"I want a name," Marcus said. "One name, one quote, one person willing to say the words on the record. That's the bar." Alex had the phone wedged between shoulder and ear, weaving past a man in a top hat made of what appeared to be taxidermied moths. The connection was bad. The festival was loud in a specific way, the way outdoor crowds get loud, layered, a kind of soft roar you have to shout under even when nobody is shouting at you. "I've been here forty minutes." "Then you have until midnight." "Marcus." "Craft beer tent needs a thousand words by Sunday either way," he said, and hung up.

Alex slid the phone into a jacket pocket and stood for a moment in the middle of the thoroughfare, taking inventory. Three years covering this beat had produced a working theory about crowds like this one, which was that the people who came to festivals with names like the Oddities Festival broke roughly into three camps. There were the costumers, who wanted to be looked at. There were the collectors, who wanted to look. And there was a third, smaller group, harder to spot, who came because something in their life had happened that they could not explain and they were hoping to find, in a field full of hand-forged pendants and cryptid merchandise, some category that would hold it. The third group did not want to be quoted. That was the problem.

Overhead, the amber lights were strung between poles in long swagged rows, and they moved in the wind the way strings of lights move in wind, except when Alex actually watched them they seemed to move a beat slower than the flags did, or a beat faster, something just off enough to notice and not off enough to prove. Alex looked away. That was the trick with this kind of story. You looked away and you kept walking and you found somebody with a name and an email address who would say a sentence you could put between quotation marks.

Alex had already tried four people. A woman selling bone jewelry had laughed and said oh sure, everybody's seen them, and then when Alex produced the recorder she had said, on second thought, no, she personally had not seen anything, she was just repeating what people said. A teenager in a rubber wolf mask had launched into a story involving his cousin and a gas station bathroom and then, at the recorder, remembered he had to find his friends. A man drinking cider from a horn had said, quote, I don't talk to press, and walked away, which was itself a quote Alex could not use. The pattern was starting to interest Alex more than the phenomenon. People wanted to tell the story. They did not want to be the story. There was a threshold there, and every time Alex crossed it the witness stepped back over.

A hand closed on Alex's sleeve. She was small, or she was hunched. The crow mask was pushed up onto her forehead so that the beak jutted skyward like a second face looking at the sky while the first face looked at Alex. Her eyes were doing something Alex did not immediately have a word for. Wide, yes, but also not quite settling, drifting a quarter inch off from wherever Alex's own eyes were. "You feel it?" she said. "I'm sorry?"

She did not repeat the question. She lifted her free hand and pointed, and Alex followed the point past a stall selling pressed-flower tarot cards, to a place where two vendor tents stood shoulder to shoulder with maybe eighteen inches between them. The gap was dark in the way that alleys between buildings are dark, which is to say it should have been, except this was a festival at dusk with amber lights strung right over the top of it, and the light was not going in. Alex noticed, too, that trying to look directly into the gap produced a small, quiet difficulty, a slippage, as though the eye preferred the tents on either side and kept catching on them. "The cold," the woman said. "Do you feel the cold. The way your eyes don't. The way they don't want to." "Can I ask your name?"

Her hand tightened on Alex's sleeve. "Just your first name is fine." Alex reached slowly, the way you reach around a nervous dog, and drew the recorder from an inside pocket. It was small, silver, no bigger than a lighter. Alex had used it for three years. It had recorded a mayor lying and a farmer weeping and a man in Cleveland claiming to have been abducted by a moth. It had never in that time frightened anyone. The woman looked at it. The woman let go of Alex's sleeve. "No," she said, backing away. "No, no, I can't, I'm sorry, I thought, I'm sorry." "Wait."

She was already gone. Not gone in any dramatic sense. Gone the way people go at festivals, which is to say she turned, and the crowd absorbed her, and the crow mask on her forehead was for a second visible above the shoulders of a group in matching cloaks, and then it wasn't. Alex stood in the thoroughfare with the recorder still in one hand, red light on, catching nothing but the general roar. Overhead one of the amber bulbs sputtered, dimmed, held. The wind moved down the row and the lights swayed and the flags snapped and a paper napkin cartwheeled past Alex's boot. On the ground, where the woman had been standing, a single black feather lay in the trampled grass. Alex looked at it for a long moment. The wind kept coming. The napkin was already gone, tumbling toward the beer tent. The feather did not move.

Alex crouched, and did not touch it, and reached instead for the recorder to note the time, and realized the recorder was already running, and had been running the whole time, and would keep running.

Alex was going to leave. That was the shape of the next ninety seconds, and Alex could feel it settling in. Pocket the feather. Kill the recorder. Walk back through the amber-lit corridor of tents to the parking field, call Marcus from the car, take the loss. Craft beer had its own dignity. Someone had to interview men about hops. The decision arrived without ceremony. Alex's hand was already moving toward the recorder when the fortune-teller's wagon came into view around the last row of stalls, and the person leaning against its painted wheel held out a paper cup as if delivering it. "You looked cold from over here," she said. She had two cups. She'd been holding two. "I don't drink from strangers," Alex said. "Smart. It's cider. From the stall directly behind me. You can watch the woman pour the next one if you like. I'm Lira."

She was maybe thirty. Dark hair pulled back loose, a coat that had seen weather, the kind of face that did most of its talking with the mouth held slightly amused. No mask. In a festival where everyone was performing strangeness, she was aggressively unremarkable, and that was the first thing Alex noticed. The second was that she'd said the name Alex hadn't given her. Except she hadn't. Alex reran the last four seconds. She'd said I'm Lira. Not nice to meet you, Alex. Alex took the cup. "You're the reporter," Lira said. "Someone told you." "Someone always tells someone. You've been asking about the shadows." "I've been asking about a rumor." "Sure." She sipped. "How's that going."

There is a particular pleasure, for a person like Alex Chen, in meeting someone who does not need the pleasantries performed. Alex had spent eleven years learning to conduct interviews in which the subject felt heard, felt safe, felt gently steered. Lira was skipping all of it, and Alex could feel the professional muscle relax in a way that was, in itself, a warning. "A woman in a crow mask talked to me for about ninety seconds," Alex said. "Then she saw the recorder and left." "They do that." "They." "The ones who've seen something. You start writing it down and it stops being theirs." Lira tilted her head toward the row of tents Alex had just come from. "Also, they're scared. But mostly the first thing." "You've talked to them." "I've listened to them. It's a different verb."

Alex let the pause do the work. Lira let it. They stood there drinking cider that was, Alex had to admit, extraordinary, and above them the strings of amber bulbs moved in a way that Alex had been trying not to look at directly since arriving. "You want a walk-through," Lira said finally. "I can give you a walk-through. The festival has layers. Most people see the top one. There's a version of tonight where you leave at eleven with nothing and file a piece about atmosphere. There's another version where you don't." "And you decide which." "You decide which. I'm offering directions." "Why." She smiled at that, the first real one. "Because you noticed the feather didn't move." Alex hadn't mentioned the feather.

Lira's thumb was tracing something in the condensation on the side of her cup. Idle, the way people doodle on napkins. A closed shape with a slash through it and two small marks above. Alex had photographed exactly that mark forty minutes earlier, scratched in ballpoint on the back of the crow-masked woman's hand, in the seven seconds before she'd noticed Alex noticing and pulled her sleeve down. Alex's phone was in the left coat pocket. The photo was three swipes deep. There was no version of the last hour in which Lira could have seen it. "What is that," Alex said, keeping the voice flat. Lira looked down at her cup as if surprised to find her thumb there. She didn't wipe it away. She didn't explain it. She took another sip and the mark stayed.

"Give me one thing," Alex said. "Something I can check. A name. A tent number. Anything I can verify before midnight or I have to walk away from this and I don't want to walk away from this." It was more than Alex had meant to say. Lira registered it without visible pleasure, which somehow made it worse. "Booth forty-one," she said. "The woodcarver. Ask him who he apprenticed under. Don't ask about shadows. He'll tell you the rest on his own if he decides to." "That's it." "That's a thread. You wanted a thread." She pushed off the wagon wheel. "I'll find you again around ten. If you still want the walk-through, we'll do the walk-through. If you don't, no hard feelings, the cider was free." "Lira."

She was already three steps into the crowd, and Alex was already learning that this was how she moved, on her own count. "How did you know about the feather." She glanced back. She didn't answer. She lifted the cup in something that was almost a toast and turned, and for a moment, no longer than the flicker of one of the strung bulbs overhead, the amber light seemed to lean around the shape of her rather than fall on it, and where she had just been standing there was a thin dark seam in the air, closing. And then a woman with a stroller crossed in front of it, and it was just a festival again, and Alex was holding a paper cup of cider and a lead and a deadline, in that order.

Alex was already walking when Lira caught up, boots grinding into the wet gravel between the shuttered kettle-corn stand and a row of dark game booths. Two in the morning. The midway had gone from carnival to warehouse. Canvas hung slack, generators hummed at a lower pitch than the daytime chatter had allowed anyone to notice, and the amber lights strung overhead had been switched off in whole sections, leaving long stretches where the only illumination was the moon and the red standby glow of speaker rigs. Lira moved without sound. Alex noticed this the way you notice a clock that isn't ticking. She was in a canvas jacket and boots that should have crunched exactly like Alex's, and they didn't. Alex filed it. Kept walking. "He's up," Lira said. "He doesn't sleep after." "After what." "You'll see."

Dov was sitting on the metal step of a small camper with a wool blanket pulled around his shoulders and a mug of something he wasn't drinking. Mid-fifties. Retired shop teacher, Lira had said. Came every year with his wife, who was inside, asleep, and who Dov did not want woken. He looked at Alex's recorder for a long moment before he nodded at it. Permission, of a kind. "I was by the drum circle," he said. "Around ten. I turned around because I thought someone tapped me on the shoulder. There wasn't anyone. And then I couldn't breathe for maybe four seconds. Not like a panic attack. Like the air went out." He looked at his own hands. "I've had panic attacks. This wasn't that." Alex wrote drum circle, ten p.m., four seconds. Asked what he saw.

"Nothing. That's the thing. I saw nothing and I was more scared than I've been since my brother's accident." Dov stopped. Considered. "I don't want that on tape, the part about my brother." Alex clicked back and deleted it in front of him. He watched her do it. Something in his shoulders came down half an inch.

They did three more before three a.m. A woman named Priya who'd felt something walk behind her the entire length of the food row and turned to find only her own shadow, cast wrong, cast by a light that wasn't there. A kid, nineteen maybe, who kept saying it was fine, it was fine, and whose hands would not stop moving. A vendor who'd closed her booth two hours early and would only speak with the door of her trailer chained. Coldness. Averted gaze. The specific, embarrassing detail of having wet oneself, offered by a grown man who then asked Alex, quietly, if anyone else had said that.

The stories didn't match. Priya said the cold came first. Dov said the cold came after. The kid said there was no cold, there was a smell, like a battery. The vendor said her dog had known before she did and was now at her sister's in another county. Alex wrote it all down and felt the shape of the piece she wanted to write starting to bend against the shape of what she was hearing. Back at Dov's step, near the end, he stopped mid-sentence. He was saying something about the drum circle again, about a woman he thought he'd seen there earlier, and his eyes went past Alex's left ear and stayed there. Not wide. Just stopped. The mug in his hand tilted and he didn't correct it. Alex turned.

There was the row of dark booths. There was the gravel path. There was nothing standing in it. But the air in the space where Dov was looking was colder by a measurable amount, cold the way an open freezer is cold when you walk past it in a dark kitchen, and Alex's eyes did the thing the woman in the crow mask had described. They wanted to be elsewhere. They wanted to be on the moon, on her own boots, on Lira's face. Anywhere but the patch of ordinary air six feet to her left. She made herself look. She counted to three looking. On three the cold was gone and Dov exhaled like a man surfacing. "Sorry," he said. "Sorry. I lost my thread." Lira was watching Alex, not Dov.

They walked back toward Alex's tent without talking. The gravel under Alex's boots was very loud. Under Lira's, still nothing. "You felt it," Lira said, once, halfway. "I felt a temperature change." Lira let that stand. In the tent, Alex plugged the recorder into her laptop and pulled up the night's file. Waveform scrolled by in green. Dov's voice, steady, thoughtful, the small stammers where he'd chosen a word and then chosen a better one. Alex scrubbed forward to the mid-sentence stop, the moment he'd looked past her ear. The waveform went flat. Not silent, exactly. A flat, low band, thin as a pencil line, holding steady for seventeen seconds by the counter at the bottom of the screen. Alex turned the volume up. Turned it up again.

Underneath the flat line, when the gain was high enough to hear her own pulse in the headphones, there was breathing. Slow. Even. Rhythmic in a way her own breath, then or now, was not. It went in for a count of four and out for a count of six, and it did this without variation for the entire seventeen seconds, and then Dov's voice came back saying sorry, sorry, I lost my thread, and the waveform picked up again as if nothing had been missing at all. Alex played it a second time with the door of the tent unzipped and the night behind her. She wanted to know if she could still hear it with the real air on her neck. She could.