Then the light began to go.

I had been half-aware of it already: the greens thinning out of the canopy above us, the pale gravel of the creek bed losing its distinction from the darker soil at the margins, the briars flattening to a uniform gray. It was the kind of dimming that had nothing to do with the hour. The sun was still up there somewhere. I could feel the faintest warmth of it on the back of my neck. But the light that reached the bottom of the ravine was arriving spent, drained of anything that might cast a shadow or separate one surface from another, and the color went out of things by degrees: first the reds, then the yellows, then everything that wasn't gray, until the whole of the creek bed had gone to gray, and the surfaces of things had lost their distinction from one another.

Julian's breathing was still there, fast and wet, but it had become the only thing I could locate with any certainty, and even that seemed to reach me from a greater distance than the ten or twelve feet between us. Beneath it there was something else: not a sound exactly, but the quality of a sound being withheld. A held silence. The particular silence of something that is listening very carefully—something that made the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. My hands felt remote. My feet on the gravel had gone vague and thick, the sensation of standing slowly replaced by the sensation of being stood upon, and I realized I had not moved in some time and could not entirely remember deciding not to.

I tried to find Margot. She had been to my left, close enough to touch, and now she was a shape I could identify only because I knew she had been there, a darker gray against the gray of the oak behind her, her edges soft, her outline dissolving into the tree line the way ink dissolves in water when you watch it long enough. Arthur was worse. Arthur had been above us on the rim and now I could not find him at all. I turned my head and the ravine turned with me, slow and thick, every surface at the same distance and the same depth, and I could not tell where the ground ended and the air began and I thought very clearly and very calmly that I was going to lose myself in this place if I did not find something to count.

Julian was still visible. He was the only thing that was. The purple on his leg held its own light in the gray, a faint, sick luminescence that had no source I could identify, and it made him the fixed point in a ravine that had lost every other one. Everything else had gone to shapes.

So I counted the shapes. Margot, to my left, still faintly there. Arthur — I searched the rim and found him, or found the shape of him, a stillness against the moving gray.

There were three shapes.

The third was long, and very still, and had been there for some time before I thought to count. It sat at the edge of where I could see, and for several seconds my mind would not assemble it into a shape. The limbs were too long. They were folded beneath it at angles that did not correspond to anything I could name, and the body they supported was narrow and low and held with a stillness that had nothing in it of sleep or rest. I knew what it was. I think I had known since before I counted.

Above us on the ravine's rim, I heard Arthur draw a single, sharp breath. Then I heard him descend. Slowly. One careful footfall at a time. The gravel shifted under him on the slope. He came down into the ravine and stood beside me, shaking badly enough that I could see it, and he did not look away.

The tuxedo cat came down into the ravine.

It came down the slope the way nothing else in those woods moved: slowly, and with no effort at all. Each leg unfolded and placed itself with a precision that made the uneven ground look flat. The briars along the slope bent away from it before it reached them. I could not tell whether they were being pushed or whether they were getting out of the way. Where its paws touched the earth, the ground released a faint copper-dark smell, deep soil turned up in slow pulses, and the smell was not unpleasant. That was the worst part. The ravine smelled like rain on clean dirt, and the thing walking through it was the reason.

Margot made a sound I had never heard from her before and have never heard since, a small, involuntary syllable, barely a word. She did not move. She did not reach for an explanation. She stood and watched it come down the slope with her hands at her sides and her jaw sagged open, loose, as though the muscles holding it had simply quit.

Julian had doubled over on the gravel. At some point during the dimming he had stopped gripping his thigh and curled onto his side, and the purple had moved past where his hands had been, up over the hip, disappearing beneath the hem of his shirt. His breathing had changed, punctuated by short, involuntary sounds that might have been pain or might have been something else. His eyes were open but I could not tell whether they were seeing anything. He was shaking from somewhere deep within—a steady, involuntary rhythm that moved his whole frame against the gravel.

The creature settled beside him with the composure of a magistrate taking his seat. Up close, the tuxedo markings were not markings. The white had its own light, cold, steady, coming from nowhere I could find, and the black beside it was not a color but a depth, the kind of dark that keeps going when you look into it. It turned its eyes briefly toward me. The look was not hostile. It was not curious. It was the flat, unblinking attention of something that had accounted for my presence long before I had accounted for its.

A low vibration began.

I did not hear it at first. I felt it: in my teeth, in the bones behind my ears, in the soles of my feet. A low, continuous vibration that did not come from any direction I could locate. It was already inside me by the time I understood it was a sound. The pressure in the ravine dropped. I felt it go the way you feel your ears pop on a descent, sudden, physical, a thing that had been pressing on me so steadily I had stopped noticing it until it was gone. The pressure dropped and the world came back in pieces. First the wind: I could hear it moving through the canopy above us, a sound so ordinary I almost couldn't stand it. Then the color. The gray bled out of things slowly, the greens returning to the briars and the moss, the pale gravel separating again from the dark soil at its edges. The light was still thin. The light in that part of the woods had always been thin. But it was light again. It fell at angles, it cast shadows, it made one surface different from the next, not the flat, drained wash that had swallowed the ravine minutes before. I could see the bark on the oaks. I could see the texture of the soil on the ravine wall. I could see Margot's face, and the color of her jacket, and the individual strands of hair that had come loose and stuck to her cheek. A crow called from somewhere in the tree line, that same inverted rattle we had always heard out here, ugly and wrong, and I was so grateful for it I nearly laughed. The woods were still the woods. They were still sick and old and strange. But they were only that, and only that felt like enough. Beside me, Arthur exhaled, a long shuddering release, and some of the rigidity went out of him, though he did not move and did not look away.

What the creature did next I have turned over in my mind for the better part of four decades, and I am no closer to a language adequate to it.

It lowered its head toward the wound. The movement took a long time. The neck extended and the head came down by degrees, closing the distance between its mouth and Julian's leg with a slowness that seemed chosen, each fraction of the motion held and released, held and released, as though the creature were measuring something we could not see. It stopped with its face just above the torn skin. I could see the fine white hairs along its muzzle, and the faint movement of its nostrils, and the wound reflected in the dark of its eyes. Then it breathed.

Something came out of its mouth. I am going to call it air because I do not have another word, but it was not air. It was pale, almost silver, and it moved slowly, slower than breath should move, in thin, distinct tendrils that did not dissipate. They reached the wound and followed its edges, tracing the border between the purple and what was still skin, and where they touched, the heat went out of the flesh. I could see it happen. The swollen, angry color of the infection stiffened and stopped, the advancing edge freezing in place the way water freezes — mid-motion, mid-intent — and the pattern it left was intricate, branching, almost deliberate. I remember thinking it looked like writing, but not ours the way we know it.

The cold came off the wound and spread. I felt it reach me — not gradually but all at once, over the backs of both hands, up my forearms, into my chest. It smelled of ozone and something beneath that, something mineral and very old. My breath came out white. Then the cold pulled back, receding like a tide on a cold winter's noon, and it left. All of it left. But my right hand stayed empty. The feeling had been in it a moment before, and now there was nothing: not cold, not warmth, not pain, just an absence where sensation had been, as though the cold had taken something with it on its way out and hadn't bothered to leave anything in its place.

Margot, beside me, was weeping without sound. I did not know this until I looked at her and saw the tears tracking steadily down cheeks that had gone the color of old wax. Her hands hung open at her sides. Her mouth was slightly open and her eyes were fixed on the creature and her face was not doing anything at all; it was just a face with tears running down it. She did not wipe them. She did not seem to know they were there. I think she was trying to understand what she had seen and finding that she couldn't, and that the tears were what was left when everything else she had gave out. She looked very young, and looked very lost.

Julian slipped into something like sleep. His breathing slowed. The leg lay still.

When it was done, the creature raised its head. It looked at Margot first, standing with her open hands and her wet face. Then Arthur, rigid and shaking at my side. Then me. I had not moved. I had stood in the same place for the whole of it, my feet on the same gravel, and I had done nothing: not run, not helped, not turned away. I had watched. The creature's gaze stayed on me the longest, and in it I felt the weight of something very old settling its accounts. There was no malice in it. There was no kindness either. It was the gaze of something that keeps a record that began before any of us were born and will continue long after we are forgotten, a record not of sin or virtue but of what has been spent, what has been given, what has been taken, and what remains outstanding. I understood, standing there with my right hand hanging open and feeling nothing, not even the air against it, that we had been entered into it, all four of us, and that the entry would not be revised.

Then it turned and moved back through the briars. I watched until I couldn't see it, and then I watched the space where it had been, and then there was nothing to watch. The ravine felt enormous without it. I was glad it was gone. I was immediately, desperately afraid that it was gone.