And behind it all, slid down the dirt, was an old Pontiac, crashed against a tree trunk, like someone had driven it over the lawns and between the trees sixty years ago and left it there, doors flung open, and run.

I stood with my mouth open. “Holy shit,” I muttered.

I had never been back here. I’d covered the trails all around our house, but they’d never connected to anything that led here. I gauged the terrain between where I stood on the narrow path and where the car lay. If I put the bike down, I could probably make it. I glanced at the sky, still light enough, and went for it.

The inside was a masterpiece, covered in leaves and dotted with water spots. The steering wheel was huge and part chrome, the seats black leather with white piping. I pulled on the door that I imagined had been rusted open for years, and it creaked, but it shut, heavy, full steel, like closing the door on a vault.

My heart raced; my skin pricked in my armpits.

I knew there was strange shit in the woods. People always said that somewhere there was an old refrigerator with the body of a little kid in it. I’d never seen it. But then, I’d never seen the car either. People also said that if you went far enough north off trail, you’d find a cabin, and that an old fur trapper still lived there, eating the animals he skinned, living on gamy meat and berries and melted snow.

There was no cell service once you turned the corner on the way out of town. Much of the woods hadn’t been mapped. It was just dense green, filled with chasms and secret waterfalls that froze half the year.

After I got out of the car, I kept looking back at it—from the other side of the ravine, from the trail as I wound in with my bike. When the path curved to the left, the car was out of sight, and so I stepped back, making sure I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

It flashed into view all at once, and my heart skipped a little. I noticed from this vantage point that another cairn stood on the edge of the cliff, five rocks high. I could see the lights of town from up here: the lit-up football field, the parking lot at the IGA, the new houses being built way up on the opposite hill.

It seemed like a magic spot, a secret. Tomorrow after work I’d bring a book, and some cigarettes, and maybe something to drink, and I’d hide out while the last light came through the windshield, safe, in a steel vault.

By the time I got home, it was dusk, the woods purple and close. Our house was lit with one lamp in the living room, but I knew I’d find the TV on as well. My mother never turned the surveillance cameras off.