Twenty paces past the boulder, Seymour reaches a single strand of barbed wire sagging between posts. Behind him is the sliding door, the kitchen, Pawpaw’s microwave; ahead are three thousand acres of forest owned by a family in Texas no one in Lakeport has ever met.

Wock wock-a-wock, calls the magpie.

It’s easy to duck under the wire.

Beneath the trees, the light changes entirely: another world. Pennants of lichen sway from branches; snippets of sky glow overhead. Here’s an ant mound half as tall as he is; here’s a granite rib the size of a minivan; here’s a sheet of bark that fits around his midsection like the chest plate of Starboy’s armor.

Halfway up the hill behind the house, Seymour comes to a clearing ringed by Douglas firs with a big dead ponderosa in the center like the many-fingered arm of a skeleton-giant thrust up from the underworld. Parachuting through the air around him, blown out of the firs, are hundreds of pine needles bundled in twos. He catches one, imagines it as a little man with a truncated torso and long slender legs. The NeedleMan ventures across the clearing on his pointy feet.

At the foot of the dead tree, Seymour constructs a house for the NeedleMan from bark and twigs. He is installing a lichen mattress inside when a ghost shrieks ten feet above his head.

Ee-ee? Ee-ee-eet?

Every hair on Seymour’s arms stands up straight. The owl is so well camouflaged that it vocalizes three more times before the boy sets eyes on it, and when he does he gasps.

It blinks three times, four. In the shadow against the bark, with its eyelids closed, the owl vanishes. Then the eyes open again and the creature rematerializes.

It is the size of Tony Molinari. Its eyes are the color of tennis balls. It is looking right at him.

From his spot at the base of the big dead tree, Seymour gazes up and the owl gazes down and the forest breathes and something happens: the unease mumbling at the margins of his every waking moment—the roar—falls quiet.

There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you.

He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.