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It was in the late summer, an especially hot one, that Les Willins at last came down out of the mountain wilderness by dusty trails and old roads to the town he’d grown up in. By his reckoning, his counting of the seething summers and harsh, frost-crust winters, eleven years had passed, and he was now a man of thirty. His beard was long, his hair flecked with white, his clothes stitched and re-stitched and ragged, his face weathered and weary and bronzed by the sun. Three shirts, three pairs of socks, and two pairs of pants he’d worn out and discarded over the years, and he was amazed his boots were still holding on, if only just. The winds had stolen his hat in his first year out in the forests, but he’d stumbled upon it sometime many years later, and so was wearing it again. His body was lean and taut, his eyes quick and darting. River fish had been his diet, and crawdads and berries and wild apples and roots and mashed acorns and roasted carrion and the occasional hare caught in the traps he’d laid.

Les carried a hefty knapsack, the same one he’d hiked with as a boy, the same one he’d kept slung over his shoulders or beneath his sleeping head for over a decade. It held a small handful of acorns, his one remaining unused pair of socks, his old compass, his mending supplies, his two steel canteens, his hopelessly ripped map, and his old switchblade knife. In his right hand he held the long sharpened stake he used for fishing, which doubled as a hiking staff.

For some reason, it had come into his brain a few days ago that he should at long last make his way back to Lainesville. This morning, not entirely sure why, he’d begun hiking southwest towards town. The afternoon was sweltering and still.

If they recognize me, they recognize me, he thought. For a long while it was the only thought he had.

If they put me away, they put me away.

He remembered the old trails, passing lower and lower until there was more mountain above him than below, and eventually none below him at all. The valley funneled him down towards the fields of corn and wheat and wild grass, toward the yellow-green patchwork plain which somehow seemed almost small under the bright and cloudless sky that was endlessly deep but not broad or expansive. Les took no notice of his body, how tired or thirsty or aching he felt. He’d taken less and less notice of those things over the years, but he felt totally detached from them now. He thought only of Lainesville, how he was nearing it.

Eleven years.

It was 1948 now, he reflected. For all this time, he’d spoken to no one – hardly even seen anyone, and then only at a distance: someone across a lake, fishing; or on the water in a canoe; or hiking on a distant trail.

The wind was picking up. He walked along a dirt road where an old rotting fence ran along his right side and telephone poles ran on his left. Every so often, there would be a bird, a blackbird or a crow or something, sitting on a post, and each one would flap off at about the same distance as Les neared it.

There were no cars, no people. Over the years in the wilderness he’d seen and heard airplanes more and more often, but there was no hint of one today. As far as he looked, there was no sign of anyone, and the only sound was of the flowing wind on the grass.

He saw the town now under the hazy horizon, maybe three miles off.

By the early evening, he stood at its edge, gazing down Center Street.

Nothing seemed to have changed much. Not a soul was in sight, and the buzzing of a few insects had replaced the wind as the only sound. Les started to walk down Center Street, but stopped himself. He’d circle the town first.

Or rather make a half circle around it, until he came to his childhood home on the opposite side… and beyond that, the field and the stream he knew so well.

He turned left down Allen Road, shuffling on stiff legs, the wide-open flat spaces to his left and a row of yards, shops, and houses to his right. Not even a dog’s bark could be heard, though birds chirped and cawed here and there. It suddenly occurred to Les that he was very hungry and there would be food – good, filling food – in one of these shops.

Patter’s General Store – did he remember that place? He didn’t care. He rushed in.

No lights on. Not a person there – not even at the counter. But the door had been unlocked, and all the wares stood neatly stacked on tables, shelves, and the floor. Les stood for a moment in the darkness. The day was cooling off. 

He called out. Nothing.

He stood his spear against a shelf, ripped open a package of flapjack mix, ate a few handfuls. In a back room he found a can opener, and began to dig in to canned peaches, prunes, green beans, lima beans. Somehow he’d find or make some money later on, he figured, then come back here and pay for what he’d taken. When he was full, he slumped beneath a table, rested his head on his pack as he’d done so many times in the deep wilderness, and fell asleep just as the sun outside was falling below the earth.

* * *

Les woke at dawn, startled by the sudden dream-thought that the shop owner might arrive and discover him. But he was alone. By the dim light, Les found the store’s washroom and freshened up. He ate two more cans of peaches, then searched among the shelves and racks and clerk’s counter for a newspaper, but couldn’t find any. He threw away all the cans of his dinner and breakfast in a trash bin, took his spear, and was out the door.

The sun was breaking over the land. Les knew that he ought to be troubled by the lack of people or any sign of them – but he’d grown so used to solitude, he figured, that the deep strangeness of this desolation hadn’t struck him until he’d slept on it. He kept alert for anything – the sound of a car or a voice, the rise of a plume of smoke – that might tell him he wasn’t alone, but nothing caught his eye or ear.

Has everyone left for good? he wondered. Anything could’ve happened in the time I’ve been gone. Maybe there’s been a war… Maybe some army came and forced everyone to leave – just last month or something. Nothing seems that dusty or neglected. It’s just that no one’s here.

He walked around the south side of town, making a long curve, glancing at each silent house he passed. He could only vaguely remember what the cars of his teenage years had looked like, but as far as he could tell, the ones parked in the driveways and at the curb seemed no different at all. Yet they all looked almost sparkling new.

Before long, Les came in sight of the house he’d grown up in – the house where he’d been born, the house of his happy and unhappy and indifferent childhood memories, the house where, one spring evening at the age of nineteen and in a sudden panicked, trembling condition, he’d thrown some food from the kitchen, some clothes from his room, some needles and thread from a basket in the living room and some supplies from the shed out back into his big knapsack, zipped up the zipper, removed his shoes and put on his hiking boots, and then fled frantically without a backward glance.

Everything about the house seemed the same. Its coat of cream-colored paint was peeling and perhaps faded by eleven years of sunshine, but otherwise it looked almost exactly as he’d pictured it so many times in his dreams and daydreams over the lonely years.

He passed the gate, went up to the door, knocked. He looked through a window. It was all coming back to him, the look and feel of the place. He waited a long time. He tried the bell – it still worked. But no one answered.

He tried the knob – unlocked. He went in.

“Hello?” Silence.

Les looked around tentatively. There they were, the old recliners in the living room, the end tables, the ottoman, the radio, the lamps, the ashtray, and even the houseplants, not withered in the least. In the icebox, there was some frozen bread and ham and roast beef. But he wasn’t hungry right now.

Les went upstairs, clutching the handrail.

There, down the hallway, was the door to his mother’s and father’s room, the door to his own room, and the door to the room his parents had planned to use for a second child – a second child who, for some reason or reasons Les didn’t remember, had never arrived.

He looked first in his parents’ room. Empty. The bed was neatly made. Les found one of his father’s pairs of boots and tried them on. They fit perfectly.

I’ll pay you back, Dad, he thought.

Les went into his own room. He sat down on his old bed, set his spear against the wall.

The bed seemed very small and soft. On the floor, on the shelves, in the closet, his eyes took in all his old knickknacks and fishing pole and baseball gear and books and trading cards. Some of that stuff he remembered, some he didn’t.

Nothing’s changed, he thought, more and more astonished.

Les rifled through his chest of drawers and his closet, stuffed some fresh clothes in his pack. While doing so, he noticed his old piggybank on a table. He shook it, and money rattled inside. He clawed out the plug on the underside and shook the coins into his hand. He pocketed them and sat down again.

Les gazed all over the room in subdued wonder.

On his nightstand was a framed photo of a girl. She had a ribbon in her hair and was smiling. Les looked at it awhile, then tore his eyes away. He sat there, feeling very tired, staring at the floor. He nudged the photo so he couldn’t see it.

Rummaging through his pack, Les took out the old switchblade. He flicked it open. The dark blade had acquired a reddish tinge with the eleven years of hare- and fish-blood it had spilt. He put it away again.

The sun struck his eyes through the curtains. He peered out the window.

Some few hundred yards away stood a strange building. Les didn’t remember it at all.

It had been built in that field he remembered well, a field that had oak trees at three of its corners and was marked off by a bright blue fence. He’d never known who owned the field when he was a boy, but he remembered that blue fence just as vividly as he remembered his home.

The building was extremely odd: cylindrical and tall, it looked almost like some kind of spacecraft that had landed dead center in the field. It was pale yellow and had no windows – none that Les could see – but it did have what looked like a doorless entrance.

Les’s heart raced. He breathed quickly and pulled at his beard.

* * *

He’d swung one leg, then the other over the blue fence, walked through the tall grass thick with dandelions, and now stood at the entry. Les touched the threshold – he couldn’t tell if the building’s material was stone, metal, plastic, or what precisely. It wasn’t cool and it wasn’t warm.

His heart gave a dreadful leap.

What is this place… a monument?

Beyond the building, the stream where Les had often fished as a boy was rushing softly among the willow trees.

Les put his hand down. It was light inside the building. The day was windless, and each bird’s cheep or warble from the oak trees came to his ears distinctly, like a small crystal object he could hold and touch.

He stepped inside. The room was bare and round. A staircase of the same material as the walls wound up around the inside of the hollow cylinder. Everything was bright, but Les couldn’t see a light source. As soon as he’d walked inside, the cheeping and the sound of the stream had vanished.

He walked in a slow circle around the room, eyes on the stairway. He looked up. He could see where the steps ended, maybe fifty feet above: a small platform that jutted out of the wall. The entire building – walls, stairs, platform, roof – was all one solid structure, all blocky and stone-hard and smooth.

Les’s mind raced in the silence.

Finally, he climbed the stairs, putting both feet on each step before his right foot went to the next. Light was everywhere, but there was no clear source of it.

After two turns of the stairs, Les reached the platform.

A man was sitting there behind a wooden desk.

He wore a brown suit and a red tie and his hair was combed neatly. He kept his hands folded on the desk. Les took off his hat.

There was a chair on Les’s side of the desk. It was a long while before the man gestured for Les to sit.

He did so, putting his pack on one knee and setting his spear on the floor. It was another long while before the man spoke.

“Do you know how long they searched for you?” he asked.

Les studied the man’s face. It was wrinkleless, young, almost unnervingly symmetrical. The eyes glinted sharply. They were green.

Les shook his head.

“Five years.”

Les swallowed. His mouth trembled. “I think… I heard them once or twice.”

The man’s expression was blank. “You kept well hid.”

Les nodded.

A long pause. “Do you still have it?” said the man.

Les kept still, then set his pack on the floor. He unzipped it, looked through it, took out the switchblade. Set it on the desk. 

The man eyed it. He unfolded his hands, put them palms down, looked up.

Les tried to speak. His mouth was dry.

“Have… have…”

“Yes?”

He licked his lips. “Have I come – too early?”

The man seemed reluctant to answer.

“There’s no one here,” he said at last.

“Yeah,” breathed Les.

The man said nothing. Les’s heart raced faster.

“I heard…” Les began, but trailed off. Then: “The stream – the stream is still there… out there, behind you. I heard it trickling while I was at the door.”

“It wiped the blade clean,” said the man matter-of-factly. But there was a hint of something hard and accusing in his eyes.

He asked: “Do you still love her?”

Les hesitated, then nodded again. The two men stared at each other.

“Where is he buried?” Les asked. “In town?”

The man nodded.

Les sat there, waiting for the other to speak.

“You both loved her,” the man said.

Les shook all over. “I didn’t… mean…”

The man only looked at him.

Les breathed deeply. “I only brought the knife – I mean, in case Olly… I didn’t mean to…”

The man was still.

“We didn’t… we didn’t like each other,” said Les. “We hated…” But he choked on the word.

The man kept staring at him – not kindly, not accusatory.

“Sarah… I couldn’t let him have her,” Les managed to say.

“He was too quick for you,” said the man.

“I know,” said Les.

“Too quick.”

Les nodded sadly.

“You were down on your back. He was walking away…”

Les touched his forehead, hid his eyes. 

“Here in this field. The place you agreed on,” said the man. He leaned forward slightly.

“And the stream washed the blade clean.”

Les couldn’t look at him. But finally he did.

“Have I come… too soon?” he said.

“There’s no one here,” said the man.

A long silence.

“When… when can I come back?” Les asked.

The man didn’t answer.

“When?” asked Les.

The man took a deep, noiseless breath.

“Keep hid,” he said. He pushed the switchblade toward him.

Les put it away.

“It’ll be raining soon,” said the man, his tone turning a touch softer. “It’ll be autumn… Let the years pass.”

Les still trembled. He nodded.

“Let them pass,” said the man. “Let the rain fall… You know,” he said, looking up vaguely toward the ceiling, “I think it’s cloudy now.” He looked down again at Les.

“It’s – cloudy?”

“Yes.”

Les stood up.

“It’ll be cloudy all day and the next,” said the man. His eyebrows arched, then his expression was blank again. He refolded his hands.

Les looked at him a long time. There seemed nothing left to say. He put on his hat, took his pack and his spear, and left.

He went out of the cylinder, crossed the field, started down Allen Road. The sun and sky were indeed all hid by clouds.

In Patter’s General Store, he set his coins on the counter.

He passed out of town, still seeing no one, and reached the long road, the old fence to his left now and the telephone poles to his right.

He reached the foothills of the mountains, and the rain began to fall, but no wind came up.

The tall trees and the brush were silent as the gray evening came on, and as Les hiked, first by a trail, then by none, the forest took him within its limbs and leaves and it folded him deeper, ever deeper, into the embrace of that vast wilderness he knew so well, that embrace of the immense and dark mountainous wilds.
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