At the edge of a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a woman stood in her nightgown on the hard-packed dirt of the road, staring up at the north slope. It was two in the morning, and the frost had settled on the wagon tracks, but she did not seem to feel the cold. Her name was Verna Souther, and she was thirty-four years old. She had stood in this same spot every clear evening for seventeen years, but never once had she been there in the dark.

Her husband, Absalom, came out of the house with his coat and put it over her shoulders. She allowed it. He walked her back inside. She allowed that too.

And in the morning, she remembered nothing of it, and wept a little at the kitchen table, and told him she was sorry, and said she did not want to go up there again. Never again. She meant it. But the mountain had already taken her once, and it had made its mark on her, and it would not let her go.

The place they called Cold Iron Gap lay eleven miles west of the county seat, in a high country where the road gave up being a road about a mile out and became two dirt tracks and a promise. In 1894, perhaps sixty families lived in that pocket of the mountains. There was a blacksmith, a store, and a small wooden church with a bell that had been hauled up on the back of a mule the year Grant died. Mail came to the store twice a week when the weather allowed.

There was a springhouse behind the church where the women brought butter in the summer, and a ferry tied to a rope a mile downstream that only ran when the miller’s boy felt like turning the winch. Twice a year, in spring and again in autumn, the county sent a road inspector, and he always came back with the same report: Cold Iron Gap did not really need a road, because the people there did not seem to want one. Above the town, on the north slope, sat an old logging camp that had been closed since 1871, when the company that owned it went bankrupt. What remained were two long bunkhouses with collapsed roofs, the iron frame of a mill wheel half-sunk in rotting leaves, and skid trails that ran up the slope and then simply stopped, as if the men working there had dropped their tools one afternoon and never returned.

Higher up, there was a spring, cold and slow, seeping through moss into a stone basin someone had carved long ago. And above the spring, there was a place people did not go. Not because anyone had told them not to. They just did not go there.

If you asked why, they would look at you as if you had asked them why they did not eat with the wrong hand. The answer was the same: because they did not. Because their people never had. Verna Souther sat on a flat rock twenty yards beyond the spring every clear evening from April until the first snowfall.

She would leave the blacksmith shop about quarter past four, take the road east out of town for half a mile, then turn up a narrow path that climbed the north slope past the old logging camp, past the spring, and stopped at that rock. She would sit there for perhaps half an hour, watching the light leave the far ridge, then walk back down. She had been doing it since she was seventeen, when she first came from Watauga to keep house for her aunt in the hollow. She kept doing it after her aunt died, and after she married Absalom, who was the blacksmith, a quiet man of forty-one with broad shoulders and hands scarred past the wrist.

He loved her. Everyone in the Gap could see how his eyes softened when she came to the shop door at noon with his dinner pail. And in all those seventeen years, she had never once stayed on the hill past dark. On the evening of Wednesday, October 10, 1894, Otille Pettebone watched Verna walk past her cabin at twenty-four minutes past four and wave a little.

Otille was forty-seven, a widow since the flood of ’89, thin as a broomstick, with pale eyes and the habit of standing on her porch smoking a clay pipe her husband had made her. She had set her clock by Verna’s walk for eleven summers. She saw the smoke rise from the Souther chimney down in the town. She saw the blacksmith shop shutter close.

She did not see Verna come back down. She said later she went to bed worried that night. Not afraid. Worried.

There is a difference, and people who live at the edge of the woods know it. Absalom noticed at supper. Verna always kept a covered plate for him on the stove. That evening the plate was still under its cover, cold, when he came home at half past six.

He called her name once, the way he always did, Lo. Then he went out and walked up the road and looked at the north slope, and stood there so long that his neighbor Ferren Scaggs came out to ask what was wrong. Ferren was seventy-two that year, a retired mail carrier with a bad hip and a strong memory. Absalom said Verna had not come back from her walk.

Ferren looked at the slope himself. It was full dark by then. “Absalom,” Ferren said, “don’t send anybody up there tonight. Wait for the light.

”

Absalom asked him why. Ferren did not answer. He said goodnight and went back inside and did not open his door again until morning. That in itself, if you knew Ferren Scaggs, was strange.

He had walked that hill in snowstorms to deliver the mail. He was not a man to leave a neighbor in the dark. But he did not go up there that night, and he did not say why. Absalom took his lantern.

He walked as far as Otille’s cabin. Otille came out onto her porch in her nightclothes with a shawl and said the same thing Ferren had said, in different words. “Don’t go past the mill wheel tonight, Absalom. Wait for the light.

”

Absalom did not go up. He stood on the path with the lantern hissing in his hand until his arm tired. He called her name once, only once. He said later that he stopped because the echo came back strange.

He could not describe it, only that it did not sound like his own voice when it came back off the trees. He went home. He did not sleep. There is an hour between three and four in the morning when a house makes sounds it does not make in daylight.

Verna Souther came down off the hill at exactly nineteen minutes past six on the morning of Thursday, October 11. Otille was the first to see her. Otille had been awake since five, unable to stay still, and when she looked out the kitchen window she saw a figure moving on the road in the gray light. She went out onto the porch.

Verna was walking slowly. Not limping. Just slow. Her arms hung straight at her sides.

Her hair had come loose from its knot. Her shoes and the hem of her skirt were covered in a red clay Otille did not recognize. There was no red clay of that color in Cold Iron Gap, as far as Otille knew, and she had lived there her whole life. Otille called to her, asked if she was hurt.

Verna kept walking. She passed within six feet of Otille’s porch and did not look at her. Her eyes were open. She was breathing.

Otille said she looked like a person who had been given a set of instructions and did not want to forget the order of them. Verna crossed the last quarter mile to the town without stopping. She came in through her back door. She sat down at her kitchen table.

She placed her hands flat on the wood, palms down, and did not move. That was how Absalom found her. He had been at the front window watching the road and had not seen her come in. He heard the back door latch.

He came into the kitchen. She was already sitting at the table. He called her name. She turned her head and looked at him and said, in her usual voice, clearly and calmly, “Absalom, is the water hot?

”

He told her it was. She said, “Good. I would like to wash. ” She stood and walked to the washbasin and unbuttoned her cuffs, and then Absalom saw her hands.

Her hands were dirty. That was the first thing. Red clay under the nails, worked into the small scars on her fingertips, as if she had been digging them into something. The second thing was this: the small silver scars from peeling apples were on the wrong fingers.

Absalom had held those hands ten thousand times. He knew exactly where those scars were. Left hand, thumb, index finger, ring finger. That morning they were on her right hand instead.

Same places. Same three fingers. Same shape. But on the other hand.

He stood there for a long moment. He thought maybe he was tired. He thought maybe he had misjudged. He said nothing about it.

He brought her a basin of hot water and sat at the table and watched her wash her hands. She washed her hands and face and forearms, unhurried. When she finished, she sat across from him and said she would like tea, so he made it. She drank it.

He asked her gently where she had been. She looked at him over the rim of the cup. “Absalom, I don’t remember,” she said. He asked if she was in pain.

She said no. He asked if someone had hurt her. She said, and this was what he told the doctor, “No one hurt me, Absalom. There was no one up there but me.

” She said it too fast. He noticed that too, but he did not press her. He was a quiet man. He thought if he waited, she would tell him.

Doctor Wentworth Kittredge was fifty-eight that autumn, a physician trained in Bristol who had come to the county in the seventies and stayed. He kept records. He kept them in a leather-bound journal with a small brass clasp. After everything was over, that book went into a locked cabinet in his office at the county seat, and it stayed there until the summer of 1922, when his grandson opened it out of curiosity.

Kittredge examined Verna Souther at eight o’clock on the morning of Thursday, October 11, in her own kitchen. He noted that her pulse was steady, her pupils equal, her temperature a full degree below normal, and it stayed that way for the three hours he was in the house. He noted the red clay on her shoes. He asked to keep a sample of it, and she agreed without interest.

He noted that she did not remember the past fourteen hours and was not distressed by the memory loss. He wrote, in a hand finer than it needed to be, that the scars on her fingers were on the wrong hand. Absalom had told him about that, quietly, in the back room before the examination. Kittredge did not raise it with her.

He wrote it in his notes. And at the bottom of that day’s entry, he wrote a sentence his grandson read twenty-eight years later and could not sleep after reading. “Mrs. Souther has come back,” Kittredge wrote.

“And something else has come back with her. ”

The first three days after Verna returned were ordinary by every measure. She cooked. She swept.

She sat at the blacksmith shop door at noon with Absalom’s dinner pail. She was quieter than she had been. She held Absalom’s hand at supper, which she had not done in years, not because they had grown cold toward each other but because they had grown used to each other. That week she held his hand at every meal.

Absalom told the doctor later that he wanted to believe she was only tired. He wanted to believe the walk had frightened her more than she admitted and that she was coming back to herself gradually. He said he sat across from her at the table that first Sunday and watched her butter a biscuit and thought, There she is. That is my wife.

Everything will be all right. Then on Sunday night at about quarter past two, he woke because she was not in bed. He got up. He walked through the house barefoot.

The kitchen was empty. The front room was empty. The front door was open. Verna was standing in the middle of the road in her nightgown, barefoot, looking at the north slope.

It was cold enough that morning that a layer of frost covered the wagon tracks. He called her name. She did not turn. He walked out to her and put his coat over her shoulders.

She allowed it. He walked her back inside. She allowed it. He put her back to bed.

She allowed it. And in the morning she remembered none of it. She was sorry. She cried a little at the kitchen table and said she was sorry.

Absalom held her, and she said, “Absalom, I don’t want to go up there again. Ever. ” He told her she would not have to. He meant it.

That evening Otille Pettebone came down to the town, which she rarely did, and asked to see Doctor Kittredge alone. She would not sit. She stood in his front room with her shawl still on and her hands clasped in front of her. She told him that on Sunday night at about twenty-two minutes past two, she had gotten up to relieve herself and looked out her kitchen window, and had seen a person standing on the path halfway between her cabin and the mill wheel, standing very still, facing the town.

The moon was not full, but it was bright enough, and she was certain it was Verna Souther. She said Verna was not wearing a nightgown. She was wearing the same dress she had come down the mountain in, covered in red clay and all. She said the figure did not move for the twelve or thirteen minutes she stood watching.

She said the arms hung at the sides the same still way Verna’s arms had hung that morning when she came down. She said, in a low voice, that the head was tilted a little, as if listening to something. Kittredge wrote that down too. He asked Otille if she was sure.

Otille said she was sure enough that she had barred her door for the first time in fourteen years, and had not slept, and had come down to the town at first light to tell him. She said she had lit every lamp in her cabin and sat in the middle of the kitchen with all of them burning until the sun came up. She had wanted anything on the road to know she was awake. Kittredge asked if she had told anyone else.

Otille said no. He asked her not to. She said, “Well. ” Then she said, “Doctor, is Verna Souther in that house right now?

”

Kittredge said yes. Verna was at home. Absalom had brought her in that morning. She was sitting in his back room now, doing mending, quiet as any Sunday.

Otille said, “Then who was on my hill Sunday night? ”

Kittredge had no answer for her. He wrote in his journal that evening a sentence he later read aloud. “The woman on the road and the woman in the kitchen cannot both be Mrs.

Souther,” he wrote. “But they may both be here. ”

On the following Tuesday, the sixteenth of October, Verna Souther, in the middle of an ordinary conversation with her husband about salt pork, spoke a name no one in Cold Iron Gap knew. She said it as if she were reading it off something.

“Cletus Renshaw,” she said. “Age thirty-one. From Boone. ” Then she blinked and put down her fork and said, “Absalom, why did I say that?

”

Absalom did not know. Neither did she. She did not know any Cletus Renshaw. She had never known anyone by that name.

That evening she said the name again while drying a plate, in the same tone. Cletus Renshaw, thirty-one, from Boone. And she added, softly, “Went up in June of ’67 and never came down. ” She looked at Absalom.

She was terrified. She said, “Absalom, I don’t know who that is. ”

Absalom went to see Kittredge the next morning. Kittredge wrote the name down.

That evening he went to the county seat and asked the clerk for the missing persons files for the summer of 1867. There were three. One of them was Cletus Renshaw, thirty-one, from Boone, a prospector, reported missing by his brother on July 18, 1867. Renshaw had gone up into the mountains west of the county seat that June with a mule, a set of picks, and an idea about a silver vein an old Cherokee had described to him when he was a boy.

His brother received one letter from him, posted from a boardinghouse at the county seat, dated June 12. The letter, which the brother kept and finally turned over to the courthouse in ’71 when he moved west, said Cletus had found a sign of the vein. It was above a spring in a north-facing hollow, eleven or twelve miles west of the town. He expected to be back within two weeks with good news or a story to tell.

After that, nothing. The mule was found near the head of Cold Iron Creek in late August. The picks were never found. His brother came from Boone that September, made inquiries at the county seat, and went up as far as the old logging camp with a hired man from the Gap.

They did not go any further. The hired man, whose name was recorded in the file as Raleigh, refused to go past the mill wheel. The brother went back to Boone. He filed the missing person report the following spring.

Cletus Renshaw was never found. His file, when Kittredge held it in his hands at the county courthouse in October of 1894, had not been opened in twenty-seven years. The clerk apologized for the dust. He was an elderly, soft-spoken man named Percival Hogg who had worked in that office since ’68.

When Kittredge signed the file back in, Hogg told him quietly that in his experience, files came out of that drawer and went back the same day and did not want to be looked at again. Kittredge asked what he meant. Hogg only said that the courthouse learned things about its own papers, and it was not his place to say more. Kittredge left the courthouse with the file still in his mind, and the phrase from Renshaw’s letter — a north-facing hollow eleven or twelve miles west of the town — sitting over it like a stone on a page.

Kittredge came back to the Souther house on the evening of Wednesday, October 17. Verna was in the kitchen. She was calm. She had been calm all day.

Absalom said it was the calm of a person waiting for a train. Kittredge sat with her at the table. He asked her gently if the name Cletus Renshaw was still coming to her. She said yes.

She said it was present behind her eyes, the way a word is when you are about to write it. Kittredge asked if other names had come. She said yes. She said another name had come that morning while she was drawing water.

She said the name was Merryweather. Just Merryweather. She did not know if it was a first name or a last name. Kittredge asked her again, gently, if she knew where these names came from.

Verna looked at him for a long moment. Then she said something he wrote down word for word. “Doctor, I don’t know where they come from,” she said. “I know where they go.

They come down. ” He asked what she meant. She said, “They come down through me like water. And there are more of them up there, and they will keep coming down.

And when they are done coming down, I will go up and bring the rest. ”

She said it simply, the way she had asked Absalom if the water was hot. Then she blinked. She looked around the kitchen as if she had just walked into it.

She said, “Doctor Kittredge, would you like some tea? ”

Kittredge stayed the night at the Souther house. He sat in the front room with Absalom in two chairs pulled near the fire. Neither man slept.

They talked little. Absalom asked him once if he thought Verna would be all right. Kittredge, who was an honest man, said he did not know. Absalom nodded and did not ask again.

At about three in the morning, they heard Verna get out of bed. They heard her walk to the kitchen. They heard the back door open. They both went into the kitchen.

Verna was standing at the back door in her nightgown, looking at the north slope. She did not go out. She did not turn around. She said over her shoulder, in her usual voice, in the tone she used to remind Absalom to bring in firewood: “Not tonight.

Not yet. ” Then she closed the door. She went back to bed. She slept soundly until morning.

Kittredge sat with Absalom in the kitchen for two more hours. He said later he could not have moved even if he had wanted to. He said his legs had gone numb in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. Absalom did not speak.

He sat with his hands clasped on the table, staring at the door his wife had just closed. Kittredge wrote one line in his notebook that night. “She is being counted to cross over,” he wrote. “I do not know by whom.

”

On Friday, October 19, Ferren Scaggs finally came to Doctor Kittredge and said he had something to say, and he did not want it written down. Kittredge said, “All right. ” Ferren sat. He was seventy-two, a mail carrier his whole working life until his hip gave out, riding the road over Cold Iron Gap down to Watauga four days a week for thirty-nine years.

He knew that mountain like the back of his hand. He said, “Doctor, I have never told anyone this. ” In the winter of 1867, in December, he had been riding the road past the old logging camp and stopped at the spring to water his horse. He heard a man calling from above the spring.

The voice was clear. It was a man’s voice. It was calling a woman’s name. The name it was calling was Merryweather.

Ferren said he stood there a long minute at the spring, holding his horse’s bridle, listening. And he said, and this is as he told it, “The voice was not coming from up the mountain. It was coming from inside it, like a man calling from the bottom of a well. ” He said he did not go up to investigate.

He rode the rest of his route in a state he could not describe. He never took that road again if he could avoid it. He would take the long way, an hour and a half longer, rather than pass the spring. He never told his wife.

He never told his postmaster. He never told a preacher. He was telling Kittredge now because Verna Souther had spoken a name that was the maiden name of his wife’s mother. Merryweather Whitlock, from Boone, who in the summer of 1867 had a young man come courting her, a prospector the family had turned away because he had no prospects, and who had gone up into the mountain that June and never come back.

His wife had told him the name once when they were courting, as a family story. He had forgotten it. Kittredge sat with that for a long time. Then he wrote, away from the journal, on a separate sheet of paper his grandson also found: “Whatever is at the spring above the logging camp knows the names of people who knew Cletus Renshaw, and it is summoning them through Verna Souther.

God help us. God help her. ”

Sunday, October 21, 1894, was a bright, cold day. Verna went to the little wooden church with Absalom in the morning.

She sat quietly through the sermon. The neighbors said she looked pale, but everyone in the hollow looked pale that autumn because of the influenza that had gone through in September. She did not speak to anyone about the names or the dreams or the walks. She held her husband’s hand coming out of church.

That afternoon she took a nap. Absalom went out to check the forge fire. He was gone about twenty minutes. When he came back, the front door was open, and Verna was gone.

She had left wearing her Sunday dress. She had not taken a coat. She had left her shoes at the door and gone out in her house shoes. She was still wearing them when they found her.

Absalom went out into the road and looked up. There was a figure moving up the north slope. He ran. At forty-one, with forty extra pounds in his shoulders and neck, in his Sunday clothes, up a road he did not usually take.

He caught her just above Otille Pettebone’s cabin. Otille was on her porch. She saw everything that happened after that. Absalom took Verna’s arm.

He called her name. She looked at him. She smiled. Otille said she smiled the way she had smiled at him when they were courting — sweet and a little shy, as if she were glad he had come.

She said, “Absalom, please let go of my arm. ” He did not. She said, “Absalom, please. ” He shook his head.

She said, “All right. ” She turned and walked up the path, and he walked with her because he would not let go of her arm. Otille called out. She said, “Absalom, don’t go past the mill wheel.

” Absalom did not turn. He did not answer. He did not let go of Verna’s arm. They walked past the mill wheel together.

Otille went inside and barred her door. She said later she stood with her back against it and prayed out loud for a long time. She did not know how long. She said she prayed until her mouth went dry.

Then she opened the door and looked. It was close to evening. There was no one on the road. Absalom Souther came down off the north slope at seven o’clock on the morning of Monday, October 22.

He came down alone. His Sunday shirt was torn at the shoulders. His hands were bleeding from the palms, not the knuckles, from the palms, as if he had held onto something rough for a long time and had not wanted to let it go. He had a scratch on his face running from temple to jaw.

He passed Otille’s cabin without turning his head. He walked to the town. He walked to Doctor Kittredge’s house, who had been summoned and had come from the county seat the night before and was already at the Souther home when Absalom arrived. Absalom sat at his own kitchen table.

He placed his palms flat on the table the same way Verna had done nine days before. He said, in a voice Kittredge described as completely spent, “I went into the mountain. ”

Kittredge asked him where. Absalom said, “Above the spring.

” Kittredge asked if he had seen her go in. Absalom said yes. Kittredge asked if he had gone in after her. Absalom said he had tried.

He said he got his shoulders inside, but something on the other side took hold of his shirt at both shoulders and held him there. It was not pulling him. It was holding him. And it spoke to him, and told him to go home.

Kittredge asked carefully what the voice had said. Absalom refused to repeat it. He said only that the voice had known his name and his father’s name, and had known the name of a horse his father had lost in the war, a thing no living soul knew but Absalom himself. The voice told him that Verna was needed, and thanked him for raising her.

Absalom said he came back down the mountain in the dark, crawling on his hands and knees most of the way. He said the mountain had not tried to keep him there. He said that was the worst part. It had not wanted him.

It had wanted only her. Sheriff Rufus Thrilkill came down from the county seat that same day. He was forty-four, a man of few words, four years in the Confederate cavalry in his youth, home with a jaw that did not quite fit on the left side. He organized a search.

Twenty-two men. They went up the north slope on Tuesday morning and searched for three days. They went past the mill wheel. They went past the spring.

Above the spring, on a rocky ledge about forty yards up, they found the entrance to an old adit. A mine opening no one in Cold Iron Gap had known existed. It was small. A man could get his shoulders through, but only with difficulty.

It ran straight into the mountain. They pushed a lantern in on a pole. The light did not reach the back. They used a longer pole.

Same result. They called Verna Souther’s name into the opening and listened for two hours. They heard water moving somewhere deep inside, but it was still. Once they heard what Sheriff Thrilkill described in his report as a shifting of rock.

They did not hear her voice. Two of the men wanted to try widening the opening. Sheriff Thrilkill said, “No. ” He said it clearly, and he said it twice.

He said he would not have the county’s name attached to opening that hole. One of the men argued. He was a young farmer from the far end of the Gap named Vardis Culpepper. He said Verna Souther was inside.

He said his wife had gone to Verna Souther for a cough that had killed her father, and that her father had been given six good months because of her, and that they owed her. He said they should widen the opening if that was what it took. The sheriff listened to him to the end. Then he said quietly that if Verna Souther was in there, she had not been there for four days, and that no one who had been taken by that mountain had ever come out, and that widening the hole would put twenty men at the same risk.

Vardis Culpepper did not argue again. He sat on a rock at the edge of the ledge and cried for a while, then stood up and helped the deputies carry the poles down. The sheriff posted a man at the entrance overnight to make sure no one went near it. The man he chose was a young deputy named Elam Coldwater, twenty-six, sober, church-going, a good shot, the kind who would stay up all night in the rain if you asked him to.

The sheriff gave him a lantern and a whistle and told him to blow three times if anything came near the entrance from any side, to stay awake, and to keep his distance. Elam said, “Yes, sir. ” He went up with a blanket and a canteen of coffee. He was seen at the entrance at eight that evening by two men carrying the last of the search gear.

He was seen at midnight by Vardis Culpepper, who had come back up alone to keep him company for an hour. Vardis reported that Elam waved him off from thirty yards down the slope and said he was fine and told Vardis to go home. Vardis went home. Elam Coldwater came down the next morning with his hair almost white on one side.

He never gave a reason. He resigned that evening. He moved to Kentucky the next month. He lived a long life.

He never spoke of that night to anyone. His grandson said in an interview with a folklore student in 1961 only that his grandfather, drinking on the porch of their house near Hazard, had told him that whatever was in that mountain had come to the entrance from inside at about quarter past three in the morning and had spoken to him through a crack in the rock in a voice that knew his mother’s name at her baptism, a name his mother had not used since she was seventeen. The grandson said his grandfather refused to repeat what the voice had said. He said only that the voice told him his time had not come yet, told him to go home, and told him not to come back.

Sheriff Thrilkill went home. He sat in his kitchen most of the night, and in the morning he wrote the report. At the bottom of the report was a box where the sheriff had to state the disposition of the case. He had to choose one of six words the state allowed.

Missing. Lost. Astray. Foul play suspected.

Deceased. Runaway. He sat with the pen over the paper for a long time. He wrote, “Astray.

” He signed the report. His hand, according to the clerk who received it, was shaking. He did not close the case. He kept it open on his desk until he retired in 1906.

And when he retired, he said to the man who took his place: “I will tell you what I was told. Cold Iron Gap has a place on the north slope that took a woman in 1894. Do not send anyone up there. If a person is lost there, write the word astray.

Write it because it is the word we have. It is not the right word for what is actually happening. But it is the word we have. ”

Absalom Souther did not stay in Cold Iron Gap.

He sold the blacksmith shop in the spring of 1895 and moved to the county seat, where he worked in a livery stable. He never remarried. He drank a little more than he used to, but not much. He attended the small Methodist church three blocks from his boardinghouse and sat in the same pew every Sunday, second from the back on the west side.

It was known that he wept silently during certain hymns. When people asked about his wife — and they did ask, because a blacksmith coming down out of the mountains alone was news in a town that size — he said only that she was gone. He would not say when. He would not say how.

If they pressed him, he would clasp his hands and go very still, and after a while the person pressing would stop. He lived to be seventy-one. He died in the summer of 1924 of a chest complaint in the back bedroom of his nephew’s house, where he had spent his last three years. His nephew, whose name was Cyrus Souther, kept a small notebook in which he wrote down things his uncle said in that last year when his mind wandered a little.

Cyrus was a schoolteacher, and had the schoolteacher’s habit of using a pencil. The notebook was donated to the county historical society in the sixties, and it is the source of most of what I have just told you. In his last month, Absalom told his nephew that he still heard Verna on the porch in the first hours before dawn. He said she never came to the door.

He said she stood in the road in front of the house, the way she had stood that Sunday in October, and looked up, not at his house, but at something in the sky above his house. He said she did it most nights. He said he did not go out to her. He said he had gone out to her once, in the first year, and walked to the edge of the porch and called her name, and she turned to look at him, and when he saw her face he went back inside and barred the door and never went out to her again.

His nephew asked him gently what he had seen. Absalom said only that it was Verna’s face. It was Verna’s face. But there was something behind it that was sorting through him the way a man sorts coins on a table.

He said he had come to understand that she was not looking for someone to bring her home. He said he understood that what was behind her face was only checking every few nights to make sure it was still there. And he said he had a feeling, one he could not shake in his final months, that when he died, that thing that was checking would move to someone else on the list. Doctor Wentworth Kittredge died in 1902.

His journal, as I told you, went into a locked cabinet and stayed there until his grandson opened it in 1922. The grandson, Isaiah Kittredge, was a young lawyer at the county seat. He read the book straight through in one sitting. He did not sleep that night, nor the night after.

On the third day he took the book to the county library and asked them to make a photocopy of the last thirty pages. Then he took the original back to his office and burned it in his stove. He said later, when he was old, that he burned it because he did not want anyone trying to go up to the spring based on what was in it. He said the photocopy was enough for documentation.

The last page of the photocopy, which I have read, contains a single line written on the morning after Verna Souther went into the mountain. It says, in Doctor Kittredge’s fine hand: “The mountain has taken what it counted. It will count again. ”

Ferren Scaggs died in 1901, in his sleep, at seventy-nine.

His wife, whose mother was Merryweather Whitlock, outlived him by twelve years. She never spoke of any of this to anyone. Otille Pettebone lived to be eighty-eight. She stayed in her cabin at the foot of the path her whole life.

She did not sit on her porch after dark. When people asked why, she said she preferred to be inside by nightfall. That was all. She kept her door barred every night from October 1894 until the night she died.

In the spring of 1955, sixty-one years after Verna Souther went up the north slope in her house shoes, a Forest Service surveyor named Duane Coldwell — a nephew of that deputy who had stood guard and come down with his hair gone white — was working the boundary line above the old logging camp in Cold Iron Gap. He did not know the family story. His father had never told him. He had come from Kentucky out west to work for the Forest Service in 1953, and was working a stretch of national forest boundary that no one had set foot on since the twenties.

He was alone that Friday. He climbed the north slope past the old logging camp and the spring, and went above the spring higher than anyone from the Gap had gone in living memory, following the compass line his supervisor had given him. About forty yards above the spring he came to a stone ledge, and at the back of that ledge he found what he later described as a very old piece of masonry, no more than three feet across, sealing what appeared to be the entrance to a small mine adit. The stones were well fitted.

The mortar was covered in moss. And pressed into the mortar of the top course, where a person standing outside would have pressed, was the flat impression of a right hand. Duane Coldwell was not a superstitious man. He was a surveyor, twenty-nine, three years out of the University of Kentucky, with a young wife and a first child on the way.

He knelt at the entrance and brushed the moss off the mortar with the flat of his hand, carefully, the way you would wipe dust off a photograph, and looked at the print. It was small. A woman’s hand or a small man’s. Long fingers.

The palm print was distinct, and three of the fingertip impressions carried small marks. Silver marks in the mortar that his brush had almost wiped away before he saw them. He took his brush away. He looked closer.

They were scars. Three fingertips bearing scars, and the scars had left their raised shape in the wet mortar and dried that way, fixed for nearly six decades, waiting for someone to look at them. Duane Coldwell took a photograph. He had a Kodak Retina in his pack.

He took three shots at different apertures, and one came out clear. That photograph exists. It is held by the county historical society under the reference Cold Iron Gap Boundary Survey, 1955, Plate 7. If you write to them, they will send you a copy.

I am looking at one now. The print, if you know what you are looking at, is a right hand. Verna Souther’s scars had been on her left hand when she first went up the mountain in October 1894. When she came down, they were on her right hand.

Someone sealed that entrance. Someone with a right hand bearing three silver scars pressed it into wet mortar and left the print. Whoever that was, they did it from the outside. You can look at that ten different ways.

You can say the print was a mason’s joke with a scar. You can say the mortar dates were wrong. You can say the whole story gets more fabricated with each telling, as mountain stories always do. But you have Kittredge’s journal in photocopy.

You have Sheriff Thrilkill’s open file. You have Absalom Souther’s words to his nephew, written down in 1924. You have Ferren Scaggs’s story of a voice coming from below. You have Otille Pettebone’s testimony of the double Verna, the one in the kitchen and the one on the road.

And you have a small right hand pressed into wet mortar sometime around the turn of the century at the entrance to a tunnel that Verna Souther walked into in her house shoes. There was something up there that counted. It counted Cletus Renshaw in 1867. It counted, through Verna Souther, a woman named Merryweather whom Renshaw loved and never came back to.

It counted Verna Souther herself in October of 1894. Kittredge wrote in that last line that it would count again. I do not know if it has. I do not know if the Forest Service still goes up there.

I know that Duane Coldwell requested a transfer in 1956 and got it, and never returned to the Blue Ridge. I know he spent his career surveying timber in the Ozarks, and that when he retired in 1988 he moved to a house on the Oregon coast, as far from the eastern mountains as he could get, and that he refused two interview requests about the 1955 survey from folklore researchers and a graduate student at Chapel Hill. I know he died in 2001. His notes, if he kept any, went with him.

I know Cold Iron Gap is no longer on the map, not under that name. The town is gone. It began emptying out in the twenties, when the young men left for the mills. The last family closed the last cabin door in 1946.

The road went away — or rather, its maintenance stopped, and the county stopped sending crews to it around 1950. The church bell was removed in 1931 and sold for scrap. The store burned in the fall of ’38, and no one rebuilt it. What you can still find, if you know where to look on the topographic map, is an unnamed creek and an unnamed bench.

Above the bench, there is a place where the contour lines close together enough that you know there is rock rising there. The spring is still there. The adit is still there, unless someone has broken the seal since Duane Coldwell photographed it in the spring of 1955. And the mountain is still there.

It is not a rough mountain. It looks easy. That is the part I do not want you to forget. It looks like land you could walk for pleasure.

It looks like a good place to sit on a flat rock at the end of the day and watch the light leave the far ridges. And if you have come this far with me, ask yourself: is there a piece of ground near you that looks like that? One that looks easy? One your family will not walk after dark and cannot always say why?

Watch your step.