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wide?” She paused. “I don’t know nothing that big.”
    â€œHorse, maybe?” Naomi asked.
    Hays shook his head. “You know a horse walks on two legs? Cause two’s all I see.”
    Cordelia listened to Hays and Naomi and Scarlett go back and forth about what could’ve gotten so close to camp in the night, listened as Scarlett said maybe it was nothing and Naomi said John David had been right, they had no business being up there in the first place, but Cordy didn’t care about any of that because the only thing that mattered was the bracelet.
    She looked at Scarlett. “Momma’s bracelet’s gone , Scarlett. She’s gonna find out, and I need me and her to be good right now.” She felt her belly, like she was trying to straighten her shirt.
    Scarlett whispered, “I’m so sorry, Cordy.”
    â€œIt’s gotta be here somewhere,” Hays said. He looked on, to where the tracks disappeared around a tall oak. “Come on.”
    â€œNo,” Naomi said. “No way. I’m sorry, Cordy, but I’m done. I want to leave. We should all just leave.”
    Hays swelled his chest. He could do that with somebody like Naomi. Not so much with somebody like John David. “That wasn’t a question, Naomi. We stick together. Always have. Right, Scarlett?”
    Scarlett nodded.
    Hays pulled the Buck knife from his pocket and held it in his hands, just in case. He grinned at Naomi and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll be at church in plenty of time for Jesus and your daddy to wash our sins. Come on. Time’s wasting.”
    It was just before seven in the morning when those three kids left the Number Four’s shadow, aiming for that oak and the wide woods in the distance. By nine, they’d all be running for their lives. Funny how quick things can turn, ain’t it?
    -2-
    I think all but Scarlett expected those tracks to keep right on through the woods a ways, or—and this would be much better—to simply vanish with as much mystery as they’d appeared, leaving the bracelet safe and sound in a soft pile of leaves. But what none a them could’ve imagined was those prints leaving the ground altogether, walking straight up one side of a tree and then straight down the other, like whatever’d left them had mocked gravity itself. Chuckle all you want, friend, I’m saying it’s true. You go up there right now, get through the gate if you can. See them for yourself.
    The trunk was wide enough for Scarlett and Cordelia to wrap their arms around it and still not touch, though neither had a mind to try. Hays fell to silence, trying to believe what his eyes said couldn’t be. Naomi’s lips moved slow. Her words came out soft, more for herself than any of the others. Cordelia was close enough to hear: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
    Hays reached out and traced a finger around the edge of the closest horseshoe-shaped hole carved into the wood. When he drew that finger away, it trembled.
    â€œBurned,” he said.
    Cordy cocked her head. “What?”
    â€œThe . . . whatever they are,” he said. “They’re burned in. See the edges? All charred up.”
    Cordelia stepped to the other side of the tree. The prints there were upside down, marking a descent that led on into the woods.
    â€œThey lead this way,” Hays said.
    â€œWait,” Naomi said. “We’re keeping on ?”
    Hays didn’t answer. I don’t think he heard. Out of all them kids, that boy understood that the stories they’d all been raised on about those mines and that mountain could be true, that maybe there really could be things up there waiting, hungry things that existed only in madness and nightmares. He’d never come out and say it, not to Naomi and Scarlett, not even to Cordelia, but Hays knew of the monsters in this world. He’d seen them.
    Those tracks had done