And maybe most of all, how much was all this exposure going to affect the town?

“The Hollow’s gotten some publicity over the years, focused on this whole thing. That’s how you found out about us to begin with. But it’s been mild, and for the most part, hasn’t done much more than bring interested tourists through. With your involvement, and now potentially two others, it could turn the Hollow into some sort of lurid or ridiculous caption in the tourist guides.”

“You knew that was a risk when you agreed to talk to me.”

She was keeping pace with him, stride-by-stride on the sloppy ground. And, she was striding into the unknown without a quake or a quiver. “You’d have come whether or not I agreed.”

“So part of your cooperation is damage control.” She nodded. “Can’t blame you. But maybe you should be thinking bigger picture, Cal. More people invested means more brains and more chance of figuring out how to stop what’s been happening. Do you want to stop it?”

“More than I can possibly tell you.”

“I want a story. There’s no point in bullshitting you about that. But I want to stop it, too. Because despite my famous guts, this thing scares me. Better shot at that, it seems to me, if we work together and utilize all our resources. Cybil’s one of mine, and she’s a damn good one.”

“I’ll think about it.” For now, he thought, he’d given her enough. “Why don’t you tell me what made you head down the woo-woo trail, writing-wise.”

“That’s easy. I always liked spooky stuff. When I was a kid and had a choice between, say, Sweet Valley High or Stephen King, King was always going to win. I used to write my own horror stories and give my friends nightmares. Good times,” she said and made him laugh. “Then, the turning point, I suppose, was when I went into this reputed haunted house with a group of friends. Halloween. I was twelve. Big dare. Place was falling down and due to be demolished. We were probably lucky we didn’t fall through floorboards. So we poked around, squealed, scared ourselves, and had some laughs. Then I saw her.”

“Who?”

“The ghost, of course.” She gave him a friendly elbow poke. “Keep up. None of the others did. But I saw her, walking down the stairs. There was blood all over her. She looked at me,” Quinn said quietly now. “It seemed like she looked right at me, and walked right by. I felt the cold she carried with her.”

“What did you do? And if I get a guess, I’m guessing you followed her.”

“Of course, I followed her. My friends were running around, making spooky noises, but I followed her into the falling-down kitchen, down the broken steps to the basement by the beam of my Princess Leia flashlight. No cracks.”

“How can I crack when I had a Luke Skywalker flashlight?”

“Good. What I found were a lot of spiderwebs, mouse droppings, dead bugs, and a filthy floor of concrete. Then the concrete was gone and it was just a dirt floor with a hole-a grave-dug in it. A black-handled shovel beside it. She went to it, looked at me again, then slid down, hell, like a woman might slide into a nice bubble bath. Then I was standing on the concrete floor again.”

“What did you do?”

“Your guess?”

“I’d guess you and Leia got the hell out of there.”

“Right again. I came out of the basement like a rocket. I told my friends, who didn’t believe me. Just trying to spook them out as usual. I didn’t tell anyone else, because if I had, our parents would have known we were in the house and we’d have been grounded till our Social Security kicked in. But when they demolished the house, started jackhammering the concrete floor, they found her. She’d been in there since the thirties. The wife of the guy who’d owned the house had claimed she’d run off. He was dead by then, so nobody could ask him how or why he’d done it. But I knew. From the time I saw her until they found her bones, I dreamed about her murder, I saw it happen.

“I didn’t tell anyone. I was too afraid. Ever since, I’ve told what I find, confirming or debunking. Maybe partly to make it up to Mary Bines-that was her name. And partly because I’m not twelve anymore, and nobody’s going to ground me.”

He said nothing for a long time. “Do you always see what happened?”

“I don’t know if it’s seeing or just intuiting, or just my imagination, which is even more far-famed than my guts. But I’ve learned to trust what I feel, and go with it.”

He stopped, gestured. “This is where the tracks cross. We came in from that direction, picked up the cross trail here. We were loaded down. My mother had packed a picnic basket, thinking we were camping out on Fox’s family farm. We had his boom box, his load from the market, our backpacks full of the stuff we figured we couldn’t live without. We were still nine years old. Kids, pretty much fearless. That all changed before we came out of the woods again.”

When he started to walk once more, she put a hand on his arm, squeezed. “Is that tree bleeding, or do you just have really strange sap in this part of the world?”

He turned, looked. Blood seeped from the bark of the old oak, and seeped into the soggy ground at its trunk.

“That kind of thing happens now and again. It puts off the hikers.”

“I bet.” She watched Lump plod by the tree after only a cursory sniff. “Why doesn’t he care?”

“Old hat to him.”

She started to give the tree a wide berth, then stopped. “Wait, wait. This is the spot. This is the spot where I saw the deer across the path. I’m sure of it.”

“He called it, with magick. The innocent and pure.”

She started to speak, then looking at Cal’s face, held her tongue. His eyes had darkened; his cheeks had paled.

“Its blood for the binding. Its blood, his blood, the blood of the dark thing. He grieved when he drew the blade across its neck, and its life poured onto his hands and into the cup.”

As his head swam, Cal bent over from the waist. Prayed he wouldn’t be sick. “Need a second to get my breath.”

“Take it easy.” Quickly, Quinn pulled off her pack and pulled out her water bottle. “Drink a little.”

Most of the queasiness passed when she took his hand, pressed the bottle into it. “I could see it, feel it. I’ve gone by this tree before, even when it’s bled, and I never saw that. Or felt that.”

“Two of us this time. Maybe that’s what opened it up.”

He drank slowly. Not just two, he thought. He’d walked this path with Fox and Gage. We two, he decided. Something about being here with her. “The deer was a sacrifice.”

“I get that. Devoveo. He said it in Latin. Blood sacrifice. White witchery doesn’t ascribe to that. He had to cross over the line, smear on some of the black to do what he felt he needed to do. Was it Dent? Or someone who came long before him?”

“I don’t know.”

Because she could see his color was eking back, her own heart rate settled. “Do you see what came before?”

“Bits, pieces, flashes. Not all of it. I generally come back a little sick. If I push for more, it’s a hell of a lot worse.”

“Let’s not push then. Are you okay to go on?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” His stomach was still mildly uneasy, but the light-headedness had passed. “We’ll be coming to Hester’s Pool soon.”

“I know. I’m going to tell you what it looks like before we get there. I’m telling you I’ve never been there before, not in reality, but I’ve seen it, and I stood there night before last. There are cattails and wild grass. It’s off the path, through some brush and thorny stuff. It was night, so the water looked black. Opaque. Its shape isn’t quite round, not really oval. It’s more of a fat crescent. There were a lot of rocks. Some more like boulders, some no more than pebbles. She filled her pockets with them-they looked to be about hand-sized or smaller-until her pockets were sagging with the weight. Her hair was cut short, like it’d been hacked at, and her eyes looked mad.”