The Party at the Stone Ring

Thirtieth of August, 1925. Pell, R., age 17. Calf, thigh. Found inside the Ring at the forest's middle, among the fallen stones. Wolf, so-called. Survived. Harrow, T., present at the Ring. No further action.

(Inside the Ring. INSIDE. Why does everybody in this book keep ending up at the same rocks?? Also T., buddy, what were you doing there. — K.)

Mr. Carver lived. I'm putting that first because it's the only part of Thursday night I'm willing to talk about, and because by Saturday the whole town had decided it was a bear, a big confused bear, poor thing, and you could watch people say it at the Gas-N-Go with their eyes sliding off each other like the word was greased.

So naturally, on Saturday night, I went into the woods.

In my defense, I went with forty other people and a Bluetooth speaker.

The stone ring sits at the dead center of the Greywood, which you reach by following Juniper's phone flashlight down a deer trail for twenty-five minutes while she tells you which senior hooked up with which junior in which canoe. Then the trees just stop. There's a clearing, perfectly round, like somebody pressed a cookie cutter into the forest, and inside it a ring of standing stones, some upright, most tipped over and sunk into the moss like teeth in a bad jaw. Someone had built a bonfire in the middle. Someone else had wedged a Coors Light into a crack in the tallest stone like a birthday candle.

"Very Stonehenge," I said. "Very Stonehenge if Stonehenge had a frat."

"Don't touch the big one," Juniper said.

"Why?"

She shrugged, which in Hollowmere is a full sentence.

I touched the big one. It was warm. It was ten at night in a forest in Maine in late August, and the rock was warm as a radiator in a prewar walk-up, and I took my hand back and wiped it on my hoodie, my I ♥ NY hoodie, and decided I'd had a beer, which I hadn't yet, and then I had one, so it was true retroactively.

Ronan Holt was on the far side of the fire.

Of course he was. He was leaning against a toppled stone with his arms folded, gray eyes catching orange, looking at the party like a lifeguard looks at a pool full of toddlers. Nobody stood within six feet of him. Nobody had to be told.

I lasted eleven minutes before I walked over.

"You look like a Calvin Klein ad for disapproval," I said.

"You shouldn't be here."

"Wow. New material."

"I'm serious." He didn't unfold his arms. "Somebody got hurt two nights ago a hundred yards from your bedroom, and you hike out to the middle of the Greywood in the dark wearing a sign."

"It's a hoodie."

"It's a sign. It says tourist."

"It says I have taste in cities." I stepped closer, because he wanted me to step back, and I'm contrarian, it's a medical condition. "What do you actually know about Thursday, Holt? Because you showed up at school Friday with a scratch on your neck and the whole lunch table went quiet like somebody died. Again."

Something moved in his jaw. "Go home, Katie."

"Make me."

He looked at me then, really looked, the way you look at a subway map when you're already lost, and for a second I thought he might. Then he pushed off the stone and walked into the dark past the ring, and the party swallowed the space where he'd been.

I said something to Juniper about needing to pee. I did not need to pee. I went the opposite way from Ronan, out between two fallen stones and into the trees, because if I couldn't win the argument I could at least storm off from it, and storming off is a skill I perfected on the Upper West Side, thank you.

The music went thin fast. Fifty feet in, it was a tinny little heartbeat behind me. A hundred feet in, it was gone.

That's when the forest got quiet.

I don't mean quiet like a library. I mean the crickets stopped. All of them, at once, the way a bodega goes silent when somebody walks in with their hand in their jacket. The air was cold enough to see my breath in the phone light, and it smelled of pine and wet bark and, under that, something rank and coppery, like the floor of a butcher's van.

Something stepped behind me.

One step. Heavy. The kind of weight that makes the ground answer.

I turned the light. Trees. Ferns. A white moth spinning through the beam.

"Okay," I said, out loud, to nobody. "Okay, Blair Witch, very good, ten out of ten, I'll leave a review."

Another step, to my left now, and then a long, slow exhale, close enough that the ferns beside me bent with it, close enough that I felt it warm on the back of my hand.

I ran.

You don't run in these woods, city girl. He'd said that to me on the first day and I'd laughed at him, and now I understood it in my legs, because running made it run too. I heard it come off its haunches behind me, heard branches snap like celery, heard it breathing in great wet pulls that weren't panting so much as tasting. My phone light jerked across trunks. A root caught my sneaker and I went down hard, palms in the needles, phone skittering away face-down so the dark slammed shut.

I rolled over. There was a shape between two pines, low, long, too long, the shoulders humped up higher than my head would be if I stood. I couldn't see its face. I could see where the moon touched it and slid off, and two eyes catching nothing, holding the light like wet coins.

It lowered its head.

And then something came over me.

I mean over me, a gray blur off a rock ledge to my right, landing between me and the shape in an explosion of needles and dirt, and the sound it made wasn't a bark or a growl but a roar that started in a chest the size of an oil drum. A wolf. A wolf the way a Hummer is a car. Silver-gray, ruff standing up like a wire brush, so big its shadow covered my legs.

They hit each other.

I can't tell you what that looked like. I can tell you what it sounded like: teeth on teeth, a noise like somebody dropping a bag of bones down a stairwell, a scream that wasn't human and wasn't any animal on Animal Planet. The dark thing broke first. It went backward into the trees and didn't come back, and the forest swallowed it, branch by branch, until it was gone.

The wolf stood in front of me, flanks heaving. Blood ran down its shoulder in a black stripe. It turned its head, and the eyes were gray.

Then it started to come apart.

I want to be accurate, so I'm going to be accurate. The spine went first. It bowed, then cracked, a series of pops like knuckles, like bubble wrap under a boot, and the wolf dropped onto its side and the fur along its back rippled the way a pond does when you throw something heavy in. Its foreleg jerked. The paw splayed, and the toes pulled long, and I watched claws draw back into fingertips like a cat's but wrong, slow, wet, the nail beds closing over them. Its jaw shortened with a grinding sound I felt in my own teeth. It made a noise halfway through that was a whine and then was a word, or the start of one, and the fur went in, not falling out, in, sinking under skin like rain into dry dirt, and what was lying in the pine needles, on his hands and knees, shaking, steaming in the cold, was Ronan Holt.

No clothes. Blood everywhere. A gash across his shoulder open to something pale.

I did not make a joke.

I'm telling you that because I noticed it while it was happening, the way you notice your phone's not in your pocket. I opened my mouth and nothing was waiting there.

He lifted his head. "Katie."

"Don't," I said. My voice came out small and flat and not mine. "Don't come near me."

He came near me anyway. He got one hand in the dirt and then one knee under him and then he was crouched in front of me, close, so close the heat came off him like an open oven, like he was still running hotter than a person, and his hand closed around my wrist. Not hard. Just there. His pulse was going so fast against my skin I could count it, and mine was trying to match it.

"Are you hurt?" Furious, the way people are furious when they've been scared. "Did it touch you? Katie. Look at me. Did it touch you?"

"No."

His thumb moved once across the inside of my wrist, checking for something, or maybe just because. His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up. Neither of us breathed. I could smell blood and pine and him, and I swear the dark leaned in to watch, and I was aware, in a stupid, high, ringing way, that I was on my back in the dirt and he was naked and bleeding and a breath too close and I did not want to move.

He let go first.

"You can't tell anyone," he said.

I stared at the blood running down his arm, dripping off his elbow onto my hoodie, onto the red heart, so you couldn't tell where it stopped.

"Not Juniper. Not your parents. Not your father," he said, and something in how he said father went sideways. "Please. I'm asking you. If you say it out loud, it doesn't stay with you. It goes places. Please."

Ronan Holt said please. Twice.

Far behind us, through the trees, somebody at the stone ring turned the music back up. Bass, thudding, cheerful. Somebody whooped.

"Katie," he said.

I looked at my hand. His blood was in the lines of my palm, dark in the creases, warm, already going cold.

I didn't answer him. I didn't say anything at all.