She took a flashlight with her, not of necessity, but because by nature she was a cautious person. Truth be told, she had made the walk so many times she could have navigated it with her eyes closed. She knew each rut and turn, each fallen tree, each mucky low spot that held water long after a rain, each cedar and hardwood that overhung the path. She knew it all. But throughout her life, the sterilizing and vapid flame of caution had tempered even her most reckless acts and heedless moments of frivolity, as if there were an angelic network television censure perched interminably upon her loath, petite shoulder, whispering gently into her ear—admonishing—constraining. This fact had long been a source of comedy for her many and, most often, more daring friends, but thankfully, for her, insecurity was never so great an issue as to prevent her from finding humor within her own actions. In fact, her own skin rarely, if ever, caused her discomfort; it was the terrible wolf-like hide of the world that caused her to tremble.

In her opinion, caution had served her well, believing that over time it had saved her from much heartache and loss. The traumatic experiences of her friends—especially of those who found her relentless prudence most humorous—had eventually convinced her of this fact. Over the years, she had been a firsthand witness to a myriad of agonizing sojourns through abortions, divorces, physical abuse, addictions, DUI citations, periods of poverty and countless STD outbreaks and scares. And it had been in the midst of these tribulations that many of her acquaintances earnestly, and without the slightest hint of sarcasm, pointed out to her the praiseworthiness of her once scoffed at foreboding and wariness. Among her friends, she became the go-to person in times of desperation and she never resented this fact.

She was no fool, however. She knew her friends would once again find the humor in her modesty once the divorce was final or the gonorrhea cleared up. And they did of course. But she never forgot the tears or the agony so barefaced within their broken and tortured laments. And so she resolved never to bring such pain upon herself.

As far as personal tragedy is concerned, it would appear, just as she had perceived, that caution had indeed been of service, but the one thing it could not guard her from was the vast emptiness that would at times flare up and terrorize her timid soul, particularly at that time of year when the pungent decay of autumn hung about the forest like the suffocating scent of flowers at a funeral. Ironically, it was her caution that had provided her with the time to first contemplate and then to eventually agonize over the myriad of absurdities and barbarisms that define modern existence. Had she lived a bit more recklessly she’d have had a boyfriend or a husband or a child to occupy her time, a disease to battle, an addiction to nurse, anything but the pristine void that she now contended with on an almost daily basis as a single and moderately accomplished young female.

Concerning her hikes to the old fire tower, the only thing consistent about them was the walk itself; the actual motivations inspiring the journey varied with the capricious winds and seasons of her life. At first, the walks served as a simple reminder of the tower’s existence. It was a darkly strange and convoluted comfort to have an avenue of escape so close at hand; the tower appearing a nearly foolproof means of ejecting oneself from what seemed so often to be nothing more than a prolonged and acutely torturous train wreck. But at other times, when the darkness did not hang so heavily and her world was colored, albeit briefly, in the golden shades of hope and optimism, she found herself making the trip as a reminder of roads traveled—a celebration of things surpassed—things left behind. But more often than not, she was unable or, perhaps, unwilling to pinpoint the motivations that colored the backdrop of her restless psyche. It was simply what she did, and like most inner workings of the brain, bathed in darkness as well as light. This particular night, however, was one of the few exceptions. She knew all to well why she was heading into the brisk, autumn darkness alone. There was nothing vague or sentimental about it. Her thoughts were centered, her movements deliberate.

Outside her apartment, dinner plate-sized poplar leaves blanketed the ground, their yellow, wilting flesh luminescent beneath the half naked branches and the jaundiced streetlight. She stepped over the sagging barbed wire at the edge of the plot and disappeared into the wood. The damp, bawdy scent of the forest encompassed her and calmed her. The moon was up and she knew her way and the flashlight lay dead in her hand.

The small deer path upon which she entered quickly opened to a branch of the broader and more rugged firetrail that snaked its way through the eight hundred or so acres of preserve. The Conservation Department had cut the trails years before as a means to access the forest in the event of a fire. Sections were also intended to act as a firebreak. Mostly though, they afforded teenagers a secluded place to feel each other up and drink.

There were multiple routes that led to Tower 33, as the trail branched and crisscrossed in numerous places, and she was familiar with each possible combination. She would take the highest route available in order to avoid the water and mud that she presumed had accumulated through much of the lower passes as a result of the recent record-breaking rainfall that had pummeled and soaked the area. She made a left at a large beech that shown pale in the moonlight. The scratchings of lovers, some of them sixty years past, shown faintly in the dimness of the night, the letters and symbols now stretched and warped by years of growth, in some cases, almost beyond recognition. She paused and switched on her light for the first time that evening and silently scanned the tree, reading the names and dates to herself, despite having previously applied them to memory. She switched off the light and plodded on with a vague sense of regret that she had left no such mark on anything anywhere in the world.

The sound of the creek met her ears and without hesitation she turned down a narrow footpath that led to a felled oak that spanned the small waterway. The bark of the old tree was worn thin on top from years of use as a footbridge. As she soundlessly tightroped the fallen tree, the moon reflected playfully upon the washboard ripples of water below and her thumb rested lightly on the switch of the flashlight. But no light was necessary. The moon and her intimacy with the place were enough.

Her mind wandered as her legs propelled her body over and around obstacles out of habit. Her solemn thoughts only confirmed her decision. She had been so careful and vigilant and smart, so even-keeled and well rounded and yet there she was beaten down and hopelessly cynical. She didn’t envy the reckless lives of her friends, but she had discovered there existed within her no desire for her own either. She was chronically unsatisfied. It was troubling to find that with every decision, no matter how permanent it may have appeared at the time of choosing, there were always other options to consider. Options that would forever hang contentment before her nose like a carrot, luring her forward into oblivion when her only desire was to sit still and to rest. It was as if her whole life her mind would be forced to wander as her legs trudged on from habit. Even as she walked, other options presented themselves but she easily brushed them away, convinced now, as she was, that there were none in the world that could possibly satisfy.

At a fork where the low pass rejoined the high, the creek veered from its trailside path to venture south. Once the trickle of water was lost to distance, the silence of wet autumn ensued. There was no sound save the soft pad of her feet among leaves and the undulating clicks of bare branches high above. Growing weary of introspection, her mind fell passively in step with the movement of her feet. She was where she was, but only at the cost of mental exhaustion.

Not far ahead lay the devil house—the skeletal remains of a large decaying milk barn now overgrown with forest. Years ago it was quite a statement, a status symbol perhaps. Certainly the only milk barn in the area to boast a fifty-by-eighty cement poured frame with a fully floored hayloft and shingled roof. Half of the roof was now missing while the other half sunk woefully into the void like the shoreline of some bottomless black hole. Directly beneath the missing portion of roof laid a charred and yawning six-foot hole in the hayloft floor where riotous youth of years gone by had held bonfires—perhaps some of the same lovers whose names were etched in the old, haggard beech. Naturally, once the fire burned through the upstairs floor the bonfires relocated to the ground level.

There were always signs of life at the old place—fresh coals from time to time, scattered piles of kindling, crushed beer cans, used condoms strewn and sagging among the stocks and bail stands—but these tokens were but trifles in the shadow of the devil house parties that were rumored to have taken place from the late seventies to the mid-eighties. Five stolen cars and a school bus shot to pieces and then burned, sixteen girls impregnated, a live bull burned alive in sacrifice, over twenty-two pounds of marijuana confiscated in a single night, three murders, one act of cannibalism and the music and general chaos could be heard, they say, for up to five square miles strong. Urban legends no doubt, but the eeriness of the place often left one with the feeling that at least some of the stories could be true, if not in whole than in part.

The name and most likely the stories themselves developed as the result of a piece of blood red graffiti plastered above the now empty front door frame. The devil lives here, it boldly proclaimed. Locals said the message first appeared in seventy-six but faithful miscreants from the surrounding area had applied a fresh coat of red every few years or so. She had been told that the painting was a right of passage of sorts for those entering middle school and wishing to gain a little respect.

Of course, this was far from the only bit of graffiti to be found upon the walls of the devil house. Six-six-six was a popular sentiment as was the marijuana leaf and the five-pointed pentagram. The ever-popular fuck you, could be found several times on most every wall in the place. I screwed, followed by various female names was another prominent fixture within the milieu. She often wondered why the writer was so bold as to list the name of the significant other but never his own. But the most ominous marking was one in the back corner where the milk bin used to sit that read: Heather was murdered here. Of the three purported devil house murders, Heather was the only to have been bestowed a name.

But not all the graffiti was morbid and offensive in nature. It was simply that what was shocking proved most memorable. In fact, the vast majority of the markings were professions of love for a boy or girl. Many others were slogans for peace and tolerance, as well as a malapropos golden rule that took up a good part of the back wall. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, in the same blood-red shade as the lettering above the outside door. The walls were an excellent representation of the absurdity and confusion with which humans live and operate and this irony was never lost on her the few times she had ventured through the darkened doors to explore. She had tried as ardently as anyone to fit the pieces of existence together but had always come up wanting. Fuck the pieces, for all she cared anymore.

Beyond the next bend loomed the wretched house, decrepit and gray, now as much forest as barn. The decaying cement exterior and sunken roof evoking a bombed out European war zone. The darkened windows like vacant and lidless eyes peering into the barren night sentinel-like, boring through her thin, pale skin to her very soul. A shudder ran the length of her body as she approached and another shook her when she heard a voice cry out in the silence—a voice both distant and near within the measureless blackness of night. She froze silent in the wood. She dared not breathe. The gentle tick of dry twigs above her. The woody creak of an old oak somewhere. The scurry of a night creature among leaves. Then the voice again.

It was a female. A moan or a cry or something in between, she could not be certain. Failing to summon the courage to call out, she slowly made her way toward one of the dense, black, glassless windows. Her slender steps were silent upon the wet leaves and moss of the forest floor and the beat of her heart was painful and uneven within her faint and fragile chest. She paused at the window’s edge, holding her breath. There were no other sounds. Inside, the pale moonlight rested on the wooden cattle rails near the center of the barn and nothing more. If she was breathing at all it was so slight as to be undetectable. She held the flashlight up, her thumb upon the switch, and debated what to do next.

Then a scream—mournful and long, as if made by one weary of life’s suffering and impatient of the repose that death affords. She startled at the sound and engaged the switch, causing a yellow light to splash across the floor before her. It was sudden and brief, but the evil unveiled to her within that short glance caused her to gasp and then, after a hasty and silent, terror-stricken pause, to turn and run.

The scream grew suddenly frantic and it echoed through the trees as she raced down the trail in the direction of the tower, her light a neurotic beacon mindlessly flicking through the canopy of branches above. She had yet to cover enough ground to silence the voice when midscream it was abruptly cut off. An echo and then nothing. She noted the sound of her breathing—heavy in the silence—her dysrhythmia of footfalls on the uneven stony ground, the chaotic flashes of light in the trees. She quickly extinguished the light and pushed on, fighting back the urge to vomit with every step.

It was a mile or more to the tower and when she reached it and began her ascent the image contained within that brief flash of light still hung before her eyes like a vivid and living nightmare. It was a young woman—a young girl perhaps—stripped naked, bruised, bound and gagged, her dark, muddy hair limp upon the filthy, concrete floor. The girl’s wide, terrified eyes fixed upon the form that had appeared so suddenly in the vacant frame of window. Pleading with the form in the window. The eyes. Her eyes. Two black holes within blazing sclera scouring the night for anything good, anything pure, anything human to draw into their gravity. Her eyes. They would not leave her.

The victim’s hands were bound at the wrist and her attacker held them above her head with one hand while clutching a knife in the other. His pants were at his knees. His legs were pale, almost translucent. His hair was strange, wild and animal like. When he turned to view the light she saw that it was a mask—a rubber mask in the form of a wolf—its stringy synthetic hair standing in all directions between the ragged pointed ears and about the fanged snarling muzzle. The gaze was felt though his eyes went unseen.

At the top of the tower, the autumn wind blew cold upon her glistening, tear-damp cheeks. She was alone and realized that in her fright she had run in the wrong direction if she were to actually go for help. She lived at the veritable edge of suburbia and was unfamiliar with the weavings of trails that stretched on through the remainder of the forest, having had the tower as the common goal of all her previous ventures. She cried as she thought of the girl, and resigned herself to the fact that the truncated scream had most likely been her last. Truthfully, the girl was already more than half-dead when she so briefly appeared out of the suffocating, ink-black darkness of the milk barn. They all were.

She straddled the railing on the top platform and then climbed to the outside. The wind blew and locks of her dark hair stuck to her moist cheeks and in the corners of her mouth as she peered over her shoulder at the ground reeling and dancing some ten stories below—distant and near within that dark measureless night. Nothing in the events that had occurred had sparked within her a new will to live. If anything, like her earlier introspection, they only reinforced her decision to venture there at all.

From that precarious position, her head began to swim. She felt the world’s craggy mass rotate beneath her and swooned within the vertigo of its headlong, elliptical orbit. She pulled herself closer to the railing and wept, the gray steel cold against the burning flesh of her face. When she lifted her eyes, faint silver ribbons of cloud framed a waxing and ancient moon, creating a delicate texture in the heavens in stark contrast to the prickly flow of forest below. The whole world bathed in silver. She wondered how there could exist, side-by-side, such unfathomable beauty and such vile, pitiless evil. She looked in the direction of the house, now indistinguishable within the sloping landscape of cedar and barren twigs, and struggled to believe that such horror could take place within a scene of such symmetry and grace. The moon. Such beauty it beholds. Such evil.

She studied the universe of earth and sky about her and slowly began to realize that it was a scene she was not yet prepared to abandon. As she clamored to the other side of the railing, hot tears streamed in torrents. She sat upon the cold, steel grating, her head cradled within trembling hands, and struggled to regain composure. Perhaps the pieces do not have to fit, she speculated. Perhaps beauty is enough.

She quickly formulated a plan to return home. There was a narrow cutoff just a hundred or so feet up the trail that led to the creek. If she could reach the water, she could follow its edge back to the old oak bridge, and in so doing, bypass the milk barn altogether. The night was silent and she crept into the forest just as softly.

A few feet in there came a sudden rush. A solitary glint of moonlight reflected beneath her chin and disappeared. She struck the ground quickly, as if the earth rose up to meet her in greeting, and she knew what had happened and she was not surprised. Her intentions would be realized whether she carried them out or not—whether intended or circumstantial—of fate or accident. But was it better this way, she wondered? Was a murder to be preferred over suicide? And in the broader scheme of things, was caution to be desired over recklessness when it had clearly failed to prevent her untimely death and only moments before had nearly driven her to purposefully pursue one? Or was the truth most often hidden somewhere in the unused and despised in-between? She felt for the moment that it was, but within the dark measureless night she knew she could not be certain. She thought instead on the beauty of moonlight.

The forest would accept the lifeless shells of two women that night. The trees and creatures would not judge. They held no opinion or partiality—no moral presumption. They asked no questions; demanded no account or testimony. But through processes as ancient and as old as time, they would transform flesh and bone and bring them into the symmetry and grace of all that is living. Though insanity would lay waste, nature would not—and will not—not while the silver moon still stares and whirls above, and the stony earth rolls on beneath the drifting, uncertain footfall of humanity. Not yet.