“Look, there’s nothing in these woods, least nothing that ain’t alive—a dog, something like that. And if it’s alive, I can knock its goddamn head off.” He reached under his jacket and pulled the nunchaku free with a flourish, spinning it in a figure eight and over his shoulder and back under where he trapped it in his armpit. He’d been practicing with the chucks since he was ten and saw his first Bruce Lee movie. Del felt safer at the sight of them; it was the next best thing to having a gun. The redhead replaced the sticks in his belt and unhooked the Mag-Lite from his shoulder strap. It was one of those official police flashlights, a gift from Charlie Bean when he’d dated their mother. “Now,” he sighed, picking up his sleeping bag. “Can we get going?”

He flicked the little rubberized switch on the flashlight and adjusted it to wide beam. It illuminated a cobblestone drive that over the decades had been reclaimed by the forest, conquered by an army of crabgrass and wildweed and creeping brambles. With the heavy foliage and the stones well hidden beneath it, the only suggestion that a drive had ever existed lay in the relatively tree-clear path that wound through the otherwise dense woods. Sometimes even that appeared to be in transition; young saplings were bursting through the drive a little further along, growing tall and strong with flat stones still embedded in their exposed roots.

Del found some good-sized sticks nearby, just like he did when Mom took them mushroom hunting years back, and they used these to brush aside the stickers as they walked and to prod the bushes for late-in-the-year snakes. The cobblestones underfoot were a good guide. Whenever their tennis shoes sank into soft mud they knew they were off the track, and had only to seek solid footing once again.

Del looked back over his shoulder two or three times, and each glance showed the gate, their doorway back to the real world, getting smaller and smaller. Deep shit, he repeated to himself. We’re in deep shit.

“Okay so far?” Bart asked.

“No problem,” he lied.

A few more minutes of walking and Del had already grown to hate the flashlight. It showed the way but that was all it showed. The beam’s radius only reached so far on either side of the trail, and the rest of the woods seemed darker because of it. Trees were looming shapes in the blackness, arthritic scarecrows that might not have been trees at all, that might move at any minute. And if something touched his foot in the tall grass or tugged at his pantleg, he wouldn’t kick at it or even look to see what it was. He would only quicken his pace and hurry on.

There were sounds around them.