Chapter 2

Here's what the internet does not want to tell you about Greythorne, Oregon: anything else.

I sat at my desk for three hours, and the sum total of what I found about the town's history could fit on the back of a cereal box. The Greythorne Historical Society had a website that looked like it had been built in 2003 and updated never. It had one page with a photograph of a logging crew and a paragraph about the town's founding that read like it had been copied from a plaque in the post office, which it probably had, because the post office had the same paragraph on a plaque, and I knew this because I had read it while waiting for a package two months ago and had thought, at the time, "What a boring plaque."

The paragraph said the town was founded by loggers. It said the forests were rich with timber. It said the community was built on hard work and neighborly values. It did not mention disappearances, shadows, or a stretch of forest that locals called the Hemlock Line, and it did not mention what happened to the people who went into those woods and didn't come back, because it didn't mention people going into those woods at all.

I broadened the search. "Greythorne Oregon missing persons." "Greythorne Oregon disappearances." "Greythorne Oregon unsolved." "Greythorne Oregon forest deaths." "Why is Greythorne Oregon so weird."

The first three searches returned nothing. Not nothing in the sense of "no results found" — I got results, but they were generic database entries for the county sheriff's office, a link to the Oregon State Police missing persons database, and a PDF from the state geological survey about landslide risks in the coastal range that mentioned Greythorne in a footnote about soil composition. No articles. No news stories. No blog posts from amateur true crime enthusiasts who had stumbled on the town and its problems.

For a town with a population under 3,000, this was statistically improbable. Even the most boring town in America has a meth lab bust or a bear attack that makes the regional news. Greythorne had nothing, and nothing in this context felt less like an absence and more like a deletion, the way a page looks when someone has gone through with an eraser and removed the important parts but left the margins.

I tried the county newspaper archive. The Greythorne area was covered by the Alder County Register, a weekly paper that had been in print since 1947 and had been digitized up to 2015, after which someone apparently decided the internet was a fad and stopped uploading. I scrolled through the archive with the kind of focus that only comes from sleep deprivation and terror, and I found what I was looking for, though "finding" implies a process more deliberate than what actually happened, which was me typing the word "missing" into the search bar and getting thirty-seven results spanning seven decades.

Thirty-seven. In a town of fewer than 3,000 people.

The earliest was from 1953. A man named Thomas Vreeland, 41, a forester with the state, failed to return from a survey of the eastern timber tract. Search parties found his vehicle at a logging road turnaround but no sign of Vreeland. The article quoted Sheriff Elmer Brody — and yes, I noted the last name with the kind of feeling you get when you're reading a horror novel and the protagonist says something portentous — who said the woods could be disorienting and that Vreeland likely became lost. The article was three paragraphs long. There was no follow-up.

The next was 1961. Two teenagers, Dale and Rita Pomeroy, were reported missing by their parents after they failed to return from a camping trip. Their campsite was found off Route 7, tents pitched, fire cold, supplies untouched. No signs of struggle. No signs of anything. The article was four paragraphs. No follow-up.

1969. A woman named Claire Hess, 34, schoolteacher. Went for a hike on a Saturday afternoon. Didn't come back. Her car was found at a trailhead parking area with her purse on the passenger seat and her keys in the ignition.

I stopped reading. I put my hands flat on the desk and stared at the screen and I didn't move for a long time because the detail about the keys was sitting in my chest like a stone, and I was thinking about Maya's car in the Hilltop parking lot with the door open and the phone on the seat and the keys in the ignition, and the pattern was so specific and so precise that it felt less like a coincidence and more like a signature.

I kept going.

The disappearances continued through the decades. 1974. 1982. 1989, two in one year, a hiker and a hunter, found separately, or rather not found, separately. 1995. 2003. 2011. The details were consistent in a way that made my teeth hurt: vehicles found, personal effects left behind, no signs of foul play, no bodies, no explanations, no follow-up articles. Each disappearance rated three to five paragraphs in the Register, always with a quote from the sheriff — Brody, Brody, Brody, the name repeating like a heartbeat in a horror movie — and always the same language. The woods can be disorienting. Search parties found no sign. The case remains open.

The case remains open.

Thirty-seven results. I went back to the search and clicked through to the last one, dated 2015, the most recent year in the digitized archive. A man named Gerald Utt, 52, a retired surveyor, was reported missing by his wife after he failed to return from a walk in the woods behind their property on Ridge Road. The article was two paragraphs long, shorter than the others, as if the paper had grown tired of writing the same story. Sheriff Brody — not Elmer Brody, this was a different Brody, the current one, the one I had spoken to in the parking lot three hours ago — was quoted as saying the department was investigating and that residents should remain calm.

Remain calm.

I closed the laptop. Not because I was done but because I needed to not be looking at the screen for a moment, because my hands were shaking and my eyes were burning and it was 2:47 in the morning and I had school in five hours and my best friend was missing and the sheriff whose job it was to find her had a family history of not finding people, and the pattern was so clear and so consistent that I couldn't understand how anyone in this town could look at it and not see it, and then I understood: they saw it. They saw it and they chose not to see it, the way you don't look at a crack in your foundation because looking at it means doing something about it, and doing something about it means acknowledging that the thing you're standing on is broken.

I went to bed. I didn't sleep. I lay in the dark and stared at the orange stripe on my ceiling and listened to Pemberley purring on my chest with the oblivious contentment of an animal that did not know its owner had been threatened by a shadow, and I thought about the word STAY scratched into my back door and the thirty-seven people who had not stayed and had not come back, and at some point the sky got lighter and my alarm went off and I got up and got dressed and went downstairs.

My mom was at the table. She had coffee and she had her face arranged in the expression she used when she was trying to be casual about something she was not casual about, which was an expression I knew well because I'd been causing it since I was twelve.

"Did you sleep?" she asked.

"Yes."

"You don't look like you slept."

"I slept with my eyes open. It's a skill."

She pushed a mug toward me. I took it. The coffee was hot and strong and it did nothing for the feeling in my wrists, which was still there, that low wrong hum that had started in the woods and hadn't stopped, that I was now associating with the shape at the tree line and the scratches on the door and the general state of my life since yesterday afternoon.

"Maya's mom called," my mom said.

I put the mug down. "When?"

"Last night. Around ten. She was wondering if Maya was here."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her Maya was supposed to meet you at the diner and didn't show up. She said she'd been trying Maya's phone. I said you'd already called the sheriff."

"What did she sound like?"

My mom looked at me with the expression she used when she was deciding how much truth to give me, which was an expression I resented because I was seventeen and had been handling truth — or at least the parts of it that didn't involve shadows with no apparent light source — for longer than she gave me credit for.

"She sounded scared," my mom said. "But controlled. Like she was holding it together for the phone."

"Like she'd done it before."

"Skylia."

"What?"

"Go to school. The sheriff said they're looking. If Maya shows up—"

"Maya's not going to show up at school, Mom. Her car was at the diner with the door open and her phone on the seat. People who are going to show up at school don't leave their cars running in parking lots."

"The keys were in the ignition?" My mom's voice changed on the word keys, a shift I recognized because I'd had the same shift when I saw them.

"Yes."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Go to school. If the sheriff calls, I'll come get you."

I went to school. Not because I thought it was a good idea but because I didn't have a better one yet, and because sitting in the apartment staring at a closed laptop was not going to find Maya, and because I needed to do something with my body while my brain worked on the problem, and because somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that if I stayed home my mom would start asking questions I couldn't answer without explaining the shadow at the tree line and the scratches on the door and the thirty-seven missing people, and I was not ready for that conversation.

Greythorne High was exactly the way it always was, which was wrong, because Maya was not in it. I walked through the front doors at 7:52 and the hallways were full of people doing the things they always did — standing at lockers, walking to class, arguing about something that had happened on a show I didn't watch — and the normalcy of it was so aggressive that it felt like an insult, like the building itself was refusing to acknowledge that a seat in second period was going to be empty and no one was going to say anything about it.

No one said anything about it.

I sat through first period biology. I sat through it. I did not hear a word Mr. Kincaid said about cellular respiration because my brain was running a loop of the parking lot, Maya's car, the open door, the phone on the seat, and the thirty-seven names I had read in the county archive, and underneath all of it the hum in my wrists that wouldn't stop.

At 9:15, between first and second period, I went to the office. The secretary, Mrs. Petrie, was at her desk with a cup of tea and a expression that said she had already been informed of Maya's absence and had already categorized it.

"Maya Chen didn't show up for attendance," I said.

"We're aware," Mrs. Petrie said. "Her mother called."

"Has anyone called the sheriff?"

"I believe the sheriff's office has been contacted, yes."

"I called them last night. At the diner. They said they'd look into it."

Mrs. Petrie looked at me with the particular patience of a woman who had been dealing with teenagers for twenty years and had developed a taxonomy of their concerns that ranged from "legitimate" to "dramatic" and had clearly placed this one in the latter category. "I'm sure they're doing everything they can, Skylia."

"What does that mean, 'everything they can'?"

"It means the sheriff's office is handling it."

"The sheriff's office sent one deputy to a parking lot and told me to go home."

"Skylia. Go to class."

I went to class. I went to second period, and I sat in my seat, and the seat next to me was empty, and I stared at it, and I thought about Maya sitting in it three days ago, her boots propped on the chair in front of her, telling me she'd found something in the woods, her face lit up with the kind of excitement she got when she was about to do something she shouldn't, which was most of the time, and which was why we were friends, because I had the same look and we recognized it in each other.

She had news about the grooves. That's what she'd said, or implied, or whatever she'd communicated in the half-second between parking and disappearing. She had news about the grooves, and she never got to tell me what it was, and the not-knowing was worse than the knowing would have been, because not-knowing left room for everything and knowing only left room for one thing.

At 10:30, during the passing period between second and third, I made a decision. I walked out the front doors of Greythorne High, got in my car, and drove to the sheriff's office.

The Greythorne County Sheriff's Office was a one-story building on Main Street, next to the post office with the boring plaque and across from the hardware store that always had a flag outside it, even in the rain, which I'd always thought was either patriotic or lazy but was beginning to suspect was just Greythorne in microcosm: doing the same thing regardless of conditions, because changing would require acknowledging the conditions.

I walked in. The lobby was small, with two chairs, a water cooler, and a bulletin board with a wanted poster for a man named Dwight Easley who had failed to appear for a court date regarding unpaid fishing licenses, which told you something about the crime rate in Greythorne, or at least the crime rate they wanted you to see.

The desk deputy was a woman named Reyes who I'd met once at a school career fair and who had told me that law enforcement was about serving the community, which I'd believed at the time and now filed under things adults say to make their jobs sound meaningful.

"I need to talk to Sheriff Brody," I said.

"He's in his office. Do you have an appointment?"

"I have a missing friend."

Reyes looked at me. I looked at her. She picked up her phone and dialed an extension and said something I couldn't hear and then hung up and said, "Go on back."

The sheriff's office was at the end of a hallway lined with framed photographs of previous sheriffs, and yes, the Brodys were well represented. Elmer Brody, 1951-1973. His son, whose name I didn't catch, 1973-1989. Then a gap, a non-Brody sheriff whose tenure coincided with a period I hadn't yet researched, and then the current one, Frank Brody, whose framed photograph showed a man with the same broad face and heavy jaw as the deputy I'd spoken to in the parking lot, the one who had told me to go home, and whose family had been not finding people in these woods for seventy years.

I knocked on the door.

"Come in."

I came in. Sheriff Brody was behind his desk, which was covered in paper and coffee cups and a desktop computer that looked like it was running Windows 7, which was probably the most criminal thing in the building. He looked up at me with the expression of a man who had been hoping I would not come back and was not surprised that I had.

"Skylia Koenig," he said. Not a question.

"Maya Chen is still missing."

"I'm aware. We've been in contact with her mother."

"And?"

"And we're following up on leads."

"What leads?"

Brody leaned back in his chair. He was a big man, broad across the shoulders, with the kind of face that looked like it had been assembled from parts that were individually normal but didn't quite go together — the eyes too close, the jaw too wide, the nose set slightly off-center, as if someone had started building a face and then got distracted by something more important. He wore his uniform the way people wear uniforms when they've been wearing them for so long that the clothes have stopped being clothes and become a second skin, which is to say he wore it like it was the only thing he was.

"Skylia, I understand you're worried about your friend. That's natural. But we've been doing this a long time, and in my experience, young people who miss appointments usually turn up within forty-eight hours."

"Her car was running. The door was open. Her phone was on the seat."

"I've seen the car."

"And?"

"And we're looking into it."

"You keep saying that. What does 'looking into it' look like, specifically, from where I'm standing, which is in your office asking you a direct question?"

Brody's expression shifted. It was a small shift, the kind most people wouldn't catch, but I'd been watching faces for seventeen years and I'd gotten good at the micro-movements, the ones people make when you've hit a nerve they don't want you to see. His eyes moved to the left, toward a filing cabinet behind him, and then back to me, and the movement was fast enough that if I'd blinked I would have missed it, and I didn't blink.

"What were you and Maya doing in the woods?" he asked.

The question changed the temperature in the room. Not the literal temperature, which was already a few degrees too high because the sheriff's office was heated like a greenhouse, but the emotional temperature, the one that tells you when a conversation has stopped being one thing and started being another.

"How do you know we were in the woods?"

"Maya's mother mentioned that Maya had been spending time on the trails. She was concerned."

"She was concerned about Maya hiking?"

"She was concerned about Maya going into the eastern woods. Near the Hemlock Line."

The way he said it — the Hemlock Line — was specific. Not the way you say the name of a place you don't know well, with the slight hesitation of someone reading a map. He said it the way you say the name of something you know intimately, the way you say the name of a problem you've been dealing with your whole life, with familiarity and something that lived next door to fear.

"We found marks in the woods," I said. "Behind the school. Gouges in the ground. Four parallel lines, about the width of a forearm."

I was watching his face when I said it, and what I saw was this: nothing. His expression didn't change. Not in the way that a person's expression doesn't change when they're hearing something new, which is surprise held in check, but in the way that a person's expression doesn't change when they're hearing something they already know, which is recognition suppressed so thoroughly that the only trace of it is its absence.

He already knew about the marks.

"I don't know anything about marks," he said. "But I'll tell you what I've told everyone who's ever asked me about that part of the woods: stay out of it. The Hemlock Line is on private timber land. It's not safe for hiking. There are old mine shafts, unstable ground, and the trails aren't maintained. People get lost out there."

"People get lost," I repeated.

"Yes."

"Thirty-seven people."

The number landed in the room like a rock through a window. Brody's face did the thing again, the micro-shift, the eye movement toward the filing cabinet, the return. He was quiet for three seconds, which was long enough to be a reaction and short enough to be deniable.

"I don't know where you got that number," he said.

"The Alder County Register. Your family's been sheriff here since 1951. That's a lot of people to not find."

He stood up. The chair scraped against the floor and the sound was sharp and final. He was tall, taller than he'd seemed sitting down, and the uniform and the badge and the gun on his hip were all the things they were supposed to be, which is to say they were authority, and authority was telling me to leave.

"Skylia, I understand you're upset. I understand you want your friend back. But coming into my office and accusing me of — what, exactly? Covering up disappearances? — is not going to help Maya. Go home. Go to school. If we need to talk to you, we know where you are."

I stood up. I was not tall. I was five-foot-four in the boots I was wearing, which were not impressive boots, which were in fact the same boots I'd worn to the woods two days ago, the ones with the mud still on them, and I was standing in the sheriff's office looking up at a man whose family had been not finding people for seventy years and I was thinking about his eyes moving toward the filing cabinet and I was thinking about the way he said the Hemlock Line and I was not leaving.

"Did Maya come here?" I asked. "Before she disappeared. Did she come to this office?"

"Why would she do that?"

"Because she found something in the woods and she was the kind of person who would tell you about it."

"No one came to this office."

"Did she talk to anyone named Hemlock?"

This time the reaction was different. Not the eye movement or the suppressed recognition. This time Brody's jaw tightened, a small contraction of the muscle at the hinge, and his hands, which had been at his sides, curled slightly, not into fists but into the precursor of fists, the way your hands move when you're about to grab something or push something away.

"Where did you hear that name?" he asked.

"The woods are called the Hemlock Line."

"That's the trees. I'm asking about the name."

"I heard it the way you hear things in a town this size. Someone said it. I don't remember who."

He stared at me. I stared back. This went on for long enough that it became a contest, which I was not going to win because he was a sixty-year-old sheriff with a desk and a badge and I was a seventeen-year-old with a backpack and a B average, but I was not going to be the first one to look away, and I wasn't.

"Go home," he said. "Don't go into the woods. Don't go looking for your friend. If she's out there, we'll find her."

"Like you found the other thirty-seven?"

His face closed. That's the only word for it. It shut like a door, the same way Maya's car door should have been shut and wasn't, and everything behind it — the recognition, the familiarity, the fear, whatever was in that filing cabinet — went invisible.

"Go home, Skylia."

I went. Not because he told me to. I went because I had seen what I needed to see, which was that Brody knew about the marks, knew about the Hemlock Line, knew the name Hemlock in a way that had nothing to do with trees, and knew where to look when someone mentioned the things that were disappearing into his woods. I went because the filing cabinet behind his desk was the kind with a lock, and the lock was the kind that meant something was inside that he didn't want found, and I was not going to get into it by standing in his office being seventeen at him.

I drove out of the parking lot and turned left instead of right, left toward the eastern road, the one that ran along the edge of town and toward the part of the woods that people didn't talk about.

Old Man Hemlock. The name had come to me in the sheriff's office, not from the internet and not from the newspaper archive but from somewhere deeper, from the accumulated sediment of eight months of living in Greythorne and hearing things that people said in half-sentences and then stopped saying. The name Hemlock was the name of the trees and the name of the woods and, I was now almost certain, the name of a person, because in a town where everything was connected to everything else by threads that no one talked about, a name that appeared twice was not a coincidence.

I didn't know where he lived. I didn't know if he was real. I knew that the woods east of town were called the Hemlock Line and that there was a house on the eastern road that I'd passed once while driving aimlessly, a house set back from the road behind a wall of trees that was so thick and so deliberate that it looked less like landscaping and more like fortification, and I knew that when I'd mentioned the house to a kid at school, the kid had said, "That's the old man's place," and when I'd asked which old man, the kid had said, "Just the old man," in the tone of voice that meant the conversation was over.

I drove east on Route 7 for twelve minutes, past the point where the town thinned to scattered houses and then to nothing, past the trailhead where Claire Hess had parked her car in 1969 with her purse on the seat, past the logging road turnaround where Thomas Vreeland's vehicle had been found in 1953, past all the places where people had last been before they stopped being anywhere, and I found the house.

It was set back from the road behind a wall of hemlock trees — of course they were hemlock trees, of course they were — and the drive was a dirt track that wound through them for a hundred yards before opening into a clearing. The house was small, single-story, built from wood that had gone the particular grey that wood goes when it's been left to weather for decades without paint or stain or any attempt to make it look like something other than what it was, which was a structure that had been standing in the woods for a very long time and had absorbed the woods into itself.

There was a garden. Not a decorative garden, a working one, with rows of vegetables and herbs and a greenhouse at the back that was made of old windows pieced together like a quilt. There was a woodpile, neatly stacked, enough for a winter that was still three months away. There was a truck, an old Ford, parked at the side of the house with a layer of moss on the windshield that suggested it hadn't been moved recently.

There was also, on the porch, a man.

He was sitting in a chair that was made of the same grey wood as the house, and he was watching me, and he had been watching me since I turned onto the dirt drive, because his eyes were already on my car when I came through the trees, and his posture was the posture of a man who had been expecting someone and was not surprised by who it was.

He was old. Not the vague old of someone who is past sixty and doesn't care about the exact number, but the specific old of someone who has been alive for a long time and has the kind of face that shows it — deep lines around the eyes and mouth, skin weathered to the color and texture of the wood he was sitting on, hands that were large and knuckled and still in a way that suggested they could be not-still if they needed to be. He was wearing a flannel shirt and canvas pants and boots that were mud-stained in a way that suggested he spent a lot of time in the woods, which, given where he lived, was a reasonable assumption.

"You're the Koenig girl," he said.

I got out of the car. The air outside was different from the air in town, colder and denser and smelling of pine sap and wet earth, and the hum in my wrists got louder, not painful but present, like a radio that had been playing at a low volume and someone had turned up.

"You know my name," I said.

"I know your name, your mother's name, and the fact that you've been walking in my woods."

"They're your woods?"

"They're the town's woods. But I've been watching them longer than the town has. Sit down."

He gestured to a second chair on the porch, one I hadn't noticed because it was tucked against the wall, half-hidden by a stack of firewood. I sat. The chair was cold and the wood was rough and I was acutely aware that I was sitting on the porch of a man I had never met who lived at the edge of a forest that ate people, and that I was doing it voluntarily.

"You're Hemlock," I said.

"Theodore Hemlock. People call me Old Man Hemlock because they're uncreative and I'm old. You can call me Theo."

"I can call you whatever I want?"

"You can call me whatever you want. I've been called worse by better."

"My friend Maya is missing."

"I know."

"How do you know?"

"Because she was here. Two days ago. She came up the drive the same way you did, in that little car of hers, and she sat in that chair and she asked me questions about the woods and the marks and the things that live in them, and I told her what I tell everyone, which is to stay out, and she left, and the next day she was gone."

My hands were on my knees and they were gripping my knees and I was trying very hard not to stand up and grab this man by the collar of his flannel shirt and shake the rest of the sentence out of him, because the rest of the sentence was clearly there, waiting behind his eyes, which were watching me with the patience of someone who had been having this conversation for a long time and was used to the impatience of the people he was having it with.

"What did she ask you?" I said, and my voice was level because I was making it level, the way you level a table by putting shims under the legs.

"She asked me about the marks. Four parallel lines. She asked me if I'd seen them before."

"Have you?"

"I've been seeing them since 1974."

The year Dale and Rita Pomeroy disappeared. I didn't say it. I didn't need to. He saw me do the math and he nodded, once, the way you nod when a student gets the answer right.

"What are they?" I asked.

He was quiet for a moment. Not the silence of someone who doesn't know what to say but the silence of someone who knows what to say and is deciding how much of it to say, which is a different kind of quiet and one that I was beginning to recognize as the dominant mode of communication in Greythorne, Oregon.

"They're a mark," he said. "Not an animal mark, not a human mark. A mark made by something that lives in the woods, or that uses the woods, or that is the woods. I don't know which. I've spent fifty years not knowing which."

"What do they mean?"

"They mean a boundary has been crossed. They mean the rules have been broken. They mean someone has gone where they shouldn't have gone, or seen what they shouldn't have seen, and the thing on the other side has noticed."

"The shadows."

He looked at me. The look was different from Brody's look, which had been closed and guarded. Hemlock's look was open and careful, the way you look at something that might be dangerous or might be valuable and you're trying to determine which.

"You've seen them," he said.

"Last night. At the tree line behind my house. It moved wrong. It watched me. It scratched my door."

"Four lines?"

"Four lines. And a word. STAY."

He was quiet again. He reached into the pocket of his flannel shirt and took out a pipe, which he didn't light, just held, turning it in his hands the way people turn objects when they're thinking, and the pipe was old and worn and had clearly been turned in those hands many times.

"They've never written before," he said. "In fifty years, I've never seen them write."

"Great. I'm special."

"You're not special. You're noticed. There's a difference."

"What's the difference?"

"Special means you have something they want. Noticed means they know you exist and they're deciding what to do about it."

"What do they do?"

"They watch. They wait. They follow. And then, when the conditions are right, they take."

"Take. Like they took Maya."

"Like they took Maya. Like they took Thomas Vreeland in '53. Like they took the Pomeroy kids in '61. Like they took Claire Hess and Gerald Utt and thirty-some others whose names you read in the paper last night."

"How do you know I read the paper?"

"Because everyone who gets this far reads the paper. It's the first thing you do. You find the pattern. You see the names. You come to me because I'm the one whose name is on the woods and you think I have answers, and I do, but they're not the answers you want."

"What answers do you have?"

"I have one answer. It's not a good one. The things in the woods — the shadows, the marks, whatever you want to call them — they're old. Older than the town. Older than the forest, or at least older than the forest as it is now. They don't work the way we work. They don't think the way we think. They move between the trees and they move in the dark and they take people who cross the line, and the line is not a place on a map, it's a thing you feel, and if you've felt it — and you have, I can see it in your face, in the way you're holding your wrists — then you're already in their territory."

"Maya felt it too."

"Maya felt it. Maya came here and asked me questions and I told her what I'm telling you, which is to stay out, and she left, and she didn't stay out, because she was the kind of person who didn't stay out, and now she's gone."

"What did she find? When she came here, what did she tell you she'd found?"

Hemlock turned the pipe in his hands. He was looking at the tree line at the edge of his property, which was the edge of the Hemlock Line, which was the edge of the thing that took people, and his face had the expression of a man who was looking at something he had lived next to for fifty years and had never gotten used to.

"She said she'd found a tree," he said. "In the woods, east of the school, past the ridge. A tree with marks on it, the same four-line marks, but carved into the bark, not the ground. She said the tree was old, older than the others around it, and the marks were deep, like they'd been made over a long time. She said the tree was — and this is the word she used — bleeding."

"Bleeding."

"Bleeding. She said something dark was coming out of the marks, not sap, not water, something dark and thick, and it was pooling at the base of the tree, and the ground around it was — she said it was wrong. She said the ground felt wrong. She said her teeth hurt."

My teeth hurt. My teeth had been hurting since yesterday, since the grooves in the trail, since the feeling in my wrists that I was now understanding was not anxiety but perception, the awareness of something that was there and shouldn't be, and the fact that Maya had felt the same thing and had described it in the same words was not a comfort.

"I told her not to go back," Hemlock said. "I told her the tree was a marker, a point where the line was thin, where they could cross more easily. I told her the marks on the ground were their tracks, the way they moved through the forest, and the marks on the tree were their door. I told her to stay away."

"And she didn't."

"She didn't. She came back the next day — the day before yesterday — and she was excited, and she was scared, and she had her phone in her hand and she was showing me something on it, a photograph, and then her phone buzzed and she looked at it and she said she had to go, and she left, and I watched her car go down the drive and I thought about following her and I didn't, because I am seventy-three years old and I don't go into the woods anymore, not since the last time, and that is the choice I made and I live with it."

"The last time," I said. "What happened the last time?"

"Nineteen eighty-nine," he said. "A man named Paul Roake. He was a friend of mine. He went into the woods looking for two hikers who had gone missing — the ones from that year. I went with him. We went past the ridge, past the tree, to a place where the forest changes, where the hemlocks get so thick you can't see the sky. Paul went ahead. I stopped. I felt it — the wrongness, the feeling in my teeth, the hum — and I stopped, and Paul didn't, and I watched him walk into the shadows between the trees, and the shadows closed around him, and he didn't come back."

"You watched him die."

"I watched him disappear. I don't know if he died. I don't know what happens to them. No one does. They go in and they don't come out and there's no body and no blood and no explanation and the sheriff files a report and the paper prints three paragraphs and the town goes back to pretending it didn't happen."

"You call it the Thinning," I said, and I don't know where the words came from. They came from the same place the name Hemlock had come from, the sediment of the town, the half-sentences and the silences and the things people said when they thought no one was listening, and the words felt right in my mouth, like they belonged there, like I'd been meant to say them.

Hemlock looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen on his face before. It was surprise, genuine surprise, the kind that breaks through the surface of a person who has spent a long time not being surprised by anything.

"Where did you hear that?" he asked.

"I don't know. I just — I know it. The Thinning. That's what it's called."

"That's what I call it. I don't know if anyone else does. I don't know where you heard it. But you're right. The Thinning. That's what happens at the tree. The line between here and there gets thin, and they come through, and they take what they find."

"How do I find the tree?"

"You don't."

"Maya found it."

"Maya found it and Maya is gone."

"Maya found it because she was looking for it, and I'm looking for it now, and you can either tell me where it is or I can go into the woods and find it myself, and I think we both know which one of those is more likely to end with me disappearing."

He looked at me for a long time. The pipe turned in his hands. The trees at the edge of his property moved in a wind I couldn't feel, and the light through them was the light of late morning in the Oregon woods, which is to say it was grey and green and shifting, and the shadows between the trunks were the shadows of trees and nothing else, and I was watching them to make sure.

"East of the school," he said. "Past the ridge, past the creek, in a stand of old-growth hemlock that's been there since before the town was founded. The tree is the largest one. You'll know it by the marks."

"And the marks on the ground, the tracks — they lead there?"

"They lead there and they lead back. The tracks are their paths, the routes they use. They go from the tree to the town and back. That's why the marks show up in places — the school, the trail, your door. They're not random. They're following the paths."

"They came to my door."

"They came to your door because you saw the marks and they saw you see them. That's how it starts. You see the marks, they see you seeing the marks, and now you're on their radar, and the only way off their radar is to not see the marks anymore, which you can't un-see, which means you're on it."

"And Maya was on it."

"Maya was on it. Maya was on it and she went to the tree and she took a picture of it and she showed me the picture and then she left and I don't know what happened after that because I don't go into town and I don't go into the woods and I sit on my porch and I watch the trees and I wait for the next person to come up my drive asking questions that I can't answer."

"You can answer one more."

"Maybe."

"The photograph. On Maya's phone. Did she send it to you? Do you have it?"

"She did not send it. She showed it to me on her phone, and then she left, and I don't have it. But her phone is in her car, you said."

"Her phone is in her car. Her car is at the diner."

"Then that's where the photograph is."

I stood up. The chair scraped on the porch and the sound was loud in the clearing, and the trees at the edge of the property shifted again, and for a moment I saw something between them — not a shape, not a shadow, just a density in the darkness, a place where the space between the trunks was darker than it should have been, a pocket of absence in the midday light — and then it was gone, and I was looking at trees.

"They're here," I said.

"They're always here," Hemlock said. "They don't come and go the way we do. They're in the woods the way the woods are in the ground. They're part of it."

"You said they come through the tree. The Thinning."

"They come through the tree when the line is thin. The rest of the time, they're here, in the shadows, in the spaces between. They don't need the tree to exist. They need the tree to take."

"To take people."

"To take people, yes. The tree is a door. Most of the time, the door is closed. But the marks on the ground — the tracks — those are the paths they walk, and they walk them whether the door is open or not, and if you're on the path, they can see you, and if they can see you, they can follow you, and if they follow you — "

"They find your door."

"They find your door. They find your car. They find the place where you stop and the woods begin, and they wait there, and they watch, and when the line thins, they reach through."

I looked at the trees. The darkness between them was just darkness, the ordinary darkness of a forest at midday, and I was telling myself that and I was almost believing it when the hum in my wrists spiked, a sharp intake of wrongness that lasted half a second and then settled, and in that half-second the darkness between the trees moved, not the way wind moves branches but the way a shadow moves when the thing casting it shifts, and I saw it — the shape, the same shape from last night, long and wrong and too dark for the space it occupied — and then it was gone, and the trees were trees and the light was light and I was standing on a porch with an old man who was watching the same space with an expression that said he had seen it too and was not surprised.

"You should go home," he said.

"I've been told that a lot today."

"Because it's true. You should go home, and you should stay out of the woods, and you should not go to the tree."

"Maya went to the tree."

"Maya went to the tree and Maya is gone, and I am telling you, as someone who has watched this happen for fifty years and has never once been able to stop it, that going to the tree will not bring her back."

"Then what will?"

He didn't answer. He sat in his grey chair on his grey porch with his pipe in his hands and his face pointed at the trees, and the silence was the kind of silence that meant he had an answer and the answer was nothing, and he didn't want to say it because saying it would make it real.

I left. I drove back down the dirt track, through the hemlock trees, onto Route 7, and I drove west toward town, and the hum in my wrists was steady and the sky was grey and the trees on both sides of the road were the same trees they'd always been, except now I knew what lived between them, and knowing made the drive feel like passing through a corridor, with walls on both sides and something in the walls watching me pass.

I drove to the library. Not to the apartment above it, to the library itself, because it was my mother's library and I had a key and because I needed to think and the library was the place where I thought best, surrounded by other people's attempts to make sense of the world.

I parked behind the building. I went in through the back entrance, the staff entrance that opened with a key my mom had given me two months ago "for emergencies," which she had defined as "if you need a place to study and the front doors are locked," and which I had used three times, always to study, never for anything that could be classified as an emergency by any reasonable definition.

This was an emergency.

I turned on the lights. The library was small, one room with shelves and a reading area and a front desk, and it was the kind of library that smelled like paper and dust and the particular sadness of books that no one had checked out in years, and I loved it, I had always loved it, because it was a place where the world was organized and catalogued and made to make sense, and I needed that right now, I needed the Dewey Decimal System and the alphabetical order and the illusion that everything had a place and could be found.

I went to the local history section. It was two shelves at the back, near the reference desk, and it contained a collection of books and pamphlets and folded maps that had been donated over the years by people who were cleaning out attics and didn't want to throw things away but didn't want to keep them either. I pulled everything that mentioned Greythorne or the surrounding forest, which was not much — a pamphlet from the founding centennial, a self-published memoir by a retired logger, a geological survey from the 1980s, and a folder of newspaper clippings that someone had assembled and labeled "Local Miscellany" in handwriting that looked like it belonged to a previous librarian with strong opinions about organization and weak opinions about what constituted miscellany.

I sat down at the reading table with the folder and started going through it, and for twenty minutes I found nothing — bake sale announcements, city council minutes, a charming article about a dog that had learned to operate the traffic light downtown — and then I found, near the back of the folder, a photocopy of a page from what appeared to be a journal, handwritten, dated October 1961, two months after Dale and Rita Pomeroy disappeared.

The page was damaged, the edges darkened by age or water or both, and the handwriting was cramped and careful and hard to read, but I read it, because I was good at reading bad handwriting, a skill I had developed by years of deciphering my own notes and my mother's grading comments, and what it said was this:

"October 14. The marks are back. Four lines, as before, at the base of the old hemlock east of the ridge. The tree is bleeding again. I have told the sheriff (Elmer) and he has said to leave it alone, that it is a natural phenomenon, that the sap is reacting to the cold. It is not sap. It is not natural. The thing I saw between the trees last week was not natural. Elmer knows this. Elmer has known this since '53, since Vreeland, and he chooses not to know it because knowing it would require doing something about it, and doing something about it would require acknowledging that the thing in the woods is real, and if the thing in the woods is real then the town is built on a lie and the lie is what keeps everyone calm and the calm is what keeps everyone alive, and I understand this, but I also understand that Dale and Rita Pomeroy are gone and their parents are sitting in their kitchen waiting for them to come home and they are not coming home and someone needs to say so."

The entry was unsigned. The handwriting was not Maya's. It was not Hemlock's, or at least it was not the handwriting I would have expected from the man on the porch, though I had no basis for that assumption since I had not seen him write anything. It was the handwriting of someone who had been alive in 1961 and had seen the marks and the tree and the thing between the trees and had tried to tell someone and had been told to leave it alone.

I put the page down. I looked at the local history section. I looked at the folder of clippings. I looked at the shelves, and I thought about Maya, and I thought about the photograph on her phone, and I thought about the car in the parking lot with the door open and the phone on the seat, and I thought about the fact that I was sitting in a library that my mother ran, in a town that was built on a lie, and the lie was not mine but I was the one who was going to have to break it, because Maya was gone and the sheriff was not going to find her and Old Man Hemlock was not going to find her and no one was going to find her unless I did, and to find her I needed to go to the tree, and to go to the tree I needed to not die, and to not die I needed to understand what I was walking into, and to understand what I was walking into I needed more than a journal page from 1961 and the warnings of a man who had spent fifty years watching people disappear and not following them.

I stood up to put the folder back, and as I did, I noticed the book return slot on the front desk.

It was a simple thing, a rectangular opening in the desk with a bin below it, and it was empty except for one item, which was a notebook, a small spiral-bound notebook with a blue cover, the kind you buy at a drugstore for two dollars, the kind Maya used for everything, for her class notes and her grocery lists and her sketches of the birds she liked to draw in the margins of things she was supposed to be paying attention to.

I knew the notebook. I knew it the way you know a friend's handwriting, by the bend in the spiral where she always bent it, by the sticker on the cover — a small sticker of a crow, because Maya liked crows, because Maya liked anything that was smart and black and slightly menacing, which in retrospect was a lot of foreshadowing for a person who had walked into a forest that ate people.

I picked up the notebook. It was cold, the way the door frame had been cold last night, the way the wood of the back door had been cold when I put my hand on it and felt the scratches, the kind of cold that has nothing to do with temperature. I opened it, and the pages were Maya's handwriting, her notes, her drawings, and the last entry was dated the day she disappeared, and it said:

They don't take everyone. They take the ones who see them. SK — don't look for me. Look for the tree.

SK. Skylia Koenig. She had written my initials. She had stood at this desk, or outside this building, or somewhere, and she had written this, and she had put the notebook in the return slot, and she had driven to the diner, and she had left her car running with the door open and her phone on the seat, and she had gone into the dark.

She had gone into the dark knowing I would find this. She had gone into the dark and left me a message that said don't look for me, which was the same as saying look for me, because Maya knew me, and Maya knew that I did not do what people told me, and Maya knew that don't look for me was the thing that would make me look for her, and she had done it anyway, because she was my friend and she was in trouble and the only thing she could do from wherever she was, was leave me a note in a book return slot and hope I was the kind of person who would find it.

I was that kind of person.

I sat down at the table with the notebook and I read it from the beginning, and the hum in my wrists was steady and the light through the library windows was the grey light of an Oregon afternoon and the tree was waiting in the woods and Maya was waiting wherever Maya was, and I was going to find it, and I was going to find her, and I was going to do it before the Thinning, before the door opened, before whatever had taken thirty-seven people came for the thirty-eighth.

I was not going to stay.