knew what they were about."

Maren reached into her jacket and removed the envelope. She set it on the table between them. The handwriting on the front, her name, caught the candlelight.

"He left that for me," Maren said. "Dated three weeks ago."

Cora's eyes went to the envelope, then back to Maren. "You haven't read it."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't want to read a dead man's handwriting and hear his voice in my head for the rest of the week."

It was more honest than she had intended to be, and Cora's mouth softened at the edges.

"Open it," Cora said. "I'll sit here while you do."

Maren broke the seal with her thumb. The paper inside was folded twice, and when she unfolded it, the page was covered in Quill's small neat script, the letters pressed hard enough to leave grooves she could feel with her fingertip.

She began to read.

The paper trembled once in Maren's grip, then went still.

Quill's handwriting marched across the page in tight, parallel lines, every word the same size, every letter formed with the patience of a man who had spent forty years teaching children the shapes of things. The ink was black, the strokes deliberate, and Maren could smell it, the particular dry-metal scent of the archival pens he kept locked in the desk drawer.

She read.

Maren,

If you are reading this, then I have done what I told myself I would not do. I have gone back. And if I have gone back, then I will not be coming out.

There is a strongbox in the basement. Beneath the floorboards behind the coal chute, where the foundation stone is chipped at the corner. The key is in the top drawer of my desk, taped to the underside of the false panel. Inside the strongbox there is a roll of microfilm. I have kept it for thirty-one years. I kept it because I was afraid. I kept it because I thought if anyone ever found it, the hollow would finally understand what it had been hiding from.

I should have shown it to you when you were seventeen. I did not. I am sorry.

Do not show this to anyone in the Lattice. Do not show this to Della. Do not show this to Pernell. They are old. They believe what they believe. I believed it too, once.

Look at the film. Then go to the church basement on the night of the new moon. There is a door behind the vestry closet that opens when you press the third panel from the left. Take a candle. Take your father's knife if you still have it.

Burn this letter.

S.Q.

Maren read it twice. The second time, slower.

Across the table, Cora Brake sat with her hands folded on the wood, watching Maren's face the way a woman watches a weather front move across a ridge.

"Well," Cora said.

"He knew," Maren said. Her voice came out flat, scraped clean of everything except the fact of it. "He knew he was going to die."

Cora said nothing.

Maren folded the letter once, then again, and slid it back into the envelope. She set the envelope down on the table beside the candle, and the wax seal cracked a little further under her thumb.

"He told me not to show you."

"I assumed as much."

"He said you were old. He said you believed what you believe."

Cora's mouth moved at the corner, not quite a smile. "Simeon was not a cruel man. But he could be precise in his cruelties."

Maren looked at the candle flame. It leaned away from her, toward the door, as if something in the basement beyond had breathed in.

"I need the film," Maren said.

"Then we will get it," Cora said. "But not tonight. The Historical Society is locked, and the side door has been chained since last week. Pernell had it done. He said there had been tampering."

"Tampering."

"With the locks. With the windows. He did not say who."

Maren turned the envelope over in her hands. The paper was thick. Quill had used the good stock, the linen-finished sheets he kept for documents he meant to outlast him.

"He left me a key," Maren said.

"He left you a location for a key. There is a difference."

"Then I will find out if there is a difference."

Cora rose from the table. The chair legs whispered against the floor. She moved to the shelf where the old hymnals were stacked and pulled down a mason jar with a rusted lid. Inside, Maren could see a tangle of small bones, a single blue button, and a folded square of cloth.

"I want you to have this," Cora said. She set the jar on the table between them. "It was my mother's. It came out of the chimney of the house on Briar Lane when they tore it down. She told me to keep it, and I have kept it for sixty-one years. I would like someone else to have it now."

"Cora."

"Don't argue with me, Maren. I am not giving you my soul. I am giving you a jar."

Maren picked it up. The glass was cool against her palm, and the bones inside shifted with a small dry sound when she tilted it.

"Thank you," Maren said.

"Now go home," Cora said. "Sleep if you can. Come to my house tomorrow at six in the morning, before Pernell is up to watch the road. We will go to the Society together."

"Together."

"You heard me."

Maren stood. She tucked the envelope into the inside pocket of her jacket, and she held the mason jar against her ribs with her other arm.

"Cora."

"Yes."

"Why did you never tell me any of this?"

Cora's eyes caught the candlelight, and for a moment Maren saw something move behind them, something that had been held very still for a very long time.

"Because you left," Cora said. "And because you had your father's stubbornness, and I knew that if I told you, you would come back and try to dig it up, and the digging would have killed you the way it killed him."

Maren held the jar tighter.

"Goodnight, Cora."

"Goodnight, child."

Maren climbed the basement stairs and crossed the dark sanctuary and went out through the side door into the wind. The rain had stopped, but the air still carried the taste of it, mineral and cold, and somewhere in the trees behind the church an owl called twice and went silent.

She walked home along the road, and the hollow was quiet around her, every window dark except the one on the second floor of the Roth place, where Della Roth sat up past midnight, watching the lane.

Maren did not wave. Della did not wave back.

She let herself into her father's house. The boards of the porch gave their usual complaint under her boots. Inside, the air smelled of woodsmoke and dust and the faint sweetness of the apples she had left to ripen on the counter.

She set the mason jar on the kitchen table. She set the envelope beside it. She hung her jacket on the hook by the door and walked into the front room and stood for a moment in the dark, listening to the house settle.

Then she went upstairs, and she did not sleep.

At five in the morning the light came in gray and thin through the curtains. Maren was already dressed, already standing at the kitchen sink, washing her face with water from the tap that ran cold enough to make her teeth ache.

She drank a cup of black coffee. She ate two slices of bread with the apple butter from the jar in the pantry. She put the envelope into the leather bag she had brought from the city, the one with the broken buckle, and she put the mason jar into a cloth tote with a drawstring, and she walked out onto the porch and stood listening.

The hollow was quiet. A thin line of smoke rose from the chimney of the Roth place. Somewhere down by the creek a dog was barking, steady and deliberate, the way dogs bark when they want someone to come out.

Maren walked to the end of the lane and waited.

At six, Cora Brake came up the road in a dark wool coat and rubber boots. Her hair was pulled back under a knit cap, and she carried a canvas bag over one shoulder that clinked faintly with each step.

"You look terrible," Cora said.

"Thank you."

"I mean it. You look like your father looked the week before he died."

"Cora."

"Hush. I am paying you a compliment."

They walked together through the morning, past the shuttered houses and the empty porches, past the schoolhouse with the broken flagpole and the clinic with the boarded windows, until they came to the iron gate of the Historical Society. The chains on the side door were new, heavy gauge, the kind Pernell Fyffe bought at the hardware store in town.

Cora produced a key from her coat pocket.

"Pernell does not know I have this," she said. "It was made when I was on the board. I had a copy made. I have never used it."

"Until now."

"Until now."

The lock turned with a sound like a small bone cracking. They went inside.

The front room smelled of old paper and camphor and the faint, sweet rot of the oak paneling that had been sealed too many times. Maren walked past the display cases, past the ledgers, past the framed photograph of the founding members of the Historical Society, twenty-six men and women standing in two rows on the steps of the church, and among them, in the back row, a young Cora Brake, her hair dark, her mouth set, and beside her, half a head taller, a young Wyatt Calloway with his arm in a sling and a look on his face Maren had never seen before.

She stopped.

Cora stopped beside her.

"Your father," Cora said. "He was twenty-three."

Maren looked at the photograph. The sling was field-dressing white, and the arm beneath it was wrapped in gauze. He was smiling, but the smile was thin, the kind of smile a man wears when he does not want anyone to see what is underneath.

"What happened to his arm?"

"He broke it. Falling."

"Falling where?"

"There is no record. It was not put in the ledger."

Maren nodded once and kept walking.

They went down the narrow stairs to the basement, and Maren found the coal chute exactly where Quill had said it would be, and the chipped foundation stone behind it, and the false panel in the top drawer of the desk above, and the key taped to its underside, and the strongbox beneath the floorboards, exactly where he had described.

The strongbox was iron, the size of a breadbox, the lock a small brass keyhole. Maren fitted the key in and turned it, and the lid came open with a groan of old hinges.

Inside, wrapped in a square of oilcloth, was a roll of microfilm.

Maren lifted it out. It was heavier than she had expected, the canister steel, the cap sealed with a small square of wax that Quill had marked with his initials.

"He dated it," Maren said. She tilted the canister so Cora could see the wax.

"I see it."

"Thirty-one years."

"He was a careful man."

They carried it back upstairs. Maren set the canister on the reading desk beneath the projection lamp, the one Quill had used for decades to examine the old glass-plate negatives the Society had inherited from the mining company.

She threaded the film. She switched on the lamp. She adjusted the focus.

The image came up on the white panel that Quill had hung on the wall behind the desk, and Maren's breath caught in her throat.

The first frame was a photograph of a group of people standing in a circle on the floor of the church basement. There were eleven of them. They were wearing dark clothes, and each of them held a candle, and their faces were turned toward the camera with an expression Maren recognized, because she had seen it on her own face in mirrors when she was seventeen, the expression of people who are doing something they have been told is sacred.

In the center of the circle, on the floor, was a length of rope tied in a knot Maren had never seen before.

The second frame was a photograph of the same group, in the same basement, but the year had changed, because Quill had marked the date in the margin of the film canister, and the faces were older, and the knot on the floor was a different one.

The third frame was the same basement again, the group smaller now, eight of them, and the knot on the floor was a third shape, and Maren could see, in the front row of the circle, a woman she recognized, and beside her, a man she recognized, and behind them, half a head taller, a young Simeon Quill with his mouth set and his eyes fixed on the camera.

"Cora," Maren said.

Cora was already looking.

"Cora, is that you?"

Cora said nothing.

"Cora. Is that Brake? Is that Pernell Fyffe? Is that Della Roth?"

Cora's hand came up and rested on the edge of the reading desk, and Maren could see the knuckles whiten.

"Turn the lamp off," Cora said.

"Cora."

"Turn it off, Maren."

Maren did not turn it off. She advanced the film one frame at a time, and the photographs came up, one after another, year after year, the same basement, the same circle, the same knot on the floor, and the faces in the circle changing, growing older, growing fewer, and among them, again and again, in frame after frame, the same set of features, Cora Brake, Pernell Fyffe, Della Roth, and Simeon Quill, and behind them, in the older frames, a man Maren had never seen, a thin man with a long jaw and a deep-set gaze, and a woman Maren had seen only in a single photograph, the one hanging on the wall of the post office, the founder's wife.

"They are all here," Maren said. "Every one of them."

"Turn it off."

"They have been meeting here for thirty years, Cora. In the basement of the Historical Society. Under Quill's own roof."

"Turn it off, Maren, or I will turn it off myself."

Maren reached for the lamp switch. Her hand stopped an inch from it.

"Why?" she said. "Why did they meet?"

Cora did not answer. The photographs hung on the white panel, frame after frame, year after year, the faces lit by the projection lamp, the knots on the floor cast in shadow.

Outside, the morning light came up over the ridge, and somewhere down by the creek, the dog began to bark again.

Maren held her hand on the lamp switch. The brass was cool against her palm. She could feel the heat of the bulb on the skin of her wrist, a small dry point of light.

"Tell me about the man in the older frames," she said. "The thin one. With the long jaw."

Cora's breath caught. It was a small sound, the kind of sound a person makes when a splinter finds a nerve.

"Turn it off."

"Was that your husband, Cora?"

The name hung between them. Maren had never spoken it in this room. She had seen it once, in a marriage register on the wall of the county clerk's office, the ink faded almost to invisibility, but she remembered it: Haren Brake. Founder. Builder of the society and of the room beneath it.

"Yes," Cora said.

"Where is he now?"

"Gone."

"Gone where?"

Cora turned away from the screen and walked to the window. The light from the projector threw her shadow long across the floorboards, stretched out past the loom of the reading desk, past the wooden map case, to the wall of the filing cabinets. She stood with one hand on the sill and the other at her side, and she did not speak for a long time.

"You will not find the answer here," she said. "Not in Quill's records. Not in the photographs."

"Then where?"

"Out at the place they call the Lattice. Out past the schoolhouse. Out where the pines thin and the rock shows through."

"What is the Lattice, Cora?"

Cora turned from the window. The light caught the deep lines of her face, the hollows beneath her cheekbones, the silver of her hair.

"It is a place where the rock comes up close to the surface. The old folks found it. The ones who settled here before the survey. They said the stone there had a pattern in it, like a web, like a net. They built the first meeting hall above it, and the pattern held them steady through the lean years."

"The pattern."

"The stone remembers what is said above it. The old folks believed that. They believed a bargain made on that stone would hold. They made their bargains there. They kept them."

"What kind of bargains?"

Cora looked at her. The look was patient and very tired.

"The kind a person makes when there is nothing else to hold onto. The kind a person makes when the weather takes the crop, or the mine takes the lungs, or the river takes a child. They went out to the Lattice and they named what they wanted, and they paid what was asked, and the pattern in the stone held the bargain for them."

"And your husband was one of them?"

"He found it first. When he came back from the war. He walked the woods for weeks. He came back thin and quiet, and he told me there was a place where a man could lay his fear down and pick up a different weight. He told me he had done it."

Maren felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. The projector hummed behind her. The photograph of Haren Brake hung on the white panel, thin, hollow-eyed, his hand resting on the knot in the floor.

"Did he ever take you there?"

"Once."

"What did he ask for?"

"He asked for the mine to stay open. He asked for the men to have work. He asked for the town to hold."

"And was it granted?"

Cora did not answer at once. She looked past Maren, past the reading desk, past the photograph, to the wall where the filing cabinets stood.

"It was granted," she said. "For a time. The mine ran another ten years. The men had work. The children had shoes."

"And then?"

"And then the price came due."

The room was quiet. The dog had stopped barking. The morning light had reached the foot of the projector screen and lay there, a thin gold line on the floor.

"What was the price, Cora?"

Cora closed her eyes. The lids were thin and blue-veined, and the lashes were wet.

"A child," she said. "A child from the town, every seventh year. Laid down on the stone. Given to the pattern."

Maren heard the words. She heard them the way a person hears the report of a rifle at a distance, flat and distinct and very far away.

"How many?"

Cora opened her eyes. They were dry.

"Four," she said. "I know of four. The first was a boy named Tice. The second was a girl named Esme. The third was a boy named Roy. The fourth was my daughter."

Maren's hand came off the lamp switch.

"Your daughter."

"Sarah. She would have been your age. She would have been a woman now. She would have had children of her own."

"Where is she?"

"In the ground," Cora said. "In the ground out past the schoolhouse, where the pines thin and the rock shows through. In the ground where the Lattice is."

The words fell into the room and lay there. Maren could not move. The projector hummed. The photograph of Haren Brake looked down at her from the panel, hollow-eyed, his hand on the knot in the floor.

"Why did you not stop it?"

"I tried." Cora's voice was level. It was the levelness of a woman who had screamed herself hoarse years ago and had nothing left to raise. "I went to the sheriff. I went to the county. I went to the state police in Welch. No one came. No one believed. The sheriff was Pernell Fyffe's cousin. The county clerk was Della Roth's sister-in-law. The state police were from somewhere else, and when they came up the hollow and asked their questions, they were told there had been no girl named Sarah Brake. They were told there was no record of any such child. They went back down the mountain, and they did not come again."

"And Quill?"

"Quill kept the records. Quill kept every record. He was the archivist. He was the one who wrote the names in the books and the names that were left out."

"Did he know?"

"He knew everything. He wrote it down. He filed it. He locked the doors at night and he went home to his wife and his boy, and he said his prayers, and he came back in the morning and he wrote another page in another book."

"Why did he stay?"

Cora looked at her. The look was the look of a woman who had asked the same question a thousand times and had never found an answer that satisfied.

"Because he was afraid," she said. "Because the pattern in the stone had a hold on him. Because a man can tell himself he is only keeping records, only holding the pen, only watching the door, and he can keep telling himself that until the day he dies, and he can die still telling himself that, and the telling does not make it true."

Maren turned off the projector. The room went dark for a moment, then the morning light filled it, pale and thin, and the photographs on the panel faded to grey and disappeared. The knot on the floor was just a knot again.

"I have to go out there," Maren said. "To the Lattice."

"You will not come back."

"I have to go."

"You will not come back, Maren. The pattern will take you the way it took my daughter."

"I am not your daughter."

Cora stepped forward. Her hand came up and rested on Maren's arm. The grip was hard. The bones were close to the skin.

"You are exactly like her," Cora said. "You have her look. You have her way of holding your mouth when you are thinking. You have her way of standing in a doorway before you come into a room. I see her every time I look at you. I have seen her every time I have looked at you since you were a girl."

Maren did not pull her arm away. She stood still and let the old woman hold onto her.

"Where is the path?"

"It begins at the back of the schoolhouse. There is a gate there, locked with a chain. The chain is rusted, but the lock is good. The key is in Quill's desk. The path follows the creek for a quarter mile and then turns up into the pines."

"What will I find at the end of it?"

"The rock. The pattern. The place where they laid her down."

"And then?"

"And then you will know what I have known for forty years. And you will have to decide what to do with the knowing."

Cora let go of Maren's arm. She stepped back. She straightened her coat. She walked to the door of the reading room, and she stopped with her hand on the frame.

"Do not trust the lattice," she said.

"What?"

"The lattice. Do not trust it. It shows you what you want to see. It shows you the shape of your own longing. It does not show you the cost."

She walked out. Her footsteps went down the hall, past the wooden map case, past the cabinet of surveyor's tools, past the door to the Historical Society's public rooms, and out into the morning. Maren heard the outer door close. She heard the bell above it ring once, thin and bright, and then go quiet.

She stood in the reading room with the projector cooling behind her and the knot on the floor at her feet. She thought of the man with the long jaw. She thought of the girl who would have been her age. She thought of her father, whose voice she had heard on the radio recording, telling her to leave and not come back.

She walked out of the Historical Society. She crossed the square. The post office was closed. The diner was open, but she did not go in. She walked past the Baptist church, past the funeral home, past the row of brick storefronts with the false fronts, to the schoolhouse at the edge of town.

The gate was there, set into the chain-link fence that bordered the school grounds. The chain was looped through the gate and through the post, and the lock was a brass padlock, heavy and new, the kind that cannot be picked with a hairpin. Maren reached into her coat pocket and took out the key she had taken from Quill's desk an hour ago. She fitted it into the lock. The lock turned with a click that sounded, in the morning quiet, like a bone snapping.

She took the chain off the gate. She set it on the ground. She opened the gate and stepped through.

The path began at the back of the schoolhouse, just as Cora had said. It was a dirt path, narrow and overgrown, running along the bank of the creek. The water was low and clear, and it made a sound like a person breathing in their sleep. Maren followed the path. The willows bent over it. The ferns grew up to her knees. After a quarter mile, the path turned up into the pines, and the sound of the creek faded behind her.

She walked for a long time. The pines closed over her head. The light came down through the needles in thin shafts, and the air smelled of resin and cold stone. After a while, the pines began to thin, and the rock showed through the soil, grey and flat, with a pattern in it that ran in every direction, a web of lines so fine they looked almost drawn.

She stopped at the edge of the clearing. The Lattice was there. The rock came up out of the ground in a low dome, and the pattern covered it from edge to edge, the lines meeting and crossing and meeting again, a net that held the clearing in its weave. At the center of the dome was a hollow, and in the hollow was a darkness that was not the darkness of shade. It was a darkness with weight to it, a darkness that seemed to lean toward her as she stood there.

Her pocket buzzed. The phone.

She took it out. The screen said WYATT CALLOWAY. She had not seen that name on her phone in eight years. She had not heard that voice in eight years.

She answered.

"Maren," the voice said. It was gravelly and warm, and there was a light static crackle under it, the sound of a radio tuning in from a great distance. "Maren, listen to me."

"Wyatt."

"Don't trust the lattice. Don't look at the pattern. Don't lay anything down on the stone. You hear me, girl? You hear what I'm telling you?"

"I hear you."

"Then get out of there. Get back to the road. Get in your car and drive down the mountain and don't stop until you reach the interstate."

"What about Quill?"

"Quill's already gone. He's been gone for years. What's left of him is the coat and the hat and the pen, and none of it is him. None of it was ever him. He made his bargain the same night your daddy made his, and he's been paying on it ever since."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I was there, Maren. Because I stood in that clearing with him and with Pernell Fyffe and with Della Roth and with every one of them who ever made a trade, and I watched them put their hands on the stone, and I watched the pattern take them."

"Wyatt, where are you?"

"I'm out past the schoolhouse. I'm at the Lattice. I've been here for eight years, Maren. I've been here since the night they told me you had left, and I walked out here, and I put my hand on the stone, and I asked it to bring you back."

"Wyatt, please."

"Don't trust the lattice, Maren. The pattern is not what it looks like. The pattern is a mouth. The pattern is a hunger. It takes what it is given and it asks for more."

The line went dead. The screen went dark. Maren stood in the clearing with the phone in her hand, and the Lattice rose before her, grey and webbed and waiting.