by Ellen Datlow
Overhead, a crow cawed and another replied. I turned to look up at the mountainside, shreds of mist disappearing as the sun broke over the eastern horizon. The wind picked up, loosing a flutter of yellow leaves from the birches. The brisk air smelled of acorns and dead leaves, the smoke from someone’s woodstove in the village below. I brushed my teeth, rinsed with a mouthful of water from my water bottle, and spit onto the yellow grass. I raked my fingers through my hair, felt in my pocket for my cell phone. I walked over to the sign and took a picture of the phone number. I’d call later, just out of curiosity.
Back inside, Helen had rolled up her sleeping bag and was gathering whatever stray bits of stuff remained. A piece of waxed paper, a balled-up tissue, a glasses case. She’d already lined up her backpack, sleeping bag, and pillow beside the wall. The Catholic church was in Gilead, about ten minutes away. She’d have to leave soon to get there in time for nine o’clock Mass.
I started on my own belongings, exchanging my socks for a clean pair. I made a circuit of the room, halting at the fireplace to gather up the spent tea lights. I dropped them into a paper bag and set it with my stuff in the middle of the room. I texted Brandon to let him know I’d be back soon, and asked if he’d like to meet at the general store for coffee and donuts. He replied immediately.
Sure, text me when you’re there.
“Brandon’s going to meet us at the general store.” I glanced at Rose. “You want to tell Hank?”
Rose didn’t seem to have moved. She still sat on the floor and stared intently at the empty fireplace, as though trying to will flames to appear in it. Finally, she reached for her handbag, took out a hairbrush, and slowly brushed her hair. When she finished, she replaced the hairbrush and got to her feet. She rolled up her sleeping bag and set it by the wall, along with her handbag and backpack, went outside and returned after a few minutes.
I picked up my own bag. I was ready to go—my back hurt from sleeping on the floor, and I had a slight headache. Too much wine. I knew Helen was growing impatient as well. Rose stood near the door but made no move to leave. Her brow furrowed; she cocked her head, gazing again at the fireplace.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
Helen and I looked at her, then each other. I shrugged. “Hear what?”
“That noise. Like—I don’t know. A radio? Listen.”
I held my breath, listening. And yes, after a moment I did hear something, though it was hard to tell if it was an actual sound or something in my head, like tinnitus—it seemed as though I might have been hearing it for a while without noticing it. A nearly inaudible sound, not voices but not quite music either.
Yet it wasn’t tinnitus. It sound more like wind chimes, or someone striking random notes on a tiny xylophone. I strained to hear, but it didn’t grow any louder.
“It’s coming from upstairs,” said Rose. She walked to the foot of the steps leading to the second floor, pressed her palm against the wall, and turned to look at me. “If you stand here, you can hear it.”
I joined her and gazed up the stairway, saw nothing but the pale morning light brightening the walls.
But Rose was right. The chiming sound was louder here, and slightly more distinct, as if a cellphone set at low volume was ringing in a distant part of the house. I glanced back at Helen. “She’s right. Come listen.”
Helen stayed where she was. “I think I’m going to just call Tim and ask him to come pick me up.”
“Hang on.” Rose shook her head and sniffed. “Can you smell that? Someone’s baking something. Bread—it smells like baking bread.”
I inhaled deeply, and nodded in agreement. “You’re right. It smells like bread. Or cookies. That’s very strange.”
The scent, like the sound, seemed to emanate from upstairs. The faint chiming hadn’t grown any louder, yet it now seemed on the verge of being intelligible, though I still couldn’t determine exactly what the sound was. It was like listening to an old-fashioned shortwave radio, trying to tune in to a station in some unknown country. Only who was broadcasting, and why?
“I’ll be right back,” said Rose. Before I could stop her, she ran upstairs.
I gazed after her in alarm, but didn’t follow. In a few seconds, I heard her footsteps on the bare wood floor above as she walked down the hallway.
Then the footsteps stilled. The chimes grew louder, as though she’d opened a door onto one of the bedrooms, and whatever produced the sound was inside. At the same time, the scent of bread gusted downstairs, though now it smelled different. Like bread but also loamy, like upturned earth when you’re gardening. I wrinkled my nose and looked over at Helen, who’d moved closer to me.
“What’s that smell?” she asked, and grimaced. “We should get out of here, it could be a gas leak.”
“It doesn’t smell like gas,” I said. But I agreed with her, we should get out. “Rose!” I yelled. “Let’s go!”
No reply. I braced myself, setting one hand on each wall of the stairwell. But I still didn’t move to go upstairs. The chimes grew louder and more measured: for the first time, they sounded like music and not aimless tinkling. The earthy smell overpowered me, filling my nostrils, my lungs.
“Rose!” I shouted, coughing. “Get down here!”
From upstairs came the sound of running footsteps, then a thump. Rose appeared at the top of the steps, wild-eyed, one hand clapped over her mouth. She staggered down the stairway, and when she reached bottom, roughly pushed past me. I only had a glimpse of her face, white as a china plate, before she fled outside.
I raced after her and found her kneeling at the edge of the lawn by the road. Her body heaved and I thought she was being sick, but when I crouched beside her and laid my hand on her shoulder, I saw that she was convulsed with sobs.
“Rose! Rose, what happened? Is there somebody up there?”
She said nothing, wouldn’t even look at me; just wept uncontrollably with her face in her hands. I took a few deep breaths—the choking smell was gone—glanced back but didn’t see Helen. What if someone was inside and had attacked her? I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, started to enter 911 when Helen ran outside.
“There’s no one up there,” she said. She knelt on Rose’s other side and touched her arm. “Rose, what happened? Did you see something?”
Rose shook her head but said nothing.
“I checked all the rooms upstairs,” Helen continued, her voice steady. “I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t hear anything or smell anything, either. I did before, when you first mentioned it, but not just now. If somebody was there, they’re gone. Can you tell us what you saw?”
Gently, she grasped Rose’s face and turned it toward her. Rose remained silent, her pale face blotched scarlet from weeping. She opened her mouth as though to speak, but seemed to think better of it.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you in the car.” I looked at Helen. “I’ll stay with her. Go get everything.”
I helped Rose to her feet and walked her down the road to my car. She refused to get into the front seat, so I opened the back and she crawled in and lay face down, covering her head with her hands.
She was afraid to look at the house, I realized. I leaned inside the car and rubbed her back, felt her trembling beneath my hand. I stared out at the second-floor windows, searching for any sign of motion, a glint of light, or the shadow of someone moving.
I saw nothing. If anything, the house seemed even more peaceful and inviting than it had the day before. Morning sunlight set the windows ablaze. The asters along the front glowed amethyst. Above, the bulk of Mount Kilden shone green and scarlet beneath a cloudless blue sky.
After a minute Helen emerged, laden with sleeping bags. She dumped them in the back of the car and returned for our handbags and backpacks, the paper bag containing the remnants from our meal.
“That’s everything,” she said, and jumped inside the car. “Go.”
I stroked Rose’s hair and touched her head, closed the back door, and got be
hind the wheel. I pulled out quickly in a spray of grit and gravel. In the rearview mirror, the house grew smaller and smaller, until we rounded a curve and it disappeared from view.
I dropped Rose off first. Helen and I accompanied her up the walkway, Rose moving between us like a sleepwalker. When Hank opened the door and saw her, his eyebrows shot up. “What the hell were you girls drinking?”
“She doesn’t feel well,” I said. Rose collapsed against Hank and once again began to cry. His confusion turned to alarm. “What happened?”
“We don’t know,” said Helen. “She—it seems like she had some kind of episode.”
“What kind of episode?” demanded Hank, but he didn’t wait for a reply. He shut the door, and through the window I saw him walking Rose to the couch.
Helen and I hurried back to the car. “What do you think happened to her?” I asked as I drove toward town.
“I don’t know. I think there might have been a gas leak or something. You said you felt strange last night.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t like that—I didn’t smell anything. And that noise—what was that noise?”
“A ghost?’ She laughed brokenly.
“Ghosts don’t act like that.”
“Have you ever seen one?’
“Of course not.” I tightened my hands on the wheel. “But that’s baloney. It’s more likely she had some kind of, I don’t know, a psychotic break or something.”
“Rose?” Helen said in disbelief. “Are you kidding?”
Whatever it was, Rose didn’t recover for a long time. She wouldn’t see me, or return my phone calls or texts. She did the same with Helen. Whenever I spoke to Hank, he was terse. I could tell he thought Helen and I were somehow responsible for whatever had happened. We hadn’t told him the truth—that we spent the night in an empty house up by Mount Kilden, and not at a lean-to at the state park. I still don’t know what Rose told him.
“She needs some time, Marianne,” he said the last time I talked to him. “When she’s ready, she’ll give you a call.”
Helen and I walked a few times after that, though we stuck to the camp roads by Taylor Lake. For a while we endlessly rehashed the events of that night, but we never came up with a reasonable explanation. Or an unreasonable one, either. Then Helen learned that her daughter was pregnant, and that took up her attention for the rest of the year.
The day after our sleepover, I got out my cell phone, found the picture I’d taken of the FOR SALE BY OWNER sign, and copied down the phone number on it. I had to screw up my courage to punch it into my phone. As I did, my heart began to pound.
The number rolled over to a message saying the call could not be completed. I attempted it again with the same result, then tried varying some of the numbers—the handwriting on the sign was hard to read on the tiny screen, even when I enlarged it. I never got through to anyone.
Later that week I went to the town office. I told Regina, the clerk there, I wanted to look at the tax map for the part of town bordering Mount Kilden. She took me to a room and showed me the oversized books with the information for every piece of land in town, showing property lines and the names of landowners.
“I know the house you mean,” Regina said as she pulled one of the heavy volumes from the shelf. “Every year people come in here asking about it.”
I wanted to ask her more, but the phone rang in the other room. “Excuse me,” she said, and went to answer it.
The house lot was easy to find—the last one on that long road that led to the foot of the mountain. I wrote down the lot number, then went to another book to check it against the landowner’s name: J. Jones. I didn’t bother to write that down. I closed the tax map and replaced it, waited till I heard Regina get off the phone, and returned to the front office.
“Do you know anything about the property owner for that place?” I asked. “J. Jones? There’s a For Sale sign there, I tried calling the number on it but I couldn’t get any answer.”
“No one ever does,” she said. “I tried it myself once, out of curiosity. Said it was disconnected.”
“But he pays his taxes, right? This J. Jones?”
She nodded. “Every year. By money order, and there’s never a return address. I checked that, too. It’s been like that for as long as I’ve been here. The deed goes back to the early 1800s. Same name and initials. Far as I know, it’s never left the family.”
“But it’s for sale. It’s a nice house.”
“It is, but that’s too isolated up there for me. Everyone else must think so, too—that sign’s been up for years.”
“Who maintains it?” I picked up a pamphlet with information about fishing and hunting licenses and pretended to peruse it. “It always seems in good shape for a place no one lives in.”
“That I do not know.” Regina shrugged. “Never heard of anyone here doing it. They might hire someone from one of the bigger property managers out of Augusta.”
“Okay, thanks.”
I set the brochure back on the counter. As I turned to go, Regina’s face creased. “How’s Rose doing? Hank was in here to register his truck and said she hasn’t been feeling well.”
“I don’t know.” I felt my throat tighten. “I think she’ll be all right. I hope so.”
“Me too,” said Regina, and nodded goodbye.
I got in the car and drove up the road to Mount Kilden. A car with out-of-state plates was parked in the first pull-out, and as I continued onto the gravel road I passed a man and a woman, both wielding fancy-looking trekking poles. They waved. I nodded and kept going, past the last turnout until I reached the house. I parked at the edge of the road, and got out.
Someone had mowed the lawn and raked away all the fallen leaves. The purple asters nodded in the wind. By the door, a single tiger lily had opened. The white clapboards appeared newly painted, as did the sign planted in the center of the lawn.
FOR SALE BY OWNER.
I hesitated, then walked warily across the grass. A different phone number had been scrawled on the sign. I held up my cell phone to take a photo, thought better of it, and let my hand drop.
“Oh my god, look at this place!”
I looked back to see the couple I’d passed a few minutes earlier. Trekking poles tucked under their arms, they gazed in delight at the house. The woman smiled and waved and began walking across the lawn.
“Are you the owner?” she asked in excitement. “We’ve been looking for a place like this for months!”
“A year!” her husband called cheerfully after her.
I opened my mouth and started to say No. Instead, I turned, grabbed the sign, and yanked it from the ground. It resisted at first, but I planted my feet more firmly and pulled harder, until it finally came out. Without pausing to catch my breath, I carried it toward my car.
“I’m sorry,” I said, as the man and woman stared at me. “I changed my mind.”
I got into my car and headed back down the mountainside. Just before the gravel road ended, I stopped and left the car idling while I retrieved the sign from the back seat. I crossed to the far side of the road and clambered over a fallen stone wall into the woods, fighting my way through brush and overhanging branches until I found a cellar hole, deep and filled with decades-worth of moldering dead leaves and fungi. I heaved the sign into the cellar hole and returned to my car, and drove as fast as I could until the mountain fell out of sight behind me.
In the Deep Woods; The Light is Different There
Seanan McGuire
A CHILD will tell you, if asked, and if they are in the mindset to answer questions as they are posed and not as the child’s mind would have them interpreted—for the ears of children seem to work differently than the ears of adults, to be tuned to a different set of sighs and susurrations, not to the clean consonants and simple constructions of the adult vocabulary, and the answers of children are often similarly distorted by the journey they must take in being spoken—that sunlight is the same everywhere it falls. There
is only one sun, as so many songs have eagerly told them since the day of their birth; there is only one sun, and its light falls everywhere at the same speed, landing on the just and the unjust alike. Thus it stands to reason that the sun which falls on a quiet suburban street, or a lakeside cabin, must by its very nature be the same as the sun which falls on the trees of the deep and tangled wood beyond the lake.
Those children will already know, of course, that they are wrong, for if they are old enough to venture outside without supervision, even if they have never been farther from their beds than the safe enclosures of their backyards; that they are lying, which is a practice that even the most profoundly honest of children must frequently engage in: for adults have little interest in hearing truth from children, when lies are so much sweeter. The worlds of children are low to the ground, terrifying and confusing, filled with dangers adult minds have forgotten, truths adult hurts have forsaken. So at times, when the worlds of adults collide with others, they must be untrue to be believed. The truth is a rock too big to swallow, especially in adulthood, when years of caustic words and swallowing back inappropriate retorts has left their throats scarred and narrow.
The sunlight is not the same everywhere it falls, as anyone who has been to a desert or a wide urban parking lot, and also to the peak of a mountain or the crest of a hill, can tell you. The sun may be the same, but once the light has left the sun, it is transformed by travel and by time into something new, something as sweet and profound as a secret, sometimes kind and sometimes cruel, but always remaining sunlight. Desert sunlight is unforgiving—not bad, not malicious, but unforgiving, ready to punish any small mistake. Coastal sunlight is diffuse and muddled, unable to warm the frozen, unable to save the lost. And in the very deepest woods, where the trees stand sentinel over ground that has never been free of roots and rot, where the branches block the sky and the birds rule the universe, the sunlight falls like treacle, or like honey from a hive; it is not sweet, but it is slow, ponderous, and intentional. It cannot be called welcoming, cannot be called warm; when it strikes a human face, it offers no succor, extends no hand of welcome. The sun which falls in the deep of the woods does not want us there. It knows who it serves, and that master is not the quick, swift humanity of city and shore, is not the place where civilization meets curiosity, and drives the domesticated descendants of our feral ancestors to seek the woods and waters wild.