The sheriff made it to the foot of the watchtower safely so Peter turned back, looking down the length of the dining table to the far end. Someone had done their best to wipe Rider’s blood away, but it had seeped into the grain of the wood, forming lines like a fingerprint. And now he thought about it, he realized that you could probably find fingerprints or other kinds of marks left by the Returnees before their home was stolen from them, across the whole lake if you looked hard enough for them. The trace of a life. An imprint of their being here. A ghost.

The candle’s flame curled over then fluttered, making the shadows splutter. Peter looked back towards the bedroom. From the darkness of that room, only the snow was visible, gentle at the window, but persistent. The flame flickered again, even though there wasn’t so much as a breeze beneath the door tonight. Only now did he notice the pattern on the rug in the bedroom. Something in the middle caught his eye. It was luminous, even from here, against the darker weave around it. Peter took the candle, making his way back to the bedroom, and the central pattern seemed to respond to the light approaching it. It wasn’t just that it was woven with white thread. It contained flecks of silver that glittered, giving the illusion that it floated above the rest somehow. Peter stood over the rug, holding the candle away from his body, and the embroidered snowflake woven into its core glimmered in the half-light. He knelt. He ran his fingers over the four points like the quills of an arrow and saw how they formed an X.

“X,” he whispered. “X marks the spot.”

He got up, pulling the rug to one side, and a trapdoor was revealed.

25

The trapdoor had a brass ring. Peter set the candle down on the floor, lifted the hoop with his finger and pulled. He assumed that the density of the wood would make the trapdoor so much heavier than it was. But there was no resistance. It lifted as lightly as a lid on a box.

The darkness below was unfathomable. And freezing. Peter peered over the lip of the hole and his breath unfurled into the space beneath him. He counted the first four rungs of a metal ladder, but the rest of it disappeared into the darkness below. He cleared his throat, forming a gob of saliva in the front of his mouth, and spat. The glistening bauble caught the light before vanishing. He waited and all expectations of there being a room directly beneath the cabin vanished. Five seconds passed before Peter heard the distant splat of the spit hitting the ground below. And it echoed. It was no room down there, but a cave.