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Children test God timidly at first: a lie, a trick, an unnoticeable theft. When no lightning strikes, they try again and again until their hearts turn black and skin grows hardened around it. Ansel was four when he first confronted the absurdity of life. The fever passed through him in a week and stole his legs with it. Afterwards, his late uncle hammered a chair for him, made from wood and iron. The wheels were uneven and their rims pinched his fingers, but he soon learned their temper. His mother, Sabine, and his aunt, Bruna, named after the blackness of her eyes, raised him together in a thatched cottage near the flax fields. They provided for him everything a child of his infection might need: prayer, scripture, cloth baths, and palms to the forehead. Their attention never lingered, though, and their eyes seemed to almost look right through him. Within their love, the clean edges of a lifetime of labor lived. Their attention was often divided between the boy and the demands of farm life, their eyes distant, as if he were only partly there, much like the young creature who shared their home.

The boy didn’t long for warmth–he didn’t know enough about love to know anything was missing. But there was care sewn into the hearts of the two women. Within that house, there lived a deer, a calf no larger than a toddler’s torso, with ribs that laddered the skin of its back, and ink-black eyes that reflected anyone who looked into them. It arrived one winter before the boy was born, when the snow was particularly heavy. Somehow, the thing neither learned to walk nor grew. It was frozen in time and was always asleep.

At night, after Sabine banked the fire, Bruna would boil the water. They cleaned a red cloth in a soot-black pot, stirring it with a spoon. The water flushed and bled, and yet the cloth remained a deep shade of red. Then, they’d ring the steaming cloth and sing–not a psalm the boy had ever read, but a humming that held the contours of a strange, sad lullaby. The boy learned it by heart. They’d wrap the steaming cloth around the animal each night from hoof to muzzle until he yet again became a parcel who breathed.

“It’ll keep the beast away,” Bruna would say to him, where he sat in his chair by the window.

Everyone in their village knew the beast. He stood at the forest’s edge where the spruce trees grew in a line as straight and sharp as any other man-made thing. He was said to be taller than any creature had reason to be, black as ink, the sort of black that swallowed light and stood out even against a moonless night like a hole in the earth. Ben, the in-keeper swore he once saw the monster. He said its eyes were wide and shone like candles in the dark and proclaimed, “He didn’t blink once when he looked at me. Not once!” He said he shouted at the thing, stood up real tall and waved his arms like a mad-man, and it turned away, casting no shadow on the ground, and leaving no footprints. Anyone who believed in the beast’s existence or paid the story enough mind to hold it in the back of their heads knew that his story was a lie. The beast left no man he encountered alive. In fact, he left no trace of them anywhere. Anyone who escaped the village or ventured curiously into the treeline would be swallowed by the darkness that was the beast. The priest told the children stories of the time before the trees were cut down and the salt line drew, when the beast would steal away three souls every night, and cursed the villagers with a disease that stained the blood in their veins. They said the beast was who made the people sick every season, and the children watched as the sickness ate at people’s veins until their blood turned so dark and thick they’d choke. Nearly everyone in the village had watched someone die in this way, and each of them told themselves they’d discovered a cure.

The citizens adopted their own superstitions. Some people went mad walking the perimeter of the village, ensuring there were no gaps in the line. Others prayed or sang. Some tied ribbons and locks of hair to the few birch trees that seemed safe enough to touch. No one knew why the beast stayed away; no one knew much of anything, then. People can come to love the weight that keeps their eyes bent towards the dirt.

Ansel watched his family’s ritual each night patiently. When winter came, the chill ate away at his thin frame. He grew envious of the small animal who shared his home. He imagined wrapping his numb, useless, skinny legs in the cloth and imagined that its warmth and magic would fix him how it fixed the sleeping deer.

That winter, to distract himself, he built a whirligig from two bent spoons, twigs, string, and the feather of a hen. When the wind turned, the contraption clicked as it pulled itself apart to then swing back together. He left it on the sill and pretended the little clicking thing was speaking to him like a friend and hoped it’d drown out the wheezing of the animal who shared his room.

On market days, the lanes wove with talk and laughter. Snow coated the ground and the air was thick with the smell of berries and cinnamon. The shambles still stank of meat and sweat from the tannery. And the bell at the chapel swayed three times a day, which, morosely, reminded the boy that time was a rope you could either hang yourself from or climb. Sabine mended torn clothes, Bruna sold bundles of flax, and Ansel enjoyed wheeling himself through the streets, half the size of the rest of the shoppers to watch, unnoticed.

Across the square, Mira, a girl two years above him, walked through the market briskly down the side-street that led past the crops and towards the tree line. Mira was sixteen and had recently come to live with an aunt in the herb cottage after her mother died of the cough that swept through town and took the lives of many others. She apprenticed in the trade of leaves and land. Mira did not disbelieve in the beast; disbelief would have cost her friends. But the story incited more curiosity than she’d ever have admitted, and often led her to the line, edging closer than was often deemed safe, but never over.

When Mira saw him, the air held the damp, throbbing clarity of a morning after a storm. This part of the meadows were almost always quiet. The wind held its breath, as if it knew what was hiding in the shadows of the trees. She heard a rustle of leaves, then two muscular front legs of a dark, furred, giant stepped out of the shadows of the trees and stood just before her, his presence heavy and unnatural. She froze and fear gripped her by the shoulders and threatened to push her onto her back. But the beast just stood there, staring straight at her, not moving or blinking. Her body came face to face with his chest, where his fur lightened to a color close to soot and grew long and thick. But what made her gasp was not the size of his body, not his blade-like white teeth, or his claws, but his large orange eyes that seemed to glow like lanterns against the shade of the trees. Moments later, two creatures emerged from the dense brush, grazing near him: a tall, horned moose and a sheep. The moose grazed carelessly upwind next to him. The sheep bleated and stamped. But the beast’s piercing eyes met Mira’s own, and did not waver. A strange hollow calm washed over her then, and if she could see herself from above, she might have noticed her body slowly tipping forwards towards the animal. She had the sense then, strangely, as she stood there with an apron full of nettles and her head turned to its side, that if she crossed the salt line he would let her pass.

A hand tugged at her sleeve. “Don’t,” Nicholas said, and when she looked back to the trees, the beast and two creatures were gone. Two years ago, Nicholas built himself a home in the branches of an oak near the boundary no one else wanted to claim. You could see it from the fields, planks slotted between the branches of a large Oak Tree.

She was shivering, and when he offered her a cup of tea, she resisted only out of politeness, not refusal. She followed him because she was shaken and curious, and because she pitied him, and the shame of it made her warmer in the cold.

Inside the house, Nicholas had shelves lined with jars. In each jar were stones, dried flowers, and pieces of leaves or broken bits of metal. He had a small stove brazed from a broken bell. He had an old chair mended with twine. He had a bed stuffed with wool and scraps of linen, topped with a quilt that looked older than both of them combined.

His home was silent but for the rhythmic creaking of wood in the wind. She admired the strange things that lined his shelves and thought of the freedom he might have found out here. She wondered what he thought of the beast, and then wondered why he didn’t mention it. Had he seen the beast before, living so close to the salt line? She looked at his back, cursing down at a pot of water he placed on the counter before grabbing a jar of dried brown herbs. She moved to continue walking, but whispered a curse of her own when her shoe caught on a plank that had thinned with dampness, the grain raised in blisters, and almost sent her to the ground. Her skin flushed red, but bent down slightly when she noticed a strange spot that was revealed just under a blanket draped across the floor. She nudged the blanket aside with her shoe and revealed precisely in the center of the home, a mark that darkened the wood. Not a burn or a stain but the silhouette of a person’s profile: Nicholas’s, unmistakeably. The slope of a crooked, twice broken nose, a dimpled chin. Some fever inside him had scorched himself into the floor. She knew that signs of dark magic like this were the mark of the plague, and when she gasped, hand to her throat and pressed her body to the wall farthest away from him, he had the grace not to feign surprise. He never denied the blackness that she now noticed staining his pores, eyes, nose and teeth, he simply looked at the floor and sighed.

She rushed down the ladder, trembling, calculating everything she touched, thanking the skies she didn’t touch his tea. He followed closely behind her, but the moment she hit the grass, she ran from him, turning her head back slightly to check how far he was behind her. He called her name as if shouting it would explain his selfish cruelty. “Mira, I—”

Just as she opened her mouth to reply, the creature came out of the trees at a near-silent gallop. There is a moment before impact when the world offered her a different ending. Time seemed to play itself back again and again as Mira watched the antlers of a moose slam Nicholas through the chest and sweep him backward into the trunk of his Oak tree. His body shuddered once, and he made a confused, gurgled sound before his tainted, black blood spilled from his lips and oozed through his shirt, and then nothing. None of the laboring breaths Mira had heard at sickbeds and all of the fear, all at once. The moose reared its head back, and Nicholas’ lifeless body dropped lamely to the dirt. Some of his blood had collected in the fissures of the bark, and the tree drank it, and in moments, there was no trace of it left in the dirt or bark.

Mira, who watched the moose turn and walk slowly back into the forest, turned and ran. As she ran she wondered what other creatures might wander through the trees. If the moose could pass through, maybe the beast could too.

At the same time, at Sabine’s hearth, the pot hissed over red-speckled wood. Neither women noticed that Ansel’s ever-spinning whirligig had stopped whirling. Nor did Ansel, he was busy wheeling himself over towards the fire while Sabine and Bruna fussed over the weak creature, ignoring him. He looked at his two guardians before shifting himself on his arms towards the edge of his seat so he could reach his right hand into the boiling, red water. He didn’t even hiss as he reached his arm in deeper and pulled the cloth out with bright red, welt-covered hands.

The cloth in his grip was heavy, hot, and dripping. It fell from his grasp with a gasp and dropped toward his knees, toward the dead muscles there. Bruna turned suddenly with a gasp on her lips. When she saw him and made the sound women make when a child walks into the road, halfway between a choke and a shout. She seized the cloth and beat him again and again on the head and ears until his blood dripped down from his jaw.

The deer woke open with a loud cry, the first of its kind. Like the sound of a child being born before it turned into a howl. Its ribs widened and split open, the skin went slack, then taut, then see-through, then a deep, rotting brown. Its legs thrashed and snapped and stretched and flailed in the air, and for a startled moment, Ansel believed it might launch itself off the counter and onto the floor in a bloody mess. Then, the body began to grow, its hair falling off before growing back the next second, then turning thick and gray. Throughout its transformation, the creature screamed and thrashed, its eyes wide open. It went through every age at once, from damp and newborn to collapsed, stained, and flattened by time.

Bruna covered her head with the corner of her apron and pressed her back into the corner, arms extended outward as though fighting between cowering and cradling the thing. Sabine held the red cloth tight in her hands as she screamed. After what seemed like hours but was really only a few seconds, the creature deflated and died on the table.

If the beast had stepped out of the woods at that moment, some townsfolk might have had the comfort of being right in their final moments. He did not. He stood where he had always stood, ears pricked, still as a rule.

“Take him,” Sabine said to the floor, and then to Bruna when her wide eyes remembered her. “Take him out. I have to clean this up. I need—” The words fell away, and Sabine’s hands fluttered for a moment in the air as if they had lost all control.

There was blood on the floor and walls where the innards of the creature seemed to have been pushed out through sheer force of will. The deer lay in the spot where it died, hollowed out. Ansel furrowed his brows when Bruna’s hands went to the handles of his chair, and not the body of the creature. She pushed Ansel quietly out through the back garden where the blue flax bulbs stood in tight fists and the furrows held the day’s last light like wine held in the rim of a cup. They went down the small path that led to the meadow and the line of dark.

They stopped where the meadow grasses and stopped just before the old salt line. Bruna took the red cloth from her arm, she had gathered it without thinking when she had followed Ansel out, and tore a strip from it with her teeth. She tied the strip to a branch and draped the rest of the cloth across Ansel’s knees. When Ansel opened his mouth to ask what was happening, Bruna placed a hand on the back of his neck, turned his face forwards and prayed. When the crackles from the fire, and the thick stench of smoke grew too heavy to ignore, Ansel pressed on the handles of his chair and Bruna watched as his body fell lamely to the floor. The beast watched too, from the tree line never moving, waiting for Mira to arrive home, and for the rest of the town’s inhabitants to destroy themselves.