Kyle wrinkled his nose at the idea. Had suburban life softened him so much? He hadn’t been afraid of these woods as a nine-year-old. He wasn’t going to start today.
He pulled out a compact flashlight, hard and heavy as a roll of quarters. Its beam lit up the woods, dropping a circle of noon into the trees. There was nothing.
Maybe it was a leftover from the stranger’s high beams. Maybe it was fox fire. Maybe it was aging eyes.
He pocketed the light and stepped up to a honeysuckle bush, unzipping his fly.
When his chest started to hurt, he assumed it was the fear running its course.
He coughed and it felt like it knocked over some furniture inside his rib cage.
His lungs caught fire and his vision wavered. He spun for his truck. His phone was in the cup holder, where it had been all afternoon.No phones while fishing.Calling 911 was a crapshoot out there, but if it was his heart…
Gravity did something and the roadside rushed him.
Gravel and twigs pressed against his lips like they wanted in. He turned his cheek and puffed out a plume like white smoke. He wanted to follow that pale vapor up and out, into the warm glow of his brake lights, but something took hold of his thoughts and shook them like a hound with a rabbit.
The world shattered into fractals against a cream-colored backdrop of pain and panic.
The thing that had robbed Kyle’s fourteen-year-old daughter of her father was already moving away. It was unchanged, there and gone like a moon shadow blotted out by a passing cloud.
Kyle Cartwright never saw what killed him.
Green would see it. Green would see it before daybreak.
The entrance to Candle-Fly Campwas a gravel driveway with a single signpost illuminated by a dim solar-powered landscaping light. There was a bulky black mailbox and a wooden sign the size of a paperback. Dark letters were burned into the wood along with a stylized moth.
Candle-Fly Camp.
A haze of insects orbited the LED glow.
Surrounded by unbroken night in every direction, suspended in a globe of arthropod movement, the camp’s logo looked like a magic sigil inscribed by a storybook witch. A warning. Or the kind of invitation that smiles with sharp teeth.
Beyond the sign was an uneven, rutted drive barely wide enough for one car sloping up a steep incline and rounding into utter darkness. The place looked like the private driveway of a hermit, a paranoid hermit who collected shotguns and named them after his favorite B-movie heroines.“Meet my girl Sonya!”It did not look like a commercial enterprise.
Green pulled in next to the mailbox and put the car in park. The way ahead didn’t look meant for hybrid vehicles with impressive fuel efficiency.
He glanced down at the GPS. It showed his car icon on a blank green space with no roads at all. As far as technology was concerned, he was off the edge of the map.
He poked an interior light on and consulted his brochure. There was a picture of that same sign with its moth logo. It seemed a lot friendlier on the page, photographed in daylight. He swallowed and flicked off the light, turned off the GPS, and coaxed his car into the lightless woods.
Green was used to places where headlights were more about being seen than lighting your way. There was no real night in the city, just an aesthetic shift. This was different. If not for the two blue-white cones of illumination ahead, the darkness was as complete as any deep-sea trench or subterranean lake beneath a hollow hill.
The gravel drive wound up and up. Green cracked his window to see if he could hear any camp sounds, whatever those might be, but instead he found a monochromatic wall of insect chirps that were part of the living darkness. The only human sounds were the purr of his heater and the stony growl of his tires struggling up the drive.
Some automatic instinct of self-preservation kicked in and he threw the car into reverse, craning his neck to look over his shoulder and begin his retreat.
No.
“This is what I came here to do.”
Speaking was harder here. The woods didn’t like his voice.
A tree branch off to the left fell with a crack like a gunshot and Green flinched.
“This is the plan. This is the plan.”
He summoned the will to overrule his reflexive need to escape and put the car back into drive.
