The forest did not pursue them.
That was the first strange thing on the way back.
The Backwoods, which had mysteriously stretched itself during the journey in, contracted on the return with almost offensive speed.
In less than two minutes they were back at the edge of the trail, back on the gravel road.
Morgan stopped so abruptly that Eliot collided with his back.
The street was there.
The gravel was there.
The crooked tree at the end of the block was there.
But.
But.
But the houses were not.
Morgan processed that first with the part of the brain responsible for visual information before the part that processed meaning had the chance to intervene.
Then the second part caught up with the first, and the result was a specific kind of internal silence that exists somewhere between coherent thought and screaming.
The houses were gone.
There were no ruins.
No rubble.
Nothing suggesting houses had ever stood there, no foundations, no broken walls, no shattered roof tiles.
There was only land.
Packed dirt and gravel road and, beyond the road, earth.
Dry grass.
The correct topography, the rises, the depressions, the slight northern incline Morgan had unwillingly memorized over four years.
But no human structures.
Crest was not there.
Forty-three people were not there.
The Protocol was not there.
Mrs.
Haverford was not there.
Morgan slowly turned in place, sweeping the flashlight across the four cardinal directions.
East.
South.
West.
North.
His mind tried to find an explanation that still fit within the parameters of what he understood as possible, dense fog, geographical disorientation, maybe they had taken the wrong trail, maybe they had emerged somewhere else in the forest, and discarded each explanation with the mechanical speed of someone who knows, at a level older than rational thought, that no explanation of that kind exists.
“Where’s our house?” Eliot asked quietly.
Morgan did not answer.
“Morgan.
Where’s our house?”
“Stay beside me.
Don’t let go of my hand.
Whatever you hear, you do not react, you do not speak, and you do not look to the sides.
You only look where I’m looking.
Understood?”
A pause.
Eliot was staring at the empty space where their kitchen window should have been.
“Understood, Eliot?”
“I understand.”
The wind changed.
Calling it wind was, Morgan realized, the same category of inaccuracy as calling the Fall an event.
It was a word with the correct shape but the wrong content.
What arrived had no temperature.
It was neither warm nor cold.
It was something else, a pressure, a direction, a movement of air carrying the unmistakable quality of a breath.
As though something of incomprehensible scale had exhaled toward them.
And within that exhalation there was, if Morgan had to describe it, and he never would, because there are things that become more real the moment they are described than any person should have to endure, there was within that exhalation an interest.
The kind of interest a predator has before deciding whether what it is looking at is worth the effort of the hunt.
Eliot tightened his grip on Morgan’s hand with a force entirely disproportionate to that of a nine-year-old child.
And then they both saw the deer.