Notes

"Now entering Mattanit County, OR," the sign, shaped like an oversized brown bear, flashed by in the headlights of Tully's beat-up Outback. The Frights¹ blared from the speakers; staring down the barrel of four a.m. after a sixteen hour drive required music—loud, angry, the kind kids liked to listen to when they kicked the shit out of each other for fun.

Though his shit-kicking days were behind him, the music had never left. He tried to focus on the lyrics as the great shadow of the bear passed across the rearview and he drove on towards Misatchee . . .

"Everybody wants me dead but I just wanna be left alone . . ."

In the dream, the one he'd been having every fucking night for the last three months, he'd seen that sign. The bear, welcoming him to . . .

"Have you ever felt the pressure building in your brain . . ."

. . . a little town with an old Chinook name deep in the middle of the forest. A kitsch motor lodge by the highway, a diner on Main Street, an all-American high school (home of the Braves!), and, down a long, winding road, a ramshackle campground with a path into the darkness . . .

"Growing up is suicide and it's making me insane . . ."

He passed each of these landmarks in turn. The song ended, and he was blanketed in silence. He could have picked up his phone, shuffled to the next playlist, and let the company of another voice give him the illusion of companionship, but he didn't. He couldn't, not when that path, the one from the dream, loomed in front of him like a specter. He cut the engine and let the last flash of his headlights glow behind his eyelids as he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

The parking lot of Misty Pines campground was deserted; the little ranger's cabin with its ICE machine on the porch stood empty at this time of night. There was a lone RV parked at the far corner of the lot, but even this looked like it had been decaying for several years. In truth, Tully barely registered any of it—and certainly not the tiny red wink of light, a camera high up on the utility pole beside his car—as he walked, was pulled, towards the path . . .

. . . to the door in the tree. The one from the dream.

It seemed as if it took no time at all for him to arrive at the place, as if he had simply blinked and been teleported. How he even knew this was his destination, he was unsure; this stretch of forest, heavy with night-sounds and thick mist, was the same in every direction. But he knew.

He stepped off the path, feet steady and sure, and plunged through the underbrush.

Barely a minute later and there it was: a massive Sycamore, trunk ghost-white against the blackness of the pines surrounding it. Except the door: the door was rimmed in red.

Look inside, Tully. He heard his own voice in his ears, but he wasn't sure he had spoken out loud. You came all this way. The dream will never end unless you see what it wants you to see . . .

With a shaking hand, he reached out, curled fingers against rough bark, and pulled.

***

In the little parking lot, the surveillance camera ticked to life once more, the motion of a panicked figure emerging from the trees triggering its internal detector. The stranger sprinted onto the asphalt, paused long enough to vomit into a culvert, and then slammed keys into the driver's side door of a Subaru Outback. The car glowed to life, peeled into a three point turn, and raced out of frame.

The rain came, and all was silent.
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