Chapter 3

I started at the front. The first twenty pages were normal Maya — grocery lists, homework reminders, a sketch of a Stellar's jay that was good enough to make me angry because she could draw like that and still couldn't remember to bring a pencil to bio. Then, about two-thirds through, the notes changed. Not gradually. Like a door opening. One page she was writing about whether to buy oat milk or regular, and the next page was this:

"Oct 3. The gouges. S and I found them behind the school. Not animal. Not human. Four lines, parallel, evenly spaced, depth consistent. Took samples (see bag). S wants to come back with a camera. I don't think she sees what I see in them."

S. Me. Skylia. Maya had been taking notes on the same things I'd been thinking about, but she'd started earlier and gone further, and she hadn't told me, and the not-telling was a knife that I didn't have time to feel right now because I was reading.

Oct 5. "Went back alone. Gouges have been covered. Someone used a rake. The dirt is different — brought in from somewhere else, darker, heavier. Why cover four lines in the dirt behind a high school? Who would notice? Who would care? Unless they know what the lines mean."

Oct 7. "Found more marks. Not behind the school. On the trail that leads to the Hemlock Line, the one the cross-country team uses. Four lines again, same spacing, same depth. But these are on a tree. Bark peeled back. The wood underneath is dark, almost black. Not rot. I touched it. It was warm. Trees are not warm. S, if you're reading this — and I know you will, because you go through my stuff like it's yours, which I allow because I love you and also because you're nosy — the tree was warm. I'm not making that up."

I wasn't going through her stuff. I was going through a notebook in a library book return slot, which was completely different and also, yes, exactly what she would have predicted I would do.

Oct 9. "Found the tree."

Two words. No location, no directions, no GPS pin, because Maya didn't think like a person who expected to lose access to her own notes. She thought like a person who would always know where the tree was because she had been there, and being there was enough. I stared at those two words and wanted to scream at her across whatever distance separated us, which direction, Maya, which way from the trail, how far past the Line, what did it look like, what did you see, but she couldn't hear me, and the notebook couldn't answer, and the next page was worse.

Oct 9 (cont). "The tree is east of the ridge, past the Line, maybe half a mile. It's a hemlock — old, older than anything around it, the kind of old that doesn't make sense in a second-growth forest. The bark is split at the base and the wood underneath is dark and the dark is moving. Not like liquid. Like — I don't know how to describe it. Like the grain is shifting. Like the wood is breathing. There's something coming out of the split. It's red-brown, thick, the color of sap but not sap. It runs down the roots and into the ground and the ground around the tree is dead in a perfect circle. Nothing grows in the circle. Not moss, not grass, not even dirt-colored dirt. It's grey. The grey is the same grey as the shadows."

What shadows. What grey. I flipped back, looking for an earlier reference, and found it on a page I'd skimmed past because it was mostly drawings.

Oct 6. "I keep seeing something at the edge of my vision. Not a person. Not an animal. A shape that's the wrong color for the thing it's next to. Like a shadow that doesn't belong to anything. It's there and then it's not. It's been happening since we found the marks. I thought I was imagining it. Then I saw one in the school parking lot, at noon, in full sun, between two cars that were both white and the shadow was grey and it wasn't cast by either car or by me or by anything I could see. It was just there. On the asphalt. And then it was gone."

Below that, she'd drawn it. A small grey shape, roughly human-sized, with no features, no detail, just a smudge of pencil shaded grey. The kind of drawing you make when you're trying to record something before you convince yourself it wasn't real. I knew that drawing. I'd made drawings like it, in my own notebooks, of things I'd seen out of the corner of my eye and then decided were tricks of light, because that's what you did in a town like Greythorne, you explained things away, you filed them under tricks of light and bad sleep and the wind, always the wind, as if wind could explain everything that was wrong with this place.

The hum in my wrists was steady. I turned the page.

Oct 10. "Went to see the old man. Hemlock. The one at the edge. I know people say he's crazy but he's not crazy, he's just old and alone and he's been watching the woods for longer than anyone in this town has been alive. He told me things. He told me the tree is the source. He told me the shadows come from there, or through there, or are drawn there — he wasn't clear on the distinction and I'm not sure there is one. He told me about the Thinning. He told me the rules."

Then, in letters that were pressed harder into the page, as if she'd leaned into the pen:

"He told me some people can see them and most can't. He says SK can. He says SK doesn't know it yet. He says I need to be careful because if I can see them, they can see me, and the ones who see them are the ones they take."

SK. My initials again. Not in the final note, but here, six days before she disappeared, in the middle of her private investigation that she hadn't told me about, in a notebook I was never supposed to read, or was always supposed to read, because Maya was the kind of person who wrote things in notebooks and left the notebooks places and trusted that the right person would find them, and the right person was me, and she'd known that, and she'd written my name in her notebook like a prayer or a warning, and I was sitting in a library reading it three days too late.

I closed the notebook. I put my hands flat on the table. The hum was in my wrists and now it was in my fingers and I could feel it in my teeth, a low vibration that wasn't sound, that was closer to the feeling of standing near a transformer, that buzzing you feel in your fillings, in your bones, in the parts of you that are metal even though nothing about you is metal.

Hemlock had told Maya I could see them. Hemlock, who I had sat with on his porch for twenty minutes while he dropped cryptic warnings like a man feeding breadcrumbs to pigeons, who had given me a name — the Thinning — and nothing else, who had watched me with an expression I'd taken for suspicion and was apparently something else entirely. He'd told Maya I was sensitive. He'd told her before I'd even shown up at his door. Which meant he'd known about me before I'd known about him, which meant someone had told him, or he'd seen something in me that I hadn't seen in myself, and either way, the man had information I needed and he'd been rationing it out like a miser with a coin collection, and I was done being patient about it.

I put Maya's notebook in my bag. I put the 1961 journal page in with it — I'd pulled it from the folder before I'd shelved it, which was theft from a public library, which my mother would have been furious about, and which I would deal with later, in the same way I would deal with everything later, which was to say not at all. I left the library through the back door because the front door faced Main Street and Main Street faced the sheriff's office and I was not in the mood for Sheriff Brody's particular brand of concerned dismissal, which I had already experienced once and which had gone about as well as a conversation with a brick wall that also had a badge.

My car was in the lot behind the building. I got in and started it and pulled out onto Route 7 heading east, the same direction I'd driven yesterday to find Hemlock's house, and the road was the same — two lanes, trees on both side, grey sky pressing down like a hand on a forehead — but this time I wasn't looking for a reclusive old man on a porch. I was looking for answers, which was a less specific search but a more honest one, and I drove fast because the light was already thinning and I didn't want to be on this road after dark, not today, not with the hum in my wrists and the notebook in my bag and the knowledge that Maya had sat in this same man's house or on this same porch and he had told her things about me that I didn't know about myself.

The turnoff came at the same place — a gravel road that was more suggestion than infrastructure, cutting north through trees that got thicker and older as the road narrowed. I bounced over ruts that my Civic was not designed for and thought about how Maya had probably driven this same road in her truck, the one that was still sitting in the diner parking lot with the door open, and I thought about how she must have come here after she'd found the tree, after she'd seen the shadows, after she'd started putting things together, and she'd come to the same man I was going to, because there was no one else, because in a town of three thousand people there was exactly one person who knew what was happening and he lived at the edge of the forest like a warning sign that everyone had decided to ignore.

The house appeared through the trees — same sagging porch, same peeling paint, same stack of firewood against the side wall that looked like it had been there since the Eisenhower administration. The trees behind the house were the Hemlock Line, the forbidden stretch of forest that no one in Greythorne talked about without lowering their voice, as if volume was the variable that determined whether the woods heard you.

Hemlock was on the porch. Of course he was. He was sitting in the same chair, wearing what appeared to be the same coat, and he was watching the tree line with the patient, incurious stare of a man who had been watching the same thing for so long that watching had become a form of being. He didn't look surprised to see me. He didn't look anything. He looked at my car, then at me as I got out, then at the tree line again, and I had the sudden and uncomfortable thought that he'd been expecting me since yesterday, maybe since before yesterday, maybe since the moment Maya had walked up his drive and told him about the marks behind the school.

"You came back," he said.

"You knew I would."

He considered this. "I knew someone would. I wasn't sure it would be today."

I climbed the porch steps and pulled the notebook from my bag. I held it out. "Maya's. She left it in the library book return slot. She'd been investigating the woods for over a week before she disappeared. She found the tree. She came to see you. And you told her I could see the shadows."

His eyes went to the notebook. Something moved in his face — not surprise, not guilt, something deeper and more tired than either. He reached for it and I didn't let go for a moment, and then I did, because there was nothing in the notebook I had that he didn't already know, and holding onto it was just me being stubborn, which was my default setting but not always my most useful one.

He opened it. He didn't flip through it. He opened it to the page with Maya's sketch of the grey shape, the shadow that didn't belong to anything, and he looked at it for a long time. His thumb traced the edge of the drawing the way you'd touch a scar you'd forgotten about, remembering it was there.

"She was better at seeing than she knew," he said. "Most people are. The ones who can see, they see their whole lives, and they spend their whole lives telling themselves it's tricks of light, bad sleep, the wind."

"That's what I tell myself."

"I know it is."

"You know a lot of things you haven't told me."

He closed the notebook and set it on the arm of his chair. The porch creaked. Somewhere in the trees, a bird called once and then stopped, the way birds stop when something else is listening.

"Sit down," he said.

I sat. The other chair was the same one I'd sat in yesterday, and it was still uncomfortable in the same way, the wood bowed in the middle so you sat at an angle that made you feel like you were leaning toward the trees whether you wanted to or not. I leaned toward the trees. I didn't want to.

"You told Maya I was sensitive," I said. "What does that mean?"

"It means you see them. The shadows. The shapes that aren't cast by anything. You've been seeing them your whole life, haven't you? In the corner of your eye. In the space between things. You've been explaining them away."

"Everyone sees things in the corner of their eye."

"Not everyone. Not the way you do. Not the way Maya did. There's a kind of perception — I don't know what else to call it — that some people have and most people don't. It's not a gift. Don't romanticize it. It's a hole. A thin place in whatever it is that keeps most people from seeing what's actually there. You have it. Maya had it. Your mother had it."

There it was. The sentence I didn't know was coming and should have. Your mother had it. Present tense had, past tense had, the kind of had that means either she still has it or she doesn't anymore, and my mother was alive, she was at work, she was running this library, she was grading papers, she was fine — and yet the way he said it, the careful past tense, the way you handle something that might break —

"My mother."

"Your mother."

"My mother sees the shadows."

"Your mother saw the shadows. She may still. I don't know. I haven't spoken to her in sixteen years, not since she asked me to stop, and I stopped, because she was right to ask and I was wrong to push, and the pushing is the thing I've regretted for longer than most things, which is saying something because I have a long list."

I needed to be careful here. I needed to not grab the front of his coat and shake him, which was what my hands wanted to do, and I needed to not start crying, which was what my eyes wanted to do, and I needed to ask the right question instead of all the wrong ones that were crowding my mouth. The right question was not why. The right question was not how could you. The right question was the one Maya would have asked, the practical one, the one that moved you from where you were to where you needed to be.

"She asked you to watch over me," I said.

He looked at me then. Really looked. Not the distant gaze from yesterday, the one that seemed to see through me to the trees. This was direct and close and it hurt, the way being seen by someone who actually sees you always hurts, because most people don't, most people see the surface and the surface is where you live because it's safe there, and this man was not looking at the surface.

"She did."

"And you've been here. This whole time. At the edge of the woods. Watching."

"Watching is a generous word for it. I've been sitting. I've been sitting and I've been waiting and I've been hoping neither of you would ever need to come to me, and then Maya came, and then you came, and now we're here, and the tree is bleeding, and hoping is off the table."

"Tell me about your wife."

His face didn't change. That was how I knew I'd hit something. His face didn't change at all, and then it changed completely, and the change was not in his expression but in something underneath it, something structural, like a wall shifting.

"How did you —"

"I didn't. I guessed. You live alone at the edge of a forest that eats people. You've been here for decades. You're not a coward — cowards move away from the thing they're afraid of. You moved toward it. You set up your chair on the porch and you watch it every day. People don't do that for strangers. People don't do that for a town. People do that for someone they lost."

He was quiet for a long time. The trees were quiet. The bird that had called earlier was still quiet. Everything was quiet except the hum in my wrists, which I was now fairly certain was not in my wrists at all but in everything, in the air, in the wood of the chair, in the space between me and the old man and the trees, and I had been feeling it my whole life and calling it nothing, the way Maya said, the way everyone in this town called it nothing because that was the only safe word for it.

"Her name was Eleanor," he said. "1973. The last Thinning. She could see them too. She went into the woods on a Tuesday in October and she didn't come back, and I was twenty-six years old and I didn't know about the tree or the rules or the Thinning because no one had told me, because the people who knew were dead or gone or pretending they didn't know, and by the time I understood enough to look for her it was too late. The Thinning had closed. The tree had stopped bleeding. The shadows had receded. And Eleanor was gone."

"You've been here since 1973."

"I bought the house in '74. I've been here since. I watch the tree line. I go to the tree when the bleeding starts. I count the days. I've been through four Thinnings since Eleanor, and each time I've watched the tree and counted the days and waited for it to stop, and each time someone has gone in and not come back, and I've sat on this porch and I've let it happen, because I didn't know how to stop it and I didn't know who to tell and the people I tried to tell —"

"Sheriff Brody."

"His father. Elmer. Same badge, same office, same answer. Natural phenomenon. Leave it alone. The town is peaceful and the peace is worth more than the truth. I've heard that sentence so many times it's become a kind of music, the kind you hate but can't stop humming."

"Maya found the tree. She went to the tree. And then she came to you."

"She did. She came on October tenth. She showed me her drawings. She told me about the marks, about the shadows she'd been seeing. She was — she was like Eleanor. Not in personality. In the seeing. The way she looked at the woods, like she was reading something written on them that I couldn't see, that most people can't see. I told her what I'm telling you. The tree. The Thinning. The rules. And I told her to go home and stay there until the Thinning closed."

"She didn't."

"No."

"She went back."

"I believe so. I went to the tree the morning of October twelfth. The bleeding was heavier than I'd seen it since '73. The ground in the circle was wet. And there were footprints in the grey dirt, leading toward the tree, and none leading away."

I sat with that. I sat with the image of Maya's shoes in the grey dirt, the dead dirt, the dirt where nothing grew, walking toward a tree that was bleeding from a wound in its trunk, and I sat with the fact that there were no footprints leading away, which meant she was still there, somewhere, on the other side of whatever the tree was, or in the ground, or nowhere, and I couldn't think about nowhere, I couldn't think about the possibility that nowhere was where Maya was, because if I thought about that I would stop functioning and I needed to keep functioning because the tree was still bleeding and the Thinning was still open and if there was a chance, any chance, it was closing.

"How long does the Thinning last?"

"It varies. The one in '73 lasted nine days. The one before that, in '58, lasted twelve. The one before that — I don't know. The records get thinner the further back you go, and the records I have are already mostly guesses. But the pattern is consistent. The bleeding starts. The shadows increase. People see things at the edge of their vision, the ones who can see. The tree opens. And then, after some number of days, it closes. The bleeding stops. The shadows recede. And whoever went in during the Thinning doesn't come back."

"When did the bleeding start this time?"

"I first saw it on October ninth. Maya's entry confirms it — she found the tree the same day. Today is October fourteenth. That's five days."

Five days. Four left, if it lasted nine. Three, if it was shorter. Less, if it was already closing. The countdown I'd been dreading wasn't a countdown at all — it was a window, and the window was narrowing, and I was sitting on a porch talking to a man who had been watching this happen for fifty years and hadn't stopped it once.

"You said you've been through four Thinnings. You've watched the tree every time. You've seen people go in. And you've never gone in after them."

His jaw tightened. "No."

"Not even for Eleanor."

"Especially not for Eleanor. She wouldn't have wanted me to. She would have wanted me to stay here and watch and count and keep the record and tell the next person who could see, so they'd know more than I did, and maybe they'd do better than I did, and maybe the next time the tree opened, someone would go in and come back, and the coming back would be the thing that changed everything."

"That's a lot of maybes."

"It's all I've had for fifty years. Maybes and a porch and a view of the trees."

I stood up. The chair creaked behind me, relieved. "I need to see your records."

He looked at the door of his house. It was the first time I'd seen him look at it — really look, the way you look at a door when the thing behind it is heavier than the wood. Then he stood, slowly, the way old men stand when their knees have opinions about the process, and he walked to the door and opened it.

I followed him inside.

The interior of Old Man Hemlock's house was not what I expected, which was saying something because I hadn't expected anything specific, but whatever vague expectations I'd had — sparse, dusty, a recluse's accumulation of canned goods and old newspapers — were wrong. The main room was a living room that had been converted into something between an archive and a war room. Every wall was covered. Maps, photographs, newspaper clippings, hand-drawn diagrams, pages torn from books and pinned to the plaster with nails and thumbtacks. A timeline ran along one wall, hand-lettered on strips of paper taped end to end, starting in the 1880s and running to the present day, with dates marked in red and names written in black beside them. The red dates were disappearances. The names were the disappeared.

There were a lot of red dates.

And there, on a separate section of wall, a different list. Not names of the disappeared — names of the sensitive. People who could see. Written in blue ink, a column of names stretching back decades, and my eyes went to them the way eyes go to the thing they're looking for before the brain has finished processing what it's seeing, and I found her name before I was ready to.

Koenig, Anne. 1989.

My mother's maiden name. My mother's first name. The year she would have been seventeen.

"She came to you when she was my age," I said.

"She did. She could see. She'd been seeing for years, and she came to me the way Maya did, the way you did, because there was no one else to come to. I told her what I told Maya. She was smarter than either of you about it — she listened, she stayed away from the tree, she stayed away from the woods during the Thinning. And then she asked me to stop contacting her, because she wanted to live a normal life and I was a reminder that normal wasn't real, and I understood that, and I let her go."

"And then she had me."

"And then she had you. And when you were about a year old, she came back. Not to the house. She wrote me a letter. She said she'd seen you watching something in the corner of the room, something that wasn't there, and you were smiling at it, and she knew. She asked me to watch over you. Not to contact you. Not to tell you. Just to watch. And I've been watching."

"My whole life."

"Your whole life."

I looked at the wall. At the names in blue. At the names in black. At the timeline of a town's worth of disappearances, stretching back over a century, and at the list of people who could see, the ones who were marked for it, the ones the shadows noticed. My mother's name was in blue. Maya's name would have been in blue, if he'd had time to add it. And my name —

My name wasn't on the wall. Not yet.

"The tree," I said. "You said it's east of the ridge, past the Line. Half a mile in. How do I get there?"

"You go to the ridge. You follow the deer trail that runs northeast. You'll know when you're close. The air changes. The birds stop. And you'll feel it — the hum. The thing you've been calling nothing your whole life. It gets louder."

He walked to a shelf and pulled open a drawer. He took out something wrapped in cloth — heavy, the kind of heavy that means metal — and unwrapped it. It was a piece of iron, flat and dark, about the length of my hand and the width of two fingers, with a hole bored through one end as if for a cord.

"Iron," he said. "Cold iron. Not the metaphorical kind. The actual kind. I don't know if it works. The old records mention it. The journal you found in the library — the 1961 entry — that was written by a man named Gerald Vreeland. He was one of the ones who could see. He carried iron. He's one of the few who went near the tree and came back. He came back wrong, but he came back."

"Wrong how?"

"He couldn't sleep. He said the shadows followed him home. He died in '64. His family moved away. But he came back, and the iron is the only variable I can point to. So take it."

I took it. It was cold in my hand — the wrong cold, the notebook cold, the doorframe cold — and I threaded a bootlace through the hole and hung it around my neck and tucked it under my shirt, where it sat against my sternum like a second heartbeat, steady and dark.

"You're going," he said. Not a question.

"I'm going."

"You know what happens to the ones who go in."

"I know what happens to the ones who go in alone and unprepared. I'm not going in alone — I'm going to the tree. I'm going to see what Maya saw. And then I'm going to figure out what to do about it, which is more than anyone in this town has done in a hundred years, including you."

He flinched. Good. He should flinch. He'd had fifty years and a wall full of names and he'd sat on his porch and watched the tree bleed and done nothing but watch, and I understood why, I understood the paralysis, the way knowledge without action calcifies into observation, the way a man who lost his wife to the woods could spend the rest of his life studying the woods instead of entering them, because studying was safe and entering was not — but understanding it didn't mean accepting it, and Maya was in there, and the window was closing, and I was not going to sit on a porch.

"One more thing," he said, as I turned to leave. "The shadows. They don't take everyone. They take the ones who see them. But seeing isn't a choice. You can't close your eyes to it, not the way your mother did, not the way she tried to teach you to. You see, and they see you seeing, and that's the transaction. The only protection is not being where they are. If you go to the tree, you'll be where they are."

"Maya's note said the same thing. They take the ones who see them."

"Maya was right."

"Maya is right. Present tense. She's not dead."

He didn't answer that. He looked at the wall, at the names in black, at the names in blue, at the timeline that documented a century of loss, and his silence was its own kind of answer, the kind I refused to accept.

I walked out of the house and off the porch and to my car, and the piece of iron was cold against my chest and the notebook was in my bag and the tree was east of the ridge past the Hemlock Line, and I had a direction and a piece of metal and a dead man's journal entry and the name of a woman named Eleanor who had gone into the woods in 1973 and not come back, and I had my mother's name on a wall in blue ink and a lifetime of seeing things I'd told myself weren't there, and I had a window that was closing and a friend who was somewhere on the other side of it.

I started the car. The engine sounded too loud in the quiet. The trees stood in their line and did not move, and the space between them was grey, and the grey was the same grey Maya had drawn in her notebook, and I could see it, and it could see me, and I drove toward the ridge.