The old man was so still that John almost didn’t see him.

  He stood on his lawn in the dark, his hands posted high on his hips. The glow from his house stitched his outline with a thread of palest yellow. Water trickled from the gardening hose at his feet, puddling around him in the crabgrass. He wore leather sandals and white socks. The socks were soggy. Roger Harding, retired machinist and John’s only neighbor (except for the Krauters, who hardly counted). Thirty-some years they’d been sharing this dingy dead-end road, and never had John seen Roger look so . . . happy. A contented smile sat on his face. The last of his hair wandered over his scalp in cobwebby strands.

  “Beautiful day we’re having, isn’t it?” he said. “Day like today, you just know summer’s coming soon!”

  Melissa Harding, a former kindergarten teacher of Wrightwood Elementary, was sitting on the porch in a patio chair. The small table next to her, bathed in light from the window, held a tall plastic pitcher full of golden liquid. She waved to John, something she hadn’t done once in the time that John had known her. “Hi there!” she called out. “I made some iced tea. Come and have some with me, won’t you?”

  “Maybe later,” he said, walking.

  “That would be lovely. And do send the kids down when you have a chance. I haven’t seen them in ages.” Melissa took a hearty drink, draining half her glass in one go. “Oh . . . and John? Please tell your lady she’s welcome any time. I’ve got some concealer that’s exactly her color. Perfect for covering up bruises. A few dabs with the sponge, and voila, you’d never even guess. She can have the whole tube—you tell her that, John. Lord knows I don’t need it.”

  John continued away.

  Behind him on the lawn, Roger Harding remained planted in a pair of sopping Birkenstocks. “Beautiful day!” he shouted at the black sky. “Beautiful day!”

  ???

  Wrightwood was a gas stop propped between a ski resort and a highway. It had been built in pieces, by demand, with no real design in mind except for the dollar sign. Down below, the town’s streets displayed a semblance of order; they either dumped into Highway 2 or ran parallel to it, but up in the fringes where there were still enough trees to get lost in, and the houses stood few and far between, the roads formed a snarling, knotted mess.

  John had no interest in roads.

  It was in his nature to avoid people, to take the paths that others ignored. He knew all the back ways, had worked on many of them over the years. He’d set his hands on almost everything, from wood to steel to stone. The guys who hired him once always hired him again, because he got done alone what usually took crews of three or more to finish, and in the same amount of time. But it was the woods that called to him. It was in the woods where John Hawthorne, who had grown up in the lonely recesses of Vermont, who had walked into its white wilderness a boy and come out a man, felt at home.

  After the Harding household, John traded asphalt for dirt and open sky for restless leaves. The path was lopsided but smooth except for a few scattered rocks; he had tended to it personally, stripping away the roots that overreached the border and filling in the trenches formed by heavy rains. Even Nicholas would have found it easy riding if he had come this way, and maybe he had, assuming he knew about it all. This path was the most direct route between their homes, which rested on opposing hills, within sight but otherwise out of reach. John wondered where Nicholas was now, if he’d made it wherever he was going before the darkness fell, if he was safe. He hoped so, for what it was worth. He hadn’t meant to be so hard on the boy, but he’d never been good with kids. Not even his own. Especially not his own.

  For a moment their names were on his lips, and the need to speak them aloud, to call them into the night, was like a hand squeezing his throat.

  Trevor . . .

  Lana . . .

  John swallowed. Their names were not his to use anymore. He had given up that right—the right of a father—long ago. He continued on his slow way, the woods around him alive with noise. Car alarms. Gunfire. Yapping dogs. Somewhere—in a small, unanswered voice—an infant cried. But these were far-off things, of no concern to him. His path was quiet. He walked it alone.

  For a while.

  To his left, toward the mountain range, all was dark except for the stars. To his right, toward town, light flickered obscurely through the trees. A shred of color here, a sliver of brightness there, caught like meat in the black teeth of the woods. The ground began to slope down, and then he heard it. A steady, moist, smacking. The sound of an enormous, feeding mouth gulping and slobbering at raw meat. John slowed. He was a practical man at his foundation; his imagination flew on clipped wings, and so the image his brain conjured up—disembodied, wet lips busy at some foul work—could not keep itself aloft for long. But he had never believed the world to be practical. Earth was a mudball hurtling through space, and all mud had something blind and slithery and rotten under its surface. You only had to dig deep enough to find it. Humans, living under the sun . . . they held onto this conviction that the universe was a warm, benevolent place, that it obeyed some kind of order. That was the real insanity to John. To stand in the light and forget that the dark exists. To convince yourself that, simply because you could not see something, it could not see you. If the universe had a mind, it was fishbelly white and utterly mad. The mind of an angler, raised and nurtured in endless night. Because night was the natural state of the universe, the cold, cold truth behind the bright lie told by the sun as it looked over the horizon. The universe was darkness—that was the truth—and the stars were nothing more than little lanterns floating in the black trench of space. Bright, welcoming lures, hiding daggered jaws.

  So, no, John did not think there was some abomination waiting for him ahead.

  Still . . .

  A figure took form beside the path. A man. He was sitting on a bench and clapping his hands above his head, bringing them together with great concussive slaps—SMACKSMACKSMACKSMACK—that all but drowned out his voice, which was soft and hoarse.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “Encore!” he shouted. “Encore! Encore!”

  John moved closer.

  Drool hung from the man’s lips. His eyes danced with lunatic starlight. He was weeping, and in more places than one. Blood dripped from his palms and ran down his forearms in thick, black lines, spotting his running shorts and the wooden slats between his legs. He had been clapping for a long time—since the sun had performed its vanishing act, if John had to guess. Perhaps he was trying to call the sun back onstage for a goodbye bow, or perhaps he had no reason for what he was doing, was clapping simply because he felt like clapping, because clapping was the only thing left to do. As John passed the bench, the man’s shouts rose into screams. “ENCORE!” he cried out, smashing his hands together furiously, flaying the skin off his bones in ragged strips. “ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE!”

  John descended the slope to the sound of applause.

  And to the sound of applause, where the slope leveled out again, John came upon Nicholas Krauter.

  At first he did not understand what he was seeing. He could not even tell that the figure was human. It hung off the ground, small in the surrounding darkness. A shadow rocking in the air, twisting, its motions slow and sinuous and somehow awful. The wriggle of an earthworm drowning on a hook.

  “ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE!”

  John took another step, the blood in his veins slowing to a trickle. The shadow had a black beetle head and a pair of skinny white legs. The head—capped in a helmet—rolled back and forth on its neck. The legs moonwalked, one foot dragging its toe in the dirt. Then there was the shirt, and the stripes on the shirt, and the way the shirt tented out sharply in the back—as if pressed outward by some grotesque, pointing hand. John stood in place, as he had stood that morning on the rise overlooking the valley. He wished that he had gone another route, that he had taken the road instead. But he was here now, and that was all there was to it. When you chose your path, you had to see it to the end. Even if it ruined you. You had to see it to the end.

  “ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE!”

  John looked away from the bike, which lay on the ground with its wheels in the air, and he went to Nicholas. The boy’s arms dangled at his sides, as if dragged down by invisible weights. His fingers played at invisible piano keys. He moaned, not once but steadily, constantly. It was the sound of an engine working deep beneath the earth—something you felt in your skin rather than heard with your ears. His eyes were squeezed shut, like the eyes of the squirrel John had encountered behind his house. The squirrel had been stuck to a tree, and that was something else they had in common. Because Nicholas was also stuck to a tree. A sturdy one. An oak, with limbs low enough to climb . . . and thick enough to hang from.

  The branch entered below his ribs.

  It continued from his back for two long, saturated feet.

  He had been coming down the path when the morning turned to night—and fast. Much faster than he should have been going on such a narrow dirt trail. But John himself had plowed the way for the boy, hadn’t he? He’d seen to it that the ground was smooth enough to ride on, the rocks cleared, the roots stripped; and so Nicholas had come blazing along on his blue Cannondale, rushing home, only to find himself in the dark, unable to stop. But none of those things mattered. What mattered was why Nicholas had been in such a hurry in the first place. And John knew the answer to that. He could still see the boy scrambling down the embankment, scared off by what he’d heard in old Mr. Hawthorne’s voice.

  “You shouldn’t have come, kid,” John said. “Why’d you have to come?”

  Nicholas opened his mouth. There was blood in his teeth. It was as black as the blood running down the clapping man’s arms, and some of it had begun to gather and dry like plaque under his gums. He let out a low, wet gargle, then his jaws snapped shut and his head heaved forward. The tendons in his neck popped. His spine stood out in raised knobs beneath his skin.

  Jaws grinding, John took out his phone. He dialed the number a person was supposed to dial in a situation like this—except, had there ever really been a situation like this?—and he heard what he knew we would hear: the dull, monotonous beep of a busy line. For a few seconds, he didn’t move, just stood there, thinking, thinking. It would have been rush hour when it happened. The freeways would all be jammed. Crashed cars, confused people, frightened people. Dead people. That left a helicopter lift. But even if a helicopter could be found, even if, was there anyone left to fly it? John hung up and glanced at the time. It was half past eight. Nicholas had been hanging here, by his ribcage, for over thirty minutes. Suffering. Alive. Suffering.

  Too long.

  Far too long.

  John tossed his phone away, let it go, forgot about it. He reached slowly into his back pocket, while up on the bench, the man continued his wild ovation to the night.

  “ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE!”

  There are things the brain forgets, but the blood remembers . . .

  John thumbed the knife open. Six inches, polished, sharp. In good condition, like all his tools. “I’m sorry, kid,” he said, holding him.

  He began to sing. His voice was low and coarse, and it surfaced from someplace deeper than his throat, deeper than his lungs, deeper than the graves of his darkest memories. A lullaby, his mother’s lullaby, the one faint memory he had of her. He’d sung it to his brother when they were children, and then, years later, he’d sung it to his own children, soothing them when they could not sleep. The lullaby was warmth and kindness in a world without either. Its words were the only comfort he’d ever known how to give.

  “Good night, good night.

  The stars are out, the moon is bright.

  Good night, little one, sleep tight.”

  The knife slipped through the neck and up beneath the skull. Nicholas shuddered—but a nice shudder, maybe, the kind of shudder that comes when you step into the sun after a long spell in the shade. The knees in his moonwalking legs bent in quick succession. He gave a dancing jig, an airborne shuffle, and went still.

  It was done.

  But the job wasn’t.

  Nicholas had been going home, and he would make it there, both for his sake and for the sake of his father. Matthew Krauter would have been at work or headed to work when the dark fell. If he was still alive, and if he somehow made it back, he would find Nicholas waiting for him. At least this way he would be spared the nightmare of never knowing what had become of his son. It was a pathetic consolation, but it would have to do. John shut the knife and returned it to his pocket. Gripping Nicholas by the back and belly, he began to pull. The branch did not want to let him go; it held onto him from the inside, scraping against his ribs. A long strip of blood-softened bark peeled away, and finally Nicholas was free. John laid him on the ground. After a moment’s consideration, he took off his jacket and bundled the boy in it. He had no practical reason to do so. It just didn’t seem right, the kid wearing short sleeves out in the cold.

  It’s not cold, Nicholas said, from another place, another time.

  And it wasn’t, John realized. Even now, it wasn’t. The dark still held onto the morning’s warmth. For how long, though? He knelt there, the night moving stealthily around him, whispering its secrets, too low to hear. At last he lifted the boy and started down the path to fading cries of encore, encore, encore. The old scar ached on his forearm, and inside him wind blew in bitter gales and snow gathered in bone white drifts.

  The blood remembers.

  Yes.

  The blood remembers.

  ???

  No two neighbors had ever lived further apart than John Hawthorne and Matthew Krauter, each one high up on his own hill. Still, they could look out across the way and see into each other’s living rooms, and sometimes John, alone at the dinner table, could even hear scattered bits of conversation through the open window. But there was no road to connect their houses, and no desire for one. Going over to pay a visit was something neither man had ever done.

  Until now.

  John walked up Matthew Krauter’s driveway with Nicholas in his arms. He climbed the steps to the front door and, using the dead boy’s key, he let himself inside.