The sign was upside down, but Dortho could read it anyway.
WELCOME TO SCARYVILLE, the crooked letters declared across a slab of white stone, though the words ran from bottom to top and the final E faced backward like a bitten moon. Black cracks split the sign from end to end. Orange lanterns hung beneath it, their flames bending sideways in a wind that did not touch the trees.
Doreas woke with her cheek pressed against cold gravel.
“Dortho,” she whispered.
He lay beside her in the road, one arm thrown over his eyes. His coat was torn at the shoulder, and dark dust clung to his hair. When she touched his wrist, he jerked awake and grabbed her hand.
“Don’t move,” he said.
“I’m already moving.”
His eyes snapped toward her. For a moment, they were ordinary eyes—brown, tired, frightened. Then the lantern light passed over them, and a thin silver ring glimmered around each pupil.
Dortho released her. “Where are we?”
Doreas pushed herself upright. The gravel bit through her palms. Above them, mountains rose on either side of the road, black and white layers of rock stacked like enormous teeth. Some peaks leaned over the town, impossibly close, while others floated in the distance beneath a bruised purple sky.
A bell rang somewhere below.
The sound rolled through the mountains, deep and hollow. One note became two, then three, until the whole valley seemed to hum.
Doreas turned toward the town.
Scaryville had been built into the mountainside as if someone had carved rooms, streets, and towers directly from the rock. Houses leaned against one another beneath crooked roofs. Narrow bridges crossed empty air. Windows glowed orange behind black curtains, and lanterns dangled from wires that stretched between chimneys. At the heart of the town stood a line of old pubs, their wooden fronts painted in black, white, and orange.
Music drifted up from them.
Not music Doreas recognized. A low chorus sang in rough, wavering voices, the melody rising and falling like a warning. Someone beat a drum. Someone else whistled through two fingers. Beneath it all, a group of unseen singers hummed the same three notes over and over.
“What happened?” Dortho asked.
Doreas tried to remember.
A room. White walls. The sharp smell of disinfectant. Dortho standing over a sink, coughing into his fist. A television muttering about shortages, hospital beds, and another district closing its doors. Her own hands trembling as she reached for him.
Then light.
Not sunlight. Something brighter and colder, pouring through the ceiling.
She pressed both hands to her temples. “We were home.”
“Where?”
“Rosterbrook.”
The word came out with strange certainty. It was the name of their town, their small suburb outside Chicago, where rent climbed higher every month and the cafés closed earlier because no one could afford to sit inside them. It was where Doreas taught children in a crowded school and Dortho worked long shifts at Gal Town Pub, carrying wood-fired pizzas and cheese fries through rooms that had grown emptier since the sickness began.
She remembered the virus. She remembered the fever burning behind her eyes.
She remembered Dortho saying, “If we can just get through this week—”
Then nothing.
Dortho stared at the lanterns. “I don’t remember coming here.”
“Neither do I.”
A scrape sounded behind them.
They turned together.
A man stood beneath the welcome sign. At least, he had the shape of a man. His coat hung from crooked shoulders, and his arms were too long, ending in fingers that curled like black roots. His face had no right side. Where his cheek and eye should have been, there was only smooth gray skin, stretched tight across a hollow.
The left eye blinked.
“New arrivals,” the man said.
His voice came from several directions at once. One voice spoke from his mouth. Another whispered from beneath the road. A third sighed from the mountains.
Dortho rose slowly. “Who are you?”
The crooked man tilted his head. “That depends which way you’re reading.”
Doreas glanced at the sign. The letters seemed to shift. For an instant, WELCOME TO SCARYVILLE became EMOCLEW OT ELLIVYRACS. Then the words rearranged themselves again.
The man smiled with only half a mouth.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The town will tell you.”
Behind him, something green moved between two lantern posts.
Doreas caught only a glimpse: a narrow shoulder, a long neck, and a pair of luminous eyes that shone like wet leaves. The creature bent low, scurried across the road, and vanished behind a stack of black stones.
Dortho stepped closer to her. “We should leave.”
The crooked man laughed.
It was not a loud laugh, but it traveled. It slipped beneath doors and rose from chimneys. In the pubs below, the singing faltered.
“Leave?” the man repeated. “You have not even been welcomed.”
The lanterns went out.
Darkness swallowed the road.
Doreas heard claws strike stone. Something breathed beside her, warm and sweet-smelling, like flowers left too long in a graveyard. Dortho seized her hand, and together they ran.
They plunged downhill without knowing where the road led. Their shoes skidded over loose rock. The mountains crowded them, black walls on one side and white walls on the other, while the town flickered below in sudden bursts of orange light.
“Left!” Dortho shouted.
“There’s no left!”
“There was a second ago!”
The road forked ahead. One path climbed toward the pubs; the other disappeared between two buildings that leaned so close together their upper floors touched. Above the narrow passage hung a sign painted with a white arrow.
The arrow pointed in both directions.
Doreas pulled Dortho toward the passage.
They squeezed between the buildings. The walls were damp and warm beneath Doreas’s fingertips. Whispers crawled through the stone.
Thiah is coming.
The Godly ones have arrived.
The hunt will begin.
Doreas stopped. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Someone said—”
A howl tore through the town.