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.

“Molly—” Wayne started.

But Molly leaned closer to whisper something in his ear.

25

The noises (over her shoulder, at her heels) had swelled to a symphony of high-pitched giggles, garbled grunts, half words, heavy breathing, and the horrible sound of rubber being torn apart. Whatever Margot was leading through the woods no longer looked like it did when they’d entered.

She knew this without looking.

She had visions of poor Wayne Sherman dying at the hands of these officers; the soft-spoken proprietor who asked her to give him a minute forty thousand years ago.

It’s the wife, she remembered the officer saying.

But it wasn’t his wife. It was the key to the city. And yet, was there a connection there? Did the key to Goblin somehow represent his wife? Or something like that?