“Could you find them?” Bruce asked. His voice sounded harsh, and deep frown lines cut into his forehead.

“Yes.”

“Let’s go,” Barry said.

‘The two of us?” Mark asked.

“Yes.”

Mark looked doubtful. “I could do it faster alone,” he said.

Barry felt a shudder start, and drew himself away from his desk with a brusque motion. He was holding himself rigidly under control now. “Not you alone,” he said. “I want you to show me those things you see, how you can find your way where there’s no path. Let’s go before it gets any later.” He glanced at the boy in his short tunic, barefooted. “Go get changed,” he said.

“This is all right for up there,” Mark said. “There’s nothing under the trees up there.”

Barry thought about his words as they headed for the woods. He watched the boy, now ahead of him, now at his side, sniffing the air happily, at home in the silent, dim woods.

They moved quickly and very soon they were deep in the forest where the trees had reached mature growth and made a canopy overhead that excluded the sun completely. No shadows, no way to discover directions, Barry thought, breathing hard as he worked to keep up with the nimble boy. Mark never hesitated, never paused, but moved rapidly with certainty, and Barry didn’t know what clues he found, how he knew to go this way and not that. He wanted to ask, but he needed his breath for climbing. He was sweating, and his feet felt like lead as he followed the boy.

“Let’s rest a minute,” he said. He sat on the ground, his back against a mammoth tree trunk. Mark had been ahead of him, and now he trotted back and squatted a few feet away.

“Tell me what you look for,” Barry said after a moment. “Show me a sign of their passage there.”

Mark looked surprised at the demand. “Everything shows they came this way,” he said. He pointed to the tree that supported Barry’s back. “That’s a bitternut hickory tree — see, nuts.” He brushed the dirt aside and uncovered several nuts. They were half rotted. “The boys found some and threw them. And there,” he said, pointing, “see that sprout. Someone bent it to the ground, it still isn’t straight again. And the marks of their feet, scuffing the dirt and leaves on the forest floor. It’s like a sign saying, this way, this way.”

Barry could see the difference when Mark showed him, but when he looked in another direction, he thought he could see scuff marks there also.

“Water,” Mark said. “That’s a runoff trail from melting snow. It’s different.”

“How did you learn about the woods? Molly?”

Mark nodded. “She couldn’t get lost ever. She couldn’t forget how things looked, and if she saw them again, she knew. She taught me. Or else I was born with it, and she showed me how to use it. I can’t get lost either.”

“Can you teach others?”

“I guess so. Now that I showed you, you could lead, couldn’t you?” He had turned his back, scanning the woods, and now faced Barry again. “You know which way to start, don’t you?”

Barry looked carefully about them. The scuff marks were on the path they had just made, where Mark had pointed them out. He saw the water trail, and looked harder for the trail they should follow. There was nothing. He looked again at Mark, who was grinning. “No,” he said. “I don’t know which way to go now.”

Mark laughed. “Because it’s rocky,” he said. “Come on.” He started again, this time keeping to the edge of a rocky trail.

“How did you know?” Barry asked. “There’s no sign of them among the rocks.”

“Because there was no sign anywhere else. It was all that was left. There!” He pointed, and there was another bent tree, this one stronger, older, more firmly rooted. “Someone pulled that spruce down and let it spring back up. Probably more than one did, because it’s still not quite straight, and you can see now that the rocks have been kicked around.”

The rocky trail deepened and became a creek bed. Mark watched the edges carefully and soon turned again, pointing to scuff marks as he went. The woods were deeper, the gloom more intense here. Thick evergreen trees covered the slope they began to descend, and sometimes they had to wind their way among the branches that touched one another in the spruce forest. The floor was brown, springy with generations of needles.

Barry found himself holding his breath in order not to disturb the silence of the great forest, and he understood why the others talked of a presence, something that watched as they moved among the trees. The silence was so intense, it was like a dream world where mouths open and close and no noise is heard, where musicians’ instruments are strangely muted, where one screams and screams silently. Behind him he could sense the trees moving in closer, closer.

Then, suddenly, as if it had been growing a long time and he only now had become aware of it, he found that he was listening to something over and beyond the silence, something that was like a voice, or voices mingling in whispers too distant to make out the words. Like Molly, he thought, and a shiver of fear raced through him. The voices faded. Mark had stopped and was looking about again.

“They doubled back here,” he said. “They must have had lunch up there and started back, but here they lost their way. See, they went over too far, and kept going farther and farther from the way they had come.”

Barry could see nothing to indicate they had done that, but he knew he was helpless in that dark forest and he could only follow the boy wherever he led.

They climbed again and the spruces thinned out and now there were aspens and cottonwoods bordering a stream.

“You’d think they’d know they hadn’t seen this before,” Mark said with disgust. He was moving faster now. He stopped again and a grin came and went, leaving him looking worried. “Some of them began to run here,” he said. “Wait. I’ll see if they regrouped ahead, or if we have to find any of them.” He vanished before he finished speaking, and Barry sank to the ground to wait for him. The voices came back almost instantly. He looked at the trees that seemed unmoving, and knew that the branches high above were stirring in the wind, that they made the voicelike whispering, but still he strained to hear the words over and over. He put his head down on his knees and tried to will the voices into silence.

His legs were throbbing, and he was very hot. He could feel trickles of sweat running down his back, and he hunched over more so his shirt was snug across his shoulders, absorbing the sweat. They couldn’t send their people out to live in the forests, he knew. This was a hostile environment, with a spirit of malevolency that would stifle them, craze them, kill them. He could feel the presence now, pressing in on him, drawing closer, feeling him . . . Abruptly he stood up and started to follow Mark.

Chapter 22

Barry heard voices again, this time real voices, childish voices, and he waited.

“Bob, are you all right?” he called when his brother came into view. Bob looked bedraggled and there was dirt on his face; he nodded and waved, breathing heavily.

“They were climbing toward the knob,” Mark said, suddenly at Barry’s side. He had come upon him from a different direction, invisible until he spoke.

Now the boys were straggling into the same area, and they looked worse than Bob. Some of them had been crying. Just as Mark had predicted, Barry thought.

“We thought we might be able to see where we were if we climbed higher,” Bob said, glancing at Mark, as if for approval.

Mark shook his head. “Always go down, follow a stream, if you don’t know where you are,” he said. “It’ll go to a bigger stream, then finally to the river, and you can follow it back to where you have to go.”

The boys were watching Mark with open admiration. “Do you know the way down?” one of them asked.