What the Mountain Kept

Chapter 1: The Notch

The dark came down faster in the Notch than it had any right to.

By six o’clock the ridge had swallowed the sun whole, turning the sky the color of a bruised plum, and by seven the spruce and hemlock had moved in close, walling off the dirt road, the campsite, and the narrow turn-around where the Outback and Hank’s pickup sat nose-to-tail like sleeping beasts.

Briony sat on an overturned log just far enough from the fire pit that the smoke didn’t sting her eyes, her knees drawn up under her oversized cable-knit sweater. The sweater smelled of cedar shavings and her mother’s laundry detergent—comforts from two hundred miles south in Northampton that felt, in the damp chill of the Green Mountains, thin as gauze.

Across the clearing, Sienna threw her head back and laughed. It was her party laugh: sharp, bright, and loud enough to scatter the crows roosting along the stream bank.

“You’re full of shit, Nick,” Sienna said, swatting at the chest of the tall boy leaning over her shoulder. “There’s no way you walked across the reservoir spillway in the dark.”

“I swear to God,” Nick said. He had a beer clamped in one hand and his Red Sox cap turned backward, his forearms pale and corded in the firelight. “Two in the morning. Half a bottle of Captain in me. Hank had to fish my sneaker out with a stick.”

Hank, sitting on a rusted metal cooler with Marissa between his thighs, grunted in confirmation. He had his chin hooked over her shoulder, his fingers working the belt loops of her cutoffs with a proprietary rhythm that made Briony look down at her own wool socks.

Marissa caught Briony’s eye through the heat-shimmer of the flames and winked. It was the same look she had given Briony at tailgates and pre-games and the graduation mixer three nights ago in Amherst: Loosen up. We made it. Nobody’s taking attendance anymore.

Briony offered a tight smile and held both hands around her enamel mug. Warm cider, spiked with a thimble of rum she hadn’t asked for and had no intention of finishing.

She had loved them for four years—Sienna with her sudden, storm-front rages and ferocious loyalties; Marissa with her easy beauty and the careless confidence with which she let men touch her—but out here, with their diplomas rolled into cardboard tubes in the back of the Outback, the distance between them felt vast. They moved through the world as though it were a room built entirely for their pleasure. Briony had spent twenty-two years suspecting the floorboards were rotted through.

“You’re awfully quiet over there, Cole,” Chris said.

He sat down on the other end of her log. He was the quietest of the three boys they had run into at the gas station off Route 100—Hank’s cousin, or a high school buddy; Briony hadn’t caught the exact pedigree. He wore a faded Carhartt jacket with the collar turned up, his brown hair curling damply at his nape.

“Just thinking,” she said, shifting an inch to make room without seeming rude.

“Dangerous hobby.” He popped the tab on a fresh can of seltzer and offered her the first sip with a tentative lift of his brows. When she shook her head, he set it between his boots. “You don’t like the woods?”

“I like them fine. They’re just... bigger up here than I thought.”

“Bigger than western Mass, anyway.” He looked around the clearing. Beyond the fire’s orange halo, the black trunks stood shoulder-to-shoulder. “My uncle’s got a cabin about twenty miles north of here. You get off the logging roads, you can walk three days in any direction without crossing a telephone wire. Just rock and moss and deadfall.”

“That doesn’t make you nervous?”

Chris considered it, watching the sparks climb into the branches. “Used to. When I was a kid. Then you realize nothing in the woods really gives a damn about you. A bear just wants the berries. The cold just wants to be cold. It’s not personal.”

“That’s supposed to be comforting?”

He smiled—a small, crooked thing that softened the blunt line of his jaw. “I guess it depends on what you’re running from.”

“We’re not running from anything,” Briony said, though the words tasted faintly false even to her. “We’re celebrating.”

“Right. The grand commencement.”

Over by the four-person tent, Hank said something in Marissa’s ear. She giggled—a wet, breathy sound—and let him pull her to her feet by her wrists. They disappeared through the tent flap without a backward glance, the zipper teeth screeching like an insect as Hank sealed them inside. A moment later, the nylon wall shuddered as someone’s shoulder hit it from within.

Sienna tossed her can into the brush. “Come on, Nick. You promised you’d show me where that trail goes down to the swimming hole.”

“It’s pitch black, Si,” Nick said, though he was already grinning, his hand sliding under the hem of her fleece.

“That’s why God invented flashlights, genius. Move.”

They stumbled into the tree line, their flashlight beam bouncing crazily against the hemlock boughs until the undergrowth swallowed them, leaving only Sienna’s stifled laughter drifting back on the wind.

The clearing went suddenly quiet.

The fire popped, spitting embers into the dirt. The woodsmoke was almost suffocating, mixed with the green scent of damp ferns and crushed pine needles.

Briony set her mug down on the log. Her neck felt cold where the wind had worked its way under her hair.

“You want another cider?” Chris asked. “I could heat some up on the camp stove.”

“No,” she said, pulling her sweater sleeves down over her knuckles. “No, thank you, Chris. I think I’m just tired. The drive took a lot out of me.”

“Sure. Of course.” He stood, hands in his pockets, suddenly awkward in the silence the others had left behind. “It was nice talking to you, Briony. Seriously. It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t feel the need to yell over the music.”

“It was nice talking to you too.”

She stood and brushed off her jeans. She didn’t look toward the large tent, where the rhythmic creak of an air mattress was audible through the thin polyester.

Her own tent—a narrow, lime-green one-person wedge she had bought at an outlet store specifically so she wouldn’t have to share—was pitched twenty yards away, tucked under the low branches of an old sugar maple near the edge of the clearing. It looked terribly fragile from here, a nylon cocoon surrounded by miles of dark timber.

“Hey,” Chris called after her.

Briony turned. He was still standing by the fire, the orange light carving deep shadows into his face.

“Did you guys see a truck pass by earlier? On the access road?”

Briony thought back to the switchbacks. “Just that black-and-gold county cruiser down by the reservoir bridge. Around four o’clock.”

“Right,” Chris said, rubbing the back of his neck. “The sheriff. Thought I heard an engine idling up on the ridge road a half-hour ago, but... probably just a logger heading back to town.”

“Probably,” she said.

Yet as she turned away, a prickle traveled up her spine—that ancient, irrational sensation of being measured from behind.

She paused before unzipping her tent and looked out past the pale new leaves of the maple.

The woods were utterly still. The wind had dropped, leaving the spruce boughs motionless against the black sky. Between two pale birch trunks fifty feet up the rise, the shadows seemed denser than the rest of the night—a wedge of dark that didn’t tremble when the fire flared.

Briony squinted, her breath hitching.

For half a heartbeat, she thought she saw the dull reflection of firelight caught on metal—a button, a buckle, the clean curve of a lens.

Then an owl called from somewhere deep in the ravine, a low, hollow who-who-who, and the illusion broke. It was only the knotted burl of a dead spruce, black and wet with mountain rot.

Get inside, she told herself, shivering as the damp air settled into her clothes. You’re being stupid. You’re twenty-two years old and you’re still afraid of the dark.

She crawled onto her sleeping pad and zipped the nylon shut behind her, pulling both metal pulls together until they clicked.

Inside, the world smelled of polyurethane and her own cold breath. She didn’t light her lantern. She changed into dry flannel pajamas in the dark, her skin goose-pimpling, and slid deep into the mummy bag.

Outside, she could hear the low murmur of Chris talking to himself, the scrape of a camp shovel tossing dirt onto the coals to bank the fire for the night. Further off, down toward the creek, came the brief, high gasp of Sienna’s voice, swallowed almost instantly by the rush of water over stone.

Briony rolled onto her side and pulled the hood tight around her ears.

The nylon overhead was thin as paper. Above it, the mountain stood immense, cold, and entirely indifferent, holding them all in the palm of its hand while the last red ember went black in the dirt.

The inside of the mummy bag smelled of three years in an attic trunk: dry cedar, the paraffin of old waterproofing spray, and the ghost of dryer sheets from some forgotten autumn.

For the first hour, Briony did not sleep. She lay on her right side, her cheek pressed into the cold nylon of her travel pillow, listening to the mountain settle.

People who lived with streetlamps and traffic never understood how noisy the dark actually was. In Amherst, night had a hum—a sixty-cycle baseline of transformers, refrigeration trucks idling at the grocer’s loading dock, the hiss of tires on wet asphalt down Route 9. Here, there was no hum. There were only discrete, sharp incidents of sound, each one landing in the ear like a pebble dropped into an empty tin pail.

A hemlock branch scraped the top of the tent like fingernails on cardboard. Somewhere across the ravine, a dead limb snapped under its own weight, the crack echoing off the rock shelf of the Notch before decaying into the rush of the creek.

Beneath her hips, the ground was unforgiving. The foam pad from the army-navy surplus in Hadley was too thin; through it, she could feel the ancient spine of the mountain—fist-sized river stones, knotted spruce roots that refused to yield to the curve of her ribs, and a creeping damp that seemed to rise straight from the water table.

She pulled the hood string tighter, until only a narrow oval of her face was exposed to the draft from the mesh vents.

Twenty-two, she thought, watching the pale square of the tent door. You have a degree in English literature. You have sixty credits in modern history. You have three thousand dollars in a savings account and an apartment lease waiting for your signature in Florence.

None of it felt real. It felt like paper money in a board game. What felt real was the cold, the indifferent volume of the trees outside, and the sudden certainty that she had spent four years preparing for a life that existed only on well-lit sidewalks.

She wondered what Chris was doing.

He had seemed kind. Awkward, maybe, with that rural hesitation that made him look at his boots whenever he finished a sentence, but there had been no edge to him.

Not like Nick, whose charm was sharp around the corners, or Hank, who held Marissa with the unthinking grip of a boy who had never been told no by anything that couldn’t hit back. Chris had looked at her as if he understood why someone might want to sit by a fire without making an exhibition of themselves.

You should have stayed out there, a quiet voice said in the back of her head. You could have sat until the coals went grey.

No. That would have invited something. A look, a shift in posture, the clumsy negotiation that Sienna and Marissa navigated with such breezy competence.

Briony had never learned the dialect. To her, every advance from a man felt like an audit—a sudden demand to produce receipts for things she hadn’t known she was carrying.

Her eyelids grew heavy. The cold lost its sharp corners, softening into a numb ache behind her knees. The wind dropped entirely, the way it always did in the dead space between two and three in the morning, leaving the spruce boughs hanging limp and wet against the black canopy.

She drifted.

In the dream, she was back in the basement library of Bartlett Hall, looking for a misplaced volume of nineteenth-century parish records. The air smelled of leather bindings and dust. But when she pulled the book from the shelf, there was nothing behind it but a square hole looking out into the mountain timber, and someone—standing tall and motionless among the ferns—was looking directly through the gap at her throat.