Saul couldn’t believe them. In person they were more confusing than any fabled version he’d imagined as a kid. Any Gobliner could see their tangled, gnarled trunks and branches from the outside, but being within them changed everything. Like the difference between knowing a man is crazy, and then stepping into his mind.

Things got much darker. For a moment Neal and Harvey disappeared ahead, taken by the trunks. But by the crooked moonlight coming through the treetops, Saul saw that the trail took a hard left. There he found that his friends had stopped and were whispering.

I’ve been inside the North Woods for thirty seconds and I almost lost them, Saul thought.

He was scared in many different ways. Scared like a good kid who was suddenly involved in a bad prank. Scared like a sixty-year-old man, a hand to his chest, wondering how much of this particular brand of excitement he could take.

Scared in a deeper, more absurd way, too.

Scared of a witch.

Nash held up the rope.

“Like they did in Carroll’s day,” he said. “We’ll tie our two around you, Saul. You’ll be our post. You stay here.”

“Stay here? Why not tie it around a tree?”

Nash shook his head no. “Animals might chew it off. Can’t chance it. Need one of us to make sure we get back to this very spot.”

Before Saul had a chance to retort, Nash was securing the rope around his waist.

“Now,” Nash said, tightening the knots and whispering far under the sound of the muted rain. “If you feel us tugging hard, like we’re in trouble, that means we are. If that happens, tie it to a tree and come after us. Here.” He handed Saul a pistol.

“Trouble, Neal? What kind of trouble could there be out here?”

But he wished he hadn’t asked it because, when Neal looked him in the eye, Saul saw his old friend was wearing a face he’d never seen him wear before. In that moment Neal Nash, the bravest man in Goblin, acknowledged the myths of the North Woods.

Then Neal tied the rope around Harvey’s green poncho and brown suit coat. He tied a second rope to the first and secured it to his own waist.

“We’ve hunted rhino,” Harvey said. “But we’ve never needed rope before.”

“Nope,” Neal said, the rain a never-ending thud above him. “A new first.”

A lot of “firsts” tonight, Saul thought.

A whisper of wind came from farther up the trail, and the three looked into the darkness ahead. A tunnel through their imaginations; fears and desires twisting, tangled with thrill and shame.

“Cheers,” Neal said, “to whatever calls these woods home.”

Then Neal and Harvey advanced, and Saul was left in the darkness alone.

16

Harvey was well shocked. The skinny trails were as tricky as all the terrible stories said they were. Neal used a penlight of his own and, as meager as the beam was, Harvey didn’t know what they would do without it.