Weeping now, after all, Saul reached out and felt a leg, a thigh, the side of a man’s fallen body. Saul’s fingers sank into where the belly and chest ought to be. He cried out and pulled his hand away.

He reached up to the person’s head and blindly felt the features of his face.

Then he turned on the penlight and opened his eyes.

It was Harvey. It had to be. But what Saul saw was an approximation of his old friend.

Harvey’s eyes were pulled out, leaving two purple swollen circles where they once rested. But his eyes were not missing; they hung by their stalks on his bruised cheeks. One was looking right at Saul, as if Harvey was saying, I see you, buddy, but I’m not doing too well. His mouth was open and where the lips met, at both ends of a grimace, the cheeks had been chewed out, exposing dark gums. Holes ran down his neck and shoulders. He wore a red jacket that was torn to shreds. His stomach and chest were indeed scooped out; half-eaten lungs hung over the corrugated edge of his abdomen. Saul thought of a torn car seat in his mother’s old Buick.

He jumped back from his old friend.

“The witch,” he said. “The witch did this!”

He replayed the moment when the body rushed past him in the woods.

He now knew it was Nash. Running from the witch.

Then, after staring for a moment more at the remains of Harvey, Saul ran, too. He followed the rope, hand over hand, shaking his head no, no he didn’t want to hear a story, no, please, no Once upon a time, no pressure in his chest, no terrible myth made real.

And when he made it all the way back to the south entrance of the North Woods, he did not feel good about it. He did not feel the relief he so desired. Looking back at the twisted puzzle of branches and trunks, he thought,

Harvey’s still in there.

And it looked like a tomb to him then. A complex carving of the lid of a coffin.

Looking ahead, he saw Nash’s car was gone.

So, as the brutal Goblin rain fell upon him, Saul began the long trek homeward on foot.

“Nash,” he said, a hundred times, his voice muted by the poncho’s green hood. “You saw the witch, didn’t you. Didn’t you? That’s why you left Harvey. Right? It was the witch, after all. It wasn’t because of…because of…”

But he didn’t want to say it. Didn’t want to ask,

Neal, did you run off with a bird?

23

Neal stood in the doorway of his big-game hangar, dripping rainwater on the floor. He ran a hand through the silver hair framing his sixty-year-old head. Carrying the thing was more work than he’d planned on but that no longer mattered. He was home. And he wasn’t empty-handed.