The names were mostly dissolved from years of acid rain. On one, 1742 was visible, sunk deep into the dirt and nestled in a pile of leaves, and letters poked out beneath. I reached down to brush the leaves away.

When my hand touched the pile, it was warm and soft—and then before I realized what it was, it moved beneath my palm. A big brown bat darted out, flapping and shrieking in confusion. Its tiny needle teeth flashed white as it emptied a high-pitched guttural noise directly into my face.

I screamed right back at it. Taut wings beat around my head as it circled once, then twice—and then, miraculously, it abandoned me.

The truck was still running. I scrambled in and pulled the door shut beside me, frantically rolling up the windows, shaking with adrenaline. My palm burned in the place where I’d contacted the soft fur.

“It was just a bat,” I told myself, cradling my head over the steering wheel. “It was just a bat. It was just a bat. Just a bat.” I looked around. No bat. See? I told myself. No bat.

I put the truck in gear and drove another mile, distracted and shaking. The only thing I passed was a damp, swollen barn whose boards zigged and zagged in opposing directions. The building strained and sagged, giving the impression that the slightest breeze could collapse it into a pile of soggy matchsticks.

I kept driving and driving but there was nothing. When the road stopped suddenly in a dead end, a wall of birches rising up in front of me like palace guards, I had to drive in reverse until the road widened enough for me to turn around.

The damp, swollen barn—it was the X. It was the only thing that could have been the X.

I should have driven back—I should have left—but instead I parked in front of the barn. A cardboard-looking door, with frayed edges, hung from a doorframe. At my touch, the handle came off in my hand, and the door itself fell and smashed onto the ground, breaking into pieces. I toed one of the soft, broken slabs, and it was so decayed that its fibers clung to the mesh of my sneakers.

Inside, it smelled like air after a storm—like a damp rag—and when my eyes adjusted it became clear that the floors beneath my feet were simply dirt, a brown expanse pierced by jagged shafts of light and pitted with muddy potholes. Toward the back, over the hayloft, the roof was partially caved in. To refer to this as a “barn” was more than inaccurate. It was a moldering, oversize lean-to—a total nightmare.