He came to a clearing, and there was Misty, now barely visible as the moon appeared in the sky. Briars had wound themselves around her legs and her muzzle, and as she had struggled against them the briars had tightened on her, so that all she could do was whimper softly. Phineas drew his knife, preparing to free her, when there was movement to his right, and he turned his flashlight in that direction.

A little girl of perhaps six or seven stood at the edge of the clearing. Her hair was dark, and she was very pale. She wore a black dress of coarse cloth, and simple black shoes on her feet. She didn’t blink in the strong beam of the flashlight, nor did she raise her hands to shield her eyes. In fact, Phineas thought, the light seemed to make no difference to her whatsoever; it was as if she merely absorbed it into her skin, for she appeared to glow whitely from within.

‘Honey,’ said Phineas, ‘what are you doing way out here?’

‘I’m lost,’ said the girl. ‘Help me.’

Her voice sounded strange, as though it were coming from inside a cave, or the hollowed-out trunk of a tree. It echoed when it should not have done so.

Phineas moved toward her, already shrugging his coat off to put it over her shoulders, when he saw Misty tugging at the briars again, her tail now wedged between her back legs. The effort clearly caused her pain, but still she was determined to break free. When her attempt continued to prove fruitless, she faced the girl and growled. Phineas could see the dog trembling in the moonlight, and the hackles on her neck were raised. When he looked back, the girl had retreated a couple of feet, moving a little deeper into the woods.

‘Help me,’ she repeated. ‘I’m lost, and I’m lonely.’

Phineas was wary now, although he could not have said why, beyond the girl’s pallor and the effect her presence was having on his dog, yet still he walked toward her, and as he did so she moved a little farther away, until at last the clearing was at his back, and there was only forest before him: forest, and the dim form of the girl among the trees. Phineas lowered his torch, but the girl did not fade into the shadows of the forest. Instead, she continued to luminesce faintly, and although Phineas could see his own breath pluming thickly before him, no such cloud emerged from the girl’s mouth, not even as she spoke again.

‘Please, I’m lonely and I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’

Now she raised her hand, beckoning to him, and he saw the dirt beneath her fingernails, as though she had clawed her way out of some dark spot, a hiding place of earth, and worms, and scuttling bugs.

‘No, honey,’ said Phineas. ‘I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere with you.’

Without taking his eyes from her, he backed away until he was beside Misty, and then he squatted and began to hack at the briars. They came away reluctantly, and they were sticky to the touch. Even as he cut at them, he thought that he felt others begin to curl around his boots, but later he told himself that it was probably just his mind playing tricks on him, as if that one small detail might make up for the far greater trick of a girl glowing in the forest depths, asking an old man to join her in her forest bower. He felt her anger, and her frustration and, yes, her sadness, for she was lonely, and she was scared, but she didn’t want to be saved. She wanted to visit her loneliness and fear on another, and Phineas didn’t know what would be worse: to die in the woods with the girl for company, until eventually the world faded to black; or to die and then wake up to find himself like her, wandering the woods looking for others to share his misery.

At last, Misty was freed. The dog shot away, then paused to make sure that her master was following her, for even in her relief to be free she would not abandon him in this place, just as he had not abandoned her. Slowly, Phineas went after her, his eyes fixed on the little girl, keeping her in sight for as long as he could, until she was visible no longer and he found himself once again on familiar ground.

And that was why Phineas Arbogast stopped going to his cabin in the Rangeley woods, where the ruins of it may still be visible somewhere between Rangeley and Langdon, bound with sticky briars as nature claims it as her own.

Nature, and a little girl with pale, glowing skin, seeking in vain for a playmate to join her in her games.

I still had an old edition of a brochure called Maine Invites You given to me by Phineas. It was published by the Maine Publicity Bureau sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s, as the letter of greeting inside the front cover was written by Governor Lewis O. Barrows, who was in office from 1937 until 1941. Barrows was an old-school Republican of the stripe that some of his more rabid descendants would cross the street to avoid: he balanced the budget, improved state school funding, and reinstated old-age benefits payments, all while reducing the state deficit. Rush Limbaugh would have called him a socialist.

The brochure was a touching tribute to a bygone era, when you could rent a high-end cabin for thirty dollars per week, and eat a chicken dinner for a dollar. Most of the places mentioned in it are long gone – the Lafayette Hotel in Portland, the Willows and the Checkley out at Prouts Neck – and the writers managed to find something kind to say about almost everywhere, even those towns whose own residents had trouble figuring out why they’d stayed in them, never mind why anyone else might want to travel there on vacation.

The town of Langdon, midway between Rangeley and Stratton, had a page all to itself, and it was interesting to note how many times the name Proctor appeared on the advertisements: among others, there was a Proctor’s Camp, and the Bald Mountain Diner, run by E. and A. Proctor, and R. H. Proctor’s Lakeview Fine Dining Restaurant. Clearly, the Proctors had Langdon pretty much all sewn up back in the day, and the town was enough of a draw for tourists – or the Proctors felt that it might be – to justify taking out a series of top-end ads, each one adorned with a photograph of the establishment in question.

Whatever appeal Langdon might once have had for visitors was no longer apparent, if it had ever been anything more than a figment of the Proctors’ own ambitions to begin with. It was now merely a strip of decrepit houses and struggling businesses, closer to the New Hampshire border than the Canadian, but easily accessible from either. The Bald Mountain Diner was still there, but it looked like it hadn’t served a meal for at least a decade. The town’s only store bore a sign announcing that it was closed due to a bereavement and would reopen in a week’s time. The notice was dated October 10th, 2005, which suggested the kind of mourning period usually associated with the deaths of kings. Apart from that, there was a hairdresser’s, a taxidermist’s, and a bar named the Belle Dam, which might have been a clever pun on Rangeley’s own dams or, as seemed more likely on closer inspection, the result of the loss of a letter ‘e’ from the sign. There was nobody on the streets, although a couple of cars were parked along it. Ironically, only the taxidermy showed any signs of life. The front door was open, and a man in overalls came out to watch me as I took in the bright lights of Langdon. I figured him for sixty or more, but he might just as easily have been older and holding off the predations of the years. Maybe it had something to do with all of the preservatives with which he worked.

‘Quiet,’ I said.

‘I guess,’ he replied, in the manner of one who wasn’t entirely convinced that this was the case and, even if it was, he sort of liked it that way.

I looked around again. It didn’t seem like there was much room for argument, but maybe he knew something that I didn’t about what was going on behind all of those closed doors.