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folklorist, not a scientist—and unfortunately, he died in the sixties, so there’s no way of going back to him and seeing if he remembers more about Morton’s Fork than he put in his book—which is all too likely.”
    â€œPity,” Truth said. She looked back at the map. “Does it strike you that this place is a little too good to be true—from an investigator’s point of view, I mean?”
    Dylan put his arms around Truth and turned her to face him.

    â€œWell, if it turns out to be some sort of locals-pulling-a-fast-one-on-the-strangers sort of thing, proof of that would be worth writing up as well—and then we can give Rowan and Ninian a quarter to go to the movies, and …”
    Truth tilted her face up so that Dylan could kiss her, trying to share his lighthearted mood. She did not fear the Unseen World, and she could certainly handle anything Morton’s Fork could throw at her, from “noisy ghosts” to little green men.
    No, it was the so-called real world that she feared. She loved Dylan, but she could see nothing ahead for the two of them but pain.

TWO

    SECRETS OF THE GRAVE
    O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?
Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough,
Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?
    â€”ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
    THE BATTERED AND ANCIENT FORD TRUCK MIGHT—BY some stretch of charity and the imagination—be called red, but there its kinship with the sleek Italian machine Wycherly had just ruined ended. It shuddered and bounced and wheezed along the narrow mountain road at a brisk thirty-five miles per hour, and its flat bed and wooden slat sides were something out of a fifty-year-old photo.
    Wycherly sat carefully upright on the battered, blanket-covered bench-seat, his bag balanced on his knees. He tried to shut out his present situation, but the attempt wasn’t working very well.
    It wasn’t that the situation was out of control. He trusted that—it was what he lived with. But the situation had passed into the control of others, and that Wycherly couldn’t bear.
    At least he’d gotten away from what was left of the Ferrari.
    The Ford had been the first thing that had come by once Wycherly had reached the road above the wreck. He’d accepted
the driver’s offer of a lift to the nearest telephone without a second thought. The ninety-minute trip gave Wycherly’s headache time to fully establish itself, and was enough time for the first faint intimations of a hangover to appear on his horizon. He almost wished he’d stayed with the wreck.
    Almost.
    Occupied with his misery, Wycherly hardly noticed when the truck came to a stop. He’d seen no sign that they were approaching a city, only the slow unfolding of the wild landscape.
    â€œHere you are, mister. This is Morton’s Fork,” his rescuer said at last.
    Roused from his thoughts, Wycherly looked around.
    No. He has to be joking.
    Morton’s Fork looked like something out of an old photograph. The place seemed to consist in its entirety of a dispirited straggle of wood-framed buildings that clung to the side of the hill as if disputing with the pinewood for possession of the land. The one exception was the combination gas station and garage across the road from the other buildings. Wycherly glanced at it briefly—the area was filled with junked cars, none readily identifiable as having been built more recently than 1963—and turned his attention back to the other structures.
    There was a general store—the signs in the window said PELTS BOUGHT and FAX—with an almost-archetypal collection of sitting locals grouped upon its porch, a narrow post office with American flag, and two or three other buildings whose purpose did not seem immediately definable. The sign above the post office door said MORTON’S FORK, WEST VIRGINIA.

    West Virginia. Appalachia: a world of poverty light-years away from the universe of debutante