A hand planted itself on her shoulder. She jumped in the darkness.

“How…close…are…we…?”

Margot didn’t turn around. Couldn’t bear seeing those cartoonish, unblinking eyes.

“We’re close,” she said. “I can smell the grass on him.”

Could they tell? Could they tell she was lying?

24

If Wayne hadn’t been driven by losing the police, his body would have collapsed. It would have been difficult to walk this far without a worry in the world. The sounds of somebody following him continued.

“Molly,” he huffed, “remember how we both dreamed of each other the night we first saw each other?”

He started to laugh.

The whole thing, The Hedges, running from the Goblin Police, real love…it was all so…funny to him then.

Snap!

Someone behind him still.

Snap! Snap!

“Remember how—”

Snap! Snap!

Wayne stopped. Whatever it was, wasn’t going away.

He turned to face it.

Blackness.

Wayne squinted, searching for movement. He knelt, needing the rest.

“Molly,” he said. “What do you think it is? The police? Or…”

It was closer now; the sound of branches pulled aside, the crackle of sticks and dead leaves.

Wayne rose again.

Memories of Molly circled through his mind like a wheel of fortune on fire.

He breathed deep.

Then whatever was trailing him stopped.

He thought he could make something out, a shape, life, a hundred feet from where he stood, rooted like a gnarled tree or an eleven-foot-high bush wall of a maze.

“Hello,” Wayne said.

It was a woman.

She stepped out from behind a tree and Wayne realized she was much closer than he’d thought. A trick of the eyes. A trick of the North Woods.

He also realized he still had the key to the city in his hand.

Before she reached him, Wayne understood it was Molly. There was no question in his mind, his eye, his heart. She was naked just the way she was at Lake Oslow, the day they took photos, the roll of film he never developed. The roll of film that sat packed in a bag in his truck outside these very woods.

“Molly,” he said, smiling, trying to almost flirt with the impossible vision. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to see you this way.”

Then the tears rolled down his face like Goblin rain.

The Hedges…a tribute to Molly…and now the North Woods…and Molly’s ghost to greet him.

He gripped the key to the city.

Molly sat down on a stump Wayne hadn’t seen was there. Her naked legs glowed in the darkness. She gestured for Wayne to come to her.

“If I’d have known it was you,” he said, “I never would’ve kept walking deeper. You know that, right?”

She looked up at him with the same eyes that she used to look at him with across their small yellow house by a big empty field.

She held out a smooth hand and Wayne took it. He knelt beside her, one knee in the dirt, holding her hand in his, their eyes locked as tightly as the lids of one of those great Goblin graves.