Highlands. The word comes to you, like a word you know but never had the chance to use before because there aren’t any highlands in the city. And so even though the sun is halfway down the western sky, you feel that as long as you keep climbing, it will never get dark. You can see so far. And there’s another word that you never had much use for in the city. Far.

But the dashboard lady is finished now. She’s given her last directive. There are no maps of this place in the GPS unit.Probably no cell service, either. You’re on your own. And even though Alyson warned you this would happen, it feels spooky, after the discussion you’ve been having with Kitty.

The forest seems to close in, and those highland glimpses of a far horizon are soon enough lost.

“About twenty minutes after we pass through Snow Road, we’re supposed to come to this broken-down log cabin on a rocky rise high up on the right.”

“There are tons of broken-down log cabins,” says Kitty.

“Yeah, but this one has a tree growing right through the middle of it.”

Kitty starts to slow down. “Whoa, what did you say?”

“Alyson told me there’s a tree growing through —”

“I heard that. But she hasn’t been here since she was — what’d you say? Eleven?”

“I know. That’s what I said —‘You remembered this from when you were eleven?’”

“And she said . . .”

“She got all kind of shifty looking, then told me she had been here again. This summer. On a little adventure — that’s what she said — with some guy.”

“Ah, poor Blink,” says Kitty. “You’re taking it pretty well.”

“Cut it out,” you say. “She’s so not my type.”

You both laugh.

“A total Ice Queen,” you say, and are about to go on when Kitty interrupts you.

“There,” she says. And up on a rise is the landmark in question: a cabin pierced by the thick trunk and heavy branches of a giant oak.

“Okay,” you say, excited now. “It’s about five hundred meters on the left.” You sit forward, your hands on the dash. “And we’re supposed to take it really slow when we turn off, because the entrance dips down real steep.”

“Got it,” says Kitty, “and there’ll be this small army waiting for us.”

You peer to the left and right. “They must be hiding real good.”

She slows down but doesn’t stop — drives right by the turnoff.

“Hey!” you shout.

“Shh!” she says.

“But you missed —”

“I didn’t miss anything,” she snaps. She’s crawling now, her eyes flitting to the rearview mirror, although there hasn’t been any traffic for ages.

“What are you doing?” you say to her, looking back as you round a long, slow bend. Your turnoff disappears behind you.

“I thought you said you were going to play this your way,” she says. “So that’s what I’m doing. We’ll find our own place to park, okay?”

You nod. Alyson had told you exactly what to look for, exactly where to go. And you’d trusted her because she had cried. You’re still sure she wasn’t lying to you, but Kitty is right. You know that, as well.

There is another turnoff on the left not so far along. She pauses at the lip of the hill, surveying the scene before her. You want her to hurry up, but you know she’s right. Be patient, boy.

She groans. “Well, here goes nothing,” she says. Then she eases the Jeep down the steep and rutted entranceway.

There is a sign nailed to a tree: TUMBLE ROAD.

“Hey,” you say. “It’s the same name she told me. Weird.”

“Yeah, so that other turnoff and this one are the same road, which is good. Because we’re like a good country mile from where they’re expecting us.”

“No one is expecting us.”

“Fine. But I’m a lot happier here, if that’s okay with you.”

She isn’t really asking, so you keep your mouth shut.

She drives slowly now, looking for someplace to pull off. Light glints through the trees in an eerie way — too bright — like there’s a Close Encounters mother ship over there, just landed in the forest. It’s not sunset yet, but the two of you are wrapped in shadows. Then you come to a rough cleared place, and she veers right into the brush, so that it rubs against the sides of the car. You instinctively pull your arms in tight against your sides. It’s like panhandlers all around the vehicle bending down to look inside.

She maneuvers the car until it is facing out onto Tumble Road but pretty well hidden. Then she stops and turns off the ignition. You catch the time on the dashboard just as the lights go out.

“It’s not even five,” you say. “We’ve got lots of time.”

“I hope so, because there’s not going to be any moon.”

“Really?”

She shakes her head. “Trust me. And you’re not going to want to be stuck in bush this dense after dark.”

You stare straight ahead at an impenetrable wall of green. “So we’d better get a move on, right?”

She nods, her face all business. But neither of you move. And the quietness rushes into the Jeep.

“No army,” you say, but you whisper it.

“Not so far,” she says.

You climb out, close the doors quietly. She pockets the key.

“No one should be able to see the car,” you whisper.

“I guess,” she says. “But I wish the damn thing were green.”

You’re still a ways from the turnoff, and then it’s another kilometer to the lodge, according to Alyson’s directions. You walk in the eerie silence along Tumble Road. Then you stop and without saying a word point ahead. Kitty nods; she’s seen it, too, about a hundred meters ahead: another turnoff. And beyond it is a clearing where an old tractor sits. The tractor is ancient, with metal wheels and spokes — an overgrown antique sitting in a clearing. That’s where you were supposed to park. She pulls you into the bush. You watch and wait. You make a move to go, and she stops you, her finger on her lips. You do as she says. You are in her territory now.

Finally, she gives the go-ahead. You make your way to the new road that goes off to the right.

Private Road says the sign nailed to a tree trunk. No Exit. It has no other name. The road is downhill, a long, slow decline. There are many turns, a winding path, sandy, with soft-looking grass growing between the tracks and everything covered with pine needles. There are alien fluorescent orange toad stools.

Kitty suddenly stops.

“What?” you whisper. But she doesn’t answer, just stares into the bush and up into the canopy. You follow her gaze. See nothing.

You remember what she said about wolves and bears up where she was from. You’re not sure how far that is from here, but these woods look like they’re jam-packed with carnivores. Who knows what’s in there, you think: cougars, wildcats, a madman with a hockey mask and machete.

You want to get this job done, climb back into the safety of that yellow Jeep, open up a bag of SunChips, and beat it back down to Kingston — mission accomplished. Instead, you pick up the pace. You have no idea how long this road is, but before you know it you’re running.

Suddenly you’re aware of being alone.

You stop and turn around. Kitty has fallen behind. She’s leaning against a tree, not casually but as if the tree is holding her up. You head back. She’s breathing hard.

“Are you okay?” you whisper right up close to her ear.

She shakes her head. “We could lie,” she says. “We could just turn around and head back. Tell the Ice Queen the place was empty. Take the money and run.”

You think about it. Now that you’re here, the whole thing is a lot scarier. But you shake your head. “Yeah, but then there’s no way we can make any big money. We only get three hundred measly bucks.”

“Don’t be so greedy,” she says. She’s looking scared, and that scares you because she doesn’t seem the type.

“What is it?” you say. Something is eating her.

She looks around. She rubs her hands up and down her thighs.

“This place,” she says. “I don’t know . . .”

“If we see anything, we split,” you say.

“It’s not that,” she says. “Listen.”

So you listen. “I don’t hear anything,” you say.

“Exactly,” she says. “No birds. No animals. Nothing.”

You touch her arm, and she shrinks from you. “Kitty,” you say, pleading a bit. “Don’t cack out on me now. We’ve got to find out for sure.” And right then — right that very instant — you think you hear laughter. You listen hard. You’re sure you heard something.

Was it your imagination? Or was it the Captain, having a good laugh? Funny how you haven’t thought about him in . . . well, pretty much since you met Kitty. But now that she’s gone all psycho on you, he’s back, just like that.

“It’s not natural. The quiet,” she says. Then she seems to snap out of it. She stares hard at you, and then she smiles. The fear is still there, but she’s smiling through it. “I won’t let you down,” she says. And for some reason, that only makes it worse. But you nod.

“I’ll hang back,” she says. “But I won’t desert you.”

You feel weak. You hadn’t realized how much you were depending on her. Breathe, Blink. Get on with it, boy.

You wipe the hair out of your eyes and head down the road. When you’ve gone another fifty strides or so, you look back and she’s following at a distance. Covering your back.

You round a bend, and there it is. You see it, kind of blurred, through the trees, just the jutting angle of the roof at first, a glint of last sunlight off a window. Then the road rounds one last bend, and there’s this big clearing and the lodge about sixty meters down the hill over on your right. You pull back into the shadows. Hide behind a tree.

The lodge is massive, two stories high, built from dark logs with white caulking between them. The roof is steeply pitched, and there are three, four, five gables on this side and a tall stone chimney stack but no smoke coming out of it. Beyond the lodge there’s a bay with a thick fringe of bulrushes, the dark green of water. The bay opens up onto a wide lake, almost black but with long smears of orange-and-pink sunset, and beyond that, a long way off, the silhouette of the far shore.

You pull back behind a tree, hold your breath. There’s noise down here, the wind, the lapping of the water.

You lean into the tree out of sight and close your eyes the better to concentrate. You want to hear voices. Or if not voices, then something human: music, hammering, a window opening.

You open your eyes again. You want to see a door open up right now and see Jack Niven step out onto the hard-beaten dirt to cross the yard to the outhouse over there on the left, clear across the yard. There are another couple of sheds there, too, and a van.

A van!

There’s a van parked in the shadows behind the shed. But it’s pretty old looking. Could be abandoned. You turn to Kitty and point toward the van. But from where she is, she can’t see it and she shakes her head. Her eyes are wide, her face angry. Stop looking at her, you idiot! That’s what she’s trying to tell you.

Right. Best to act as if you’re on your own, in case . . . Well, you don’t want to think about what might happen.

You kneel and peer out from behind your cover. Take it all in. A red canoe pulled up on the shore, a narrow dock leading out into the bay, an aluminum boat sitting in the water at the end of the dock, rocking ever so slightly up and down in an onshore breeze. You can feel the breeze off the water, just a tendril of it, all the way up here in the trees at the very edge of the clearing. It cools the sweat on your face and makes the branches above you stir and crack.

The outboard motor is tipped up. Fishing rods stick up from some holder contraption on the rail of the boat.

Fishing rods?

People might leave a boat in the water — how would you know? But fishing rods? Would there be fishing rods left out like that if there wasn’t somebody here? And the canoe: it’s just sitting there on the beach.

You risk a glance back toward Kitty, but she’s gone. Nowhere to be seen. Vanished.

Your heart is beating like a jackhammer. She did desert you! No, you don’t believe that. You can’t believe that. She’s taken cover — that’s all. But a part of you wishes you had those car keys.

You turn your attention back to the clearing. Someone is here. No one is supposed to be, as far as Alyson knew, but someone is here. She was right. Alyson was right. You were right, too. Her daddy wasn’t kidnapped. He’s hiding out. He’s here! This comes crashing into your brain all in a rush. You could go now, you think, but then you imagine the look Alyson would give you if you didn’t do the job right. You’ve done a lot of lying in your life, but you’re not sure you could get away with lying to her. She’d have some test, anyway. She’d know. You need to clamp your eyes on him.

So you move from tree to tree, around the clearing, your eyes peeled. You wait. You ignore the Captain, who is yelling at you at the top of his lungs, deafening you. You take your time. The upstairs gable windows are shuttered, which is good because it means no one can see you. The downstairs windows, however, are not. What does that mean?

It means be careful!

That’s what the Captain screams. But those naked windows mean something else, too, just like the fishing rods and the canoe and the van.

You watch the dark of the windows for anything like movement. There are no lights on inside. You move with stealth, staying close to the trees, every nerve and fiber tensed. You watch your tread so you don’t step on some damn branch. You are thirty, twenty, ten meters from the place, sneaking up toward the back of the building as far away from any window as possible.

You want to get close enough to look in just one window.

Then without warning an enormous pair of arms wraps around your chest and holds you tight.

“Where the heck you think you’re going?” says a voice you almost recognize. You struggle without any chance of getting away, but in your squirming you catch a glance of the man who has soundlessly stalked you and now has you bound tight to his chest.

It’s the Moon.