Archive of Our Own

beth (present day)

              The trees die a lot faster than they used to. She presses her palm against the trunk the way The Stranger taught her to do. She feels the gentle pulse of the life within, the way the heartwood responds to touch and to stress.  There are places here where only dead things grow, and where the living come to die. The mountain she lives on now isn’t the mountain she grew up with.

              Which is to say—before her siblings scattered across Blackwood Pines, before Bob and Melinda Washington let The Winemaker into their home, and long before they began their garish Bacchanal mockeries, the mountain used to be beautiful and abundant.

              Once, they thought they could restore Blackwood to the way it used to be. Cut down the dead trees and try to keep the things in the woods at bay. But, she thinks, a lot of that was just wishful thinking. It doesn’t stop her from wanting to smother them all, leave the place burning, burnt, and what remains of her family trapped in the flames.

0

              The first time they sneak into the Old Washington Manor at Blackwood Pines, they’re all seventeen and college-bound. It’s Mike’s idea. For all the years they’ve lived in the foothills of the mountains, they’ve never really explored the place like some of the other kids from school brag about doing, or having done.

              “C’mon,” he says to Chris, almost a week before it happens. “It’s not like the mines, or anything.”

              “I don’t know…”

              “Maybe you and Ash can get some alone time or something,” Mike says with a wink and a nudge.

              Chris acquiesces because Matt does, and Matt, only because he hears that someone’s going to bring alcohol. It’s much harder to get Sam (“It doesn’t sound like a good idea,”) and Em (“Didn’t they all die in there?”) on board. But Mike uses his almost-silver-tongue and convinces them that they should do something before all of them part ways.

              They meet up at Jess’s house on a Friday afternoon halfway into May. Chris brings enough gear for them to spend the weekend like Mike wants them to, but they never quite make it that long. On the first night, after Matt and Em find a weird bust in the library (that they unanimously decide not to play spin the bottle with,) and after Chris finally, finally, finally kisses Ash and has his hands around her midsection on a couch, the one-eyed old codger from the edge of town bursts in and barks orders at them.

              “What are you guys doing here?” He’s dressed for a season that ended nearly three months ago, and is tightly clutching a shotgun. “Leave.” He says again.   

              “It’s cool,” Mike says, with a cup of beer in his hand. “Our parents know we’re up here.”

              “It’s not safe.”

              Em is about to laugh him off, but he fires a shot at an old lamp on the table, and they scatter.

              (Chris and Ash last six months, and Mike and Em don’t make it nearly as long.)

chris

              There’s a very large part of him that doesn’t want to come back. He used to be a west coast boy but after four years on the other side of the Rockies, pierced ears, and a faux hawk, he thinks there’s something kind of sexy about never sleeping and neon signs. Life is fast; Chris loves big data, and he’s going to move back after meeting up with his high school friends one last time. He hasn’t kept in touch with them as well as he had planned—the occasional text to Ash, or sometimes a hand-written letter and a few assorted phonecalls to Sam. Matt called him once to talk about a new game or something, but forgot about the time difference. The more he thinks about it, the less he realizes the group had in common. It was good, but unsustainable.

              Em was the one who suggested they all meet up again. Some bigshot fashionista saw her blog or something and offered her a job in New York. “It’s totally lame but I thought about you guys when doing some of my spreads.”

              Mike, being Mike, suggests they make it memorable, and meet up at the old Washington place. Properly explore it, and maybe take grainy Sasquatch pictures. Jess brings up the old guy who interrupted them last time, but for some reason, the prospect of being caught by a stuffy guy with a freaky-looking cataract makes the entire thing more appealing. Chris can already picture the story Mike is going to tell to his East-Coast friends. “Not to brag or anything, but, I was shot at in a haunted house. Just narrowly dodged the bullet,” he’ll say, and roll up his sleeve to reveal a bruised shoulder. “Yeah. It’s still kind of tender. But I saved the rest of my friends. It’s in the local paper.”

sam

              Sam spots Ash leaning against the front gate at the old manor. “Hey!” She’s probably kept in touch with Ashley the least. Or, maybe Mike, after the Jessica and Emily fiasco. Sam knows the basics though—graduated a year early, writing a book about the town. Ash posted an excerpt on facebook a while ago to ask for advice; Sam read through it. It was good. She told her as much in a comment, but nothing else beyond that.

              “Stupid thing is locked. I texted Mike about getting a fence cutter.” She scowls. “I guess we’re stuck here until he shows up.”

              “So, how have things been?” Sam asks hesitantly.

              “Good, actually.” Ashley smiles. “Mike graduated early too, so we've been hanging out a lot. It doesn’t really help that everyone else out here is too old to relate to.”

              Sam nods. “Yeah. Makes sense.” A part of her wants to ask about what happened between her and Chris—both of them were pretty vague about their situation, but she doesn’t know if it’s her place to ask. They haven’t been in touch for long enough—not the way she has been with Chris. “Hey, have you been reading the local paper lately?” She asks instead.

              “Yeah. The animal deaths are all anyone can talk about.”  Ash shudders. “Gives me the creeps.” There was a string of them in high school causing a big stir. Their town is small—everyone knows everybody else, and there’s hardly ever any crime. So when the rangers found a bunch of elk with teeth embedded in the skin and meat in the mountains, it made the front page for a week.

              “Are the old Sasquatch rumors still running around?”

              “Aren’t they always?”

bob and melinda washington

              From the time the first brick was laid, to the time the house was abandoned, there was always something about it. “This is where life comes from on this mountain,” The Stranger had said to them. “This is where it’s from, and where it will return to.” It was as close to a warning as they had ever gotten. The land was cheap, and beautiful. It used to be a tourist town, until some new road that bypassed the mountains entirely opened up. Bob thinks he’s seen enough to last a lifetime. From the dustbowl and the way cities were divided up territorially in the East. Racism is ugly, but the land is not. Before life, he thinks, there is death. And then rebirth.  

              “It’s perfect,” Bob says, holding his hands up to his eyes in the crude approximation of a viewfinder. He kisses Melinda on the nose, and then on the cheek, resting his hand on her baby bulge as he does. They’re six months in with their first child, and this house is as much for the purpose of raising their child away from LA and Bob’s work as it is anything else.

              It’s like that for a while. A year after they have Josh, they have the twins, Beth and Hannah, but work calls, and the mountain is picturesque and the house is large and horror is just so in in Hollywood. At first, Melinda is opposed to raising her kids in a home with imported skeletons buried in the back yard and pseudo-satanic symbols painted on seemingly every surface in the house. But she loves and trusts Bob, and so she stays. The mountain is good to them, and for a time, The Stranger only knocks at their door to protest the burial of dead things into the ground. He and Bob argue for a while, but Bob eventually lets up—there are scenes that can be filmed elsewhere. None of it matters too much because he prefers shooting in black and white. It paints a grimmer picture.

              Eventually, Hollywood executives and big-name producers and actors begin to show up, the mountain’s pretty and people are dying to see it. And it becomes a place for more private gatherings. Suddenly, Bob and Melinda are too busy to raise their kids the way they’d planned. There’s almost always an argument around the corner; but this, Melinda justifies to herself. Bob likes to keep his work confidential, and doesn’t think anybody in the nearby town could help themselves if the press got involved.

mike

              “Hey, hey, hey!” Mike says, raising the fence-cutters in the air. He stops a few feet before the house and draws a sign out from underneath his arm. Mike Munroe for Mayor. He kicks it in. “For the hippies and creatures that live in the woods.” He’s only half-joking. He’s running against an incumbent that everyone seems to trust. And, he thinks, if he’s going to run for president someday, he’d better start practicing his campaigning skills.

              Matt rolls his eyes, and Em groans. Mike notices a few awkward smiles, or, in Chris’s case, a blank look.

              “Oh, c’mon. You’re almost as bad as city council.” He grins, and tugs at the rusty chain-link before cutting it open with a heave and a grunt. He leaves the fence-cutters by the gate, making a mental note to pick them up before they leave.

              The chain and lock fall to the ground, and for a moment, everyone is paralyzed in fear, wondering if The Stranger with the cataract and scars is going to stop them from exploring the property this time.

              “You could’ve helped me out, big guy,” Mike says to Matt, breaking the silence.

              “Absolutely not,” Matt retorts.

              Mike laughs. “What? Am I not handsome enough for you?” He bats his eyelashes, and Matt makes a face. 

              “So, uh… are we gonna explore or what?” Chris interrupts, clearing his throat.

              Sam shakes her head and rolls her eyes. “Why don’t we split up and meet back up when it starts getting dark?” She suggests.

emily and jess

              “I saw the billboard for the perfume shoot you did,” Emily says to Jess. Collectively, they make up Team Sasquatch. Neither of them were interested enough to check out the rumors in high school, so they’re unsure what a huge ape has to do with the Old Washington Lodge. “We probably know the most about fur,” she remembers herself saying. There’s a part of her that’s still at odds with Jess, but she thinks it’s probably time to get over that—they’re going to end up in the same industry, some day. Maybe even have to work together.

              “Yeah? I keep tabs on your blog!” Jess smiles. “Mike has no idea what he lost.” She looks over at Em first, and then down at her perfectly manicured nails, and does a quick one-over of her outfit in appreciation.

              Em grins. “Oh, I know.” And she kind of means it. Jess is pretty. And talented, from what she can tell.

matt, mike and ashley

              Matt, Mike and Ash end up “looking” for the guest house somewhere in the woods. Mike says something about having been there before. “Oh, come on guys, she’s like the last living Washington. You can’t say that isn’t a little cool.” And Matt has to wonder why they’re going back if he’s already (apparently) tried to talk to her once and struck out. “No, come on man, that was business, this is pleasure.”

              Matt’s about to suggest that they turn back, and explore the house with Chris and Sam, when Mike asks him: “You guys go mushroom picking down in Santa Barbara?”

              “Not really. Why?” He pretends to be interested in a dead leaf, and a patch of grass, running over them with his shoe. He catches a glimpse of Ashley’s hair from behind a tree.

              “There’s this festival next week, and I wanted to see if—” Mike shrugs and cocks his head to the side.

              “Are you asking me out?” Matt interrupts.

              “Nah man. Like in a friend way.”

              Matt nods and lets a deep breath out. He’s not quite sure how to respond. “Listen, Mike, I’m flattered and everything but—” He wants to somehow convey his gratitude for the friendship, and maybe something else in that vein.

              But before he can voice anything, Mike winces, presses his hand to his temples and collapses.

              “Mike?” Matt kneels over and checks his pulse. “Ash! You gotta get over here.” He frowns and takes his jacket off and slides it under Mike’s head.

//

              He was trying to ask Matt out, or something. But now his head hurts. Everything seems to be like he’s looking through the lens of a kaleidoscope. In a small, far-off triangle, he sees Ash and Matt looming over him, and in another, Sam trying to pick the lock of a door open with a hairpin. There are patches of grass and trees, and little people laying foundations for things.

              What the fuck?

              He reaches out and tries to touch Matt’s face, or maybe grab Ash’s sleeve, but the little patches of things rearrange themselves until all he can see, and all he can feel is a reverberating heartbeat. He thinks he’s holding the old guy with giant, monstrous claws—and turning him over and over again, until The Stranger’s bones are ground to dust, and his body lies prostrate between teeth as hard as diamond.

              “Beth.” He murmurs in a voice that isn’t his own.

//

              “Oh my god!” Ash puts her ear to his chest. “What if he had an aneurysm or something?” She turns to look at Matt. “We should call the paramedics.”

              Matt nods, and tries to make a call, only to get a static “no signal” voice on the other side. He curses and kneels over by Mike. “I could try to carry him back to the car,” he says.

              As if on cue, Mike turns to look at Matt and grins. “Is the linebacker gonna manhandle me?”

              “Jesus Christ, Mike!” Ash glares at him. “You freaked us out.” She gets up and dusts her knees off. “Was this some sort of sick practical joke, or something?”

              “Nope,” he says, “but I almost kinda wish it had been—”

              “So, uh, we should probably get you some water or something,” Matt says, attempting to diffuse the situation.

              “No, I’m fine.” Mike says. “Must’ve just been tired or something.” He slides Matt’s letterman on. It’s slightly loose on him.

              Matt helps him up, and looks him over.

              “You kept saying this name, while you were on the ground.” Ashley says finally. “Beth.”

              “Huh? Really?” Mike furrows his brow. “I had this weird dream and…” He looks over at Ash and Matt. “Well, it’s not really that important. But, weird coincidence. We’re going to go see a Beth Washington, actually.”

sam and chris

              Sam and Chris take the house. They’re probably the closest to each other, after Chris and Ash, or Matt and Em. Chris has self-proclaimed nerves of steel and Sam doesn’t think she can stomach dead animal corpses (which is unfortunate, because the mansion is filled with taxidermy.) It’s just as big as they remembered from the last time they were up there, although, a little more decrepit—shards of glass from various assorted bottled alcoholic beverages are on the ground. The wallpaper is peeling, and the furniture is covered in stains of different types.

              “This dude must’ve styled himself after Indy Jones or something,” Chris says, looking at a framed picture of Bob Washington kneeling next to a dead lion. There’s a wall of them in the formal living room, each photo next to an animal head, or paw. “I mean, these are probably all his hunting trophies.” He runs his thumb over the bent metal, and then glances at the date. “Hey, this one was taken back in the forties.”

              Sam makes a face, looking at the stuffed deer-head above the mantle. “We should go look around in another room.”

              “Yeah.” Chris says, looking at a messily-preserved bear. “Hey! We should go look for that ugly-ass bust Emily found the last time we were up here.”

              Sam’s quick to agree.

              “Hey Chris?”

              “Yeah?”

              “Can I ask about what happened between you and Ash?”

              He rolls his eyes. “Things didn’t really work out between us.” But he doesn’t say anything else.

              “Is that it?”

              “Yeah,” Chris says with a sigh. “Oh. Watch your step. That floorboard’s kind of loose.”

               The room adjacent to the foyer has a painting with three long gashes through the middle, and a white circle painted on the ground.

              “It’s so creepy,” Sam says.

//

              The library is big and old, and nearly ruined. Books that used to line the shelves are splayed on the floor, the sunlight streams in through broken windows and torn curtains. The claw marks from the earlier paintings crisscross and intertwine themselves on the great armchairs in the middle of the room. The wallpaper is peeling in places.

              “Where the hell is this bust?” Chris frowns. “We’ve been through like every single room downstairs.”

              Sam shrugs. “Don’t you think it’s weird though?”

              “What?”

              “That they still have all this weird black magic stuff in their house. It’s been in every room we’ve checked out so far.”

              “The guy did a bunch of movies way back when, right?” Chris looks around and spots a couple of props lying around the library—a decorative skull candle and cracked porcelain mask. “Maybe he did trial runs in his house or something. Dunno.”

              Sam grimaces. “Imagine growing up like that.”

               “Well, now, you know why they all vanished.” Chris picks the mask up and puts it over his face. “I mean, come on, this is worse than my dorm was freshman year.”

              Sam laughs. “It couldn’t have been that bad.”

              “One of my roommates had one of those nylon strings to hang his laundry up to dry, but for some reason, only put up used pairs of socks and like. The most disgusting underpants you’ve ever seen.” He sets the mask down on a pile of decaying, illegible newsprint.

              Sam shakes her head and inspects one of the oversized bookshelves. “Hey, Chris?”

              “What’s up?”

              “Is this it?” She points to a marble bust of a guy in his early-to-mid-twenties. Hair pulled back, a pleading look in his eyes. He would have been handsome, if it wasn’t for the killer shark teeth, and the destroyed skin around the unnaturally elongated mouth.

              “It isn’t that ugly.” He frowns. “Kind of a weird choice for a movie prop, though.”

              She runs her fingers against the inscription. “Joshua.”

josh (1957)

              It’s hard to tell Dr. Hill from his dad when they’re all in hoods whiter than bone and ash. The cameras are all off; this is one of the things they don’t talk about. Especially not with The Stranger. (Even if he has been told to keep a close eye on unwelcome guests, but that’s hardly relevant—he’s ten and his father is a living god.) There’s only one thing they disagree on. He likes The Stranger, and his dad hates him. He gets this idea that maybe, a while ago, before Dr. Hill came around, they used to be friends or something.

              When he’s out in the woods with The Stranger, he never tells his dad. Sometimes they press their ears up against trees, and listen for the slow, methodical ticking of an internal clock. Other times, The Stranger shows him the best places to hunt. The proper way to hold a shotgun, the types of deer to kill. How to clean the meat and bones, and how to never take more than he needs. The Stranger tells him it’s enough to survive on the mountain, but not enough to own it.

              But, maybe, he thinks that’s what his father is for. He has these trysts at night, when he thinks all three of his children are asleep. (But really, Josh watches from the second-floor window. He peeks through the curtains when he’s sure there’s nobody in the house.) There’s fire and sometimes blood, and shouting. He can’t really tell one scene from the next. He doesn’t have enough words to categorize and compartmentalize death, or revelry yet. They all have hoods drawn over their faces, and drink from chalices sometimes, and the necks of animals at other times, shouting and dancing.

              It’s the same as the movies, he thinks. But also not.

jess and emily

              “I can’t believe we spent all that time fighting in high school,” Em says. Their favorite colors are complimentary. Jess likes to model classic and vintage styled clothing. Em likes the opposite.

              “I know, right?” Jess agrees. She’s a few feet ahead of Emily on a trail that seems to be getting narrower and narrower as it winds through the mountains. She purses her lips and pauses. “Hey, Em?”

              “Yeah?”

              “Do you think the Sasquatch has claws?” She has her hand on a tree with three large, deep cuts across the trunk.

              “Ugh. Not you too.” Emily huffs.

              “No, but, it’s just…”

              “Just what?”

              “I don’t know. Isn’t it kind of weird?” Jess turns to look at Em.

              She scowls. “Okay. Fine, I guess it is.”

              “Is something wrong?” Jess asks.

              “No.” Emily says. “I just didn’t think we’d actually be looking for this thing.” She sighs. “Just forget it. Let’s find whatever it is and get the hell out of here.”

              Jess frowns. “So, why did you let Mike turn this into a—I don’t know. A redo? Of our last get-together.”

              “I don’t know. I thought it’d be nice to see everyone again, and maybe more people would show up if they were excited about it. None of us have kept in touch or anything, really, and I don’t know how appealing hanging out with friends from high school is.”

              “So, why did you want to do it?”

              “Didn’t know when I’d see any of you guys again.” She puts her hands on her hips, and for a moment, contemplates asking Jess why she’s so interested. But she lets it pass.  

//

              She shrieks and almost jumps into Jess’s arms when she sees the glassy eye looking at her from underneath the brush. For a second she wonders if all the Sasquatch rumors are true, and then maybe apologizing to Jess for being rude about them. But then the eye is replaced by the barrel of a gun, and Em sort-of breathes a sigh of relief. “We’re just hiking! We’re hikers.”

              “Yeah! We aren’t going to hurt anyone!” Jess chimes in.

              There’s a slight rustling, and The Stranger steps out from behind the leaves. He gives them a thorough one-over, and frowns. “Didn’t I already tell you to leave?”

              Emily’s hands are on her hips. “Yeah, like four or five years ago. But we aren’t trespassing this time.”

              He shakes his head. “Time works differently on this mountain.”

              “C’mon Jess, let’s go. It’s just the weird old guy.”

              “Can we just leave him here? He seems like…” She looks back at Em. “Shouldn’t we contact his family or something?”

              “They’re all up here,” He says.

              Jess looks embarrassed.

              “But this mountain doesn’t belong to you, either,” Em says matter-of-factly.

              “It did, once.”

              “Okay. Let’s say for a minute that we actually believe you were rich enough to own the mountain before the Washingtons,” Emily says. “That’d make you super old. Like you’d have to have sold it in the fifties.”

              Jess frowns. “Em… do you think he’s one of those conservationist types?”

              “What do you mean?”

              “I don’t know… maybe he’s about nature being public property?”

              “I didn’t come here to get lectured on hippie politics.” She puts her hands on her hips. “God, Jess. We’re just wasting our time. We should find everyone else and get drunk at a bar or something.”

              “How many of you are there?” He asks.

              “Why should we tell you?”

              “Em…”

              “Okay. Fine. Seven.” She sighs. “Happy?”

              “Em!”

              “What?”

              “Do you guys hear that?”

              It’s a sound halfway between a screech and a roar. The Stranger looks at Jess and Em, and then the trees. “Shit.”

              Em groans. “Ugh. It’s probably just the wild animals or something. You have a gun.” She says. Don’t you read the papers?

              Jess nods. “Yeah. Nothing up here’s that scary. Don’t worry too much.” She looks at Em, who she thinks is about ready to bolt.

              “It’s not the kind of animal that you think it is.”

              “So you’ve seen it?” Em asks.

              “You could say I hunt them, in some sense.” He cocks his head to the side. “You’d better come with me.”

josh (1963)

              He can’t trust Dr. Hill; or anyone that sits at his father’s feet, for that matter. “There are certain kinds of steel that can only be tempered by blood,” he overhears. The medicine they give him makes him sick as hell, and he can’t tell if that’s part of the master plan he’s orchestrating, but he dribbles them down the sink instead of his throat.

              He trusts The Stranger though. The Stranger and the woods. “You have to leave as soon as you can. This mountain has become inhospitable.” As long as he keeps Beth and Hannah away from his parents; until he’s saved up enough to get them a small place in the next state over.

chris and sam  

              Chris puts his weight against a door that refuses to budge, and grunts when it creaks open. He and Sam have been through three of the four bedrooms, and haven’t found anything of any real interest. There was an old box of love letters between Bob and Melinda that he thought was disgustingly cute and romantic, but ultimately insignificant in terms of the legends behind the Old Washington House.

              “Maybe, they were just misunderstood?” Sam offers. “It’s kind of easy to see why a rumor about this place would get kind of out of hand.”

              “Yeah…” Chris agrees. The room is darker than the last few, and he kind of wishes he had a flashlight that wasn’t attached to his iPhone. He steps in the remains of a dead wolverine, and makes a face.

              Sam shrieks. “Oh my god, Chris!”

              “What, what?” He points his phone in the direction that Sam is wordlessly staring at, and almost drops it when he sees a figure, hunched over, green eyes glinting. “Jesus.”

              Chris doesn’t really want to call the thing an “it.” But before he can blink, it’s on him, wide-eyed, with teeth in his forearm. If he hadn’t held his arm up to protect himself, he thinks it would have gone straight for his jugular.

              He winces, phone flashlight still aimed at the thing. He can see the sharp, long teeth where the mouth should have ended. Sort of human, but at the same time, not.  Sam audibly gasps. He thinks he can hear her say something. (But, Chris’s first thought is, embarrassingly enough, oh my god, I almost had sex in this house.)

              He gasps, and tries to twist his arm away from it. Part of him wonders if it’s like the finger traps he used to play with as a kid; but if he doesn’t struggle, he thinks he’s going to be eaten all the same. He looks directly at the thing and realizes that there’s something about the face that’s oddly familiar. He thinks that it’s probably a long shot, but, he’s willing to try anything. “Wait…” Chris frowns, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “… are you…? Joshua?” He tries. “Josh…? Maybe?”

              He thinks Josh is looking at him, for a second. Recognition (or fear.) And then his mouth and nails are no longer on Chris’s arm. He bolts out of the open door.

//

              “Wait, I don’t understand.” Chris says, looking at Sam and at the dead wolverine at his foot. Her cardigan is tied around his arm. He’s not bleeding profusely; although he thinks there might be a tooth embedded in his muscle.

              “Chris… we should probably get you to a hospital.”

              He shrugs. “Do you think we should go after him though?”

              “Who? Josh?”

              “Yeah. In case there are… other things around.”

              Sam looks at Chris, and says nothing for a while. “How do you know he’s not…” Sam frowns “… feral, or something?”

              “He looked at me when I said his name.” He runs his fingers over the wound and winces. To be entirely honest, he’s not completely sure, and the idea of being attacked again seems unpleasant, to say the least. But he has a feeling about this that he can’t quite explain.  

josh (1965)

              The Winemaker first arrives in a white hood drawn over his eyes. He’s smiling faintly, and he has a wineskin that is neither full, nor empty in one of his arms, the other hand gripping a rope tied around a goat’s neck. Nobody knows his real name—but Josh can tell almost immediately that he’s nothing like The Stranger.

              He’s the one that answers the door, but he makes no motion to invite him in. Looking at him seems like looking at the afterimage of a dream. (It’s only when he speaks, that Josh knows that he is real.)

              “I’ve come all the way from my home in Greece,” he says. “Your father summoned me.” Won’t you let me in?

              (But it was never really up to him in the first place.)

the stranger, jess and emily

              He’s been here since before the town began; before the mountain had a name. Born at the same time as the place itself, and chosen (by the land) to protect it. It’s never really been a place for ordinary humans; so he doesn’t really blame Bob and Melinda for what they became in the end, but he resents them nevertheless.

              The Stranger doesn’t ever expect to clean up the mess they’ve made, but he considers it his job to keep the things on the mountain separate from the things around it. (But damn do these kids make it hard.)

              “Both of you need to follow me.” He says, gripping his shotgun. “Stay close behind.”

              “Why?” Emily asks, aggravated. “Why should we follow you?”

              “We need to find your friends quickly and get them back to the house.” He sighs. “They move fast.”

              “What about getting off of the mountain?” Jess asks.

              He spits on the ground. “There are some points in time when it is better to keep a door shut,” The Stranger says, glaring at Jess and Em, “than it is to leave it open.”

hannah (1966)

              The longer The Winemaker stays with them, the less she thinks about The Stranger’s warnings, or her brother’s promises to get her out of the household. She finds herself trusting her dad more; the fires at night are for fun, the blood is all fake—mixed with wine, and splattered on props.

              He’s beautiful, hair curled into ringlets, with a smooth face and gorgeous eyes. It’s hard not to fall in love with him. He’s kind, and speaks to her in muted Greek, which is all it takes in Hannah’s case. Her brother and sister don’t share quite the same sentiment. Josh avoids him because of the old man who lives somewhere on the mountain (their mountain!) And Beth openly cusses him out in front of the guests. But he’s sweet to her, nonetheless.

              The first time, he offers her wine, she glances at her dad for approval, which he readily gives—it doesn’t bother her that she can’t remember anything from the previous night. (She justifies it with a low alcohol tolerance.) She feels much better the morning after.

              The next day with him is almost always the same as the last. They wake up together, the first time in the woods, with leaves and twigs in their hair. The second time, in a place that felt more like a dream than a memory. She was sure they had left Blackwood Pines somehow; there were crumbling marble sculptures all around them, but The Winemaker convinces her otherwise.

              The longer she’s with him, the more restless she becomes. At first, it’s the extra clothes. She can’t stand wearing more than one layer at a time. And then the house. It’s harder and harder to be confined. Josh tries to say something to her about maybe trying to live somewhere other than Blackwood. “Remember how you said you wanted to go live in Kentucky?” But she knows The Winemaker wouldn’t be in a place as ordinary as that.

              One night her father invites him to begin their ceremony. It’s late in the summer, The Winemaker brings his goat along. Bob offers him a knife, which he hands to Hannah. He makes a slitting motion on his own throat with his forefinger, and she follows. It’s easier than she thinks, if she focuses on his face, and his smile.

 He doesn’t have to tell her that it’s a prop, or that it’s wine, or paint, or something else this time.

beth (present day)

              When they come knocking on her door, she knows that the Munroe kid is behind this. She doesn’t want to have to explain tasteful political abstinence to him again (“No, Mike, I’m not voting for the other candidate. I’m not voting at all.”) She doesn’t expect him to, however, scream “hey, Beth! Madame Washington! Guess who just had a vision,” at the top of his lungs.

              “Munroe? Are you high?” She barks back. She’s in the middle of deciphering The Stranger’s notes on magnetic fields and summoning circles. He has the same page written over and over again in at least five languages. 

              “No.” He says. “Beth, I saw things happen.”

              She sighs and slides her front door open, and finds three kids standing on her front porch. Mike Munroe is waving at her. “Oh, good. You brought friends,” Beth says.

              “Actually, there are seven of us,” Mike responds, sheepishly. “Two of them are in the mansion, and there are another two out looking for the Sasquatch.”

              She narrows her eyes. “And, the vision?”

              “I passed out,” Mike shrugs. “Followed by a weird dream. Thought it’d get you to open your door.”

              “Munroe, we take these things seriously around these parts.”

              “Maybe we should go,” one of them says, tugging at Mike’s jacket. “Tell the others about the… thing…?”

              “What thing?”

              “We found a mangled raccoon up by the trail over there,” Matt adds in an attempt to be helpful. “We know about the animal attacks, so we thought we’d—”

              “Dead, mangled raccoons aren’t anything to worry about,” Beth interrupts. Raccoons, wolverines, and other small animals aren’t worth Hannah’s time. “You start getting worried when you find dead elk and disemboweled people.” She laughs, and Mike shrugs at his friends apologetically. Sorry guys, that’s just kinda the way she is.

              “Excuse me?”

              “Excused,” Beth says to the redhead. She thinks she’d better notify The Stranger anyways, let him know about the kids.  “I’m going to radio my partner.” And then, almost as an afterthought. “I guess you’d better come inside.”

//

              She’s not surprised that Munroe’s already rifling through her stuff, hands on the Stranger’s journal, and on hers.

              “I think this is wrong,” he says, and she’s about to dismiss him offhand. Yeah, kid. Summoning’s some serious stuff. “This shape just doesn’t look like it would go here,” he says, pointing at notes she’s transcribed. And she’s about to look, but then he does an obscene hand gesture to illustrate. “It should be a little more like this, if you know what I mean.”

              “Mike,” the redhead hisses sharply. What do you know about any of this anyways?

              “Chill out, Ash.” He leafs through the book again. “Matt’s got me. We’ve seen this stuff before, right?”

              Matt shakes his head. “No. Sorry.”

//

              She lets them argue in the background, figuring that it’ll clear up by the time she’s done with her call.

              “Beth?” The Stranger asks. His voice is muffled by static, and the sound of bickering in the background. “I was just about to call you.”

              “Yeah.” She glances over at the trio, lounging on a couch in the cabin. “I have three kids up here who say they have a couple of friends. Do you know anything about that?”

              “Yes. I have two with me, and there are supposedly two more back in…” he pauses. “Your old house.”

              “Okay. So it’s the same group of kids. That story checks out with mine. Are you gonna bring your kids up here, and go back for the other two or…”

              “I’m taking them to the manor.” He says, calmly. “You should bring your group there too.”

              “Wait. Why?” She briefly thinks about the thing still running around in there, and wonders why he’d ever take his chances with it. Or what he’d tell the kids if they saw it.

              “Your sister is out hunting. I saw some of her tracks.”

              “Shit.”

              But then, Munroe collapses on her kitchen floor.

josh (1967)

              The Winemaker has a knife to Hannah’s throat, grinning. He’s not as beautiful as he once was; horns and hooves, and glittering deep-set eyes. Her hair falls out in clumps, every time he brushes through it. Her skin is grey and taught.

One night, before his first fire, after his parents sat them all down in a circle, after Hannah started howling and screaming instead of speaking, Beth began packing her suitcase. At first, he didn’t know why. He asks her, but she never tells him. Before he knows it, Beth is gone. (Beth is gone.)

              He wonders if The Stranger’s forgotten about him, because his dad hasn’t.

              If he knew what he knows now, he would have taken the knife from the Winemaker and run the blade across Hannah’s throat. (But he doesn’t.) He can see Beth and The Stranger behind The Winemaker, grey and elongated like Hannah. He can’t take the knife, and he can’t leave the circle around fire, the wood, without eating something. His father looks at him expectantly. His nails are blunt, and he digs them into his own skin. (It hurts, but he doesn’t want to hurt Hannah.)

              The first time he eats human flesh, he doesn’t know whose it is. He doesn’t see the body. It’s winter on the mountain, and no matter how long he wanders, he always ends up at the same spot. Right in front of the mansion. It snows so hard that sometimes, he’s resigned to dying. The last time he sees Hannah, it’s with The Winemaker. She doesn’t look anything like the person she used to be—she’s ten feet tall with nails sharper than kitchen knives and eyes the same color as a cloudy sky. He has her on the length of rope he used to drag his goat around with. It’s the last time he sees The Winemaker too, animal legs and a dangerous smile, but he can still smell the grapes fermenting.

              (Maybe she still wears the rope around her neck. But he doesn’t know if she feels anything.)

              The first time he eats human flesh, his mom gives it to him. There are some people who still wear white robes huddled in their house. Every time he counts, it’s different. Sometimes less, and sometimes more. He hasn’t seen Dr. Hill in months.

              He takes it, because there’s nothing else to eat. The animals avoid them, and any fruit they try to pick rots in their hands. He can see Beth at the end of the hall sometimes. Other times, she’s just outside his field of view, holding her heart in her hands. Her pupils are white, and veins run down her face. She screams the same way Han does, but he’s hungry. He’s so hungry. He begs and pleads with her but she never forgives him.

              It’s messy, but by the time he’s done, his teeth are a little sharper. He thinks it’s going to be easier the next time around.

josh (present day)

              It’s been a while since Josh has seen anyone other than The Stranger. Longer still since anyone has referred to him by name. (The Stranger doesn’t really look at him—he looks through him, hands him a dead animal unskinned and unprepared with an expression somewhere between disgust and distaste.) Each year is the same as the last, and he doesn’t know how long a while really is.

              He thinks he can maybe, remember the guy with the glasses. Maybe remember tearing him limb from limb before.

              Sometimes people stumble into the house. But they keep to themselves, they never go upstairs. There were two of them this time, and he wonders if there are more. He doesn’t like people. The last time there were people, they shot at him. It wasn’t his fault—he’s been hungry for so long. (There was nothing.)

              He looks behind him before he throws the door to Hannah’s room open.

emily and jess

              Her shoes are caked in mud, and she’s been walking for at least an hour. The sun is much lower in the sky than it was before, but they still haven’t found the manor. A part of her is sure that The Stranger is bullshitting them, leading them deeper and deeper into the woods, until they become some sort of grisly small-town murder statistic. If he didn’t have a gun, she’s sure she would be able to take him—she took six years of martial arts and she’d be lying if she said she doesn’t keep a close eye on pressure points.

              The entire thing about sasquatches—or maybe just The Sasquatch of Blackwood Pines being some sort of weird, cannibalistic monster sounds kind of unbelievable, and she’s sure he’s bullshitting her at least a little. There’s no universe she sees a movie director and his family being forced to eat each other.

              “Okay. Let’s pretend I do believe you.” She says. “How do you know about any of this? There aren’t like any articles at the library about people eating each other.”

              “This place isn’t for the living anymore; and it’s hard for the dead and dying to leave.”

              “Oookay.” Emily huffs. “If these monster things or whatever can’t usually get down the mountain, and people can’t usually get up, where does that leave you?”

              “I already told you. I used to be the master of this mountain.”

              “So… who’s the master now?” Jess asks.

              “He who drank the unmixed wine.”

              Em groans. She looks at Jess, who looks back at her sympathetically, and shrugs. If I die because we followed a strange man with a shotgun out of the woods, I’m glad that at least, I was with you. 

ashley, mike, matt and beth

              Ash follows Beth’s instructions—don’t touch Mike, don’t try and talk to Mike. These are words from a world beyond our own, and he’s lucky enough to receive them. She thinks it’s tinged with a hint of resentment, but she doesn’t know Beth well enough to say for sure. She and Matt are on lookout duty, although Beth hasn’t really explained what they’re looking out for.

              “Mike’s passed out twice in one day,” she says. “Do you think we should do something about it…?”

              “I don’t know if we can.” Matt sighs.

              “Do you think we can trust Beth?” She asks.

              “I don’t know.”

//

              Mike wakes up to pins and needles in his right arm. This time, he saw a fire. Or dreamed about, or something. Ruby red and searing pain. He sits upright, and looks for Matt and Ash. He’s mildly panicked when he doesn’t find them. Beth is standing across from him, arms crossed, in either admiration or disgust—he can’t quite tell which.

              “Visions, Munroe?” She says, accusatorily.

              “More like weird dreams,” he says, with a laugh that sounds more like a groan. “Are my friends okay?”

              “They’re fine,” she says. “What did you dream about?”

              He shrugs. “Fire, I don’t know.”

              But she’s insistent. “The mountain chose you, what did you see?”

              “I don’t know,” he says again. “I was burning the second time, and the first time, I saw myself kill the guy you live with,” he looks at her and frowns. “What do you mean about the mountain choosing me?”

              “It means,” I’m not what I was told I would become. “You’re very fortunate.” She pauses, trying to choose the right words to explain the current situation. “You become the mountain.”

              Mike opens his mouth to protest, he wants to tell her that there’s some sort of mistake; he’s supposed to be The President one day, not stay in a tiny town, surrounded by death and old legends. But when he tries to say something, nothing quite comes out.

sam and chris

              Sam thinks she’d feel a lot better if they left to go get medical attention for Chris, and if they just left Josh, or whatever he is, to his own devices. But Chris seems dead-set against either option (“Sam, I’m fine/We need to figure out if he has… family.”) There was a tooth nested inside his forearm that she picked out, and he pocketed.

              “Look, Josh, I don’t know if you believe in the tooth fairy, but…” He holds the tooth out to no one in particular. “In case you do…?”

              Sam forces herself to laugh. “Do you think that’ll actually work?”

              “Dunno.” He sighs. “It’s worth a shot though.”

              “What if it tries to attack us again?” She gives Chris a worried look.

              “I don’t think he will. I mean, he looked at me when I said his name.”

              She walks over to an open door, unsatisfied by Chris’s answer, but unsure of a better course of action—he’s right about needing to know if Josh is alone, but not entirely confident that looking for him is the right way to go about that. “Do you think he’s in here?”

//

              Sam’s not surprised when she sees Josh’s eyes on them from the corner of the bed. She screams nonetheless.

              “Hey,” Chris says, approaching the bed slowly. “We’re not gonna hurt you.” He holds the tooth out in front of him, and then, almost as an afterthought, pulls a flattened twinkie from his back pocket. “You can have these,” he says, setting them on the floor, at his feet.” He backs up, close enough for Sam to reach out and grab his hand.

              Josh darts out from back behind the bed, and Sam notices the messy scars on his face.

              “This is Sam,” Chris points at her. And then he does a wave. “I’m Christoph—call me Chris.”

melinda washington

              She loves her children. Even if Hannah is in the woods, and Beth doesn’t want to live with them anymore. She loves her husband, and she loves Josh. When the supplies start dwindling, she tries to make trips down the mountain to buy food, or telephone for something. But the line’s always dead, and there aren’t ever any roads that lead back. The Winemaker left, but took none of the guests with him. The mountain was too cold for fires, for him, he said. It wasn’t alive like it first was.

              She asks if he is going to leave a name and a number for Hannah. If she ever goes to Greece. (Adoneus, 12.)

              Bob still does the rituals around the fire, but Melinda no longer has the desire to participate. She’s hungry, but in an entirely different way. By the time December rolls around, there’s nothing to eat. The animals have stopped coming to the mansion the way they used to. She doesn’t ask Bob what he uses; she notices the guest list growing smaller and smaller. At first, it’s the fledgling actor who leaves. They find a sweater hanging from a tree branch and later, after the snow melts, a watch with the initials engraved onto them.

              And then it’s the old producer with a broken leg and cloudy eyes.

              Alan’s third. But he’s not like the others. Melinda finds him wandering the courtyards. (She has a knife behind her back.) She asks him how his day was, and then plunges it into his heart. A part of her wonders if she was shortsighted—Josh may still need prescriptions.

              At first, she tries to cook with the meat, but then, just looking at fire, and then thinking about fire is painful. Her eyes cloud over first. And then, the nails and teeth.

              Her skin never quite becomes grey and taught. She’s second-to-last. Bob finds her in the library, tearing through a white hood. She looks at him for a moment, only able to discern the outline of his body. And then his hands around her neck.

              And then, nothing at all.

josh (present day)

              The last time he stood on two legs was when he went to confront his father. He doesn’t know how long ago that was, the mountain isn’t very good at keeping time. When he tries again, so he can maybe reach out and shake Chris’s hand, and then Sam’s, his back cracks, and Chris starts laughing.

              Sam looks at him sharply and elbows him. “Sorry. But you kinda have to admit that was funny.” She rolls her eyes at him, and for a moment, Josh is too afraid to approach either. He doesn’t want them to hurt him, the way that other people who came to the mountain did.

              Chris moves closer and closes the distance between them. He hold out his hand for Josh to take and smiles. “So… uh… you are Josh, aren’t you?”

              Josh takes his hand and nods.

              “Uh… so… uh… I don’t have any hard feelings about the entire hand thing,” he says.

              Josh looks away, kind of embarrassed about the thing in the first place.

              “But there is one thing…” Chris looks directly into his eyes, and Josh is overwhelmed. “Some of our friends are on this mountain, and we need to know if there are any… I mean… how true the rumors are.”

//

              Josh has heard it before, back when he could actually leave the mountain, and go down to the town. The son of a Satanist, a wily landlord hellbent on gentrification. He doesn’t think that much time has passed, if they’re still circling around town.

              But the cult of souls was never what they thought it was. (Or what he or The Stranger thought for that matter.) His dad had grown up with dirt in his mouth, eating dust and coasting from town to town picking things. Never quite as privileged as the white kids that lived under the same abject misery, and miserable all the same.

              They ate trash, and watched crows pick out the eyes of corpses. Planting siblings in the ground in places between places.

              (This place was alive, and he wanted rebirth.)

//

              There isn’t any way he can explain the history of the mountain. Or his father’s history. What happened to Hannah is more complicated and nuanced, and it’s painful to try and form words. So, instead he takes them to a room he made once. One hanging off of the library that The Stranger promptly sealed. Trust me.

              He’s confused when he finds the door open.

              “I didn’t know I was supposed to keep it closed.” Chris shrugs. “I can try and lock it back up or something.”

              Josh shakes his head.

He gives Chris a white robe, and mimes putting it over himself. Chris follows suit. Sam has her reservations, but Chris shrugs them off. “What’s a piece of cloth gonna do to me anyways?” He says, drawing the hood over his face, so the only eye visible is the golden one embroidered on the front. It’s one of the last remnants from his dad’s rituals.

              Josh stares at Chris intently. It’s too big for him, and he looks nothing like a leader. Chris grins. “So, what next?”

              There’s a white circle underneath a frayed carpet, and a bowl with eyes painted on the bottom that he hands Chris. Sam stands opposite from him, and Josh is in the middle. He can’t quite remember how these things started, but the end is more important. If they can go from the end to the beginning, that will be enough, he thinks.  

the stranger, jess and em

              He’s never seen his own death before. They’re usually not hard to find on the mountain. Sometimes in rivers or the trees. He’s seen the death of all things that the mountain gave birth to, in a sense. Once, when the mountain was a place for life, and rebirth, he saw the entire expanse of existence spread out in front of him. Things that were yet uncreated shaped themselves into strands of grass and leaves.

              Beth lives until she’s ninety-four and dies of lung cancer. He sees people he does not yet recognize at her bedside.

              Josh is more difficult. He doesn’t die on the mountain, so The Stranger can’t say for sure. It’s an event that exists, but it is outside his jurisdiction.

              But he’s never seen Hannah’s.

              He knows, objectively, that she could burn. He could start the fire. (But the mountain would too—the thing inside her would eat it alive.)

//

              Leading Emily and Jessica back to the mansion was more difficult than he’d anticipated. Emily’s too strong-willed to be lead, and Jessica is too irreverent to care about the particular traditions, like laying smooth white rocks to form a path. They are in their own way, a good pair, The Stranger thinks. Just, elsewhere.

              “Don’t touch anything,” he says, letting them in through the back. “Don’t make any noises or sudden movements.”

              “Is there a sasq—” Jess looks at The Stranger, who’s giving her a sharp glare. “Monster in here too?” She asks.

              “Not quite yet.” He looks over at Emily.

              “What?”

              “I was anticipating a contradiction,” he says. Jess giggles.

              “Yeah, well, I figured I’d ask you what the hell that means, but you were just gonna say something like oh, it’s just he who wears black goatskin or something.” She rolls her eyes. “How long are you going to make us stay here, anyways.”

              The Stranger cocks his head to one side. “She only stops when she’s satiated.”

              “What does that mean?” Jess asks.

              “It means,” The Stranger sighs “let’s hope she finds an elk.”

//

              He thinks he owes it to Josh to tell him that Hannah is around. Not that he expects them to have a sibling reunion in any capacity. And he needs to find the two other kids before they do something reckless, and undo everything he’s done to try and contain the mountain.

              If Jess and Emily didn’t insist on tagging along—or rather, Emily insists on tagging along, and Jess decides that she has to hold Em’s hand, he thinks he’d feel a lot better about it. They find Hannah’s room first, and he wants to shut the door before they can find anything incriminating. But the first thing Jess picks up is her diary.

              She flips to a page in the middle. “I love him, but he’s going to leave one day. He told me so himself. I haven’t had anyone call me beautiful before the way he did.” Jess laughs. “Em, isn’t that sad? She was so into this guy.”

              “I guess,” Emily says. “Sounds like she had low standards.”

              The Stranger looks back at them.  “You might not want to finish reading that.”

              “Why not?” Em asks, her hands on her hips.

              “Parts of it are… unpleasant.” He says.

              Jess leafs through to the end. The handwriting gets messier and messier, until there’s a single, barely legible word, scrawled over and over again on the last page. “Hungry,” she reads out loud.

              “That’s just sick.” Em says. 

//

              He’s mildly panicked when he doesn’t find Josh in his usual spot, and even more so, when he finds fresh blood on the floor of his room, and an incomplete wolverine. Sometimes, Josh gets hurt, he reminds himself. A part of him expects the worst, disemboweled teenagers and a hungrier and more restless spirit with sharper teeth and claws and tougher skin. There’s another part of him that wonders if the two of them have somehow hurt, or maybe subdued him. It isn’t quite time for his death yet, but an injury may be just as bad.

              “Is something wrong?” Jess asks him.

              “Maybe.”

              He takes Em and Jess through the house in a roundabout way. He wishes he could take his mind off of the worst possible ending he can imagine (a full monster somewhere that isn’t on the mountain.)  

              Em says “hey, I think I hear Chris from back there,” and points a finger in the direction of a door that he had assumed would be closed, as he’s about to give up.

              For a fraction of a second, he thinks he sees Bob Washington in a hood, back to the door, and aims his shotgun directly at him. He’d assumed he was dead. But the way the mountain is now, he realizes he might not be able to tell how permanent death is. Before he can pull the trigger, Jessica screams.

matt, ash, mike and beth

              “I have a plan,” she says. There are two deaths that The Stranger cannot see, and she’s willing to bet that both of them happen at the same time.

              Beth gives Matt a flare gun, and for a second Matt wonders if she plans to leave them alone, potentially surrounded by spirits of starvation and a place that apparently exists only to suffocate the living. And then, an if he fires it, a will there be anyone to see.

              “Uh, thanks.” He slides it into his pocket next to his wallet and keys.

//

              There’s a clearing with a single marble column in the middle, and a ruined sculpture to the side. (If Matt had paid more attention to Greek Art and Architecture 201 he might have been able to place what was left as King Pentheus.)

              “Where are we?” Ash asks.

              “A place that shouldn’t exist,” Beth says. “A movie producer built it as part of a set for a movie that was never shot.”

              She looks at Mike and Matt and nods. “He says violence will only lead to more violence, but you know? If she gets to that house, all your friends are as good as dead.” She’s been cryptic with them—the truth behind the visions stretched to fit a more convenient agenda. She thinks, if she had her way, then she’d go after Josh too. The Stranger talks about incomplete spirits, and how releasing them back into the air is the same as setting a hungry lion out in a remote village. His death is tricky, but if she can convince Mike to kill him, she thinks that his job—and possibly, by extension, her job will be easier.

              “So, what do you want us to do about it?” Mike asks.

              “You come with me,” she says. “Ashley and Matt can scout this place out.”

//

              “You have to slit its throat yourself,” Beth says, holding a young mountain goat in her hands. “The mountain doesn’t like when the unworthy try to take from it.”

              Mike makes a face. “Have you tried being… you know? More worthy?”

              Beth rolls her eyes. “Munroe, just kill the damn goat.”

              In the end, Beth has to hold his hand steady so he can make the cut. She doesn’t touch the knife, but she takes the first blood, and rubs it all over her face. She tells Mike to do the same; hoping that whatever part of Hannah is left inside that thing can sense blood and meat and death.

              (And if the thing is anything like Hannah was, she’ll want to eat Mike alive.)

//

              “How do you know she’s going to come here?” Mike whispers to Beth.

              “She almost always does. She can’t remember me, but thank god she remembers that Greek guy who screwed her over and made a goddamn monument to commemorate it.”

chris, sam, josh, emily and jess

              Chris turns to face the loaded barrel of a gun. He pulls off his hood. “Whoa,” he says, swallowing.  He sets the bowl on the floor. Josh is trying to hide behind him, but the old guy with the cataract seems to notice anyways. And he thinks he’s scaring Em and Jess. “I-I’m just exploring,” he backs up a little “with my friends here…” his voice is shaky, and he thinks there’s so much more he wanted to say.

              “Do you know what you’re doing?” The Stranger asks. “If you start…” he warns.

              “Not really.” He shrugs. “It’s a good thing you found us, then.”

              The Stranger looks at Chris, and then Josh, and then Sam, and back at Josh again. (Bob Washington’s kid should have been enough of his own man,) his eyes seem to say. (Or, maybe, he shouldn’t be a person at all.)  

              “What were we doing?” Sam asks. “Chris was just holding this bowl, and…”

              “Bacchanal.” The Stranger answers. “There aren’t any set rules. But that kind of frenzied state is dangerous.”

              “Did you know that?” Chris asks Josh. “Did you want us to do that?” He’s acutely aware that everyone in the room is probably glaring at him.

              Josh shakes his head.

              “Then, what?” The Stranger asks.

              Josh looks at him pleadingly, holding a fistful of Chris’s robe, and some of his shirt underneath. He opens his mouth to speak, and he can hear himself say “backwards,” with one too many a’s, and a voice that doesn’t sound anything like what he remembers it being.

//

              “You can’t summon him like that. Or get rid of his influence that way, for that matter,” The Stranger says.

              “Summon who?” Em asks.

              “Dionysus. The god of wine and revelry.”

              Em laughs. “You can’t be serious.”

              “He was telling us about these things… Monsters, cursed by the mountain or something,” Jess says. “And um…” she looks at Josh. “Looking at him, I think he might be right.”

              “Wait.” Chris says. “Okay. So if we’re going to summon him, or get rid of him, or whatever. What should we do?” Sam looks at Chris, who looks at Josh.

//

              The Stranger draws a star in the circle, and a series of concentric circles within the star with a piece of chalk from his pouch. He writes something none of them can read in it, and puts a bone in the center. He acquiesces, because nobody else is willing to move—Chris trusts Josh and Sam trusts Chris and Jess trusts Sam and Em isn’t going to go anywhere without Jess.

              “I don’t know if this is going to work,” he says. “Greece is out of my jurisdiction.”

              Em rolls her eyes. “Let’s just get on with it.” She holds Jess’s hand, as they stand on two adjacent points on the star. 

              Chris puts his hood back on, and The Stranger hands him two stones. One black, and one white. They’re the size of marbles, and Chris looks at them in confusion.

              “Urim and Thummim,” he says. “You’ll know when you need them.” He nods at the group, before turning to leave.

              “Wait.” Jess says. “Aren’t you going to stay?”

              “I have to find the rest of your friends.” He says. “And I have to find my partner.”

//

              Chris hasn’t ever really summoned anything before. Well, anything that wasn’t on a video game with a very specific set of instructions, anyways. He doesn’t know any Greek, but he has a cup with eyes on it, and a bone from something that someone killed a long time ago or something. He looks at Josh, and tries to nod reassuringly. “Uh, hey, Dionysus, or whatever…” He swallows. “So, my friend here tells me you fucked the mountain up a while ago. Or something.” This is gonna look so badass he thinks, when he talks to his East Coast friends. “Anyways, we have this humble bone as a sacrifice, and we want you to put it back together.”

              He thinks, after his speech, he should feel some sort of sense of swirling power. And maybe the need to throw Urim and Thummim into the middle of the summoning circle. But instead he has this sense of foreboding dread.

              “Hey,” Sam says. “Is the bone…” she looks at it quizzically. “Is it cracking?”

              Chris leans over to get a better look, and Josh moves closer to him. “Yeah,” he says. “Does that mean it worked?”

              They watch as the bone breaks into a series of fragments.

              “Did we fuck it up?” Chris asks. He’s about to step out of the circle, when he hears a deep, low rumbling. He frowns and looks at Urim and Thummim in his hand. He wonders if he should drop them into the bowl, or something.

              Sam points to a break in the floorboards, radiating out from where the bone was.

              “What do you think that means?”

              “Run!” Sam yells.

              Josh looks at them all in confusion.

              Chris grabs his hand.  

hannah (present day)

              Her head hurts. There are memories of being born on the mountain, and of sinking her teeth into her own skin, and of watching herself from afar. She’s a deer sometimes, sometimes a person, and sometimes herself. Every time she remembers, she screams. She loved somebody once, a long time ago, but any time she thinks about them, there aren’t any distinct shapes or voices. Just haze and static. She comes here first, hoping that it’ll subside, and she might see something that she can recognize. (She’d know if they were back though. She’d know.)

              She’s always hungry. Eating makes the headaches go away, makes things come back for a time, even though the part of her with a name knows that the images and thoughts that come from the meat aren’t hers. But it’s better than having nothing, it’s better than being nothing. The thing inside her rattles and shakes and churns and eating puts it to sleep.

              There’s movement somewhere in her periphery. But when she turns to look, everything goes blindingly bright. She can feel her face and her arm and her chest burn. But why would anything hurt her? Why would anything try? Don’t they know she’s just hungry?

              She screams and looks for something, anything to hold and to eat. All pain is the same. Her head hurts and she’s hungry. Her skin is burning, and the spirit inside her is on fire. There isn’t any movement, but she swipes her hand in front of her and grabs something. It’s the only thing that’s moving towards the pillar. It sees her, it sees her.

              “Hannah,” it says. But she’s too hungry to respond. It hurts.

              She brings it to her mouth, writhing, and takes a bite.

              It tastes like dirt.

ashley, matt, mike and beth

              Ashley watches The Stranger die. Matt shoots, and he dies. (The alternative: Matt doesn’t shoot, and Mike and Beth die.) It happens slowly, the thing—the monster, or whatever it is, the thing Beth was so cryptic about comes dangerously close to grabbing Mike. Beth’s right behind him, and Matt shoots. He doesn’t see The Stranger at first, he doesn’t know he’s looking for them. He fires, and she writhes in pain. Turns around and grabs him.

There’s blood on Ashley’s coat, and she knows that Beth is screaming behind her, but it doesn’t register at first. She was supposed to die, Beth says. Not him. Not just him. He’s the mountain. There’s a screech, and she puts her hands over her ears.  

              The only part of him Hannah leaves behind is an arm.

bob washington

              He’s the second to eat, and the last to die. Han’s first. She eats The Winemaker’s arms and legs, over and over again. He grows them back, like branches on a tree. It makes him believe in the power of his ceremonies, and the need to perform them even long after The Winemaker is gone. He doesn’t take any of Bob’s friends with him. He’s reckless, but he doesn’t leave things behind. Bob can’t see him anymore, but he can feel him after he eats.

              Han takes the fledgling actor. Han takes him, and when Bob goes looking, he finds a headless, legless, armless torso in a snowdrift. He’s hungry then. Everyone is. It makes sense, he’s sorry about it, but it makes sense, putting the lungs and the heart into the fire, and fanning the ash into the faces of those who are left. They eat the skin and muscle. They share. After giving The Winemaker his portion. He takes a bite and offers the rest to anyone who is willing.

              At first, none of them eat. But then they get hungrier and hungrier. His skin and bones change first. Greyer and more taught. (Josh doesn’t take anything from him for the longest time. But when he does, it’s his teeth that get sharp first.)

              When he finds out about Hill, or rather, how Melinda killed him, he finds the sculptor. He’s thinking about making a movie. A monstrous family who eats and eats and eats. He can use his camera to film, and they’d never know. But he needs props. He needs to make the set as regal as possible.

              He doesn’t ask for a sculpture of himself or of Melinda. Neither of them can stand to see. He has one done of Josh. It’s beautiful. And it’s the first thing he films.

//

              He doesn’t tell anyone he’s filming for a movie. Not even Melinda. He watches her sharpen her knife from the viewpiece. He tells her its practice. So when they get off of the mountain, he can make another movie.

              He talks until his tongue is tangled in his teeth, until all he can do is screech. He only eats when he’s hungry, but after a while nothing satiates him. Not the movie, or the food. Josh avoids him but Melinda doesn’t. His head starts hurting, and before he realizes it, there aren’t any others left.

              He eats her before she can do the same to him.

              His son looks for her, but he doesn’t have the words left to explain why he did it. He knows Josh is furious, but his head hurts and he can’t figure out why it matters to him.

              The last thing he sees is Josh’s nails, sharp like knives, and his white, white teeth.

mike, beth, ashley and matt

              Mike does it because he feels like he has to. He picks up The Stranger’s arm, and takes a bite. It tastes kind of like spearmint gum, and he coughs a little after swallowing it. Ash grimaces, and Matt just looks at him, horrified. He thinks that maybe, in a cosmic sense, things might even out. The mountain loses whatever The Stranger was, and gains whatever he is.

              “Dude, what if you turn into one of those things!”

              Beth shakes her head. “I don’t think it works like that. He wasn’t really human.”

              “So, what now? Does the mountain just die?” Ash asks Beth.

              “Maybe.” She looks at Mike. “You and Han both have part of it inside of you.”

              “So?”

              “I guess it depends on what you want to do.” She shrugs. “Part of the mountain might eat itself.”

              Mike shrugs. “I mean, I think mid-level bureaucracy is good enough for me.”

1

              The newspapers don’t mention anything about the mansion, or the mountain dying for a while. It’s a small town in remote mountains. By the time the rangers figure it out, a week has passed, and nobody can really connect them to the scene. The entire mess (the dying grass and trees, the dust, the rubble,) is attributed to climate change and natural factors.

              When they meet back up in the foothills of the mountain, Josh doesn’t need an introduction the way Chris thought he might; he’s just there, and Beth is not. No one says anything, not at first. Em starts with “was any of that real,”

              And, Josh says in a voice unfamiliar to himself, “don’t know.”

//

              Jess and Em are the first to leave the town and Mike is the last. They hop in a car and drive down the coastline. Jess suggests they take it easy. Sometimes their work pops up in magazines, and other times, the internet. They keep to each other mostly, never really talking about The Stranger, or the mountain. It’s not hard to see how they fit together. Em’s an editor and Jess is a model.

              Mike’s buried on the mountain. He makes it ninety years, six months and two days. Sometimes he goes up to where the Washington house used to be. He heard how it cracked and settled and turned into dust. The upper reaches of the mountain are starving. Things there eat each other. The part of The Stranger that he has in him is enough to keep the foothills alive. Sometimes he wonders what happened to Hannah. He makes a good mayor, and then a good congressman.

              Eventually Matt comes back to live with him. He has a couple of years in the NFL on second string and then a career-ending injury. He keeps in touch with Mike. Both of them bury Beth. He teaches for a while, and lives in town.

              Ash stays as long as she needs to to finish her book. It’s four hundred pages when it’s published, with a comprehensive history of what came before, and what came after. It’s published under fiction, though. Under a name that isn’t her own. Her second book is about ancient mythology. Chris calls her to congratulate her, and they keep in touch that way.

              Sam drives two towns over to catch a plane to Ecuador. She got her degree in conservation and she’s planning to work on the Galapagos. They get postcards from her every so often. After her movement catches on, they sometimes see her on the late-night talk shows. She’s made up and pretty.  

//

              Chris takes Josh with him. Nobody else quite knows what to do with him.  The teeth and the scars are hidden under ace bandages first, and then a surgical mask. Josh doesn’t want to stay on the mountain, or in the town, or anywhere nearby. He trusts Chris the most. He holds Chris’s hand while he drives, and curls up in the backseat in piles of clothing and blankets. The first stop they make is a gas station, Josh stays in the car and Chris stops for supplies. He cuts Josh’s hair to a manageable length, and apologizes because he’s not the best with scissors.

              The next stop is a motel somewhere in Idaho at an ungodly hour in the middle of the night. Josh holds onto Chris tightly, and Chris assures him that nobody will notice. He’s right, they’re innocuous enough. The Washingtons haven’t been a big deal for fifty years or so. He doubts the press remembers what they look like. (Or that they had a son.)

              He takes Josh to the Mojave and the redwood forests close to the Pacific.

              Somewhere between Reno and the Rockies, on a quiet night, three months before he’s due to start work and nearly two weeks since the incident on the mountains, he pulls up on the side of the road. Josh is asleep in the backseat, and he looks over at him. The toothy side of his face is obscured by a blanket and he’s curled up in a ball. There’s something about the picture that’s serene. Josh told him about his father, slowly and in pieces. Chris doesn’t think he’ll ever understand.

              He watches cars pass by on the highway and reaches into his pocket for a cigarette and his lighter. Instead, his hands find the two smooth stones The Stranger gave him.

              He looks them over. “Is what we did—or no. Is Josh—was what I did for Josh… or, I guess, was what Josh did… right?” He mumbles to the stones. He holds them out in front of him. Guilt and innocence.

              They both fall out of his hands.