The trail, not so much a dotted line as a vague row of spots of less enthusiastic undergrowth, led them away from the house, as away as the isle allowed: the westernmost tip stretched only some sixty yards from the building. Some feet short of the water they faced one monumental tree. It was a fir. The trunk, too thick to embrace, exhibited a large, oozing ulcer in front, slightly above their line of sight, exposing a large cavity in the wood.
This distracted them at first from the symbol painted over the wound. It appeared to be a monogram of sorts, more complex than a letter, somewhat simpler than an advanced Chinese character, though it resembled the latter in the way it had been drawn, a convoluted glyph broken down to simple strokes. In red.
“Is that…?”
“Paint,” Kerri assured Andy.
Nate swallowed what felt like a tennis ball in his throat.
“I’ve seen this symbol before.”
Andy turned to find him iceberg white, eyes fixed on the red mark. “You mean here, thirteen years ago?” she prompted.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Man, you all right?”
Nate blinked out of the trance, seemingly surprised to be welcomed by Andy on the other side. “Yeah. Fine.”
“Fine,” she echoed. “Let’s follow the sulfur trail the other way. Kerri?”
Kerri was standing in front of the tree watching the tiny maggots feeding on the edges of the gash.
“Kerri, what’s up?”
It took her a little time to gather the grit to raise her arm and reach into the hole. Her fingers dipped in a pool of sticky resin. Then something grassy. A plump black beetle came scuttling down her arm.
“Ew,” Andy contributed.
Kerri grasped something, then retracted her hand, shaking the bugs off, and looked at the tiny bundle of straws and twigs in her palm—a sort of spherical bird nest.
Gently, she unwrapped it. At last her face surrendered to a grimace.
“Fuck.”
“Oh, God,” Andy groaned. “Is it human?”
They all leaned over the small treasure in Kerri’s hands. It was a tooth—a little too small for a human molar, Kerri considered, but too big for a burrowing animal or anything a bird would prey on.
“What does it mean?” Andy asked.
“I don’t know.” Kerri returned the tooth to the nest and tossed it into the tree hole.
“You’re putting it back?”
“Why not?”
“It’s a clue.”
“I don’t wanna carry a tooth around, and I have no way of telling where it comes from. If we happen to need it again, we know where we left it, right?”
“Yeah. I guess,” Andy slowly assented. “There’s more of that sulfur that way and that way. Let’s follow the trails.”
They tried, but the lines proved too blurry to follow, and in both cases they seemed to lead straight to the water. However, upon following the first trail in the opposite direction, they found another two monograms in red.
One was painted on a tree stump on the south side, facing inland, lurking over a parapet of bony shrubs. It was as inextricable as the first, but definitely different.
From there, they made out another line leading to the east, past the beach where they had landed. A decrepit willow, veiled by a curtain of its own drooping branches, slouched there, leaning suicidally over the water. Andy pushed the curtain aside and stepped into the vault. Inside it, a smooth marble slab, once white, now marred with mud and weeds, lay forever sheltered from sunlight.
“Daniel Debo?n’s grave,” Kerri captioned. “Killed in the fire in ’forty-nine and buried here on his isle according to his will.”
“I remember this,” Andy said.
“I don’t think we saw this, though,” Nate said, pointing at the third monogram painted on the trunk. Again, in red.
“These marks look old,” Kerri observed. “Maybe they were here last time, but it was too dark to find them?” She was addressing Nate now. “Where else could you have seen them?”
“A book,” he said, a fingernail scratching the paint. And then, focusing on Kerri, he added: “My kind of book. Not yours.”
Andy tried to dispel the gloom and let the curtain of branches fall. They drifted away from the willow like they would from an old man offering candy.
Kerri stayed near the shore, making sure the boat didn’t move until Andy decided it was time to go. Nate spent some time copying down the monograms on a piece of paper.
Andy borrowed Kerri’s binoculars for a last tour around the house. With the doors padlocked and the first-story windows barred and shuttered, there was not much left to explore. Still, the isle had its own exclaves. A row of small, sharp rocks lay scattered beyond the contour of the mainland. A solitary shape swam stranded some sixty yards off the northern shore. Night was falling too quickly, but with the help of the binoculars Andy made out a buoy.
“Hey, Nate. Check this out.”
Nate stood facing the house, seemingly studying the rear fa?ade. More specifically, the round window atop the house.
“Nate. You okay?”
What made her queasy was not that he didn’t stop looking. It was that Tim was right next to him, looking up too.
“Nate!”
“Yeah,” the boy said as he clicked back. “Sorry. I remember that room.”
“Me too,” she joined in, reminiscing. “It’s where we set the booby trap with the serving cart and the fishing net. The ‘Lake Creature Phony Express,’ wasn’t it?”
“That was a good trap,” Peter rated, standing between them. “Simple mechanics, flashy results. Instant classic. Also, catchy name.”
“Too bad it caught the wrong guy,” Nate said to Peter’s face, but instead he found himself confronting Andy.
She gave him the kind of concerned, furrowed squint that mental patients often complain about getting from strangers in group therapy.
Tim had lost interest in the house and padded off to join Kerri by the pier.
“Hey, check out that thing on the water,” Andy said. She walked Nate to the shore and gave him the binoculars.
“Yeah, it’s a buoy,” he quickly concluded. “Maybe it signals a reef or something that can be a danger to boats.”
He didn’t try to make it sound convincing, but Andy didn’t come up with anything better.
“It’s called Necronomicon.”
“Nec-what?” Andy frowned. “What is?”
“The book. The one the symbols come from. It’s a grimoire.” He caught her second frown, rephrased: “A book of spells, a witchcraft manual, written a thousand years ago; almost all copies were burned; most people don’t even think it’s real, but it is. There was a copy in the house, in the attic.”
Andy made sure to process all the information, rogered it with a nod.
“Don’t tell Kerri about this,” Nate added.
“What? Why? I don’t want to complimentalize information.”
“Compartmentalize.”
“Yeah, that. It’s important we don’t keep things from each other; we should all be on the same page.”
“Look, Kerri is on the ecovillain page now. She’s not ready to accept something unnatural is going on here, but there is. There always was. The…creature. The hanged corpses. Whatever capsized our boat that night.”
“Nate, how many times did we think we were chasing, or being chased by, ghouls and monsters? And every time it was a guy in a mask.”