Natalya, Queen of the Hungry Dogs

John Langan

In Memoriam Lucius Shepard

I

When it came, Hunter’s e-mail was brief, blunt. “Well,” it read, “that’s wife number three packed her bags and gone. Said she cared too much to watch this thing have its way with me. Pity. If she’d stuck it out a little longer, she’d have done quite well for herself. She may still. I haven’t told the lawyers. Anyway. The doc says it’s a matter of weeks, at most. Why don’t you come up for a couple of days? Bring a bottle of something good. Maybe two. You know the way.”

“What should I do?” Carl asked his wife after she had read the message over his shoulder.

“You mean you aren’t going?” Melanie said.

“No, I am going.”

“Then what . . . Ah. You don’t know how long you’ll be there.”

“He shouldn’t be on his own. Not now.”

“Doesn’t he have a daughter?”

“They haven’t spoken for fifteen years. She stopped talking to Hunter when he married the second time. I suppose it’s never too late, except it almost is.”

“What about his brothers and sisters? Isn’t he one of four?”

“They don’t talk much. There’s one brother he’s on good terms with, but he lives in Austria.”

“Well, it isn’t as if he’s alone.”

“Nurses aren’t the same as family.”

“You aren’t family.”

“I’m close enough.”

Melanie sighed. “You have coverage at the dojo?”

He nodded. “Indrani can do the four-thirty classes, and I’m pretty sure Tara and Jeff can teach the five-thirties. The only day I’m not certain about is Saturday. I’ll have to call Carmen, see if she’s available.”

“You should take the Subaru. I’m pretty sure I read something about there being snow on the ground in Vermont already.”

“Will do. And babe?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“Of course you do.”

II

Of the many stories Hunter Kang had shared with him over three decades of friendship, the one Carl Kimani returned to as he packed for the trip to South Burlington, was that of Hunter’s first death. “Not near death,” Hunter had said. “Death. I was gone for at least five minutes before I was revived.” They had been sitting at a booth in Pete’s Corner Pub in Huguenot, drinking Heinekens, after a particularly grueling workout at their karate school. They had known each other six months.

“What happened?” Carl said.

“Riptide,” Hunter said. “My dad decided to take the family to the Jersey Shore. This was after my little sister died—I told you about Natalie, right?”

Carl nodded.

“That’s right, I did. We had been in mourning for, it must have been a year by then. Dad packed us into the van, including Mom, who insisted she didn’t want to go, and drove to Point Pleasant. Sprang for three rooms at the Neptune Motel, one for him and Mom, one for my older sisters, and one for me and my little brother. It was . . .” Hunter shook his head, smiling. “Man, it was fantastic. One of the best things my old man ever did. Maybe the best. We spent our days at the beach, with a break at lunchtime for subs at a deli a couple of blocks away. At dinner, we had pizza or hamburgers, and were allowed to watch TV in our rooms until eleven o’clock, which was unheard of. You remember Simon & Simon?”

“Sure.”

“That was the first time I ever saw that show. I loved it. Anyway, our second to last day at the beach, I swam into a riptide. The next thing I knew, I was being carried away from everybody, out to sea. I didn’t know what to do. I tried swimming toward shore, but I wasn’t strong enough to keep myself in place, let alone fight my way to the beach. I started to panic. It wasn’t long before I was screaming for help, waving at the rest of my family. At first, they thought I was showing off. By the time they realized what was happening, I was going under.

“If you were forced to pick a way to die, drowning isn’t the worst. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty bad at the start. You thrash and cry, struggling to keep the water out of your mouth and nose. In what seems like a matter of seconds, though, you’re overcome by a feeling of tremendous peace, and you let the process that’s started, continue. After I went under for the final time, I looked at the water around me, which was this luminous blue, and thought this was the color of death, and it was beautiful. Even at this age—we’re talking eleven years old—I was aware that what I was experiencing was a kind of gift, not like what Natalie had been through, the year before.

“My sister Vicky was the one who reached me first, and not my other sister Heather, which was strange, because Heather was on the swim team at her high school, and Vicky was captain of the chess club. Vicky also knew that the way out of a riptide is not to swim against it, but sideways to it, parallel to the shore, until you’re free. This was what she did. As she was turning toward the beach, Heather joined her, and together, my sisters brought me in. When they delivered me to my dad, though, I was dead. No heartbeat, no breathing. If you could have hooked me up to an EEG, I’m sure it would have showed no brain activity.

“For what might have been the first time in his life, Dad froze. Here was a man who had immigrated to the US from Busan with a degree in graphic design and a bank account with just enough in it to let him live outside LA for three months. At the end of six weeks, he had a job with a small advertising company; within six years, he was chosen to head up their office in West New York. During that time, he met my mom, which meant dealing with her parents. Let me tell you, however progressive their voting record, when it came to whoever was dating their Lily, Grandpa and Grandma McMaster were not terribly thrilled with their daughter dating and then becoming engaged to an Asian. Apparently, Grandma said to her, ‘Marriage is hard enough as it is. Why do you want to complicate it?’ Nice, huh? But the two of them stuck to their guns, and when Dad moved east, he took his wife and young daughters with them. Together, they built a life for themselves in Jersey. The family expanded, two boys and another girl. At five, his youngest daughter was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer, which took two agonizing years to kill her. Throughout all of it, he had remained steadfast. Mom called him her rock, and I think the rest of us viewed him that way, too. Now here I was lying lifeless in his arms, a second child lost within the span of twelve months. It was too much.

“Fortunately for everyone, my mom hauled me away from him and dropped me onto the sand. She pumped my chest, turned me on my side to help the water pour out, rolled me on my back, pinched my nose, blew two breaths into my lungs, and started a set of chest compressions. My sisters, my brother, my father gathered around us, along with some other people who had witnessed Vicky and Heather dragging me out of the surf. One of the bystanders ran for a lifeguard (all of whom, needless to say, were fucking useless). Dad started to speak to Mom, words to the effect of, ‘Honey, he’s gone,’ but she stopped him with a look that killed the sentence in his mouth. She labored over me. She pressed down on my sternum one, two, three, four, five times, switched to my head to fill my lungs, went back to working on my heart. The seconds advanced, each one carrying me that much further from her, but my mother’s pace did not slacken. She was a dentist—did I ever tell you that? Met my dad when he came in with an abscess. Romantic, eh? She was six years older than he was. Packed up her practice in San Marino and opened a new one in Jersey City, while managing a steadily expanding family. When Natalie was given her diagnosis, Mom brought in a second and third dentist so she could spend the maximum time possible with her. She took my sister’s death hard—not that the rest of us didn’t, but with Mom, it seemed almost personal, as if death had targeted her child, in particular.

“Well. Mom put all of her effort—her concentration, her strength, her will—into her fight with the Grim Reaper. It was as if she was prying his grip from me one bony finger at a time. Right as the ambulance pulled up in the parking lot, I opened my eyes and sucked in a gigantic breath. Heather shrieked. Dad burst into tears. The EMT’s insisted on taking me to the hospital, which my parents agreed to. Mom rode in the ambulance with me. Dad followed with everyone else in the van. On the way there, as the EMT was fussing over me, Mom leaned in close and whispered, ‘You know what happened to you.’

“I nodded. The fact of my death felt too enormous to fit into words; it crowded the back of the ambulance with us.

“She glanced at the EMT, and when he looked away to check something, she said, ‘Did you see anything?’

“I knew what she was asking. I nodded again. ‘Natalie,’ I said.

“Mom inhaled sharply. ‘Really?’

“ ‘Really,’ I said. ‘She was glowing—she was surrounded by yellow light. She was wearing the Hello Kitty T-shirt she liked, the purple one, and her favorite jeans. She held out her hand to me, said where she was was beautiful and peaceful. That’s all I remember. The next thing I knew, I was sitting up on the beach.’

“ ‘Oh, baby,’ Mom said. She sat back, one hand over her mouth, her eyes full of tears. ‘Oh.’ If the EMT noticed, which I’m sure he did, then I’m also sure he thought she was overcome by what had almost happened to me. He was half right. She didn’t ask me anything else, not there, not during the day I spent in the hospital, not during the trip home. In fact, she never mentioned what I’d described to her again. But after that, I had the sense she wore her grief for my sister more lightly, as if it were no longer a heavy coat, but a light scarf.”

Hunter raised his hand. “Before you ask, because how could you not, no, I did not see my little sister in a full-body halo. She did not speak to me. You want to know what I experienced while I was dead? Nothing. One moment, I was floating underwater, my vision closing off, and the next I was on the beach, coughing up the water still in my lungs. In between was a blank. It wasn’t like being asleep. I had no sense of the passage of time, no sense of anything. I simply . . . wasn’t.

“Of course, I couldn’t tell my mom any of that. I knew what she wanted to hear—what she needed to hear. So, I told her. I lied, but . . . when she was dying, she was at peace with it. On her deathbed, she told my sisters Natalie was coming for her.”

After a sip of his beer, Carl said, “Not to play Devil’s Advocate . . .”

“What?”

“The kid who went to twelve years of Catholic school would argue you didn’t see the next life because you weren’t heading there. It wasn’t your time.”

“I was dead. That sounds like it was my time.”

“Not if God didn’t want it to be.”

“Yeah, well, tell your inner Catholic child to come talk to me after he’s been dead for five minutes. Then we can compare notes, talk about what God wants.”

III

On a clear, cold Wednesday morning in early November, Carl took I-87 from the Beacon-Newburgh exit north to Route 7, on the other side of Albany, which he followed east out of New York into Vermont. Once over the border, he turned north again with 7, driving along the western edge of the state, toward South Burlington, a place Hunter had declared among the most civilized small cities he had spent time in, with the perfect proportion of bookstores and good restaurants, and within easy distance of Canada, his second favorite country. “Although,” he had added recently, “the way things are going here, it’s edging closer to the top spot.” Set on a hill a couple of miles southwest of the city, his large house was surrounded by evergreens, which did not diminish the view of Lake Champlain with the Adirondacks beyond from its windows. The fruit of Hunter’s years as a photojournalist, as well as of a handful of prudent investments, the house was a source of mild envy for Carl, whose modest Cape was, now that the girls were at college, plenty big enough for him and Melanie, especially with the garage converted into a study. But a spacious residence had been Carl’s fantasy since a childhood spent sharing fifteen hundred square feet of raised ranch with his parents, older brother, and younger sisters.

When he expressed his jealousy to Melanie, his wife reminded him that Hunter’s abode had been paid for by bullets zipping past him, once pinging off the helmet he almost never wore, not to mention, by threats from local warlords and field commanders, a few of which had drawn perilously close to coming true. His Pulitzer, his books, his house had been earned risking his life to show the world sights it didn’t want to see, but needed to. All of which was true, nor had success curdled Hunter’s personality. He was essentially the same guy Carl had met when they started karate classes together in their early twenties, at the Double Dragon Dojo in Poughkeepsie. These days, the principal difference in Hunter, as he himself liked to say, was that he could afford the top-shelf single malt he preferred. (In fact, he was part owner of a small distillery somewhere in Scotland; Carl couldn’t remember its name.) Yet this did little to dilute Carl’s envy for his friend’s dwelling. As far as he was concerned, if you had to select a location in which to live out your last days, Hunter’s was about as good as any.

Or so he thought. He wondered if Hunter shared his opinion, if he spent his time conscious of the understated beauty surrounding him, or if the prospect of his impending end, the one he’d already tasted, chased other concerns from his mind.

The road passed between the gnarled ranks of an apple orchard, and without warning Carl found himself remembering his first and only HIV test, taken at twenty-three, when he was not long out of a relationship which had given him a case of the crabs cured in one long night, and trust issues which would require longer to treat. Over a pitcher of cheap beer, he had relayed the tale of his ex-girlfriend and her infidelities to a coworker at the Office Max he was then assistant-managing. Instead of the chuckle and expression of commiseration he was expecting, Porter had stared at him with concern. “Dude,” he said, “please tell me you were using protection.”

“At first, sure,” Carl said, “but then she was on the pill.”

“Have you been tested?”

“For what?”

“What do you think? AIDS.”

“Oh,” Carl said, “I don’t think I—”

Porter cut him off. “You were having unprotected sex with a girl who was cheating on you with someone who passed on crabs to her. Who knows what else he might have given her?”

“But . . .”

“You really want to chance it?”

He didn’t, and so Carl had gone to the Department of Health to have his blood drawn; although, self-conscious about meeting someone he knew there, he drove twenty miles up the Hudson, to the office in Wiltwyck. After sitting on a molded plastic chair in the waiting room, Carl was directed to a closet-sized office, where he sat on another uncomfortable chair while a nurse dressed in a brown pantsuit and cream blouse asked him questions about his sexual and drug-use history before instructing him to roll up his sleeve. She filled a vial with his blood, taped a cotton ball over the spot on his arm, and gave him a slip of paper with his ID number on it and told him his results would be ready in two weeks.

Carl had spent that time trying not to think about the test’s outcome. In unguarded moments, though, he would recall his older brother’s best friend, Wayne Ahuja, who had suffered with and then died from AIDS-related complications over the course of a year and a half. Ever skinny, Wayne had become positively skeletal as his health worsened, his skin yellowing from the cancer consuming his liver. Toward the end, he had lost vision in his left eye, and for reasons of which Carl was unsure, had taken to walking with a cane. Throughout his decline, Wayne had retained an exasperated sense of humor, complaining of dying from a fling with a paralegal, and not a debauched weekend with Freddy Mercury. While he refused to be despondent—at least, publicly—about a month before he entered hospice care, Wayne said to Carl, “You know, I’m going to miss not seeing Paris.”

They were sitting on the back porch of Wayne’s mother’s condo in Beacon. Manny, Carl’s older brother, was helping Mrs. Ahuja in the kitchen. It was a warm spring day, but Wayne was wearing a cardigan and a blanket draped over his shoulders. Carl said, “Paris?”

“I’m treading perilously close to stereotype, I know,” Wayne said. “I can’t help it. I’ve always loved France. When my father was alive, he used to fly to France for business. He always brought me a souvenir, a little Eiffel Tower, French comics. The way he described Paris made it sound like the most amazing, wonderful city. In high school, I took French 1, 2, 3, and 4, all with Madame McCarthy, who was a flake. My junior year, there was a class trip to Paris, but we couldn’t swing it, financially. My first real crush was on an exchange student from Besançon my senior year; he was beautiful and totally clueless, just thought I was very friendly. I’ll say. In college, I majored in French. One of my teachers, Claude, was from outside Paris, and I used to ask her about the city in my terrible French. I watched every French movie Blockbuster had on the shelves. I read The Stranger, first in English and then (slowly) in French. A lot of poets, too, Rimbaud and Verlaine, Baudelaire, Valéry. I liked Baudelaire the best; Rimbaud always seemed like he was trying too hard to play the bad boy.

“Anyway, my plan was, once I finished college, I would work for a couple of years, stay with Mom to save money, and then spend a summer in Paris. I intended to hit all the tourist spots, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre, Shakespeare & Co. I fantasized about finding a job while I was there, but hadn’t figured out how to make that happen. I wasn’t concerned. I assumed I had time. You know what they say happens when you assume?”

“You make an ass of you and me,” Carl said.

“There you have it.”

That was their last conversation; the next he saw Wayne, he was lying in his coffin in a funeral home in Fishkill. The final expression on his face suggested disappointment, as if, after his lengthy suffering, whatever Wayne saw approaching was anticlimactic. Carl had not forgotten the look, made uneasy by what it suggested.

The apple trees gave way to open fields dotted with rocks. As the date of his test result had approached, he remembered, he had noticed a sensation at the limit of his perception, not unlike the feeling of pressure his ears registered during a change in altitude. No amount of swallowing or yawning affected this pressure; indeed, it strengthened each day. He noticed, too, the people and objects around him outlined ever-so-slightly in black, as if they were comic book illustrations and he aware of the inker’s hand. He recognized the link between the sensation and the black haloes and understood both as by-products of his escalating anxiety. Yet he could not shake the suspicion that this was more than an elaborate hallucination, that he was perceiving these things more than inventing them. Perhaps they had always been present, waiting for a situation of sufficient duress to disclose them.

By the time Carl was driving Route 9 to the Rhinecliff-Wiltwyck Bridge, he had decided that what he had grown aware of was death, was the void, the nonexistence atop which everyone and everything sat like soap bubbles quivering on the surface of dark water. At any moment, an individual bubble might burst, or dwindle to nothing, and the remaining bubbles would shift to close the gap, and it would be as if the particular bubble had never existed. Crossing the bridge high over the Hudson, he felt himself as hollow as any mix of soap and water blown into a sphere, his life a momentary structure fated to collapse.

Threaded through this apprehension, however, was another, of the sheer loveliness surrounding him. From the mid-afternoon sunlight bright on the corrugated surface of the Hudson below, to the chrome shine of the bumper in front of him, from the fine hairs on the knuckles of his right hand resting on the steering wheel, to the long blades of green grass nodding on the other side of the road as he drove off the bridge, beauty met his eyes wherever he turned them. A long line of passengers waiting to board a Trailways bus for Manhattan might have been figures in a painting by Brueghel. The buildings on either side of Broadway glowed with Technicolor vibrancy. A group of children running home from school could have stepped fresh from Renaissance marble. The impression swelled like a great piece of music rising to a crescendo, in its own way as pitiless as the sense of death with which it was entwined. Lightheaded, he parked up the street from the Department of Health. He was in the grip of an experience more profound than any he had undergone since the death of his father two years before, a moment in some ways adjunct to the earlier one. It continued as he once again entered the small office, where a different nurse, wearing a green dress and a necklace of large green beads, passed him a piece of paper on which he read the word NEGATIVE. Nor did it cease upon his return to his car, where he sat with the engine off and let relief spill through him. Perhaps the imminent dread of death lessened somewhat, but his recognition of the glory of the world did not. It held steady, even climbed a few rungs higher. By the next day, it would diminish considerably; while the morning following returned him to normal.

After that, the closest Carl drew to perceiving the raw, unfiltered beauty around him were the births of his daughters. Random moments in the intervening decades offered glimpses of loveliness, but nothing to compare with what he had known during his swing into death’s orbit. He wondered if Wayne Ahuja had known the same beauty as he was dying, if perceiving the world’s grace was compensation for losing it, if the disappointed expression on Wayne’s face post-mortem was because whatever came next could not approach the beauty he was leaving.

On his left, the ground dropped to Lake Champlain, across whose shining breadth the Adirondacks stood in a line like the wall to some unimaginable kingdom, their jagged heights draped in snow.

IV

Despite previous assurances that he would do so, Hunter had not paved the long driveway to his house. It was a nod to privacy, a complement to the NO TRESPASSING signs nailed to the trees at the end of the drive; albeit, one easily overcome by anyone willing to take the quarter mile rutted dirt slowly enough to avoid scraping their vehicle’s undercarriage. For most of its course, the driveway ran between dense rows of tall red pine. Amidst the trunks to the right, Carl glimpsed a figure in jeans and a red jacket, a woman walking beside a golden retriever, who ran and gamboled about her. That didn’t take long, he thought; although the woman could as easily be Hunter’s doctor, checking her patient’s status, or his lawyer, here to review details of his will. She could have offered to take out the dog as a kindness. Or maybe she’s the reason his third wife left him. Hunter had always been charming, to put it mildly. In fact, it was a particularly credible threat from one woman’s angry boyfriend that had brought him to train at the Double Dragon. His flirtations and an extended affair had strained his first marriage far past what Carl had been certain was its breaking point; the end of the same affair had undone marriage number two. With Hunter’s third trip to the altar, Carl had wondered if his friend might be ready to settle, but it would hardly be surprising to learn that, even in the face of a terminal diagnosis, Hunter remained restless.

And what business is that of yours? Melanie might have been sitting in the car with him. That isn’t why you’re here, is it?

“No,” he said.

The trees thinned and fell away, revealing the short hill atop which Hunter’s house sat. The architect had been after something in the spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright, and had constructed a long wooden box with a flat roof and a western wall composed of two stories of windows, which Hunter said made the place a bitch to heat during the Vermont winters, but offered stunning views of the lake and the mountains. The driveway climbed through tall grass to a pair of garage doors set in the hillside below the southern end of the house. An olive, late-model Range Rover was parked in front of one of the doors, an older blue Volvo before the other. Carl tagged the Range Rover as Hunter’s, the Volvo as belonging to his dog-walking guest. He stopped far enough behind the vehicles to allow either’s departure. He retrieved the plastic shopping bag with the bottles of Auchentoshan and Talisker in it, and stepped out of the car for the walk up the stone steps to the front door. The air was cold and damp, brimming with the promise of snow.

Hunter opened the door as Carl was leaning to press the bell. “Hey!” he said, “You made it!” He looked terrible. The weight he had accumulated with his semi-retirement was gone, devoured by his sickness. He was as thin as he had been when he and Carl had met, thinner. A belt cinched on its last hole secured his jeans to his hips, while his blue and white flannel shirt enveloped him like a small tent. A faded blue baseball cap shielded a face drawn to the bone. Carl embraced him, and his friend felt insubstantial, more fabric than flesh. It’s as if he’s already gone. They released one another, and Hunter gestured at the shopping bag. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Water of life,” Carl said.

“Bit late for me,” Hunter said, “although I swear, it’s what’s brought me this far. You know how long the docs gave me? Three months. ‘Put your affairs in order,’ they said. ‘This is gonna be quick.’ That was nine months ago, almost ten, at this point. Who could have guessed? But come in, come in,” he said, retreating inside the house.

Carl followed, passing along the front hall to the living room, a vast open space across which were scattered couches, love seats, and easy chairs, all upholstered in the same black padding, each oriented more or less toward the large flat-screen TV hung on the wall to the left. A doorway in the same wall led down another hallway, past a number of closed doors on the right, a wall of windows on the left, which showed the tops of the red pines and, beyond them, a shining stretch of Lake Champlain, a cluster of the Adirondacks. They emerged into the kitchen, which was centered around a sizable island whose gray and white marble top glowed with the afternoon light. Hunter continued to another doorway, which admitted to a smaller room, its walls lined with tall bookcases stuffed with volumes shelved without apparent regard to size, subject, or author. Facing the windows and their view, a pair of easy chairs in the same black padding as the living room furniture flanked a small table, atop which rested a pair of glass tumblers and a jug of water. Seating himself on the far side of the table, Hunter nodded at the glasses and said, “There you go. I’ll trust you to decide which bottle we finish first.”

“You don’t think it’s a little early?” Carl said. “Don’t you want to have lunch?”

“Early was a long time ago,” Hunter said. “I’ll have Annie order us a pizza when she gets back. You like mushrooms? Don’t worry about it. We’ll order two pies. You can get what you want.”

“Fair enough,” Carl said. He removed the bottles from the bag, set them beside the glasses. “As I recall, you favor the Auchentoshan.”

“You recall correctly, sir.”

He poured three fingers’ worth into one tumbler, reached for the water. Hunter raised his left hand. “Don’t bother.”

“Do I have to give the speech about how the drop of water unlocks the Scotch’s flavors?”

“At this point, I prefer my experiences undiluted.”

“If you insist.” Carl placed the bottle on the table and settled into his chair.

“Ahhh,” Hunter said, smacking his lips after his first taste. “This is the stuff.”

“It’s even better with the water,” Carl said.

“You don’t let up, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Dying’s looking better and better.”

Carl supped from his glass. “What’s the latest on that?”

Hunter shrugged. “We’re in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, two strikes. Not much longer to go. Maybe a week or two. Maybe less.”

“You seem in pretty decent shape, all things considered.”

“You mean, for a guy who’s already a skeleton?”

“Is that what’s different about you? I thought it was your hair.”

“You’re not wrong about that.” Hunter removed his baseball cap, revealing a head rough with stubble.

“Chemo?”

“Yeah.” Hunter returned the cap to his head. “I stopped a month ago, once the docs told me there wasn’t any point. Had you seen me while I was on that stuff, you would’ve had no trouble believing the end was nigh. Since I discontinued it, I feel pretty good. You know, for a guy who’s on his way out. It’s strange: This is what got my mom. I’m five years older than she was, but in the end, heredity won.” Hunter raised his drink, frowned. “Goddammit, why is this empty?”

“Hang on,” Carl said, and poured him another generous portion of Scotch.

“Good man,” Hunter said.

“Still a no on the water?”

“Why do you insist on asking questions you know the answer to?”

“Hope springs eternal, or something.” Carl’s glass was almost finished. He refilled it with less than he’d served Hunter, added a drop of water. Outside, on the lake, a boat was heading south. Exactly what type of vessel it was, he couldn’t say, only that it was neither sailboat or speedboat. A yacht? Maybe. It appeared to be making good time; long waves rolled away from it in a V.

“What about you?” Hunter said. “How’s Melanie? How’re the girls? Everything okay at the dojo?”

“Good, good, and yes,” Carl said. “Melanie’s not long back from a trip out west to a couple of shows. She did pretty well at one of them, may have found a new outlet for her jewelry. Deb has one more semester to go at Binghamton, then she’s looking at NYU for her master’s. Art history. Karen’s at community college, leaning toward nursing. We’re up to a hundred and fifty students at the studio, give or take.”

“That is good.”

“I can’t complain.” Carl tipped his glass at Hunter. “Any word from—it was Jill, right?”

“Gillian, yes,” Hunter said. “And no, nothing. You never met her, did you?”

“Once,” Carl said. “At the party you had for your book, the one about New Orleans after Katrina.”

“American Atlantis.”

“That one. Melanie came with me. She met Jill, too. She didn’t like her.”

“Your wife is a very perceptive woman. Which is why I’ve never asked you what she says about me.”

“It’s not all bad. She thinks you have a good eye.”

“Coming from Mel, that’s high praise.”

“I take it Francesca hasn’t been in touch.”

“Believe it or not, she has. Nothing like your old man’s imminent demise to bring you to his doorstep. She was here last week for a few days. I wouldn’t call it a good visit, but I didn’t expect it to be. She had a chance to say what she wanted to. Where I could, I explained and apologized. Not everything that’s happened to her has been my fault. We left things about as good as we could.”

“I’m sorry, man.”

“At least I saw her.”

“How about the woman I saw on my way in? Walking a golden retriever? Is she—did you say her name was? Annie?”

Hunter nodded. “Her name is Antoinette, Antoinette Mazarine; although she prefers to be called Madame Sosostris. It’s . . . her professional name, I guess.”

“Exactly which profession is she in?”

“She’s a psychic, fortune-teller, that kind of thing. She’s here to help me with some stuff.”

“Such as?”

“Drink up,” Hunter said, emptying his tumbler and holding it out for more. Sunlight turned the lake into a sheet of bronze, made the mountaintops burn white.

V

At some point thereafter, Carl looked at the Auchentoshan and saw that the bottle was empty. Simultaneously, he realized that he was drunker than he had been in years, since his last visit with Hunter, when the two of them had stayed up after his book release party drinking their way down a bottle of high-quality rum, which Hunter took straight, and Carl mixed with various leftover sodas. The next morning, much to Melanie’s mingled amusement and irritation, he had suffered a hangover so blinding he crawled into the back seat of the car and lay there while she drove them home. “Melanie isn’t here,” he mumbled, the statement filling him with crushing sadness.

“What?” Hunter said.

“Nothing.” With great care, he leaned over and lifted the Talisker from the table. He attempted to remove the seal from the cap, which proved a far more laborious task than he thought it should be. Finally, he peeled the last bit of plastic from the bottle’s neck and twisted the stopper free.

“At last,” Hunter said. “I thought I was gonna die of thirst.”

“You live next to a lake,” Carl said, amazed at his ability to pour the contents of the bottle into his friend’s held-out glass.

“So?”

“So, there’s plenty of water there.” He gestured at the windows, outside of which, the water was dark blue, the mountains heaps of shadow crowned by clouds lit red and orange.

“Yeah,” Carl said, “but . . .”

“But what?”

“We’re almost—we—we only have one bottle left.” He nodded at the Talisker, whose contents were already noticeably diminished.

“Don’t worry,” Hunter said, “we can get more. There’s a liquor store in town.”

“Sure,” Carl said, “but neither of us can drive. Not like this, in this state, this state of drunkenness.” He was finding it difficult to express himself; he wasn’t sure the words he was using meant what he wanted them to.

“Not us,” Hunter said. “Her. Annie. Sosostris. Madame. When she goes for the pizza, she can pick up another bottle. Or two.”

“Oh. That’s okay, then.”

“See? Problem solved.”

“Wait. Did we order the pizzas?”

“Of course, we did. Remember? Mushroom for me, cheese for you.”

“I never said I wanted cheese.”

“Well, why didn’t you? It’s too late to change now.”

“No—I mean, I don’t think we called anyone.”

“We didn’t. Madame Annie did.”

Had she? Carl couldn’t recall anyone entering the study after the two of them, but neither could he bring the last couple of hours into focus. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m . . .” Hunter’s voice trailed off. “Dammit. Didn’t we?” He placed his glass on the table. “Tell you what. One more, and if the pizza isn’t here, we’ll go order it. Mushroom for me, cheese for you.”

“Hawaiian,” Carl said.

“What?”

“Hawaiian,” Carl said. “Or maybe you call it Canadian. I know I had it in Canada. At a knockdown tournament in Toronto. Ham and pineapple.”

“On a pizza?”

“It’s delicious.”

“Ugh.”

“That’s what I want. It’s delicious.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Hawaiian is what I say.”

“I thought it was Canadian.”

“Either way.”

There was more conversation after that, but Carl couldn’t keep track of it. Some of it involved Hunter lecturing. He was a great one for holding forth when in his cups, was Carl’s friend. “The French call them . . . What do they call them? Les fantômes de . . . something.” Hunter’s one last drink turned into another two, or three, and Carl tipped a couple more servings into his tumbler, and the Talisker was done, which seemed an unbelievable, a ridiculous amount for the two of them to have consumed in a couple of hours. Except the view out the windows had gone dark, and the room’s track lighting was glowing—had Hunter switched it on? Or did the study have some kind of light sensor? Or maybe that woman, Annie, had looked in on them and turned on the lights. Did it matter? No, what mattered was that their pizzas hadn’t appeared. Which meant that someone hadn’t delivered them. Or ordered them. No pineapple and mushrooms for them. From the windows, a pair of middle-aged men regarded them from the comforts of their padded easy chairs. Jesus, when did we become so old? Still holding his glass, Hunter heaved himself from his chair with such force he staggered forward a half dozen steps, almost losing his balance before recovering. Waving for Carl to follow him, he staggered from the room; although Carl wasn’t certain of his friend’s destination, the kitchen or some other spot deeper within the house. Either way, his eyelids had grown incredibly heavy, as had the rest of him. Full of Scotch, he supposed. Who knew alcohol weighed so much? He set his tumbler on the table, closed his eyes, and unconsciousness rose over him in a flood.

VI

He woke needing to pee, urgently. On legs not fully awake, he lurched from the chair, swaying with the effort not to tip over. The room spun like a carnival ride winding down. Still drunk, he thought, though not quite as much as he had been. The utterly disconnected feeling had subsided, replaced by the sense of being on a one to two second delay, requiring the slightest bit more time to respond to his surroundings. There was a bathroom somewhere nearby. At different moments throughout the afternoon and evening, he and Hunter had risen to seek it out. On the other side of the kitchen, on the way to the living room. Third door on the left.

Though the kitchen seemed to have expanded dramatically since he had crossed it last, he succeeded in navigating to the hallway where the toilet was. His bladder relieved, he exited the room and continued along the hall to the living room, whose assorted seating was dimly visible in the moonlight falling through the windows. Whether Hunter had shown him his room, he couldn’t remember, nor was he sure enough of his recall of the house’s layout, especially drunk and in the dark, to want to search for it. He would crash on one of the couches. First, he would have to venture out to the car for his bag.

As he exited the front door, a pair of lights clicked on to either side of it. The temperature had plunged; his breath vented from his mouth in a cloud. Mist floated near the ground. The steps to the driveway sparkled with frost; he descended them with care. At the foot of the steps, another set of lights, these positioned over the garage doors, snapped to life. Down here, the mist rose higher, denser, catching the light and holding it, submerging the cars in a lake of pale radiance. It was colder here, too. Gooseflesh raised up and down his arms. Carl hurried to the Subaru and lifted his bag from the back seat. He shut the door, and caught something out of the corner of his right eye.

Standing near the edge of the woods, a child regarded him. The mist reduced it to an Impressionist blur, but its size suggested eight or nine. It appeared underdressed for the cold in a red T-shirt and jean shorts. A sleepwalker? From where? Did Hunter allow campers on his property? Who would want to spend the night outside in this weather? Carl took a step forward, halted. There was something else out there. Closer to the tree line, a pair of shapes paced back and forth, weaving in and out of the pines. Lean, low to the ground, they could have been mountain lions, except their trunks were too long, their legs spread to either side in a way that suggested a spider’s limbs more than a big cat’s. Their heads, too, something was off about the heads, a disfigurement the mist would not allow him to see clearly. They were too long. Fear icier than the air sliced through his intoxication. Could these be dogs? They didn’t seem to be menacing the child, at least, not yet. He dropped his bag and felt in the front pocket of his jeans for the knife tucked there (ironically, a gift from Hunter). He considered calling the house on his cell, but his friend was likely to be deeply unconscious; nor was Carl certain of Annie’s location. Knife retrieved, its blade unfolded, he advanced toward the child, his eye on the twin creatures behind it.

The closer he drew to all three, however, the harder they were to see. The mist thickened until only the glow of the lights at his back indicated direction. Left hand up in a guard, right ready to stab, he moved in small steps, sliding the soles of his sneakers over the ground to minimize an attacker’s ability to knock him off his feet. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Carl. I don’t know if you can see me, but I’m walking to you. I don’t want you to be frightened, but there are a couple of animals out here with us. They’re probably just dogs, but I don’t know them, so I think it’s a good idea to be careful. Can you tell me what your name is?”

In reply, the air erupted in high pitched laughter, like the lunatic cries of a pack of hyenas. Carl started, his heart hammering at the base of his throat. He stopped where he was. The hysterical yelps subsided, replaced by a new sound, the scrape of skin over dirt. Something was treading a wide circle around him; he was reasonably certain it was not the child. The hairs on the back of his neck lifted. He turned with the noise, doing his best to keep the knife aimed at whatever was producing it. Of course, a voice in the back of his brain said, this would be a good way to distract you from an attack to the rear. “One thing at a time,” he murmured. Should have held on to the bag, could have used it as a shield. “Too late, now.”

Without warning, the lights over the garage went out. Momentarily blind, Carl tensed, listening for the paws he was certain were about to run at him. None did. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that the mist had thinned to a fine vapor, and that he was at the edge of the woods. Of the featureless child, the strange predators, there was no sign. He stared into the trees, but if anyone was standing amidst their dim ranks, he could see neither them nor any animals.

For a second time, manic laughter filled the air. Glancing over his shoulder as he went, Carl retreated to his car, bending at the knees to retrieve his bag. Finally, the garage lights popped on. He was half expecting to find the child standing at his elbow, one of the big predators ready to pounce, but there was nothing there.

VII

Certain he would not be falling asleep any time soon, if ever, Carl dumped his bag next to the biggest couch in the living room before heading to the kitchen. Although his nerves were humming with adrenaline, he could feel the drag of the alcohol his system had not processed. He found a glass in one of the cupboards and poured and drank four and a half cups of water. Given how much Scotch he had imbibed, there was no way he was escaping a hangover, but he figured he would do what he could to minimize it. Depositing the glass in the sink, he returned to the living room, where he settled onto the couch. He had no idea what time it was, only that it was late, far later than he was accustomed to being awake these days. Old, he thought, you’re so old.

The next he knew, he was climbing out of sleep, prompted once more by the urge to urinate. No time seemed to have passed, but a look out the windows showed the sky washed with faint light, herald to the dawn. He found the bathroom more easily this time, and foregoing modesty, left the door open while he peed. The chamber music echoed through the hall. While he was washing his hands, he heard mixed with the water’s hiss another sound, what might have been the squeak of sneakers on the floor outside the bathroom. He shut off the tap and waited, listening.

Nothing. He dried his hands and walked to the kitchen. Another couple of glasses of water, then back to the living room, where the couch was waiting to receive him.

VIII

Breakfast smells (coffee, sausages, toast) and sounds (the stuttering burp of the coffee maker, the sizzle of oil in the pan, the ticking of the toaster) roused him to late morning sunlight. Head complaining at the effort, Carl sat up. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen this coming. At least he’d remembered to hydrate; otherwise, the hangover would have been mortal.

Hunter was waiting in the kitchen, standing at the stove cooking sausages in one pan and scrambled eggs in the another. A gray tracksuit floated around him. Aside from his sunglasses, he showed scant evidence of the previous day’s excess. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “How’re you feeling?”

“About two steps from death,” Carl said. “How is it you’re even moving around?”

“Please,” Hunter said. “You think that’s the most I’ve ever had to drink? I tell you about the time I was in Chechnya, following a squad of Russian spetsnaz? Those guys spend all night working their way through a case of vodka, then are on the move at dawn, fighting by breakfast. If you want to run with them, you have to be able to keep up with them.”

“I’m amazed your liver survived.”

“Yeah, well, I did lay off alcohol for about a month after I came back from that assignment. What do you want to eat? Eggs? Sausage? Both?”

“For the moment, this’ll do,” Carl said, lifting the mug of coffee he’d poured. “I don’t suppose you have any oatmeal.”

“Yeah, there’s a box of the instant stuff in the cabinet to my left. Apple and cinnamon, I think.”

“That’ll be fine, thanks.”

They sat on high stools at the kitchen island, Carl with his coffee, Hunter with a plate of sausage and eggs. Through the windows, Carl watched a hawk skim the tops of the evergreens. “Actually,” Hunter said through a mouthful of food, “that was among the drunkest I’ve been.”

“No ‘among’ for me.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve never been what you’d call a heavyweight, but I’ve put away my fair share of booze. Not like that, though.”

A smile broke over Hunter’s face. “Good. I like the idea of our final visit being marked by a memorable event. You’ll always be able to say, ‘The last time I saw Hunter, we drank more Scotch than I ever had before or since.’ ”

“Couldn’t we have gone out for a nice dinner, instead? Or a game of miniature golf, maybe?”

“Nah. Think of it as being like Vikings on the eve of a big battle, working themselves up for it.”

“We’re fighting a battle today?”

“What would you say if I said yes?”

“I’d say I wish I stayed home, sent you a nice card, instead: ‘So long, nice knowing you.’ ”

“A card? Really?”

“A nice card. You’d love it. They’d show it off at your funeral.”

“After I was killed in the battle you bailed on.”

“It would be some card,” Carl said. “Speaking of which, are you planning a memorial service?”

“Yeah.” Hunter nodded. “Immediately after I go, there’ll be a small gathering in Burlington, at one of the galleries. Then, in the spring, there’ll be a bigger event down in Brooklyn, a retrospective of my work with remarks by a few of my friends and colleagues. If you’re available . . .”

Carl’s throat tightened. “Sure.”

“Good. Thank you. I’m just about done writing your speech. I figured we could rehearse it later.”

“What? You don’t trust me to tell the truth?”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

“So, what’s the plan for today?”

“Finish your coffee,” Hunter said. “You should probably have your oatmeal, too.”

IX

After breakfast, Hunter led Carl to the guest room, which was on the other side of the study, up a flight of stairs, and along a short hallway. “I’ll see you for lunch,” Hunter said. “I have some dying stuff to attend to.”

“Right,” Carl said.

The room was on the east side of the house, what Carl thought of as its back side. Instead of a wall composed of glass, a pair of regular-sized windows gave a view across an overgrown field behind the house to the tree line. Low hills rolled in the distance. Resisting the temptation of the queen-sized bed, Carl showered in the attached bathroom, dressed, and called home.

“How hungover are you?” Melanie asked.

“It could be worse,” Carl said.

“That bad.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you leave any Scotch for today?”

“Technically, it was today when we finished the second bottle. I think it was, anyway.”

“Wonderful. Well, I’m sure Hunter has more liquor, just in case there’s anything left of your liver. How is he?”

“Honestly, he’s in better shape than I was expecting. Don’t get me wrong: He’s skin and bones, with an emphasis on the bones. But I imagined he’d be confined to bed, too spent to say much; instead, he’s up making scrambled eggs and sausages this morning. As far as I can tell, he’s as sharp as he ever was.”

“He’s led a pretty active life. He must have a lot to draw on.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Has he said anything about his ex? Jill, was it?”

“Gillian, yeah. Not really—only that he hasn’t heard from her. There’s another woman staying here, Annie something. I saw her yesterday on the way in, walking the dog. I haven’t met her, yet.”

“Really.”

“Apparently, she’s a psychic. Hunter says she’s here to help him. I don’t know with what.”

“I’ll avoid the obvious remarks,” Melanie said.

“I thought the same thing, but I’m not sure it’s the case.”

“Either way, Hunter’s a big boy. Anything else going on?”

Carl hesitated, weighing a description of his early morning driveway encounter with the child and the weird animals. Already, though, the event seemed distant, dreamlike, if not a product of the Scotch, then colored by it. He settled for, “Not much. I ran into a couple of coyotes when I went out to the car for my bag.” The instant the words left his mouth, he realized how false they sounded. Even through liquor-clouded lenses, the things he’d seen had not moved like coyotes. He remembered their strange, spread-eagled crawl, their elongated skulls. No, not coyotes, and not cougars, and not anything with which he was familiar.

“Holy crap,” Melanie said. “What did they do?”

“Oh, they prowled back and forth in front of the woods for a minute or two, and ran away.”

“Be careful. It’s more wild up there.”

“Yeah,” Carl said, but he had an obscure feeling it was too late for caution.

X

There wasn’t space for him to practice his morning (now afternoon) kata in the guest room, so once he and Melanie had said their good-byes, Carl made his way downstairs. He was considering finding a spot outside, but during the time he had spent in the guest room, clouds had thickened the sky, obscuring the Adirondacks and releasing torrents of snow. In the kitchen, he stopped to watch the crowns of the red pine swaying this way and that, as if engaged in a vast conversation about the snow accumulating on their branches. Behind him, a voice said, “It’s supposed to last all day.”

He turned, and saw a woman standing on the opposite side of the kitchen island. Late twenties, he guessed, dressed in a white cable-knit sweater and jeans, her chestnut hair pulled back into a ponytail. On the marble in front of her, a number of oversized cards had been arranged in a circle—Tarot cards. The woman was holding the rest of her deck in her left hand. “Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m Annie.”

“No need to apologize,” Carl said. “I’m Carl. Hunter maybe said I was coming?”

“He did. I saw you on the driveway yesterday.”

“You were walking a dog.”

“Rufus, yes.”

“Where is he? I haven’t seen him at all since I’ve been here.”

“Hunter’s rehoming him with some friends. I took him over there yesterday afternoon.”

“That’s . . . oddly responsible of him.”

“You aren’t the first person to say that to me.” Annie picked up the card at the top of the circle and returned it to the deck.

“Am I interrupting you? Because if I am, I can get out of your way.”

“It’s all right,” Annie said. “I was done, anyway.”

“I take it from the cards you’re Madame Sosostris.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“What were you doing the reading for? Or can I ask you that?”

“I was—you might say I was checking on Hunter.”

“And?”

“Your friend is very sick.”

Carl nodded. “Yeah. A week or two, he said.”

Annie lifted the last card from the island. Without looking at Carl, she said, “It’s a little less. Days, really. If he passed this afternoon, I wouldn’t be surprised. You shouldn’t be, either.” She placed the deck on the island.

“That’s . . .” The words were a roundhouse kick to his unprotected head. “I mean, I knew he didn’t have long. It’s why I’m here. But I assumed we’d have a little time together. He’s—he seems fine.”

“Hunter possesses more willpower than anyone I’ve ever encountered. I’m fairly certain that’s what’s keeping him going at this point.”

“He’s always been stubborn.”

“Yes, I can believe it.”

“We met in karate class,” Carl said, crossing to the island. He slid out a stool and seated himself on it. “I don’t know if he’s mentioned this. There were some things he was good at right from the start. Free sparring, in particular: he was fast, and he was ferocious. He would hit you four times before you knew what was happening. The forms, though, the kata, were a challenge. He had a hard time remembering the sequences of moves, and then performing them at the proper pace. For some students, this would not have been a big deal. They would do whatever kata they were responsible for well enough to earn their next promotion, and that was that. Not Hunter. He wanted his forms to be perfect. Every time he made a mistake, it was back to the beginning, running through the form until he had it right, no matter how long that took. I used to practice with him after class was over. We would stay an extra hour, longer. While we were training, his focus was absolute. Those sessions made me a better martial artist. Without them, I doubt I’d have ended up with my own studio.”

“He told me a version of that story,” Annie said. “In it, he wants to go home, but you insist he keeps working until he does the form properly.”

“Well, there may have been a little of that,” Carl said. “What about you? How did you meet Hunter?”

“On a message board. He had some questions he was looking to have answered, and he reached out to me. We corresponded for about a month, then he invited me up here.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not sleeping with him, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“No,” Carl said, glancing away. “I mean, it’s none of my business if you are.”

“You’re right,” Annie said, “it isn’t. But I don’t want anything distracting you from what we have to do.”

“Which is?”

“Help him as he leaves this life.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m not talking about another marathon drinking session.”

“Thank God,” Carl said, and smiled. “It’s been years since Hunter and I discussed these things, but time was, he didn’t have much use for notions of the afterlife. I’m guessing that’s changed.”

“Yes and no,” Hunter said, entering the kitchen. He had changed from his gray tracksuit to a white long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. His faded blue baseball cap perched on his head.

“Hey,” Carl said.

“You’re ready?” Annie said.

“Getting there,” Hunter said. “First, my friend and I need to discuss a few things.”

“We do?”

“Why don’t you make yourself some lunch? There’s plenty of stuff in the fridge.” Hunter pulled a stool toward him and climbed onto it, adding, “I’m not hungry.”

“All right,” Carl said. “How about you, Annie? You want anything?”

“Thanks, I’m fasting.”

While he was retrieving bread, cold cuts, and mustard from the refrigerator, Carl heard Hunter say, “Well?” and Annie reply, “It’s as good a time as any. You see what’s happening outside.” Hunter said, “I take it you checked the cards.” Annie said, “I did. Let’s put it this way: You’re lucky your friend is here.” Hunter grunted. Annie said, “Do you want me to give you time with your friend?” “It’s all right,” Hunter said, “I don’t imagine this’ll take too long.”

His smoked turkey and Swiss assembled, a glass of milk poured, Carl resumed his place at the island. “So,” he said to Hunter. “What is it you want to talk about?”

“It’s my sister,” Hunter said.

“Which one, Vicky or Heather?”

“Neither,” Hunter said. “Natalie. The dead one.”

XI

“Come again?” Carl said.

“I lied to you,” Hunter said. “All those years ago, when I told you about me dying.”

“Your first death.”

“Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, the drowning part was true. My heart stopped. I was gone. My mother had to resuscitate me. The lie was me saying there was nothing after I died.”

“Okay.”

“I’m just gonna describe what happened,” Hunter said. He swallowed, licked his lips. “Start with me underwater. My vision closing off, contracting to a single point. It was like the reverse of the stories about moving through a bright tunnel. I seemed to be traveling backward along a dark passage, away from the light. Or, could be the light was moving, leaving me behind. It was a little frightening, but mostly, I was sad watching it go. I’m pretty sure the sensation of floating was the last thing I felt.

“And then I was on my hands and knees, gasping. I was no longer in the water. I was back on land. Not the beach, though. My fingers and knees were pressing into thick, gray mud. I was still wearing my swim trunks. I looked up, and saw the mud rising to a line of scrub grass. Overhead, dense gray clouds blocked off the sky. I stood, and glanced behind me. An enormous brown river, so wide its other shore was a distant line, flowed from left to right. Patches of mist hung above its surface, which swirled and eddied with competing currents. Despite that, I had the oddest impression I was watching a gigantic snake, something fit to wrestle Godzilla, sliding to a destination I didn’t want to know. I turned and headed for the grass. The mud made it slow going; I kept tripping and almost tripping. I wasn’t upset or scared—well, maybe some, at the prospect of a monster snake. What I mean is, I wasn’t especially freaked out at slipping under the waves and opening my eyes next to a river. Could be I was stunned, overwhelmed, but I mostly remember being curious about this place, which didn’t resemble the afterlife I’d learned about in Catholic school. I knew enough Greek mythology to think of the River Styx, except there was no sign of Charon the ferryman, and the rest of the shore was empty.

“As I approached the grass, I saw stands of trees, birches. In their midst was a structure—when you were a kid, did you make forts out of old cardboard boxes? You know, big ones, like the kind an appliance comes in?”

“Sure,” Carl said.

“What was in front of me was the biggest box fort I had ever seen. It was the kind of thing my siblings and I would have fantasized about building. There were boxes of all sizes, some large enough to hold a refrigerator. A low wall of cereal boxes separated a cluster of the biggest boxes from individual boxes scattered around its perimeter. Some of the boxes had pictures on them, the kind of crude figures small children draw, done in mud. Seeing the fort filled me with happiness. This was the kind of afterlife I wanted. Plus, I assumed the fort meant there were other kids here. I didn’t know who, but if they built something like this, I was sure we would get along. I hurried forward.

“As I passed one of the boxes outside the low wall, I saw the word JAIL written on it. From inside, someone whimpered. I stopped beside it. The box was washer- or dryer-sized. I circled it to see if there was an opening in one of its sides, a door to the jail. None. I leaned in close to it and said, ‘Hello?’

“Right away, a pair of voices burst out crying, ‘We’re sorry! We’ll be good! Please let us out!’ One of them started sobbing, the other went on pleading to be released. They both sounded young, four or five.

“ ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I’ll get you out of here.’

“Upset as the kids were, I thought they’d be happy to be released. But the one who was crying cried harder, and the other one shouted, ‘No!’

“ ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘You guys don’t sound like you’re having much fun.’ I ran my hands over the top of the box, searching for a loose corner to pull on, but the flaps were sealed tight.

“ ‘No,’ the kid said again. ‘If she finds out, we’ll be in trouble.’

“I said, ‘Aren’t you already in trouble?’

“ ‘Please,’ the kid said. ‘We have to stay here.’

“ ‘How come?’ I said. ‘What did you do? Who put you in here?’

“ ‘The queen,’ the kid said. ‘We made her mad, so we had to go to jail.’

“ ‘Who’s the queen?’

“The other kid’s sobs had diminished; my question revved them up. ‘She’s awful,’ the first kid said. ‘You should probably run away before she sees you.’

“The second kid stopped crying long enough to wail, ‘I don’t wanna be a dog!’

“I didn’t know who this queen was, but if she was ruling over a box fort, I guessed I could handle her. I said, ‘This isn’t fair. You guys shouldn’t be in here.’ Which only provoked more protests and sobs. I crouched, sliding my hands along the base of the box in search of a hole or tear an opening I could work to enlarge. Nothing. When I stood, I saw my sister, Natalie, standing on my left, between the jail and cereal box wall.

“She looked the same as she did in the photographs hanging around the house. In the year since we’d buried her, I had stared at those pictures a lot, afraid that, if I didn’t, I would forget her. Her hair had grown in to what it was before the chemo took it, down well past her shoulders. She was wearing a cardboard crown, a red T-shirt, and jean shorts. She was barefoot. She cocked her head and said, ‘Hunter? What are you doing here?’

“ ‘Nat!’ I said. Strange as it sounds, I think this was the moment I realized I was dead; I mean, when it really hit me. I ran over and threw my arms around her, the way I never had while she was alive.

“She stiffened. ‘This is my place,’ she said.

“I released her. I said, ‘You’re the one who put those kids in that box?’

“She nodded. ‘I’m the queen,’ she said.

“ ‘They’re little kids,’ I said. ‘One of them’s crying.’

“Natalie walked to the box and bent over to it. She said, ‘I’m the queen. Isn’t that right?’

“ ‘Yes!’ the kids shouted. ‘Yes, you’re the queen! Yes!’ The first kid added, ‘Please let us out, Your Majesty. Please. We’ll be good. We’ll do everything you say.’

“ ‘Come on, Nat,’ I said. ‘Listen to them. They’re really scared.’

“ ‘They’re fine,’ she said. Leaning on the box with her left hand, she trailed the fingers of her right over the cardboard. She said, ‘They’re going to be my dogs. Aren’t you? You’re going to be my dogs. Aren’t you? Aren’t you?’ She turned the question into a song: ‘Aren’t you, aren’t you, aren’t you?’

“In response, both kids cried. I mean, they cut loose, with the kind of full-throated abandon kids can tap into. I said, ‘Nat, come on.’

“ ‘Shhh,’ she said, holding her index finger to her lips.

“The crying continued, until it wasn’t crying anymore, it was laughing, then screaming, the hysterical laughter of someone who’s been overwhelmed by the joke. It sounded too big for the box. The kids started to pound on the walls, shaking it.

“ ‘Nat!’ I said. ‘Please! Will you let them out?’

“ ‘Here,’ she said. She straightened, put her hands on top of the box, and pulled the flaps apart. The pounding ceased, but the laughing continued. With a mocking bow that was pure Nat, my sister stepped away. ‘Happy?’

“I ran to the jail, ready to lift one or both of the kids out. The cardboard prison was empty. The laughter seemed to surround me. For a moment, I thought my sister had played an elaborate joke on me, allowing the kids to exit the box while I was distracted by her theatrics. I circled it, but aside from the laughing, there was no sign of them. ‘What’s going on?’ I said. ‘Where are they?’

“Natalie didn’t answer. She gave me this look—her face went blank, except for her eyes, which burned like blowtorches. She said, ‘Shut up,’ and the laughter died away. ‘You don’t belong here,’ she said to me. ‘This is my place. I’m the queen here.’

“I said, ‘Nat—’

“ ‘Stop calling me that!’ she screamed. ‘That was my old name. Now I have a new one. I’m Natalya, Queen of the Hungry Dogs.’

“I started to laugh, but her expression stopped me. I decided to shift to big-brother mode, because even in the afterlife, I still had that over her, right? I returned her stare with a frown of my own and said, ‘Listen—’

“Apparently, my sister hadn’t gotten the memo about me still outranking her. She said, ‘No, you listen. You don’t belong here. I don’t want you here. This is my place. I made it. You need to leave.’

“ ‘I can’t leave,’ I said. ‘I drowned. I can’t go back.’

“ ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘Leave.’

“ ‘Nat,’ I said.

“ ‘Queen Natalya.’

“I had forgotten how stubborn—how ornery my little sister could be. I was annoyed, and under that, scared at the prospect of spending the rest of eternity with someone so unreasonably hostile to me. I mean, I was her brother, for God’s sake. Shouldn’t we be sticking together?

“From the way Natalie was acting, the answer to my question was no. I felt my irritation bubbling into anger. ‘Well, Queen Natalya,’ I said, ‘what if I don’t want to leave?’

“ ‘Then I’ll make you,’ she said.

“ ‘You and what army?’ I said, a favorite taunt from our childhood.

“ ‘This one.’ She raised her right hand to her mouth, put her index and ring fingers between her lips, and blew. Her whistle was sharp and clear. Immediately, the laughing returned, but louder, as if it was coming from dozens of throats. I saw movement in a stand of trees to my left, and watched as a pack of animals raised themselves from where they’d been lying on their bellies and sides. I glanced at the other groups of birches, and the same thing was happening in each of them, these animals standing.”

“Animals?” Carl said.

“Man, I don’t know,” Hunter said. “They were on all fours, which made me think they were the Hungry Dogs Nat had referred to. But they didn’t look much like dogs. They were hairless, and tailless, and their heads—there was something wrong with their heads. They were misshapen, no two in the same way. Some were long and knifelike, others squashed flat. This one’s jaw was too big for its mouth, that one’s ears flared like fans. You might have thought they were a child’s drawings, brought to life. Or death, I guess. They were the source of the laughter, each one a voice in the mad chorus. They started in our direction, and they didn’t move like any dogs I’d ever known. They crept along the ground, the way you would if you were sneaking up on someone. Of course I could see them, but I had the sense this didn’t matter. They wanted me to watch them coming closer. I was suddenly conscious of myself in my bathing suit, with no means of defense but my hands and feet, which seemed woefully inadequate for the job. The laughter seemed to draw a line under that fact, to emphasize how defenseless, how vulnerable, I was. I didn’t know if I could die a second time, but I guessed I could be hurt. I turned to Natalie and said, ‘All right, I’m sorry. Maybe there’s someplace else I can go.’

“ ‘Too late,’ she said, with all the smugness of a gambler holding a winning suit.

“ ‘Nat,’ I said.

“ ‘Queen Natalya,’ she said, ‘Sovereign of the Hungry Dogs. Who are going to tear you to shreds.’

“I bolted. There was no point in running any direction but the river, so that was what I did. At my back, I heard Natalie whistle, and the thunder of the dogs’ feet as they leaped into pursuit. My hope was to reach the river, splash in and let its current carry me to safety. Or at least, away from my sister and her animals.

“In the time I’d spent talking to Natalie, however, the distance between her box fort and the muddy shore had expanded to the length of a couple of soccer fields—not so far apart as to place the shore beyond reach, but enough to give the dogs a decent chance of bringing me down. I’d always been a fast runner, faster than anyone else in my grade at school, or two grades ahead of me, for the matter. A glance over my shoulder at the assembled dogs chasing me spurred my feet to move even quicker across the grass. But the dogs were running on four feet, which had to give them the advantage. By the time I was halfway to the river, the leader was right on my heels, its laughter dropped to a low chuckle. I veered right, left, faked right, trying to do what I could to increase the distance between us. The dog’s teeth snapped at me, missed me. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was about to burst out of my chest; my lungs were filled with fire. Funny, a small part of me picked up on this and thought, Wait a minute. You’re dead. How can you be getting tired?

“It didn’t matter. I had reached the shore. At the edge of the grass, I threw myself forward in what I intended to be a long jump, but was more my arms pinwheeling, my legs flailing, as if I could swim through the air. I landed off balance, in a half skid, and my feet went out from under me, dumping me on my back, hard. Before I could do anything, the dog was on me. Its snout tapered to a jagged blade. It raised up on its hind legs, and drove the blade into me, right here.” Hunter’s hand pressed the middle of his shirt.

“Holy shit, did that hurt. I had never experienced that kind of pain before; in comparison, drowning had been almost pleasant. It stunned me, as if I’d been plunged into freezing water, this full-body shock. The dog jerked its head loose from my midsection. Blood splashed my face. I wanted to raise my hands, protect myself from its next strike, but the most I could force my arms to do was tremble madly. The dog prepared to skewer me again. This time, its target was my throat. I shut my eyes.

“And nothing happened. No stabbing pain pierced my neck. I opened my eyes to darkness—no dog, no shore, no river—and then the world rushed at me. I was still on my back, but my mother was above me, her knotted hands pressing my sternum, my older sisters and younger brother leaning in to watch Mom’s efforts, my father standing just beyond them, as if afraid he’d jinx Mom if he was too close, too hopeful. After that, it was pretty hectic: the paramedics, the ambulance ride to the hospital, the exams to check my status. I didn’t forget what happened to me while I was dead, but I . . . put it to the side, you could say. There was no doubt in my mind as to its reality. I still hurt where the dog had impaled me. But since this reality didn’t align with anything I’d been taught to believe about the life to come, I needed time to process it. I can’t remember: Did I ever tell you about my mom asking me if I’d seen Natalie?”

“You did,” Carl said. “You told her she was happy, surrounded by glowing light.”

“Yeah,” Hunter said, “because how could I say her daughter was ruler of her own little hell?”

“Is that what you think it was?”

“Not exactly,” Hunter said, “but not too far off.”

“So, wait,” Carl said. “What about the whole ‘I died and there was nothing’ bit? Not to put too fine a point on it, but for as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been pretty insistent about that.”

“Like I said, I lied. Or, not exactly. By the time you heard the story of my first death, I pretty much believed what I was saying. Or I believed I believed it. I don’t know. In my late teens, I went through a phase where I became obsessed with near-death experiences. You know, rising out of your body, moving along a tunnel of light, being greeted by all your loved ones. I read every account I could lay my hands on, searching for a narrative that matched up with what I’d been through. I couldn’t find one. I moved on to scientific studies of near-death phenomena, and learned that there were biochemical explanations for all of it. The tunnel of light was caused by the firing of certain neurons as your eyes shut down. The vision of your loved ones was a last-minute effort by your brain to fool itself about what it was undergoing, a final delusion. It made a sense I couldn’t argue with. I had always been a creative kid; my brain had just come up with a more elaborate fantasy. Yes, it had felt real at the time, but a lot of things had seemed real to me when I was a kid. I used to be very religious; I’m sure I must have told you.”

Carl shook his head. “You didn’t.”

“Oh yeah. Altar boy, morning and evening prayers, Bible study, the works. My parents had this series of books, The Catholic Encyclopedia, big, oversized volumes with gold covers, and I would slide one out from the bookcase and sit leafing through it. I didn’t just believe in Catholicism intellectually, I felt it viscerally. Jesus, Mary, the saints were these living presences I swore I could sense, as was the Devil. By the time I was a teenager, though, my faith had started to waver, mainly because I discovered girls, or maybe I should say, they discovered me. Either way, I knew all of the Church’s prohibitions against anything other than the most chaste kissing, but when Marcie Roy unhooked her bra, all of that went out the window. I was smart enough to be able to rationalize what we were doing, but I also recognized my mental gymnastics for what they were, a type of bad faith, believing my own bullshit, and this revelation was the first crack in the wall. Considering how devout I had been, my belief crumbled remarkably fast, undermined by good old sex.

“The point is, if I had been wrong about religion, which had been at the center of my life, then the chances seemed petty good I had been mistaken about my post-death encounter with Natalie. If there was a difference between the two, it was that what I’d been through with my sister and her dogs retained the vividness of actual experience. I told myself it was due to the extremity of the situation which had produced it. Let’s face it, you’re probably thinking something along those lines right now, aren’t you?”

“You were young,” Carl said, “and it was a horrendous event. It wouldn’t be a surprise if your mind tried to protect you from it. Although . . .”

“What?”

“If it were purely a matter of distracting you from your end, you would think the fantasy would have been more pleasant, less threatening. You go into the light, you meet your sister, and that’s all, folks. This is way outside my area of expertise, though, so there could very well be another explanation I’m not aware of.”

“Like residual guilt over the death of my sister.”

“I suppose. If what we’re talking about is some kind of defense mechanism, I’m not sure that works.”

“You’re right,” Hunter said, “it doesn’t. I want to say it took me a long time to reach the same conclusion, but I knew, on some level, I knew all along. I couldn’t admit it, was all.”

“What changed? The cancer?”

“Before that,” Hunter said. “About six years ago, I saw Natalie again. I was back in Afghanistan, Kabul, to shoot a piece on the rise of heroin addiction there. I was working with a journalist from the Guardian, Janet Singh, and she had been told about a spot under one of the local bridges where the addicts gathered. We took a taxi to the place, and sure enough, there were all these men sheltering under a structure that might have gone back to the Soviets. This was in the middle of winter, January, and it was freezing. Janet found someone to talk to, a young guy who had the worn-out look long-term users get. He had a frankness I associate with certain kind of addict; it’s like their drug use has reduced everything in their lives to the essentials, which is maybe not so strange.

“Anyway, we asked the guy the usual questions. How did you start using? How did it affect your relationship with your family? Is the drug hard to come by? Are you afraid of the police? My Pashto isn’t very good, but it didn’t need to be. The guy gave the same answers you get from addicts the world over. Until it came to his dealings with the cops, when he said something that caught my attention. ‘There are good cops and bad cops,’ he said, ‘but the men are more worried about the little girl.’

“ ‘The little girl?’ Janet said.

“ ‘Yeah,’ the guy said. For about the last week, a girl had been showing up among them. It wasn’t unusual for there to be kids under the bridge, but this girl dressed like a westerner, in a red T-shirt and shorts. Taking her for the child of an aid worker or a journalist, one of the older men tried to shoo her away. In return, she did something to him.

“ ‘Did something?’ Janet said. ‘What? What did she do?’

“The guy became embarrassed, looked at his shoes. ‘She put her finger to his forehead,’ he said, ‘and the old man fell down in a fit. His eyes rolled back in his head; foam came out of his mouth. At the end of it, he was dead. Since then, everyone avoided her.’

“Janet took the story for a variety of collective hallucination, which is the rational interpretation. I hadn’t thought about what happened after I drowned for I can’t tell you how long—not consciously, anyway—but right away, I was back beside the box fort. It was as if I’d been punched in the solar plexus. All the air rushed out of me. I bent over, hands on my knees. Janet noticed, asked if I was okay. I shook my head. Hard as it was to speak, I asked the guy if the girl was wearing anything on her hair. I didn’t know the word for crown, so I swirled one hand around my head. His eyes grew large, and he nodded, said she had on a taaj like a child would make. ‘Who is she?’ he wanted to know.

“I couldn’t think how to answer him. Janet wanted to know what was going on. I started to say, ‘Nothing,’ but it was obvious that wasn’t true. Did I mention I’d been in the country for a week? I didn’t, did I? You could guess, though. I looked up at the guy, and standing ten feet behind him, there she was: Queen Natalya, Ruler of the Hungry Dogs, my dead sister. She hadn’t changed much since I’d seen her last, four decades earlier. She glared at me with hatred pure and freezing as an Arctic gale. I panicked, told Janet we had to leave, apologized to the guy we were interviewing, dug in my pocket for some cash to press into his hand. I was terrified Janet was going to notice the girl in the red T-shirt and jean shorts, wearing the cardboard crown, which of course she did while I was attempting to hustle her from under the bridge. The addict had already turned and seen Natalie, and he leaped back the way he might have if he’d seen a cobra raised to strike. ‘Who is she?’ he asked. ‘You know that little girl?’ Janet said. I told the guy to steer clear of her. I didn’t know the word for ghost, so I settled for calling her bad. Janet said, ‘How is this child bad?’ She was trying to step around me, to get to Natalie, who was radiating malice, who was radioactive with it. ‘Please,’ I was saying, ‘we need to go. We can’t stay here.’ But Janet was having none of it. ‘We have to find out what this girl is doing here,’ she said. ‘No, we don’t,’ I said. While we were arguing, Natalie turned and ran the other way, out from beneath the bridge. Everyone gave her plenty of room. Janet pushed me aside and set out after her.”

“What did you do?” Carl said.

“I walked to where the cab was waiting, got in, and returned to the hotel, where I sat at the bar consuming more alcohol than I had in years. This wasn’t convivial excess; this was shot after shot of overpriced vodka to numb the memory of what I’d seen. Eventually, Janet showed up. She’d chased Natalie into a maze of alleys where she’d lost her. She was tired, and pissed, and wanted answers I was too drunk to give her. Let’s face it, though: had I been sober, I doubt I would have told her the truth, either. I was deeply afraid, in a way I’d never been. Scratch that. The fear—the absolute dread hollowing me was what I’d experienced as a kid, when I worried about Hell. The joys of religion. Once you know about something like that, you start to wonder if you might wind up there. It leaves you with the sensation of being horribly exposed, as if your skin is made out of glass and everything you are is on display. It did for me, anyway. Part of an overdeveloped superego, I thought when I left the Church. Sitting at the bar, I felt all the old fear, vulnerable in a way I hadn’t standing across a tent from a Sunni chief pointing his .44 magnum at me. I finally told my friend I’d freaked out because the girl we’d seen looked exactly like my long-dead sister, which had triggered all kinds of emotions I wasn’t prepared for. If you’re going to lie, keep it as close to the truth as you can, right? Janet wasn’t satisfied. We’d been in enough high stress situations for her to know I didn’t lose my shit, not like that. But she let the matter drop, for which I was grateful. It was the last time we worked together, though. Two days later, I left Kabul on the first flight I could snag. I spent the intervening time firmly ensconced at the bar.

“So that was weird,” Hunter said, “but maybe it was an isolated incident, right?” He shook his head. “Nope. On and off since then, Natalie has appeared to me. While I was shooting wildfires in the hills above LA, she was visible between a pair of flaming trees. In eastern Ukraine, she was in the middle of a group of rebels creeping through high grass. I saw her on the roof of a burned-out car on a side street in Aleppo. Always, she wore the same, hate-filled expression.

“My most recent encounter came the week following my cancer diagnosis. I decided I wanted to drive down to the Jersey Shore, revisit the site of my first death. Morbid, perhaps, but there you have it. Do you know, in the years since, I hadn’t been back to that beach once? Not so surprising, I guess.

“With traffic, it was a ten-hour drive. I went alone, didn’t want to bring Jill with me. I suppose that was a sign the marriage was on its way out. I left at breakfast, arrived in the early evening. The town had taken a beating during Sandy: There were still gaps where beach houses had stood. I had an idea I would find a motel room, spend a couple of days on the shore. I stopped at a deli, bought an Italian combo hero and a Coke. Being there might have been all kinds of traumatic, but parking on a side street, walking toward the beach, I was kind of exhilarated. The sky was hung with low puffy clouds the sun was filling with red and gold light on its way to the horizon. I strolled onto the beach, which was mostly empty, sat down halfway to the ocean, and ate my dinner while the waves rolled in. If there was one place I was certain of encountering Natalie, this was it, ground zero for our first meeting. Or, not first, but you know what I mean. Our first posthumous run-in. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I wasn’t concerned about it, but I was less worried than you would have anticipated. Maybe what I needed to do, I thought, was to confront my sister here, where everything had started. Call it a version of taking the fight to the enemy.

“All my bravado went straight out the window when I saw her running toward me. She burst from the waves, already moving full-tilt, her arms out low to either side, her fingers curved into claws. Her mouth was open in a scream that made me nearly piss myself. Where the ocean foamed behind her—I don’t know how to describe this—it was full of the Hungry Dogs, I couldn’t say how many of them, rising from the water and falling back into it, as if they were trying and failing to gain form. Natalie’s bare feet pounded the sand. Her clothes were dry, as was the cardboard crown. I’m not sure I can convey how frightening it was. It—she had lost none of the intensity, the single-mindedness kids have, and that we spend our adult lives attempting to recover. She didn’t hate: She was hate. She was no bigger than she’d ever been, but her screaming surrounded her, made her part of something enormous and terrifying. I swore I could hear the dogs laughing in the waves.

“I didn’t waste any time. I left my sandwich wrapper and bottle where they were and fled for the car, which sounds easier than it was. My feet kept threatening to slip from underneath me and dump me on my ass. At my back, Natalie’s scream expanded. Legs burning, I reached the pavement. Natalie’s scream was deafening; it vibrated right through the center of me. I glanced over my shoulder, saw her a dozen steps away. Whether I was going to reach the car before she reached me was looking like a close thing. Thank God for keyless entry; I jammed my hand in my pocket, found the remote, and pressed the unlock button. My shirt jumped as Natalie swiped at it, missed. As we drew even with the car, I sped up, running past the driver’s side door and then dodging left, around the trunk, to the passenger’s side. It was the kind of trick I used to play on her when we were growing up, and it worked now, as it had worked then. I flung open the passenger’s door, threw myself into the car, and hauled the door shut, locking it.

“Natalie was furious. She circled the car three times, and I swear, her scream was as loud inside the car as it had been outside. My heart was pounding, my head swimming. How ironic would it be for me to die from a heart attack here and now? I forced myself to move. If Natalie gained entry to the car, I had no plan. I sidled into the driver’s seat, started the engine. My sister came to a halt directly in front of me and stood there, screaming. I’ll admit, I considered shifting into drive and stepping on the gas.”

“Why didn’t you?” Carl said.

“Because whatever she had become, she still looked like my little sister. I reversed away from her, and burned rubber out of there. Natalie didn’t pursue me, but her screams rang in my ears the entire way home.”

XII

“I assume this is when Hunter called you,” Carl said to Annie.

“Eventually,” Hunter said. “For the first twenty-four hours after I pulled into the driveway, I was certain Natalie was on her way. Any minute now, I was going to look out the window and see her springing up the front steps. I didn’t, but I didn’t sleep all that much, either. I started chemo a couple of days later. My oncologist had recommended aggressive treatment as my only hope. As I believe I may have said, it kicked my ass. I was terribly afraid Natalie would appear while I was sitting on one of the hospital’s comfy chairs, IV’d to the stuff that was nuking my body in hopes of frying the cancer first. I was tense, irritable. Jill was gone from the house a lot, which I can’t say I blame her for.

“Finally, I decided I had to start talking to people about Natalie. I don’t mean psychologists. I already had a decent idea of the interpretation they would offer me. My original experience was a fantasy constructed ad-hoc by my mind to fool itself into believing it wasn’t facing extinction. Its ambiguous nature owed itself to unresolved guilt over my sister’s death. My recent visions of her were the result of decades of poorly treated PTSD brought about by the accumulated stress of the places I’d covered. What had happened was a full-blown psychotic incident, precipitated by my recent diagnosis and its poor prognosis. That sound on target?”

“I’m not a shrink, but yeah, I guess so.”

“The people I was interested in were the ones who would take my story at face value. I started with the local Catholic priest. Faith of our fathers and all that. He was followed by Episcopalian, Lutheran, Greek Orthodox, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Unitarian clergy, after which, I moved to conservative and reformed Judaism, then Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. I didn’t have much luck with any of them. Assuming they didn’t think I was playing some kind of weird joke on them, most of the men and women I spoke to opted for the psychological view. The Episcopalian and Unitarian were more flexible; each of them suggested I might have encountered a Hell that was adapted to me, specifically. The Tibetan Buddhist raised the possibility that what I took for my sister was a kind of wrathful god, a figure who appears to you once you’re dead to frighten you toward the right path. There was no doubt Natalie had scared me, but none of our meetings had driven me to enlightenment. And I couldn’t understand why my younger self would have merited a trip to Hell, and why my little sister would have been waiting for me there. No, none of it was especially helpful at explaining the story I told. I went online, hung out on all sorts of out-of-the-way message boards. This was how I found Annie.” Hunter nodded at her. “There was this woman on one of them. She was being—I guess you would call it harassed by what she thought was her brother, until she found out he was out of the country, on a month-long trip to New Zealand. This . . . figure was making all kinds of weird shit happen to her. Annie wrote a long response to the woman’s post which made me think she might be the person for me to talk to. I messaged her, sketched out the parameters of my situation, and asked if she had any insight into it. She replied straight away, said she’d do some research and let me know in a day or two. Which she did.

“And to cut to the chase, here we are.”

“Here we are,” Carl said. He stood from the kitchen island, carried his dish and glass to the sink. “If one of you could tell me exactly where here is, that would be helpful. Specifically, what is it you’re planning, and why do you want me to be part of it? I mean, I assume that’s the point of all this, to persuade me to assist in your—are you going to perform an exorcism? some kind of casting out of the evil spirit?”

“No,” Hunter said. “All I need is for you to walk with me for a little while.”

“This is one of those it’s-more-complicated-than-it-sounds deals, isn’t it?”

“No,” Hunter said. “Or yes. Somewhat. Annie, feel free to jump in.”

“Hunter’s telling you the truth,” Annie said. While Hunter had been telling his stories, she had quietly removed six Tarot cards from the deck, and placed them at what appeared to be the points of a hexagon. “He has to cross dangerous terrain. Having a friend with him, especially one he’s known for so long, will help.”

“Dangerous?”

“She means Natalie’s turf.”

“The box fort place?”

“Her kingdom, yeah. With the Hungry Dogs.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“Hunter’s become entangled with his sister’s domain,” Annie said, “to an extent that will make it difficult for him not to be caught there. I’ve worked out a map to guide him through; however, once he sets foot in it, Natalie is going to do what she can to keep him with her.”

“You want me to fight your sister for you?” Carl said.

“I’ll deal with Natalie,” Hunter said. “It’s the dogs I’m worried about.”

“I’m protecting you from them? I’m still not sure what they are.”

“They’re souls,” Annie said. “Of children, as far as I can tell. Drawn into Natalie’s sphere and warped by her.”

“Jesus,” Carl said. “What are we talking about? I thought she was a ghost.”

“Imagine,” Annie said, “that when you die, you have to cross from the land of the living”—she placed her index finger on the card at the top of the hexagon and slid the digit to the card at the bottom—“to the land of the dead. Let’s not worry about that place. What concerns us”—she moved her finger to the center of the space—“is what lies between.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be a tunnel of light?”

“Or the river Styx, or a Valkyrie leaning to grab you from her winged horse, or—you understand. It’s reactive. You’re likely to encounter whatever you expect to. The majority of those who enter it succeed in reaching the other side. A few turn back, try to return to this life, which generally doesn’t go well.”

“Ghosts.”

Annie nodded. “Among other things. A few souls become lost in this middle ground. They see somewhere they want to remain, so they do. Call it Limbo, albeit, of a highly personalized kind. There, the dead change, go feral.”

“Hunter’s sister is a feral ghost?”

“Yes, and from everything he’s described, she’s a powerful one. She’s learned how to employ the landscape’s reflective quality to alter other souls.”

“But she’s a kid—was a kid.”

“You have children?”

“Two, daughters.”

“Then you have direct knowledge of a child’s creativity and will power. What do you suppose would happen if you placed a particularly bright and strong-willed child in a place where those qualities would have an immediate effect on her surroundings?”

“Okay,” Carl said, “you have a point. But what are the other kids doing there to begin with? I’m guessing there’s some kind of connection among family members, which would explain why Hunter was drawn to the place. Those kids, though, the ones Natalie’s transformed, what brought them to her? Shouldn’t they have been traveling their own paths?”

“Most do. As I said, it’s possible to lose your way, and once that happens, to wander into someplace like Natalie’s domain. There, you’re liable to her influence.”

“To what end? Why would she do all this, change other kids into monsters, chase after Hunter?”

“Boredom,” Annie said. She began to collect the Tarot cards in front of her. “Eternity is long. She wants Hunter because he escaped from her, because he escaped back to life. Think of a frustrated child. I would guess she’s been searching for a way to extend her pursuit of him ever since that afternoon. How she accomplished it, I’m not sure. Single-minded persistence, obviously, but combined with some quality of the places Hunter went which allowed her to push through into them. Possibly the connection to trauma, to pain, suffering. Those kinds of extreme states weaken the barrier between our world and Limbo.”

“If she’s this strong, why not grab him, drag him off to her kingdom?”

“I don’t know,” Annie said. “To do something like that requires tremendous power and knowledge. Natalie has the one, but may not have the other. Or she may know he’s dying, and have decided it’s easier to wait.”

“So you kick off,” Carl said to Hunter, “and Natalie’s waiting to turn you over to her dogs for a rawhide bone. I understand you have Annie’s map through Limbo, but I don’t see how you ever get to use it.”

“Because we’re cheating,” Hunter said. He doffed his baseball cap and set it on the kitchen island, grabbed the bottom of his T-shirt and pulled it over his head. In the wintry light, his chest and arms were pale, the skin tight against the bone, painful to look at. His flesh was covered in designs executed in pale red ink, what might have been a child’s approximation of letters, except the longer Carl studied them, the more they grew to resemble not so much letters as animals, fantastic creatures whose outlines stirred the hairs on his arms. He said, “What . . . ?”

“Camouflage,” Hunter said. “It won’t hide me from Natalie, but it should make it harder for the dogs to track me.” He folded the T-shirt, placed it beside the baseball cap.

“Should,” Carl said.

“Hey, none of this is the kind of thing there are manuals for. We’re doing the best we can.”

“What about me? Where’s my camouflage?”

“You don’t need any.” Hunter unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans, and lowered them. Underneath, he was naked, his emaciated skin a canvas for more of the strange characters.

“Dude,” Carl said.

“Our theory,” Annie said, “is that Natalie and the dogs will be focused on Hunter. The sigils will throw the dogs off Hunter, while your presence will confuse them further.”

“A living guy in Limbo is not something they’ve seen,” Hunter said. He folded his jeans, set them on top of the T-shirt.

“Are you saying they can’t hurt me?”

“No,” Annie said.

“You’re the living weapon, remember?”

“Seriously? I run a small dojo in small city in the Hudson Valley. Most of my students are under ten. Half my classes I spend in fun activities so the kids won’t get bored.”

“Don’t sell yourself short.”

“You want to know the last time I was in a fight? Not a sparring match, but an actual fight? I was thirteen, and the other kid cleaned my clock. And this was a human being, not some kind of monster.”

“All right,” Hunter said, “how about, you’re all I’ve got?”

“That’s hardly a ringing endorsement. What happened to your spetsnaz buddies?”

“Dead,” Hunter said, “except for the one who’s in Syria.”

“Son of a bitch,” Carl said. “How am I even supposed to accompany you?”

“At the moment,” Annie said, “the next world is very close. When you’re talking about this kind of geography, the places move in relation to you. Just over the border, Natalie and her dogs are waiting. She’s so concentrated on Hunter, she won’t notice if I slide our place and hers into conjunction.”

“You can do that?”

“Under normal circumstances, no. You need knowledge and power, remember? I have plenty of the former, but nowhere near enough of the latter. Natalie has power to spare, however, and I’ve worked out how to siphon off a sufficient amount to put my knowledge to use.”

“Annie’s gonna drop us behind enemy lines,” Hunter said, “so to speak. We’ll have a head start on our pursuers; plus, we’ll be that much closer to our destination.”

“Your destination,” Carl said. “I still have to return from this excursion. Which I’m going to do how?”

“Once Hunter has reached the other side of Natalie’s domain, I should know. I’ll release the spell holding the worlds together, and you should be carried back here.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of maybe to this plan.”

“Yeah,” Hunter said, “there is.”

Carl sighed. “It amazes me that I’m having this conversation.”

“You’ve always been pretty gullible.”

“Very nice,” Carl said. “Okay. When is all of this supposed to happen? Do you know how much longer you have?”

“Until about two hours ago,” Hunter said.

Snow filled the kitchen, swirling around the three of them.

XIII

“What do you mean?” Carl said. “You’re . . . ?” Unsaid, the word lay leaden on his tongue. Heavy, wet snowflakes pattered his face. The temperature was plunging.

“Don’t worry about it,” Hunter said. He crossed to Carl, grabbed his left shoulder with a hand that felt as solid as it ever had. Snow stuck to his bare skin; his breath misted the air. A mix of emotions, grief, incredulity, anger, surged in Carl’s chest, making him sway as if still drunk. His eyes moistened, dissolving the snow clinging to his lashes.

“We’re on the clock,” Annie said. She had fanned the Tarot deck on the marble in front of her and was using both hands to push certain cards out of it. Snowflakes eddied about her, condensing into clouds that rushed away from her.

Hunter relaxed his grip on Carl. “Madame Sosostris,” he said, “thank you. I couldn’t have done this alone.”

Without looking up from the cards, Annie said, “You’re right.”

“Come on,” Hunter said, moving toward the hallway to the living room.

“One moment,” Carl said. He wiped his eyes. A magnetic strip on the wall to the left of the sink held a series of rubber-handled knives hung points down in ascending order of size. He selected the second largest, just shy of the butcher knife at the end, and tugged it loose.

From the doorway, Hunter said, “Ready?”

“No,” Carl said, testing the knife’s weight, its balance.

“Excellent.”

In the hall, the snow thickened, the flakes becoming smaller and denser, almost ice pellets. They rattled against the windows, clattered on the wall, stung Carl’s face and hands. Raising his left hand to shield his eyes, his right ready with the knife, he said to Hunter’s back, “This already sucks.”

“Yeah, well, try doing it naked.”

“About that: Couldn’t you have found a way to do this clothed?”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize you’d be so intimidated.”

“Intimidating is not the word I’d use for your scrawny ass.”

Carl glanced at the windows, but the storm outside had reduced the view to driving snow. At his feet, mist carpeted the floor, rising to his knees as he moved forward. “I feel like we should be having some kind of heartfelt conversation,” he said. Icy snow clung to his hair, his ears, the back of his neck.

“What is it you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know. Did it hurt? Dying?”

“I took some pills,” Hunter said. “I went to sleep. At the end, I panicked a little, thought, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing? What if all of this is bullshit, and I’m killing myself because of it?’ But it was already too late; the only thing I could do was trust the plan Annie and I had come up with.”

“How about now?”

“How do I feel? Weird. Half of me is elated. It’s like, it worked! Here I am! The other half of me is scared shitless. I’ve deliberately made myself vulnerable to my sister and the Hungry Dogs. Those things, man . . .”

“I know.”

“What do you mean?” Hunter slowed, cast a glance over his shoulder.

“I saw them,” Carl said. “Last night. Or technically, I guess it was this morning. When I went out to the car for my bag. There were a couple of animals at the edge of the woods. I couldn’t see them very well. Even with the garage lights, it was pretty foggy. I thought they might be coyotes, except they didn’t move like any coyote I’ve ever seen.”

“Sounds like them.”

“I think I saw your sister, too. There was a kid dressed in a red T-shirt and shorts.”

“She probably wanted to check you out.”

“That’s reassuring.”

At the end of the hall, a framed eight-by-ten photograph hung. Hunter paused to study it, giving Carl time to join him. One of his better-known efforts, Hunter had taken it in the aftermath of Katrina’s inundation of New Orleans. It showed a man and woman waist deep in water, straining to hold on to a rowboat crowded by four frightened children, a pair of dogs, and an assortment of worldly goods, including a cooler, a microwave, and a television weighing down one corner of the boat. Water foamed around the hull, the man appeared to be on the verge of losing his grip, the woman’s face was contorted with effort, two children were crying, one of the dogs was attempting to scramble over the side. The photo was one of those iconic images of the disaster, part of the visual library news directors and documentary filmmakers went to for their pieces on the storm. Now, every last one of the figures in it had been replaced by Natalie, including the dogs. She looked on with concern at her struggling attempt to fight the current threatening to carry her away. Tongue lolling, she leaned against herself, who wrapped her arms around her tightly, eyes closed.

“Well,” Carl said.

“Yeah,” Hunter said.

As they emerged into the living room, the snow lost its ferocity. Carl lowered his hand. The space was full of trees, red pine mixing with birch, rooted in the hardwood floor. Couches and chairs scattered among them. The mist reached above his and Hunter’s heads. He said, “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

“I wasn’t sure,” Hunter said.

“No, it totally works,” Carl said. “Gives a real, ‘You’re going to suffer a horrifying death here’ vibe.”

“Exactly what I was aiming for.”

They advanced quickly, Hunter aiming for a group of three pines beside a recliner. About four feet up, the trunk of the middle tree had been scored with a series of short, shallow cuts, forming a symbol somewhere between a diamond and an eye. Hunter gestured at the mark. “All right. That’s one of the runes Annie’s using to stitch everything together. We can use them to guide us. More importantly, you can follow them out of here.”

“I thought I was supposed to be whooshed to safety.”

“That’s the plan, but I figure we should have a backup.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

In the middle distance, a larger pine was faintly visible. Skirting an end table, Hunter set off toward it. The snow had returned to large, damp flakes, which dropped around them in slow, lazy motions. To the left, a shape appeared: a brown box, big enough to hold a washing machine. On the side facing them was written HUNTER in childish letters. “Jesus,” Carl said. Hunter did not comment.

The same blend of diamond and eye stared at them from the second tree’s bark. Hunter brushed it with his fingertips. “Okay,” he said. “The next part is tricky. We have to walk in a more or less straight line until we come to a tree that’s forked at the base. It shouldn’t be too far, but distances can be tricky, here. The important thing is to maintain our direction.”

Carl nodded. He switched the knife to his left hand, flexed the fingers of his right. “After you.”

Two steps from the tree, the mist congealed, rendering Hunter dim, insubstantial. In the dim light, the red figures written on his skin appeared clearer, as if the mist were a lens bringing them into sharper focus. Carl had the momentary impression the symbols were carrying Hunter, a mix of strange creatures and unfamiliar characters taking him through the mist. “You with me?” he said. The mist muffled his voice, making him sound farther away.

“Yes, sadly.”

First on the left, and then the right, Carl heard the click of claws on hardwood. They were being paced, by several animals, from the sound of it. Glances to either side showed only mist. He returned the knife to his right hand. “Hey,” he said.

“I know,” Hunter said. “Nothing to do but keep going.”

Now the claws were behind them, as well. The skin between Carl’s shoulders tingled. He said, “I thought you were supposed to be camouflaged.”

“Who says it’s me they’re tracking?”

“Great.”

Another box, this one tall and narrow, loomed directly in front of them. “Shit,” Hunter said. HUNTER’S FRIEND was scrawled on it. Carl’s mouth went dry. He approached the box, reached out his hand to touch the words. The mud in which they were written was still damp. He wiped his fingers on his jeans. He felt his distance from Melanie, the girls, from everything he knew, a gap vast and profound. The claws herding them slowed but did not stop. Cold filled him, his interior weather mirroring the exterior conditions. “Oh,” he said, “I am fucked.”

“Not yet, you’re not,” Hunter said. He stepped closer to Carl, caught his elbow. “Come on.” Carl nodded, allowed Hunter to tug him around the obstacle.

On the other side of the box, the dogs struck. To the right, claws scrabbled on the floor. Raising his left hand to guard, dropping his right to stab, Carl pivoted at the sound. As he did, another set of claws raced at him from the rear. He half turned in that direction, and the first dog smashed into his left knee. The pain was instant, overwhelming, taking him from his feet. Although he landed on his elbows, adding injury to injury, he held on to the knife. With the shock broadcasting from his leg, it was the most he could do. His assailant continued into the mist, as did the decoy, passing close enough for him to feel the drum of its paws through the wood. In this position, he was horribly defenseless, his back open to the teeth of the next attacker, but he could not move, could not draw sufficient breath to voice the curses streaming through his head: Fucking fuck oh motherfucker fuck me you fucker fuck.

Laughter burst around him, a shrieking choir whose volume suggested it issued from a hundred throats. Had it not been for the hurt, his nerves would have glowed with fear. As it was, he registered the approximate number voicing their delirium and added one more curse to his mental litany: Shit.

Hunter crouched beside him. “What happened?”

“My knee,” Carl said, nodding at it.

He felt Hunter’s hands on his leg. “No sign of a bite or cut.”

“No. Hit it with their head.”

“Right,” Hunter said. He caught Carl under the armpits, started to lift. “Let’s go. You don’t want to stay here.”

Of course he was right. With Hunter’s help, Carl pushed himself to standing. His knee protested, but took his weight.

“You need to lean on me?” Hunter said.

“I think I can manage.”

Accompanied by the laughter, and under it, the snicker of claws on wood, the two of them resumed their trek. The snow had tapered to scattered flakes, which circled them like moths. Cold numbed Carl’s fingers, ears, face, made his nose run. He passed the knife back and forth between his hands, tucking whichever hand was free under the opposite armpit to warm it. At least the movement helped the pain radiating from his knee, allowing him to breathe more freely. But as the hurt ebbed, a tide of dread pushed in to take its place. A solid shot from one of those things and he was left helpless. How was he supposed to handle the laughing horde trailing them?

A red pine materialized in the mist, split at the foot into a pair of thick trunks whose lower branches were barkless, dead. On the trunk to their left, Carl recognized the diamond/eye symbol. The right fork was inscribed with the figure, too, but this one was surrounded by a tall rectangle, above and below which were cut short horizontal lines. Hunter stood beside the left trunk and pointed into the mist at about a forty-five degree angle from where they were standing. “This way,” he said, and set off in the new direction.

At first, Carl thought it was his imagination, or an acoustic trick played by the moisture around them, but as they left the latest signpost behind, so did the laughter diminish in intensity. He wouldn’t have sworn to it, but it seemed to be moving away from them. For a brief time, individual yips and screams continued to sound perilously close, and then the only noise was his and Hunter’s feet on the floor. He said, “Is this the part where I say it’s too quiet?”

“Another one of Annie’s tricks,” Hunter said. “Won’t last forever, but it’ll allow us to put some room between us and the dogs.”

The mist was thinning, trees coalescing to either side. Hunter veered slightly to the right, to a young pine whose slender length bore the familiar mark. At the tree, he turned ninety degrees to the left and continued walking. “You know,” Carl said, “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to remember this route.”

“Relax,” Hunter said. “You won’t have to, remember?”

“And if something goes wrong? What happened to the contingency plan?”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” Hunter said. “We made it this far, didn’t we? Jesus, when did you become such a worrywart?”

“Two kids and one business ago.”

“It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Why do you have to be like this?”

“Because I’m the one looking at a future as the chew toy of the damned.”

On their left, a collection of geometric silhouettes, smaller rectangles and larger squares, appeared through the mist. Another couple of steps, and the shapes resolved into a series of shoeboxes stood on end, forming a half circle before a pair of square boxes. Beyond this arrangement, further boxes were visible, clusters of low boxes interspersed in front of a line of bigger boxes, which were joined in what might have been a tunnel whose ends continued into the mist. Behind the tunnel, assorted boxes stacked three, four, and even five high formed precarious towers. Here and there, a birch rose in the midst of the constructions. Clearly, this was the box fort of Hunter’s story, but it had grown from fort to metropolis, its full dimensions obscured by the mist. There appeared to be writing on some of the boxes, but between the distance and the mist, Carl could not read any of it. He said, “Wow.”

“Natalie was never one for half measures.”

“I can’t help thinking how cool this looks. Is that crazy?”

“You have to respect her dedication.”

They proceeded within sight of the cardboard city for ten minutes, more, past long, narrow boxes balanced to form a succession of archways, past a massive collection of coffee-mug-sized boxes meticulously layered into a ziggurat whose flat top stood as high as Carl’s head, past tiny jewelry boxes arranged upon the floor in great spirals and stars. Mixed with his admiration and dread, Carl was aware of a new emotion, pity, for a child whiling away the endless days of her afterlife in yet another game. “Do you suppose,” he said, “your sister has anyone else with her? Not the dogs, I mean another person.”

Hunter shrugged. “My previous trip, she was the only one I saw. It’s hard for me to imagine her tolerating another kid for very long. If an adult wandered into this place, I expect she’d consider them a threat to her authority.”

“She must be lonely, though.”

“Yeah, well, she’s kept herself busy, hasn’t she?” Anxiety strained Hunter’s words.

“Is it much further?”

As if in answer, Carl saw a trio of red pines ahead. The trees on the right and in the center bore Madame Sosotris’s symbol. Hunter strode between them. Carl followed. “We’re most of the way there,” Hunter said.

“That’s good. Right?”

Instead of replying, Hunter stopped. Carl was on the verge of asking him what was wrong, when he saw the girl standing directly in front of them, a large animal behind her.

Natalie Kang might have been any nine- or ten-year-old entering an early growth spurt, all long skinny arms and legs. Her thick black hair reached past her waist and was in need of a brush. She was barefoot, wearing denim shorts and a red long-sleeved T-shirt. A cardboard crown circled her hair. Looking at her there in front of them, Carl was reminded of his daughters at that age, brimming with energy, possessed of surprising depths of melancholy and reflection, as well as titanic mirth. She was much smaller than he remembered, which was a ridiculous observation, because he had glimpsed her just the night before, but Hunter’s stories had caused her to grow in Carl’s memory to a raging monster, twelve feet tall.

When she shifted her large brown eyes from her brother to Carl, however, any reassurance her appearance might have caused withered. The gaze she directed at him was of pure, distilled malice, of hatred concentrated into its coldest form. He thought of Deb and Karen unhappy, of the rages they could fly into, the expressions of raw anger that would lower their brows, straighten their mouths. What was scalding him now like a jet of liquid nitrogen was the same emotion focused over decades, refined to a degree far in excess of what was humanly possible, tolerable. Briefly, he had wondered if Hunter might have misjudged his sister, misinterpreted her actions; now, he saw, his friend had not. Her eyes swung to Hunter, and it was as if Carl’s skin warmed.

“You’re naked,” Natalie said. Her eyes narrowed, as if she was attempting to decipher the characters on Hunter’s skin. Something was off about her voice; it had a worn quality, as if it had been too long at the same pitch. Carl found it simultaneously frightening and sad.

“Yeah,” Hunter said. “Hi, Nat.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said. She raised her chin. “I am Natalya, Queen of the Hungry Dogs, and you are trespassing in my kingdom. Who is this?” She pointed at Carl.

“He’s a friend. He agreed to come with me on my way through here.”

“Why does he have a knife?”

“To protect himself. There are some pretty scary things in these parts.”

“You mean my dogs.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You’re right,” Natalie said, “he should be afraid of them.” She glanced behind her, and the creature at her back crept into view.

At the sight of it, Carl’s stomach dropped, and despite himself, he said, “Jesus Christ.”

The size of a big dog, a Great Dane or an Irish wolfhound, it slunk close to the floor, slender limbs out to either side like an enormous insect. Its hide was the damp white of flesh left days under a Band-Aid. Its head was awful, a pair of jaws distended by a cage of fangs the length of Carl’s hand. Eyeless, it tasted the air with a fluttering white tongue whose edges were ragged from its teeth. A low chuckle rolled from its throat. The Hungry Dog positioned itself in front of Natalie, sitting as best the awkward arrangement of its limbs would allow, and turning its monstrous head in search of the palm she laid on it. She said, “This is Sam.”

“Hi, Sam,” Hunter said.

“Don’t talk to him,” Natalie said, her words laced with contempt. “He’s mine.”

“Okay,” Hunter said, hands held out in apology, “I’m sorry.”

“They’re all mine,” Natalie said. “Now you are too.”

“Can we talk about that?”

“No.”

Left hand low, palm forward, right hand holding the knife close to his body, Carl slid next to Hunter, who said, “Are you sure? I’m going to the summer country; maybe you could come with me.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“To see Mom and Dad.”

“Them? They let me die.”

“I don’t think that’s—”

“Shut up,” Natalie said. “When I got sick, I asked them if I was going to die. ‘Oh no,’ they said, ‘we would never let that happen.’ I did everything they told me to. I took their stupid medicine, which made me feel terrible. All my hair fell out. And it didn’t work. I died anyway. Before I did, Mom and Dad promised me I was going to heaven. ‘You’ll be lifted up by angels,’ they said, ‘and brought straight to Jesus. You’ll see Grandpa Hugh again.’ But there weren’t any angels. I didn’t see Jesus, or Grandpa Hugh. I wound up here. I saw a box fort and stopped at it. I didn’t know where I was. I thought I was in Hell. I didn’t know why; I didn’t know what I had done. For a long time, I was so scared. Then I got tired of being afraid and got mad.” Natalie lifted her hand from the dog (Sam) and he lurched to his feet. She said, “I knew when Mom and Dad died. I was ready for them. I was going to show them this place. I was going to ask them why they’d lied to me. I was going to make them apologize. Only, I missed them. Both of them. I went to find them, and I couldn’t. It was like they didn’t want to see me. Don’t you think they would have? Don’t you think they would have come looking for me?”

“I’m sure they did,” Hunter said. “After I returned from here—after I was resuscitated—you were the first thing Mom asked me about. ‘Did you see Natalie?’ she said while we were in the ambulance.”

“She did?”

“Yes, really.”

“What did you tell her?” Eagerness blended with Natalie’s anger, softened the stern cast of her features.

“I said I’d seen you.”

“Did you tell her about my kingdom?”

“No, I did not.”

“Why not?”

“To be honest, I was pretty freaked out by it. I thought Mom would be too.”

Natalie’s face hardened. “So even if she had wanted to find me after she died, she couldn’t have, because you didn’t tell her the right place to look.”

“Whoa,” Hunter said. “Hang on a minute.”

Carl didn’t pick up on the exact cue Natalie employed, but he caught the dog rocking back, gathering himself to leap, and pushed in front of Hunter as the creature sprang. For an instant, the Hungry Dog hung in the air, his abundance of fangs spread wide. Ice water flooded Carl’s chest. Sam drew nearer in fits and starts, as if in a series of slides caught in a stuttering projector. Somewhere inside Carl’s head, a voice was saying, Move move move move move. When the dog was an arm’s length away, he did. Aiming for Sam’s throat, he snapped the knife straight out, exhaling sharply as he twisted his right hip into the strike. The dog came in lower than he anticipated, however, and the knife drove into Sam’s open mouth, piercing his tongue and lower jaw. Fangs tore Carl’s hand as the dog jerked his head left in an attempt to avoid the weapon that had already wounded him. His momentum carried him into Carl, who released the knife and stumbled backward, thudding against Hunter and knocking the two of them to the floor. Sam landed next to them, thumping on his side, and immediately started wailing, a frantic cry halfway to a laugh. On his ass, Carl scooted clear of the thrashing dog, colliding with Hunter and forcing him back too.

“Dude,” Hunter said when they were a safe distance, “your hand.”

Carl raised it. It was bright red with blood streaming from the furrows Sam’s fangs had dug in it. “Jesus.” His head swam. He was aware of pain, incredible pain, astonishing pain, the moment his ravaged hand came into view, but he was more concerned that neither his thumb nor his middle finger seemed capable of movement. Nausea fought with panic in his throat.

“Holy shit,” Hunter said.

At first, Carl thought his friend was commenting on his hand, until he saw what was happening to Sam. All over him, the dog’s pale flesh was quivering, losing its solidity, becoming gelid, sliding partway from his limbs and torso onto the floor, then regaining its integrity and retracting up his frame. In some places, what reformed was not the shape of the Hungry Dog, but of a child, a seven- or eight-year-old, Carl would have guessed. An arm, a leg, a hand, a foot, a shock of curly red hair, a green eye wide with agony and fright, all blended with the dog’s monstrous features, while he continued his laughing wail, pawing at but unable to dislodge the blade buried in his lower jaw.

“Hush,” Natalie said, and Sam’s cry diminished to a whimper. Mingled with his whining were sounds that might have been words; Carl thought he could pick out, “Hurts.” Natalie crouched in front of the dog, her left hand on his head, her right reaching amidst his fangs to grab the handle of the knife. She murmured something to Sam, too low for Carl to hear, and tore the knife from his mouth with a downward stroke that split his lower jaw to the throat. Carl and Hunter shouted. The halves of his jaw flapping, pinkish blood venting from his open neck, Sam reared on his mismatched hind legs and fell over. His eye rolled frantically, then fixed. He sighed, shuddered, and was still. His body began to slide apart.

“What the fuck, Nat?” Hunter said.

“You broke him,” Natalie said. She dropped the knife, stood, wiped her hand on her shorts. “He’ll go back to his doghouse until I can fix him.”

Hunter raised himself to his feet. He held out his right hand to Carl, who took it in his left and used it to help him up from the floor. The pain from his injuries was excruciating. “How’re you doing?” Hunter said.

“Have I mentioned how much this sucks?” Trying to keep the hand elevated, Carl pressed his right arm across his chest.

“You might have.”

“I don’t think I’m gonna be much good for anything else,” Carl said. Natalie had kicked the knife away.

“That’s okay. It isn’t too far from here. I’m pretty sure I can make it on my own.”

“You are going nowhere,” Natalie said.

“Are you sure?” Carl said. “Do you know which direction you’re supposed to be heading? Because I have no idea.”

“I said, You are going nowhere.” Natalie advanced toward them.

“Yeah, I think so,” Hunter said. “Hang tight; it shouldn’t be too long.”

“That’s assuming you succeed.”

“Ever the voice of encouragement.”

“I SAID, YOU ARE GOING NOWHERE.” Natalie was standing beside them. This close, hatred poured from her in freezing waves. “You are mine,” she continued, addressing Hunter, “and so is your friend. I rule here. What I want to happen, happens. I want both of you to suffer, so you will. There’s a box waiting for you, big brother. I’ve been preparing it for a very long time. Maybe I’ll sic what comes out of it on your friend. Maybe I’ll let the dogs have him, for what he did to their brother.”

“Nat—”

“Queen Natalya.”

“Yeah.” Hunter shook his head, and leaped at his sister, catching her in a tackle that brought them crashing to the floor. Almost too fast to see, Natalie twisted, planting her feet against Hunter’s chest and kicking with enough force to shove him away from her, mist rolling about him. She sprang up, ready for Carl, but he was hurrying to Hunter, who grimaced, his left arm wrapping his ribs. “Well, that worked,” Carl said, extending his left hand.

Behind him, Natalie’s voice thundered, “GIVE IT BACK!”

In his other hand, Hunter held his sister’s crown. Waving away Carl’s help, he staggered to his feet.

“GIVE IT BACK!” Trembling with fury, Natalie glared at the two of them. Loosed from the cardboard circle, strands of her hair lifted as if in a breeze. “GIVE ME MY CROWN, HUNTER!”

Hunter shook his head. “No can do, Nat.”

In response, Natalie screamed, an ear-splitting shriek which lasted longer than Carl would have thought humanly possible. Somewhere deep in the mist, a distant pack of laughs answered. “Now you’ll see,” she said. “I won’t bother putting you in your box. I’ll let the dogs get you. You’re going to be so sorry, Hunter. They’re going to hurt you so bad.”

“Thank you,” Hunter said to Carl, “for coming with me. I don’t know if I could have made it this far without you. I’m sorry about your hand.”

“That makes two of us.”

“I love you, man.”

“I love you, too. I hope you make it.”

“That makes two of us.” Crown in hand, Hunter turned left and ran.

“HEY!” Natalie shouted after him. “HEY! COME BACK HERE, HUNTER! HUNTER!”

Already, the mist was closing around him, rendering him ghostly, dulling the slap of his feet on the floor. For an instant, the strange red symbols written on him appeared to float in the air, then they faded from sight, as well.

Natalie didn’t waste any more time. Without another glance at Carl, she sprinted after her brother, her long black hair streaming behind her like a banner.

XIV

Laughter roared around Carl, raged, together with another sound, the rumble of many feet, of hundreds of feet, running at him. The floor shuddered with their approach. How many Hungry Dogs were there? Carl’s hand throbbed. If one of them left the chase, he was in trouble; two, and he was finished. Hang tight, Hunter had said. Easy for him to say. The laughter swelled. The floor jumped under him. Hang tight.

As fast as his legs would carry him, Carl ran, aiming ninety degrees from the direction in which Hunter and Natalie had vanished. Laughter pursued him, enveloped him. The floor bounced like a trampoline, throwing him into a stumble that almost sent him sprawling. To his right, a stand of birches waved like reeds in a wind. He considered sheltering in them, rejected the idea. An arm’s length in front of him, a dog loped from right to left, its head an assortment of blades. Closer still, another crossed behind him. This direction, the mist was heavier, which he supposed was equal parts to his advantage and disadvantage.

Snow rushed against him. He slowed, shielded his face with his left hand. “HUNTER!” Natalie’s voice boomed on his left, made him flinch. He quickened his pace. The Hungry Dogs’ laughter ebbed, swelled, ebbed. The shaking of the floor subsided. Ahead, someone panted with exertion. “Hunter?” Carl said. Faintly, he heard Natalie shouting, but could not decipher her words. Snow stuck to his skin, clung to his hair. At least it numbed his injuries.

His feet were starting to drag. There was something to the right, a squat form about which snow swirled. Its outline was too regular for a tree. Carl jogged over to it. Made of gray brick, it stood waist high, a foot and a half on each side. Set in its flat top was a shallow bowl of dull metal. Snow silted the bowl, spackled the column’s sides. Carl walked around it, but could see no markings on it, no hint of its purpose. One of Natalie’s creations? He couldn’t be absolutely sure, but didn’t believe so. He squatted to study it more closely, using his left hand to balance himself. As he did, he realized his fingertips were touching not wood, but soil. Pulse leaping, he brushed his hand over the ground, confirming his discovery:

He had left Natalie’s domain, and Madame Sosostris’s path through it. He was lost.

XV

For a long time, Carl stood beside the brick pillar, as snow drifted against it and the blood flowing from his wounds began to freeze. He could attempt to find his way back to Natalie’s kingdom, but there seemed little point in doing so. If Hunter had succeeded in escaping her, then Madame Sosostris would have performed whatever action was necessary to unlink Limbo from the world of the living, and Carl would be entering a hostile environment from which there was no escape. He did not imagine Annie would or could keep the worlds locked indefinitely—she had mentioned the tremendous power required to do so, hadn’t she?—so if Hunter did not reach his goal, if Natalie caught him or if he ran off course, there would come a moment when she would have to effect the separation, anyway. Which would yield the same result of him returning to Natalie’s domain, except he and Hunter would be suffering together. He could continue into this new precinct of Limbo. The brick column was evidence at least one other person inhabited or had inhabited the area. But what if that individual was as hostile as Natalie, another feral ghost? What if they were worse, at the head of their own army of monsters? He could not risk wandering further into this territory.

The snow continued.

XVI

At some point, he crouched against the brick pillar, thinking it would offer him a modicum of shelter from the elements. He supposed it did; although it sharply curtailed his view of his surroundings. He was too cold to let that sway him. How long had it been since Hunter and he had set out on their journey? A couple of hours? Was that possible? It felt as if he’d followed Hunter along the hallway out of the kitchen days ago. Attempting to conserve body heat, he huddled tight. Could he die, here? Given that he could be hurt, it seemed likely. What would it mean, to die in the afterlife? Would he notice? Or was there some deeper level of existence waiting under this one?

His family would not know what had happened to him. Presumably, Annie would call 911 to report Hunter’s lifeless body. One look at the empty pill bottle beside it would tell the cops how he had exited his life, while a conversation with Hunter’s doctor would explain why. No doubt, the investigating officers would have plenty of questions for Annie, but Carl didn’t think she’d have any trouble answering them. He was less certain how she’d respond when they asked about the owner of the other car parked in the driveway. Her best option would be to hew as close to events as she could, to admit she didn’t know. In short order, what started as a call about the death of a famous photojournalist, apparently at his own hand, would have developed into a missing person case involving his long-term friend, the owner of a shotokan karate studio in Beacon.

What would the cops assume had happened to him? More importantly, what would Melanie think? She would have leaped in the car the instant the call to her ended. An accident would seem the most reasonable explanation. In this version of events, he went for a walk in the woods surrounding his friend’s house and suffered some kind of mishap, tripped, fell, knocked himself unconscious, then froze to death in the storm. A heart attack would work as well, despite a clean bill of health at his last checkup. The lack of any trace of his body on Hunter’s grounds would lead to the search being expanded to neighboring properties, possibly down to Lake Champlain, whose cold waters would offer a compelling explanation for the absence of his remains. The cops might posit he had slipped and fallen into the lake. How long would it be until the search was called off, suspended? What would the official verdict be? Missing, presumed dead? Yet the coincidence of him vanishing at the same time his friend ended his life would lend his disappearance an aspect of mystery which would birth conspiracy theories as quickly as the internet could midwife them. The prospect was almost enough to bend his mouth into a smile, except that the same open-endedness would haunt Melanie and the girls.

From Carl, from Dad, names which over a lifetime had become synonyms for stolid, calm (if unexciting), dependable (if forgetful), the man who had been one quarter of the family would assume a new identity, or rather, lack of identity. He would become a cipher, a blank onto which Melanie, Deb, and Karen would write whatever anxieties and doubts they’d had about their relationships with him. Melanie would fear he had left her for a new life with another woman, one of the younger black belts whose fawning she teased him about. Deb and Karen would worry they’d been abandoned by a father who had only ever feigned interest in them and their lives. With time, perhaps the girls would accept that he had died in an accident which had hidden his body, but he doubted Melanie would. She would know something was not right about his vanishing; the low-level marital telepathy they had developed over their decades together would tell her the situation was off. Would she seek out Madame Sosostris, demand more of an answer than the woman had provided the police? And suppose Annie acquiesced to her request, told her everything? What then? Assuming Melanie didn’t take Annie as either lying or insane, what could she do? What options could Annie offer her? Without the power she had drawn from Natalie, she could not access this place. The best Melanie could expect was to know her husband was forever lost to her. Grief for her, for what she had not learned she already had lost, shot through him like a steel pin fixing an insect to a board.

Nearby, footsteps crunched in his direction. Wondering if Hunter had failed in his efforts and had managed to track him here, he raised his head. But no, he did not recognize the young man advancing toward him. For one thing, he was clothed, wearing a peach dress shirt, charcoal slacks, and black loafers. For another, everything about him, the colors of his clothes, the tone of his skin, even the shine of his eyes, glowed with a rich light, as if the midday sun were shining full on him. The man’s expression, however, indicated he knew Carl. Squinting at the snow pelting his face, the man approached Carl until he was standing over him. In a pleasant voice, he said, “Your ride’s here, kiddo. Time to go.”

XVII

“Who are you?” Carl said through chattering teeth.

“The gift horse you’re looking in the mouth.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, bracing himself against the pillar as he struggled to stand, his legs complaining as they unbent. “It’s just—”

“Your friend’s sister, yes.”

“You know about her?”

“Some.”

“Can you tell me if Hunter got away from her?”

The young man shook his handsome head. “I can’t. What I can offer you is a way out of here.”

“Is this a trick?”

“This is not a trick.”

“Then why are you doing this?” Sudden suspicion widened his eyes. “Are you an angel? A god? God?”

The young man burst into hearty laughter. “That’s terrific,” he said. “What a difference a change of clothes makes, I swear.” Noting the blend of consternation and embarrassment on Carl’s face, he added, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have expected you to know me. The last time you saw me, I was in considerably worse shape. Actually, the last time you saw me, I was lying in the coffin in the Miskowski Funeral Home in Fishkill.”

Here, Carl realized, was Wayne Ahuja, his older brother’s friend, dead these many years, one of the multitude consumed by AIDS and its attendant infections. The delay in his recognition was understandable. Even before his sickness, Wayne had been skinny, the type of kid, it was joked, who had to stand in the same place twice to cast a shadow, who had to run around in the shower to get wet. In contrast, the man in front of him had the robust dimensions of an Olympic swimmer. He wore vitality with the same ease as his immaculately tailored shirt. Nor did the difference end there. When Carl had known him, Wayne had been reserved, guarded, a consequence of being out at a time and in a place whose attitudes were struggling to advance. This Wayne was suffused with self-confidence. It was as if he was seeing Wayne not as he would have been had he lived, but as the best possible self he could have been. Wonder and bewilderment competed to find their way into speech; what emerged from Carl’s mouth was a compromise: “Why?”

“Are you saying you want to stay here?”

“No,” Carl said, “no, no, of course not. It’s—I don’t understand. I thought I was trapped in this place.”

“I supposed it does seem a little deus-ex-machina-y, doesn’t it? Just when all hope seems lost, the handsome ghost from your past swoops in to rescue you. Well, more like, trudges across a snowy waste, but you get the picture. It’s because of that,” Wayne said, pointing at Carl’s torn right hand. “Blood was spilled. Whenever that happens in this neck of the woods, it creates all kinds of opportunities.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t ask. Be glad your friend’s sister didn’t know about it, or she wouldn’t have spent two seconds on him.” Wayne turned to the pillar, on top of which a couple of inches of snow had accumulated. With the flat of his hand, he swept it clear, then scooped out the snow remaining in the metal bowl. He waved to Carl. “Give me your hand. No, the injured one.”

Carl removed his hand from its position against his shoulder and held it out. Wayne took it in his warm grasp and guided it over the bowl. Rotating the wrist this way and that, he inspected Carl’s mostly frozen wounds. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, and squeezed Carl’s hand tightly.

Pain burned his fingers and palm. He yelped, went to jerk away, but Wayne’s grip did not lessen. From numb, Carl’s hand was aflame, flesh and bones luminescent. Fresh blood streamed from the grooves in his skin and pattered onto the bowl, striking it with a tinny music. “That should do,” Wayne said, and released him.

“Fuck!” Carl said, cradling his reinjured hand.

“Again, I apologize.” Wayne peered at the bowl, watching Carl’s blood slide down its sides into a crimson bubble. The blood quivered, elongated, shooting up the bowl’s curve in a straight line. Wayne pointed in the direction it indicated, about twenty degrees to their left. “This way,” he said.

Snow whirled around them. “There’s a hell of a lot more walking in the afterlife than I expected,” Carl said.

Wayne chuckled. “It isn’t far.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You want to know what it’s like.”

“Heaven, yeah. Hunter called it the summer country.”

“What makes you think that’s where I come from?”

“You didn’t?” Carl glanced at him.

“No, I’m teasing you,” Wayne said. “If your friend reaches it, he’ll be happy.”

“I would hope so, after all this.”

They proceeded in silence for a minute or two, until Carl said, “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

In front of them, a low wall made of flat black stones layered thigh high barred the way. “Here we are,” Wayne said. “Do you think you can get over this on your own, or do you need a hand?”

The stones were a single layer deep. Carl stepped across with a minimum of effort.

“And there’s my answer,” Wayne said. “All right. Continue straight on and you should see your destination in about five minutes.”

“Thank you,” Carl said. “I wish I could come up with something better to say.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I still don’t understand why you were the one who came for me. Not that I’m complaining; I just wondered.”

“Do you remember the last conversation we had?”

“Yes. You told me about wanting to go to Paris.”

“That was a bad day. A horrible day. I was in a lot of pain, and I was starting to understand I didn’t have much longer. All the stuff about France had been such a central part of who I was, how I saw myself, and it was going to be lost, to go down to the grave with me. I was depressed and I was afraid. You allowed me to talk about something I loved one more time—for the final time, as it turned out. It was comforting, at a time when comfort was in short supply. For my remaining days, I appreciated that.

“Plus, you did a good thing for your friend. I admire that. I could help you, so I did. You get a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card. Why not, right?”

“No argument here,” Carl said. “One last thing?”

“Yes?”

“If you happen to see my friend—Hunter—tell him I’m glad he made it.”

“Should I see him, I will.”

“Thanks.”

“Go home,” Wayne said.

Carl did.

XVIII

More like ten minutes after he departed Wayne, Carl noticed the mist thinning, disclosing the trunks of trees around him. The snow had not let up; indeed, it had gained in intensity, accompanied by a wind that sliced through him to the bone. Carl advanced to one of the trees, saw that it was a red pine, and his heart lifted in his chest. Moving from evergreen to evergreen, he continued forward. The wind whipped away the last of the mist. He was walking through the woods lining the driveway to Hunter’s house; through the blowing snow and the trees, he could see his Subaru, and beyond it, the steps climbing the slope to the house’s front door.

A tremendous wave of emotion rose in Carl, sent tears flooding his cheeks. The snow, the trees, the car, glowed in his sight, suffused with beauty. The wave broke, became joy and relief and a fierce love for the world and everyone in it. The snowflakes were a miracle, the trees astonishing, the car a work of art. He could not contain himself: He broke into a run toward the house, where his old friend’s body lay on the bed in the master bedroom, an unreadable expression on its cooling face.

Epilogue

The surgery to repair Carl’s hand took place at the UVM Medical Center. He had blamed his injuries on an attack by a stray dog he’d encountered when he went outside to practice his kata. The explanation was simple enough to repeat to the police convincingly; although it necessitated a series of rabies shots he couldn’t refuse and maintain the illusion. The doctor who treated him at the ER strongly recommended operating as soon as possible, which opinion the surgeon on call endorsed. Already on her way up, Melanie met him at the hospital, where a slot had opened early the following morning. “Holy crap,” she said when she saw the bandages wrapping his hand. “A dog did this?”

Although he hated lying to her, Carl said, “Yeah. It was the craziest thing.” Which was perhaps not as much a lie as he had thought.

After the surgery, while he was in the recovery area, surrounded by tall green curtains through which various nurses came to check his vitals, Hunter appeared to him. Melanie had ducked out to run to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a snack. Carl was lying with his eyes shut, riding in and out of consciousness. He heard the curtain rings jingle, felt someone sit on the end of the bed. He assumed it was Melanie, but when he opened his eyes, saw Hunter. Still unclothed, his skin still a canvas for the red figures, Hunter was wearing Natalie’s cardboard crown, perched unsteadily atop his larger head. On the floor beside him, a Hungry Dog sat awkwardly, its head an elongated wedge.

Carl was aware that he should be terrified, but whatever drugs were coursing through his system dulled the emotion to a mild concern. He said, “You’re still naked.”

“Yeah,” Hunter said.

“I take it this means the plan failed.”

“No,” Hunter said, “it didn’t.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I couldn’t do it.” Hunter looked down. “I made it. We made it; Natalie chased me all the way there. We must’ve made some sight, me running bare-assed down the middle of this cobbled street, her hot on my heels, screaming her head off. She finally brought me down, started punching and kicking me. I wouldn’t let go of this, though.” He pointed to the crown.

“Wait,” Carl said. “Heaven has cobbled streets?”

“This part does. You know what it reminded me of? Have you ever been to St. Andrew’s, in Scotland?”

“Heaven is like Scotland?”

“I’m sure the Scots would agree with that. It’s not important. Anyway, there we are, me on the cobblestones, Natalie beating the shit out of me, and the next thing, there are people in the street. I want to say they were there all along, it just took us a minute to see them. I don’t know what the hell that means, either. Their clothes were these incredible colors . . . I can’t say exactly how, but they separate the two of us, form a circle around Natalie. She’s furious; she’s shouting at the crowd, running up to and pushing them, punching a couple. They don’t react. Or, they don’t react the way you would expect. They talk to her, reassure her, tell her it’s okay, everything’s all right. As they do, they’re doing this thing with their hands.” Hunter mimed moving his back and forth, as if he were playing tug of war and drawing the rope to him. “I’m thinking I should run, escape my sister while I have the opportunity, but I can’t stop watching. I swear, I can almost see these people drawing something out of Natalie, like long, silvery webs. Eventually, she goes from running around inside the circle, to standing still, to sitting, then she lies down and falls asleep right there in the middle of the street. Some members of the group leave, others keep on with the hand stuff.

“I was so relieved; I can’t tell you. A woman approached me, said we should see about getting me settled. ‘What about my sister?’ I said. ‘Oh, her, too,’ she said. Just like that. As if Nat hadn’t been this raging monster.

“And it hits me, what about the Hungry Dogs? I’m thinking about Sam, about what we saw happen to him. I’m thinking about I don’t know how many of these creatures, these kids, there without their queen. I’m thinking about what I’ve witnessed with Natalie. If there’s a way to, I don’t know, get her back from whatever she had transformed into, then shouldn’t there be a way to reclaim them, too? But who’s gonna do that? I can’t bring Natalie out there, and I can’t ask any of these people I don’t know. I can’t say it isn’t my problem, because . . . well, I can’t. How could I enjoy this place knowing this pack of kids was wandering around the box fort, wondering what happened? I asked the woman I was talking to if she could help my sister, could connect her with our parents. She said she would, so I put the crown on my head and set off the way we’d come.

“It wasn’t hard to find the path back to Natalie’s kingdom. Once I arrived, most of the dogs avoided me. I could see they recognized the crown, but had no idea what it meant for me to be wearing it. A few approached me, but this guy,” Hunter nodded at the dog at his feet, “was the only one to stay. So far. I can’t say why, but I think his name is Rudy.”

“Hi, Rudy,” Carl said.

The dog stared at him blankly.

“Although I could be wrong,” Hunter said.

“How are you planning to retrieve them?” Carl said. “Who they were?”

“I have no idea,” Hunter said. “If Natalie could transform them into these things, then I figure there’s a way to return them to who they used to be. I just have to find it.”

“Sounds like it could take some time.”

“It’s not as if I’m doing anything else.” The bed creaked as Hunter stood. So did the Hungry Dog (Rudy?). “Okay, I just wanted to drop by, check on you. I don’t foresee myself having a lot of adult conversations in the immediate future.” He moved toward the green curtain.

“Be careful,” Carl said.

“I’m already dead.”

“And for God’s sake, get some pants, Your Majesty.”

“Kiss my ass, peasant.”

The curtain rings sang, the dog’s claws clicked on the floor, and Carl was alone. When Melanie returned, she saw her husband wiping his eyes with the back of his unbandaged hand, but she did not ask him about it, not then.

“And if he were wrong, well, what would be the harm in that? Better to be wrong forever than to live without hope.”—Lucius Shepard, “Limbo”

For Fiona