“Who are you?” Rachel said from the shadows, her one lens glinting in the moonlight.
“Manners!” The woman huffed and took a step toward us. We shrank back. “Forgive me.” Her smell too was overpowering, but mixed with something mustier, a disturbing odor I couldn’t place. I held my breath so as not to breathe her in. “I am Simone, and this is my son, Dean.” She swept out her arms with a dramatic flourish as if presenting him to us, as if we had not yet noticed him.
Dean looked down, into the woods, anywhere but at us. He snatched up his sharp stick again before bounding back into the woods.
“You will have to forgive him. Bit of an odd duck. And don’t expect a lot of chitter-chatter. The boy is mute. Born with no tongue.” She grew thoughtful a moment, twirling a rope of knotted hair; now I saw that the woven-in pieces of bone were the skulls of birds or something equally tiny, chipmunk maybe. I was terrified, mesmerized. “It’s a shame, if you ask me. But he handles it well.”
We introduced ourselves, and she nodded at each of us in turn, seeming to look through us with her direct stare, as if she knew things about us we’d long forgotten and would rather not remember. Without further comment, she turned, and the forest engulfed her.
We followed her—or the scent of her—toward the fire that still burned in the clearing on the mountainside. As I stepped into the ring of light, I felt something above me. A presence. A few yards over our heads, a pitch-dark object hung from the arm of a tree. The head of a black bear swayed and turned in the night wind, its bulbous pink tongue lolling out, close-set eyes glassy and almost surprised-looking above its dusky snout. Other objects twisted from sinewy ropes, staring down at us from the dome of trees, creaking and swaying in the night breeze. A moose head gaped down, its massive antlers framing a starry section of sky. The head of a deer gazed plaintively toward the river. Some kind of catlike creature I couldn’t name, caught in a perpetual snarl, faced the brutish gray head of a coyote. The necks were more torn than cut; gristly pieces of flesh hung down in ghastly curtains. Most heads had dried and visibly shrunken from the time they had walked the earth attached to their bodies, but the bear’s head looked fresh; a dark liquid oozed from it, puddling on the ground. The heads faced out, forming a kind of lookout around the beaten earth of the clearing. Sandra issued a brief cry as she looked up, but Pia clapped her hand over her mouth and hissed at her to keep going. Rachel caught a whiff of Sandra’s fear and whitened, but stayed silent. I was flattened with terror and had pretty much left my body; like one of the animal heads, I looked down on myself as I feigned all sorts of calm.
We stumbled toward the fire, Rachel still holding on to me. From the shadowy recesses of the camp a baby goat came bleating on spindly legs. It bumped up against my knees. My instinct was to reach down and pet it like a puppy, but the mother goat followed, fat with milk. Crying in an eerily human voice, it butted up so hard against my thighs I nearly fell backward. The animal glowered at me with its sideways pupils as it chewed, devil horns twisting back. Two more young goats ran up to us, white ones, braying, busily smelling us out.
“Get away now, Rose,” Simone admonished. She slapped the big one on its flank and led it by a curled horn back to what looked like a waist-high jumble of twisted bones. “Dean, how’d these girls get out?”
Dean dashed around us, gathering the animals and guiding them to the enclosure, made entirely of entwined antlers, including the gate, which vanished into the structure once he hooked one antler over another. It was the strangest-looking pen I’d ever seen.
“I could swear they have hands, those goats,” Simone said with a prissy annoyance. She stepped behind a log cabin that leaned hard toward the woods as if trying to escape into them. Oblong windows bulged out from three sides of it; it took me a few seconds to realize these were car windows, and the door of the cabin was a car door, caked with rust and dirt.
Simone emerged from behind the shelter carrying a plastic jug and metal cups and set them on a tree stump. A joined section of green and orange leather seats that looked scavenged from a VW bus—springs and stuffing busted through—huddled close to the fire. I moved toward it, holding my hands up to the flames as if to warm them, when what I was really doing was trying to stop quaking with fear.
“Would you ladies care for a drink?”
We all looked at each other. Rachel stood by me, still gripping my belt, her face unreadable. I didn’t think she’d seen the animal heads. Sandra’s face was utterly drained of color. I gripped her hand, her flesh clammy and cold, her breath coming in shallow bites.
Pia took one of the metal cups offered to her and said defiantly, “What is it?”