“And then?”
“If they take us where I think they will, well, we’ll have some answers.”
“Back to the campground.”
“Something happened there, Tean.”
“Yeah,” Tean said.“I messed up.”
“You didn’t mess up, babe.”
An old pine creaked, needles rippling.A faint, resinous smell floated on the air, and somewhere up the gully, stone clicked against stone.
“We need water,” Tean said.“And food.”
“One hour.If we don’t find anything, we turn back and call the police.”
Tean put his glasses back on.“One hour.”
24
It looked like a house of cards, ready to fall over if someone breathed on it too hard.Whitewashed walls.A shallow porch.A steeply pitched roof that sagged in the middle like a broken orbital socket.The only hint of ornamentation was the cornicing under the eaves.Tean put the farmhouse at a hundred years old, and nobody had taken care of it for probably the last twenty.
Behind the farmhouse stood a larger—and somehow even more dilapidated—barn.Whatever color it had once been, it was impossible to tell now.It was just sun-bleached wood and rusted metal and a gambrel roof with a few decomposing wooden shingles.A narrow, shingle-sided building farther back Tean pegged as a smokehouse.A newer building—oxidized metal panels with padlocked doors—was probably equipment storage and workshop combined.
The trail they’d been following for the last forty minutes ended at a dusty ATV parked in the old farmhouse’s shadow.
“Fuck me,” Jem said.
Tean nodded.
“That place is creepy as hell.”
There weren’t any good words to respond to that, so Tean nodded again.
“Oh snap,” Jem said.“Have you ever seenThe Hills Have Eyes?”
“I’m calling the police,” Tean said.
“Not yet.”
Without waiting for a response, Jem set off on a course that ran parallel to the buildings.He went about thirty yards before stopping.He watched the house.A minute passed.And then another.
“I think it’s empty.”
“Why?”
Jem shrugged.“You get a feel for it.”
Tean didn’t want to knowhowyou got a feel for it; there were chapters in Jem’s life that he knew about only vaguely, and he also knew that a part of him had avoided learning too much about those chapters because they broke his heart.Cowardice, most definitely.But it seemed like that was more and more the case with him these days.
All he said was “Someone drove through here in the last day or two.They’re gone now.”When Jem raised his eyebrows, Tean pointed to the twin tracks of flattened weeds that led toward the barn.
For maybe half a minute, Jem was silent.Then, shaking out the loop of paracord from his wrist, he said, “Here I go.”
“Jem—”
“If you hear me scream, or if you hear gunshots, or if you hear literally anything about snakes, call the police.”
