a portion of one wing protruded from the foliage, and the flashlight made parts of the fuselage glitter. Neither of the men knew much about airplanes, but they could see that it was a small twin-engine prop, now minus the starboard engine, lost during the crash along with most of that wing. It lay on its belly to the north of the pool, its nosecone hard against a big pine. The forest had closed over the path that it must have torn through the trees upon its descent, although that in itself was not so remarkable. What was strange, and what gave the men pause, was that the plane was almost entirely covered with vegetation. Vines had wrapped their tendrils around it, ferns had shaded it, shrubs had masked it. The very ground itself appeared to be slowly absorbing it, for the plane had sunk some distance into the earth, and the lower portion of the port engine was already lost. The plane must have been here for decades, Harlan thought, but the portions of it that were visible through the greenery did not appear that old. There was no rust, no obvious decay. As he would tell his family during his final days, it was as though the forest were absorbing the plane, and had accelerated its growth accordingly so that this end might be more rapidly achieved.
Paul began walking toward the wreckage. Harlan released his hold on the tree trunk, and gave the pool a wide berth as he followed his friend. Paul used his rifle butt to test the earth around the slowly sinking plane, but the earth was hard, not moist.
‘It’ll soften during the spring thaw,’ said Harlan. ‘That might explain the way the plane is going down.’
‘I guess,’ said Paul, but he did not sound convinced.
All the windows of the plane were covered with ivy, including those at the cockpit. For the first time, Harlan acknowledged the possibility that there might still be bodies in there. The thought made him shudder.
It took them a while to find the door, so thick was the cloak of vegetation. They used their hunting knives to hack at the ivy. It came away reluctantly, coating their gloves with a sticky residue that gave off a sharp, caustic odor. Paul got some of it on his exposed forearm, and he would carry the burn scar that it left until the day that he took his own life.
When they had exposed the shape of the door, they found that the sinking of the plane had left an inch or more of it beneath the earth, so they had to hack at the ground to make enough space for the door to open out a little. By that time the blackness was upon them.
‘Maybe we ought to come back when it’s light,’ said Harlan.
‘You think we’d even be able to find this place again?’ asked Paul. ‘It’s not like any part of the woods I’ve ever seen.’
Harlan took in their surroundings. The trees, a mix of tall evergreens and huge, misshapen deciduous, were older here. This area had never been logged. Paul was right: Harlan couldn’t even have said where they were, exactly. North: that was all he knew, but this was Maine, and there was a lot of north to go around.
‘We can’t find our way back in the dark anyway,’ said Paul, ‘not with the compass on the fritz and no stars to guide us. I figure we got to stay till first light.’
‘Stay here?’ Harlan didn’t like the sound of that at all. He glanced at the black pool, its surface smooth as a plate of obsidian. Vague memories of old horror movies came to him, B-features in which creatures emerged from ponds just like that one, but when he tried to put a name to the films he found that he could not, and he wondered if he had made up those images all by himself.
‘You got a better idea?’ said Paul. ‘We have supplies. We can light a fire. Wouldn’t be the first time we spent a night in the woods.’
But not in a place like this, Harlan wanted to say, not with a pool of not-quite-water calling to us, and the wreck of a plane that might well be a tomb for anyone still inside. If they could get far enough away from it then the compass might begin to function properly again, or, if the sky cleared, they could navigate their way home by the