I gave up on writing for the day, Saturday, and hiked off my hangover, going to the village and back.

Dottie enlisted my help with some upkeep chores. We waxed the nice wooden floors, broomed and dusted the rooms that were still heated and in use. But even by nine that night neither of us could face food. I volunteered to walk Fredo.

“Wear layers,” Dottie said.

Behind the inn were white-timber terraces, where the summer guests would drink and dine. From the terraces, a path with a pipe handrail curled down the bluffs to the beach.

Fredo lunged ahead down the path so that, clenching his leash in my fist, I descended in a barely controlled scuttling fall. In my free mitten was an eight-volt box flashlight.

There was moonlight but scraps of snow clouds were dark, shadowing the beach. The dog paused at an old ice patch to squirt lines of urine. The light at the end of the jetty and the St. Michael’s Island light had come on. They twitched like faltering stars.

Fredo hobbyhorsed through a dense clutch of grass, spiky with ice, at the foot of the palisades. Down here the Atlantic winds had scraped away the snow piles, and the beach itself made a kind of flat avenue.

There was an access lane that curved off the Point Road and swerved down a quarter mile to dead end on the beach. Parked at the dead end was an old school bus, I could see. The bus was painted matte black. Beside it were the flames of a campfire.

I headed that way.

“That’s deceased,” I told Fredo, who was sniffing and whimpering over the big shell of a horseshoe crab.

We walked on, in the direction of the bus. Eerie things lay all along here. I saw a broken eyeless eel, phosphorescent with frost; a rope-soled shoe pointing inland; a dead gull whose white body made a W-shape on the sand.

I got within shouting range of the bus. There were three or four figures idling around the campfire. In its light, they were genderless, mammoth-sized and strange.

Fredo loped ahead; a ridge of fur pricked up along his spine.

The figures had turned to watch.

I waved, tugged on Fredo’s leash. He walked low, gargling threats, half dragging me.

A girl broke from the group and headed for me. I could make out her shape and the angles of her face. She carried a stick she pointed. Its strip of shadow pointed too.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

“I dunno—nothing,” the girl said.

As we spoke our words vaporized in the warm currents of our breath, froze and blew off.

The girl was scaled larger than I but was only eighteen or twenty, I guessed. “I see you’re walking that little dog,” she said.