At three in the morning, Cassian Heldfeld would wake to the sound of a young man laughing. It lasted about four seconds, the laugh of a man who had just heard a joke he liked, bright and easy and utterly at ease in the dark. Cassian would sit up in bed and wait for it to come again. It never did, not the same night.

But the next night, at three, it was there. He tried sleeping with the radio on. He tried sleeping in different rooms of his house, at his sister’s, in a hotel in Charleston. It made no difference.

The laughing came through, not from the room, not from the radio, but from the air around him, a sound too quiet for anyone else to hear, a sound that had followed him up out of the earth and would not let him go. Cassian Heldfeld had spent the rest of his life trying to forget the sounds that belonged to the number seven shaft of the Vulcan Wrath Colliery in the mountains of West Virginia. He never could. Not once.

Not for a single night. He was forty-three years old in the autumn of 1947, a narrow-shouldered man who had swung a pick most of his life, with a long jaw and a brow that made him look like he was always on the verge of asking a difficult question. His hair had gone gray at the temples by the time he was thirty. His hands were black in the creases no matter how hard he scrubbed, his knuckles thickened from years of working a roof bolt and a pry bar in a seam barely tall enough to crouch in.

He was not a big man and not a small man, the kind you would walk past on a street and not remember an hour later. By the time the war ended and the trains were bringing the boys home, he had become the only man in three counties who would still go down into number seven. Every other miner had quit. Every replacement they hired quit too, sometimes within a single shift.

There was a foreman named Oadia Truscott who lasted four days and was found on the fifth morning at the mouth of the shaft, sitting in his own truck with the engine running and the doors locked from the inside, refusing to speak, refusing to look at anyone. They took him home to his wife. He did not say a word for nine days. When he finally spoke, the only thing he said was, “I heard her voice.

I heard her voice down there. ” He would not say another word about it for the rest of his life. To understand what happened in number seven, you have to go back to a time before the colliery existed at all. The mountain the Vulcan Wrath was carved into had no name on the company maps.

The company called it Hill 218, but the people who lived in the hollows around it called it the Stillmount, not because it was peaceful, but because of what they said happened to sound there. They said if you stood at the base of that mountain and shouted, your voice did not echo. It just stopped, like the mountain ate it. The old folks would not hunt on its slopes or cut timber there.

A creek ran out of a fissure on the eastern face, and they would not drink from it, and they would not let their stock drink from it either. When the company surveyors came in 1864 looking for new seams, the local guides refused to go past a certain ridge, and the surveyors had to hire men from outside the county. The first shaft was sunk in 1871. It hit a coal seam ten feet thick at a depth of about three hundred feet, a very rich strike, and the company that owned it, Marwood and Crane, built a small camp at the base of the mountain with bunkhouses, a company store, and a little Methodist chapel the men attended on Sundays mostly because there was nothing else to do.

Within two years, almost three hundred miners were working that shaft. By 1878, the shaft was sealed. The official cause was a roof collapse. That is what the company filed with the state, and that is what the newspapers in Charleston and Wheeling printed.

A tragic roof collapse. Eleven men lost. The bodies could not be recovered. The shaft was deemed structurally unsound and ordered closed.

End of story. But the men who died in that first collapse did not all die in the collapse. Some of them were already dead before the roof came down. Cassian first heard about number seven in the spring of 1947.

He had been working a seam in Logan County for a company called Westgill Brothers, and the seam was running thin. The foreman told him there was new work opening up northeast of there in a county called Airmont. The pay was a dollar more a day than what he was making, and a dollar a day in 1947 was the difference between meat on the table on Sunday and not. He took the job.

He drove up in a battered pickup truck he had bought off his cousin for twenty-two dollars, everything he owned in a single canvas duffel on the passenger seat, and arrived at the Vulcan Wrath camp on the third of April. The company had taken over the old Marwood and Crane workings in 1912 and reopened a different shaft about half a mile west of the original one. That was number three, and it had been operating without major incident for thirty-five years. But Cassian was not hired to work number three.

He was hired for number seven, which had been sunk in 1945, just two years before he arrived. The foreman who hired him was a man named Wendell Kiogi, forty-eight years old, built like a wood stove, missing the last two fingers on his left hand from an accident at a tipple in Pennsylvania when he was twenty-four. Kiogi shook Cassian’s hand, looked him in the eye, and said, “I’m going to tell you something straight, and you can decide whether you still want this job after I tell it to you. ” He said the men did not last in seven.

They quit fast, some of them before they even finished their first shift. The pay was higher than the other shafts because the company knew there was something wrong with that shaft. They did not know what. Nobody knew what.

But the coal was the best coal in the operation, a seam twelve feet thick of the cleanest anthracite this side of the Alleghenies, and the company wanted it out of the ground, so they paid extra. Cassian asked him what the men said was wrong. Kiogi looked at him for a long moment. “You’ll hear it for yourself if you take the job,” he said.

“I’m not going to put pictures in your head. All I’ll say is this. If you take the job, you take it knowing that some men who go down into seven come back up changed, and some men come back up the same. And I can’t tell you which kind of man you are until you’ve been down.

”

Cassian took the job. He was not a brave man. He was a poor one, and there is a difference. Brave men walk toward the danger because they choose to.

Poor men walk toward it because there is nowhere else to walk. His sister Bula, thirty-eight years old and unmarried, was looking after their mother, who had a wasting illness and could no longer get out of bed. The extra dollar a day was the dollar he sent home for medicine that cost three dollars a bottle and lasted two weeks. His first shift was on the seventh of April, a Monday.

The shaft house at number seven was a tall wooden structure painted a faded company red, with a steel cage elevator that descended 640 feet into the earth. Cassian rode down with a crew of seven other men. He knew the cage, the way the wood creaked, the way the cable hummed, the way the air pressure changed as you went down and your ears popped and the temperature dropped and the smell of the surface gave way to the deep smell of coal and damp stone. What he did not know was the silence at the bottom.

When the cage stopped at the working level, the men stepped out into a wide chamber lit by a string of electric bulbs. The first thing Cassian noticed was that he could not hear the cage anymore. That was not right. The cage hummed, the cable creaked, and even when it was not moving, the wind in the shaft made it sing.

He turned and looked back at the cage. The cable was definitely moving in a slight breeze, and he could see it moving, but he could not hear it. Not a sound. Then he stepped two paces to the left, and he could hear it again.

There was a line, an invisible line in the air about eight feet from the cage. On one side of that line, sound carried normally. On the other side, certain sounds did not carry at all. His mind talked him out of it.

He was tired. He had driven a long way. The air down here had gas in it sometimes, methane, carbon monoxide that messed with your hearing. He calmed down and went to work.

The seam they were cutting that day was about four hundred yards east of the main shaft down a long sloping tunnel called a drift, reinforced with timber every six feet. The lighting got worse the further in you went, so by the time the crew reached the working face, they were depending on the carbide lamps mounted on their helmets and one battery-powered safety light on a tripod. Cassian shoveled coal into the mine cart, set roof bolts, drank from his canteen, ate the cold biscuit and ham his landlady had packed him. The work was familiar and honest, the kind of work he had done his whole life.

But there were three things he noticed during that first shift that he could not explain. The first was the wind. There should not have been any wind that deep into a drift. The ventilation shaft was four hundred yards behind them, and the airflow that far in was supposed to be a gentle, steady drift, almost imperceptible.

But every twenty minutes or so, Cassian felt a sudden gust against his back, cold and sharp, like someone opening a door behind him into a winter night. He turned around the first two times. There was nothing there, just the tunnel, just the timbers, just the dim orange glow of the carbide lamps fading into black. The second thing was the man at the end of the line.

There were eight men in the crew including Cassian. He counted them at the start of the shift when they got in the cage. He counted them again when they reached the working face. Eight.

He counted them at lunch. Seven. He looked around and counted again. Eight.

He looked again. Seven. He stopped counting after the third try because he could feel his heart starting to beat too fast. The third thing happened about three hours into the shift.

He heard a woman crying. It was very faint, so faint that at first he thought it was the wind and the timbers. Old timbers in a mine make all kinds of sounds; they moan, they sigh, they sometimes whistle when the air pressure changes. Cassian had heard all of those sounds before in a hundred mines over twenty-five years.

This was not that. This was a woman crying, not screaming, not wailing, just crying, the way a person cries when they have been crying for so long that they have gone quiet about it, when the sobs have run out and what is left is just a small, exhausted, hopeless sound that comes from deep in the chest. The crying was coming from further down the drift, past the working face, where the tunnel had not yet been cut, where there was no tunnel at all, only solid coal. He looked at the man working next to him, a man with a broad sunburnt face and a missing front tooth named Iverson Chasterly, fifty-one years old, the longest-tenured miner in the entire shaft.

Cassian said, “Do you hear that? ” Iverson did not look up. “You’ll hear a lot of things down here,” he said. “Don’t listen to any of them.

Don’t say anything to them. Don’t ever answer them. Do you understand me? Don’t answer.

Just keep working. ” Cassian asked what it was. Iverson stopped working then, stood up to his full height of almost six feet, and turned and looked at him with the kind of look you give a man whose hand is on a stove and does not know it yet. “Son, don’t ask.

Don’t ask what it is, because if you start asking, you’ll start trying to answer. And the answers are worse than the questions. Just work. Just go home.

Come back tomorrow if you can stand it. That’s all. ”

The crying stopped about twenty minutes later. It did not fade.

It just stopped, the way a record stops when you take the needle off. In the silence that followed, Cassian heard very clearly the sound of footsteps coming from the same direction the crying had come from, slow, deliberate footsteps on the bare rock floor of a tunnel that did not exist. The footsteps came closer. They reached the area just behind the working face.

Then they stopped. Cassian could feel very distinctly the sense of someone standing about ten feet behind him, not moving, just standing. The cold gust came again, sharper this time, and the hair on the back of his neck rose. He did not turn around.

He worked. He kept his pick moving. He did exactly what Iverson had told him to do, which was nothing. After what felt like a very long time, probably no more than two minutes, the sense of someone standing behind him went away.

He finished his shift, rode the cage back up, washed the coal off his hands and face with the brown lye soap the company provided, and walked back to his boarding house. He did not sleep that night. He went to work the next day and the day after and the day after that, because he had to. Because the dollar a day extra was the dollar he was sending home to Bula.

Over the first three weeks, he learned what every man in that shaft eventually learned. He learned the rules. The rules were not written down. There was no orientation.

The company did not acknowledge that anything was wrong with number seven, so the company could not very well issue a list of rules for dealing with what was not wrong. The rules were passed from one miner to the next in low voices, in the wash house at the end of a shift, in the corner of a saloon over a beer, in the truck on the way to the shaft house in the morning. Rule one: don’t answer. If you hear a voice, no matter what it sounds like, no matter what it says, no matter how much it sounds like someone you know, do not answer.

Do not say anything. Do not even nod. Just keep working. Rule two: don’t count.

If you find yourself counting the men in your crew and the number is not right, stop counting. Get back to work. The number will be right when you stop looking. Rule three: don’t go past the working face.

If your tools are missing and you think they might be a few feet ahead in the darkness, leave them. Get new tools. The company would rather give you new tools than have you walk past the face. Rule four: if you smell something burning, do not stop and try to figure out what it is.

Just keep working. The burning smell will go away on its own. Rule five: if you see a light in the distance that looks like another miner’s lamp, and you were not told there was another crew working in that direction, do not walk toward the light. Do not signal it.

Do not look at it for too long. Pretend you did not see it. Rule six, the most important rule: if you hear someone calling your name by your full name, your given name and your surname together, and the voice sounds like it is coming from somewhere inside the coal itself, you go up. You leave your tools.

You leave your hat. You leave your boots if you have to. You ride the cage to the surface, and you do not come back down for at least one full week, because something has noticed you and it knows your name, and the only way to lose its attention is to be gone long enough that it forgets. Cassian followed the rules for three weeks.

The worst he experienced was the crying woman, the cold gusts, the occasional miscount of his crew, and once the smell of something burning that no one else seemed to notice. He survived. He sent his money home. He went to the chapel on Sundays, not because he was religious, but because the chapel was the one place in the whole camp that felt warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

Then, on the morning of the twenty-ninth of April, a new man arrived at the camp. His name was Algernon Pickerstave, twenty-six years old, fresh out of the army, a tank crewman from the European theater who had come home in 1946 and spent a year drifting from one job to another before showing up at the Vulcan Wrath shaft house with a duffel bag and a hopeful expression. Wendell Kiogi hired him because the company always needed men, and gave him the same speech he had given Cassian. Algernon listened, nodded, and said he could handle it.

He had seen worse in the war. Cassian, standing nearby drinking coffee, thought to himself, no, son, you haven’t. Algernon was assigned to Cassian’s crew. He was a tall, lanky young man with a mop of straw-colored hair and a wide, gap-toothed smile that came out very easily.

He had grown up in a small town in eastern Ohio, the son of a railroad clerk. He had a fiancée back home, a young woman named Melena Westerfield, twenty-four years old, who worked as a typist at a feed and grain company, and he was working at the Vulcan Wrath shaft to save up enough money to marry her in the autumn. They were planning a quiet wedding at the church where Melena’s grandmother had been married. Algernon carried a small photograph of her in his wallet.

He showed it to Cassian on his first day, beaming, the way a young man beams when his life is just starting and the world looks bright in spite of everything. He was a good kid. He was funny. He could imitate the voices of his old officers in a way that made the whole crew laugh during lunch.

He was the kind of man who in another life would have been a schoolteacher or a barber, the kind who made people feel better just by being in the room. Cassian liked him. That is why what happened was so hard. On Algernon’s fourth day in the shaft, on the second of May, the crew was working a fresh face about five hundred yards east of the main shaft.

There had been a heavy rain the night before, and the drift was damp, the kind of damp that settles into your clothes and your bones and makes the lamps hiss. About two hours into the shift, Cassian heard the crying again, the same crying, the exhausted, hopeless crying of a woman who had been crying for a very long time. Algernon stopped working. He stood up.

He turned his head toward the sound. He looked at Cassian and said, “Do you hear that? ” Cassian said very quietly, very evenly, “You keep working. You don’t ask about it.

You don’t listen to it. You don’t talk about it. You work. ” Algernon said, “But Cassian, there’s a woman down here.

We have to go check on her. ” Cassian said, “No, we don’t. ” Algernon said, “What do you mean we don’t? She’s hurt.

She’s lost. Listen to her. We have to. ”

Cassian told the story later to a man who wrote it down, and he said that was the moment he should have grabbed Algernon by the collar and dragged him bodily up the drift and out of the shaft and not let him go back.

That single moment. If he had done that, everything would have been different. But he did not. He said again, “Algernon, don’t.

Just don’t. ” And Algernon, who had been a tank crewman who had pulled wounded men out of burning vehicles in France, who could not turn his back on the sound of a person in distress, said, “I’m just going to look. I’m just going to walk to the end of the drift and look. I’m not going past the face.

I’m just going to look. ” He set his pick down. He took two steps past the working face. He stopped, turned around, and looked at Cassian, and the smile was still on his face, that wide gap-toothed smile.

He said, “It’s all right. I’ll be right back. ” Then he walked into the darkness past the cut. Cassian shouted his name.

The whole crew shouted. Iverson shouted. The carbide lamps swung in their hands as they ran toward the working face, and they got to where Algernon had stepped into the darkness, and they shone every light they had into the unmined coal beyond. There was nothing there.

There was no tunnel. There was a wall of solid black coal, twelve feet thick, untouched, the same wall that had been there when they started the shift. Algernon was not in the wall. Algernon was not on the floor.

Algernon was not anywhere. He was gone. His pick was where he had laid it down, the wooden handle still warm from his hand. His helmet was on the floor about four feet past the working face, the lamp still burning.

His boots were one foot further on, neatly placed side by side, as if he had taken them off and set them there himself. There was no body. There was no blood. There was no sign of struggle.

There was, however, a sound. When the crew finally went silent, when the shouting stopped and the running stopped, and they all just stood there in the carbide light, staring at the boots, they heard it from the wall of coal. Faint. Gentle.

The sound of a young man laughing. Not crying. Laughing. The way a man laughs at a joke he has just heard.

The way Algernon had laughed at lunch the day before. It was Algernon’s laugh, coming from inside the coal. The crew did not finish the shift. They went up.

Wendell Kiogi was waiting at the top because he had felt something, he said later, that made him stop what he was doing in the office and walk to the shaft house and stand there. He saw Cassian’s face when the cage came up, and he did not ask any questions. He just nodded. Algernon Pickerstave was officially listed as a missing person two weeks later.

The company report said he had walked off the job and never returned. The local sheriff, a man named Mortimer Blasto, sixty-one years old, three years from retirement, drove down to the camp the day after the disappearance, looked at the boots and the helmet, looked at the wall of coal, listened to the men’s accounts, and then drove back to his office and wrote a one-page report saying the worker in question had become disoriented in the shaft and likely walked into an unmarked drift in another section. The case was closed within the month. Nobody was ever found.

Melena Westerfield, the fiancée in Ohio, received a letter from the company expressing their regret. She came down to West Virginia once in the summer of 1947 looking for him. She walked the camp. She talked to the men.

Cassian spoke with her for almost an hour on the porch of his boarding house. He told her gently that her young man had been a good man and a brave man, and that whatever had happened to him had not been because of any failing on his part. He did not tell her about the laugh. He could not.

She went home. She married another man two years later. She lived to be ninety-one years old. She never knew.

After Algernon’s disappearance, Cassian made a decision. He decided he was going to find out what was in number seven. Not because he wanted to, but because he felt he owed it to Algernon. The boy had walked into the dark on his watch.

The boy had asked him a question a few nights before, after showing him the photograph of Melena: “Do you ever feel like the mine knows you? ” Cassian had laughed and said, “No, the mine doesn’t know anybody. ” And Algernon had said, “I do. I feel like it knows me.

” Four days later, he was gone. Cassian decided he was going to know what knew him. He started by asking the old men, not the miners, but the men in the hollows, the ones whose families had been there since before the company came. There was an old man named Garlock Pennywhistle who lived in a one-room cabin three miles up Brushwell Creek, ninety-four years old, born in 1853, who remembered the original Marwood and Crane operation.

Cassian drove up to see him on a Sunday afternoon in late May with a bottle of bourbon as a gift, because he had been told the old man liked bourbon. The old man let him in, poured them both a glass, and listened to Cassian’s questions. Then he said, “You’re working in seven, are you? ” Cassian said yes.

Garlock said, “You’ve heard her. ” “Who? ” “The woman. The crying one.

” Cassian said yes. Garlock leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a long time. Then he told him what he knew. His grandfather, a young man when the first shaft went down in ’71, had been one of the local guides who refused to go up on the Stillmount with the surveyors.

There was a reason. The mountain before the company ever came was known by the people in those hollows to be a place that did not have a bottom. Not in a literal way. There was something in the mountain that went deeper than the mountain itself.

The people who lived there before the white men had a name for it. They would not speak the name aloud. They had ceremonies they did at the base of the mountain twice a year, in the spring and in the fall, to keep what was in the mountain from coming out. When the white men came, the ceremonies stopped.

When the company came in ’71, they sank a shaft right into the heart of it. And in ’78, eleven men went into the shaft and did not come back. Cassian said, “The cave-in. ” Garlock laughed, not a happy laugh.

“Son, there was no cave-in. The roof was as stable as any roof in any mine in this state. The cave-in was reported because the company needed an explanation. ” What happened was that one Tuesday morning in November of 1878, eleven men went down for their shift and did not come back up at the end of the day.

When the foremen went down to look for them, the entire working face had been changed. The shaft they had been cutting was no longer there. There was a different shaft going in a different direction, a shaft no man had cut. It went deeper, much deeper.

At the bottom of it, the foreman said later, in a private letter to his brother in Pittsburgh, he heard voices, many voices, not the voices of the eleven men, other voices, old voices, voices that did not speak in any language he had ever heard. He ran. He ran back up that shaft and out of the mine, and he never went back down. The company sealed shaft one the following week, but they kept mining.

They opened other shafts, and for a long time those were quiet. Number two was opened in 1891, quiet for forty years. Number three in 1912, quiet right up to now. Four, five, six, all of them mostly quiet, some sounds sometimes, a man would quit now and then, nothing to write home about.

But seven was different, and Cassian asked why. Garlock said because seven was sunk in 1945. The engineers who picked the spot did not know what they were doing. They drilled their test cores, looked at the seams, and picked the place with the richest coal.

And the place they picked was exactly where shaft one had been, the 1871 shaft. They sank number seven right on top of it. The old company maps had been lost in a fire in 1903. The new engineers had no idea what was underneath them.

They thought they were sinking a fresh shaft into virgin ground. They were sinking a shaft into the same hole that ate eleven men in 1878. Cassian sat very still. “What happens now?

” Garlock said, “Now you stop working in seven. You go back to Logan County. You find another job. Because the thing that’s in there has been waking up for two years, son.

And it’s not going back to sleep. Your friend who walked into the wall, he won’t be the last. There’ll be more. And if you stay, eventually it’ll be you.

Not because you did anything wrong. Just because you were there. ” Cassian asked what it was. Garlock looked at him for a long moment.

“I told you. I’m going to tell you what I know, not what I think. And what I know is that I don’t know what it is. My grandfather didn’t know.

The people who lived here before us didn’t know. They only knew what it did. And what it does is take. It takes men.

It takes their voices. It takes their names. It keeps them. And sometimes when it’s hungry, or when it’s bored, or when it just feels like it, it lets you hear them.

It lets you hear them crying, or laughing, or calling your name in the voice of someone you love. Because that’s the bait, son. That’s how it pulls you in. It uses what you’ve already lost.

”

Cassian thought about Algernon’s laugh. He thought about the photograph of Melena. He drove back to the camp that evening and sat on the porch of his boarding house for a long time. The next morning, he went down into number seven for his shift, because he had to.

Because his sister Bula was out of money. Because their mother needed medicine. Because he was a poor man, not a brave one, and there was nowhere else to go. He worked in number seven for another four months.

In that time, three more men disappeared. Ron Fred Heathcastle, thirty-one years old, vanished on the eighteenth of June. Watson Eldermill, forty-four, vanished on the third of August. And on the twentieth of August, Cleopus Grumbbeck, fifty-two, who had been working in number seven longer than anyone except Iverson Chasterly.

Cleopus did not vanish at the working face. He vanished from his bunk. He went to bed in the boarding house on the night of the nineteenth. In the morning, the bed was empty.

The blanket was still warm. His boots were beside the bed. His clothes were folded on the chair. The window was closed and locked from the inside.

And on the floor under the bed, there was a thin trail of coal dust leading from the bed to the wall, where it stopped. Just stopped. Wendell Kiogi closed number seven a week later. He told the company the shaft was unsafe.

The company protested. Kiogi said he would resign before he sent another man down. The company, after a long argument, agreed to seal the shaft temporarily. They never reopened it.

By 1952, the entire Vulcan Wrath operation had been sold to a larger concern, and the larger concern had no interest in number seven, and the seal stayed. It is still sealed today. The shaft house was torn down in 1968. The land is now a reclaimed forest owned by the state.

There is a small marker on the trail that runs near the old shaft, but the marker does not mention what is underneath it. It just says the area was an active mining operation in the mid-twentieth century and that hikers should stay on the trail. Cassian Heldfeld went home in October of 1947. He moved back to Logan County and took a job at a mine called Beachwood number four, where the worst thing he ever encountered was a partial roof collapse that broke his collarbone in 1953.

He retired from mining in 1966 at the age of sixty-two. He outlived his sister Bula by eleven years and his mother by thirty-six. He never married. He lived alone in a small house in a town called Pennystone, with a vegetable garden in the back and a dog named Walter, a brown mutt of indeterminate breed and considerable affection.

Cassian Heldfeld died on the seventeenth of February 1978, at the age of seventy-three. The cause of death was heart failure. He died in his sleep. That should be the end of the story.

But it is not, because in 1976, two years before he died, Cassian gave a long interview to a man named Hollis Trantmore, a journalist from Charleston who was researching a book about West Virginia coal mining. The book was eventually published in 1979, three years after the interview, ran 800 pages, and is now out of print. The interview took place over the course of three afternoons at Cassian’s house in Pennystone, with a tape recorder running. Trantmore wrote in his notes that Cassian was a quiet, soft-spoken man who chose his words carefully and never seemed to be in a hurry.

He drank black coffee. He smoked a pipe. He answered every question Trantmore asked. But there was one thing Cassian told Trantmore that did not make it into the book.

Trantmore left it out because he did not believe it. He wrote a note in the margin of his transcript: “Heldfeld is reliable on every other point I’ve cross-referenced. I cannot include this. Reader will lose trust in narrator.

Possible early stage dementia. ” The note is preserved in the Trantmore archive at West Virginia University, along with the original transcripts. Here is what Cassian told Hollis Trantmore in 1976. He said that every night since he came up out of number seven on the last day of October 1947, every single night, he heard a sound at three o’clock in the morning.

It did not matter where he was, what house, what bed, whether he was sober or had been drinking. At three in the morning, he woke up because he heard someone laughing. A young man laughing, the way a young man laughs at a joke he has just heard. It lasted about four seconds.

Then it stopped. He sat up in his bed and waited for the sound to come again. It never did, not the same night. But the next night at three, it was there.

He tried sleeping with the radio on, with the windows open, in different rooms of the house, at his sister’s, in a hotel in Charleston. It did not matter. The laughing came through. It was not coming from the room.

It was not coming from the radio. It was coming from inside his head, but it was not in his head. It was in the air around him. It just was not loud enough for anyone else to hear.

He said, “I think it is following me. I think it has been following me since the day I left the camp. I think it is waiting. I think it is patient.

I think it has all the time in the world and I do not. And I think when I die, it will not be the laughing I hear. It will be the answer to the laughing. It will be the joke.

And I will laugh. And I will be where Algernon Pickerstave is. And we will laugh together in the dark for a very long time. ”

That was the part Trantmore cut.

Cassian died two years later. The neighbor who found him in the morning, a woman named Ula Marwe, sixty-eight years old, said his face was peaceful. He looked, she said, as if he had been listening to something pleasant in his sleep, as if he had been laughing at a joke. The clock by his bed had stopped at three in the morning.

The clock had been wound the night before. The neighbor wound it again out of habit when she came in to clean the house for the funeral. The clock would not start. She took it to a watchmaker the following week.

The watchmaker took it apart and said there was nothing wrong with it. The mainspring was tight. The gears were clean. The escapement was perfect.

There was no reason for it to have stopped. He put it back together. It still would not run. He gave it back to the neighbor.

She kept it on her mantel for the rest of her life. The hands stayed at three o’clock. Number seven is still sealed. The mountain is still there.

In the autumn, when the leaves come down off the trees on the eastern face and the wind comes down out of the high country, hikers on the state trail sometimes report that the woods get strangely quiet near the marker that nobody reads. The birds stop singing. The wind stops moving. And once in a while, very rarely, almost never, a hiker will say afterward that they thought they heard, very faintly, the sound of someone laughing.

A young man. A gap-toothed laugh. The kind of laugh you give when somebody has told you a joke you have never heard before. A joke so good that you do not even have to think about whether to laugh.

You just laugh, and laugh, and laugh.