Margins

Ninth of September. Pruitt, A., age 67. Hands, forearms. Defensive. Lynx, so-called. Survived. Declined to name what she saw. No further action.

Juniper's aunt started at five-thirty on Wednesdays. By five-forty, I was crouched behind a rack of pamphlets called Hollowmere: Gateway to the Greywood! with my heart doing the thing it does on the Q train when the lights flicker between stations.

"You said it was a hook," I whispered.

"It is a hook," Juniper hissed back. "It's just a hook behind a lady."

The lady was Mrs. Dorrance, the clerk, a woman built like a mailbox and armed with a crossword. She had been on seventeen down for six minutes. I knew because I'd been counting, the way you count stops when you've missed yours and refuse to admit it.

The town hall smelled like floor wax and wet wool and the particular despair of municipal carpet. Somewhere upstairs a radiator clanked like it was trying to escape. Behind the clerk's desk, on a brass hook shaped like a pinecone, because of course it was, hung one long iron key.

"Okay," I said. "Plan B."

"We didn't have a plan A."

"Plan A was optimism. Plan B is me."

I stood up, tugged my hoodie straight so the I ♥ NY was centered like a badge, and walked to the desk with the confidence of a woman who has talked her way past a Soho bouncer with an expired learner's permit.

"Hi," I said. "Sorry. Super random. I think there's a raccoon in the bathroom? A big one. It looked at me like it had opinions."

Mrs. Dorrance lowered the crossword. "A raccoon."

"Or a very small bear. I'm from Manhattan, everything here is a bear to me."

She sighed the sigh of the deeply local, got up, and went down the hall toward the restrooms. Juniper was over the desk before the door swung shut. She tossed me the key. It was cold and heavier than it had any right to be, and it hummed against my palm like a phone on silent.

It did not hum. Keys don't hum. I'm telling you what my hand thought, not what happened.

The basement stairs were behind a door marked STORAGE in hand-painted letters, and they went down further than a building that size should have needed. Juniper held her phone flashlight. Neither of us said anything. The air got colder every step, pine and stone and old paper, and the walls went from drywall to brick to something rougher that looked hand-cut.

The door at the bottom was oak, black with age. The key turned like it had been waiting.

Inside: a desk. A green-shaded lamp. A wooden lectern, and on it, a book the size of a pizza box, bound in leather gone the color of dried blood. Somebody had left a fountain pen beside it, uncapped.

"Oh," Juniper breathed. "Oh, that's so much creepier than I wanted."

I opened it to the ribbon. Mr. Abbott's handwriting, neat as a tax form:

Twenty-sixth of August. Dunning, H., age 52.

Hank. Logging road. Wolf, so-called.

I flipped back. And back. The ink browned, then faded to rust, then the paper turned thick and furred and the handwriting went spidery and the spellings went feral, and it didn't stop. Pages and pages and pages of names, like a phone book for the dead.

Upstairs, a toilet flushed.

"She's coming back," Juniper said.

I shut the book. I picked it up. It was so heavy my elbows locked.

"Katie. Katie. We said look."

"I'm looking," I said. "At home. Where there's Wi-Fi."

We went out the side door by the recycling bins, because Mrs. Dorrance was yelling about raccoons at the front. Juniper peeled off toward her aunt's car with the key, promising to rehang it during the mopping, and I hugged the Register against my chest under the hoodie like a stolen baby and cut across the town green.

It was nearly dark. The streetlights in Hollowmere come on late and apologetically. Fog sat low on the grass, and beyond the last row of houses, the Greywood stood like a wall someone forgot to finish painting.

"That's not a library book."

I didn't scream. I want that on the record. I made a sound like a subway door closing on a backpack, which is different.

Caspian Crowe was sitting on the war memorial. Black coat, black jeans, a paperback open on his knee that he definitely hadn't been reading, because it was too dark to read. His hair fell over one eye. The other eye was on me, and on the very obvious rectangle under my sweatshirt.

"It's a tablet," I said. "Very retro. Kindle Classic."

"It's eleven hundred pages of vellum and rag paper." He closed his book. "And it's not yours."

"Are you going to call the cops? Does Hollowmere have cops? Or just a guy named Earl with a whistle?"

He slid off the memorial. He didn't hurry. He walked like he had nowhere better to be and knew I did, and he stopped close enough that I could smell him, cold air and ink and something like a struck match, and I had to tip my head back to keep looking at him, which annoyed me on a cellular level.

"Put it back," he said.

"No."

"You don't know what you're holding."

"Then tell me."

Something moved in his face. Not a smile. The ghost of a decision.

"Some books," Caspian said quietly, "read back."

"Okay, Edgar Allan Bro—"

He put two fingers on the spine of the book, through my hoodie, right over my sternum. Light pressure. Barely anything. My whole pulse went there to meet it.

"Read it," he said, "if you're going to. But read it carefully. And don't read it out loud."

Then he stepped back, picked up his paperback, and walked off into the fog toward the trees, and I stood there on the green with my heart slamming against a thousand-year-old book like it wanted to get in.

Let me be very clear: that was adrenaline. From the crime.

At home, I said hi to everybody in one breath and went straight upstairs. Mom was stirring something with the grim face she wears when cooking is a moral exercise. Owen didn't look up from his Switch. Lucy asked if that was a book under my sweatshirt, because Lucy can smell a book through drywall, and I said it was a feeling and she accepted that.

Dad was at the kitchen window. He was always at the kitchen window now. Right hand in his pocket.

"Where were you?" he said.

"Juniper's."

He looked at me a second too long. I looked back. Then he nodded and went back to watching the tree line, and I went upstairs, and that was the whole conversation. Two Harrows, perfectly polite, telling each other nothing.

I built a fort. I'm eighteen, I'm allowed. Duvet over the head, phone flashlight, the Register propped on my knees like I was doing homework for a class in being haunted.

And I read.

It's boring at first. That's the scariest part. Names, ages, body parts, the word so-called, and No further action, No further action, No further action, like a dripping tap. About forty pages in, I found a pen in my nightstand, a purple gel pen from a Duane Reade on 86th, and I started writing back.

Fourteenth of March, 1862. Coyle, R., age 19. Throat. Wolf, so-called. Deceased. No further action.

In the margin I wrote: "no further action" — groundbreaking investigative work, Hollowmere PD.

Second of June, 1871. Farr, M., age 8. Scalp, eyes. Raven, so-called. Survived, blind.

a BIRD?? what bird does this. pigeons in Bryant Park are aggressive but come ON.

I kept going. I kept writing. My notes got shorter.

Around page three hundred, I noticed it, because once you see a pattern your brain won't unsee it, like the face in a light switch. There were three kinds of wounds. Only three, ever. Throats and legs and long dragging tears: wolf, so-called. Eyes and scalps and faces, small deep punctures in clusters: raven, so-called. Hands and forearms and the backs of necks, four parallel lines: lynx, so-called. Never bear. Never coyote. Never moose, and Maine is basically moose soup.

Three. Like a lunch table.

I didn't write that one down. I sat with it in my fort, breathing my own warm air.

Then I noticed the second thing. The entries weren't even. Most years, a few. A handful. Then every hundred years or so, the pages went thick and crowded, the handwriting cramped like whoever was keeping the book couldn't keep up. 1725. 1825. 1925.

And in each of those years, somewhere in the swarm, the same last name.

Harrow, E., 1725.

Harrow, J., 1825.

I turned to 1925 with my thumb shaking, which I'm blaming on the flashlight angle.

Thirty-first of October, 1925. Harrow, T., age 18. Unharmed. Stood, did not choose. Forty-one dead in the following month. No further action.

Unharmed.

Age eighteen.

I read it four times. Stood, did not choose. Choose what? Stood where? Why was the only person in eleven hundred pages without a wound the one followed by forty-one bodies?

In the margin I wrote lol same name, small world and then I looked at it for a long time and scribbled it out until the purple went through the paper.

Underneath, smaller, I wrote: who are you.

Harrow isn't a weird name. There are Harrows in Ohio. There's probably a Harrow on Love Island. I told myself that in a calm, reasonable internal voice while my calm, reasonable hand flipped back to 1825 to check J.'s age.

Eighteen.

Outside my window, something tapped the glass. Once. Twice. A hard little beak sound.

I didn't look. For the first time since we'd moved here, I didn't open the curtain to tell it off. I turned off my flashlight and lay very still under the duvet with the book on my chest, and the tapping stopped, and the silence after was worse.

I didn't sleep so much as lose consciousness in shifts. At some point I heard the window across the hall slide up, two soft thuds on the porch roof, then the crunch of gravel. Max and Mia, doing their nightly impression of a raccoon heist. I waited for the third, lighter thud.

It didn't come.

What came instead, maybe an hour later, was Bea's voice through the wall, small and sleepy and perfectly conversational: "Hi, kitty."

I sat up so fast the Register slid off the bed and hit the floor like a dropped body.

I went to her room. Bea was kneeling on her window seat in her dinosaur pajamas, nose to the glass, waving. The garden was blue with moonlight, the tomato cages leaning like drunk skeletons. Nothing in it. Nothing at all.

"Where's the kitty, Bee?"

"He went." She yawned. "He was looking at the woods. He had his angry ears."

"Angry ears."

"Flat," she explained, and showed me with her hands, and climbed back into bed.

I stood at her window with the cold coming off the glass onto my face. Fog over the lawn. The fence. The trees beyond the fence, black and close and breathing, the pines doing that slow shushing thing, the smell of resin leaking even through the closed window. My bare feet had gone numb on the floorboards. I could hear the house tick. I could hear Bea's breath going long and even behind me.

And then I heard the scream.

A man's. Not far. Not deep in the Greywood, not mile four of some logging road. Close, out past our fence, where the Carvers' back field runs into the trees, short and raw and then cut off like somebody had yanked a cord.

Then something howled. Long, low, ragged at the edges, so near the window buzzed.

Downstairs, a lock snapped open. Dad's feet on the porch. Mom's voice saying his name, high and thin.

I grabbed my sneakers and my phone and the hoodie off the bedpost. I went back to my room, picked up the Register, and shoved it under the mattress, then stopped, pulled it back out, and flipped to the ribbon, to Hank Dunning, to the last line in Mr. Abbott's tidy hand.

The next line was blank.

Not for long, I thought, and went for the stairs, taking them two at a time toward the open front door and my father's flashlight swinging wildly across the dark, toward whatever was lying in the Carvers' field, before anyone could tell me to stay inside.