Pel said two. And the old man nodded once, slowly, and said, "Then we have this one and no other." He asked Pel if he had spoken back to the voice. Pel said no.
The old man closed his eyes for a moment when Pel said that. Then he opened them and said, "Good. That is the reason you are on my porch and not somewhere else. And if you had spoken back on the second night, I would not have opened my door to you today."
That was the first time either of them understood all the way down through the bone what they had been in the middle of. Because a man does not shut his door against you in the Ozarks in a hollow where you might die unless he knows he cannot help you and does not want the thing that took you at his door in the night. The old man said, "Come in."
And they went in.
The inside of the cabin was one room. There was a stone hearth, a table, a rope bed, a chair, and along the walls there were shelves, and on the shelves there were jars. Some of the jars had things in them that Orin could name. sassafras root, yellow root, bloodroot, one dried root Orin could not name, devil's shoestring. Some of the jars had things in them he could not name, and he did not ask. The old man put wood on the fire, and then he took down a cloth bundle from the mantle and laid it on the table and opened it.
Inside the bundle was salt, three black hand-forged iron nails, a small square of red flannel, and a piece of chalk. He looked up at them and he said, "Sit down." Then he said, "I am going to tell you what I know and I am going to tell you once and I am going to tell you because if you do not know it, you will not do what I tell you to do tonight. And if you do not do it tonight, one of you will not be here at first light." Pel sat down.
Orin sat down and the old man told them. He said, "This hollow is one of them. There are hollows in these hills and in the hills further east that keep something. It has been in this hollow longer than my people have been in this country and my people have been in this country longer than the county. It is not a haint. It is not the dead."
"It is a thing that was here before there was anybody to be dead. It does not want you. It has no want. It has a habit."
"Its habit is that when a man comes into its hollow and hunts and does not leave an offering and does not speak its name at the fork, it walks with him for three days and it takes him on the third night. Some come out. Most do not. The ones who come out do not come out whole." He said, "The reason it took your names first is because your names were the door.
It went in through your names. If either of you had answered, it would have come in through the door." Pel asked what the offering was at the fork. The old man looked at him a long time. Then he said, "Salt on the flat rock and a word spoken to nobody. But you did not know to leave it, and no man now living in Newton County knows to leave it because the last man who knew was my father's brother, and he is fifty years dead."
"So you did not do wrong. But you are in wrong. There is a difference."
He said, "Tonight I will draw a ring around this cabin. Inside the ring you will sit, and you will not go outside the ring for any reason; you will not answer any voice you hear; you will not open the door or the shutter. If you hear your wife, Ketaring," he used Pel's last name, "you will remember that your wife is at the foot of Ketaring Ridge, and she is not in this hollow, and the thing that sounds like her is not her. Do you understand me?" Pel said yes. And Orin said, "Yes."
The old man said, "Good. Then we will eat."
They ate a stew the old man had made of squirrel and cornmeal and something bitter that Orin could not identify. And while they ate, the old man did not speak. And after they ate, he went outside. And he was outside a long time. When he came back in, it was near dark.
He said, "The ring is drawn. It is drawn in salt and in ash and in one thing more that I will not tell you. It is closed now."
The old man sat down in his chair by the fire, laid the piece of dark wood across his knees, and said, "We will sit up."
Then he said, "If it speaks, do not answer. If it knocks, do not answer. If it says my name, do not answer because I am here beside you, and it is not me. Do you understand?" And they said yes again. And then the three of them sat in the one room cabin with the fire built to a moderate height, not high.