The barking was getting louder, but she couldn’t tell if she was closing in on the dogs or the other way around. The dirt track had left the slope’s edge to climb over the top of a rise and wind through some scrubby trees. Here and there, bright-red-and-yellow shotgun shells poked out from among the ferns.
She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, off in the tree shadows: something bigger and meatier than a falling leaf or a nodding branch. She stopped to stare into the trees, but the rain was dripping into her eyes, smudging her vision. She stood for a moment, licking water off her top lip, waiting for something more, but aside from the subtle jostling of leaves by the raindrops, the woods were still. She was seeing things.
Ivy hurried on, telling herself to stay cool. She couldn’t understand this road, its lack of purpose, its aimless wandering, but one thing was sure—it was taking her closer to the dogs. The track wandered down off the rise, then hopped another small gully and bent around to the left. Ivy slowed at the sight of a rusted-out school bus parked in the trees. The barking was coming from behind it, loud and panicky. She moved to the far edge of the road and took a half step forward to see a house farther back in the trees, behind the bus. It was small, half covered in baby-blue siding, half in pink insulation, a door and two windows punched in its front wall without much ceremony. Two black dogs were springing off the chain-link sides of a pen, raising their chins to bark toward the sky, which rained down echoes over the whole mountain.
The scene reminded her of the half-invisible people living around the edges of Good Hope, where they burned trash in shed heaters and strung up deer hides in their yards like big skin sails. There was a wildness about them that made people nervous. Ma had always warned Ivy to stay away.
Ivy backed up, putting the house out of sight again behind the bus. Moving slowly, she edged into the woods and back down toward the creek, giving a wide berth to the bus and the dogs and the general feeling of redneck meanness hanging in the air.
She was about ten yards down the hill when she heard a man’s shout, then the ring of a boot against chain link. The barking trailed off into whines. Ivy plunged straight down the hill, sliding through sodden mats of leaves and hopping over branches. When she got to the creek’s mossy bank, she forced herself to turn and look up to the road, but there was nothing to see other than rain-darkened tree trunks and occasional leaves slapping wetly to the ground.
Ivy found a narrow spot in the creek and sidestepped the length of a fallen tree, then hopped over to a rock and a thatch of leaves, and finally just splashed the rest of the way across the creek bed. On the opposite bank, she started running, her jeans wet and heavy, her feet sinking into mud flats and wanting to leave her shoes behind. She was shivering wildly, which made her arms and legs all jerky, and she fell once, then again, her hands and knees sinking into the mush and a low howl escaping her clamped jaw. Then the bank shrank into the slope and she was forced upward once again, scrabbling along the wall of the ravine like a half-stepped-on cockroach.
Finally, she found a wider, more level area leading back to the creek side, and when she got down there, she saw flat rocks lined up in a sort of path. There were NO TRESPASSING signs nailed to trees here and there, and the stones led to the slope and began marching upward in what was definitely a rough staircase. She climbed them slowly at first, then sped up, deciding she didn’t care where they went, relieved to be walking on something hard, something regular, something that fought back against the forest’s slippery mystery with some kind of good sense.
Above her head, a building loomed out of the hillside like a shoebox about to fall off a shelf. Ivy’s eyes were streaming with rainwater, so she couldn’t make much of it. When she finally got to the top step, her breath lunging out of her throat in thick, rasping clouds, she wiped the wetness from her face and took a good look.
It wasn’t like any house she’d ever seen. It was made of huge boxes that looked like shipping containers, or Dumpsters, stacked on top of each other and wedged into the hillside. The boxes were made of rusted metal, with entire sides cut away and filled with glass. Two long boxes faced one way, and two shorter ones were set perpendicular, at the end, making an L. A wide deck of nearly black wood, no railings, stretched out from the base of the house, ending where the earth dropped away.
Ivy used the last strength in her trembling thighs to climb up onto the deck, then she slowly approached the glass wall of the lower story. Everything was dark and still. She cupped her hands around her face and pressed it against
