Absalom Vail sat at a long wooden table in a three-room inn above a cookhouse, his hands resting flat on the boards. The widow who ran the place, Rua Colburn, had set pork and cornbread before him and waited until he had eaten most of it before asking where he meant to ride in the morning. When he told her, she studied his hands with a careful attention, as if holding them still before they could move on their own. “You survey,” she said.

He said that he did. “And nobody told you,” she said. “Told me what? ”

She looked at him for a long, slow moment, then said, “Sit there, Mr.

Vail. I’ll fetch Barnabas. ”

Barnabas Combs ran the general store across the way. He was a heavy man in his mid-fifties with a long forked beard, still wearing his apron when he came in.

He sat across from Absalom without a word and waited until Rua had closed the kitchen door and brought coffee. “You’re going up the hollow tomorrow,” Barnabas said. “That’s the plan. ”

Barnabas said, “Whitston didn’t tell you anything.

”

Absalom said he had been told the mountain people had some strange ideas about the land. Barnabas Combs made a sound at the back of his throat that was not quite a laugh. “Listen, Mr. Vail.

I’ll say this once. If you decide to go anyway, I won’t stand in a grown man’s way. But I’ll say it. ” The hollow he was heading into was called something else on the old maps—Hangman’s Hollow.

There was a tree at the head of that hollow, or there had been in his father’s time: a massive black oak with a burned top. That tree had hanged eleven men over two summers, in 1793 and 1794, back when law and lynching ran together in that country. Some of them deserved it; some of them did not. After the last one was cut down, the men who had hanged them began dying in unhappy ways.

Not all at once. Over the years, one by one, each of them in the woods, each of them alone. Then a family had gone up into the hollow at the turn of the century and taken the tree for themselves. They took the tree’s name for themselves, too, and they had been there ever since.

Three generations of them that Barnabas knew of. They answered to no authority, no court, and they never came down to the crossing. “What’s their name? ” Absalom asked.

“These people. ”

Barnabas said their name was Maroon. He pronounced it the way a man says a word he does not want to linger in his mouth. “Old Isham Maroon is the head of them now.

His brother Vardaman lives with him. A cousin named Thorl. A woman named Merritt, who was married to the third one before he was buried. Maybe a few others.

I don’t go up there, and I don’t ask. ”

“And nobody’s surveyed it,” Absalom said. Barnabas said a man from Frankfort had come in 1844 to try. He had not come out.

His horse came down twelve days later, alone. There was no saddle on it, just a bridle, cinched up neat as if you meant to leave a horse for someone. Rua Colburn, standing by the stove, said quietly, “And there was one from Cincinnati in 1851. Timberman.

” Barnabas said the result was the same. There had been others—not surveyors, just men who went up into that hollow for one reason or another and did not come back. The county sheriff had not gone up there in all of Barnabas’s life. He rode right past the mouth of that trail and pretended he was going somewhere else.

Absalom sat with this for a while. Then he said, “And nobody’s ever gone up there and come back. ”

Barnabas Combs did something strange then. He looked at Rua Colburn, and Rua Colburn looked back at Barnabas Combs and after a moment Barnabas said, “I know of one case in my whole life.

A young preacher went up there in the summer of ’39. He stayed in that hollow six days. On the seventh day, he rode his little horse down the mountain to Red Fern Crossing, went past my store without stopping, and out the other end of town. He was never seen in this county again.

”

“Then he survived,” Absalom said. Barnabas said, “He came out of the hollow. That’s what he did. Whether that counts as surviving, Mr.

Vail, is a question I stopped answering when I was younger than you. ”

They sat with that. Then Barnabas Combs said, “If you go—and I can see plain enough that you will—I’ll tell you three things and ask you to remember them. First, don’t eat their salt.

If they put salt on your plate, leave it. If they put salt in your coffee, leave the coffee. Once you eat their salt, you’re a guest. And their idea of guest is not like ours.

Second, don’t sleep with a door behind you. Whatever room they give you, whatever bed—turn it if you have to, sit up if you have to, but don’t put your sleep between yourself and any door in that house. Third, if the sun goes down and you’re still walking, sit down. Don’t keep walking.

That hollow is not what it is in daylight, and it’s less so in the dark. ”

Absalom Vail said he would remember. He rode out the next morning. He was not a superstitious man and he was not a fool.

He was educated for his time, and his time was the 1850s, when educated men in Kentucky were beginning to speak the language of science and geology and the logical order of things. He set out from Red Fern Crossing believing what Barnabas Combs had told him, but believing it the way one believes a story told carefully over coffee—part of him believing, the rest of him continuing the survey. The road narrowed to a track after two miles. The track narrowed to a footpath after five.

The trees closed in and did not open again. He rode Mayor where he could and led her where he could not. By mid-afternoon of the second day, he was inside the hollow itself. He was descending.

That was the first strange thing. Kentucky hills run high and cold at the tops, warm and green below. You climb out of one valley and down into another. Not this one.

He crossed the last ridge and the trail dropped, down and down and down, farther than the hill behind him should have allowed. He kept looking back to check the elevation because it was beginning to worry him arithmetically. By his estimate he was walking below the level of the creeks he had crossed that morning, and the creeks still ran somewhere above him, and yet no water came down here. The light changed too.

It turned from the usual yellow of an autumn afternoon into something brown. Not darker, exactly—older. The way light looks when it passes through several panes of window glass, or through the leaves of a season that is not the season you are standing in. The third thing was the smell.

He noticed it just before he heard the first voice. It was not unpleasant. That was what made it strange. Woodsmoke and old apples and something else underneath—something like the inside of a cellar.

Familiar, almost. If you were asked to describe the smell of a well-kept mountain kitchen at suppertime in October, you might come close. The voice that came was a woman’s. It said, from somewhere on his right among the trees, “Sir.

That Mayor of yours is about to throw a shoe on the near front. Best stop and see to her. ”

He stopped. He looked.

He saw no one. He looked at Mayor. The near front shoe was loose. Not thrown, but loose, and it would have been thrown within the hour if he had not fixed it.

He set down his gear. He worked at the shoe. It took him a quarter of an hour, kneeling in the leaves, sweating with cold. When he stood up, the woman was standing on the trail not three yards from him, and he had not heard her come.

She was in her mid-forties, not tall, broad-shouldered, in a plain gray dress and an iron-colored shawl. Her hair was yellow like old straw. Her face was not unkind. Her eyes were very pale—so pale in the brown light that they seemed to have no color at all.

She said, “I’m Merritt Maroon. You’re the Louisville man. ”

He said he was. She said, “My father-in-law sent me to bring you in.

The road to the house is farther than you’ll want to walk in the dark, and dark comes early here. Come on, then. ”

She turned. She walked.

He followed. He noticed as he walked behind her that Merritt Maroon did not move the leaves. His boots kicked them; hers did not. He decided this was a trick of the light.

It was one of the small decisions Absalom Vail made in that first hour that he would later revisit, sitting alone in a room in Louisville, turning it over and trying to understand it. The Maroon place sat at the far back of the hollow, in a small cleared yard, with three log dwellings facing inward around a fire pit. That was the fourth strange thing, and a surveyor would notice it: mountain houses in that region always faced south or east to catch the morning sun. The Maroon houses did not.

They faced each other, their doors opening onto the common ground between them. Their few windows looked onto the same common ground. Not one window in any of those three buildings looked out at the woods. Old Isham Maroon stood at the door of the largest house, waiting.

He was in his mid-sixties then, shorter than Absalom, spare-bodied, with silver hair combed back from a broad forehead. He was clean-shaven, which was rare in that country and that year. He wore a black coat over a white shirt buttoned to the throat, and he had the courtesy of the old mountain gentry who had come from Virginia and Carolina before the turn of the century. He took off his hat when Absalom rode in, came down off the porch, and shook the surveyor’s hand.

“Welcome to our home, Mr. Vail,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you. ”

“You were expecting me,” Absalom said.

Old Isham smiled a small neat courteous smile. “We don’t get much mail up here, sir, but word of a company survey spreads. It wasn’t hard to know they’d send someone eventually. Glad it’s you.

”

The other two came out of the smaller houses. Vardaman Maroon was a huge man, over six feet, barrel-chested, with a thick gray beard that reached the second button of his coat. He did not speak then or later. He nodded once to Absalom and stood by his brother.

Thorl Maroon was in his early thirties, lean and tall, with sharp features. He carried a rifle in the crook of his arm the way a man carries an old friend. His eyes went to Absalom’s gear before they went to his face. Absalom noticed, and would remember it later.

The three of them and Merritt Maroon stood in the common yard, and old Isham said, “We’ve made up a room for you in the west house. You’ll take supper with us tonight, and we’ll talk about the survey in the morning. The trail you came in on will be dark within the hour. You’ve had a long day, sir.

”

Absalom Vail thanked him. He tied the mare in a small lean-to at the edge of the clearing and walked toward the west house behind Merritt Maroon, and that was when he passed the fourth building, the one he had not seen from the trail because it sat behind the largest of the three dwellings. It was smaller than the houses, more square, built of logs, but the seams were fitted so tightly that the joints were almost invisible. It had no windows at all, and its door was barred from the outside with an iron bar as thick as a man’s wrist, set into two big staples driven deep into the wood.

“Granary? ” Absalom asked. Merritt Maroon did not turn. She said, in a tone he could not read, “We call it the storehouse.

”

She opened the door of the west house and said, “Supper in an hour. ”

That was the end of Absalom Vail’s first day in Hangman’s Hollow. Merritt Maroon set a long wooden table in the largest of the three houses, old Isham’s house. Five places were laid: old Isham at the head, Vardaman at his right, Thorl at his left, Merritt at the foot, and Absalom Vail down the side facing old Isham.

The food was simple and good. Pork, corn, squash, a pot of white beans, a plate of pickled beets, cornbread baked in a heavy iron skillet, and in the middle of the table, a small dish of white salt. Old Isham said, “The blessing. ” It was not the blessing Absalom Vail had grown up with in his Presbyterian childhood.

It was longer than usual, and it mentioned no God by any name he knew. “We thank the ground under this house for what it gives, and we thank the hollow that shelters us, and we thank the tree at the head of the hollow that watches over us. ” Then: “Amen. ”

Absalom Vail said, “Amen.

”

He noticed, as they began to eat, that no one at that table reached for the salt. He noticed too that Merritt Maroon was watching him—not staring, just watching. He remembered Barnabas Combs. Midway through the meal, old Isham himself lifted the small salt dish in his hand.

He turned it between his fingers, and said to Absalom, “Sir, forgive me, but you haven’t seasoned your food. Merritt’s cooking is good enough, and I don’t blame her, but perhaps our salt doesn’t suit your taste. It’s a poor host who doesn’t offer. ”

Absalom Vail looked at that small white dish.

He almost reached for it. He had ridden all day. He had been received with courtesy. He was hungry.

He had been raised to be polite at a stranger’s table, and a simple refusal at a table like this one was far harder than a simple acceptance. But he thought of Barnabas’s plate, and he heard in his head the voice of that big bearded man: “Don’t eat their salt. ”

Absalom Vail said, “Sir, I’m grateful to you, but I have a condition of the blood that won’t allow me salt. My physician in Louisville has forbidden it these three years past.

Your table is fine as it is. ”

Old Isham Maroon set the small dish back in its place. He looked at Absalom Vail for a long moment, and then he smiled. It was the same small neat courteous smile he had smiled at the door.

“Well, then, we won’t trouble you. Forgive me, sir. ”

Nothing at the table changed. The talk went on.

Vardaman ate in silence. Thorl asked polite questions about Louisville and the roads and that year’s crops. Old Isham talked about the hollow and the weather and the tree at its head, which he called by name, the Tree, as if it were a person everyone knew. Merritt Maroon did not say much, but she smiled slightly once.

When Absalom Vail refused the salt, the smile was gone from her face within a second. He would think later that she had smiled the way one smiles at a rabbit that has understood the trap. He slept that first night in the west house. He did what Barnabas Combs had told him.

He moved the small rope bed so that the door was at his right, not behind him. He set his gear beside the door before he lay down, so that anything opening it would have to move the gear, and moving the gear would wake him. He kept his boots on. He kept his pistol, an old Colt, carried by habit more than expectation, under the folded blanket he used as a pillow.

He slept poorly. He slept the way a man sleeps in a strange bed when the wind makes a sound outside that he cannot identify. At some point he heard footsteps in the common yard. Not many.

A few. At another point he heard a low hum—not a tune, just a long tone, almost inside the walls of the house rather than outside. But he heard nothing at his door, and by morning he was beginning to convince himself that Barnabas Combs was an old man with old men’s fears, and Rua Colburn a widow with too much time, and the Maroons, whatever else they were, only mountain folk with mountain habits. The second day was for starting the survey.

Old Isham brought out a hand-drawn map of the hollow, drawn by his own father, he said, at the turn of the century. Absalom Vail laid it on the wooden table and studied it. It was a good map for something drawn by hand. The major features were correct.

A small cross was marked at the tree at the head of the hollow. The three houses and the fourth windowless building were drawn in. And at points that seemed random to the surveyor, small circles were inked in. He counted them.

Seventeen. Absalom asked what the circles were. Old Isham said, “They’re marks, Mr. Vail.

My father put them there. They have to do with the way of the hollow. They won’t affect your survey. You can walk right past them and never notice.

”

Absalom Vail went out that morning with Thorl Maroon as his guide, at old Isham’s suggestion. Thorl carried the rifle. Absalom carried the compass and the field notebook. Mayor was left in the lean-to.

Thorl said Mayor would hide in the deep parts of the hollow. He said this without looking at Absalom. They worked for four hours in the north part of the hollow. Absalom took his bearings, marked witness trees, read the numbers.

Thorl recorded them for him in the field notebook at Absalom’s request. Thorl’s hand was surprisingly fine, like copperplate, the hand of a man who had learned to write at some point, for someone who cared how it looked. Around midday they reached the first of the circle marks on old Isham’s map. It was a beech tree, and on the beech tree, at about a man’s chest height, a mark was carved.

It was not a letter, and not a shape Absalom recognized. Three lines meeting at a point, with a fourth line running across them. Old, deep, cut into the tree so long ago that the bark had grown thick and knotted around it—whoever had made the mark, whoever he was, must have gone to dust a generation since. “One of the marks,” Absalom said.

“Yes,” Thorl said. “And what does it mean? ”

“That’s a question for old Isham, sir. ”

“But you know.

”

Thorl Maroon looked at him then for the first time since they had left the clearing. His eyes were pale, colorless, like Merritt Maroon’s. Two of the Maroons with the same colorless eyes. In a family, it was not unusual.

Absalom buried the thought. Thorl said, “I know what my kin know, and that’s not the same as knowing what a thing means. Old Isham’s father put these marks down. His father drove them into the tree.

We keep them. ”

“You keep them from what? ”

“From anything that might try to leave. ”

He walked around the tree once, slowly.

He put his hand on the bark just below the mark, left it there for a moment, then took it away. “This is the oldest tree still standing. There was an older one up the hill, but the bank it stood on washed out in the winter I was born. My uncle went out to put a new mark, and he came back the next morning with the new mark cut into his own arm because he couldn’t find the right tree in time.

He carried it the rest of his life. Said it was easier that way. ”

“And your uncle is buried,” Absalom said. “What are those nine years?

” Absalom asked. “Of what? ”

Thorl said, “The same thing we all bury, sir, in this hollow, when our time comes. ”

He did not explain what it was.

He kept walking. He said it as plainly as a workman says something about his trade. Absalom Vail stood there in the brown light of Hangman’s Hollow, looking at a mark cut into a tree by a man dead fifty years. And he understood for the first time, in a place in him older than his education and older than his profession, that Barnabas Combs had not been a foolish old pessimist.

He said nothing to Thorl. He wrote the location of the mark in his notebook. They walked on. He noticed things.

That evening he noticed there were no birds in the hollow. No blue jays, no sparrows, no crows. He had been in the hollow a day and a half, and he had not heard one call, not one. A hollow as quiet as that was not a natural thing in a Kentucky autumn.

He noticed that the stream beds, though dry in the bottom of the hollow, were coated with moss and stained the way a watercourse is when water has run through it recently, and yet no water was running through them. And yet, when the wind blew from the right direction, he heard the faint sound of water running somewhere—somewhere that, by the shape of the land, could not be near. He noticed that Vardaman Maroon, the great silent brother, went out of the clearing every evening at dusk carrying an iron pail, and came back after full dark with the pail empty, and no one spoke of where he had gone. He noticed that the fourth building, the one Merritt Maroon called the storehouse, was visited by old Isham himself once every morning at first light.

Old Isham went to it alone. He stood at the barred door for about a minute. He said something to it, too. The voice was too faint for Absalom to catch, and then he walked away, and no one approached it for the rest of the day.

Absalom Vail noticed these things and wrote them in his field notebook, in the back, where survey notes were not kept. On the evening of the third day, sitting alone in the west house with the lamp low, he took out his field notebook and read what he had written there, and realized he had begun, without deciding to, keeping a record of a different kind. That night he heard the voices. He was awake when he heard them.

He had trained himself since Barnabas Combs to wake at every noise. The voices came at about what he judged to be midnight. There was more than one voice. He could not count them.

He would say later in Louisville that it sounded like more than five and fewer than twenty, and he could not narrow it further. They were speaking, or doing something like speaking. He could not make out any words. The sound was low and rhythmical, and the rhythm was the rhythm of speech.

But the words, if there were words, were not words in any language he had ever heard. Absalom Vail had heard the French that rivermen spoke, and the German of the settlers north of the Ohio, and the Cherokee of the old people down the hill. This was none of those. It was not any language.

And here is the part he wanted heard: the voices came from the woods, and the Maroons in the two houses across the common yard did not stir. Not one door opened. Not one lamp was lit. Not one voice was raised inside those walls to ask what was making the sound.

Absalom Vail lay in his bed and listened until the voices stopped, which was shortly before dawn. He did not sleep after that. He watched the light come. When it was light enough to read, he took out his notebook and wrote at the back, in a hand steadier than he felt, “I do not believe I will be permitted to leave this hollow.

”

Later, in Louisville, he would take that page from the notebook and keep it folded in his wallet for the rest of his life. On the fourth day, he found the bones. He had gone out that morning without a guide. He told old Isham over porridge that he wanted to work the east side of the mountain that day, and that he preferred to work alone because he would be climbing and did not want to slow his guide down.

Old Isham thought about this in his polite organized way, then said, “Certainly, Mr. Vail. Merritt will fix you a lunch. ”

Merritt Maroon had fixed him a lunch.

He did not eat it. He walked past the east section and circled around it. Mid-morning, he came into a small side hollow off the main one, one that was not on old Isham’s map. And in that hollow, in a shallow depression partly covered with leaves, he found a rib.

A human rib. He knew what it was in a moment. He had surveyed enough ground to know the difference between a deer’s rib and a man’s, and it was a man’s rib, and it was not new. The bone was clean and dry, the color of old ivory, weather-worn.

He pushed the leaves aside. There was more than one rib. He found the remains of what he estimated, from their arrangement, to be seven men. And they had not been buried.

They had been placed, every one of them, in the same arrangement, with their arms crossed and their feet pointing toward the head of the hollow—toward the tree. The oldest of them was nearly bone. Moss had grown over his ribs and settled there. Roots had grown through some of them, and the hollow had begun, slowly and patiently, to take those bodies back.

The newer ones had not yet been taken. Absalom Vail knelt in that small hollow for what he later judged to be about an hour. He did not touch anything after the compass. He counted the men.

He wrote their arrangement in the back of his field notebook, in a shorthand he had never used before and would never use again. He tried once to say a Protestant prayer over them, and found he could not form the words. He tried once to close his eyes, and found he could not do that either. He noticed, at some point during that hour, that the ground under the men was warmer than the ground around them, and that the leaves over them, where he had pushed them aside, were drier than the leaves on the ground beside them, and that a faint familiar smell came up from among them—woodsmoke and old apples and the inside of a sealed cellar.

The same smell he had come into the hollow with. And one of them was fresher than the others, and among that man’s ribs, Absalom Vail picked up a small brass compass. The maker’s mark on the back was still legible. It read Cincinnati, Ohio.

He put the compass in his coat pocket. He covered the bones again with the leaves he had moved. He came out of the draw, went back to the east section, worked, or pretended to work, until mid-afternoon, and returned to the clearing at dusk with his notebook and his gear, and ate supper with the Maroons, and said nothing about what he had seen. That night, sitting in the west house, he made his decision.

He would leave at first light. He would say he had received a message. He would say the survey required his return to Louisville. He would ride out fast, and he would not stop until he reached Red Fern Crossing.

He did not sleep that night either. He waited for the first light, and when it came he rose, gathered his things, opened the door of the west house with great quietness, and stepped out into the common yard. Old Isham Maroon was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the largest house, watching the door of the west house. His hat was on his knee, his hands folded over it.

He had been waiting. He said, in his thin polite voice, “Good morning, Mr. Vail. ”

“Good morning,” Absalom Vail said.

“You’re up very early. And you’re carrying your bags. ”

Absalom said, “Word has reached me that I’m wanted in Louisville. I intend to set out this morning.

”

Old Isham thought about it. Then he said, “I saw no messenger. ”

“He came late last night. I didn’t want to disturb the household.

I met him at the edge of the clearing. ”

Old Isham Maroon smiled his neat courteous smile. He said, “Mr. Vail, please sit down.

”

Absalom Vail did not sit. Old Isham said, in a lower voice, “Please sit down, sir. I would rather talk. ”

He gestured to the second rocking chair on the porch of the largest house, and Absalom Vail sat because he did not know what else to do.

Old Isham said, “Mr. Vail, my family has kept this hollow for four generations. My great-grandfather put in the first mark. My grandfather put in the tree.

My father put in the marks you have been walking past. I keep them now. There is a duty in this hollow, sir, that goes back to 1794, and it is not lifted because a Louisville company decided to survey the land. ”

“Sir, my survey is separate from your family’s duty.

”

“No, sir, it is not. And I think you know it. I think from the way you sat at my table last night, and from the way you carried your gear this morning, that you have understood some of what you have walked through. ”

Absalom did not answer.

Old Isham said, “My father used to say the men who come up into this hollow to work its land do so on one of two impressions. Either they think there is no hollow to speak of, and they come by ignorance, or they think the hollow is something to be tamed, and they come by pride. He said the ignorant ones were easier. He said the proud ones were harder to break.

”

He looked at Absalom Vail. “Which are you, Mr. Vail? ”

“I’m a surveyor.

I came to work. ”

Old Isham nodded. “Then I’ll tell you what I’ve told every surveyor, every timberman, every well-meaning preacher who has walked this trail in my lifetime. The hollow does not release what it has swallowed.

This is the duty my family bears. It was not a duty we chose. It was laid on us in 1794, when the men of this county hanged eleven innocent people from the tree at the head of this hollow. And when what was in the ground under that tree acquired an appetite from their hanging, my family fed that appetite, sir, for four generations.

Not our kin. That would be a violation of the old understandings about what the hollow brings us. And the hollow brings us those who come to it. It is very patient.

It is very slow. But it brings. ”

“And you feed it,” Absalom Vail said. “We maintain it,” old Isham said.

“With the men in the draw. ”

Old Isham was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Ah. ” He said, “So you have been into that draw.

”

He looked at the common ground of the clearing, at the sky beginning to turn pink above the trees. He said, “A pity, Mr. Vail. A pity.

Because had you not gone into that draw, I would have let you finish your survey and leave. I would have followed you to the foot of the trail and watched you go, and the hollow would have taken one of the next men who came, and the balance would have held. But now it cannot. The hollow has seen you see.

And the hollow does not release what is seen. ”

“I will not stay here,” Absalom said. “No, sir. I don’t expect you to stay.

That’s not it. The hollow does not require you to remain here. All it requires is that you not leave with what you have seen. ”

He rose from the rocking chair.

He put on his hat. He said, “Vardaman will be along in a moment. I ask you to go with him quietly. It will be easier for you.

”

And Absalom Vail, sitting on that porch in the dawn, understood in a moment of complete clarity that the polite old man before him was not asking. He ran. He did not stop to argue. He did not draw his pistol.

He did not shout. He rose from the rocking chair and ran off the porch, across the common yard, past the little lean-to where Mayor was tied, and into the trees on the western edge of the clearing. He did not go for Mayor. Mayor was a trap.

He had understood that sitting on the porch, in a way he could not have put into words out loud. He ran into the trees. Behind him, he heard old Isham Maroon say one word, in a voice not loud so much as carrying. He heard the word Vardaman.

Then he heard, or felt, the heavy arrival. Vardaman Maroon, the great silent man, moved through the woods of Hangman’s Hollow at a speed no man of that size should have possessed. Absalom heard him coming from behind, and did not look back, because looking back cost three steps, and three steps were more than he had to spend. He ran.

The hollow rose in front of him. The trail that had descended, descended, descended, farther than the land behind it should have allowed, now rose and rose at a steeper pitch than it had fallen. He ran, he climbed, and the brown light of the hollow, for the first time in four days, began to thin ahead of him. He was climbing toward the ordinary yellow of an autumn morning.

He was climbing out. And behind him, Vardaman Maroon was closing. And around him, in the woods on both sides of the trail, he heard other footfalls. Mazy.

Thorn. And once or twice he heard the low hum he had heard the first night in the west house, which he had convinced himself was the wind, and he heard voices too—voices in no language he understood. The voices of midnight, and this time they were not distant. They were in the trees on either side of him, keeping pace with his running.

He ran. His lungs began to burn. The crooked little finger on his right hand pounded as it did in cold weather. He ran, and somewhere in the climb he lost his hat.

Somewhere higher, the toe of his boot tore on a root. Somewhere higher still, his notebook came loose from the inner pocket of his coat and fell among the leaves. He stopped to pick it up. He stopped because he understood, even with the crashing of feet behind him and the voices at his sides, that the notebook was the only thing in the hollow that bore witness to what he had seen.

If he came out of the hollow without it, he came out empty. He knelt in the leaves. He put his hands in them. He found the notebook.

He pushed it inside his shirt, against his skin, where it could not be lost. Then he rose. And in the moment he rose, he heard Vardaman Maroon’s breath behind him, so close that Absalom Vail felt the heat of it on the back of his neck. He did not look.

He ran. He would say later, when he could speak of it at all, that at a certain point on the climb—he could not tell you which point—the sound of Vardaman Maroon’s pursuit stopped. Not slowed. Stopped entirely.

And the sound of whatever had been pacing him on either side, matching his speed, fell away like a wind dropping. And he ran the last quarter mile up out of Hangman’s Hollow in perfect silence, so that the sound of his own boots on the trail seemed obscene to him. He reached the top of the last ridge. He fell to his knees in the fallen leaves.

He looked down into the hollow. And what he saw, he wrote later in the last of the field notebook, in his own words, with nothing better of his own to add: “I looked down into the hollow, and I saw the four of them—old Isham and Vardaman and Thorl and Merritt—standing in the common ground in the middle of the clearing. They were not looking up at me, and they were not looking at each other. They stood in a small tight circle, faces turned inward, heads bowed.

And in the middle of them, between them, the ground was moving. Not the ground under them. The ground between them, as if something beneath the earth was rising toward the surface and being pressed back down again. I did not stay to watch any more than that.

I got up and I ran, and I do not remember the rest of that day. I do not believe I want to remember it, either. ”

He came back to Red Fern Crossing that evening at dusk, on foot, without gear, without the mare, without his hat, his boots torn at the toe. Barnabas Combs stood at the door of his store as if he had been waiting there.

He said nothing to Absalom Vail. He came out into the road. He took Absalom by the elbow and walked him to Rua Colburn’s house, and Rua Colburn fed him a plate of something he did not afterward remember, and put him to bed in the smallest of the three rooms above the kitchen, and sat on a chair outside that room’s door all night. He left Red Fern Crossing the next morning on a borrowed horse and rode to Louisville with no more stops than the horse required.

He walked into Whitston’s office after three days, laid the field notebook on the desk, and said, “Sir, that hollow must not be surveyed. Not by me, not by any man your company sends. If you send another man up that trail, you will not see him again, and his blood will be on your neck, and on mine too for telling you now, and you will remember that I told you. ”

He said, “Sir, burn this notebook.

”

Whitston did not burn the notebook. He kept it. And so, decades later, a private account of that survey settled into a company records box in Louisville, and that is how this story survived. Absalom Vail left the employ of the land company within the year.

He went back to his people in a small town in the northern part of the state, and took up a profession that did not require him to walk in the woods, and lived quietly for the rest of his days. He never went east to Frankfort again. He never spoke of Hangman’s Hollow. And on nights when the wind blew from the north and the leaves began to move in the yard, his housekeeper remembered, Absalom Vail would get out of bed, come down to the sitting room, sit in a chair by the window, and watch the yard, and would not go back to bed until the wind died.

She said he was not afraid. She said he was, she believed, listening. She said once, in the last year of his life, she came down to the sitting room at three in the morning and found him at the window, and asked him what he heard. He answered without turning: “They’re not close tonight, Mrs.

Reed. Go back to bed. ” She asked him who they were. He did not answer her.

She went back to bed. Absalom Vail died in the autumn of 1889, peacefully, in his bed, of causes his physician considered entirely mundane. He was buried in the cemetery of the small town where he had settled, and his headstone is still there, bearing only his name and his age. The Maroons remained in Hangman’s Hollow after his death.

There is a record in the Louisville archives themselves of a second survey attempt made in 1867, after the war, by an Ohio man of the Union who was not acquainted with the local history. That man was never heard from again, and no horse appeared either. Old Isham Maroon died, or is said to have died, in 1879. Vardaman is said to have died the following winter.

Merritt and Thorl kept the hollow between them for years after that. There is one detail that stays with him, and he would leave it here. On the last page of Absalom Vail’s field notebook, in the same steady hand in which he kept his notes, a single line was written. It was not dated.

There is no way to know when he wrote it. It might have been written in the week he returned to Louisville. It might have been written forty years later. The line says: “The hollow has not forgotten me, either.

”