Chapter 5
5
That night I have the dream.
I call it the dream, but it isn’t as if it’s one set sequence—it’s different every time. I’ll be in my childhood bedroom trying to fit my feet into a series of ever-smaller shoes or running through bookstore corridors that seem to wind forever, and then some piece of the dream will appear, out of place. The red star gleaming between the shelves. Snow falling thickly to blanket that old beige carpet.
The buzz of the dragonfly’s wings.
Tonight I’m in Harper’s apartment, at a party—not the party where I met Connor, though he’s here somewhere, in another room. The dream slews between half-realized conversations, anxiety thrumming through them—I’ve forgotten something important, and Harper won’t tell me what it is. Then the door opens to welcome in new party guests, but instead of a hallway and tipsy grad students, there waits a maw of black, and in it, a single red star. Something buzzes at my wrist. I look down. The dragonfly is perched on my forearm. Its wings gleam, metallic.
Footsteps crunch behind me. I don’t want to turn, because I know what I’ll see.
He’s there. He’s always there. The rest is just prelude.
I don’t want to turn, but I have to. It’s the dream, and in the dream I turn. In the dream I stumble back and fall, and he looms above me: the antlered man. Shadow blackens half his face. Antlers rupture from his temples, branching into razor points.
“Scream,” he says, and I do.
And then Connor is shaking me gently awake. “Theo,” he says, “you’re having a nightmare. Wake up.”
The dream bleeds away. I try to speak but can only gasp, and Connor gathers me up against him. I burrow against his warmth, shutting my eyes, waiting for Connor’s touch to soothe that fearful animal that lives in my chest.
I don’t know what the dream means, only that the pieces are always the same: the star, the cold, the dragonfly, and the antlered man.
I know the antlered man wants to hurt me. That he will hurt me.
And I can never escape.
I’ve wondered if the dream has its origins in a memory. My life before I came to live with the Scotts is a blank—I was young, of course, but my therapist believes the complete lack of memories is a consequence of trauma. It was clear something had happened to you , Joseph once told me, on one of the rare occasions he talked about when I first arrived or even acknowledged I’d ever been anywhere else.
I was four years old when the Scotts took me in, and yet I don’t even know my real name. I only have the dream, the fragments. The cold, the star, the red scarf wound around her throat.
The memory of a fear so intense, it traps the breath in your lungs.
I lie with my head on Connor’s chest, listening to his heartbeat. It’s slow and steady.
“You know, I used to have nightmares, too,” he tells me. He trails his fingers up and down my arm. “After my father died. I used to dream that I was trying to catch up to him, but he kept getting farther and farther away. As metaphors go, it wasn’t subtle.”
“How did your father die?” I ask. “You’ve never told me.”
“You’ve never asked,” he says. His fingertips still.
“I don’t like to talk about my childhood. It doesn’t seem fair to ask people about theirs,” I reply.
For a moment he’s quiet. “It was an accident,” he says at last. “A fall. He slipped off a roof, that’s all. Random and meaningless. I was seven years old. At least I remember him. Trevor was only three. It was hardest on Alexis, I think—she was fifteen. It really messed her up for a while.”
He takes my hand and runs his thumb over the dragonfly tattoo, as he often does. As if he’s trying to feel the shape of it beneath my skin.
“Your sister said you haven’t been happy for a long time,” I say. He looks at me with surprise, his fingers making a bracelet around my wrist. “Is it because of your father?”
“I think that’s part of it,” Connor acknowledges. “He was my hero. And then he was gone, and my mother—it just about broke her. She’s never had another relationship after him. I always felt like I had to fill the void he left. It doesn’t help that I look just like him. Anyone who knows my family knows who I am at a glance. It’s always ‘You must be Liam Dalton’s son.’”
“Well, I had no clue who you were when we met,” I said. “I assumed you were just one of Harper’s insufferable poet friends.”
“I am definitely insufferable. But not nearly talented enough to be a poet,” Connor replies seriously.
“And what about me? Did you think I was a granola-crunching James Joyce quoter?” I ask.
“The secret is that Granddad loves James Joyce,” Connor says.
“That bastard.”
“You’d better be careful. He’s going to invite you out hunting.”
“That’s a bad thing? I wasn’t kidding. I’ve done it before. Not bowhunting—but with a rifle, a few times,” I say. They’re some of my few positive memories, some of the only times I felt like I’d figured out who Joseph wanted me to be.
There’s a beat of silence. “Why did you let Alexis think you were from Seattle?” he asks.
Because when we met, I told you more of the truth than I should have. I thought you would vanish with the dawn. “I didn’t want to correct her in front of everyone. I already felt awkward enough.”
“I’d like to see where you grew up sometime,” he says.
“There’s nothing there worth seeing,” I say. I sit up, easing free of him.
“Come back to bed,” he urges. I shake my head.
“I’m going to sit up a little while. You sleep.” He’s too tired to protest much. I wrap a blanket around my shoulders and pad out into the main room, shutting the door behind me. I walk to the window, looking out at the snow-shrouded woods. The moon is nearly full—waxing gibbous, as I would have been sure to call it at thirteen, in love with the sound and specificity of the word. The snow reflects the moonlight, making the night eerily bright. A dark shape slips between the trees: an owl. The scene looks peaceful from here, but somewhere among the roots a mouse is scurrying toward soft wings and sharp talons.
I don’t know if I’ve never liked the winter because of the dream, or if winter infects the dream because I hate it. There isn’t always snow, but there’s always some element of the season—a cold wind, foggy breath, creeping frost.
But it’s only a dream, and there are no men with antlers sprouting from their skulls to chase me through these woods.
I start to turn away from the window, and then I pause. The moonlight shines over the snow, turning it to an unbroken spill of silver—but it isn’t entirely unbroken. A staggered line of discrete shadows trails from the trees toward the cabin. Footprints. They lead toward the bedroom. Toward the window that looks in on where Connor is still sleeping.
They could have been there all day, I tell myself.
But I think of the crunch of footsteps in the dream, and the winter steals into my bones.
Before I have time to think better of it, I’m grabbing my coat and shoving my feet into my boots. I open the door and then pause, glancing behind myself, waiting to see if Connor will emerge—but there’s nothing. I ease the door shut.
Outside, the cold is biting, but I ignore the sting. There hasn’t been more than a dusting of snow all day. Our tracks leaving for dinner are as clear as the ones coming back. There’s no reason to suppose that this other set wasn’t here before.
I follow them.
My own footprints are smaller. At a guess, it was a man who walked this way. As I feared, they continue to the window that looks into the bedroom. The curtain is closed, but there is a gap an inch wide. Easy enough to look in without being seen.
The prints lead toward the window. Then they veer away. I keep following.
This is my problem. I can’t turn back once I’ve started. It’s one of the things the Scotts never really understood, what made them afraid of me. How once I had a notion in my head, no amount of correction could stop me from chasing it down. They tried prayer and patience, threats and lectures, but I wouldn’t bend.
In the end, what happened was entirely predictable. Everyone knows not to put your hand in a stray dog’s mouth. You’ll only get bit.
The sugar maple and birch near the cabin have surrendered to hemlock and pine. The evergreen branches shelter the ground, leaving only the thinnest skin of snow and blanketing it in shadows. Not far to my right, the ground drops off in an abrupt slope. If it weren’t for the moonlight casting its scant illumination, it would be easy to topple down in the dark. Not far enough to kill you, but enough to break an ankle, maybe, and I think of the way snow swallows sound, how loud you’d have to shout to be heard, out here in the cold.
Without the footsteps to follow, I continue forward cautiously.
There’s nothing here, and my hands are aching from the chill. My face, too. Under the canopy of the trees, I can’t see a thing.
Except, up ahead, the dark shape of a two-story building. My mind constructs the map from the bathroom, tracing a dotted line from the steps of the White Pine cabin. If I’ve headed mostly straight, I should be right where the fifth cabin is.
My imagination sparks with images of lurking slashers and skulking fugitives, taking advantage of a disused cabin to set up camp, but I tell myself it’s ridiculous. Though the mountain would make a pretty good place to hide—anytime but two weeks over Christmas and a month in the summer.
I creep forward, moving more by feel than sight. The trees give way a few feet from the cabin, and the moonlight makes the wood look pale and gray. Three steps lead up to a small porch. The wood is scuffed, one step bowed. It groans under my boots.
White Pine has a brass tree tacked to its door, and I look for one here, but there’s nothing—only, when I brush my fingertips over the wood, a pair of holes where screws might have once been drilled through and a faint silhouette, wood less weathered than what’s around it. The shape is indistinct, barely discernible in the pale moonlight flung up from the snow.
Bright light spills across me. I whirl with a cry, flinging up a hand to protect myself from the blinding beam of a flashlight. It lowers quickly, but I can’t see the figure who’s holding it.
“Miss Scott, isn’t it?” says a voice it takes me a moment to place.
“Mr. Vance. You startled me.”
“What are you doing out here in the dark?” His tone is thick with suspicion—or maybe just confusion.
He steps closer, the light still down, and as my eyes adjust, I see that Duchess is with him, her attention trained on me, her head held low. A faint rumble of a growl sounds before Vance hushes her.
I consider lying, then decide against it. “I heard something outside the cabin, and when I looked out, there were footprints,” I say, watching his face for a reaction. Trying to ignore Duchess’s intent stare.
His eyebrows raise. “Footprints?” he echoes. “And you decided to follow them.”
“It was probably pretty stupid,” I acknowledge. My teeth are chattering.
“That’s a word for it,” he says. “Don’t let the luxury fool you, miss. The cold kills you just as quick here as anywhere else, and it’s easy to get turned around in these woods. Even when you’ve brought a light. Which it doesn’t look like you’ve done.” He sighs. “Come on. I’ll walk you back to your cabin. You can show me these footprints.”
I don’t see that I have another choice, especially as he’s already setting off in the direction I came from. It occurs to me belatedly that I didn’t see his light until it was shining on me—and that he’s backtracking without asking me which way to go. It means he spotted me before he approached. And it means Mr. Vance is as comfortable in the dark as I am.
I glance behind myself again. With my eyes now calibrated to the bright flashlight, I can’t make out anything but the rough shape of the door.
There is something about it—some low thrum of a feeling I can’t name. It reminds me of the moment a plane begins to ascend, the strange sensation of the ground rising up beneath you.
“Where are these tracks?” Mr. Vance asks, pulling my attention back around. I hurry forward to catch up with him and with the light, putting myself on the opposite side from Duchess, who watches me with wary dark eyes. She’s silent as she moves. Something about that strikes me as odd, and then I realize—she’s not wearing tags, or they would jangle.
My throat is dry as I point across the stretch of bare earth, toward where the snow layer thickens and the footprints—and mine—are visible. Vance grunts and walks to them.
He has a gun on his hip.
Mr. Vance kicks at one of the prints, caving in the heel. “Could be fresh. Could be from this morning,” he says. “You said they went by your cabin?”
“Up to the bedroom window,” I say.
“Think someone was sneaking a peek?” he asks.
My cheeks heat, images and sensations ghosting through my mind—Connor’s hands stealing under my shirt, Connor’s teeth against my neck, Connor pulling me roughly to him.
“Did you see where they came from?” Vance is asking; I’ve taken too long to answer.
“Just followed where they went. I think they came from the main path, though,” I say.
“Probably won’t be able to sort them out from everyone else’s, then,” he says. “They’re probably from earlier today. Somebody taking a walk, that’s all.” He shifts his weight, and I look down at the impression he leaves in the snow. I think his footprints look larger than the others—but I can’t be sure.
“There’s no chance there’s someone else around?”
“Nobody’s on the mountain and I don’t know about it,” Vance says, teetering between offense and pride. “It’s just the family here. And you.”
“No cannibals hiding in the old cabin?” I ask with a forced note of humor.
“Nobody’s stayed there in years,” Vance says. “Not since Liam died.”
“The accident,” I say; he grunts. “Connor said… he fell off a roof?”
Vance takes a moment to speak. “A storm blew through. There was some roof damage. I couldn’t get out on short notice, so Liam came up. By himself. I should’ve been with him, but there you go.” He sets off again, tramping through the snow. Duchess gives me a you coming? look.
Liam came up , he said. Came here . Which means that Connor’s father died at Idlewood. I look behind me, at the cabin with its shaggy eaves and unkempt shutters. Left abandoned when all the others were gleaming. No wonder, if it was where Liam Dalton died. I burrow into my coat, suppressing a shiver that has little to do with the cold.
The return trip doesn’t take nearly as long as it did to get here. Vance follows the tracks the whole way, shines his flashlight on where they stop by the window. He’s scowling, but that seems to be his natural expression.
“Well,” he says, “it’s probably nothing.”
“Probably nothing,” I agree. My mind is still on the cabin with its blank door, its empty windows. Its history. Why didn’t Connor mention that his father died here , at Idlewood?
At least now I know why the table fell so silent when I asked about the fifth cabin.
“Still,” Vance adds, his light still fixed on the prints, “you ought to be more careful. Wandering around after dark. During the day, too. It’s hunting season.”
“Do lots of people hunt up here?” I ask.
“This time of year, it’s just me and the Daltons allowed. From time to time, we do get folks sneaking up without permission, though.” He’s quiet, long enough that I wonder if he expects me to leave. Then he speaks again. “Can I ask you, Miss Scott—have you been around here before?”
“Nope. Never been here in my life,” I answer. “Why?”
“No reason, I guess,” he says, staring intently at me. “Good night, Miss Scott.”
He gestures to the front door and stays put until I step inside. I watch through the window as he sets off, the flashlight tracing the course in front of him. He said it was probably nothing—but I notice that he follows the trail of the footprints back the way they came, all the way to where they vanish into the more numerous tracks of the main path.
He stands there for a long time. Then he ruffles Duchess’s ears and sets off again.
Why did he ask me if I’ve been here before? I wonder.
And why does it feel like I answered wrong?