GABRIEL’S FINGER POINTS out the house that he once called home. It is a square farmhouse and below it, in the valley, there are tobacco fields. Harry watches Gabriel’s feet at his side and wonders if he has re-found a connection with the fields. Does the house that they are walking toward again feel like home? The expression that he reads on Gabriel’s face indicates that it is not so.

“Et voilà,” says Gabriel at the gate. “I must present you to my mother.”

White light splinters through the shutters, but the room is dark. It takes Harry’s eyes a moment to accustom. Embers indicate the shape of a fireplace. A woman spins around from it as if startled, as if she expects someone else. She says few words in acknowledgment and the little she does say Harry cannot comprehend. Slowly the details show themselves; he discerns a large table, an assortment of chairs, and little other comfort. It is stiflingly hot in this room. He looks at his feet on the doorstep and wonders what he is doing here. What is he doing among these strangers, these people whose language he does not even understand? Why has he traveled south and not north? But then, how can he travel north before he knows if Edie is right?

“She says that you look lost,” Gabriel says with a laugh.

“Is it that obvious?”

He hands Harry a roll of blankets and leads him across the yard to the barn, advising that the mice will trouble him less in the loft.

Harry acquaints himself with his accommodation and makes a mattress of the straw. The scent of it brings back billeted discomforts. He aligns his possessions, such as they are, on the lintel—makes an altar of it with his offering of cigarettes, pencils, and Edie’s portrait. He remembers nights in other barns, the rhythm of his brothers’ breathing, and the shape of their joined initials scratched into a plaster wall.

At dusk Gabriel returns with a candle, bread, and broth. “My mother tells me off like a child,” he complains. Harry suspects that Gabriel envies him his apartness and the shadows of the hayloft. “We used to play in this barn,” he remembers aloud, watching Harry eat. “Have you written to her?”

“Every day.”

Harry watches the light retreat. It is warm in the barn and the old straw is sweet. He finds sleep easily, with the day’s journey weighing on his bones, but wakes with the stars. In the roof-space is a white shape that is either an owl or the ghost of an owl. It stretches, screams at the night, and is gone. For a moment he is back in the nightmare woods.