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The cabin feels empty.
After five minutes, I step carefully to the back of the cabin. Sissy is already there, ear pressed against the shuttered window. She holds up her hands, shaking her head. No one inside. She raises her eyebrows. Shall we go in?
The front porch creaks under our weight despite our efforts to tread softly. At the door, Sissy takes hold of the knob, flinches at the cold, then grips it firmly. Her hand turns, and the door swings open with surprising quiet.
We step in, swiftly close the door behind us. Best to cut off the light streaming in as quickly as possible. Let sleeping dogs lie, if there are any. We step into a dark, narrow hallway, and wait for our eyes to adapt to the darkness. We wait for sounds we do not want to hear: skittering, scratching, hissing. But there is only silence.
Shapes emerge only gradually. We tiptoe into the room to our immediate left, the floorboards creaking under our boots. Our eyes scan the ceiling first; at the first hint of anyone sleeping up there, we’ll backtrack immediately out of the cabin and race away. But it’s empty, just a few crossbeams. A bare table and large storage closet furnish the otherwise empty room.
We venture cautiously to the room across the hallway. The ceiling is similarly clear of any sleeping, dangling bodies. A wooden stool sits in the corner, its circular seat like an open eye staring at us. It’s a tumbledown room, bereft of any other furniture, tinged with the smell of mold. Long eaves above us, oddly ominous. Something bad was done in this room, I think to myself, and shiver. We slink out.
There’s only one room remaining, located at the very end of the hall. Sissy is two paces ahead of me and her head snaps back as she enters the room. Her face lights up with hope.
It’s a bed. A flimsy mattress sitting on a narrow frame, a small blanket tousled against the pillow like shed snakeskin.
I walk to the windows, find a lever for the shutters. The shutters grate noisily upward. Daylight pours in, brighter than I remembered even though thick clouds now completely coat the sky. I now see a curious contraption hung against the far wall of the room. It looks like some kind of humongous kite, a monstrous moth nailed into the wood.
Sissy is at the bed, inspecting the mattress.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“I think this place has been empty for quite some time.” She sniffs, trying to detect lingering odors. “We bunker down here tonight. Hunt some game, build a fire, replenish our energy reserves, get a full night’s sleep. At first light tomorrow we’ll look around, see if we find anything else.”
“What if this is it? The Land of Milk and Honey.”
She walks to the window, stares out. “Then it is.”
I look at the bed. “Then where is he?”
12
LATER AT NIGHT. They are asleep in the bedroom: the boys squeezed on the mattress, feet dangling, Sissy curled into a wooden chair. I walk down the hallway, into one of the other rooms. We’d debated after dinner—a pair of hunted marmots cooked over fire—whether to close the shutters. In the end, we opted—the claustrophobic black tunnel apparently still affecting us—to risk keeping them open. I’m glad we did. The wintry landscape, cast in a silvery moonlit hue, is soothing. Even the looming mountain peak bestows a regal calm.
I wrap a parka jacket tightly around me, appreciating the warmth. It’s one of a number of clothing items we’d found stashed away in a wooden chest. Ben found the chest under the bed, and he’d shouted with glee when it opened to coats lined with rabbit fur, scarves, wool socks, and gloves. And an odd-looking vest, weighed down by hooks and carabiners attached top to bottom.
The house creaks constantly, the wooden beams shifting in the dropping temperatures. The noise—cracking loudly at times—frightened Ben as he settled into bed for the night.
Everything is okay, Ben, I can still hear Sissy’s voice in my head, everything is just fine.
Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps this is it. The end, the destination, the Promised Land. This cabin, this clearing, this mountain. And any moment now, my father will come hiking out of the woods and into this cabin.
Footsteps in the hallway. The sound startles me; as I spin around, my fingers scrape across the splintery windowsill. A stab of pain and I flinch my hand away. Warm beads of blood prick out of my finger.
It’s Epap. He peers drowsily into the room, moonlight hitting him flush in the face. I’m hidden in the shadows; he doesn’t see me. His face folds in puzzlement. He’s about to turn away when he sees something outside the window.
The whole structure of his face collapses, his pallor washing out. He drops into a crouch.
“Epap?” I say, stepping out from the shadows.
He jumps at the sound of my voice. But instead of scolding me, he presses his index finger against his lips. Then flicks his chin in the direction of the window. Staying low, I sidle over to him.
Somebody is standing in the clearing outside.
A dark lithe figure cut in the white snow. A girl.
Staring right at us.
13
SHE IS AS stationary as we are.
A young girl; I put her at thirteen or fourteen. She looks like a wood elf with her pixie-cut bleach-white hair and waifish figure. A black scarf is cinched around her neck, dark like the shell of a black scorpion. She’s expressionless as her eyes swivel from Epap to me and back to Epap again.
“No sudden moves,” I whisper to Epap, trying to keep my lips as still as possible.
“The shutters, we need to close them.”
“No time. She’ll be on us in two seconds. If we give her a reason.”
We stay very, very still.
“What now?” Epap asks.
“I don’t know.”
She takes a step toward us. Pauses. Lifts an arm, slowly, until a finger points directly at me. Then descends down again.
“I’m going out to her,” I say.
“No!”
“Have to. This cabin offers as much protection as a paper lantern. If she wants us, she’ll have us.”
“No—”
“She doesn’t know what we are. Otherwise she’d be at us already. I go out, lure her in. Then we pounce on her.”
“That’s not going to—”
“It’s the only play we have. Now go wake Sissy. Quietly.” I push through the front door.
I have lived among them my whole life. I know their mannerisms, can ape them down to their smallest nuances. I walk out calmly, without betraying a trace of fear. As I step off the front porch, I pause at the rim of darkness before stepping into the moonlight, my eyes half-lidded for effect. I let my steps flow smoothly, gliding through the snow, trying not to kick up any puffs of snow. I layer on my face an expression as bland as the moon. My arms hang at my sides without swinging.
And then I remember.
The blood on my hand.
She twitches spasmodically. She is looking at me anew with fervent interest. Her arms crook, her head tilts to the side, her eyes narrowing then widening.
She takes a step toward me, then another, and another, until her legs become a blur.
She comes at me, face beaming brightly, knifing through the snow, through the night air, like a whispered curse.
I steady myself, readying for the pounce. At my neck. They always go for the neck first.
From behind me, through the open door, I hear Epap—“Sissy, wake up wake up wake up!”—his voice as distant as the stars.
And the girl—
Something’s off.
She’s still running. Hasn’t even covered half the distance yet. Her arms still pumping the air, instead of pawing the ground on all fours. Her chest is heaving from exertion, clouds of snow kicking up around her.
And then it hits me all at once. I study her even as she draws closer, my suspicions being confirmed.
But not yet. There’s one last test. And it’s an all or nothing.
I raise my finger, the one dappled in blood.
Her eyes flick to my hand, halting
there for one endless second. Then shift back to my face, unmoved.
She’s not one of them. She’s one of us.
“Hey!” I shout, not sure what to say next. “Hey!”
And still she keeps running at me. From behind, I hear the clocking of feet on floorboards, drawing closer.
I spin around, arms raised high. Sissy is sprinting down the hallway; I see her dim shadow, one arm raised, the glint of a dagger about to be unleashed. “Sissy, wait!”
But I’m too late. As she clears the threshold, one foot planting on the front porch, she hurls the dagger. Because I’m standing in the direct path, she has to throw it off to the side, boomeranging the dagger toward the target.
I don’t wait—there’s no time. The boomerang trajectory has bought me three seconds.
