SIENNA POV
I told myself I was only going to the treeline.
This was true, in the same way that a lot of things I told myself were true, technically, provisionally, subject to revision based on what I found when I got there. The camera was already in my bag when I left the house, a secondhand 35mm I'd bought the previous spring for forty dollars from a man on Craigslist who'd lost interest in the hobby. I'd loaded it with fast film, the kind rated for low light. I'd done this the night before. I hadn't admitted to myself why.
It was forty minutes before the curfew. The sky held the specific grey-amber of dusk in October, the light thickening at the horizon, the shadows under the trees already a different quality of dark than the shadows in the open. I walked the long way around the school's athletic field, past the orange blaze marker, past the place where the nervous boy had leaned against the post yesterday. The marker cast a thin shadow pointing east, into the trees.
I stopped at the edge. Not the treeline itself, ten feet short of it, on the last patch of mowed grass, where the ground was still flat and the light still reached. I stood there and looked in.
The trees were old hemlock and birch, the birch trunks pale and peeling in the dimness, the hemlock boughs so dense at the canopy level that the forest floor underneath was nearly clear. No undergrowth to speak of. Just root systems rising from dark earth and the long corridors between trunks going back and back until the dark swallowed them. It looked, at this distance, like a place that had been swept.
I took the camera out and held it without raising it yet.
The temperature at the treeline was wrong. Not dramatically, not a wall of cold, nothing cinematic, just the differential you feel when you step from sunlight into the shade of a large building, except there was no building. The air moving out of the woods was three, maybe four degrees cooler than the air at my back, and it carried the green-rain smell I'd first caught in Yara's bakery, stronger now, almost medicinal.
Nothing moved. I watched the space between the nearest trunks for two full minutes, counting my breaths to keep the measure honest.
Then I raised the camera and started shooting.
✦
The first frame was the treeline straight on, documentation, baseline, the kind of shot you take before anything happens so you have something to compare it to later. The second was the birch trunks at the left edge, where the bark caught what remained of the light. The third was the corridor of hemlock going back into the dark, the fourth the root systems, the fifth the ground just inside the treeline where the texture of the earth changed from torn grass to something smoother, packed, used.
I was framing the sixth shot, the canopy, what little of the sky was visible through it, when something moved.
Not a sound first. A pressure change, the way the air shifts in a room when a door opens somewhere else in the building. Then my peripheral vision caught it, twenty feet inside the treeline and to my left, between two hemlock trunks, a darkness that was differently shaped than the surrounding dark.
I did not lower the camera.
My thumb found the advance lever by muscle memory and wound on to the next frame. My eye stayed at the viewfinder. The shape and it was a shape, it had edges, it occupied space in a way that shadows didn't, was partially obscured by the nearer trunk, but what I could see of it was wrong in the specific way the shape in the fog had been wrong two nights ago. Wrong in terms of scale. Wrong in terms of the joints, which didn't bend the way a person's joints bent. Wrong in terms of the stillness, which was not the stillness of something that had stopped moving but the stillness of something that had never needed to move to begin with, that was simply present the way a fixed point was present.
I pressed the shutter.
The click of it was very loud.
The shape moved. Not away, it didn't retreat, didn't startle, nothing so readable as that. It shifted its weight from one position to another, and in doing so turned slightly toward me, and for one frame, one literal frame of exposure, a fraction of a second, it was fully between the two trunks with nothing blocking it, and I pressed the shutter again on pure reflex before my brain had finished processing what my eye had seen.
Then it was gone. Gone the way a light goes out, present, then absent, the space it had occupied looking exactly as it had before, as though the space itself had rearranged its memory.
✦
I stood at the edge of the grass for another minute without moving.
My pulse was doing something loud and specific at the base of my throat. I kept my breathing shallow and even and watched the trees and waited for the shape to reappear or for something else to happen, and nothing did. The woods went on being the woods, the hemlock boughs moving slightly in a wind I couldn't feel from where I stood, the birch trunks pale and indifferent, the darkness between them absolute and still.
I wound the film on and ejected the camera card, then stood there holding it in my palm.
I already had a second card in my jacket pocket, same model, same speed, pre-loaded, because the part of me that had loaded fast film the night before had also, apparently, prepared for the possibility of needing to swap out quickly. I slid the original card into the inner pocket of my jacket, against my sternum, and loaded the new one into the camera with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be.
Then I took the new card back out and held it in my right hand, visible, obvious.
The walk home was twenty minutes. I took the long route, past the hardware store and down the main stretch of Aldermoor, in the last seven minutes of light before the curfew. I held the decoy card loosely, not hiding it. The folder had taught me that the thing you protected too carefully was the thing that told people what mattered. The thing you carried openly looked like the whole of it.
Nobody stopped me. Nobody appeared from the treeline. The fog was already down at the far end of Aldermoor, doing its nightly work, and the streetlamps had come on in their orange rows, and Black Hollow was folding itself into the version of itself that existed after dark, quieter, the front doors closed, the driveways empty, the whole town drawing inward like a hand making a fist.
I went inside and locked the front door and didn't mention where I'd been.
✦
After dinner I went back to my room and sat on the window seat and took the original card out from against my sternum and held it under the lamp.
Seven frames. The first five were what I'd intended them to be, documentation, comparison points, nothing remarkable. I wouldn't know what the sixth and seventh had caught until I developed them, and I couldn't develop them here, not in Black Hollow, not at any drugstore where the person running the machine might look at the prints before I did.
I wrapped the card in a square of black electrical tape I'd brought from the hardware store purchase and tucked it into the toe of my spare boot in the wardrobe, under a folded sock.
Then I sat back down at the window and looked out at the street.
The fog was dense now, the streetlamps reduced to soft haloes, the far end of Aldermoor invisible. Nothing moved in it. No shapes at the treeline from this angle, no suggestion of anything at the boundary between the town and the dark beyond it.
But I kept thinking about the moment the shape had turned. The fraction of a second between one frame and the next when it had been fully visible, fully between the trunks, facing me. I hadn't processed it at the moment, adrenaline had been driving, but now, sitting still with the town locked up around me, I turned it over in my mind the way you turn over a stone to see what the underside looks like.
Before the shutter clicked, it had turned to face me.
Toward me specifically, with the particular orientation of something that had already known exactly where I was standing and had simply been waiting to see what I would do about it.
Outside, the fog pressed against the glass, and the deadbolt on the window was locked, and I did not move from the window seat for a very long time.