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His voice comes out of the pines to my left, low and rough, and it goes through me like cold water. It's the voice from the tape but it isn't, because the tape doesn't have air in it. This does. This has the creek under it and the wind over it and a man's chest behind it, twenty meters away, and I have to put my free hand down on the frozen stone to steady myself.

"Can I record you?"

"No."

I click it off. I set it down beside me on the stone where he can see it's off.

"You know who I am," I say. "You know why I'm here."

"Yes."

"Do you know where they are? The seven?"

A long pause. Long enough that I count it. Then: "Some of them."

"Are they alive?"

"The ones who wanted to be."

"Why did they stay?"

"Why haven't you left?"

That shuts me up. I sit on the stone with my mouth open and the cold coming up through my jeans, and I can't think of one single answer I'd be willing to say out loud.

"That's not how an interview works," I manage finally. "I ask the questions."

"Then ask a better one."

I look up into the pines. I can't see him. I can see a hundred black trunks and the light coming down between them in long gold bars, and I know he's standing in there somewhere looking straight at me.

"Why were you on the road?" I ask. "The first day. You stood right behind me."

"Wanted to know if you were any good."

"Was I?"

"Nobody's ever found me," he says as an answer.

The creek runs. I sit there with my hands in my lap, and something rises up through my chest that isn't fear at all.

That night the radio wakes.

I left the second walkie on the north-side stump yesterday, under the loft window, with a strip of masking tape on it that says CH 4. TALK TO ME, YOU COWARD. The other one sits on my pillow, volume low.

He doesn't circle. I'd have heard that. He comes straight to the north side and stops, and the speaker gives a soft hiss, an open channel, someone breathing out there with his thumb on the key.

I'm awake. I've been awake for an hour, lying on my back in a t-shirt and underwear on top of the quilt, waiting.

"You didn't lock it," he says. Static eats the edges of his voice.

"No."

"I told you to."

"I don't do what strange men tell me to do on tape."

A puff of air on the open channel. It might be a laugh, if he's ever laughed.