In the winter of 1896, in a Bavarian village so small it never appeared on the proper maps, a thing that had followed Greta Eichelberger for years finally found her. She told the old guide Constantine Marbach so herself, in the cottage at the eastern edge of the black pines, after the strange business with the singing and the dogs had already begun. “Constantine,” she said, “there is a thing that follows me. It has followed me for a very long time.

I had hoped that it had given up, but I see now that it had not. It had only been waiting. ” When he asked what kind of thing, she shook her head. She said that to name it would be to invite it.

And when he asked whether it had a face, she looked at him for a long time. “Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes it has my face. ”

The village lay in a high valley above the larger town of Mittenwald, beneath the Karwendel Range.

Thirty households stood in two rough lines along a single road of packed earth, their roofs weighted with stone against the spring melt. The people knew one another completely: the blacksmith Augustin Vetterli, the schoolmaster Oswald Klee, the woodcutter Friedolin Brendel and his ailing wife Hedwig, an old guide named Marbach who claimed he could feel a change in the weather three days before it came. And Greta Eichelberger, twenty-nine years old, tall and raw-boned, with pale gray eyes that rested on a person a moment too long. She had come to the village in the spring of 1886 as the new wife of a goatherd named Johann Eichelberger.

Where she had come from, nobody could quite say. When asked, she smiled her closed, careful smile and said she had come from a place where the winters were longer. Johann died in the autumn of 1890, caught alone on the high pasture when a storm moved in faster than anyone expected. They found him three days later, half buried in a drift.

There was talk afterward. People said a wife who truly loved her husband would have felt the moment he fell. She did not remarry. She kept his goats, built the herd to nineteen head, made a sharp cheese the merchants came up twice a year to buy, wove blankets on his grandmother’s loom, and lived alone in the easternmost cottage.

The village let her. For nearly six years, that was the way of it. The first sign came in November. The village kept four working dogs, thick-coated mountain animals with yellow eyes that did not bark at shadows.

Beginning in the second week of the month, all four began to bark at the eastern edge of the village, always between two and four in the morning, always facing the black pines and the slope behind Greta’s cottage. Marbach remarked on it in the blacksmith’s shop. Vetterli said dogs did that when a wolf was about. Marbach said no.

He knew the sound a dog made for a wolf. “It is the sound a dog makes when it sees something it does not understand. ” He left without finishing his wine and walked along the eastern road, past the pines, where he stood for nearly a quarter of an hour looking up the slope. He told no one what he saw, not then.

Much later he would say there had been a single track in the snow, leading down from the tree line and stopping ten paces from Greta’s back door, unlike any track he had seen in seventy years of climbing those mountains. The second sign came in the third week. Hedwig Brendel woke her husband at half past three and told him she had heard a woman singing on the road outside, a lullaby in a dialect nobody in Falkenrast spoke, the dialect of her own grandmother, dead for forty years. Her husband looked out; the road was empty, the snow untouched.

When he turned back, she was sitting up with dry, wide eyes. “She is at the door now,” she said. There was nothing at the door. In the morning she remembered none of it.

The woodcutter told no one. The third sign was Marbach’s apprentice, Wendelin Holtzmann, a sensible young man of twenty-four with no taste for stories. On the morning of the 27th of November he did not come down for breakfast. Marbach found him sitting upright on the edge of his cot, fully dressed, his eyes open, staring at the wall.

It took nearly half an hour to bring him round. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. He had gone out walking after dark, driven by a great curiosity to see the slope above the eastern cottage. Among the pines he had become aware that he was not alone.

“It knew me,” he said. “It knew my name, and it knew the name of the woman I was going to marry, who died of fever three years ago in Mittenwald, and whose name I have spoken to no one in this valley. ” He had seen nothing, only heard a voice. On his way back down he had passed Greta’s cottage.

Through the lit kitchen window he had seen her sitting at her table alone, both hands flat on the wood, eyes closed, lips moving as though she were speaking to someone across from her. The chair across from her was empty. Marbach went to her that morning. She invited him in for coffee, as she always did.

The kitchen was clean, the chair across from her usual seat tucked neatly in. He asked whether she had been sleeping well. She held his look for a long moment. “No, Constantine.

I have not been sleeping well at all. ” Then she told him the thing followed her, that she had named it once when she was young and had been paying for it ever since. The fourth sign came at the beginning of December. On the morning of the 2nd, Roswitha Pfluger found the cover of the village well pushed aside, the bucket wet, the chain wet.

When she drew it up, it held a small bundle of black hair tied with red thread, weighted with a stone, hung inside the bucket by a hook someone had patiently driven into the wood. It was Greta’s hair. And when Vetterli drew a fresh bucket to taste the water, it had gone bad, flavored of iron and of something old. A delegation of six men walked to Greta’s gate.

She came out before they had to call. “You have come to ask me about the hair in the well. ” She said it was hers, but she had not put it there. The thing had come into her house while she slept, cut the hair clean at the nape of her neck, and later taken the bundle from her hands in daylight.

“It is taking pieces of me,” she said, “and it is putting them in the places where you live, so that you will turn against me, and if you drive me out, I will be alone with it in the snow, and then it will have me. ” She gave the men instructions: do not drink from the well until the spring water ran clean, keep the dogs in at night, and if you hear singing on the road in the small hours, do not open your door, do not open your window, and above all, do not answer. For nearly a week, nothing happened. Then, on the night of the 9th of December, the schoolmaster Oswald Klee, sitting up late by his fire reading his late wife’s book of poems, heard a woman singing on the road.

The melody was unknown, the words in no language he knew. He remembered Greta’s warning. He did not go to the window. The singing came close, paused a moment at his door, and moved on toward the eastern end of the village.

When at last he looked out, the road was empty, the snow untouched. At the far end, a single light burned in Greta’s window. It went out, came back, went out again, three times, as though someone were signaling. In the morning he told Marbach.

The old guide listened in silence. “Then it has begun,” he said. He told Klee he had seen something like it before, in the year 1847, in a valley to the south. A woman who said a thing followed her; the village drove her out; what they found of her in the spring was not entirely a woman.

“We must believe Greta,” Klee said. “Oswald, it is not so simple. The believing alone does not stop these things,” Marbach answered. “The believing is only where you begin.

”

That morning, the 10th of December, eight men walked together up the slope behind Greta’s cottage: Marbach, Vetterli, Klee, the woodcutter Friedolin Brendel, a merchant from Mittenwald named Albrecht Dolser caught in the village by the snow, Wendelin Holtzmann, and two farmers, Florian Reemer and Quirin Knobloch. Greta watched them go from her back door and did not speak. About a hundred paces above her cottage the slope leveled into a clearing, and there they found a circle four paces across. The snow inside it had been pressed hard and flat, as though something heavy had turned upon it for many nights.

Around the perimeter, marks that were not quite footprints went round and round, all in the same direction, perhaps a hundred passes or more. At the center, half buried in the trampled snow, lay a small object. Marbach went in alone and picked it up. It was a wooden doll, old, the paint worn nearly away, carved in the shape of a woman in a long dress with her hands folded at the waist.

The face was carved with great care by someone who clearly knew the person they depicted. It was Greta’s face: the pale eyes, the narrow chin, the closed, careful mouth. The wood had been worn smooth by the rubbing of fingers over a great length of time. Wendelin spoke at last.

“This is what spoke to me that night,” he said. “This is what knew my name. ”

Marbach put the doll inside his coat. They walked back down to the cottage, where Greta still stood in her doorway.

“You found it? ” she asked. Yes, he said. “You should not have brought it down,” she said.

Why not? “Because now it knows you have it. ”

They gathered in the schoolmaster’s house and laid the doll on the table. It lay perfectly still, too still, in a stillness that began to feel like tension.

Florian Reemer laughed nervously and said they were losing their minds over a piece of wood. Marbach told him to be still. They could feel the doll listening. They decided to burn it.

Then Klee argued they should first speak to Greta. They sent him alone, because she trusted him. Her cottage was empty. The fire had burned to ash, the kettle was cold, her shawl lay folded on the back of her chair, her boots and cloak were gone.

On the kitchen table lay a single sheet of paper in her careful hand. “Oswald, do not come after me,” it read. “The thing wants me, and it will have me, and I would rather it have me out on the mountain than here among the houses. Burn the doll if you can.

If you cannot burn it, bury it under stone in a place you can find again, but do not name to anyone. If a stranger comes to the village in the spring looking for me, tell them I went south. Do not speak my name aloud after the snow melts. I am sorry for the trouble.

Greta. ”

Marbach read it twice. “Then we have lost her,” he said. Vetterli stood up.

“She is one of ours. We cannot let her walk up onto the mountain in December with that thing following her and do nothing. ” So six of the eight men went up after her that afternoon: Marbach, Vetterli, Klee, Brendel, Holtzmann, and Reemer. The doll was wrapped in oilcloth, locked in Marbach’s strongbox, placed in his cellar under heavy stones, and the key given to Knobloch.

They had four hours before dark. Greta’s tracks were clear at first, a single pair of boots going up through the clearing and beyond, toward a saddle in the ridge. Then, after about an hour, Marbach halted them. A second set of tracks had appeared, walking beside Greta’s on her right hand.

Vetterli bent to look. The second set was identical to the first: the same boot, the same length of stride, the same depth. The same tracks doubled. “It is walking with her,” Wendelin whispered.

They climbed on through the failing light. Then, just below the saddle, both sets of tracks simply stopped. They did not turn aside, did not double back, did not lead anywhere. They ended in open snow with no disturbance around them, as though the two figures had at the same moment stepped off the surface of the world.

Klee called her name into the wind; the wind carried it away. Vetterli laid his bare hand on the snow at the end of the tracks and kept it there until his hand went numb. He said afterward that the snow there had been colder than the rest, that it had felt under his palm like the lid of something. He never said what he thought lay beneath.

Marbach ordered them back. Vetterli protested. “Augustin, she is not here,” Marbach said. “Look, there is nothing here.

There is nowhere for her to be. ” They came down by lantern at half past six, all of them shaking. They drank brandy in the schoolmaster’s house and said very little. Greta did not come back.

Snow fell heavily for four days and buried everything. The doll remained under the stones in Marbach’s cellar. The men avoided his house. They did not speak of the slope or of Greta, and the silence over Falkenrast deepened with the drifts.

But the singing came back, on the night of the 18th of December. Klee heard it on the road again, moving east, stopping at the gate of the empty cottage. Then it began to come back, passing his house going west, out of the village into the woods, and only then fading. When he finally dared to look out, the snow was untouched, but on the road exactly outside his door lay a single small object: a length of dark hair, tied at the top with red thread.

He sent for Marbach. The old guide looked at it and did not pick it up. “It is leaving them for us,” he said, “as gifts or as warnings. I do not know which.

” What is it doing? Klee asked. “It is making itself at home,” Marbach said. The thing had wanted Greta for a long time, and now it was settling into the place where she had lived.

The cottage was empty, and the thing did not like empty places. It would fill it. “And in time it would begin to come down into the village, the way a wild animal comes down out of the woods once it learns that chickens are unguarded. ” Marbach had thought about it for many days.

The only thing to do was to give it the doll back. Take it up to the saddle, put it in the snow, walk away, and hope that when the spring melt came, the doll was gone and the thing with it. Klee asked, if they gave it the doll, did they not also give it Greta forever. Marbach was silent for a long time.

“Oswald,” he said, “we gave her up the day she walked up that slope alone. ”

On the morning of the 20th of December, the day before the shortest day, the same six men went up again, carrying the doll in the inside pocket of Marbach’s coat. They reached the saddle by midday. Marbach stood at the place and unwrapped the doll and laid it in the snow with the small carved face turned up to the sky.

They formed a line several paces away. Marbach took off his hat. “Greta Eichelberger, if you can hear me, we are sorry. We did not know how to help you.

We did not know what was following you. We are giving you back what was taken. We will not speak your name aloud after today. We will not come up here again.

Go in peace if you can, and if you cannot, do not come down to us. Stay on this mountain. It is yours now. ” None of them dared look directly at the doll.

They turned and walked down, and not one of them looked back. Vetterli said afterward he had felt a pressure between his shoulder blades in the last hundred paces, as though somebody very small were watching him from a long way behind. But he did not turn. That night, the 21st of December, the shortest day of the year, was clear and very cold.

No singing came on the road. No dogs barked at the eastern edge. And the night after, and the night after, through December, January, and February, the village was undisturbed. The well, when they uncapped it to test the water, ran clean and tasted of stone and cold.

Hedwig Brendel died in early February, peacefully, in her bed, and was buried without any visitations, without any singing in the night. In late April of 1897, Marbach and Vetterli went up to the saddle together, telling no one. They came back the same day and would say only, “The doll is gone. ” They did not say where it had gone, or whether the snow showed any disturbance, or what they had felt up there.

They did not go up again. Greta Eichelberger was never found, not in the spring when the pastures cleared, not in summer when the herds went up, not in any year after. The cottage stood empty; no one would buy it, no one would live in it. The black pines grew thicker, and sometime after the turn of the century a heavy snow brought down the roof, and the walls fell in, and the pines closed over the place.

Today you would find only trees. The men of that December lived out their lives. Marbach died in 1904 at seventy-seven, having told only his housekeeper, Theresia Olmer, what really happened; she told the parish priest on her deathbed in 1919, and the priest wrote it down. Wendelin Holtzmann never married.

He left Falkenrast in 1901 and moved to Vienna, where he worked as a tailor. He was a quiet man who slept poorly, his nephews said. He kept a single object on his mantelpiece: a length of red thread in a glass jar. When asked, he said it had been given to him by an old friend.

When he died in 1931, the thread was still in the jar. Vetterli stayed in the village all his life. Neither of his grown sons ever climbed above the saddle, and they warned their own families away from it; the warning passed down generation by generation, and to this day there are households in that valley who will tell you there is a place above the pines one does not visit, though most of them no longer know why. Klee retired in 1910 and died in 1916.

On his bookshelf they found a small leather notebook in which he had written, over many years, a careful account of everything he had seen that winter. On the very last page of that notebook, in handwriting that grew shakier with each word, the schoolmaster made a final entry dated the winter of 1915. He wrote that he had gone walking in the snow on the road outside his house late one December afternoon and had heard, very faintly, from somewhere far up on the slope above the eastern end of the village, a woman singing the same melody, the same unknown tongue. He stood a long time and listened.

The singing had not been mournful, and it had not been cruel. It had been, he wrote, almost peaceful, as though the singer had at last grown accustomed to her place and had perhaps even come to love it in the way one loves something one cannot leave. He went home that day and was not afraid. He had begun, in his old age, to believe that whatever Greta Eichelberger had been, she was still up there, and that the thing that had taken her had perhaps in turn been taken by her, and that they had become, in their own strange way, a single quiet thing walking the saddle in slow circles season after season as the snow came and went.

In the last line of his notebook, in handwriting so faint it can barely be read, he wrote: I do not know if she rests, but I know that we let her go, and I know that the mountain has kept her, and I think that perhaps in the end that is all that any of us can hope for, to be kept by something, to be remembered, even if only by the wind.