Whelk was not sleeping.

Back when he was an Aglionby boy, sleep had come easy — and why shouldn’t it have? Like Czerny and the rest of his classmates, he slept two or four or six hours on weekdays, up late, up early, and then performed marathon sleeping sessions on the weekend. And when he did sleep, it was hours of easy, dreamless sleep. No — he knew that was false. Everyone dreamed, only some forgot.

Now, however, he rarely closed his eyes for longer than a few hours at a stretch. He rolled in his bedsheets. He sat bolt upright, woken by whispers. He nodded off on his leather couch, the only piece of furniture the government hadn’t seized. His sleep patterns and energy seemed dictated by something larger and more powerful than himself, ebbing and flowing like an uneven tide. Attempts to chart it left him frustrated: He seemed more wakeful at the full moon and after thunderstorms, but beyond that, it was difficult to predict. In his mind, he imagined that it was the magnetic pulse of the ley line itself, somehow invited into his body through Czerny’s death.

Sleep deprivation made his life an imaginary thing, his days a ribbon floating aimlessly in water.

It was nearly a full moon and it had not been long since it rained, so Whelk was awake.

He sat in a T-shirt and boxers in front of the computer screen, operating the mouse with the unprincipled and dubious productivity of the fatigued. All in a rush, the countless voices invaded his head, whispering and hissing. They sounded like the static that buzzed over phone lines in the vicinity of the ley line. Like the wind before a storm front. Like the trees themselves conspiring. As always, Whelk couldn’t pick out any words, and he couldn’t understand the conversation. But he did understand one thing: Something strange had just happened in Henrietta, and the voices couldn’t stop talking about it.

For the first time in years, Whelk retrieved his old county maps from his tiny hall closet. He had no table and the counter-top was cluttered with opened packages of microwave lasagna and plates with stale bread crusts on them, so he spread the maps out in the bathroom instead. A spider in the bathtub skidded out of his way when he flattened a map against the surface.

Czerny, you’re in a better place than me, I think.

But he didn’t really believe that. He had no idea what had become of Czerny’s soul or spirit or whatever you wanted to call what had been Czerny, but if Whelk had been cursed with whispering voices merely by his part in the ritual, Czerny’s fate must’ve been worse.

Whelk stood back and crossed his arms, studying the dozens of marks and notations he’d made on the maps over the course of his search. Czerny’s impossible handwriting, always in red, noted energy levels along the possible path of the ley line. Back then, it had been a game, a treasure hunt. A play for glory. Was it true? It didn’t matter. It was an expensive exercise in strategy with the East Coast as the playing field. Looking for patterns, Whelk had painstakingly drawn circles around areas of interest on one of the topographical maps. A circle around an old copse of ash trees where the energy levels were always high. A circle around a ruined church that wildlife seemed to avoid. A circle around the place Czerny had died.

Of course, he had drawn the circle before Czerny had died. The place, a sinister group of oak trees, had been notable because of old words carved into one of the trunks. Latin. It seemed incomplete, difficult to translate, and Whelk’s best guess was “the second road.” The energy levels were promising there, though, if inconsistent. Surely this, then, was on the ley line.

Czerny and Whelk had returned a half-dozen times, taking readings (next to the circle, there were six different numbers in Czerny’s handwriting), digging in the dirt for possible artifacts, watching overnight for signs of supernatural activity. Whelk had constructed his most complicated and sensitive dowsing rod yet, two metal wires bent at a ninety-degree angle and inserted into a metal tube handle so that they could swing freely. They’d dowsed the area around it, trying to establish for certain the path of the line.

But it remained spotty, coming in and out of focus like a distant radio station. The lines needed to be woken, to have their frequencies honed, the volume turned up. Czerny and Whelk made plans to attempt the ritual in the oak grove. They weren’t quite sure of the process, though. All Whelk could find out was that the line loved reciprocity and sacrifice, but that was frustratingly vague. No other information presented itself, so they kept pushing it off. Over winter break. Spring break. End of the school year.

Then Whelk’s mother had called and told Whelk that his father had been arrested for unethical business practices and income tax evasion. It turned out the company had been trading with war criminals, a fact his mother knew and Whelk had guessed, and the FBI had been watching for years. Overnight, the Whelks lost everything.

It was in the papers the next day, the catastrophic crash of the Whelk family fortune. Both of Whelk’s girlfriends left him. Well, the second one was technically Czerny’s, so perhaps that didn’t count. The whole thing was all very public. The Virginia playboy, heir to the Whelk fortune, suddenly evicted from his Aglionby dorm, relieved of his social life, freed from any hope of his Ivy League future, watching his car being loaded onto a truck and his room emptied of speakers and furniture.

The last time Whelk had looked at this map had been as he stood in his dorm room, realizing that the only thing he had left was the ten-dollar bill in his pocket. None of his credit cards meant anything anymore.

Czerny had pulled up in his red Mustang. He hadn’t gotten out of the car.

“Does this make you white trash now?” he’d asked. Czerny didn’t really have a sense of humor. He just sometimes said things that happened to be funny. Whelk, standing in the wreckage of his life, didn’t laugh this time.

The ley line wasn’t a game anymore.

“Unlock your door,” Whelk had told him. “We’re doing the ritual.”