We walked up onto the porch of the general store and saw a CLOSED sign in the window. Will looked at the hours and checked his pocket watch. “They closed over an hour ago.”

I peered in the window. “But the lights are on, Will, and I see someone moving around in there.” I rapped on the glass, gently at first, then louder.

“Easy, you don’t want to break the window,” Will warned.

An old man in a plaid wool shirt shuffled toward the door and unlocked it. It was the same shopkeeper who’d tried to sell us the bottled water last year—the one who’d shown us his hand, which had been healed by the water after he’d burned it.

“We’re closed,” he said, speaking through the crack in the door, which he held only slightly ajar. His face was more gaunt than it had been when we’d seen him last year.

“Please, sir. We just need directions. We can’t find our way to the springs,” Will said. “We keep getting turned around and end up going in circles.”

“Springs are closed up,” the shopkeeper said, starting to shut the door on us.

“Wait!” I called.

Then he noticed little Margaret, who shifted in my arms.

“Please,” I said. “She’s sick. My friend, she was here a month ago, she bought your last jar of water.” I showed him the empty jar we’d brought with us. “This jar!” I waved it at him. “We gave the water to our baby, little droppers of it, and it made her better. But now we’re out and she’s sick again. She needs more. Please.”

He looked at me, eyes icy blue, then held open the door. We stepped inside. The store was uncomfortably hot. The little cast-iron pot-bellied stove was roaring away in the corner. The moose head stared gloomily at us from the wall, its fur and eyes glazed with a thin layer of dust. A train schedule was nailed to the wall, but the Brandenburg stop had been crossed off, a penciled note next to it read: Canceled until further notice. Another sign next to it announced that the Pine Point Inn and Dance Hall on Lake Wilmore were closed for good.

“You’re sure this is what you want?” he asked.

“If she was your child, wouldn’t you do the same?”

He looked at me for a few seconds, then turned and disappeared into the back of the shop. When he returned a few minutes later, he had a boy of about twelve with him. The boy was wearing patched dungarees and an old gray sweater that was far too large for him. “This here’s my grandson, Phillip. For a dollar, he’ll take you to the springs.”

Phillip shifted nervously from foot to foot.

Will looked at the boy, then at me. I nodded at him. Will pulled out his wallet and paid Phillip. We followed him out of the store, but as we were leaving, the shopkeeper said, “Just this once. You get what you need up there, then you go home and don’t come back. And hurry. It’ll be dark soon. You don’t want to be up there after dark.”

The boy got on his bicycle, and we got back in our car and followed him back up the main road to a muddy turnoff; a little ways up, trees were lying across the road. Trees someone had cut down and placed there to block access.

“You gotta walk from here,” the boy said.

Will pulled the car over to the side of the road. We hiked in on foot, Phillip leading the way. He stayed a good ways ahead of us and walked quickly. Will offered to carry Margaret, but I clung tight to her. Our shoes were soon caked with thick black mud, and we were sweating and panting despite the cold air. The walking was difficult and tedious, as if the road itself were trying to stop us, trying to suck us down and hold us. We had a hard time keeping up with Phillip and worried that if we lost sight of him, we’d not only never find our way to the springs, but might not be able to find our way back to town.

Trees and brush had overtaken the road, narrowing until it was only a wide path. The branches had knit together to make a thick canopy, shading out what little light there was. It was overcast, twilight. The sun would set soon.

I thought of the shopkeeper’s warning: You don’t want to be up there after dark.

We walked without speaking. Margaret grew heavier and heavier, and though Will offered to take her again, I still would not let her go. “Almost there, little sparrow,” I whispered into her hair.

At last, the trees thinned, and we came to a large clearing. Where the grand hotel once stood was only a vast cellar hole, the broken and burned remnants of timbers, piles of slate roofing. It smelled of ruin.

Gone was all sense of a familiar place, a place I was meant to be.

I walked up to the edge of the hole, which had a small lake of water pooled at the bottom, black and filthy. I could see bent and broken copper pipes sticking out of it. There was a bathtub down there. Part of the crystal chandelier from the lobby. I felt dizzy and swayed slightly. Will grabbed me, pulled me away from the edge.

“Be careful, Ethel,” he scolded, not releasing his grip on me.

Broken window glass was everywhere, crunching beneath our feet. The heat must have caused the windows to explode outward, away from the building. I tried to imagine it: the hotel on fire, the people inside. The screaming.

I was sure I could hear it still; some echo trapped forever down in that cellar hole.

“Do they know what caused the fire?” Will asked as he pulled me a safe distance away, the mud sucking at our shoes, trying to trap us.

“Benson Harding,” said the boy, the name coming out like a snarl. “He burned it down.”

“Why on earth would he do such a thing?”

Phillip shrugged, kicked at the mud with the worn toe of his leather boot. “Folks say he was sick over what happened to his wife. Went crazy, she did.” There was a funny gleam in the boy’s eyes. “Said she’d seen a monster in the springs.” He turned and spat in the dirt.

Will and I looked at each other. Margaret stirred, breath wheezy, against my chest. I looked at Will, said with my eyes: We have no choice.

The boy led us to the springs. We stepped around the wreckage and found the old footpath hidden amid the dead, overgrown grass. Off to our right, astonishingly, the rose garden was flourishing: the leaves green, the untrimmed vines overtaking the trellises, the early buds offering unsettling explosions of color. It didn’t seem right, to see a lush oasis of green in such a dead place.

We smelled the pool before we saw it: a rotten, sulphurous stench.

The wooden gate that had once been around it was knocked down, a sign still tacked to it: The Pool is CLOSED. Will reopen tomorrow at 9 a.m.