SEP SLATHERED THE antiseptic on his severed knuckle, tore a strip from his undershirt to bind the wound, then he and Arkle watched the movement behind the graveyard gates, Arkle rubbing Sep’s back as he wept. The faces on the other side of the bars were slack, the dark clothes were torn, and pale hands shook the padlock’s chain.
“There’s so many of them,” said Sep, his thumb on the Dictaphone’s play button—unable to press it, knowing what was trapped inside. “It’s so sad. It’s not even scary; it’s just sad. Look what we’ve done.”
They held each other until their strength returned, then pedaled in silence through the rain, watching lightning strike the forest.
By the time they’d reached the woods, Sep had stopped crying.
“Thank God,” said Hadley when they arrived. “We’ve been so worried.”
“Have you seen anything?” said Lamb.
Sep looked at Arkle.
“What?” said Lamb.
“Mario’s dead,” said Sep. “It was Barnaby—he must have been looking for me. Now Mario’s dead. And it’s our fault.”
“Oh my God,” said Mack. He coughed and gasped for breath, sticky spit catching in his throat as tears welled in his eyes. He reached for Arkle’s shoulder to steady himself.
Lamb dropped to her knees.
“Are you okay?” said Hadley, blinking through tears. “We didn’t know—”
“Mario’s dead,” Sep said again, and the weight of it hit him in the chest.
Lamb bit her lips. “Let’s end this,” she said.
Sep nodded, looking at his hands, imagining the rain that soaked them as splashes of crimson from Mario, Roxburgh, and his fox: all dead at the hands of their stupidity.
“Now,” he said, and he led them into the forest.
The path, like everything else—like their clothes and skin and hair—was soaking wet, and the rain drilled into the ground and hissed in the puddles. The world was an explosion of damp, running soil, and they fell again and again, Sep’s bandages plastering coldly to his skin as they pressed farther into the trees.
He felt Hadley’s hand slip into his, and he squeezed it gratefully.
“Not too tight,” said Arkle.
“Dude!” said Sep, dropping his hand. “Come on!”
“I’m freaked out! Please, I just can’t— What’s his name again? The big guy?”
“Mack?”
“Mack! Oh my God . . . my brain, I can’t—”
Arkle’s face was wide and frightened. Sep took his hand again and helped him forward. “Just for a minute, all right?”
“Thanks, Seppy.”
The ground underfoot was slippery and spongy, oozing over Sep’s torn feet whenever he found softer turf. He felt the texture of the forest’s skin on his, and remembered, with the soles of his feet, running barefoot with the others over this path.
He balanced on a tree trunk, swore as the bark peeled off in his grip—and landed beside an unmistakable shape: the enormous, round-toed bootprint of Roxburgh, pressed deep and wide in the soft earth and filling with water that glowed silver in the moonlight.
Arkle helped him to his feet, and Sep found another print beside the first. It had looked—and sounded—as though the gamekeeper’s legs had broken when he’d fallen from the shack, but the prints were close together, and deep. So he was walking, slowly, and—Sep stepped back—walking out of the woods.
“Look,” he said, pointing.
“Look at what?” said Arkle.
“Roxburgh’s footprints!”
Mack leaned down and ran his finger around the lip of the boot’s impression. “Pretty recent,” he said.
“How do you know that?” said Hadley.
“The edges. The turf hasn’t sprung back yet, so it’s not been there for long.”
“What are you, the Lone . . . Star?” said Arkle.
“Ranger,” said Mack.
“We’ve been here for a while,” said Lamb. “If he’d left the woods, we’d have seen him.”
“But look—he’s been this way!” said Sep. “That’s brilliant—one less thing we need to worry about. Let’s keep going.”
He turned to Hadley, standing beside him, shining in the wet.
“I don’t feel well,” she said. She looked even more drawn than before, her eyelids and skin shrinking against her skull.
“I know,” he said. “We’ll be there soon, and we’ll fix it, I promise. We’ll—”
And as he spoke, his eyes refocused, past her face and into a pool of moonlight that hung, bright and heavy, in the mist.
Roxburgh’s corpse was walking toward the box, a shambling, slow, unyielding step that dragged him through the forest’s knots without pause.
Sep’s body ceased to function. He felt his blood stop, and his lungs froze as he looked down.
Roxburgh’s legs were broken and splintered, grinding shards of bone protruding from the feet: feet that were on backward and making—with a soft, sucking sound—backward footprints in the mud.
Hadley stifled a scream, and Sep started to back away as silently as he could, inches at a time.
The two of them turned to the others as Roxburgh reached the edge of the puddle of light and moved into the shadow of the trees.
“Did you see him?” whispered Sep, though he knew by their faces that they had.
“Holy shit,” said Lamb, almost breathing the words out. “What do we do?”
“Go the long way,” said Sep. He wondered whether a gamekeeper’s ears would be as keen when they were undead, and added, “Quietly.”
Hadley nodded, and they turned to go.
Ptwing!
Sep saw Arkle anxiously rethreading his floss, and before Sep could grab him, he’d fixed it in his grip and pulled.
Ptwing!
Roxburgh’s ruined body turned slowly toward them.
“What?” said Arkle. “It’s making me feel better—I can remember how to floss, even if my mind is—”
The forest exploded in eldritch shrieks and green light as the Roxburgh-thing screamed—and they ran again, agony filling every part of Sep until it took him over completely and he didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, where it might end.
They ran through thickets of whispery thorns, tangled their hair in spiderwebs, and cut their faces on the trees’ hanging claws, and the thing kept gaining on them, scrambling across the ground on its hands and knees and the splintered bone of its feet, the shard of Sep’s stick of candy glinting in its dead eye.
A buzzing storm of dragonflies fell on them from the trees, and something white and scorched dropped onto Hadley’s head. She fell, clutching at strings; a lump of bloody fur flew into Lamb’s face and she staggered back, hands flailing at her face, Mack hauling at the green-glowing thing and throwing it against a tree before spiking it through the head.
Sep ran along a ridge—a hundred-foot drop onto slippery rock—and fell to his knees.
Then Roxburgh was on him.
His skin had been rebuilt by animal fur, his face studded with too many eyes, and he gnashed at Sep’s throat with teeth that were not human.
Arkle grabbed the thing’s jacket and it rounded on him, falling and landing on his face, its fur-patched chest bursting open. Sep kicked it and saw the dark, tarry bags of the old gamekeeper’s lungs drag over Arkle’s gurgling mouth.
As Lamb tore Here’n’now from Hadley’s face and threw him into the darkness, the Roxburgh-thing leaped once more at Sep. He heaved back against the stinking deadness of its hands on his neck, pulling against its fierce strength, but its muscles were no longer human, and they knew no weakness, no cease—only the crushing anger that closed on Sep like a steel trap, pushing him to the edge of the cliff.
Sep battered on the stick of broken rock candy in the thing’s eye until his skin broke—and still the thing pushed, its leering mouth dribbling sulfurous bilge.
A branch swung in and knocked its head away, splitting the neck in a shower of blood, and—as Sep dragged himself from the ravine’s edge in a mess of knees and elbows—the Roxburgh-thing slid into the darkness, the lights of its eyes winking out as it fell.
“Is everyone okay?” said Sep. Blood flowed from the space in his gums, and he swallowed it.
“No,” said Lamb, throwing the branch to the ground. She was holding her eye with both hands. It was swollen closed, and already purple. “That bloody thing nearly burst my eyeball.”
“Where’s Arkle?”
“Smoker’s lungs,” said Arkle’s voice from a nearby shrub. “Smoker’s lungs . . .”
Mack was vomiting on a tree. His leg was buckled beneath him, his lip split by a trickle of blood.
“Hadley?” said Sep. “Hadley!”
He saw the glitter of her shoes first—she was lying in a sweep of giant roots, her arm twisted behind her when she’d fallen, the thin scores of string visible across her neck.
“Hadley!” He ran to her, lifted her head, and held it in his lap. “Can you hear me?” he said, touching her cheek. “Hadley?”
“She’s so pale,” said Lamb, dropping to her knees. “Why’s she so pale?”
“It’s killing her,” said Sep, pressing his fingers into her neck. “It has been since it took her blood. I can’t find a—”
Hadley’s pulse flickered weakly against his skin. He ground his teeth, and sucked more blood into his mouth. “We shouldn’t have brought her here.”
“But we needed her to—”
“Well, we need to think of something else now!” said Sep. “Hadley? Hadley, can you hear me?”
Her eyes peeked open, and she coughed. Her eyes found Sep’s, and he leaned in closer.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.
Sep almost laughed with relief. “It helps me think,” he said. He watched her eyes close again, then turned to the others.
“You’ve got blood in your teeth,” said Arkle. “Want some floss?”
“I’m going after it,” said Sep. He swallowed.
“What are you talking about?” said Lamb. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to the box alone.”
Lamb shook her head. “I didn’t tell the truth before, about the mirrors,” she said, holding Hadley’s hand in both of hers. “It was only one that broke—I said it was all of them, but it was just the one on her dresser. That morning, when it was my turn, it had a huge crack . . . and when I looked in it, I looked like her, and I—smashed the rest of them, all of them. I couldn’t—I had to tell you—”
“It doesn’t matter now,” said Sep, gripping her shoulder. “I’m going to kill it.”
“Sep, no!” said Mack. “We’ll all go, we’ll all do it—together!”
“You can’t even stand! Lamb can’t see. Hadley’s unconscious—”
“I’ll come,” said Arkle, rising and falling in one movement. “Or maybe not. Sep, I’m sorry—I can’t stand up.”
“How’s your watch?” Sep asked Mack. “Is it still working?”
Mack nodded.
“Then it’ll be all right, won’t it?”
“Here,” said Mack, taking the watch off and holding it out. “Take it.”
“Thanks,” said Sep. He strapped it to his wrist, three holes up from the groove worn by Mack.
“Wait, Sep,” Hadley said breathlessly, her eyes flickering.
He leaned in and kissed her, pressed his lips into hers so that she might know his feelings and read his thoughts, tasted her breath in his mouth and let her fill him up inside, the glorious sense of her shining like sunlight in his heart.
“I’ll be back soon,” he whispered.
She nodded, then slipped into unconsciousness again.
Sep took the scrap of paper from his pocket and pressed it into her hand, then ran into the darkness.
“Check out the bold Sep,” said Arkle. Then he vomited behind a bush.