In the autumn of 1878, a lead logger named Cassius Vellinger came down from the high ridge above Black River Falls with his left eyelid twitching. The men who saw him put down their tools without being told. He walked past the sawmill and the cookhouse, went straight to his cabin, and poured himself a drink before sundown for the first time in 19 years.
Black River Falls was a small logging camp in a fold of the northern Appalachians. The river that ran through it was black with tannin from rotting hemlocks. The town itself was 22 cabins, a general store, a meeting hall, a bunkhouse, and a sawmill that ran from October to May.
Cassius had been lead logger for 19 years. The men under him knew him by three things: he drank his coffee black, he never raised his voice, and when something felt wrong in the woods, his left eyelid twitched once. That twitch was law in Black River Falls.
That afternoon, Cassius told the blacksmith, Obed Crannick, that something had been following him on the ridge. It was not a bear, not a cat, not a wolf. It had been walking on two legs the whole time. But every 20 steps or so, it had remembered to make wolf tracks behind itself.
Cassius had stopped to look at one of those tracks. The toes were too long. The pad was too narrow. The soil around the print had been smoothed deliberately, with what he thought was the back of a hand. About three feet away, hidden in the leaves, he found a real wolf track. The real track was older than the false one.
Obed said the word nobody in Black River Falls had said out loud since the previous March: skinwalker. Cassius did not say yes. He did not say no. He poured them both another finger of rye.
That night, Cassius did not sleep. Just past 4:00 in the morning, he heard footsteps walking the perimeter of the camp. They moved deliberately around the back of the meeting hall, around the henhouse, and along the line of cabins. They stopped outside his own window.
Through the glass, he heard a breath. It was a man's breath, drawn slow and held and let out. But there was something off about the rhythm. As if whoever was breathing was thinking between each breath about how to do the next one. The footsteps moved away toward the high ridge.
The next morning, Cassius did three things he had never done before. First, he sent the cutting crew to the lower flats instead of the high ridge. Second, he bought every yard of iron chain the general store had in stock: 48 feet of half-inch links. Third, he walked out to the old root cellar at the back edge of the camp and opened the doors for the first time in a decade.
The root cellar had been dug in 1841. It was lined with fitted stones and roofed with timbers as thick as a man's thigh. Cassius swept it out. He found the bones of a small animal he could not identify. He laid the iron chain along the floor in a careful spiral. He examined an iron ring set into the back wall.
The ring was old. Older than the cellar around it. The mortar around its base had been laid in twice, as if someone had reset it once, and then someone else had reset it again. The ring itself was warm to the touch. Cassius tested it with his weight. It did not move.
Obed came to Cassius's cabin that night and asked what the chain was for. Cassius said it was for the thing on the ridge. He said the thing had come down off the ridge sometime in the night. He had heard it stop outside his window. He said the breath had not sounded like an animal's breath. It had sounded like a man trying very hard to remember how an animal breathed.
Cassius said he was going to catch it. The thing was curious. A creature that curious would walk into a trap. Obed said it was the worst idea Cassius had ever had in his life. Cassius agreed. He said he was going to do it anyway.
Cassius did not bait the trap with meat. He said the thing was not hungry. The thing was looking for something else. Company. It had been alone a long time. It wanted to learn how to be a person.
So Cassius baited the trap with himself. He sat in the root cellar from sundown until past midnight, alone, with the oil lamp turned low and the doors propped open just a finger's width. The iron chain lay coiled at his feet.
Around 2:00 in the morning, the lamp guttered. Then a voice spoke from outside the cellar door. It was Obed's voice. It said, "Cassius, are you in there? Come on out. The horse has thrown a shoe and I need a hand."
Cassius did not answer. The voice tried again. It tried calling him by his first name, which Obed never did. Then the voice changed. It was the voice of Cassius's older brother, Lucan, who had died of pneumonia in 1871.
The voice said, "Cassius, it's awful cold out here. Won't you let me in? Let me in, brother. I've been walking such a long way."
Cassius felt his hands begin to shake. He did not let the voice in. He let it go through every dead person he had ever loved. His mother sang him a snatch of an old hymn. Lavinia, a woman he had courted in 1854, laughed once. His brother begged him to open the door.
Cassius did not open the door. He held himself on the stool. He let the voices come and he let them go.
Finally, around 3:00 in the morning, the voice gave up. The thing on the other side of the door made a small sound, halfway between a sigh and a sob. Then the door pushed itself open just a hand's width. And the thing came in.
Cassius later refused to describe the thing in plain terms. He said the human eye was not built to remember it accurately. What he wrote was this. It was the size of a tall man. It walked on two legs, but the legs bent in too many places. Its skin was the color of birch bark, but moving like there were small things underneath it traveling.
It had no proper face. It had a suggestion of a face. The eyes were the only finished part. They were yellow. Yellow like old paper. Yellow like a letter someone wrote a long time ago and then forgot to send.
Cassius kicked the iron chain. He had laid it so that one good kick would send the loose end up and over a rafter hook. The chain came down and caught the thing across the chest and shoulders. Cassius passed the loose end through the iron ring set into the back wall and padlocked it.
The thing did not fight. It looked down at the iron crossing its chest. It looked up at Cassius, and its yellow paper eyes filled with what Cassius could only describe as relief. As if it had, at long last, been caught.
Cassius backed out of the cellar. He shut the door. He padlocked it. He walked back to his cabin and sat at his pine table with the empty rye bottle in front of him, watching the sky turn from black to gray to the pale blue of an October dawn.
Cassius did not tell the rest of Black River Falls what he had caught. He told Obed. He told no one else. The two men met at the cellar door at first light. Cassius said the trap had worked and the thing was inside. Obed asked what Cassius meant to do with it. Cassius said he didn't know yet.
That night, Cassius walked back to the cellar. He brought the lamp. He did not bring the revolver. He brought a small folding knife, a tin cup, a flask of water, and a small wooden chair. He felt, walking out to the cellar, like a man going to call on a sick neighbor.
The thing was still chained where he had left it. It had settled into a more definite shape. It had the rough shape of a man, long-limbed, with birch bark skin and yellow paper eyes. The face was still wrong, but it was wrong in a more deliberate way.
Cassius sat down on the wooden chair six feet from where the thing was chained. He asked it what it was. The thing did not answer at first. Then, slowly, in a voice that was a perfect copy of Cassius's own voice, it said, "I don't remember."
The thing said it had been in these mountains a very long time, longer than the town, longer than the trees. It said once, a long time ago, it had been something, a person, perhaps, or close to a person. It said the shape of the thing it had been had worn off, the way a name on a stone wears off.
It said it had been alone for so long that it had begun to forget how to be anything at all. So it had started watching the people in the valley and learning and trying to remember.
Cassius asked it why it had let itself be caught. The thing said because it was tired. It had been trying for a long time to remember, and it could not. And it was tired.
Cassius asked it why it had walked the perimeter of the camp that night. The thing said it had not been hunting. It had been listening. It had heard through the window Cassius breathing in his sleep, and it had wanted to remember what that was like.
Cassius asked it if it had ever harmed anyone. The thing was quiet for a long time. Then it said it did not remember everything it had ever done. It thought it had, perhaps, frightened people. It thought it had, perhaps, made some of them go strange. But it did not believe it had killed. Killing was a shape it had not learned.
Cassius asked the thing one more question. He asked it what it wanted. The thing looked at him with the yellow paper eyes, and it said, in a voice that was not Cassius's voice anymore, but was the voice of a man Cassius had never heard, a softer, older voice with an accent Cassius could not place.
"I want you to let me die."
Cassius did not decide what to do that night. He decided over the course of three weeks. Three weeks during which he visited the cellar every single night after dark, alone, with the lamp. Three weeks during which the thing chained inside grew slowly into a more and more recognizable shape.
By the second week, it had a face. A long jaw, a high forehead, cheekbones that sat slightly too high. A nose that had been broken at some point in its long-ago life and never set straight. By the end of the third week, the birch bark skin had begun to look more like skin. The yellow paper eyes had begun to lose some of their yellow.
They talked those nights in the cellar the way two men talk when one of them is dying and both of them know it. The thing told Cassius about a settlement that had stood in this valley before Black River Falls. A settlement of people who had come down out of the high passes in the 1540s.
The thing said those people had done a thing in this valley. It would not say what the thing was. It said only that the thing had cost them the shape of themselves. Some of them had gone home. Some of them had not been able to. The ones who had not been able to had stayed in these woods, slowly forgetting year by year what they had been.
Over the long centuries, some of them had managed to die. And some of them had not. The thing thought perhaps it had been the youngest of them. It said the only thing it remembered clearly was a woman's voice singing. It did not remember the woman. It did not remember the song. It only remembered that the voice had been kind.
It had been waiting in these mountains for 300 years to hear a kind voice again.
On the eighth night, the thing asked Cassius what year it was. Cassius told it. The thing was quiet for a long while. Then it said it had thought it might be earlier. It had thought perhaps the 1840s. It said three more decades was a long time to have lost.
On the tenth night, the thing told Cassius about other things in the valley. It said there had been others once, others like it. Most of them had stopped over the centuries. The last one besides itself had stopped in the 1820s near a stream three valleys west, when a Cherokee man named Walking Heron had sat with that other one in a similar way and had finally helped it to stop.
The thing said it had felt that other one stop. It had felt it the way a man feels the stove go out in the next room. It had been alone, completely alone, since that night. This was why it had begun, finally, to come down to the camp. To listen. To learn. To try to remember enough of being a person that it might ask a person for what it needed.
On the twelfth night, the thing asked Cassius about himself. Cassius told it about the logging, about the trees, about the way you read a hemlock before you cut it. The thing asked what a hemlock smelled like when it was freshly cut. It asked what the river sounded like in the spring melt. It asked whether Cassius had ever loved a woman.
Cassius told it about Lavinia. He had not told anyone about Lavinia in 20 years. He told the thing chained to a wall in a cellar in October. He told it the whole story. He told it about her dark hair and her quiet laugh and the way she had married eventually a clerk in Pittsburgh and had been very happy.
The thing said perhaps Cassius was telling it because the thing had nowhere to take the story. Sometimes a story needed to be told to something that could not pass it on.
On the fourteenth night, Cassius asked the thing if it wanted him to sing. He had been thinking about the woman's voice. The thing said yes. Cassius did not know any songs. He hummed badly the only tune he could remember from his own mother, who had died when he was 11. He thought it might have been called "Wayfaring Stranger."
He hummed it through twice. The thing chained to the wall closed its yellow paper eyes. When Cassius finished, the thing said, "Thank you." It said the tune was not the song the woman had sung. But it was in the same family of songs.
On the seventeenth night, the thing began to look almost human. The skin had taken on a real color. The eyes had faded from yellow to a pale amber. The hair on its head was now real hair, the silver gray of an old man who had once been dark-haired. The chain stayed exactly as it had been.
On the nineteenth night, Cassius asked the thing what it wanted him to do. The thing told him. The telling took a long time. The thing was careful in its instructions. The instructions were simple in the end. They were also, Cassius wrote later, the heaviest thing he had ever been asked to carry.
On the twenty-first night, Cassius took the iron chain off. He had decided. He had not told Obed. He had not told anyone. He simply walked into the cellar after dark, unlocked the padlock, and let the chain fall to the floor.
The thing did not move. It sat where it had been chained, its back against the stone wall, and it looked up at Cassius. Cassius said the chain was off. The thing nodded. Cassius said it could go. The thing shook its head. It said it did not want to go. It wanted to stop.
They sat together for a long time. The lamp burned down. The thing said it had been so tired for so long that it had not been able to remember how to be a thing, but it had also not been able to remember how to stop being one. It thanked Cassius for the chain. It thanked him for the singing. It thanked him especially for sitting and listening.
Cassius asked it what it needed him to do. The thing told him. Cassius did the thing.
Cassius wrote in the letter to his sister in Albany that whatever it was, it was kind. He wrote that the thing thanked him as it was happening. He wrote that the yellow paper eyes turned in the last moment to the color of an ordinary man's eyes. Brown. Plain brown.
He wrote that the thing in the very last second said the name of a woman. He thought it was the woman who used to sing. He wrote that the cellar after was very quiet and very still. And that he sat with what was left until first light.
There was no body to bury. There was only a shape on the cellar floor that looked in the dim lamplight like the shape of a person who had been lying down for a long time and had finally gotten up and walked away, leaving a clean place behind.
Cassius walked out of the cellar at dawn. He shut the doors. He padlocked them. He walked to the smithy and told Obed it was finished. Obed asked if the thing had escaped. Cassius said no. Obed asked if it was dead. Cassius said he wasn't sure dead was the right word. He said it had stopped.
Cassius left Black River Falls four days later. He sold his interest in the outfit to Obed for a fair price. He packed a single trunk. He took the empty rye bottle his brother had given him, and he walked down out of the valley following the Black River. He never went back.
He settled eventually near his sister in Albany. He worked for the rest of his life as a furniture maker. He made plain, honest chairs and tables, the kind that last. He never married. He kept on the mantle of his small house the empty rye bottle. He died of a quiet heart attack in 1894, sitting in one of his own chairs with a cup of black coffee gone cold beside him.
The letter to his sister was found in the bottom drawer of his workbench.
Black River Falls did not last long after Cassius left. The lumber played out by 1886. The mill closed. The cabins emptied one by one. By the time the federal census came through in 1890, the place was three families and a postmaster. By 1895, it was nothing.
The root cellar with its walls of fitted stone and its roof of timbers as thick as a man's thigh is still there. It is on private land now. It has not been opened, as far as anyone has bothered to record, since Cassius padlocked it that October dawn in 1878.
There is a story that the deer that pass through that part of the ridge will not walk over the cellar roof. They walk around it. There is a story that hunters who camp near the old foundations of Black River Falls sometimes hear in the small hours of the morning a man humming a tune they cannot quite make out.
The hum is always slow. It is always badly carried. It always sounds, the hunters say, like a man trying to remember a song his mother used to sing. And on certain nights, when the wind is right, the hunters say there is a second voice, very faint, humming along.