“I have no idea,” I said, peering at the map. “Apparently, an old barn.”

“Go look!” she said. A horn honked, and Jonny called her name. Her show—it was installing today. “Eeek. I have to go. Call me later. Tell me everything. I need constant updates. Love you,” she said.

“Love you bye,” I replied automatically. Paper map in hand, I climbed into the limp brown hammock on the porch, hoping that it wouldn’t break under my weight. Thankfully, it was dry and sturdy. I wished I’d stopped to get a blanket and pillows.

The map was a loose illustration of the colony, nowhere close to scale. All the bungalows were marked by artist (Tyler, Marlin, Jes, and Jack; Carey’s name was notably absent) and the lake labeled as THE DARDANELLE. I traced the route from my bungalow—one of Marlin’s—to my supposed studio with my finger.

There was no time to waste. If I could unload everything, and get the house in order, then tomorrow could be a productive day. That was all that mattered.

I packed up my hurt feelings, climbed back into the truck, and drove west, in the direction of a service road that stretched back into the woods. Summer air filled the cab, and as I entered the forest and paused to navigate around a particularly big pothole, the sounds came in, too, loudly enough to overpower the idling engine.

It was almost a shrieking—I heard it all so quickly. Wind battered the trees; birds screamed at each other. Cicadas rattled their exoskeletal cages like a jailed Christmas choir, and somewhere behind me, the vast, empty lake beat against its rocky shore. The outside world shrank and fell off the edges, like a twig going over a waterfall, and I had the sudden sensation of total solitude. These were the deafening sounds of human absence.

Next—the heat flew in, thick and choking with humidity. Sweat dripped down my sides in tiny tributaries, pooling against the sticky smack of my thighs on the old leather seats. Flies landed on my arms, crawling over my wrists while I turned the wheel this way and that as I drove for over a mile along that old dirt road.

It narrowed into a natural hallway. The ground was covered in foot-high weeds and gnarled tree roots, its sides walled closely with peeling birches and thickly needled conifers blanketed with cobwebs. The rare patches of meadow seen through the trees were tamped down flat, their clots of slender grasses depressed by the bodies of slumbering deer.

The farther I drove, the denser the forest grew. Soon I was in an older part of the resort, at least a hundred years neglected, a private, broken-down world that felt beyond time. I wondered if anyone burned witches here. When I passed a cluster of worn limestone gravestones that butted up against the road, I threw the truck in park and went to look.