On a September morning in 1907, a land agent named Emmett Hirsch sat on a rented mule at a fork in a mountain trail in Letcher County, Kentucky, and listened to a man named Isham Vardie tell him how to survive the week ahead. Vardie, a lean man in his fifties with a black beard streaked with gray, had agreed to guide Hirsch to the entrance of a valley called Wolf’s Neck, but no farther. He had been there once, years ago, hunting bear. He had reached the door.

He had not crossed it. Vardie spoke quietly, like a man reciting instructions he had heard before and hoped never to need. Don’t wander after the bell rings. Don’t cross the creek at dusk.

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

Never refuse. And any room they put you in, if it has a mirror—and it will—keep it covered. Hirsch, who was thirty-eight years old and had spent most of his career on horseback surveying timber land for the Cumberland Lumber and Coal Company, looked at Vardie and said this was just a survey. He was measuring a piece of ground for the company.

Were there people up there? Yes, Vardie said. Probably. You might not see them.

But they might see you. Hirsch laughed once, a short, flat laugh. Vardie did not join him. Vardie said that if Hirsch wasn’t back by sunset Friday, he would come to the mouth of the valley.

He would not go farther. Hirsch said yes, and turned his mule up the right-hand trail alone. The trail was barely a memory of a trail, following a stream for the first mile and then climbing onto a bench under old hemlocks that had not been touched, as Hirsch noted, in at least a hundred years. He stopped and took two rough measurements before moving on, because timber like that would make any company man’s mouth water.

But he wrote in his field notebook that the silence under those trees was less silence than absence. No birds. The wind moved in the hemlock tops but never seemed to reach the ground. The sound of the creek vanished behind him within half a mile, as if the earth had swallowed it.

And the mule stopped sweating. It was a hard climb; the animal should have been lathered. It walked ahead of him, obedient, as though being led to a barn it didn’t know but didn’t particularly fear. An hour later the trail turned left around a rock outcrop, and the valley opened below him.

Seven cabins, arranged in an irregular ring around a wide clearing that had once been common pasture, with a low stone well-house in the middle. On the north side stood what he first took for a barn, but 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. Beyond it, deeper in the trees, he could see a low stone structure with a half-collapsed roof, and beyond that, something whitish that might have been a small chapel without a steeple.

He rode down into the clearing. Smoke rose from three of the chimneys. He counted five people in the yards and on the porches. No one moved toward him, but he had a strong feeling, which he recorded, that more of them were watching from behind the walls.

He dismounted at the well-house, held his mule’s reins, and waited. Three or four minutes passed. Then a woman came out of the nearest cabin. She was in her sixties or older, thin, with hair pulled back so tightly it looked painful, and a face made of long straight lines.

She wore black, with her sleeves rolled to the elbows, and her forearms were the strongest he had ever seen on a woman her age. She crossed the clearing, stopped at a polite distance, and said, “Land man. Just that. ” Two words.

Yes ma’am, Hirsch said. She said they had known someone would come. She said her name was Melvina Coles and she spoke for the valley. She said they had prepared a room for him.

Hirsch wrote her name in his notebook, and beside the phrase “prepared a room for you,” he put a question mark. He asked politely how they had known someone would come. She said they knew when the land changed hands. He asked how they could know that, three ridges and thirty miles from the courthouse.

She looked at him for a long second and did not answer. Inside her cabin, the front room was clean and dim: a table, a cast-iron stove, a rocking chair, a shelf with perhaps four books, one of them a Bible worn until its leather was black. Above the stove hung a small framed piece of embroidery in faded red thread. It said, “Guard the door.

” That was all. 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.

On the wall opposite the bed hung a half-length mirror, covered with a heavy dark cloth that had been sewn shut around the frame. Sewn, Hirsch wrote. Not draped, not pinned. A cover you couldn’t remove without cutting it.

He asked about it. Melvina said they covered them in every house. He asked why. She said because they did.

That evening he met three other inhabitants: an old man named Alaric Federman, with a beard the color of clean snow and eyes the color of a coming storm; a man his age named Otis Grow, who said nothing in Hirsch’s presence, only nodded, his hands trembling constantly in a way that seemed unconnected to anything he was doing; and a younger woman, perhaps forty-five, named Perpetua Lyle, who wore her hair in a braid down her back and watched Hirsch with a wariness that looked like interest, turning away too quickly whenever he met her eye. He counted five souls in the clearing that first evening, and over the day he saw or heard movement of six more inside the cabins. Eleven souls, he wrote. Not people.

Souls. At dinner—cornbread, beans cooked with a little salt meat, bitter coffee in tin cups—Hirsch asked about the buildings behind the cabins. He asked casually about the small chapel at the rear of the settlement. Alaric set down his spoon, looked at Melvina, looked at the table, and said that building was not a church.

What was it, then? Something old, Alaric said. It had been there when their great-great-grandparents came to the valley. They did not go past it.

Did anyone go past it? Anyone who went past it did not come back to ask that question. He asked about the well-house. Melvina said they did not draw water from the well.

What was it for, then? It’s for the well, she said. That first night, Hirsch did as Vardie had told him. He kept a candle burning on the box beside the bed.

He read a chapter of the Bible out of habit, because his mother had made him read one every night of his life and old habits persist for a reason. He slept in his boots. His sleep was poor. Shortly after midnight, the bell under the eaves of the building that was not a barn rang seven times, slowly, not a death knell but something like counting.

Hirsch lay in bed and counted 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 the window. He watched his door until the candle was down to its wick, then fell asleep without meaning to.

In the early hours he half-woke thinking 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 meant it. Before dawn he stood at his window and looked out.

There was a thin moon. Nothing moved. But he felt—and he recorded this when he returned to the office—that something had been moving a moment before he came to the window, and that his coming had stopped it. He wrote that whatever it was, it had been walking.

Not floating, not standing still. Walking, in a slow half-circle around the well-house, the way a farmer walks a piece of ground thinking about fencing it. The next morning he ate a bowl of oatmeal at Melvina’s table and asked to be shown the property line. Alaric said he would walk with him.

They crossed the clearing and climbed a side hollow on the west side of the valley. Hirsch carried his survey chain, his transit, his field book, his compass. Alaric carried nothing. He walked with the mountain man’s gait, unhurried, without waste.

On the western ridge, where the corner of the tract should be per the deed, Hirsch set up his transit and took a reading. The compass needle would not settle. It drifted slowly back and forth about ten degrees without stopping. He tapped it.

He waited. He tried a second compass from his bag. Same behavior. Alaric stood nearby, watching with a calm, patient expression, as though he had seen many men arrive at this part of the day.

Hirsch asked if anyone had ever brought a compass up here before. Yes, Alaric said. What happened? It never worked, Alaric said, in the tone of a man stating a fixed fact of the country.

Hirsch wrote in his notebook: “The needle will not settle. The compass is unreliable in this valley. ” He tried to fix the boundary by sight instead, choosing landmarks. The trouble was that looking down from the ridge, the well-house, the building with the bell, the closed stone structure, and the small building at the rear were not arranged as they had appeared from below.

He could not have said why. They simply were not. He wrote: “Checking bearings against sketch from clearing. Bearings do not match.

Will try again from north ridge tomorrow. ” He surveyed 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 a very short line in the notebook: “This tract cannot be surveyed.

” He crossed it out and wrote beneath it, in smaller letters: “This tract does not wish to be surveyed. ” He crossed that out too. But it remained legible, and later readers of the notebook could make it out. On the way back down they passed the low stone structure at the rear of the settlement, the one with the half-collapsed roof.

It was another well-house, or at least shaped like one. No door, only an opening, the inside too dark to see anything. There was a smell coming off it, not a bad smell, not quite the cold smell of a springhouse, but strange, like water that had never seen light. Hirsch stepped toward it.

Alaric put a hand on his shoulder, very lightly, almost politely. He did not press. He said, please don’t. Hirsch didn’t.

Later, sitting in Melvina’s front room with his notebook open on his knee, Hirsch tried to draw a map of the settlement from memory. He drew the well-house in the center, the seven cabins around it, the building that was not a barn with its bell, the closed stone structure, the small building at the rear with no cross on its roof. Then he stopped, because while drawing it, he realized he could not remember whether the small building had windows. He went out the cabin door to look.

From the clearing he could see its roof above the trees. He counted. Three windows on the side facing him. He went back inside, sat down, picked up his pencil.

The moment he tried to draw the windows, he could not remember how many there were. He went out again. Counted again. Three.

Went back inside. Drew two. Looked at what he had drawn. Said aloud, “Three.

” Drew a third window. Looked at what he had drawn. Still only two. He put the pencil down and wrote in the margin, in a hand different from the rest of the entry: “I cannot hold the number of windows in my memory.

I cannot hold them on the page. ”

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. That evening he tried something else. He asked Melvina if he could see the graveyard.

She told him where it was, up a small hollow on the west side of the clearing, and said, go if you want, but don’t touch the stones. He walked up alone. A quarter mile. Twenty-two stones, he counted twice to be sure, all low, rough-cut limestone, unworked, set in the earth.

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

R. KR. Some had a small crescent hollow carved above the letter. Some did not.

The ground under his boots was very soft, the way ground gets in a place few people have walked for a long time. No plots defined, no fence. When he stepped back and looked at them from the edge, he saw they were arranged in a rough ring, like the cabins below. Seven stones in the outer ring.

Inside that, another ring of seven. Then in the center, one stone alone, taller than the rest by a hand’s width, bearing no letter at all. The ground around it was slightly lower than the ground around the other stones, as though something had settled beneath it. The stone was faintly 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 stood there a long time. A very light rain began. He wrote in his notebook: “No names, no dates, only K and R. Some stones marked, some not.

” And beneath that, without crossing 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 the one who carved them knew, and everyone in the valley knows, and no one speaks of it, because speaking of it might summon it. ”

On the third day, Melvina led him to the cabin she said had been used by the men who came before him.

It was the smallest of the seven, with no fire, no bed, and the smell of paper. On a table under the window lay a ledger, not a small book but a work log the size of a company register, bound in dark green cloth, its spine cracked from opening. She said, this is what they left. We don’t touch it, she said.

But perhaps you would like to. Then she went out and closed the door. It was a Cumberland ledger; he recognized the printer’s mark on the inside cover. The entries were written in many hands over a period he later estimated at thirty-two years.

Each entry began with a name and a date: Ansel Kirkpatrick, June 1875. Willard Ketterson, October 1893. Cyrus Voyle, April 1896. Robin Pettit, September 1899.

Harmon Cleary, August 1902. Josiah Enfield, May 1905. Beside some names was a small mark. A K.

Beside others, an R. Beside some, both. Beside some, nothing. By the end of the evening he had reasoned that K meant “kept” and R meant “returned,” that some names had been returned, some kept, and some neither.

He did not yet know what those words meant. Most of the entries were survey notes, distances, boundary marks, timber estimates. Some broke off mid-sentence. One, for Ansel Kirkpatrick, ended with the line: “This land does not permit an accurate reading.

” The entry for Cyrus Voyle ended: “My chain is a foot shorter than it was on Tuesday, and I do not know why. ” Willard Ketterson’s entry ended: “If anyone reads this, I have chosen to stay in the valley, and my choice was made of my own free will. ” His name was one of those marked with a K. Hirsch read that sentence several times.

Beside it he wrote in his own notebook: “Of your own free will? ” with a question mark. He turned the pages until he reached the last one with writing on it. There at the top, in his own hand, was written: “Emmett Hirsch, September 1907.

” And beside the name, no mark. Only the space where the mark should be. He sat staring at it for what he later said was a long time. His own handwriting.

The letters of his name at the end of it, inside the little loop he had made his letters in since he was a boy. And no memory, none, of writing it there. He closed the ledger. He went out and crossed the clearing to Melvina’s cabin and asked her plainly what the marks meant.

She said, kept and returned. Kept meaning? Kept meaning stayed. And returned meaning?

Returned meaning went home. Then she said, but not all who returned home were the ones who left. She looked at him steadily and did not blink. Hirsch 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, read a chapter of the Bible, slept or tried to. At a time he could not later fix, the bell rang. But this time it rang twice, about a minute apart.

After the second ringing, he heard from outside the cabin, at what he judged to be Melvina’s front threshold, someone calling his name. “Emmett. ” Just that. Twice.

The voice was his own. He did not answer. He did not move. He lay in bed with the candle burning low and listened to his own voice.

On the other side of a door he had barred from within, it called his name a third time, then a fourth, then stopped. Then he heard, from inside the room where he lay, from the corner behind the covered mirror, a fifth call: “Emmett. ” From behind him, inside the room, in his own tone of voice. He did not turn his head.

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

But he felt, as he wrote, that the wall with the mirror 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 record it because I do not trust my ability to remember it accurately in the morning.

”

In the morning he made his decision. He would leave. He would report that the land was unfit for work. He would go down to Isham at the saddle and go home.

He walked to the shed behind Melvina’s cabin where he had put his mule the first night. The mule was not there. He walked the whole settlement and asked everyone he passed. He asked Perpetua Lyle.

He asked Otis Grow. He asked a man he had not seen before, a stooped man in a black coat with a chest narrow as a board, who touched his hat brim and gave his name as Ephraim Vandegrift. No one had seen the mule. No one, he noted, looked surprised at the question.

He tried the trail out of the valley. He walked half an hour up the shoulder trail he had come in on. It rose and turned, rose and turned, and then something happened that Hirsch could not later absorb. He came out into the clearing.

His own clearing. From the same direction he had left. He tried the trail again. Same result.

He tried the other trail, the one that ran beside the stream. Same result. He came back into the clearing 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.

After a few minutes, Alaric said, they need you. We need you. There used to be nine families living here, he said. Three remain.

The thing we watch does not care about those arithmetic sums. It was fixed on nine. It needs nine. We have been holding it back with three for longer than we should, and it has begun to hunger.

And when it hungers, it begins to look toward Whitesburg and beyond. It is not a thing you want looking toward Whitesburg. If you stay, he said. If you take a name.

If you sit at the bell every dawn and every dusk for as many years as you can manage, the town down below will grow old and die in peace. The towns below and beyond, their people will die the way people die, not the way things come out of this valley. If you stay. Hirsch said, and if I don’t?

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

And something will go with you. Not something bad. Not something good. Just something.

Not all of you will reach Whitesburg. A part of you will stay in the valley whether you want it or not. And a piece of what is in the valley will come down on the mule with the rest of you. Hirsch said that wasn’t a choice.

No, Alaric said. No, it isn’t. But it’s all we have. I was in your place in 1871.

I made your same choice. And I have thought about it every day of my life since. Whatever you decide, I will not blame you. Hirsch said, talk to me plainly.

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

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

Hirsch thought about it. He thought about Louisville. About the third-floor office in the brick building. About the woman he had meant to write to for six months, whom he had stopped answering because he had nothing left to say to a person who might want to read it.

He thought about the Wesson revolver in his saddlebag, not because he was the kind of man who would use it that way, but because he wanted to know whether he had the courage to be that kind of man. He decided he did not. He said, I’m going down. Alaric nodded and rose slowly from the edge of the well-house.

Good, he said. Sunset is the best time for you. The bell will ring at sunset. 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 will know you when he sees you. He said one last thing: when you reach Whitesburg, and when you get home to Louisville, and for the rest of your life, don’t stand long before 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’ll see it anyway. But don’t look for it.

At sunset the bell rang once, long. Hirsch rose from Melvina’s threshold, where he had been sitting, and crossed the clearing. He did not look at the well-house. He did not look at the closed stone structure.

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

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

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

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

In Whitesburg, Isham put him in a room at the inn and took the room across the hall. Hirsch slept eighteen hours. When he woke he ate. When he finished eating, he wrote in his field notebook 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, shook his hand, and asked him nothing. As the train moved off, Isham said one thing: if you write to me, don’t put my name on the envelope. Just the address.

Hirsch said he wouldn’t write. He didn’t. In Louisville, Hirsch filed his report with the company. He recommended against working Tract 14.

He noted there were inhabitants on the tract, and wrote that their claim to the land was older than the science of surveying ownership, and perhaps older than ownership itself. He signed it and put it on the desk of the supervisor, a man named Halston. Halston read it and laughed a short laugh, and sent a crew two weeks later—thirteen men. When they reached the mouth of Wolf’s Neck, they found no trail up.

They found a rockfall covering where the shoulder trail should have been. They walked the perimeter of the valley for three days looking for a way in and found nothing. They returned to Whitesburg and told Halston they could not see what Emmett Hirsch had seen there. Halston, a company man to the bone, wrote in his report to the board that the tract was inaccessible due to the terrain, and that Emmett Hirsch, in his opinion, had suffered a nervous breakdown of the kind common to men who spent too long alone in the mountains.

Two men from 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 got home that they had all heard a bell ringing in the woods on the second day. The sound hadn’t come from the valley. It had come from behind them.

He said it was walking, moving through the trees on the trail they had just come up. His wife recorded it in her diary. That is how we know about it. Hirsch kept his job another year.

He grew quieter than he had been. He stopped taking field assignments. He worked from the office. He stopped looking at mirrors.

He asked to have the mirror removed from his room at the boarding house and stored in the cellar, and paid the landlady an extra dollar a month for the trouble. In the summer of 1909 he left that house and rented a small room on Fifth Street, where there was no mirror in the parlor and no mirror in the bath. The landlady, a 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. She wrote later that he met her at the door, sat with her at the kitchen table for two hours, made her tea, asked the usual questions about her husband and her home—but he never once looked directly at her face. Not once, she wrote. He looked at the door, the table, the window, or his hands.

Not at me. When she got up to leave, he said, forgive me. She didn’t know what he was asking her to forgive. She wrote that during that visit, he stopped talking mid-sentence and went completely still, tilting his head slightly to the left, as though listening to something on the other side of the wall.

After what she judged to be a full minute, he came back to himself, blinked once, and finished the sentence he had stopped in the middle of. She asked what he had heard. He said, nothing, the house is just settling. She wrote that his house made no sound at all the whole time she was in it.

No creaking floorboard, no pipes. She wrote that when she stepped out onto Fifth Street to take a cab back to the station, she turned and looked up at his kitchen window, and he was standing there watching her leave. The strange thing, she wrote, was that he stood very close to the glass, and there was no reflection of him in it. Not his body, not the kitchen behind him.

Nothing. Just the window and her brother, and the sky beyond showing through the pane where his reflection should have been. She tried to convince herself on the train back to Ohio that the light had been deceptive, or that the glass was of an odd kind, or that she was simply tired. She wrote that she could not convince herself of any of those.

She never came again. He kept writing in a field notebook he carried in his coat pocket. After his death, his sister gave the pages to a physician named Norbert Kraddock, who was then working on a small study later published in a Lexington medical journal about what he called dissociative episodes in the Appalachian mountains. Kraddock treated Emmett kindly.

He treated him as a case of something that had no name. He noted that in his last two years Emmett spoke of a feeling that part of him had never returned from a valley he visited in 1907, and that that part of him felt itself being counted, at intervals, in the hours before dawn. Kraddock underlined the word “counted. ” He described one of his visits to Emmett’s room where the patient stopped mid-sentence, looked at the corner of the room, and did not move for eleven minutes.

When he began speaking again, Kraddock wrote, he resumed his sentence at the same word he had stopped on, as though no time had passed at all. Kraddock asked what had happened in those eleven minutes. Emmett said he had not known they passed. Emmett Hirsch died on March 3, 1915.

He was forty-six. The cause of death on his 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 lay open on the table beside the bed. The last entry, in handwriting Kraddock later confirmed was Emmett’s, was dated March 2 and contained these words: “They are counting me now. ”

The mirror in the sitting room of the house had been covered sometime in the night with a heavy cloth, fastened with six iron nails.

The landlady swore she had not done it. No one else had a key. I would like to tell you that the end is here. It is not.

Between 1910 and 1954, Cumberland Lumber and Coal sent four more agents to Tract 14. Their names, in order of going, were Robin Pettit II, nephew of the Robin Pettit in the ledger; Silas Ballance; Corwin Hedgepath; and in 1954, a man named August Vennimore. All four came back. All four filed the report Emmett had filed.

All four died of heart failure between the ages of forty-four and forty-seven. In all their rooms at the time of death, the mirror was covered. Robin Pettit II died in 1922 in a company house in Harlan, Kentucky, aged 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 stillness. ” 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 never opened 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 origin of. Corwin Hedgepath died in 1947 in a Lexington boarding house run by the niece of the very Mrs. Ottinger who had housed 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 and said, good. Then he went up to his room and closed the door, and as far as she could tell, sat in the dark. She could hear his breathing through the floorboards. In the morning he did not come down.

The last of them, August Vennimore, left a written account that was appended to a later edition of Kraddock’s study. Vennimore wrote that he went up to Wolf’s Neck alone in 1954, and that when he arrived, only two people were in the valley. A woman named Melvina 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 a day older.

He wrote that they told him, we need one more. He wrote that he refused. He wrote that Melvina walked with him to the start of the trail and said at parting that he would be the last one the company ever sent. She said, we’ll 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 as he descended, he heard, from somewhere behind him and slightly to his left, a bell. I do not know what was in that valley. I have thought about it again and again for a long time.

I have my own ideas. You will have yours. What I keep coming back to is that ledger. That Emmett’s name was written in it, in his own hand, before he ever went up there.

Willard Ketterson wrote that his choice was made of his own free will, and beside his name was a K. He chose to spend the rest of his life in that valley, because he chose it. And August Vennimore chose the other road, and left to die in a rented room forty-six years later, with a bell receding through the trees on his left, and a mirror in the room covered by a hand no one could see. Each of them, in his own way, stayed.

Each of them, in his own way, went home. The valley kept what it kept, and returned what it returned—and it was never quite sure which was which. Nor, in the end, was anyone who walked out of it.