The laugh came from inside the coal. That was the part Cassian Hildfeld could never make sense of, not in all the years that followed. It was faint, gentle, the laugh of a young man who had just heard a good joke, and it came from a wall of solid black anthracite where no tunnel existed, where no man could possibly be standing. The eight miners stood in the carbide light and listened to their friend laugh from inside the earth.

Then the laughing stopped. Wendell Kiugi was waiting at the top of the shaft when the cage came up. He had felt something, he said later, something 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 and did not ask any questions.

He just nodded. Aljernon Pickerstave was listed as a missing person two weeks after that morning in May of 1947. 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 and 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.

The worker in question, he wrote, had become disoriented in the shaft and likely walked into an unmarked drift in another section. The case was closed within the month. No one was ever found. But this was not the beginning.

To understand what happened to Aljernon Pickerstave, and to understand why Cassian Hildfeld spent the rest of his life waking at three in the morning, you have to go back much further, to a time before the Fulcan Roth Colliery existed at all. The mountain that the colliery was carved into did not have a name on the company maps. The company called it Hill 218. But the people who lived in the hollows around it had their own name for it.

They called it the Stillmount. Not because it was peaceful, but because of what they said happened to sound there. If you stood at the base of that mountain and shouted, your voice did not echo. It just stopped, as if the mountain had swallowed it.

The old folks in the hollows would not go up there to hunt. They would not cut timber on its slopes. There was a creek that 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.

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, and at the time that was considered a rich strike. The company that owned it, Marwood and Crane, built a small camp at the base of the mountain: bunkhouses, a company store, a little Methodist chapel.

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

The bodies could not be recovered. The shaft was deemed structurally unsound and ordered closed. That was the story the company told. It was not what happened.

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. But that was a truth Cassian Hildfeld would not piece together until late in his time at number seven, and he would not hear the full account until he sat in a one-room cabin up Brushwell Creek, drinking bourbon with an old man named Garlock Pennywhistle. 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. A foreman told him there was new work opening up northeast, in a county called Airmont. The pay was a dollar more a day. In 1947, a dollar a day was the difference between meat on the table on Sunday and no meat at all.

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 in the passenger seat. He arrived at the Vulcan Roth camp on the 3rd 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 number three had operated 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 Wendell Kiugi, 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.

Kiugi shook Cassian’s hand, looked him in the eye, and told him straight that the men did not last in seven. They quit fast. Some quit before finishing their first shift. The pay was higher than the other shafts because the company knew there was something wrong with that shaft.

Nobody knew what. But the coal was the best coal in the operation, a seam twelve feet thick, the cleanest anthracite this side of the Alleghenies. The company wanted it out of the ground, so they paid extra. Cassian asked what the men said was wrong.

Kiugi looked at him for a long moment. You will hear it for yourself if you take the job, he said. I am not going to put pictures in your head. I am not going to tell you what to listen for, because if I do, you will hear it whether it is there or not.

All I will 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 cannot tell you which kind of man you are until you have been down. Cassian took the job. He was not a brave man.

He was a poor one. Brave men walk toward danger because they choose to. Poor men walk toward it because there is nowhere else to walk. His first shift was Monday, the 7th of April, 1947.

The shaft house at number seven was a tall wooden structure painted a faded company red, with a steel cage elevator that descended six hundred forty feet into the earth. Cassian rode down with a crew of seven other men, none of whom he knew by name yet. The cage was familiar, the creak of the wood, the hum of the cable, the way the air pressure changed and the temperature dropped and the smell of the surface gave way to the deep smell of coal and damp stone. He knew all of that.

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. The cage hummed.

The cable creaked. Even when it was not moving, the wind in the shaft made it sing. He turned and looked back at it. The cable was moving in a slight breeze, 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. He told himself he was tired, that he had driven a long way, that the air down there had gas in it sometimes. He 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.

The drift was reinforced with timber every six feet. The lighting got worse the further they went, and by the time the crew reached the working face they were depending on their carbide lamps and one battery-powered safety light on a tripod. During that first shift, Cassian noticed three things 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, almost imperceptible drift. 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. The first two times he turned around.

There was nothing there, just the tunnel, the timbers, 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.

He counted them again when they reached the working face. Eight. He counted them at lunch. Seven.

He looked around. He 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, and he did not want to give in to it. 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 made all kinds of sounds. They moan. They sigh.

They whistle when the air pressure changes. Cassian had heard all of those sounds over twenty-five years in a hundred mines. 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 from deep in the chest. The crying came 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 number seven. He had been there almost three months.

Cassian said, Do you hear that? Iverson did not look up. You will hear a lot of things down here, he said. Do not listen to any of them.

Do not say anything to them. Do not ever answer them. Do you understand me? Do not answer.

Just keep working. Cassian asked what it was. Iverson stopped working then. He stood up to his full height and turned and looked at Cassian with the kind of look you give a man whose hand is on a stove and does not know it yet.

Son, he said, do not ask. Do not ask what it is, because if you start asking, you will 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 is 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.

He did not turn around. He worked. He kept his pick moving. He did 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. He rode the cage back up, washed the coal off at the wash house, 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. The extra dollar a day was the dollar he was sending home to his sister Bula Hildfeld, who was thirty-eight years old and unmarried and looking after their mother, who had a wasting illness and could no longer get out of bed. Cassian needed the money. So he went down into number seven.

Over the first three weeks, he learned what every man in that shaft eventually learned. There were no rules written down, 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 a truck on the way to the shaft house in the morning.

The rules came from men like Iverson Chasterly, men who had been down in seven and had figured out what kept you alive. Rule one: do not 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: do not count. If you find yourself counting the men in your crew and the number is not right, stop counting.

The number will be right when you stop looking. Rule three: do not 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 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: if you hear someone call your name, 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 learned the rules. He followed them 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. On the morning of the 29th of April, a new man arrived at the camp.

His name was Aljernon Pickerstave, twenty-six years old, fresh out of the army, a tank crewman from the European theater who had come home in 1946 and had spent a year drifting from one job to another before showing up at the Vulcan Roth shaft house with a duffel bag and a hopeful expression. Wendell Kiugi hired him, because the company always needed men, and gave him the same speech he had given Cassian. Aljernon listened, nodded, and said he could handle it. He had seen worse in the war.

Cassian, who happened to be standing nearby drinking coffee, thought to himself, no, son, you have not. Aljernon 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. He was working at the Vulcan Roth 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. Aljernon 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.

Cassian liked him. On Aljernon’s fourth day in the shaft, the 2nd 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 exhausted, hopeless crying of a woman who had been crying for a very long time.

Aljernon 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 do not ask about it. You do not listen to it. You do not talk about it.

You work. Aljernon said, but Cassian, there is a woman down here. We have to go check on her. Cassian said no, we do not.

Aljernon said, what do you mean we do not? She is hurt. She is lost. Listen to her.

We have to. Cassian would say later, when he told the story to a man who wrote it down, that this was the moment he should have grabbed Aljernon by the collar and dragged him bodily up the drift and out of the shaft, and not let him go back. If he had done that, everything would have been different. But he did not.

He said again, Aljernon, do not. Just do not. And Aljernon, 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 am just going to look. I am just going to walk to the end of the drift and look.

I am not going past the face. I am just going to look. He set his pick down. He took two steps past the working face.

He stopped. He turned around and looked at Cassian, and the smile was still on his face, that wide gap-toothed smile. It is all right, he said. I will be right back.

Then he walked into the darkness past the cut. Cassian shouted his name. The whole crew shouted. Iverson Chasterly shouted.

They ran toward the working face and 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.

Aljernon was not in the wall. Aljernon was not on the floor. Aljernon 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 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. It was Aljernon’s laugh, coming from inside the coal. The crew did not finish the shift.

They went up. Melena Westerfield 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 himself 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 Aljernon’s disappearance, Cassian made a decision. He was going to find out what was in number seven. Not because he wanted to.

Because he felt he owed it to Aljernon. The boy had walked into the dark on his watch. A few nights before, in the boarding house, Aljernon had shown him the photograph of Melena and asked, do you ever feel like the mine knows you? Cassian had laughed and said, no, the mine does not know anybody.

And Aljernon 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, 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. He was ninety-four years old, born in 1853, and he 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.

Garlock let him in. He poured them both a glass. He listened to Cassian’s questions. Then he said, you are working in seven, are you?

Cassian said yes, sir. Garlock said, you have heard her. Cassian asked, who? Garlock said, 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 Cassian what he knew, not what he thought.

There was a difference. What he knew had been told to him by his grandfather, who had been a young man when the first shaft went down in 1871. His grandfather had been one of the local guides who refused to go up on the Stillmount with the surveyors. The reason, Garlock said, was that 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.

That was how his grandfather put it. He did not mean it in a literal way. He meant that 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, but 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 1871, they sank a shaft right into the heart of it. And in 1878, eleven men went into the shaft and did not come back.

Cassian said, the cave-in. Garlock laughed. It was not a happy laugh. There was no cave-in, he said.

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 that no man had cut. It went deeper, much deeper. And 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. And 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 other shafts 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, Garlock said, was different. Do you know why?

Cassian said no. Because seven was sunk in 1945, Garlock said. The engineers who picked the spot did not know what they were doing. They drilled their test cores.

They looked at the seams. They picked the place with the richest coal. And the place they picked, son, is exactly the place where shaft one was, the 1871 shaft. They sank number seven right on top of it.

The old company maps were 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. He said, what happens now? Garlock said, now you stop working in seven. You go back to Logan County.

You find another job. Because the thing in there has been waking up for two years, son. And it is not going back to sleep. Your friend who walked into the wall, he will not be the last.

There will be more. And if you stay, eventually it will 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, he said. I am going to tell you what I know, not what I think.

What I know is that I do not know what it is. My grandfather did not know. The people who lived here before us did not 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 is hungry or bored or 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 is the bait, son.

That is how it pulls you in. It uses what you have already lost. Cassian thought about Aljernon’s laugh. He thought about the photograph of Melena.

He drove back to the camp that evening. He 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 that cost three dollars a bottle and lasted only two weeks. Because he was a poor man and 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.

Their names were Ronan Fred Heathcastle, thirty-one years old, vanished on the 18th of June. Watson Eldermill, forty-four years old, vanished on the 3rd of August. And finally, on the 20th of August, a man named Cleophus Grumbeck, fifty-two years old, who had been working in number seven longer than anyone except Iverson Chasterly. Cleophus Grumbeck 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 19th. 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 Kiugi closed number seven a week later. He told the company the shaft was unsafe. The company protested.

Kiugi said he would resign before he sent another man down. After a long argument, the company agreed to seal the shaft temporarily. They never reopened it. By 1952 the entire Vulcan Roth 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 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 Hildfeld went home in October of 1947. He moved back to Logan County. He 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. He outlived 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 Hildfeld died on the 17th of February 1978. He was seventy-three years old. 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 eight hundred 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. 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 that read: “Hildfeld 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. It did not matter what house or what bed.

It did not matter if he was sober or if he 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. And he sat up in his bed in the dark 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. He tried sleeping with the windows open. He tried sleeping in different rooms.

He tried sleeping at his sister’s. He tried sleeping 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 Aljernon 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 o’clock 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. He took it apart. He 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 you do not even have to think about whether to laugh. You just laugh, and laugh, and laugh.