Mandy Barely had three nights left to save the boy in the cabin, and she had not slept in two. She sat in the woven chair on the porch with her flashlight in her lap and the stuffed rat her grandmother knitted tucked under her thigh. The rat's stitched runes glowed faint against her jeans whenever the wind shifted. Inside the cabin, the boy lay quiet the way he had been quiet since the first night of camp, when he wandered off the trail alone and came back with a spiral burned into the back of his neck. Three clean rings, and a fourth so faint she had to tilt his head to the firelight to see it. Nothing in any book she had found mentioned a fourth ring. The cabin stood alone in the clearing now. The other counselors had moved the rest of her group two nights ago, after the scratching started. She hadn't told them about the drawing folded in her back pocket, or about the boy's face, which looked dimmer every morning, like a lamp someone kept turning down. The door behind her was the problem. Each night something climbed the porch and gouged spirals into the planks. The first night, one spiral, low near the handle. The second night, three more, deeper. Tonight the door was a field of them, overlapping, the wood split white along the cuts. She had counted the rings on the largest spiral that morning. Four. She had sat on the steps and put her head between her knees. She could not stay awake another night alone. Her uncle had taught her that a tired tracker misses the print right under her boot. So at sundown she walked to the memorial post at the edge of the clearing, where campers and counselors had hung trinkets for thirty summers, and she lifted down a small tin medal a girl had left the year Mandy started. She brought it back and nailed it to the center of the door, between two spirals. Then she sat in the chair with the charm rat in her lap and waited. The scratching came near two in the morning. She heard claws test the bottom plank. The rat in her lap grew warm. The medal on the door began to hum, low, like a wire under tension. Whatever stood on the other side of the wood drew one slow line, stopped, and tried again. The medal hummed louder. The claws scraped sideways and then stopped. She heard something step back off the porch and walk away through the leaves. She did not move until the birds started. At dawn she opened the cabin. The boy was sitting up. He looked at her, and the fourth ring on his neck was darker than it had been the night before. He said her name. It was the first word he had spoken in six days, and it was not a relief. It meant whatever had been kept outside the door was now finishing its work from inside.

Mandy stepped back from the cabin door and felt a sting bloom on her left wrist. She pushed up her sleeve. A single ring sat in the skin, pink at first, then darkening as she watched. The boy had said her name at dawn. That was all it had taken. She pressed her thumb against the ring and her thumb came away cold, like she had touched the inside of a window in winter. She could not work this out on the porch. The cabin held the boy and whatever was finishing him, and her drawing was useless against a mark already starting. She grabbed the charm rat off the chair, folded her drawing into her pocket, and ran down the path to the old farmhouse the camp used for storage. It stood half a mile back through the trees, two stories of weathered clapboard with green shutters and a stone foundation. The director kept the trunks of leftover camper things in the front room. Her uncle had walked her through it once and shown her which floorboards creaked. She went inside and shut the heavy door behind her. She dragged a farm table into the middle of the room and emptied her pockets onto it. The drawing of the four-ring spiral. The charm rat, runes faint now under the dim window light. A book of trail superstitions her uncle had given her at twelve. She laid her wrist flat next to the drawing and compared. One ring on her. Four on the boy. She had hours, maybe less, before the second ring set. She opened the book and worked through it line by line. Marks are passed by name. A name spoken inside completes one stage; a name answered begins another. She had not answered him. She had only stood there. That was something. The book said a forming mark could be broken if the link was severed before the second ring. The method it gave required a token of weight, given freely, worn against the skin. She thought of the trunks in the next room. She found it in the third trunk, under a pile of name tags from a summer ten years before hers. A heavy gold ring set with a red stone, left behind by some camper's mother and never claimed. The weight of it surprised her. She slid it onto her finger above the marked wrist and pressed her palm flat over the ring on her skin. The cold under her thumb rose to meet the stone. The rat's runes flared once, bright, then dimmed. The ring on her wrist faded from black to pink to nothing. Her hand shook. One ring gone. She sat on the farmhouse floor and breathed. Then she remembered the boy, alone in the cabin with four rings and her name in his mouth, and she understood the ring had bought her hours, not him. She pulled her sleeve down over the gold band and stood up.