Keech Blackwood splashed up from the Little Wild Boy River and blinked at the autumn sky. He had lost count of the number of times he’d emerged from a freezing river the last few days. Sputtering, he dug his hands into dark sand at the water’s edge. He noticed his hat floating and grabbed it, amazed he hadn’t lost it in the river.
Glancing back to the east, Keech spotted their exit and whistled in disbelief. The Little Wild Boy spilled out of a black hole sliced into the foot of the Floodwood mountain, a fissure the shape of an upside-down horseshoe. The back side of the mountain was a jumble of black dirt, half-buried boulders, and gnarled trees—all of which looked on the verge of tumbling into the crazed water.
There was a loud splash nearby as Cutter broke the river’s surface and sucked in a giant breath. “What a swim!” he exclaimed, his own hat sagging on his head. “I can’t believe we’re still kickin’.” Shivering, he staggered through the shallow water and stood next to Keech on the bank, his face a mixture of relief and shock. As if by instinct, Cutter’s hand dropped to his red sash to make sure his knife was still intact.
Hectic movement near a bend upstream caught Keech’s eye. “Oh no,” he moaned.
Nat and Duck were working to pull John Wesley out of the river’s current. The boy looked unconscious, his arms loose by his sides. Nat stood behind him, arms linked around his chest, heaving the boy onto the bank while Duck cleared the sand of debris.
“John!” Cutter cried. He sprinted up the bank. Keech hurried after him.
Nat and Duck dropped to their knees around the boy. The rancher began to push at the soft base of John Wesley’s chest—hard, quick movements. Whenever Nat paused, Duck would bend, pinch John Wesley’s nose, and blow into his mouth.
“What in blazes are y’all doing?” Cutter shouted, running up to John Wesley’s side. “Leave ’im alone!”
“We’re saving him,” Duck said. She bent again to John Wesley’s mouth and blustered more air down his gullet. “Pa used to say when a fella drowns, you have to push air back into him.”
Keech stood at the unconscious boy’s feet, gripping his sodden hat. He would never forgive himself if the boy perished.
John Wesley coughed up a lungful of water. His face turned deep purple from the vicious hacking. He muttered two words that sounded like, “Papa, no,” but Duck shushed him.
“Easy. Don’t talk.”
John Wesley struggled to regain his feet, but Cutter pushed him gently back. “Stop your fussing,” he said. “You almost drowned.”
John Wesley spluttered, then collapsed on the riverbank.
* * *
Keech sat on a fat driftwood log and pried off his boots. As he emptied them of water, Nat, Duck, and Cutter stepped over, trembling in their wet clothes.
Nat joined him on the log. “Your crazy hunch saved our hides back there.”
Keech nodded. “We need to find Bone Ridge now. We have to be close.”
“We’ll find it.”
“Thanks for saving John Wesley.”
Nat smiled, but it quickly fell to a frown. “He ain’t out of the woods yet. We need to dry him up, warm his skin.”
“We could build a fire here,” Cutter said, gesturing to a flat spot on the bank.
“I don’t relish camping where the river spills out,” Duck said. “Bad Whiskey could come riding out of that hole any second.”
“He won’t be coming through there,” Cutter said. “Last I saw, he was being torn to bits by the bear.”
“Who’s to say the bear did him in?”
“If it didn’t, the cave-in must have finished him,” Cutter said.
But Keech didn’t believe for one second that Bad Whiskey was done. That ornery cuss had pulled an arrow out of his own heart.
To make matters worse, Keech had given him a vital tool. The pendant. There had been no choice but to abandon the charm, but if Whiskey had survived, he would have felt the presence of the silver and retrieved it.
Nat must have plucked this thought straight from his mind, for he turned to his sister and asked, “You still have Pa’s charm, right?”
Duck lifted the shard out of her shirt. The hand around it was shivering from the cold. “If Whiskey survived, I’ll take him down.”
“Good.” Nat stood and cracked his back. “Let’s scout for a safe camp and go to ground for a spell. I don’t want to look for Bone Ridge when we still have company.” He gestured to the dimming sky north of the Little Wild Boy. Three dark specks floated under the lowest cloud. They were bathed in dying sunlight, and they moved in steady circles, as if sweeping the land for woodland prey.
Keech frowned at the sight of them. “They don’t seem confused anymore. Over the forest they were acting all mixed up, like they’d found a bushel of wild berries.”
“Come to think of it, I don’t hear that awful buzz,” said Cutter.
“The weird pressure’s gone, too,” Duck said, wiggling a finger inside her ear. “Does that mean we’re out of the curse?”
“I think we made it out of Floodwood, at least,” Keech replied. He slipped his wet boots back on. “Nat’s right. We better get a move on.”
“Y’all go without me,” said a croaky voice.
Everyone wheeled around. John Wesley stood behind them, his legs wobbling.
“John!” Cutter said. “You should be resting.”
The boy shambled closer, his big arms clutched around his river-soaked body. He had left his bullet-riddled hat sitting on the ground, and his long curls of strawberry-blond hair clung to his face and neck in wet clumps. “I ain’t gonna put no one else in danger. Not anymore. It’s best if you go without me.”
“Nobody’s leaving you behind,” Nat said. “We’re a team, remember?”
“We ain’t no team,” John Wesley said. “We’re just a rabble of fool orphans. We don’t know where we’re going, we lost our ponies and our food, and our friend from Big Timber got shot up.”
Cutter walked over and stood defiantly before him. “If it weren’t for you, I’d still be riding the countryside alone, or dead on the side of some road.”
John Wesley dropped his head.
Pa Abner’s comforting words came back to Keech as he stood and put a hand on John Wesley’s thick shoulder. “Work as two, succeed as one, John.”
“Huh?”
“You are Cutter’s left hand, and Cutter is your right. Our mission is to stop Bad Whiskey and find the Char Stone. We can’t do this without you. Cutter can’t do this without you. Our posse won’t succeed if you stay behind. I honestly believe that.”
John Wesley turned his back on the others, as if struggling with a hard thought. A stark silence descended over the group.
Finally, the boy nodded. He turned and pointed at Cutter.
“I’ll keep on for you, amigo. We made a pact to ride down your desperado, and that’s what we’re gonna do.”
Keech glanced at Cutter, whose calloused lips had cracked into a smile.
“As for the rest, I’ll do my best to watch your backs,” John Wesley said. “I can’t promise I won’t mess up, but I’ll stand by you as best I can.”
Grinning, Keech said, “Then let’s get moving and finish this.”
* * *
The gang made haste up a northern track, taking a fox trail Keech had discovered behind a heavy wall of jimsonweed. Cutter used his knife to chop away the growth as Nat and Duck moved alongside John Wesley, who was slumping on Nat’s shoulder and humming a lonely-sounding tune. Keech walked behind Cutter, his eyes locked on the distant crows.
A frigid wind whistled over the trail, shuddering the jimsonweed. Keech raised his coat collar and wished he was riding his horse, Felix. Having his trusty pony would make all this infernal traveling so much easier. It saddened him to think Felix might be forever gone.
A loud curse gave him a jolt. Cutter had paused on the trail and was looking back at him.
“Admit it, Blackwood, you can’t see no trail. We’re lost.” He spat another curse, and continued chopping weeds. “I can find my way through a cave better than you can walk through woods.”
“Speaking of the cave, whatever happened to you back there?” Nat asked.
“After you left me in the tunnel, I took off running to face El Ojo. I could see his torchlight getting brighter, but then the light faded and I was standing in darkness as black as tar.”
Keech pondered. “The curse must have led you down a different tunnel.”
“What’d you do then?” Nat asked.
“I got lost,” Cutter said. “I couldn’t see my own hands.”
“We must’ve wandered the cave a good hour,” Duck said. “You were in the dark the whole time?”
Cutter nodded. “Sometimes I heard noises and tried to track them. I think I even heard y’all at one point.”
“You should’ve called out.”
“I did for a spell, but then I heard a rumble. That shut me up.”
“The bear?” Duck asked.
“Yep. You know what happened next, I reckon.”
Keech had been keeping his eyes focused on the path. He saw something at the edge of the trail and stopped. He stepped closer. A few of the weeds had been bent. “Looks like someone’s been ahead of us. We must be on the right trail.”
They marched onward. After a sharp turn west, Keech called another halt as the fox trail slipped into a dense thicket. He dropped to one knee, searching for more evidence of passage, but there wasn’t even a hint of a broken stalk. Perhaps the secret traveler had realized his mistake with the weeds and squirreled the rest of his movement.
“We have to be careful,” Keech told the others. “Watch for an ambush.”
Soon the fox trail bent back to the north and the forest opened into a large field, a meadow of tall broomsedge that spread for hundreds of yards. In the distance, the land dropped steeply downhill. Keech studied the sky over the meadow. The crows had disappeared, but he could feel their presence the way a fella could feel a headache behind his eyes.
The gang moved with caution through the meadow. When they came to where the landscape dropped, they stopped and beheld the sight below with astonishment. The valley at the bottom was surrounded on three sides by a steep bluff carved out of grayish white stone, a trinity of high walls that resembled marble or—
“Bone,” Keech whispered to himself. “Beware the high ridge made of bone.”
The shape of the lowlands had a curved look as if formed by the shoe of God’s own horse, a divot stamped into the surrounding woodlands. Nestled inside the valley was a ghost town, a sprawling settlement overtaken by time and decay. The town looked as large as Big Timber, and yet not a single living thing stirred upon its streets.
Duck peeled off her hat. “Ain’t that a lonely sight!”
The tall wooden wheel of a gristmill was visible at the ruin’s western end, but where the waterwheel would have dipped into a stream, there was nothing but dried-up bedrock, encroached on by desolate forest. All around the town’s borders, Keech saw only thick hems of black locust trees, and realized with dismay that the forest engulfed the entire bowl of the valley, obscuring everything else past the settlement.
A gristmill. A waterless brook. He couldn’t shake the sudden feeling that he had seen such a village before. But then again, there were many settlements that looked exactly like it: dried up and discarded.
“I wonder what happened down there,” Cutter said.
“I reckon the Withers drove them out,” Keech said.
“The Withers?”
“As it was told, Bone Ridge was the graveyard where they buried the victims of a wasting disease called the Withers. They say the disease killed so many folks, the graveyard stretches on for miles.”
“Sounds like a bunch of nonsense,” Cutter said.
Nat turned to Keech. “Daylight’s burning. We should move.”
* * *
By the time they reached the ruins, the sky had faded to a deep purple. Full dark and a hunter’s moon would be upon them soon. At the village outskirts, there was no welcoming signboard, but there was a sign at the approach to the settlement’s main road, a miserably crooked placard that said POLK STREET.
As the gang shuffled up the old street, they regarded the devastation around them with a hushed reverence. From all appearances, the town had been a respectable outpost in its day, but many of its structures had either burned or collapsed. Weeds clogged the filthy alleyways, and the wooden sidewalks had long ago surrendered to the broomsedge that cluttered the valley floor.
Nat pointed to the town’s livery stable, one of the few buildings still intact on Polk Street. “We’ll hole up in there,” he said. “No one could see a campfire behind the main wall.”
A cold feeling of déjà vu swept over Keech when he saw the old stable.
“We could set a watch,” John Wesley said, his voice raspy. “I’ll sit first.”
“You’re still blue as a fish,” Cutter told the boy. “I’ll take first watch.”
“A couple hours’ rest wouldn’t hurt,” John Wesley conceded. “And it sure would be nice if we could eat something.”
As the gang settled into the stable, Keech searched around the street for some kind of food. He longed for Cutter’s pemmican, but the meat had run off with the horses. He settled for a heavy patch of blue chicory, still in its bloom, growing in one of the town’s wild alleys. After inspecting the plants and finding them healthy, he brought back a heaping handful. The group nibbled silently on the greens and petals.
“A bunch of weeds ain’t really what I had in mind,” John Wesley grumbled, but he scarfed down his portion all the same.
After the meal, Keech and Duck struck out across the ruins to gather firewood as Cutter kept watch over Polk Street. Nat stayed back at the livery stable to fashion John Wesley a dry straw bed.
Every stick and branch Keech collected was dark with moisture from the recent rains, but Duck boasted that Nat could get a fire burning even when the wind was high and the day was stormy.
“Maybe we can burn this,” she added, kicking at a large brown sign wedged in the mud in the middle of Polk Street.
Keech looked at the sign and felt his mouth go dry. It was the signboard that should have been standing at the town’s outskirts, but the valley’s high winds must have blown it up Polk Street. The message painted across the cracked wood read:
YOU HAVE ENNERED
THE VILLEGE OF SNOW
NO PICK POCKETS OR HORSE THIEVERS!
Keech dropped his firewood. “I’ve seen that sign before.” In a dream, he almost added, but the déjà vu was far too strong for him to believe it had merely come from fantasy.
He turned to Duck. “Tell your brother I’ll be a little longer coming back. I have something to check out.”
Duck scowled. “Keech Blackwood, you’re gonna get yourself in trouble.”
“I’ll be back in a flash.”
“Where in tarnation are you headed?”
“West of town, to have a peek at the woods past that old gristmill.”
“Don’t you dare go in those woods!” Duck warned. “You might get trapped again.”
Keech looked up and down the ravaged avenue. “I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think Snow is part of a route we’re meant to investigate. Call it a hunch.”
* * *
Keeping to the shadows, Keech moved to the western edge of town, where Snow’s lonesome gristmill house stood upon a high foundation of stone.
He approached slowly and touched one of the paddles of the waterwheel. Flashes of Pa Abner’s face, younger, struck him as he did.
Keech looked beyond the millhouse and scanned the dense forest of ugly black locust trees that made a veritable wall around the town’s boundary. The trees were gnarled and bent, leaning back toward the house and the dried-up stream. Much like the trees on the other side of the Floodwood mountain, he couldn’t see ten feet beyond their wrinkled, thorny trunks.
Images of a path behind the mill flashed through his mind, more a feeling than a clear picture.
“West, past the millhouse,” Keech murmured aloud. “Has to be.”
He descended the dry riverbank, stepped across the barren stream bed, and pushed into the forest. Somewhere in the dark, a slew of wild dogs barked and bayed at the hunter’s moon. It was a desolate sound, full of omen, but he kept moving.
Bone Ridge Cemetery was close. Keech could feel a chilling menace creep upon him like the night itself. The feeling grew stronger when the land dipped like a washbowl and pitched him unexpectedly downhill. There was no choice but to pick up speed. Keech raced to the bottom of the short slope, unsure whether to feel panic or exhilaration. He ran through branches and moonlight; he ran through fear and fury. He slowed when he felt his boots scurry over flush earth. He tossed a quick glance behind him, but the old millhouse with its giant wheel was no longer visible.
He expected to see more thick woods ahead of him, an impossible wall of forest. Instead, the gnarled trees parted slightly to reveal a single, slender footpath.
At the end of the trail stood a black gate, at least fifteen feet high.
Keech’s heart pounded as he gazed at the entrance to Bone Ridge, the graveyard Pa Abner had called the Sullied Place.
The gate was made of twisted iron, its intricate bars coiled like strangling vines, converging at the top with dull spearhead points. The gate stood open, but only enough to allow a man to squeeze past, as if the last visitor had slipped out in a hurry and forgotten to seal the way. Beyond the gate, the broomsedge was so tall Keech couldn’t make out where the tombstones began.
A thick stone wall surrounded the graveyard, at least ten feet high on each side of the gate. The top of the wall was crumbled in places. Broken fieldstone littered the ground, as if a giant fist had tried to smash the wall in rage. All around the great partition—north, south, east, and west, from all appearances—stood a rugged, gnarled barricade of black locust trees, leaning toward the stone as though ravenous to enter the Bone Ridge yard.
Keech noticed a rusted metal sign hanging crooked from one of the spearheads. The sign simply read:
EXĪTE
The word meant nothing to him, but it still caused a strange, gray feeling to creep over him, like he had seen the word somewhere before.
“It’s Latin.”
The voice made him jump. Keech spun to face the footpath. Duck stood at the base of the hill. She held a makeshift torch made from an old broom handle.
“Duck! You scared the hair off me.”
The girl crossed the footpath. “I had a feeling you were gonna explore. I just couldn’t leave you to wander about unprotected.”
“It’s dangerous out here.”
“Exactly. You oughta have your neck wrung for wandering about alone.”
Keech smirked. “You sound like my Granny Nell.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Where’d you get that torch?”
“Nat had started a fire. I used some burlap wraps to hold the flame. I told Nat you was still out finding wood. Lucky for you he’s distracted by John Wesley or he’d be out here scolding you.”
Keech shrugged, then pointed to the rusted sign. “What does that mean?”
Duck shone her torchlight on it. “Back in the Middle Ages, folks who lost family to the Black Death would scrawl that word over the doorways of the dead as a warning.” She gave Keech a dismal look. “It means ‘Get out.’”
Heavy clouds rolled over the full moon, leaving no illumination at the moment other than Duck’s yellow torch flame. Keech examined the sky, but the firelight blinded him. If the crows were flying overhead, they were impossible to see. Frowning, he put a hand on Duck’s shoulder.
“This is the place. Bone Ridge. Go round up the others, bring them straight here. If John Wesley’s too weak, tell him to stay and rest. Tell them the Char Stone is here.”
Duck winced at the mention of the Stone. “I’m scared to find it, Keech. Our fathers went out of their way to hide it, and we’re gonna go dig it up? That seems unwise.”
Her words sparked a memory of Tommy Claymore, back in the Swift Hollow glade. The Stone is life, the thrall had said. If resurrected fiends like Bad Whiskey Nelson were the product of the Char Stone’s magic, then there indeed was much to be frightened of. He could hardly imagine what dark purposes the Reverend Rose planned for the Stone.
“Our fathers wanted to protect it,” Keech said. “We have to dig it up to keep it out of Bad Whiskey’s hands. Besides, the Reverend Rose knows it’s here. We can’t just leave it. We have no choice. Now go fetch the others.”
After she crossed to the base of the hill, Duck paused to look at him. Torchlight shone upon her small face, and Keech caught a glimpse of the real Duck. Not the ten-year-old child Nat wanted to shield, but the fierce, dauntless individual who had been raised by an Enforcer.
Then she headed up the hill and left Keech, once again, alone.
Shuddering, he stood before the tall rusted gate. The clouds parted, liberating the red hues of the hunter’s moon. He gazed at the sign in Latin—Get out.
Steeling himself, Keech entered Bone Ridge, where the victims of the Withers awaited.