I ran through the woods until I tripped and, with a sickening lurch, fell, taking the weight on my knee. I sprawled on the cold ground as I caught my breath, finally stumbled to my feet. I limped out of the evergreen cover, crossed the road, and walked, following the fence. Adrenaline and pain momentarily canceled out the cold. I tried to guess how much time had passed. Not more than an hour. That left a little more than two hours until dawn.
The moon had vanished behind the black wall of conifers. The road felt increasingly claustrophobic, tunneling into a darkness that seemed solid. I kept moving, dragging one foot, then the other, as though I walked toward an unseen cliff edge.
Phantom lights appeared in the darkness, random dots and lines that merged into symbols. An eye, an arrow; horned circles, spidery swastikas, and fiery grids. Threads of poisonous yellow light streaked the sky overhead, forming a map of fragmented insignia.
I struggled to make sense of them, the way I used to read acid trails as messages from the future, even though I knew what this really signified: the early phases of amphetamine psychosis. Even when I closed my eyes, the symbols remained, branded on my eyelids.
A voice whispered my name. I knuckled my eyes until the symbols disintegrated into blobs of red and muddy orange, blinked rapidly as I tried to focus. I saw no one.
But in front of me shone a single light. I stared at it till my eyes watered, wondering if this was another hallucination. It didn’t move.
I broke into a shambling run and halted where the road divided. To the right, it dwindled to a snow-patched, grassy track through the woods. In front of me, the road continued for a hundred yards, ending in a broad sweep of well-tended land illuminated by a powerful floodlight atop a barn. The wind carried the scent of woodsmoke.
Scattered across the clearing were a half-dozen boxy structures resembling giant plastic Monopoly houses, all tidily kept. A two-story building, red with a green roof and a line of decorative stick figures stenciled along its white trim, half a dozen large propane tanks propped at one back corner. Two pickups were parked in front of a separate garage, along with the same blue Volvo I’d seen earlier. Near the garage stood a blue playhouse emblazoned with a cartoon bear. Two crossed axes were nailed above the door of a shed like the one where I’d found the dirt-filled cartons. There was also a single telephone or electrical pole with no lines running to it.
The harsh floodlight made everything look garish and staged, a movie set waiting for the principals to show up. The impenetrable wall of black trees surrounding the homestead intensified the unsettling effect: the floodlight seemed like a futile effort to keep back the encroaching forest.
I eased back into the shadows and stared at the house. Above the front door hung a disk painted with a black sun, an Aryan Nations hex sign. The decorative stencils that ran under the eaves weren’t stick figures but runes. The pole was a totem carved from a single tree, stripped of its bark and topped with an elongated man’s face—long mustache, beard, Viking cap, and a single deep-set eye, all chiseled meticulously from the tree trunk. Odin.
Someone had swept neat paths in the snow between house and vehicles, barn and shed and playhouse. The large propane tanks were lined up as precisely as tenpins in a bowling alley. Despite the black sun and crossed axes, Odin totem and runes, the homestead seemed utterly mundane. It was easier to imagine its inhabitants as law-abiding Swedes whose taste ran to folkloric remnants of their country’s culture than as white supremacists. I had a vision of myself as Quinn—as anyone—would see me, a gaunt figure staggering to the edge of someone’s yard at 4:00 a.m., peering out from the trees like a demented scarecrow. I’d be lucky if they didn’t do what Quinn had warned: shoot me on sight. I turned and began the trek back to the main road.