Emmett Hirsch was thirty-eight years old in the autumn of 1907, a tall man, six feet one, thin the way a man gets thin who eats his supper wherever he finds it, with hair gone the color of cold coffee at the temples and a face the wind had made older than his years. He worked from a third-floor office in a brick building on Market Street in Louisville, Kentucky, for the Cumberland Lumber and Coal Company, and his title was land agent, a word that hid a great deal of traveling. He spent most of the year on horseback. Born in 1869 in a small town in Ohio, he had moved south with his family after the panic of 1873 and had worked in the mountain trade in one form or another since he was old enough to hold the end of a chain.

He wrote left-handed, which people in that part of the country noticed then, and he had a habit of not speaking until he had looked a thing over twice. He was not married. According to his sister, he had been briefly engaged to a schoolteacher in Frankfort in 1898. That engagement ended by mutual agreement, in a way his sister described as decent, and Emmett never fully recovered from it.

He kept her photograph in his field kit for years. I tell you these things because Emmett was not the kind of man who could later be accused of being fanciful. That matters. What he wrote in the field notebook they found afterward was written by a man who checked his compass three times before trusting the direction, and that is what makes what he wrote hard to ignore.

The assignment came down on the seventeenth of September. Cumberland had bought a parcel of land at auction, without surveying it, in Letcher County on the Virginia border. The parcel was called Section 14 in the papers, but the mine hands who would later go up to cut its timber called it what everyone in that country called it: Wolf’s Neck. The Wolf’s Neck valley was a gash of ground about four miles long between two slopes that leaned toward each other like two hands about to close.

The company wanted timber estimates and boundary markers. What they did not tell Emmett, because they had not written it down anywhere they could hand him, was that there were still people living in the valley. People who did not know their land had been sold out from under them. People who had lived on it continuously for as long as anyone in the county could remember.

There is a note in the company minutes from that August, if you know where to look, where a minor clerk raised the question of prior occupancy, and the supervisor’s reply is written in the margin in a hand that slants hard to the right. The reply was one word: “Handle it. ” That is all the record shows on the point. They gave him a guide.

His name was Isham Vardee. Isham was a wiry man in his fifties, one of those men who look as though they were carved from walnut and never sanded, with a black beard shot through with gray and a mouth he kept shut unless the question was asked twice. Isham lived on the east side of Whitesburg and knew the hills as well as any living man. He said he had once reached the mouth of Wolf’s Neck when he was younger, hunting bear.

But he had never gone into the valley itself. He did not want to. That is the thing, and I want you to hold on to it: he had reached the door. But he had not crossed it.

Emmett reached Whitesburg on the eighteenth. He had covered the last twelve miles from Jenkins Station on a rented horse, and the horse was so unhappy that he had to walk it the final two miles. He lodged at an inn run by a widow named Mrs. Raydenour, who set before him a plate of white beans with pork, and after the plates were cleared she sat across from him at the kitchen table in silence for some minutes.

Then she said, “They tell me you’re going to Wolf’s Neck. ” He said, “Yes, ma’am. ” She said, “My daddy used to trap outside Kingdom Come. ” He said, “Yes, ma’am.

” She said, “He never would set one on the Wolf’s Neck side. ” He said, “Well. ” She said, “That’s all. ” Emmett wrote that conversation down that night, word for word.

He and Isham left town the next morning at first light on two mules loaded with field gear, the survey chain, a Wesson revolver in Emmett’s saddlebag—he later wrote that he almost forgot to pack it—and enough hardtack, coffee, and salt pork for a week in the field. The road out of Whitesburg followed a creek called Rockhouse for a while, then turned away from it into higher, wilder ground. It was cold. The leaves had begun to fall.

Emmett wrote in his field book that the air smelled of wet stone. They traveled most of two days. On the first day they passed two farmhouses, and the people who came out the doors to look at them looked at Isham first, then at Emmett, and said nothing to either of them. On the second day they passed no houses at all.

Instead they passed a low, half-collapsed stone chimney with no house left around it, and a graveyard of about a dozen stones set into a slope so steep the graves must have been dug on an angle. Emmett stopped there for a minute. The stones bore no names, only initials. He noticed that some of the initials had been chiseled away.

At noon of the second day they reached a place where the road forked. The left track curved back along a ridge, and Isham said it would take them to a settlement called Cranks Creek. The right track went up. It climbed steeply toward a narrow pass of pine and mountain laurel, and that was the track Emmett needed.

Isham stopped his mule at the fork and did not follow. Emmett wrote about that moment carefully. He wrote that Isham did not look at him. Isham looked at the right-hand track, at the trees where the road went out of sight, and said quietly that he would make his camp at the ridge.

He said Emmett would be all right if he remembered a few things. That was his word, “remember,” as though these were things Emmett already knew and had merely forgotten. Isham said, “Don’t wander after the bell rings. ” He said, “Don’t cross the creek at dusk.

” He said, “If you hear your name called from outside the door, don’t answer, no matter how familiar the voice sounds. ” He said, “Keep a candle burning all night. ” He said, “Anything they offer you to eat, eat it all. Anything they offer you to drink, drink it.

Never refuse. And whatever room they put you in, if it has a mirror, and it will, keep it covered. ” He said, “Don’t go past the small building in the back. It will look like a little church.

It isn’t a church. Don’t go past it. Don’t touch its door. Don’t stand in front of its windows.

”

Emmett said, and I want you to imagine the way he said it, because he was not a man who raised his voice: “Isham. This is just a survey. I’m surveying a piece of land for the company. Are there people up there?

” Isham said, “Yes. ” Emmett said, “Well, then. ” Isham said, “Probably. You may not see them.

But they may see you. ” Emmett wrote that he laughed at that once, a short, muffled laugh, and Isham did not laugh with him. Isham said, “If you’re not back by sundown Friday, I’ll come to the mouth of the valley. I won’t go farther than that.

Do you understand? ” And Emmett, who was not the kind of man to say yes when he did not fully understand, said yes. I want you to sit with that for a moment. He said yes.

He turned his mule onto the right-hand fork and went up alone. The trail into Wolf’s Neck was not what you would call a trail. It was a memory of a trail. It followed the creek for the first mile, then rose to a bench of ground under old-growth hemlocks that had not been touched, as Emmett noted, in a hundred years at least.

Timber like that would make any company man’s mouth water. He stopped and took two rough measurements before he went on. And he noted in his book that the silence under those trees was not so much silence as absence. The birds: there were no birds.

The wind moved in the tops of the hemlocks, but it did not seem to reach the ground. The sound of the creek faded behind him within half a mile, as though the earth had swallowed it. He noticed, and this stuck with him, that the mule had stopped sweating. It had been a hard climb and the animal should have been lathered.

But it was dry. It walked ahead of him obediently, as though it were being led to a barn it did not know but did not particularly fear. He rode another hour. The trail bent left around a rock outcrop, and when he came around it, the valley opened below him.

There were seven cabins. Seven, set in an irregular ring around a wide yard that had once been a common pasture, with a low stone well house in the middle, and to the north side what he took at first for a barn. But it was not a barn. It had no doors on its long side.

It had two doors on its short side, small and close together, and a bell hung under the eaves on a rope. Behind that building, deeper in the trees, Emmett could see a low stone structure with a half-collapsed roof, and beyond that, farther still, something white that might have been a small church without a steeple. He wrote all of this down. He always wrote everything down.

He rode into the yard. Smoke rose from the chimneys of three of the cabins. He counted five people in the yards and on the porches. He saw no one else move as he approached, but he had a strong feeling, and he recorded this feeling in his book, that there were more of them watching him from behind the walls.

When he reached the well house, he dismounted and stood holding his mule’s bridle in one hand, and waited for someone to come speak to him. He waited what he later estimated as three or four minutes. No one came. Then a woman came out of the nearest cabin.

She was in her sixties, or perhaps older, thin the way a person gets thin who has lost the desire for food, with her hair pulled back so tightly it looked painful, and a face made of long straight lines. She wore black, and the sleeves of her dress were rolled to her elbows, and her forearms were the strongest forearms Emmett said he had ever seen on a woman of that age. She walked across the yard to him and stopped at a polite distance, looked at him, and said, “Land man. ” Just that.

Two words. Emmett said, “Yes, ma’am. ” She said, “We knew someone would come. ” She said, “My name is Malvina Coles, and I speak for the valley.

” She said, “We’ve prepared a room for you. ” Emmett wrote her name in the margin and the phrase “we’ve prepared a room for you” with a question mark after it. He asked politely how they knew someone would come. She said, “We knew when the deed moved to other hands.

” He asked how they could know that, three ridges and thirty miles from the courthouse, and she looked at him for one long second and did not answer. She turned and walked back to the cabin she had come out of, and he walked his mule behind her. Inside her cabin, the front room was clean and dark: a table, a cast-iron stove, a rocking chair, a shelf with perhaps four books, one of them a Bible, so worn its leather had gone black. On the wall above the stove hung a small framed embroidery with a phrase in faded red thread.

The phrase was “Guard the door. ” That was all it said. No maker’s name, no date. The room they had prepared for him was behind a curtain at the back: a narrow bed, a washbasin, a window looking out on the well house, and on the wall opposite the bed, hanging on a nail, a mirror about half as tall as a man, covered with a heavy dark cloth that had been sewn shut all the way around the frame.

“Sewn,” Emmett wrote in his book. “Not draped. Not pinned. Sewn.

A cover you cannot remove without cutting it. ” He asked about the mirror. Malvina said, “We cover them in every house. ” He asked why.

She said, “Because we do. ” He waited. She waited longer. He let it go.

That evening he met three other residents. An old man named Alaric Federman, perhaps eighty, or sixty and worn out, with a beard the color of fresh snow and eyes the color of an approaching storm. A man about Alaric’s age named Otis Grow, who did not speak a word in his presence, only nodded, and whose hands trembled constantly in a way that did not seem connected to anything he was doing. And a younger woman, perhaps forty-five, named Perpetua Lyle, who wore her hair in one braid down her back and watched Emmett with a suspicious interest, looking away with excessive quickness whenever he looked at her.

He counted five people in the yard that first evening. Over the course of the day he saw or heard the movement of six more inside the cabins. He wrote: 11 souls. He wrote “souls,” not “people.

” He was not a particularly religious man, but he wrote “souls. ”

Supper was cornbread and beans cooked with a small amount of salt meat and bitter coffee served in tin cups. Malvina and Alaric sat at the table with him. Otis sat by the stove and did not eat.

Emmett asked about the buildings behind the cabins. He asked casually about the little church at the back of the settlement. Alaric set down his spoon. He looked at Malvina, and Malvina looked at the table, and Alaric said, “That building is not a church.

” Emmett asked, “What is it, then? ” Alaric said, “It’s something old. ” He added, “It was here when our great-grandparents’ great-grandparents came to this valley. ” He said, “We don’t go past it.

” Emmett said, “Does anyone go past it? ” Alaric said, “Those who do don’t come back to ask that question. ” And that ended the conversation. He asked about the well house.

Malvina said, “We don’t draw water from the well. ” He said, “What’s it for, then? ” She said, “It’s for the well. ” He wrote all this down.

This was the kind of talk you write down because you don’t understand it at the time, and you know from experience you will need to review it later. That was Emmett. He wrote everything down. That first night, he did what Isham had told him.

He kept a candle burning on the chest beside the bed. He read a chapter of the Bible from the shelf out of habit, because his mother had made him read a chapter every night of his life, and old habits stay for a reason. He slept in his boots. His sleep was bad.

A little after midnight, in the pitch dark of the valley, the bell hanging under the eaves of the building he had thought was a barn began to ring. It rang seven times, slowly, not a death knell but more like a counting. Emmett lay in bed counting along with it, and when it stopped, the silence that followed was so complete he could hear the candle melting its own wax. He did not move.

He did not open his window. He did not walk. He watched his door until the candle was down to its wick, and then he slept without meaning to. In the early hours he woke halfway and thought he heard, from somewhere on the far side of the clearing, a second bell answering the first, fainter and farther.

He was never sure afterward whether he had dreamed it. He wrote that he was never sure, and I want you to notice that. A man who checks his compass three times before trusting it. A precise man wrote on that first morning that he was not sure whether he had dreamed a sound, which means he was not sure of almost anything.

Before dawn he got up quietly and stood at his window looking out at the clearing. There was a moon that night, a thin crescent, sending enough light to see the well house and the barn that was not a barn and the shapes of the cabins around the circle. Nothing moved. But he felt, and he wrote this down when he got back to the office after relighting the candle, that something had been moving until a moment before he came to the window, and that his coming had stopped it.

He wrote one line: whatever it was, it was walking. Not floating. Not standing still. Walking.

In a slow half-circle around the well house, just as a farmer walks around a piece of ground, thinking about fencing it. He watched for another hour, and it did not begin again. In the morning he ate a bowl of oatmeal at Malvina’s table and asked that someone show him the property lines. Alaric said he would walk with him.

They went out together across the clearing and up a side draw on the west side of the valley. Emmett brought the survey chain, the transit, the field book, and the compass. Alaric brought nothing. They walked for two hours.

Alaric was old, but he walked the way mountain men walk, without hurry and without wasted motion. Emmett had to lengthen his stride to keep up. On the west ridge, where the corner of the property should have been according to the deed, Emmett set up the transit and took a reading. The needle of his compass would not settle.

It drifted slowly back and forth about ten degrees without stopping. He tapped the compass. He waited. He tried a second one from his bag.

Same behavior. Alaric stood a short distance away watching him with a calm, patient expression, as though he had seen a great many people reach this part of the day. Emmett said, “Has anyone ever come up here with a compass before? ” Alaric said, “Yes.

” Emmett said, “And what happened? ” Alaric said, “They never worked. ” He said it the way you say the road dips after the bridge, as a fixed fact of this country. Emmett wrote in the log: “The needle will not settle.

Compass unreliable in this valley. ”

He tried to establish the boundaries by topographic sight instead. He picked landmarks. The trouble was that when you looked from the ridge down into the valley, the well house, the building with the bell, the closed stone structure, and the small building in the rear were not arranged as they had seemed from below.

He could not have told you why. They simply were not. He wrote: “Checking bearings against sketch from the yard. Bearings do not match.

Will try again from the north ridge tomorrow. ” He established the boundary a third time. He got a third reading that differed by nine degrees from the second, which had differed by fourteen degrees from the first. Then he wrote one very short line in the log.

It said: “This parcel cannot be surveyed. ” He crossed it out and wrote beneath it in smaller letters: “This parcel does not wish to be surveyed. ” He crossed that out too. But it remained legible, and later readers of the log were able to make it out.

They walked back down. When they reached the yard, they passed the low stone structure at the back of the settlement, the one with the half-collapsed roof. Emmett slowed his steps. It was a well house too, or at least it was shaped like one.

It had no door, only an opening, and the inside was too dark to see anything at all. There was a smell coming from it. Not a bad smell, and not exactly the cold smell of a springhouse, but a queer one, like water that had never seen light. Emmett took a step toward it.

Alaric put his hand on his shoulder. Alaric’s hand was very light, almost polite. He did not press. He said, “Please don’t.

” Emmett didn’t. Later, Emmett sat in the front room of Malvina’s cabin, his notebook open on his knee, and tried to draw a plan of the settlement from memory. He drew the well house in the center. He drew the seven cabins around it.

He drew the barn that was not a barn with its bell. He drew the closed stone building. He drew the small building in the back that had no cross on its roof. Then he stopped, because while he was drawing it, he realized he could not remember whether the small building had windows.

He went out the cabin door to look. When he came into the yard he could see its roof above the trees, so he counted them, and there were three windows on the side facing him. He went back inside. He sat.

He picked up the pencil. And the moment he tried to draw the windows, he could not remember how many there were. He went out again. Counted.

Three. Went back in. Drew two. Looked at what he had drawn.

Said aloud, “Three. ” Drew a third window. Looked at what he had drawn. It was still only two.

He put the pencil aside. He wrote in the margin, in a hand different from the rest of the entry: “I cannot fix the number of windows in my memory. I cannot fix them on the paper. ”

Let that idea settle in your mind for a moment.

A man who had spent his career fixing distances and elevations on paper, sitting in a cabin at three in the afternoon, unable to draw three windows on a wall he could see from his own door. Have you ever had a moment where the floor of your attention tilted slightly beneath you? Where you looked at something you had just seen and could not hold its image in your head for one second? If you have had such a moment, then you already have one foot inside this story.

The rest of you: God help you. That evening he tried something else. He asked Malvina if he could see the graveyard. She told him there was one.

She pointed to a small path that branched off the west side of the clearing and climbed between the hemlocks. She said, “Go if you like. ” And she said, “Don’t touch the stones. ” He walked the path alone.

It was about a quarter mile. The graveyard was small, twenty-two stones. He counted them twice to be sure. They were all of rough, low limestone, unchiseled, set into the earth.

None bore a name. None bore a date. Some had a single letter carved into the top. K.

R. K. K. R.

Some had a small crescent-shaped hollow carved into the top of the stone above the letter. Some did not. He walked slowly among them. The ground under his boots was very soft, the way ground gets in a place few people have trodden for a long time.

There were no marked graves. There was no fence. He noticed, stepping back and looking at them from the edge, that they were arranged in a rough ring like the arrangement of the cabins in the yard below. Seven stones in the outer ring.

Then inside that ring, another ring of seven stones. And in the center, one stone alone, taller than the rest by a hand’s width, bearing no letter at all. He walked toward that central stone and studied it. He did not touch it.

He noticed that the ground around it was slightly lower than the ground around the other stones, as though something had settled beneath it. He noticed also that the stone was slightly warm on its western face, at three in the afternoon in October, when the air on the ridge was cold enough to see his breath. He wrote all of this down. Emmett stood in that graveyard a long time.

It began to rain very lightly. He wrote in the notebook: “No names. No dates. Only K and R.

Some stones marked, some not. ” And beneath that, and he did not cross it out: “I do not want to know what those letters mean. ” And beneath that, in smaller writing: “But I think I know what they mean. And I think whoever carved them knew what they meant, and I think everyone in the valley knows what they mean, and no one speaks of them, because speaking of them might summon them.

”

On the third day, Malvina led him to the cabin she said had been used by the men who came before him. It was the smallest of the seven cabins, with no fire and no bed, and it smelled of paper. There was a table under the window. On the table was a log—not a small book, but a working log the size of a company register, bound in dark green cloth.

Its spine was cracked from being opened so often. She said, “This is what they left. ” And she said, “We don’t touch it. ” And she said, “But maybe you’d like to.

” Then she went out and shut the door behind her. The log was a Cumberland book. He recognized the press mark on the inside cover. The paper was Cumberland paper, but the entries were written in many hands over a period he later estimated at thirty-two years.

He turned the pages. Some entries were in a hand he could not fully read. Some were in the careful penmanship of a draftsman. Some were in pencil that had faded almost to nothing.

Every entry began with a name and a date. Ansel Kirkpatrick, June 1875. Willard Kesterston, October 1893. Cyrus Foyle, April 1896.

Robin Pettit, September 1899. Harmon Cleary, August 1902. Josiah Enfield, May 1905. Beside some of the names was a small mark.

The letter K. Beside others, another mark. The letter R. Beside some, both.

Beside some, nothing. Emmett studied the marks and the entries for a long time. By the end of the evening he had concluded that the K meant “kept” and the R meant “returned,” and that some of the names had been returned and some kept and some neither. He did not know at that moment what these words meant.

He tried to read the actual entries. Most were survey notes, distances, boundary determinations, timber estimates. Some broke off in the middle of a line. One, for Ansel Kirkpatrick, ended with the sentence: “This land does not permit an accurate reading.

” He copied that phrase into his own field notebook, verbatim. Cyrus Foyle’s entry ended: “My chain is one foot shorter than it was on Tuesday, and I do not know why. ” Willard Kesterston’s entry ended: “If anyone reads this, I have chosen to remain in the valley, and my choice was my own free will. ” His name was one of those with the K beside it.

Emmett read that sentence several times. And beside it, in his own notebook, he wrote: “Free will? ” with a question mark. He turned the pages until he reached the last page with writing on it.

There at the top, in his own hand, was written: “Emmett Hirsch, September 1907. ” And beside the name, no mark. Just the space where the mark should go. He sat staring at it for what he later said was a long time.

His own handwriting. The letters of his own name at the end of it. The little loop he had made in his letters since he was a boy. And no memory, none, of ever having written it there.

He closed the log. He went out of the small cabin, crossed the yard to Malvina’s cabin, and asked her plainly what the marks meant. She said, “Stayed and returned. ” He said, “Stayed means?

” She said, “Stayed means remained. ” He said, “And returned means? ” She said, “Returned means went home. ” Then she said, “But not all who went home are gone.

” And she looked at him steadily and did not blink. And Emmett wrote in his notebook that night: “I understand the sentence. But I do not understand the sentence. ”

That third night he did what he had done the first two nights, and it was not enough.

He kept the candle burning. He read a chapter of the Bible. He slept, or tried to. At a time he could not later fix, the bell rang.

But this time it rang twice. Twice, about a minute apart. And after the second ringing, he heard from outside the cabin, at what he estimated to be the front threshold of Malvina’s cabin, someone calling his name. “Emmett.

” Just that. Twice. The voice was his own voice. He did not answer.

He did not move. He lay in bed while the candle guttered and listened to his own voice on the other side of a door he had bolted from the inside, speaking his name a third time, then a fourth, then stopping. Then he heard, from inside the room he was in, from the corner behind the covered mirror, a fifth call. “Emmett.

” From behind him. Inside the room. In the tone of his own voice. He did not turn his head.

He did not close his eyes. He watched the candle flame until the sky outside the window went gray, and he did not sleep, and no other sound came. He wrote in his field book, when there was enough light to write, that during the last hour before dawn he had begun to feel that the room he was in had become slightly larger than it had been the night before. He wrote that he could not have proved it with any measure he carried.

But he felt, as he wrote, that the wall with the mirror on it had receded an inch or so in the dark. And that whatever had called his name from behind him had been standing in that added space. He wrote: “This is not a rational note. I write it because I do not trust myself to remember it accurately in the morning.

”

In the morning he made his decision. He would leave. He would report that the land was not workable. He would go down to Isham at the saddle and go home.

He would not open the log again. He would not stay another night. He walked to the shed behind Malvina’s cabin where he had put his mule the first night. The mule was not there.

He walked the whole settlement, asking everyone he passed if they had seen the animal. He asked Perpetua Lyle. He asked Otis Grow. He asked a man he had never seen before, a stooped man in a black coat with a chest as narrow as a board, who touched his hat brim lightly and introduced himself as Ephraim Vandegrift.

None of them had seen the mule. None of them, Emmett noted, seemed surprised by his question. He tried the trail out of the valley. He walked about half an hour up the shoulder pass he had come in by.

The pass rose and turned, rose and turned, and then something happened that Emmett could not later take in. He came out into the yard. His own yard. From the same direction he had left.

He tried the pass again. Same result. He tried the other path, the one that ran by the creek. Same result.

He came back into the yard at midday and sat on the edge of the stone well house and looked at his hands and was shaking. Alaric came and sat beside him. Alaric did not speak for some minutes. Then he said, “They need you.

” He said, “We need you. ” He said, “There used to be nine families living here. Now there are three. And the thing we watch does not care about such arithmetic.

It was set for nine. It needs nine. We have been holding it back with three for longer than we should have, and it is beginning to hunger. And when it hungers, it begins to look toward Whitesburg and beyond.

And it is not a thing you want looking toward Whitesburg. If you stay,” he said, “and if you take a name, and if you sit at the bell every dawn and every dusk for as many years as you can stand, the town will grow old and die in peace. The towns below and beyond, their people will die as people die, not as what came out of this valley, if you stay. ” Emmett said, “And if I don’t?

” Alaric was silent a long time. He said, “Then we will let you go. ” He said, “We will not stop you. ” He said, “The mule will be at the mouth of the valley at the start of the trail when you look for it.

” He said, “And something will go with you. ” He said, “Not something bad. And not something good. It is just something.

Not all of you will reach Whitesburg. Part of you will stay in the valley whether you want it to or not. And a piece of what is in the valley will come down on the mule with the rest of you. ” Emmett said, “That’s not a choice.

” Alaric said, “No. No, it isn’t. ” He said, “But it’s all we have. ” He said, “I stood where you are standing in 1871.

I made the same choice you are making. And I have thought about it every day of my life since. ” He said, “Whatever you decide, I will not blame you. ” Emmett said, “Talk to me plainly.

” Alaric looked at him. He said, “Plainness is not something this valley allows. ” He said, “But I will tell you as plainly as I am permitted. Whatever lies behind the little building at the back of this settlement was here before the first white man crossed the ridge.

And it was here when the people who lived here before the white man came came to it, and they knew how to deal with it, and they are the ones who taught the first families how to keep it. And then they left after they taught them, and nine families kept it. And now there are three. That is all I can tell you.

”

Emmett thought about it. He thought about Louisville. He thought about the third-floor office in the brick building. He thought about the woman he had meant to write to for six months, and had stopped answering her letters because he no longer had anything to say to a person who might want to read it.

He thought about the Wesson revolver in his saddlebag. And I want you to understand that he thought about it not because he was the kind of man who would use it that way, but because he wanted to know whether he had the nerve to be that kind of man. And he decided he was not. He said, “I’ll go down.

” Alaric nodded. He rose slowly from the edge of the well house. He said, “All right. Sundown will be the best time for you.

The bell will ring at sundown. When it rings, walk toward the start of the trail. Don’t look back. Don’t answer if you hear your name called.

Don’t stop for any reason. Isham is at the saddle. He’ll know you when he sees you. ”

He said one last thing.

He said, “When you reach Whitesburg, and when you get back to your home in Louisville, and for the rest of your life after that, don’t stand long in front of a mirror. Cover it if you can. And if you can’t, look at it directly and then look away. Don’t look long.

Don’t look for a face that isn’t your face. You will see it anyway,” he said. “But don’t look for it. ”

That was the last conversation Emmett Hirsch had in Wolf’s Neck valley.

At sundown the bell rang once, a long ring. Emmett rose from the threshold of Malvina’s house, where he had been sitting, and walked across the yard. He did not look at the well house. He did not look at the closed stone building.

He did not look at the little building at the back of the settlement. He walked to the mouth of the trail and went up it, and did not look back. He heard once, partway up, his name called. He heard twice a bell he assumed was behind him but that seemed to be moving away through the trees on his left.

He did not stop. He reached the top of the side trail and the trail bent, and this time it did not bring him back. It brought him out at the mouth of the valley, and the mule was there, saddled, its reins looped around a branch. He did not remember mounting the mule.

He did not remember the ride down. What he remembered next was Isham Vardee at the saddle where they had left, standing with his lantern raised, looking at his face. Isham said nothing. Isham took the mule’s rein and led it.

Emmett rode in silence back toward Whitesburg. During the ride down, at some point in the early hours before dawn, Isham stopped his mule and looked at him for a long minute in the lantern light. Emmett thought later that Isham was trying to decide whether both of them were still on the road. Neither of them spoke of it.

At Whitesburg, Isham put him in a room at the inn and took the room across the hall. Emmett slept eighteen hours. When he woke, he ate. When he finished eating, he wrote in his field book for four hours straight.

After that, he never opened it again. Isham took him to the station the next morning and put him on the train to Louisville, and shook his hand and asked him nothing. As the train moved, Isham said one thing. He said, “If you write to me, don’t put my name on the envelope.

Just the address. ” Emmett said he would not write. And he did not. In Louisville, Emmett submitted a report to the company.

He recommended against working Section 14. He noted the presence of residents on the parcel, and wrote that their claim to the land was older than the science of surveying ownership, and perhaps older than ownership itself. He signed the report and put it on the desk of the supervisor, whose name was Hallston. Hallston read it, laughed a short laugh, and sent a crew two weeks later.

The crew consisted of thirteen men. When they reached the mouth of Wolf’s Neck, they found no trail going up. They found a rockslide covering what should have been the shoulder pass. They walked the perimeter of the valley for three days looking for a way in, and found nothing.

They returned to Whitesburg and told Hallston they could not see what Emmett Hirsch had seen there. So Hallston, who was a company man to the bone, wrote in his report to the board that the parcel was inaccessible due to the terrain, and that Emmett Hirsch, in his opinion, had suffered a nervous breakdown of the kind common among men who spent too long alone in mountain country. Two men of that crew, according to their families, refused ever to work for Cumberland again after that trip. One of them, a surveyor’s assistant named Josephus Boyd, told his wife the night he came home that they had all heard a bell ringing in the woods on the second day.

The sound did not come from the valley. It came from behind them. He said it was walking, walking through the trees on the trail they had just come up. His wife wrote that down in her diary.

That is how we know about it. Emmett kept his job for another year. He became quieter than he had been before. He no longer accepted field assignments.

He worked from the office. He no longer looked in mirrors. He asked that the mirror be removed from his room at the boarding house and stored in the cellar, and he paid the landlady an extra dollar a month for the trouble. In the summer of 1909 he left that boarding house and rented a small room on Fifth Street, where there was no mirror in the parlor and none in the bath.

The landlady, a woman named Mrs. Ottinger who had known his mother, watched him and said nothing. She wrote later that he never looked at a window at night. He always drew the curtain first.

He stopped answering his mother’s letters. He stopped writing to the woman he had meant to write to. His sister came from Ohio in the autumn of 1912 to visit him, and wrote later that he met her at the door, sat with her at the kitchen table for two hours, made her tea, and asked the usual questions about her husband and her house, but he did not look directly at her face once during the whole visit. Not once, she wrote.

He looked at the door, or the table, or the window, or his hands. He did not look at me. And when I rose to leave, he said to me, “Forgive me. ” And I did not know what he was asking me to forgive him for.

She wrote that during that visit, he stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, went completely still, and tilted his head slightly to the left as though he were listening to something on the other side of the wall. She waited. After about a minute, by her estimate, he came back to himself, blinked once, and finished the sentence he had stopped in the middle of. She asked him what he had heard.

He said, “Nothing. The house is just settling. ” She wrote that his house had made no sound at all the entire time she was in it. No creaking floorboard.

No pipes. She wrote that when she went out onto Fifth Street to hail a cab back to the station, she turned and looked up at his kitchen window, and he was standing at the window watching her go. And the strange thing, as she wrote, was that he was standing very close to the glass, and there was no reflection of him in it. Not of his body.

Not of the kitchen behind him. Nothing. Just the window and her brother, and the sky behind them showing through the pane where her brother’s reflection should have been. She wrote that she tried to convince herself on the train back to Ohio that the light had been playing tricks, or that the glass was a strange kind, or that she was just tired.

And she wrote that she could not convince herself of any of these. She never went back. He continued to write in a field notebook he carried in his coat pocket, and after his death his sister gave the pages of that notebook to a doctor named Norbert Craddock, who was at the time working on a small study later published in a medical journal in Lexington about what he called dissociative episodes in the Appalachian highlands. Craddock’s study, if you can find a copy, is worth reading.

He treats Emmett kindly. He treats him as a case of something that has no name. He notes that Emmett spoke in his last two years of a feeling that part of him had never come back from a valley he visited in 1907. And that that part of him felt itself being counted from time to time in the early hours before dawn.

The word “counted” Craddock underlined. Craddock describes one of the visits to Emmett’s room where the patient stopped in the middle of a sentence, looked at the corner of the room, and did not move for eleven minutes. When he began to speak again, Craddock wrote, he finished his sentence from the same word he had stopped on, as though no time had passed at all. Craddock asked him what had happened in those eleven minutes.

Emmett said he had not known they had passed. Emmett Hirsch died on the third of March, 1915. He was forty-six years old. The cause of death listed on the certificate was heart failure.

He was found in his room on Fifth Street. The candle beside his bed was still burning. His hands were folded on his chest. His field notebook was open on the table beside the bed.

The last entry in it, in a hand Craddock later confirmed to be Emmett’s, was dated the second of March and contained these words: “They are counting me now. ” The mirror in the sitting room of the house had been covered at some point during the night with a heavy cloth, nailed in place with six iron tacks. The landlady swore she had not done it. No one else had a key.

I want to tell you that the end is here. It is not. Between 1910 and 1954, the Cumberland Lumber and Coal Company sent four more agents to Section 14. Their names, in order of going, were: Robin Pettit II, a nephew of the man mentioned in the log; Silas Ballance; Corwin Hedgepath; and in 1954, a man named August Fenimore.

All four returned. All four submitted the report Emmett had submitted. All four died of heart failure between the ages of forty-four and forty-seven. And in all of their rooms, at the time of their deaths, the mirror was covered.

Robin Pettit II died in 1922 in a company house in Harlan, Kentucky, at the age of forty-five. His widow told the coroner that in the last month of his life, he asked her every morning at breakfast whether she heard a bell. Every morning she said no. Every morning he nodded and went to the office.

Silas Ballance died in 1931 on a train, of what the conductor described as “sudden tranquility. ” He had been reading a newspaper. The conductor said Silas set the paper aside, folded it carefully in half, placed it on the seat beside him, closed his eyes, and did not open them again. The conductor added that the mirror at the end of the car had been covered, at some point in the last hour of that journey, with a black cloth no one knew the source of.

Corwin Hedgepath died in 1947 in a boarding house in Lexington run by the niece of the same Mrs. Ottinger who had lodged Emmett Hirsch. That niece also kept a diary. She wrote that Mr.

Hedgepath asked her at dinner on the night of his death whether she heard a bell. She said no. He nodded as though she had confirmed something for him, and said, “Well. ” Then he went up to his room and shut the door, and as far as she could tell, sat in the dark.

She could hear him breathing through the floorboards. In the morning he did not come down. The last of them, August Fenimore, left a written account that was included as an appendix in a later edition of Craddock’s study. Fenimore wrote—and this is the close of what he wrote—that he went up to Wolf’s Neck alone in 1954, and that there were, when he arrived, only two people in the valley.

A woman named Malvina Coles and an old man named Alaric Federman. He wrote that they looked exactly as Emmett Hirsch had described them forty-seven years earlier, not aged a day. He wrote that they said to him, “We need one more. ” He wrote that he refused.

He wrote that Malvina walked with him to the start of the trail and said to him at parting that he was the last the company would ever send. She told him, “We will hold on as long as we can. ” And she said, “We are sorry for what will happen when we can’t. ” He wrote—and this is the last line—that on the way down he heard, from somewhere behind him and a little to the left, the sound of a bell.

I don’t know what was in that valley. I have turned it over and over for a long time. I have my own thoughts. You will have yours.

What I come back to, always, is that log. That Emmett’s name was written in it in his own hand before he ever went up there. Willard Kesterston wrote, “My choice was free,” and beside his name was a K. And he spent the rest of his life in that valley because he chose it.

While August Fenimore chose the other path and went away to die in a rented room forty-six years later, with the sound of a bell receding through the trees to his left, and the mirror of the room covered by a hand no one could see. Some of you will write to me and say it was all hallucination. Some of you will write and say they were haunted by something they should have named, and by not naming it, they let it grow. Some of you will write and say this is why we do not sell land we have not walked.

I will read all of it. If this case has taken hold of you, tell me what you think in the comments. Tell me the strangest thing that ever happened to you on ground you did not fully know. I read them, and I think about them, and some of them end up in the next episode.

Sleep with a candle, just in case. And I will see you in the next one.