“So it appeared.”

“Later that night, drunk on his own cunning, Farraline foolishly answered a tapping on his tent. Unarmed, he was confused to see what looked like a lantern floating in the darkness. He thought it might be an angel, a congratulations from the God he adored. He had no way of knowing the natives had painted themselves night-black and planned on bringing their visionary chief those seventy heads after all. Blood erupted. The indigenous people were like a physical manifestation of Blackwater’s mental landscape. Chaotic. Righteous. Unstoppable. Carroll, leading a group of women and children through the outskirts of that slaughter, saw three lights off in the distance. Hoping it was Farraline, he followed them. Turned out it was. Farraline’s face was wrapped around a lantern set on a tree stump. Three lights shone. Two out the eyes and one big beam out the mouth.”

“Clever. Good one.”

“Carroll rounded up whoever was left for Goblin’s first makeshift militia. He wasn’t giving in. Not yet. But he wasn’t sure exactly how to proceed. Nobody was. And then, in South Shilling Field, a farmhand named John Phillis hatched a plan that would salvage Carroll’s gang, and secure what would become Goblin, for good. The remaining settlers pretended to evacuate. They staged a faux fleeing. They admitted defeat by packing up their belongings and heading north. And after they were sure the natives saw them leave, they hid out in the North Woods. The very woods that, legend says, drove Blackwater insane a quarter century before. Goblin’s great expanse of brittle black trees, thousands of twisting trunks, nature in chaos, with no path or clearing to guide them.”

“I’ve never stepped foot in the North Woods.”

“Nobody will go more than a hundred feet deep. I’ve heard you can see beer cans near the entrance. Teenagers, I suppose. But even cocksure youth won’t go any farther than that. There’s a witch in there, didn’t you know?” Kamp smiled.

Mrs. Doris shrugged. “It’s the Great Owls’ domain. Let them have it, I say.”

“No doubt. And they don’t need us ruining it for them.”

“So did they make it out of the woods sane? They must not have, if they’re our ancestors, after all.”

“John Phillis, George Carroll, and the highest-ranking remaining officers mapped out their course of action. Restless members of the camp could go walking along the winding paths so long as they were secured by rope. Kind of like lowering someone into a cave, I suppose. Volunteers stood post at the head of the trails, and if you wanted to go deep you asked for a rope, one end of which would be fastened to your waist and the other tied to the hand of the volunteer. If someone tugged on the rope violently, men would be dispatched to check it out. These men would have to be tied to the volunteer as well.”

“I hear the Great Owls can eat up an entire man. Is that true, Walter?”