Katie turned in a slow circle. She was at the very edge of the Lower Bend, just where the road inclined sharply to begin switchbacking the hill toward the center of town. The area was lit with sporadic lamplight, but this only served to highlight the many pools of shadow behind her. On either side, long-weathered buildings creaked and groaned under the assault of the wind. This end of the Lower Bend was the closest thing to an industrial row that the Town could boast: Mr. Eddings’s forge; Ellen Wycroft’s flour mill; the ceramics shop, which held ten potter’s wheels and two kilns and was open to all via a sign-up sheet; and Mr. Levy’s all-purpose art store, full of leads and canvas, homemade paints, and plain, well-made oak picture frames. These were good buildings, friendly buildings, but now they leaned and groaned in the darkness, and Katie felt a trickle of unease at how different they were, how easily certainty became uprooted in the dark. Where was Row? If he was playing a trick on her, she would make him regret it.
“Row?” she called. The wind picked up her voice and carried it; it seemed to slip down the street, around corners and into shadows, places she didn’t want it to go. She thought of the graveyard, bones strewn every which way by an animal that thought nothing of tearing into graves and carrying off corpses. Her imagination, so vivid that Mrs. Warren often read her creative writing assignments to the class, was coming to life, sparking and popping. She sensed movement all around her, behind her, in each pool of shadow.
“Row!” she cried out, her voice cracking mid-syllable. She didn’t care if they both got caught now; in fact, she would welcome it, welcome some disapproving adult to escort her back up to the Town for a talk with Mum about being out after curfew. Ahead of Katie were deep woods, broken only by the almost imperceptible glimmer of the path. She would rather face getting caught than enter those woods alone.
“Row!” she screamed, but the wind grabbed her voice and seemed to shred it to tatters. No one lived down at this end of town. All of the buildings were closed up and empty at night, but that very emptiness seemed suddenly terrible to Katie, a void waiting to be filled. She would never forgive Row for this, ever. He had snuck past her, taken one of his secret ways through the woods, and now he was probably halfway home, laughing all the way. They both liked to read horror stories, but the stories didn’t frighten Row the way they did Katie. He probably thought nothing of leaving her stranded here in the dark, thought it was a wonderful joke.
Don’t you think he knows you better than that?
Yes, he did. Row knew Katie’s imagination, knew that she wouldn’t like to be alone in the windy dark. He had done this on purpose. Katie had behaved badly at Jenna’s shop; she knew it. She had meant to apologize. But what Row had done here was deliberate, spiteful.
Katie heard something.
Beneath the high, cold cry of the wind, her ears picked up the stealthy sound of something moving. Not behind her, but in front, somewhere beyond the mill and the ceramics shop. There was plenty of movement out there; the wind on this slope was so strong that the trees were always talking and rustling in their own secret language, but these were not tree noises. Slow and clumsy, but purposeful, the sounds getting closer. Katie heard the sharp crack of a disturbed branch snapping back into place.
“Row?” she asked faintly. The sound barely left her lips, and she was glad. She might not have any gifts; she couldn’t see in the dark, like Gavin, or move with the quick, animal silence of Lear, but her intuition worked as well as anyone’s, and what she heard out there was bad. Not Row’s kind of bad, charming and seductive, but something terrible. Katie thought longingly of her knife, still sitting on her dresser next to a pile of clothing. They weren’t supposed to wear their knives anywhere but practice, but Katie would have given anything to have a blade with her now.
There was no hope for it. She turned and began walking up the path into the woods, tucking her head, trying to step quietly, determined not to look backward. The woods would be bad, but she could manage; she was fifteen years old. The path was longer than Row’s shortcut, but at least it was a way that Katie knew; she wouldn’t get lost. She would walk back up to town and crawl into her own bed, and the next time Row came knocking, she would keep her window shut.
Even in the dark, she made decent progress; the tree cover was thick, but enough moonlight shone down through gaps in the branches that Katie could pick her way along. Despite her best intentions, she kept glancing behind her, but she saw nothing. Whatever it had been—and she had no intention of dwelling on that question, not until she was safe in her bed and the sun had risen and flooded the Town with light—it hadn’t followed her up here.
The path curved. Ahead of her, Katie saw a wide break in the trees, giving on to a broad, leveled field. Moonlight limned the field clearly, revealing the dark, rounded shapes of tombstones. The graveyard. The Town, worried about contaminating the water supply, had always buried its dead near the bottom of the hill. William Tear encouraged cremation—he and Row agreed on that, at least—but there were too many people whose religious faith demanded that they go into the ground. The last time the subject had come up at meeting, Paul Annescott had rallied a large contingent of Christians; they had won the vote to keep the graveyard, and won it fairly, but for a moment, Katie hated them all. That wide expanse of field glowed ghostly in the moonlight, but it was the markers that bothered Katie most. Bad enough to put people in the ground to rot; did they have to commemorate it as well?