Ig drove on to the foundry, bumping gently across the overgrown meadow. As he rolled toward the building, he scanned the old foundry for signs of life. On a summer day in his own childhood, on a hot August evening, half the kids in Gideon would’ve been out here, looking to score something: a smoke, a beer, a kiss, a grope, or a sweet taste of their own mortality on the Evel Knievel trail. But the place was empty and isolated in the last of the day’s light. Maybe since Merrin had been killed out here, kids didn’t like to come around so much anymore. Maybe they thought the place was haunted. Maybe it was.

He rolled around to the rear of the building and put his car into park to one side of the Evel Knievel trail, positioning the Gremlin in the shade of an oak. A frilly blue skirt, a long black sock, and someone’s overcoat hung from the branches, as if the tree were fruiting mildewed laundry. Beyond the front bumper were the old and rusting pipes leading down to the water. He shut off the car and got out to look around.

Ig had not been inside for years, but it was much as he remembered it. The foundry lay open to the sky, brick arches and pillars rising away into the slanting reddish light. Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed to Ig that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want to Be.

Part of one wall had fallen in, and Ig navigated his way around a mound of bricks, past a wheelbarrow piled with rusting tools. At the far side of the largest room was the chimney. The iron hatch to the blast furnace hung ajar, an opening just large enough to crawl into.

Ig approached it and peered in at a mattress and a collection of red candles, melted to fat stubs. A filthy and stained blanket that had once been blue was pushed to the side of the mattress. Farther back were the charred remnants of a campfire in a circle of coppery light, centered directly beneath the chimney. Ig picked up the blanket and sniffed it. It reeked of stale urine and smoke. He let it flop from his hands.

On his walk back to the car, to get his bottle and his cell phone, he finally had to admit that snakes were following him. He could hear them, the hiss their bodies made moving in the dry grass: almost a dozen of them in all. He grabbed a chunk of old concrete from amid the weeds and turned and threw it at them. One snake effortlessly weaved aside. None of them were struck. They went still, watching him in the last of the day’s light.

He tried not to look at them but at the car; a two-foot rat snake dropped from the oak tree above and hit the hood of the Gremlin with a tinny bang. He recoiled with a scream, then lunged at it, grabbing at it to throw it off.

Ig thought he had it by the head, but he’d gripped it too low, mid-trunk, and it twisted on itself and fastened its teeth into his hand. It was like catching an industrial staple in the meat of his thumb. He grunted and flung it into the brush. Ig stuck his thumb into his mouth and tasted blood. He wasn’t worried about poison. There were no poisonous snakes in New Hampshire. Or no, that wasn’t quite right. Dale Williams had liked to take Ig and Merrin hiking in the White Mountains and had warned them to be on the lookout for timber rattlers. But he had always done so gleefully, his chubby cheeks bright red, and Ig had never heard of rattlers in New Hampshire from anyone else.

He spun on his entourage of reptiles. There were almost twenty of them now.

“Get the fuck away from me!” he roared at them.

They froze, watching him from the high grass with avid, slitted, gold-foil eyes-then began to scatter, veering aside and slipping into the weeds. Ig thought some cast disappointed looks back at him as they departed.

He stalked toward the foundry and pulled himself up through a doorway several feet off the ground. He turned there for a last look into the deepening twilight. A single snake had not done as she was told and had trailed him all the way back to the ruin. She swished restlessly about directly below, a small, delicately marked garter, staring up with the excited, eager look of a groupie under a rock star’s balcony, desperate to be seen and acknowledged.

“Go brumate somewhere!” he shouted.

Maybe he was imagining it, but she seemed to squiggle about even faster, almost ecstatically. It reminded him of sperm swimming up the birth canal, of loosened erotic energy-a disconcerting line of thought. He whirled around and got away from there as fast as he could without running.

HE SAT IN THE FURNACE with the bottle, and with each swallow of wine the darkness surrounding him opened and expanded, becoming more lush. When the last inch of merlot was gone and there was no point sucking on the bottle anymore, he sucked on his sore, snakebit thumb instead.

He didn’t consider bedding down in the Gremlin-he had bad memories of the last time he’d dozed off there, and anyway, he did not want to wake up with a blanket of snakes covering the windshield.

Ig wished for a way to light the candles but wasn’t sure it was worth going to the car to get the cigarette lighter. He didn’t want to walk through a mess of snakes in the dark. He was sure they were still out there.

He thought there might be a lighter or a matchbook somewhere in the furnace with him, and he reached into his pocket for his cell phone, thinking he could use the light from the screen to look around. But when he put his hand in his pocket, he found something in there with his phone, a slim cardboard box that felt like, but couldn’t be…

A box of matches. He slipped them out of his pocket and stared at them, a prickle of gooseflesh spilling down his back, and not just because he didn’t smoke and didn’t know how he had come by this particular matchbox.

LUCIFER MATCHES, it said on the cover in ornate black script, and showed the silhouette of a leaping black devil, his head tossed back, goatee curling from his chin, horns thrusting at the sky.

And for a moment it was there again, tantalizingly close, what had happened the night before, what he had done, but when he grasped at it, it slipped away. It was as slippery, and as hard to get a hand on, as a snake in the weeds.

He pushed open the little drawer in the box of Lucifer Matches. A few dozen matches, with evil-looking purply black heads. Big, thick, kitchen-style matches. They had a smell on them, the odor of eggs beginning to go bad, and he thought they were old, so old it would be a miracle if he could get one to light. He dragged one across the strike strip, and it hissed to life on the first try.

Ig began lighting candles. There were six in all, arranged in a loose semicircle. In a moment they were throwing their reddish light upon the bricks, and he saw his own shadow surging and falling against the curved roof above. His horns were unmistakable, his shadow’s most striking feature. When he looked down, he saw that the match had burned itself out against his fingers. He hadn’t noticed, hadn’t felt any pain as it sizzled down to his skin. He rubbed thumb and index finger together and watched the blackened remains of the matchstick crumble away. His thumb didn’t hurt anymore where the rat snake had bitten him. In the poor light, he couldn’t even find the wound.

He wondered what time it was. He didn’t own a watch, but he had a cell phone, and he turned it back on to see that it was almost nine. He had a low battery and five messages. He put the phone to his ear and played them.

The first: “Ig, it’s Terry. Vera’s in the hospital. The brake on her wheelchair let go and she rolled down the hill and right into the fence. She’s lucky to be alive. She broke her fuckin’ face and cracked a couple ribs. They got her in intensive care, and it’s too early to get drunk. Call me.” A click and he was gone. No mention of their encounter in the kitchen that morning, but that didn’t surprise Ig. For Terry it hadn’t happened.