Overmountain

It was approaching evening, the horizon just beginning to relax into a dull orange, when I started climbing the mountain. It rose in front of me in a deceptively gentle slope, no trees covering the undulating form of its three bald ridges. Nothing but faded brownish green grasses and bushes decorated the sleepy rolling behemoth, and as I walked, I watched the wind pick at the plants and push the clouds around, and if I narrowed my eyes just so, I thought I could see the mountain breathing.

It could have just been the hunger, of course. Almost 400 miles into a 2,200-mile hike and it was really setting in now: the near-constant gnawing sensation of emptiness in my stomach. As I continued my approach to the summit of the first ridge, trudging along the deep rut of the thin upwards trail, I started thinking about breakfast: pancakes, sausage, blueberries. Then lunch: a BLT, the chicken sandwich I had back in Hot Springs a few weeks ago. I sighed and, as I crested the hill, out of breath, reached into my hip belt pocket and extracted a granola bar with a resigned anticipation.

I pulled out my phone as I chewed on the artificially sweet cashews and checked how much distance I had left. Only a mile. I could get to Overmountain Shelter before dark. There was also a text. You gonna make it? Stickers—tall, fast, and skinny to an absurd degree—had probably rolled up to our predetermined location hours ago, and was likely already enjoying her ritual post-dinner cookie by the fire. 20 miles was nothing to her, but to me it was a lot of work this early in the hike. I was 19 in for the day, with only one to go. I knew I could do it. I finished the bar and stuffed the wrapper back into my pocket, took a swig of water from my broken-down bottle, and continued down the other side of the ridge.

The last mile was always the hardest. I needed music. I put in my headphones and selected a song with a fast enough beat to get me hyped to maneuver around mud puddles and avoid pokey rocks. I was excited to make it to Overmountain—a legendary stop on the southern Appalachian Trail. Formerly a barn, it had been minimally converted into a shelter for hikers, and was supposedly perched on a hill overlooking a picturesque valley. I hadn’t been sleeping very well in shelters, but it was supposed to be a cold night and snoozing in an old barn seemed much preferable to setting up my finicky tent. And besides, all of my friends would be there. It would be a good night.

I had traveled probably about a half-mile from the top of the ridge, and I was just getting into the song, dancing and singing along in the half-breathless don’t-give-a-damn voice that characterized the end of a day, when I stopped dead in my tracks.

A doe—massive, silent, stock-still—was standing in the middle of the trail a few yards ahead of me. I hadn’t seen her until I got up close, and she startled me.

I smiled when I realized what the shape was. “Hi,” I breathed at her, and realized my hand was still on my chest from the surprise, and my heart was beating wildly from exertion and primal fear. I hadn’t seen a bear yet, but I was ready for an encounter any day now. I was relieved that it was a deer instead. “You’re lovely.”

She said nothing, of course. Just stared at me. Black eyes deep and watery, like a pool underneath a cavern, simultaneously thick and piercingly clear. Like something you could dive in. Not empty, but full of unknowable, alive things, so far below. Her ears were perked up, twitching ever so slightly in reaction to my words. Otherwise, she didn’t move.

“Honey. I need to keep hiking,” I said to her, realizing the absurdity as it came out of my mouth: I was talking to a deer. Somehow it didn’t feel strange in the moment, though. On the trail it made sense. A lot of things made sense.

She made no move, even as I stood there, even as I began to walk forward. Her eyes were locked on me as I took a tentative step further on the trail, and another, until I was within ten feet of her. I could almost reach out and touch her soft brown fur, feel the downy suppleness of her muzzle, her head. I was within four feet now, three, two. She still didn’t move. I was silent, watching her from so close. I wanted to touch her, wanted it so badly it hurt, but as I reached out my trembling hand it was as if she finally realized how close we were, and she leapt over the underbrush and into the trees.

I exhaled, disappointed. “Well, goodbye,” I said to her. And she stopped running, and turned around to look at me from the bushes. My breath caught, and I gave her one last smile, before turning northwards on the trail towards Overmountain.

The breeze picked up slightly, playing with the unruly hairs on the side of my face, almost like a fingertip tracing my jawline. And I can’t remember exactly how it happened, or even what it sounded like, but as I walked closer and closer to my destination for the night, over (or under? Or in between?) the music in my headphones I thought I could pick out a message: Stop. Don’t go.

Chalk it up to exhaustion.

I reached the turnoff for the shelter at last, breathed a sigh of relief, and walked down the side trail to meet my friends.

---

“Hey, look who it is!” I heard the chirpy voice of Stickers a few hundred yards before I even got to the shelter.

Sure enough, Overmountain Shelter was an old red barn, rickety yet idyllic in its location under a stand of trees and on the edge of a gentle wooded valley. Just outside the wide doorway was a picnic table, around which a group of hikers was clustered, cooking their dinners in titanium pots over tiny camp stoves. There was Stickers—the trail name given to her in reference to the decals applied to every available surface she owned—with long red braids and wearing her bright yellow leggings, standing on one gangly leg while the other rested on the bench, her hands busy with filtering water into her pot.

I recognized a few of the other hikers; I’d seen them on the trail over the last few days: Bookworm, Paper Crane, Trusty. There were others I didn’t recognize milling about, setting up tents, standing in the meadow. It was a big shelter, and it could host a veritable party.

“How’s it hangin’, Stick?” I called as I got closer to the table. My feet knew we were almost there, and the pain in my arches was getting unbearable. I couldn’t wait to sit down.

“Not bad.” She grinned. “Cool place, huh?”

I nodded, and smiled at the other hikers as I pulled up to the table, unclipped my pack, and let it fall on the ground. I plopped down on the bench next to Trusty, an older man with a long white beard and the gentlest voice I’d ever heard, who got his trail name because he referred to all of his gear as “trusty”: “My trusty pack,” “This old trusty quilt.” Immediately the relief of sitting overwhelmed my lower body.

“Y’all remember Antlers, right? The girl with the crazy hair?” Stickers nodded to me and the others by way of reintroduction. She was always doing that: forming and reinforcing social bonds, making people feel comfortable with each other. I obliged her unspoken request and removed my hat; a mountain of unruly brown curls sprung free into the world. The second morning on the trail, the day I met Stickers, my hair was standing straight up on either side like a pair of antlers. The other hikers laughed, recognizing me immediately.

“How was your hike today, Ants?” Bookworm—a petite but terrifyingly strong librarian in her 30s—asked me.

“Not bad,” I replied, pulling out my cooking gear and preparing to satiate the new bubble of hunger that was rapidly growing within me. “Those mountains were beautiful. And right before I got here I almost ran right into this deer, she was looking right at me, like—”

“Oh my god, me too,” interrupted Paper Crane. Her green eyes were wide. “Did she just, like, stand there staring at you, like she was trying to get you to stop hiking?”

I looked at her, mildly surprised. “Yeah,” I replied hesitantly. “You too?”

“Wait, yeah,” interjected Stickers, her eyebrows knit together. “She did it to me too. I wonder if it was the same one?”

Theories were offered as explanation as we continued cooking our dinners: something had spooked the doe, or she was looking for snacks, or she was possessed. Maybe she knew something we didn’t. Eventually, as is the way of conversations, the topic shifted, and time continued. Evening began to drip into night, the orange in the sky getting deeper, the individual shades of pink and blue more pronounced. The air was chilly in the late April twilight, and I pulled on my down jacket as I ate my underwhelming noodles and chatted with my friends.

“Hey, it’s almost 8:17,” said Trusty, who was cleaning out his cook pot with the edge of a very dirty bandana.

I cocked my head. “What’s 8:17?” I asked, finishing up the last bite and scraping my spoon against the side to get every last drop.

“Ohh, she doesn’t know,” teased Stickers. “Tell her, P-Crane.”

Paper Crane was clearly excited about the information she was about to offer. Her eyes flashed as she smiled in the waxing moonlight. “Apparently, there’s a mansion across the valley where all of the lights come on every night at 8:17, on the dot.”

“Why?” I asked, only mildly interested. I was focused on cleaning my cookware and moving towards the shelter.

“No one really knows,” Paper Crane replied. “It’s not in the guidebook or online. They just say that there’s a light that comes on at that time every day. Maybe it’s on a timer.”

“Or maybe,” said Stickers, in a mysterious voice, “it’s haunted.”

Bookworm snorted. “Yeah, by the ghosts of hikers.”

We laughed at this, although by the time I was most of the way through my halfhearted chuckle I wasn’t sure why.

---

It was now becoming properly dark. I walked into the shelter and climbed up the ladder to the top floor, where I set up my sleeping pad and quilt between the piles of gear that I knew belonged to Stickers and Trusty, who were already downstairs on the porch that faced the valley and waiting for the show.

“Come on, Antlers!” called Stickers, urging me to join them before I missed the lights. I was a little annoyed. I just wanted to sleep. I didn’t care about creepy ghost lights across the valley. I wanted to be unconscious, to return to dreams of unlimited breakfast. But I heaved a sigh, put on my nighttime clothes and my jacket, retrieved my journal from deep within my pack, and headed down the ladder to join the group.

They were huddled together on the platform that made up a kind of porch underneath the upstairs loft, all a jumble of sleeping bags and down jackets. I squeezed in next to Stickers and looked out towards the valley. It was 8:15—two minutes until the rumored showtime—and as we waited for the mysterious lights we went over our plans for the next day and shared fantasies about all-you-can-eat buffets and our ideal pancakes. I started to write in my journal, using the light of my headlamp: April 28: Overmountain Shelter.

Two minutes went by. “It’s 8:17!” yelped Trusty in a singsong voice. “They should be coming on any moment!”

They didn’t though. In the dull evening light we could just barely make out the faint, floating shape of the mansion across the valley and up on the facing hillside, but no lights illuminated it.

“Maybe they’re just late tonight,” offered Paper Crane hopefully. She sipped on the last of her tea and watched the house like a pleading hawk. But no lights appeared.

“Y’all were definitely messing with me,” I laughed, as I continued my journal entry. Today was a beautiful 20-miler.

“Okay, this was definitely a rumor. I’m going to bed.” Bookworm was the first to give in and head upstairs. The others protested, saying it was only 8:25 and that she should stay up with them, but she was dead set.

One by one, the others followed her: Trusty, then Paper Crane, whose slumped shoulders and begrudging “goodnight” belied her disappointment.

Stickers and I were left.

“Sorry I left you behind today, Ants,” she said, nibbling on half of her cookie and offering me a piece. I took it. The sugar almost warmed me.

I smiled. “No worries, Stick. You’re a lot faster, and if you need to go ahead I’d understand.” I hoped she wouldn’t though. She was my closest friend on the trail, something that kept this little universe together, and I didn’t know what I’d do without her at camp.

She shook her head. “No.” She chewed her last bite, then swallowed. “I like hiking fast, but I like being with you too.”

I melted slightly at this, and rested my head on her shoulder. The lights still weren’t on across the valley, and it was nearly 9 now—hiker midnight.

“Well,” said Stickers, rubbing her palms together to discard the cookie dust. “I think I’m ready for bed. Bummer about the lights. You coming up?”

I nodded. “I’m just going to finish this entry first,” I replied. “See you up there.”

“Alright,” she said, and disappeared through the doorway. I heard her out behind the shelter brushing her teeth, then climbing the ladder to the loft.

I continued my entry, writing quickly so I could join her. We went over Roan Mountain, all misty and covered in conifers, and then the beginning of the Roan Highlands, which are gorgeous bald mountains. Also, I saw this really weird—

Something caught my eye. Something yellow, just a flash. I looked up.

All of the lights in the house were on.

---

My heart started beating way more quickly than it had any right to. I found myself wanting to berate it: Oh shut up, I wanted to tell it. It’s just lights. Stop being so dramatic. It didn’t work though. I closed my eyes and opened them again, knitting my brows together and squinting, but the lights stayed on.

This light was yellow, the kind of sick yellow produced by an old sodium lamp, one that hisses gently, just out of earshot. Every single window and door that was visible seemed to have a light coming from it. Though the house was far across the valley, in its weird light I could see that there was a large porch that wrapped around the whole front of the building and around the sides. There were eight large windows on the top floor, nine in the middle, and seven on the bottom, plus a massive front door. This incongruity was somehow disturbing. It was just barely off-kilter, the kind of vague wrongness you can’t quite hold in your brain. Every opening of the improbable house seemed to be spilling, oozing with the light.

I wanted to tell the others, wanted to call for them and show them that the lights were on, that they had been right, get them to see the sickly viscous membrane of yellow sliding out from the doors and windows. Stickers! I wanted to call. Tried to call. Couldn’t. Bookworm! Trusty! Tried to make my mouth form the syllables, wrap around the morphemes. Tried to remember how to vibrate my vocal cords and couldn’t make the neurons slide. Paper Crane! In my head the name squeaked and ground like dead brakes against a concrete tire. There were no names and no voices. There was only that light.

And now it seemed to be pulsing, too. Soft, almost so soft it was loud; a pulse that I almost heard but almost saw too, and felt, and tasted. Felt the soft tread of the light inside my eardrums. Tasted the tickle of the light on my face. While that light slid out into the valley its mycelium grew subdermally inside me and fruited from my skin. The soft fizz of yellow did not illuminate; it consumed. As I watched those lights I became dully aware that something was moving around me. Not so much because I could hear it as because I just knew.

With an effort that exhausted me I looked away from the light and saw. Deer. Eyes reflecting in the light. Hundreds of them, crowding around the shelter. Their eyes, in the daylight dark black cavernous pools, now filled with the sodium-gas yellow. Hungry, steaming. A congress of them, or an army: some bucks, with unimaginable antlers reaching into the sky and mingling with low-hanging branches of trees, and some does, their steely lithe faces strong set and staring. They formed a semicircle around me. (I didn’t remember getting up from my spot on the porch, but now I was a few yards away, standing in front of the shelter, facing the light, facing the herd.) As far as I could see it was deer with their liquidy ghost eyes. And beyond them: that light.

As I watched them, some of the deer started to shift. Some of them moved to the right, some to the left, some back. They all moved silently, with only the slightest rustle, as if in a dream sequence where objects find themselves in a different place without a say in the matter. Until finally, where those deer had shifted, there was a thin path. A trail leading into the trees, with a faint sliver of that feverish light falling on it.

I started walking. And as I walked, the light grew stronger. Every step, shuffling past the hulking bodies of the deer, brought the light nearer. Or perhaps not nearer as much as bigger. Or perhaps not even that, as much as thicker. Or perhaps not even that. I felt the deer behind me, shifting and following where the path had been. Farther and farther, around bushes and mushrooms and trees, downhill and then up. The deer didn’t end, and the path didn’t seem to either. I am walking, I thought, but the words floated away, and did I need words to explain that I am walking towards the house, and did I need words to know that I by rights should have been covered in bruises and scrapes from all of the branches and bushes I had walked through and brushed against, but I was not. And were there words to explain that then I was walking up the stairs, and there was nothing but the yellow light in my eyes, and the porch was massive and the house immaculate and asymmetrical. It was huge, and there was yellow light, and it was pulling at me with a gnawing appetite, reaching, craving, and there were deer eyes: alive, as alive and teeming as the forest and its symbiosis, as storied and dense as coral reefs, as dark and echoing (Hello? Hello?) as caverns and the black pools under them, hidden.

Each wooden stair creaked: screech, screech, plunk. I swam through the yellow light, now blaring with the screams of indistinct piercing millions, photons and deer and yellow oozing, and silence. And I walked up to the main door (four windows to the left and three to the right, just like I’d seen from the shelter), and opened it.

---

I woke up when the yellow light struck my eyes. A jolt ran through my limbs, and I jumped up in panic. But it wasn’t the yellow light of the house anymore, the sick slime of sodium. It was the sun this time: warm and dry and white. I exhaled in relief.

I sat up and blinked, willing away the mist of the dream. The trail does weird things to a person. My body felt strange and foreign as I stretched. The soreness from yesterday’s long day was there, just as I expected. But there was something else too, some kind of tingling feeling of wrongness, like I had reached the threshold for the nail length that I could stand, or like there was hair somewhere where hair hadn’t been the day before, or like I couldn’t quite remember what it felt like to crave breakfast.

Oh, well, I thought. It’ll probably wear off when I start walking. Things will go back to normal.

It occurred to me then that I was in the sunlight, not inside. And it also occurred to me that I couldn’t hear any of my friends. Concerned, I looked around. I guess I’d fallen asleep in front of the shelter. Good thing it didn’t rain. Everything was as it looked yesterday: the big red barn with the porch, the loft above and the platform below where we’d watched across the valley to see if the lights would turn on at 8:17.

But none of my friends were there now. No tents were set up; no voices could be heard from the shelter. They must have left without me. A deep, primal loneliness started to permeate my bones, then. They were probably just a little ways up the trail. I’d probably catch up with them later. Everything would be okay. But I couldn’t shake it, the dread. Why hadn’t they woken me up? They’d just gone on, even though they knew we were going to the same place today? Why?

I looked behind me then. The house was there, a speck of unremarkable brown across the valley in the daylight. And as I saw, as I felt, as I breathed, I knew.

The doe emerged from between two trees, stood in solid silence, and looked at me. Her eyes were full and black, heavy with empathy. They were still deep, the waters under a cavern, but now I could feel the intricacies of the life that swam beneath them. I looked at her, soft fur and wet eyes, and somewhere within (or over? or behind?) my ears, I heard her.

I tried to tell you.