She drops the chain. Her heart slamming.

It comes again: Hello? Someone in there?

It’s not him. It’s some other man. Close, and not close. Well back from the door. Keeping his distance, according to some law of mountain etiquette. Or fear at what he heard, her wild thrashing.

Her throat constricts, her jaw opens, and a voice she does not know calls out, Hello? Is someone out there?

Hello, the man calls. I saw the smoke. I thought it might be a fire.

She takes a step toward the door and her right leg halts painfully in midstride and she looks back in confusion at the length of chain on the floor.The leather-wrapped cuff at her ankle, the big padlock with the word Master at its base. Her own naked foot, filthy and alien.

She turns back to the door. Are you the police?

He doesn’t answer. Th en: Who are you? And she knows he is just a man. Not the police. No gun. No dogs. No walkie-talkie. No helicopter on its way. No father no mother no brother.

Who are you? he says again. Are you all right?

She puts a hand to her throat and feels the words in her fingers as they come up, as she says her own name for the first time in so long. Her family is looking for her, she says. Th e police are looking for her. A man has been keeping her here, please help.

Th e snow crunches and the man is approaching.

All right, he says, all right. Take it easy. Did you say Caitlin? Close now. On the other side of the door. She hears the padlock shift. Hears him tug on it. Caitlin? he says.

Yes?

Where is he?

I don’t know. He left me.

How long ago?

She shakes her head. Two days? She swallows down her climbing heart. Please help me. She can hear him breathing hard in the thin air. Th ere’s an ax somewhere, she says. Do you see it?

He takes a step back from the door. No.

It’s out there, she says. She can see it so clearly. I hear him chopping all the time.

Th e man takes a few steps away, then comes back.

Is there another way in? A window? he says, and she says, On the other side, but it’s locked too, and his footsteps move away from the door and grow faint as he makes his way around the shack.

She drags the chain across the floor and steps onto the cot and puts her eye to the small burning hole in the window board, stopping the coin of light.

Incredibly, he is already there—exactly there. Dark shape of him in the white nimbus of vision. Dead-centered like a figure posed in a lens not yet focused. Th ere he stands before her, and yet the sound of his footsteps reach her through the wall to her left. He is standing still and he is walking around the shack, both. She blinks in the tearful light and the figure in the peephole clarifies, taking its true form, and a blade comes into her chest to halve her heart like an apple.

Th e footsteps progress around the corner and grow louder, nearer, and then they halt, short of the window, short of what she can see of the world, and she hears the man say Jesus. He makes a sound like a kind of laugh. Where’d you come from, buddy?

Same place as you, I reckon. Th e Monkey smiles and his face begins to turn toward the window and she drops like loose bones to the cot.

I saw the smoke, the Monkey says. Th ought there was a fire.

So did I, says the man. But there’s somebody in there. He takes two steps and stops. Th ere’s a girl inside.

Slumped against the wall, knees hauled to her chest, she hears them as though they stand in a tunnel, voices tubing along the stone walls toward the opening.

I know, I heard, the Monkey says. Heard her say a man’s been keeping her up here.

Th ese words roll and die in the tunnel.

You wouldn’t be that man, would you? says the Monkey.

Hell no, says the man. And nothing else.

Th ey are silent, the world silent, until a crack detonates in the roof timbers, relaying in the wall where her shoulder touches it and jolting down through her.

Pretty funny the two of us arriving at the same time, says the Monkey, and the man says, I saw the smoke.

You said that. Th e Monkey sniffs. You don’t look like a ranger.

I’m not.

You’re not?

No.

What are you then?

What am I? Hell, I’m just a hiker.

A hiker. Th e Monkey shifts somehow in his jacket. You’re a ways off the trail, aren’t you?

Like I said, I saw the smoke.

Th e Monkey shifts again. You saw that?

I smelled it first.

Ah.

Th ey are silent. Water drips from the roof and rings in its wells.

What about you? the hiker says.

What about me?

What brings you up here?

I’m a volunteer ranger.

A volunteer ranger. What’s that mean?

It means I’ve got a cabin down the mountain I don’t want burning up.

Th e hiker says nothing. Th en he says, Hadn’t we better see about getting her out of there? She might be hurt. Are you hurt in there? he calls.

Run, damn you, she whispers. Get away. Get down the mountain.

She sounded fit enough a second ago, says the hiker. Th ere’s a padlock on the door, but she said there’s an ax out here somewhere.

I heard that. Is that it over there?

Where?

Behind you. Under that tree. Where that wood is.

Th e hiker changes his footing in the snow, is still, and then moves quickly in the direction he came. Okay, he calls. It’s an ax. I found the ax, he calls to her. Th ere’s another man out here. He’s a volunteer ranger. We’re gonna come around and knock the padlock off the door, Caitlin.

He is walking again and she tracks his footfalls, and the Monkey’s, as they circle the shack, and soon the hiker arrives once more at the front door.

Don’t, she breathes. Don’t, don’t . . .

Don’t do it like that, says the Monkey. Use the poll.

Th e what?

Th e blunt end.

Why?

Cause you’ll ruin the edge.

Who gives a damn if I ruin the edge?

Th ere is silence. Th en the hiker says Wait and through the door comes a sound she knows, a sharp festive pop, like a single firecracker. Hardly loud enough to startle a bird yet sudden and sharp enough to cleave open a mountain and send it shearing down itself. Immediately the door shudders in its jamb, as if he has decided to throw his weight at it, but feebly, and then in defeat has slid slowly down to the snow.

I do, says the Monkey.

She hears him click open the pistol. Eject the casing. Snap the pistol shut again. Something scuffs at the outside of the door, down low, near the floor. Like an old dog scratching to be let in. Th ere is a second pop and the scuffing stops.

SHE IS ON THE cot as before, unmoved, legs drawn up in the same tight ball of herself, when she hears him returning. His footsteps, the sled runners, moving more easily through the snow. She remembers the high snowy ledge, the tumbling emptiness beyond, but he has not been gone long enough for that, has stashed the body someplace nearby. As he unlocks the padlock the timbers crack overhead and her legs spasm, kicking as they do in dreams of running, and her mind plays her a scene in which the last thing she sees and feels in life is the cold, blued face of the only other human being in all this time who knew where she was, who heard her voice. A stranger with whom she will now lie through however many years, centuries, nothing to do but hold each other until they’re found, rags of cloth and mummy’s flesh inseparable, histories inseparable, locked in each other’s bones. More in love by the look of them than any man and wife of the living world.