This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2023 by Joe Hill

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781662516894 (digital)

Cover design by Faceout Studio, Spencer Fuller

Cover illustration by Phantom City Creative

one

Willy rode up front, next to the real estate agent. Marianne sat in the back, her face turned to the window. The agent glanced at her now and then in the rearview mirror, probably wondering about Marianne’s unfocused eyes and air of dreamy disinterest, but Sally Timperley directed the sunny, inconsequential flow of her chatter at Willy.

He did his best to hold up his end, resenting Marianne for making him do all the work, resenting himself for resenting her. What part of New York are you from? We’ve got a place in Brooklyn. What do you do there? I work for a digital marketing outfit. Would you have to give that up if you moved to Maine? No, I’ve been working from home since COVID started, and management really couldn’t care less whether home is New York, Maine, or the Outer Hebrides. What’s your Brooklyn residence like? Well, it’s 840 square feet, it cost more than this farmhouse you’re going to show us, and my wife miscarried in the bathroom. I mopped up the blood myself, used a whole tub of Lysol Wipes, and now it feels like we live in a morgue. Thanks for asking.

But Marianne surprised him by interrupting.

“I grew up around here. In Brunswick,” Marianne said. “I lived twenty miles away and I never heard of Hobomeck. Not once, my whole life. Isn’t that funny?”

“It’s out of the way,” Sally said, darting another look at Marianne in the rearview.

“And I’ve never met anyone from here,” Marianne went on, as if Sally hadn’t spoken. “I never knew anyone who knew anyone from Hobomeck. It’s like it didn’t exist until last week, when Willy saw the farmhouse on Zillow.”

“It’s almost all farms in Hobomeck. But Wiscasset is close, and Wiscasset is to die for. Great seafood, lots of shopping,” Sally told her.

“Maybe Hobomeck only reveals itself to you when you need Hobomeck,” Marianne said.

After that, they drove in silence. The trees along the sides of the road had been hit hard by gypsy moths, and the branches were cloaked in sticky sheets of white webbing. On every oak, a thousand fat caterpillars squirmed inside those milky shrouds, blindly gorging themselves on their dying hosts. Willy tried to imagine what it would be like to be wrapped in those clinging funeral sheets, unable to move or scream, while a horde of caterpillars wriggled all over him. The last year had made him morbid.

Marianne was roused again, ten minutes later, by the sight of a couple making their way arm in arm along the side of the road. They looked like they had walked off the set of a Jane Austen miniseries. The woman wore a white nineteenth-century bonnet that enclosed her face in a linen cone, hiding her features entirely. Her stooped and shrunken husband swam inside his clothes: a stiff brown frock coat and a pair of black trousers with pipestem legs. An old-fashioned neckerchief frothed at his throat. His eyes were bright and alarmed, as if he had never seen an automobile before and quailed before this dreadful chrome vision from the future. They drove past, trailing a skirt of dust, and the old man clapped a hand to his head to keep his straw boater from sailing off.

“Oh, are the Amish here?” Marianne asked. “Maybe that’s why I never met anyone from Hobomeck. Brunswick is a long ride by horse and buggy.”

“Mm? No, not Amish,” Sally said in a distracted sort of way, peering ahead for the next turn. “Those are Sin-Planters. There’s still a few of them around. They’re like the Amish—or the Shakers—but also not. One of those little religious movements that were a lot more popular when people churned their own butter.”

“Do they still churn their own butter?” Marianne asked.

“They do. You can buy blocks of it at the Hobomeck country store, which is, by the way, destination shopping for folks in the area. Lovely little market. Can you imagine milking cows when you’re ninety? That’s all that remains of them now, a half dozen nonagenarians who think zippers are immoral. This is their last generation. They’ll be extinct soon.”

“Why are they called Sin-Planters?” Marianne asked. “That can’t be their real name.”

“No, that’s just what folks round here call them. The Covenant of the Sorrowful Leaf, that’s their real name. They worship in groves instead of churches. They planted trees when they first arrived, and they were hung from them in bunches, first by the Pequot, then by the Methodists, then the Catholics. Everyone took a turn.”

“Did they use sin as some kind of organic fertilizer?” Willy asked.

He was joking, but Sally Timperley said, “Apparently,” and turned the wheel, and they began to bump up a long, rutted dirt drive. “We’re here.”

The farmhouse was a broad, two-story sprawl right out of a Wyeth painting. It perched on the very top of the hill, surrounded by ten acres of open meadow, with the forest hemming it in on three sides. White pines as tall as ships’ masts prodded an improbably blue sky.

Once they were through the front door, Sally settled in beside Marianne, and the two women walked nearly shoulder to shoulder, while Willy trailed behind. He was curious to see how they got on. At some point on the ride, Sally had correctly concluded she didn’t need to sell the house to him. It was Marianne who needed to be wooed and won.

And as they toured the first floor, something in Marianne seemed to stir. It lifted his heart to see it—it was like watching her stretch and yawn as she woke from a peaceful afternoon nap. She was a graphic designer by trade and understood color. She could throw a light citrus hue on a wall and turn a drab space into something from the Amalfi coast. She could rescue an eighty-year-old packing crate from a junk shop and upcycle it into a coffee table right out of the Restoration Hardware catalog. And the Hobomeck farmhouse already had so much of what she liked: barn-board siding, lots of natural light, windows big as doors.

The kitchen was, at first glance, a disappointment after the high-ceilinged den and the walnut-paneled dining room. The wallpaper was the green of split pea soup, the color of sickness. The floor was cruddy black-and-white linoleum, peeling up in one corner. Marianne tugged it back to reveal cherrywood beneath.

“Why would anyone cover that lovely floor?” Sally cried.

“They had a dog,” Marianne said, nodding toward the back door. There was a large flap at the bottom, big enough for a child to crawl through. “But we don’t. This lino could come right up. That wood just glows.”

Sally cocked a hip, put her thumb under her chin, like a woman examining a painting in a gallery. “Take down that wallpaper too?”

Marianne nodded. “Get a fresh coat of paint in here. Cream, maybe—something that takes advantage of all the sunshine. I love this big black oven, though. Look at those lion-paw feet. You wouldn’t believe what you could get for this oven in Park Slope.”

After that, the women talked with an easy comfort . . . right up until they climbed to the second floor. The master bedroom was across the landing, facing the top of the steps. A narrow corridor, overlooking the stairwell, led to a pair of additional bedrooms.

“You got your home office space for now,” Sally said, “and plenty of room for the kids once you get started.” Marianne jerked her head, flushed, and quickly turned away. Sally reached for her shoulder. “Oh no, darling, what did I say? Have I been stupid?”

But even the tears were all right, Willy thought. Marianne accepted Sally’s hug and smiled in the face of Sally’s indignation on their behalf—as if there were somewhere they could lodge a complaint about Marianne’s miscarriage. By the time they came back downstairs, Sally and Marianne were laughing about something, and when Marianne caught Willy’s eye, her gaze bright and wicked, he felt a rush of gratitude. Sometimes when you needed a break, the world threw you a rope.

As he went down the steps into the yard, Willy was breathing freely for what seemed the first time in months. It was late in the day, the heat fading, the sun low enough to be obscured by the pines that crowned the top of the hill. The women held up just inside the front door, talking with an animation that he would’ve imagined impossible that morning.

He left them behind and wandered, wanted to see what he was already thinking of as his land. The notion delighted and amazed him in equal measure, the idea of making all this his . . . William Halpenny, the thirty-seven-year-old son of a single mother who’d had her car repo’d more than once, who’d sent him to school with mayonnaise sandwiches, who would pack them up and move them in the middle of the night to stay ahead of creditors.

Willy had seen a shed when they pulled in, just to the east of the house, near a gap in the tree line. The farmhouse was well kept, but that shed tilted to one side, and the mossy shingle roof was partially caved in. It stood like a tollbooth to one side of a wide and grassy lane plunging away into the forest. They’d almost certainly have to pull it down, but he wandered over for a look inside anyway.

He drew back the wooden bolt, and the door creaked open with a sound right out of a third-rate haunted house ride. He peered into a darkness pierced with dusty shafts of fading sunlight. The shed was heaped with junk: an old push mower, a woodsman’s hatchet, a stack of corroded paint cans. He saw a rusting pitchfork in one corner and ducked through the low doorway for a better look. It was the kind of thing Marianne could clean up, hang on a wall, and turn into art. Something crunched under his shoes, and when he looked he saw what he first thought were bits of broken china on the floor. When he sank to a squat, though, he realized they were the bones of small animals. The long, delicate skull of a rat—or maybe a bat—its underslung jaw bristling with thorns of bone, grinned cheerfully up at him. That was fine. Bones didn’t disturb him. This shed had been at the forest’s edge for decades and no doubt had been home to any number of scavengers.

But when he stood, he rose into a cobweb, which spread itself—sticky and clinging—across his face. He was going to shout in surprise and then it was in his mouth, a taste of autumn, of dust, insects, and mold. His mind flashed back to the oaks along the highway, smothered inside shrouds of webbing, crawling with fat and hungry caterpillars—an awful thing to remember. He swiped the cobweb off his face and got out of there as the women came around the side of the house. He waved and put a big fake grin on his face, like he hadn’t just eaten a spider sandwich.

The gap in the trees opened onto a broad green avenue that dipped down the side of the hill and out of sight. It was lined with ancient yews. The branches had been thrashed by the prevailing easterlies to make a dim, witchy tunnel over the lane. Yet it was peaceful, too, suggested the nave of a ruined church. What had Sally said on the ride? The Sin-Planters believed wild spaces were more holy than any church a man could build? He thought they had a point. He wondered what it smelled like, imagined the sweet odor of pine and moss and crushed leaves. He hadn’t been able to smell anything since getting COVID-19.

The women fell in beside him.

“The bridle path,” Sally said.

“Those trees were around before my grandparents were born and will probably still be here when my grandchildren are—” Willy remembered there would never be any grandchildren and broke off. He felt a sharp need to change the subject and said: “No gypsy moths. I wonder why. They don’t like yews?”

“I’m sure gypsy moths like yew,” Marianne said. “Don’t be so sensitive.” And he laughed—harder, really, than the joke deserved, but it was such a relief to know he hadn’t screwed up her good afternoon with a careless comment about grandchildren.

“Did the Sin-Planters plant them?” he asked.

“That’s why the moths won’t touch them,” Marianne said before Sally could answer. “It’s forbidden.”

He laughed again, and when they started back to the house, they were holding hands.

Marianne glanced toward the shed. “What’s in there?”

“A rodent graveyard. Something’s been using the place to chow down on the local rat population, with the occasional warm, squealing bat for dessert.”

“Yummy!” Marianne cried. “What kind of varmint are we talking about?”

“Who cares? It’s going to have to find a new place to eat lunch after we knock down the shed.”

“You leave that shed right where it is, Mr. Halpenny,” Marianne told him. “We don’t want whatever it is moving in with us.”

Which was when he knew for sure they were coming to Maine.

two

The last hours before the miscarriage were as happy as any in their marriage: they had a good, energetic late-afternoon screw and ordered Thai from Grubhub afterward. Marianne found herself suddenly desperate for crab rangoon, a thing she couldn’t remember eating in years. They had laughed about it—her first pregnancy craving.

They ate in their pajamas, sitting around their massive old butcher’s block, the food spread on the paper bags it came in. Willy felt well used and content, a sensation magnified by a couple of glasses of sake (cranberry juice for Marianne). He had a yellow curry and she ate her crab rangoon and they talked about taking their kid to the Salt Marsh Nature Center to hunt for crabs in tide pools. Willy could almost see him, a boy in rubber boots and a white bucket hat, the hair beneath a tousled brownish red like his mother’s, his face solemn and serious, a pail in one hand and a plastic shovel in the other.

He struggled up from sleep at 1:00 a.m. and found Marianne awake, sitting against the pillows, smiling thoughtfully with a hand on her stomach. She said there had been a few sharp twinges, a sense of tightening. She told him she thought her uterus was doing warm-up stretches. He fell asleep again with his head against her shoulder, while she gazed into the dark corner of their bedroom, as if studying a distant object on the far horizon.

Afterward, she said it was her fault. “I did this,” she said in the hospital waiting room, her arms wrapped around her abdomen. “This is my fault.”

“Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t start building up a narrative. How could it be your fault?” he asked her.

He couldn’t get it out of her, not there, not then. It took days, and when she finally confessed, it was by text, writing from the bedroom while he sat in their living room / kitchen. She had ignored the cramps, had laughed them off, while her baby was dying. If I listened to my body, she texted him. If I didn’t go back to sleep.

Somehow he knew that wasn’t all of it, but it took another few days of delicate prying to get the rest out of her. She had eaten shellfish, she texted him, as if they were in different countries, not different parts of their condo. She had poisoned herself and the fetus with it.

He sent her a link to the Mayo Clinic with a list of pregnancy-safe seafood. Crab was the first item on the list. As for this shit about not listening to her body, she had never been pregnant before, so she couldn’t possibly know the difference between the ordinary sharp pains of early pregnancy and the sort of pain that indicated something more. He didn’t add that he believed those first sharp tugs of pain had only struck after the baby was dead, had been the beginning of her body rejecting the fetus.

It didn’t matter what he said or didn’t say, though. Nothing helped. Her complexion took on a waxy translucence, and for weeks she wore the zonked-out expression of someone who had just woken from a too-heavy nap. She watched bad TV instead of working, shows she hated: daytime talk, cable news blather. She fell months behind on projects. Her editors reassigned work to other graphic designers and sent kindly meant emails about taking the time she needed.

It frightened him to see her so shattered. He did crazy things to draw her back from the bleak, private place she had retreated to inside herself. He bought a lamp at Anthropologie. He filled the house with oil diffusers so everything would smell of lemons and mint instead of sadness. He did the laundry, the dishes, wouldn’t let her anywhere near a chore. He got takeout from everywhere she loved (everywhere except the Thai place), and eight weeks after they lost the baby, he went to her favorite burger bar and came back with two SmokeShacks, a couple of milkshakes, and a whopping side of COVID.

Willy thought she almost welcomed it. The virus let her stay in bed for most of a month, in the dark, hating herself without distraction. She wore the same clothes for ten days straight. He didn’t say anything.

He himself spent two nights feeling as if he were trying to breathe with a small child sitting on his chest. When he recovered, his sense of smell was gone, which made him feel stupid for spending two hundred bucks on essential-oil diffusers. For weeks afterward, climbing stairs exhausted him.

The condo felt smaller than ever, the floor covered in drifts of used Kleenex, the trash spilling over because they were both too tired to pull the bag. This is literally a place of sickness and death, he thought, with something very like desperation.

While Marianne dozed, he opened his laptop and pulled up Zillow, Christie’s, RE/MAX, and Downeast Properties. A year into the pandemic—when working from home began to seem like the new normal—they had started to talk about getting out of Brooklyn and moving to Maine, where Marianne had grown up. She wasn’t pregnant then, and their discussions were a harmless daydream, a fantasy of scouring ocean breezes and fisherman sweaters. But in the months after the miscarriage, it started to seem a matter of desperate importance. It became usual for him to work with fifteen tabs open in his browser, a different listing on every one. Get her out, he thought. Get her out, get her out. It was less like she was lying in their dark bedroom, surfing the web to read about other women’s miscarriages, and more as if the building had collapsed on them and they were trapped under tons of brick and plaster. They had to escape, back to sunlight, back to air. Get her out, he muttered, when he tossed oil diffusers in the trash. Get her out, he said under his breath, while he dragged the garbage bins to the curb. Get her out, he told himself, as he carried the lamp from Anthropologie down the street to Goodwill—it was too big for their little condo.

It never once crossed his mind that he was depressed, too, that he had also lost a child.

three

A few weeks after they moved into the Hobomeck place, Marianne took their new Prius to look at curtains in Wiscasset and left Willy to himself. He had a performance review at four, but in the early afternoon his line director, Val Derrickson, hit him up on Slack to ask if they could kick it to next week. His kid was home from school with stomach flu, and his wife couldn’t cover.

You’re smarter than the rest of us—you didn’t have kids, Halpenny. Hot-blooded little sacks of infection with innocent, smiling faces. I envy you.

Willy smiled reflexively when he read Val’s message and ignored the sour throb in his stomach. Val had no idea why Willy didn’t have kids. Willy hadn’t talked to anyone about the pregnancy, and if he didn’t talk about that, he sure wasn’t about to spill his guts about the miscarriage.

He was in a bad mood after Val’s message and didn’t know it, not at first. He discovered his bad mood only when he tried to leave his office—one of the spare bedrooms upstairs. The doors all hung crooked in the Hobomeck house, and when he tried to step into the hallway, his office door stuck. He gave it one pull, and bumped it with his shoulder, and it didn’t open, and then suddenly he was kicking at it with a kind of blind ferocity. After it sprang open, he was embarrassed by his own outburst and thought he might feel better if he went outside. It was always a mental relief to him, to step into his wheat-colored field, where he could get some fresh air on his face and watch the butterflies blowing about like shreds of confetti after a parade.

It came to him then that he could do whatever he liked with the rest of his day, and what he liked was the thought of surprising Marianne with a homemade dinner. Some lollipop lamb chops with potatoes twice cooked in duck fat, that would tie up the day nicely. Willy’s earliest jobs had been in restaurants, dropping baskets of fries into hot grease—he still had the shiny burn marks on his forearms. Even without his sense of smell, he could enjoy the oily fats and sharp salts of some rare lamb chops. He wondered how hard it was to get an Uber in Hobomeck as his gaze drifted to the gap in the woods and the bridle path beyond.

He checked his phone to make sure of the distance, zooming in for a close look. If you traveled by the road, it was nearly two miles to the country store. But the bridle path went straight there, following a line that could’ve been drawn with a ruler. It looked like a walk of less than a mile.

The thought of a ramble lifted his spirits. He set out under a fair blue sky, the sun warm on his shoulders, until he reached the wood and descended into the tunnel of cool shadows under the yews. It filled him with an almost superstitious delight to walk beneath them. Their branches curved above him like the blackened ribs of some monstrous creature, the ancient bones of a beached megalodon. He whistled a single note and stopped. It felt like whistling in a monastery.

Beyond the trees, on either side of him, were overgrown meadows, farmland that had not been cultivated anytime this century. Picturesque stone walls, old enough to predate electric lights, meandered along the edges of the fields. Bees produced an atonal thrum from the wildflowers, a sound that naturally put him into a sleepy, daydreaming trance. He had an idea that he might follow this path all the way from Hobomeck and into thirteenth-century Camelot. Meet a pretty girl in one of those silky dunce caps (why did the princesses all wear dunce caps back then?) and learn to play a lute.

He emerged from the forest some ten minutes later, and the Hobomeck country store was there, just across the Lowell Town Road, painted the fire-truck red common to New England farmhouses. It was barnlike inside, with a floor of wide planks, and eight aisles of Ye Olde Maine Crappe: hand-painted wooden loons, novelty baseball caps with beer cozies on the sides. But the place was even bigger than it looked at first glance, with a whole second room through the back containing a gourmet grocery store that wouldn’t have been out of place in Park Slope. They had raw milk from local farms, bags of heirloom apples, and, yes, blocks of locally churned butter (Sacred Arbors Sweet Cream Milk Made in Hobomeck, Maine, with Sea Salt and Joyful Hearts).

The country store was kept by a gregarious English transplant named Brian Goodkind, who ran the place with his American wife and an assortment of daughters and granddaughters. He chatted with the customers while the women stocked shelves and rang people up and did whatever else needed doing. Goodkind was as tall and gaunt as Lincoln. His pale-blue eyes glittered with knowing mischief above a grandfatherly white beard. He had apparently never heard a crackpot theory he didn’t like; he spoke loudly, without embarrassment, about the health benefits of cold-coffee enemas and believed the Nazca Lines were ancient landing strips for UFOs. Willy had liked him from the first.

“Where’s the missus?” Goodkind asked.

“Took the car to Wiscasset for some retail therapy. I walked.”

“Come by the bridle path, then?”

“Seemed the fastest way and it’s a good day for it.”

Goodkind lifted his chin and cast a genial, considering gaze across Willy’s purchases. “I hope you’re not going to have those lamb chops without a Bordeaux.”

“I’d pair it with a Syrah,” Willy said, “but I’ve just about bought too much as it is. If I add even one more thing, I won’t be able to carry it all home.”

“Oh, well,” Goodkind said. “I’ve got you, my son. Leave your bags and follow me.”

Goodkind led Willy out onto the front porch, down the steps, and around the side of the shop. There was a carriage house set back from the gravel parking lot. Willy hesitated at the hay-strewn entrance, but Goodkind plunged into the dark, past a John Deere riding mower. In the dimness, Willy glimpsed stalls that had not held horses in decades. Ancient tack hung from rusted nails.

He heard the soft squeak of wheels, and Goodkind emerged from the shadows pushing an antique baby carriage. The wheels were comically large and ornate, almost as big as the tires on a ten-speed. The basket had been painted sky blue, once, but the paint was mostly gone, revealing gray wood beneath. The canvas canopy was spotted with cancerous blotches of mold. Drapes of canvas mostly hid the mattress within, but Willy had a glimpse of it, just as blackened and mildewed. As Goodkind approached him, Willy felt a woozy wave of light-headedness wash over him. The old Cat Stevens song “Here Comes My Baby” started up in Willy’s imagination, and he thought, with a kind of dreadful hilarity: It’s a boy!

He shoved the thoughts aside with something like resentment. He needed a way to get his shopping home, and Goodkind had found him one. There was nothing more to it than that.

“Are you sure? I don’t want to take anything valuable.” Or infectious, Willy thought.

“I don’t think anyone cares about this except the moths. I had a notion of fixing it up and selling it once, but by the time I got done replacing things, it would be the Ship of Theseus, wouldn’t it?” Which was a typical Goodkind-ism. In his flannel shirt and hiking boots, he looked like any Maine bumpkin, but then he’d make some remark about the exile of Ovid in that voice that made him sound like Ian McKellen.

“I’ll bring it back,” Willy promised.

“And load it up again! All part of my diabolical plan to keep you from patronizing the competition.”

As if there was any competition.

“Guess I better pop back inside for my bags—and that bottle of Bordeaux we were talking about.”

“Or a Syrah. I can point you to a nice one.”

“Either way—I appreciate the loan of the carriage.”

“Oh, that’s not a carriage, mate,” Goodkind told him. “That’s a pram.”

four

As he pushed the pram along, Willy felt, at first, a splendid melancholy. The wheels made no sound on the pine needles in the black tunnel of twisted branches. First comes love, then comes miscarriage, then comes Willy with a lonesome bottle of red in a baby carriage.

The miscarriage had been termed medical waste, not a baby. There had been no funeral. It seemed to him now, as it seemed to him then, that there should’ve been something—some public expression of grief for the baby that wasn’t. He was never going to carry that child on his shoulders at the zoo, pausing to watch gibbons spring from tree to tree. He would never lift the boy gently from the back of the car after a long late-night drive and carry him ever-so-carefully to bed. Marianne had already told him she couldn’t try again, couldn’t go through it, just to be destroyed once more. Their love would end with them.

The weight of the pram was exactly like there was a baby hidden beneath the canopy. He did the math. Their son would’ve been nearly half a year old now. Gurgling and babbling and waving his hands just to get a look at them. The thought was a swallow of acid. He didn’t feel they had lost a baby; it had been stolen from them, along with their daydreams, their whole idea of the future. Alone, in the woods, with no one to judge him, he could help himself to all the resentment he liked. Striding along the bridle path, he could admit it felt good to marinate in an unfocused and unmoderated rage.

He began the long climb uphill home, and although the stroller made it possible to schlep his groceries, it was still a workout. Sweat tickled the back of his neck. He whistled for a while—he didn’t feel like he was in church anymore—then sang under his breath. Old habit. Willy had always sung to himself, usually in a voice pitched to just above a whisper, whenever he was occupied with a mindless chore. He sang now in a toneless, half-angry, half-comic chant.

“I got the blues, I feel so lonely,” he sang. “I’d give the world if I could only.” He would’ve sung to his child exactly this way, every time they went for a walk together. “Baby won’t you please come home? I have tried in vain, evermore to call your name—” And then he remembered how the rest of the song went and his voice trailed off.

The baby gave a low, musical coo. Willy thought he wanted to hear more and was about to take it from the top when he remembered there was no baby. His pulse quickened. He stuck in place, his scalp crawling with a sensation that was partly alarm and partly a dreadful fascination.

The coo came again . . . and he recognized it as the call of a mourning dove. He exhaled, a sudden weakness of relief in his legs.

“Scared me for a minute, kiddo,” he told the baby that wasn’t there. Some groceries shifted as he started pushing again. Just like an infant kicking its feet.

He put the pram in the shed and carried the bags of groceries the last hundred feet to the house. It wouldn’t do for Marianne to see him with the baby stroller, could only stir up bad associations. He’d find a reason to roll it back to the country store another day.

Dinner was a hit. The chops were so rare they bled.

five

“Babe,” Marianne said into his shoulder at two in the morning. He startled awake. “You’ve got to do something about the dog door.”

“What?” he asked. His head was swimmy with sleep.

She didn’t answer, had already drifted off again. In another few moments, he was unconscious, too, and by morning he had forgotten all about it.

six

Marianne suffered migraines, and ten days later, on the first of August, she had a bad one and took herself to bed in the early afternoon. Her migraines had been frequent and bleak since the very beginning of pregnancy and had continued to make house calls in the months after losing the baby. Her doctor said it was hormones. First her body had turned against the baby; then it turned against her. The unfairness of it angered Willy. It made him want to strangle someone. God, perhaps. Give him some nails—Willy would crucify the unjust bastard all over again.

He worked in the office née spare bedroom, a window open a crack to keep it from getting stuffy. It had been warm all day, but as the sun edged toward the earth’s rim, a breath of cooler air wafted in, and when he inhaled, he caught a whiff of yew and balsam fir. He continued to work for another minute, then abruptly sat up and inhaled, drawing air deeply into his lungs through his nostrils. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t bring back that sweet, delicious hint of evergreens. The smell was gone as suddenly as it had come . . . if it had been there at all. If he had not merely imagined it.

He wondered if a walk, accompanied by some healthy deep breathing, might be just the thing to give his sense of smell another jolt. This was followed by another thought—the Midol hadn’t touched Marianne’s migraine but a gin and tonic might, and they had Bombay Sapphire at the country store. Just the thought of getting out of the house and taking himself into the green dark of the bridle path filled him with pleasure. He longed for the scent of pine needles as they were gently crushed under the wheels of the pram.

He tramped out to the shed, threw the bolt, and creaked the door open. The shed had just a single window, and he had left the pram parked in front of it. The glass was nearly opaque with filth, so the light was gray and diffuse but still strong enough to render that rotten old canopy semitransparent. Willy took a step toward it, small bones crunching underfoot, and something sat up inside the pram, a dark shape silhouetted against the canvas. Two black, wizened, childlike fingers reached out from within and closed around the lip of the basket.

Willy found himself fighting for air, couldn’t seem to pull any oxygen into his lungs. He moved convulsively, all at once, in a burst of panicky courage, shoving the canopy aside. A raccoon lifted its face to him and hissed, showing the tip of a rough pink tongue. Its bright eyes flashed, an infected metallic red in the watery sunshine. It leaped, not away from him but toward him, toppling the pram as it came out of it. Willy choked on a scream and stumbled back into the doorframe, rapping his head. The raccoon’s awful little paws scrabble-scratched at the floor as it launched itself out of sight into the back of the shed, disappearing between a half-open umbrella and an elderly hoe.

“You little son of a bitch,” he shouted after it. “Get fucked and die.”

His vision darkened and brightened in pulses, keeping time with his pounding heart. He stood the pram up, his movements jerky, overcaffeinated. He dragged it out and threw the door of the shed shut. It banged against the frame and wobbled open again. Fuck it. He spat, once, twice, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. Then he laughed because his hands were shaking. The fearless urban dweller, who’d stalked the Brooklyn bodegas and bars after midnight with the confidence of a man who has drunk some drinks and fought some fights . . . reduced to a shaking mess after being mugged by a thirty-pound rodent.

When he went down into the woods, he had a touch of a headache himself. He didn’t know fear could also give one a hangover. It was a bright, almost cloudless day—the sky was appallingly blue—which had the effect of making the path under the trees that much darker, a green well descending into fathoms of gloom. He was glad for it, wanted the darkness. His sense of smell did not return, and he was not surprised. The universe had settled into the business of taking things away from him: the baby, his simple married happiness, the sensual enjoyment he took from the smell of pines.

An insect of some sort droned pitilessly. The sound was everywhere or maybe nowhere. He had the unsettling idea it was only in his head. That idiotic thrumming sound was the sound of his own resentment. He felt dangerous, as if he had gone into the woods with a loaded weapon and bad intentions. When the raccoon had moved inside the pram, Willy had felt something beneath that jolt of panic, a galvanizing thrill of . . . excitement. Some part of him had thought—he shook his head, couldn’t even allow himself to admit what he had thought, only that it was something childish and sad and he hated himself for thinking it.

He came out of the forest and stood on the side of the Lowell Road, while a logging truck lumbered past, trailing a whirlwind of bark and eight or nine cars. While he was waiting for a chance to cross to the country store, he happened to see a funny thing. Goodkind stood at the half-open barn door of the carriage house, in close conference with a pair of elderly Sin-Planters. It might’ve been the same couple Willy had seen on the day Sally Timperley had shown them the farm. The old woman wore a bonnet with a cone almost a foot long. Her husband’s coarse brown frock coat had last been in fashion before scurrilous inventions like the radio and the telephone. Of course, Goodkind was on excellent terms with the old folk of the Covenant. He bought all manner of local produce from them—not just blocks of butter, but also fiddleheads, radishes, tomatoes, and late-summer corn. Willy supposed they were talking trade now, though the way they stood, with their heads bowed and close together, they might just as well have been sharing a prayer.

He left the pram on the country store’s wide front porch, went in, and gathered up his groceries: cans of elderflower tonic water, the bottle of Bombay Sapphire, cream, bucatini, a block of the local holy butter. By the time he reached the register, Goodkind had resumed his usual perch on the stool behind the counter. One of his girls began to ring Willy up.

“Better hold on to the pram,” Goodkind said. “You’re going to need it, if you’re going to haul all that back along the bridle path.”

“Funny the way the trees grow along the trail. It’s less like a path, more like a tunnel.”

“Not a tunnel. A funnel!” Goodkind said and waggled his eyebrows.

“What do you mean?”

“That path is on a ley line,” Goodkind told him. “You must have felt it. The Covenant did, and they acted accordingly. Planted their trees all along it. Planted them and nourished them with blood. They cut themselves, you see? In the old times, it was no easy thing for a supplicant to join the Covenant. Took years. One of the final steps, before a fellow could be admitted, he had to hack a cross into his palm and bleed for a tree. Drain his sin into the soil. The Covenant planted groves around here. If you stand in them with a compass, the needle will whirl every which way without ever finding north—circles of trees containing little eddies of energy. And then there’s the bridle path, which is little more than a funnel a mile long.”

“Funnel for what?”

“Don’t know,” Goodkind said and shrugged with a laugh. “Only those who have made the final sacraments can know all their secrets, which leaves out blokes such as you and I. But a funnel is just a tool. You can pour anything into one. Fuel. Grain.”

“Resentment,” Willy murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing. Speaking of grain, though—I should’ve grabbed a loaf of sourdough.”

“We’ve got some fresh out of the oven,” Goodkind said. “Still hot. Haven’t even put them out yet. Let me get you one.”

He bounded away on his gangly legs, leaving Willy with one of Goodkind’s innumerable women. She wasn’t his wife—a daughter, perhaps, or granddaughter, with straight brown hair and a heavy unibrow. She piled Willy’s last items in a brown paper bag.

“Leave it here,” she said, her voice a kind of angry whisper. “Just leave it.”

None of Goodkind’s women had ever spoken to him before, and he was taken aback, wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly. “The pram? Brian said it would be okay to keep using it.”

She opened her mouth to say something else—there was urgency in the whole forward lean of her body—but then Goodkind appeared behind the counter again, and she pressed her lips together and shoved his groceries at him. Willy looked at the girl, perturbed, expecting more, but she turned and disappeared into the back office without another glance at him.

“Give us this day our daily bread!” Goodkind cried and handed Willy the loaf, steaming and fragrant in its paper wrap.

“And forgive us our trespasses?” Willy asked.

“We should be so lucky,” Goodkind told him and waggled his eyebrows again.

seven

He held his bags and stared into the basket of the pram. Black mold blotched the striped mattress. Maybe that was why the girl had told him to leave it. Possibly she thought it was unhygienic. Very likely she was right. And never mind the mold. Did he really want to put his groceries in that thing, after a raccoon had been nesting in it? A better question was: Did he want to carry twelve pounds of shopping back, midges landing on his face, feasting on his sweat, while his hands were full and he couldn’t swat them away? The food, unlike him, had some protection. The groceries went into the pram.

Goodkind’s talk about ley lines and feeding the yews on sinful blood had not made him skittish about the bridle path. Quite the opposite. He liked the idea that there was force here and the old folks had known it. He liked the idea that they had created an avenue sheltered from the awfulness of the everyday, a green burrow that ran outside reality, a place where it was juuuuust about possible to visit the life that had been stolen from him. To vacation in an alternate, better timeline. The sky was bright, but the sun was down behind the hills, and it was dark and solemn in the tunnel of yews. His headache was gone. His walk to the store had funneled it away . . . a thought that pleased him intensely. It seemed to him now he had spent months quaking with fury. He liked the idea that all his undirected hate could be funneled away, leaving him drained, refreshed, and restored.

Here on the bridle path, with no one to watch or judge, no one to find him foolish, he could push the pram along, taking a walk with the baby that never was. He could sing to it if he liked, and he liked. He sang “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” and this time he sang the chorus, and it didn’t even seem strange.

Baby won’t you please come home?

Because your daddy’s so alone.

He saw a white flash at the corner of his eye and looked around, thought he had glimpsed a barred owl. It was only a circle of peeled wood on the trunk of a yew, the bare wood the brightest thing in the dimness. It was about the size of a human face, and when he went closer, he saw an inscription carved into the soft wood:

EPHRAIM ASHER, REPENTANT, BLED FOR HIMSELF,

ANNE, GRACE, MIRIAM, DOLORES, HARMONY, JUBILATION

AND OUR SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST

BROUGHT INTO THIS ETERNAL COVENANT FEB 13 1943

He looked back the way he had come and saw another circle of peeled bark on the next yew. It was easier to spot them in the eerie half-light. The peeled wood caught the fading sunshine and glimmered. The trees were all marked in the same way. He was taking this in when the baby gave a ratcheting cry from the pram, as babies will, when Father stops pushing the stroller.

That’s a bird. Like last time, he thought.

The baby wailed again, and a sick jolt of alarm, almost electrical in nature, seemed to shoot through his bones.

“No, not a bird. That’s a fox,” he said aloud. His mouth was very dry. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, he thought. It’s an impossible baby.

The baby made the ratcheting sound of distress once more, and he found it impossible to turn his head and look. He thought he would clean his glasses instead. He did not know if he was terrified or exalted. Both, perhaps. Willy removed them and wiped them with his shirttail—they were dusted yellow with pollen—and then angled them so he could see the pram, reflected upside down in the curve of the lenses. The baby lifted one fat arm into view and dropped it again.

“I didn’t see that,” he said, but when he turned back, he didn’t look into the pram. Once he was behind the handlebars, he was safe—he couldn’t see into the pram. The canopy obscured his view. It would be all right when he began to push again, he decided. The fox would run when it heard the rattle and clatter of the pram coming uphill. Also, the baby would be soothed once they started to move again, even though there was no baby.

He was right. He didn’t hear (the baby) the fox again, and the weight shifting this way and that in the pram was the groceries, not a child. And never mind that it didn’t feel like shopping bags. It rolled differently. It moved.

Willy should’ve been unnerved, but as he mounted the hill, closing in on the shed, he found himself grinning, his brow pricking with a sweat that he could not entirely put down to exertion. Some men were born to play football, fuck models, and be on TV; some men were born to attend Yale and run for Congress. Willy was born to push the pram . . . to walk out of his unhappy life and into the green wood of something better. He was only sorry the bridle path was so short, not even a full mile. He would’ve gladly pushed the pram until all daylight fled and the moon rose behind him. He could’ve pushed it all night.

He left it in the shed again. He wasn’t worried about the raccoon anymore. It had been warned.

eight

That night it was his turn to hear it: the steely whap of the dog door snapping shut downstairs. It brought him awake a little after 1:00 a.m. The wind roared and the house creaked. It often grew windy after dark here, the gusts coursing along the edge of the ridge, thrashing the trees and pressing against the house.

He settled back into his pillow and ignored it when the dog door whapped again. Fix it in the morning, he thought.

But in the morning he had other things to think about.

nine

Marianne was headed out, first thing after breakfast. She was meeting a guy at the town dump to talk about getting rid of some dilapidated furniture that had come with the house. But no sooner had she opened the front door than she made a coughing grunt of unhappiness and retreated into the living room.

“Cleanup on aisle one,” she said.

Willy was at the butcher’s block in the kitchen—they had brought it with them from Brooklyn—finishing a last crust of toast. He slid from his stool, looked a question at her.

“Dead raccoon on the front porch,” she said. “I’m not touching it.”

He let himself out into the warming day. The raccoon was sprawled on her side, the planks still damp and glimmering with her blood. Whatever animal had caught up to her had slit her open from throat to crotch and left her thoroughly gutted. It had also made off with her head.

Willy found a rubber kitchen glove under the sink and snapped it on. He returned to the scene of the crime, gripped the carcass by an unpleasantly stiff tail, and walked it across the meadow to the edge of the woods. He held the corpse well away from his body, wound up, and whipped it off into the pines.

“That’s right, honey,” he said. “Fuck around and find out.”

ten

The first time he had heard the baby, he had been rooted in place by the sound of it, made breathless with a mix of fear and fascination. That second time, when he had seen a fat waving arm reflected in his glasses, he had been lanced through with shock. But in the days since, whatever alarm he had felt had steeped, like tea, into something else: curiosity and a desire to hear the baby again.

Willy wanted to be alone with the pram, walking the avenue of the yews, hidden in that cage of tormented black branches. Brian Goodkind called it a funnel. Wasn’t the birth canal also a kind of funnel? Willy did and did not believe that sometimes there was a baby in the pram. He did and did not believe he had seen it waving one chubby arm. He walked the path and the path funneled away his hurt and his misery and, yes, his resentment, his completely justified resentment at the cosmic forces that had fucked him over. The bridle path focused all that energy into something he could almost pick up and hold, something that wanted to be held and sung to. He had to push a little more, a little longer. He thought if he pushed the pram another time or two, he might get back from the country store with a child instead of groceries. A plump baby with his mother’s delicate skin, his father’s slate-gray eyes, and plump, grasping hands.

For a moment, on the last Monday of the month, it looked like his chance to be alone with the pram again had come. Marianne peeked in the cupboard and discovered they were out of coffee filters.

“Don’t suppose you want to run to the country store and get some? You could get some cider doughnuts too. You like those.”

“I’ll walk,” he said. “It’s a nice stroll.”

“You know what’s also nice? Coffee you don’t have to wait an hour for. You know what else is nice? Staying married.”

He tossed the car keys and caught them with a jingle on his way out the door.

Goodkind was occupied. He was at the deli counter in the back, engaged in a loud and jovial argument with a pair of sunburned men in baggy shorts—New Yorkers up for a weekend of fishing, Willy thought. Goodkind raised a hand, palm out, to calm the sunburned tourists, and said in a placating tone, “I tell you, lads, only what you already know: every thought in your head is a simple electrical impulse. A sensitive 5G receiver easily captures the electrical signals sent by your phone. Is it so hard to believe they can also detect the synapses firing in your brain?” The tourists began to roar again. Goodkind’s wife, a brawny, disinterested woman in her midsixties, rang Willy up without looking at him.

He was carrying his bag to the car when his gaze happened to stray to the carriage house, and he saw the girl standing in the open barn door, the girl who had told him to leave the pram. She had a hand clapped over her mouth, and when he looked at her, she startled and quickly retreated into the gloom.

Willy paused, ill at ease. He didn’t like the way she had been staring at him, which was exactly the way someone might stare as the EMTs zipped a corpse into a body bag. And he didn’t care for the way she had suddenly retreated, as if she didn’t want to be seen. He wrestled with himself for a moment, then put his bag down in the passenger seat and crossed to the carriage house. The floorboards were old and loose, strands of ancient hay stuck in the gaps between planks. Stalls marched away into the shadows. For a maddening instant, he thought he caught the scent of the place: dust and old straw and the memory of horses. His sense of smell had been wavering in and out, ever so faintly, for a week now. The rear of the carriage house was open wide to the sunlit day. He thought the girl was gone, had slipped out the back, but he stepped inside anyway and called hello. His voice echoed and frightened the pigeons in the rafters.

There was a little open room to one side. Willy was sure it had once been hung with bridles, the shelves piled with horse blankets. Now it was a small office with a desk and wooden trays full of bills. Some photos in black plastic frames had been stuck up on the beams. Willy leaned close for a look. One picture showed Brian Goodkind with a grizzled beard, younger by at least three decades, carrying one daughter in his arms, another on his shoulders. Behind him was the White Horse of Wiltshire, a vast, blazing mare of white chalk standing on the side of a gentle green English slope. In another picture, Brian Goodkind and his wife and daughters danced in a thatch hut beneath a thousand brightly colored flags—Willy thought it might be a picture of a Santo Daime ritual in Brazil. Goodkind’s eyes were rolled back in his head to show only the slick whites, a disturbing image. Still: Willy could not help feeling a certain fondness for the silly old Englishman. He had always had a fondness for seekers, for people who could cheerfully and wholeheartedly find meaning in the ridiculous.

A final photograph behind the desk caught his eye. He looked once and then again. This one was a color image of a green meadow behind a brick-red New England farmhouse. Willy recognized the hills in the background, knew at a glance he was looking at Hobomeck. Goodkind and his daughters wore green ceremonial gowns and stood among perhaps a dozen members of the Covenant, recognizable by their bonnets and straw hats. Someone had dressed himself in a great shaggy mask of bark and branches, topped with a crown of red berries. Another man, wearing a robe of leaves, open to show his sunken chest and his loincloth, held a Bible up to the sky in both hands. Children in white dresses appeared as little more than streaks, running with poles strung with ribbons. The blurs melted their faces, giving the little ones a look of deformity and derangement. A folding table had been set to one side, with bowls of potato salad and lime Jell-O upon it. Willy had almost missed the pram in his first glance. It stood to one side of the half-naked preacher in the Christlike loincloth. The pram’s basket had been piled high with fruit—apples and pears, mostly, although Willy also spied a pineapple. A rude cross, made from bundles of branches, sat in the basket with the offering.

As Willy took in the scene, he found a smile spreading across his face; he felt a tremor of emotion adjacent to gratitude and close to wonder. It was all meant to be, he thought—everything he had experienced in the woods, with the pram. The quiet babbling of the baby, the glimpse of a waving arm. He was almost light-headed with possibility, with a sense that he stood steps away from a new conception of reality.

It did not surprise him that Goodkind would’ve wangled a chance to participate in one of the Covenant’s harvest rites, or whatever he was looking at. The old English seeker could not have kept away. Willy wondered now if Brian Goodkind had somehow known of his loss and had not slyly nudged the pram into the lonesome life of William Halpenny to see what good might come of it. Ideas flitted through his head: something about funnels, something about that long line of ancient yews, something about the way all trees bore fruit. Perhaps Goodkind’s daughter had wanted him to leave the pram because she thought it was sacrilegious to use something that had played a role in local ritual, but Willy wasn’t worried about offending God. The way he figured it, God owed him. He walked back out of the carriage house feeling light at heart, and longing to push the pram again, or even just to look upon it once more.

He didn’t have to wait long for that. When he drove up the road to the house, there was a town truck parked in the dooryard, a six-wheel pickup with a wooden flatbed. Marianne was there with the guy from the Wiscasset dump, piling in junk. The pram was already loaded in the back.

As Willy jerked the car to a stop in a cloud of dust, the trash guy and Marianne were stacking rust-caked paint cans into the flatbed. They had about half the shed loaded into the truck.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice compressed with strain. His heart raced.

Marianne caught his tone and gave him a curious look. “Getting rid of the junk.”

“He can’t take that,” Willy said, reaching into the truck to get a hand on one of the pram’s oversize wheels.

Marianne wrinkled her upper lip. “Can’t he? Jeez, babe, it’s awful.”

Willy lifted it out of the flatbed and set it down in the dooryard. The canopy had been crushed in, a few of the ribs snapped inside the fabric. Seeing it made him dizzy with rage. If it was broken, it might not work anymore. He might walk the path for hours without hearing a single coo, without feeling the baby rock once.

“It isn’t ours. And it’s fine,” he said, controlling his voice with some effort.

“It’s not fine. It’s disgusting. I think an animal has been living in it. I know an animal died in it. Remember the raccoon? Well I know where the head wound up. I thought I was going to barf and—what do you mean, it isn’t ours?”

“I borrowed it from the country store to bring groceries home. On my walks.”

“Oh ffffork me,” Marianne said. The trashman stood to one side, grinning uneasily, an unwilling spectator to what was shaping up to be a good old row. “You put food in that? Food we ate? Babe. How about using the car from now on? Or a backpack? Or anything that doesn’t smell like roadkill?” Her face changed then, understanding passing across her expression. “You can’t smell it. Honey, this thing is rank.”

As far as Willy was concerned, the way it smelled was irrelevant, and if anyone had a good reason to be upset, it was him. She had literally tried to throw the baby out with the bathwater, a notion that almost sparked a horrified laugh. He had finally found something that brought him back to who he was before the miscarriage. On the path, with the pram, he was recalled to his old hopeful self. The thought that she had been ready to throw the pram away—and all that contentment with it—made him itch with dislike. It crossed his mind that she couldn’t know what it meant to him. Another part of him felt that was no excuse. She hadn’t asked him how he felt about getting rid of the things in the shed because his opinion didn’t matter. She made choices and he supported them—that was his role. She felt feelings and he accepted them—that was the foundation of their relationship.

He had spent walk after walk sharpening the edge of his resentment. That blade was very keen now.

“It’s an antique and it doesn’t belong to us. If you have such a problem with it, I’ll return it. After I fix it,” he said and gestured at the canopy’s snapped ribs. “I’m not going to take it back to Brian Goodkind all smashed to shit.”

“It isn’t all smashed to—Willy. Willy. I didn’t know you borrowed it from the store. I’m sorry I almost threw it away. Just—take it back. I don’t want our groceries in that. I don’t want you touching it. You could get tetanus. Or maybe rabies. I don’t even understand why you’re yelling at me.”

Now she was telling him off like a child. He stood to one side while Marianne spoke with the garbageman about the last items in the shed. Once, she shot a questioning, concerned glance at him. Her expression irritated him so much he had to turn away. She couldn’t make them a baby so she had to mother him, a thought that made him want to be anywhere she wasn’t.

He couldn’t bear those worried glances anymore, didn’t want to be anywhere near her anymore. A part of him wanted to walk the pram straight into the woods, where he could soothe the baby in his softest voice and apologize for Marianne’s mistreatment. Storming away, though, would only make him look as childish as he felt. So instead he collected the groceries from the car and went in to make coffee.

He left the pram on the porch, to one side of the door, where she’d have to see it whenever she peeked out the front windows.

eleven

They avoided each other until late afternoon, as if they had fought. He ate half an Italian sub from the country store and worked on his laptop at the butcher’s block in the kitchen. At that time of the day, it was the coolest, shadiest space in the house. He enjoyed the stillness, the gloom. Also: when he looked into the living room, he could see the pram through one of the north-facing windows. The sight of it comforted him, made him feel less alone.

He didn’t know Marianne had joined him until he heard the fridge open. “Do you want some iced tea? Or a beer?” He thought she put some effort into sounding casual.

“I could drain a Sam.”

She opened two bottles of Sam Adams and put one in front of him. Then she rested her bottom against the edge of the kitchen counter and had a tug and wiped her mouth and said, “Do you think you could take it back?” She didn’t need to say what it was. “If you pick up something for dinner while you’re there, I’ll cook.”

She wasn’t going to let it go. She would keep needling him until he got rid of it. She was determined to take this from him too. He tried to think how to explain what it meant to him, how to tell her what he had seen and heard when he was with the pram, on the trail. This is going to sound crazy, but sometimes there’s a baby in it, he imagined telling her. Yes; it did sound crazy. Frighteningly crazy. There’s something there that wants to live and it needs my help or it will fade away. That was quite a bit worse.

“I’ll return it,” he said and hated himself and knew he couldn’t do it. Not yet. “I want to see if I can fix the canopy first, though. Is tomorrow soon enough for you?” He didn’t mean to give those last two words, for you, a bitter twist, but there was something in them, some undertone, that caused her to look at him with unhappiness.

She lowered her head, swept the toe of one boat shoe back and forth across the floor, and he knew she was measuring her reply. She sneaked a look at him through her curls.

“Willy, are you all right?” she asked. “You know, sometimes I think we worried so much about me, there was never room for you to have your feelings too.”

“About what?” he asked. She looked away, but not before he saw the flash of pain in her eyes.

“Just,” she said, “maybe you can at least put it back in the shed? Don’t leave it on the porch. I’m worried it’ll attract animals.”

She left her bottle of beer half-drunk by the sink. He finished his. Then he finished hers.

twelve

He was three beers in when he walked the pram out to the shed. By then the wind was rising, the sort of warm, damp wind that runs ahead of a summer storm, pressing at his back and hurrying him along. Out behind the house, beyond the edge of the mowed lawn, the high straw flexed and rippled, like an animal’s coat.

He put the pram into the dusted, tidy, mostly empty interior of the shed. The few items that remained—a hoe, a rake, a few plastic tubs of weed preventer—had been arranged in an orderly fashion along the walls. The light coming through the grimy glass flickered and shifted. Shadows fought one another across floor and wall.

He had been close to something, had walked with something precious and vital and wriggling with life, and the world wanted to take it away from him, like it took away the last one, and Willy wanted to start kicking the walls of the shed until it fell down on top of him.

When he squeezed the door shut behind him and started back toward the house, he was distraught and full of desperate ideas. Plans to conceal the pram deep in the woods came and went. He had gone only a few steps when he heard a lonely, keening cry, a sound that pierced him through.

“We’ll figure it out, little guy,” he promised the thing in the shed, although it was possible—just barely—that the cry had been the wind whistling under the eaves of the shed. “I won’t let them take you away from me. You can count on it.”

He was halfway across the yard when he heard the bang of a gunshot and stumbled and looked back. No, not a gun—the door of the shed, swinging in the heavy gusts. He had forgotten to bolt it.

It seemed like too much work to go back and fix it. The door banged again as he slipped into the house, someone squeezing off another round from a .44.

thirteen

He had the other half of his Italian and was working on his sixth beer when Marianne asked him if he wanted dinner. By then he had made his way to his recliner in the living room and had his laptop open across his thighs. He said he’d already eaten and then pretended he couldn’t see her staring at him. He said he had to catch up on work. It was almost true. He had a presentation due on Friday, had concepts to mock up, but he’d been too distracted to start. The first five beers, however, had helped lubricate his creativity. He was finally getting somewhere.

The gun went off again in the backyard. He was acting like he couldn’t see her, but he could, and he snorted when he saw her flinch.

“What the hell is that?”

“You must’ve forgotten to bolt the door to the shed,” he told her. “After you finished cleaning it out.”

She stood in the kitchen doorway, looking at him for a while longer. Finally, she turned and went back into the kitchen. The gale hooted derisively in the chimney.

It grew dark in the living room. He didn’t turn on the light. The gun went off three more times, as if an executioner was making his slow way through a list of the condemned.

“I might go to bed,” she said from somewhere across the room. The lights were off and she was little more than a slender blackness against the paler blackness of the downstairs.

“I better try to polish this off,” he said.

“The whole six-pack?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” she told him. She stood at the bottom of the stairs for a while. He looked at his computer without seeing what was on the screen and hated her for trying to take the pram away from him. I get to have this, he wanted to tell her. I get to have this one impossible thing.

The gun went off once more and jolted her into movement. He heard her light tread on the stairs. The bedroom door snicked shut.

A while later, his phone blipped with a text. He glanced, saw it was from her, didn’t bother to read it, didn’t want any drama. He wanted to do his job, the job that paid for this house, the job that paid for this life, the job he did without complaint while she wallowed in her feelings, in her grief. She had an emotional life. He had a job. That was the deal. Or at least that had been the deal until he’d heard the child cooing in the pram.

He wondered how close the storm was. Marianne would hate to sleep alone while the wind roared and peeled shingles off the roof. The thought pleased him. He felt she had earned herself a lonely night, sneaking around on him, trying to get rid of the pram on the sly. He got up for a splash of Bombay Sapphire and hip-checked the doorframe on his way into the kitchen. He was walking unsteadily but feeling good. Anger felt good. He didn’t allow himself his anger often enough. That had been another thing he loved about his walks along the bridle path. He could be as angry as he liked there and it never felt wrong.

The wind keened. The underlighting beneath the kitchen cabinets flickered, went out, came back on. He wondered if he had lost the Wi-Fi. He tumbled a little gin into a glass, threw some tonic on top, and strolled in a liquid, loose-jointed way back into the living room. He sat down with his laptop. Yep. No internet. He was restless, decided to look at her text, which was now two hours old.

Whatever you’re dealing with—if you’re angry at me for losing the baby, if you’re unhappy in our marriage—I want to work through it with you. You seem so unhappy. Let me help.

Please let me help.

I love you, Willy.

He flinched at suddenly stinging eyes. He turned his face away from the phone, as if the screen were too bright, blinding him. He stood up. He sat down. He felt like he might throw up.

Something is wrong with me, he thought. When he stood once more, the floor rocked underfoot, and he imagined a ship wallowing in the swells. He read the text again. His vision blurred, and he lowered his phone.

His thinking was sick. The thought of losing the pram had set off a panic. It felt like losing the baby all over again. But he wasn’t in danger of losing a baby; he was in danger of losing his mind. The pram was full of dry rot and mold. The only things living in it were the wood mites.

In a way, it was a relief, to recognize that he was going through a mental crack-up. He had not realized how angry he was at Marianne for losing the baby, or how angry he was at the world for taking it away from him. Instead he had fled into a weird and unhealthy daydream. He needed a professional and a prescription.

Willy climbed the steps and stood on the small landing, facing their bedroom door. He wanted to go in. He wished he could slide himself under the bedroom door without being heard, slip into the bed without being felt.

What stopped him was another gunshot crack from outside. The fucking door to the shed would be banging all night—waking him up, waking them both up—unless he went out to shoot the bolt. He didn’t remember why he hadn’t bolted it in the first place. As he descended the stairs, the first drops of rain began to tap against the shingles.

He couldn’t find his shoes. One was by the recliner. He went looking for the other and kicked his laptop, which was on the floor next to the chair. He wished he wasn’t so drunk. The shadows of raindrops bled down the wall. He picked the laptop up and carried it to the side table, under the windows overlooking the backyard, which was when he saw the pram. It was parked outside, a few feet from the back step, visible in the dim light thrown by the kitchen windows. He could see the dark indentations the wheels had left in the grass, trailing back over the curve of the hill, in the direction of the shed. He was trying to figure out how it had gotten there when he heard the steely whap of the dog door flapping shut in the kitchen.

That’s the wind, he thought. Only it wasn’t and he knew it. The gusts had slammed the door to the shed again and again, but in all the time he had been downstairs, he had not heard the dog door once. That side of the house was in the lee of the wind.

He found it curiously difficult to move, to turn toward the kitchen. The sight of the pram had fixed him in place, and now a horrible notion came to him. It was true, his thinking was sick. But what had made him sick? The pram, that’s what. Marianne had taken one look and said it was infected, something anyone could see.

Anyone but him.

He heard a bony thud on the exposed cherrywood floor. There was a second thud after that and a third, the sound of something crawling through the dark. It was the child, he knew. His child, the one he had been raising over the last month on his walks along the bridle path. He had nursed it on his resentments and it had gorged itself—he had no doubt he had raised a big, strong, healthy boy.

With the greatest effort, he was able to turn from the windows and look across the room. In a moment he—it—would crawl into sight. He willed himself not to scream. If he stayed very still, it might not see him.

It came on all fours, out of the kitchen and into the living room. It was naked, and it had the head of a child perhaps a year old, and its skin was spotted with the same black mold that spotted the canvas of the pram’s canopy. It didn’t look toward him, didn’t know he was there. It crawled implacably toward the staircase and paused at the bottom to peer up the stairs. It put one hand on the first riser. Willy had felt almost paralytic with dread, watching it move across the room, through the darkness, but the thought of it climbing the stairs to Marianne brought him back to himself.

He whistled, a single clear note. It swung its head around looking for him, and he could see its mouth was a leathery black hole, the mouth of an obscene old man. The child stared at him, jaws agape, and something dropped from its mouth to squirm on the floor. A gypsy moth caterpillar, fat and bristling with wiry black hairs. He thought it wasn’t a baby at all, only something wearing the idea of a baby, and wearing it badly. A low, rattling, knocking sound began in its throat, a sound halfway between the purr of a cat and the clatter of a worn-out crankshaft thudding in an idling engine.

“All right, you little bastard,” Willy said. He should’ve been breathless with fright, but in that moment, his fear left him in a single exhalation. He couldn’t be a father. But he could still be a husband and keep it from going upstairs. “Come to Papa.”

When it moved again, it didn’t crawl, heavily and clumsily, like an infant. It lunged, like a mad dog loosed from its chain. The knocking, rumbling sound in its throat became something closer to a choked growl, and that was like a mad dog too. Willy had drawn in a great breath to shout, to yell for Marianne to run, when he gagged at the reek of it. His sense of smell had come flooding back to him at last.

The infant stank of mildew and old blood. It smelled like the scene of a slaughter. Which it turned out this was.

fourteen

He didn’t know what was inside that baby costume, only that when it hit him, it took his left leg out at the knee, shattering the kneecap so it folded backward on itself with a pop, like a light bulb exploding. Willy dropped, as if a trapdoor had opened beneath him. He had heard there was nothing more painful than a shattered kneecap, but it didn’t hurt him any more than being sideswiped by a passing truck would’ve hurt. The shock was too great for pain—even when the infant put both pudgy hands on him and buried its teeth in his flesh. He had fed it on his rage, but now that it was bigger, he supposed it needed something more substantial. He didn’t try to throw it off him, couldn’t seem to lift his arms. Fatal injuries were a powerful narcotic.

His head lolled, and he saw they were being watched. The kitchen door to the backyard was open. The elderly couple he had seen that first day he came to Hobomeck were there—the old man in his frock coat, the faceless old woman in the linen bonnet. They had brought company. A tall, lanky man in a green gown stood wearing the great mask made out of bark and roots. Brian Goodkind’s women—the wife, the sister, the daughters, and granddaughters—fanned out behind this walking tree, dressed in bonnets of their own, and new handmade floral-patterned dresses. They wore necklaces of wildflowers. The girl who had tried to warn Willy about the pram gazed at him now with wet, resentful eyes. Willy was not at all surprised when the tall man lifted his mask of bark to show Goodkind himself. Goodkind beamed fondly at him, as if Willy had solved a challenging riddle. Blood dripped off the fingers of the shopkeeper’s left hand.

The onlookers waited patiently while the child gorged itself, wiggling deeper and deeper into the hole it had torn in Willy’s midsection. I’m carrying, he thought, and would’ve laughed if he had any air in his lungs. I am great with child. Brian Goodkind’s sturdy wife stood next to the pram, one hand on the handle. Only maybe it was a carriage after all. A mis-carriage. Pretty good joke, Willy, Willy thought.

At last, Goodkind sank to a crouch and made a clicking sound with his tongue, the way one might call a dog. There was a wet, sucking sound as the infant lifted its face out of the mess that had been Willy’s abdomen. He felt a distant, gentle tugging as it dragged out a fatty string of gut with its chops, its little face all smeared. Goodkind made the clicking sound again, and the infant crawled off Willy and went thumping merrily back across the floor, dragging a great smear of blood behind it. The shopkeeper lifted it gently. His wife had a swaddling blanket at the ready. She wrapped it deftly and put it into the pram.

The elderly Sin-Planter turned to the crowd gathered behind him and raised his hands over his head, palms out. “We welcome this child to the faith with thanks to the Lord Most High—and we welcome Brian and his kith and kin to the Covenant with all our hearts. May Brian be as a tree planted by the rivers. May his leaf never wither.”

“Alleluia,” said the womenfolk and the elder nodded and turned into the crowd. The old woman followed, her bonnet bobbing.

Goodkind’s wife began to push the pram. The girls fell in around it, murmuring, jostling for a look, as the parade wound away into the night. Goodkind stayed behind, his gaze lingering upon Willy with unmistakable affection.

“Nothing but girls in this family,” Goodkind said. “I always wanted a boy, William. I prayed for one and you see . . . sometimes prayers are answered! I’ll say them for you, too, mate. Every day of my life.”

He lifted one hand in a gesture of farewell, or perhaps a benediction of thanks. He had hacked a ragged cross upon the palm. He did not close the door, only turned and followed the others, leaving Willy with a view of night and rain. Willy sprawled in his own blood, his abdomen pulled inside out. There was some pain now, dull, deep, and profound, ringing through his whole midsection. He imagined women felt much the same in the hours after birth. Faraway, he heard the yews shushing in the damp breeze, a sound like children whispering excitedly to one another.

The real estate agent, Sally Timperley, had said the Sin-Planters would soon be gone from the earth, but Willy thought there might be another generation left in them after all. He was sure Goodkind meant it, when he promised to pray for Willy, but honestly, the way that kid ate? He thought Goodkind better save his prayers for himself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2021 Gillian King

Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman, Heart-Shaped Box, and Full Throttle. His work in comic books includes the long-running epic fantasy Locke & Key, cocreated with artist Gabriel Rodriguez. Much of his work has been adapted for film and television, including the Blumhouse hit The Black Phone and AMC’s celebrated two-season adaptation of NOS4A2. He lives in New Hampshire.