I shook my head. “Nothing looks the same.” I pointed to a little side road, hardly wide enough to get a single car down. “Try that way. That might be it.” Will coaxed the car in about two hundred feet, then pronounced the road impassable. “This mud is like goddamn quicksand. We’re nearly up to the axles. If I keep going, we’ll be stuck here all night.” He maneuvered the Franklin’s gear shift into reverse, gripped the wooden wheel tightly, turned, and looked over his shoulder as he backed out to the main road.

We stopped at several houses to ask directions. All the locals we encountered insisted that the road to the springs was closed. One careworn old woman sweeping her porch tried to warn us off when we asked her for directions. “You go there and you’re inviting terrible things to happen.” She peered into the car, saw Margaret on my lap. “If you want to do right by that little baby, you’ll turn your fancy car around. Go back where you came from.” She went back to sweeping frantically, creating a great storm of dust around her.

“Let’s try the store,” I said. “Maybe they can help us.”

Will navigated down Main Street and found a place to park a little ways down from the store, in front of the post office.

We walked up onto the porch of the general store and saw a CLOSED sign in the window. Will looked at the hours and checked his pocket watch. “They closed over an hour ago.”

I peered in the window. “But the lights are on, Will, and I see someone moving around in there.” I rapped on the glass, gently at first, then louder.

“Easy, you don’t want to break the window,” Will warned.

An old man in a plaid wool shirt shuffled toward the door and unlocked it. It was the same shopkeeper who’d tried to sell us the bottled water last year—the one who’d shown us his hand, which had been healed by the water after he’d burned it.

“We’re closed,” he said, speaking through the crack in the door, which he held only slightly ajar. His face was more gaunt than it had been when we’d seen him last year.

“Please, sir. We just need directions. We can’t find our way to the springs,” Will said. “We keep getting turned around and end up going in circles.”

“Springs are closed up,” the shopkeeper said, starting to shut the door on us.

“Wait!” I called.

Then he noticed little Margaret, who shifted in my arms.

“Please,” I said. “She’s sick. My friend, she was here a month ago, she bought your last jar of water.” I showed him the empty jar we’d brought with us. “This jar!” I waved it at him. “We gave the water to our baby, little droppers of it, and it made her better. But now we’re out and she’s sick again. She needs more. Please.”

He looked at me, eyes icy blue, then held open the door. We stepped inside. The store was uncomfortably hot. The little cast-iron pot-bellied stove was roaring away in the corner. The moose head stared gloomily at us from the wall, its fur and eyes glazed with a thin layer of dust. A train schedule was nailed to the wall, but the Brandenburg stop had been crossed off, a penciled note next to it read: Canceled until further notice. Another sign next to it announced that the Pine Point Inn and Dance Hall on Lake Wilmore were closed for good.

“You’re sure this is what you want?” he asked.

“If she was your child, wouldn’t you do the same?”

He looked at me for a few seconds, then turned and disappeared into the back of the shop. When he returned a few minutes later, he had a boy of about twelve with him. The boy was wearing patched dungarees and an old gray sweater that was far too large for him. “This here’s my grandson, Phillip. For a dollar, he’ll take you to the springs.”

Phillip shifted nervously from foot to foot.

Will looked at the boy, then at me. I nodded at him. Will pulled out his wallet and paid Phillip. We followed him out of the store, but as we were leaving, the shopkeeper said, “Just this once. You get what you need up there, then you go home and don’t come back. And hurry. It’ll be dark soon. You don’t want to be up there after dark.”

The boy got on his bicycle, and we got back in our car and followed him back up the main road to a muddy turnoff; a little ways up, trees were lying across the road. Trees someone had cut down and placed there to block access.

“You gotta walk from here,” the boy said.

Will pulled the car over to the side of the road. We hiked in on foot, Phillip leading the way. He stayed a good ways ahead of us and walked quickly. Will offered to carry Margaret, but I clung tight to her. Our shoes were soon caked with thick black mud, and we were sweating and panting despite the cold air. The walking was difficult and tedious, as if the road itself were trying to stop us, trying to suck us down and hold us. We had a hard time keeping up with Phillip and worried that if we lost sight of him, we’d not only never find our way to the springs, but might not be able to find our way back to town.

Trees and brush had overtaken the road, narrowing until it was only a wide path. The branches had knit together to make a thick canopy, shading out what little light there was. It was overcast, twilight. The sun would set soon.

I thought of the shopkeeper’s warning: You don’t want to be up there after dark.

We walked without speaking. Margaret grew heavier and heavier, and though Will offered to take her again, I still would not let her go. “Almost there, little sparrow,” I whispered into her hair.

At last, the trees thinned, and we came to a large clearing. Where the grand hotel once stood was only a vast cellar hole, the broken and burned remnants of timbers, piles of slate roofing. It smelled of ruin.

Gone was all sense of a familiar place, a place I was meant to be.

I walked up to the edge of the hole, which had a small lake of water pooled at the bottom, black and filthy. I could see bent and broken copper pipes sticking out of it. There was a bathtub down there. Part of the crystal chandelier from the lobby. I felt dizzy and swayed slightly. Will grabbed me, pulled me away from the edge.

“Be careful, Ethel,” he scolded, not releasing his grip on me.

Broken window glass was everywhere, crunching beneath our feet. The heat must have caused the windows to explode outward, away from the building. I tried to imagine it: the hotel on fire, the people inside. The screaming.

I was sure I could hear it still; some echo trapped forever down in that cellar hole.

“Do they know what caused the fire?” Will asked as he pulled me a safe distance away, the mud sucking at our shoes, trying to trap us.

“Benson Harding,” said the boy, the name coming out like a snarl. “He burned it down.”

“Why on earth would he do such a thing?”

Phillip shrugged, kicked at the mud with the worn toe of his leather boot. “Folks say he was sick over what happened to his wife. Went crazy, she did.” There was a funny gleam in the boy’s eyes. “Said she’d seen a monster in the springs.” He turned and spat in the dirt.

Will and I looked at each other. Margaret stirred, breath wheezy, against my chest. I looked at Will, said with my eyes: We have no choice.

The boy led us to the springs. We stepped around the wreckage and found the old footpath hidden amid the dead, overgrown grass. Off to our right, astonishingly, the rose garden was flourishing: the leaves green, the untrimmed vines overtaking the trellises, the early buds offering unsettling explosions of color. It didn’t seem right, to see a lush oasis of green in such a dead place.

We smelled the pool before we saw it: a rotten, sulphurous stench.

The wooden gate that had once been around it was knocked down, a sign still tacked to it: The Pool is CLOSED. Will reopen tomorrow at 9 a.m.

The grass was overgrown. The deep pool lined with stones looked the same as it had when we visited. I wondered what had happened to the peacocks as I looked down into the black water and thought of Eliza Harding drowning there.

I held my breath as I watched the water, half believing that Eliza might surface—that she’d come up from the depths and swim as she had when Myrtle had seen her.

“It’s bottomless,” the boy said now. “My daddy, he says you shouldn’t even touch that water. Poison, he says.” He looked around at the water, the sun falling behind the hills, casting us in deep shadows. “Reckon you can find your own way back,” he said. Then he scurried off like a frightened rabbit.

I watched him, thinking, Could we? Could we find our own way back? Or would we be lost here forever?

I got down on my knees, laid the baby on the ground. She squirmed, her breathing fast and hard like a chugging train.

“Please,” I said to the water, to God, to Eliza Harding maybe, to whoever was listening. “Please save my baby girl.”

I scooped up some icy black water, dabbed it on her lips, put some in her tiny mouth. She opened her eyes wide, looking at me. I rubbed it into her skin, on her hands and feet.

“Do you think we should bathe her?” I asked.

“The cold will kill her,” Will said, eyes steely. He stepped away, studying the burned-out timbers, kicking at the ashes. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was frightened.

I gave Margaret a sponge bath with the water, cooing to her, promising that the water would make her well. “This water is magic,” I whispered when Will was far enough off not to hear us. “It’s the reason you’re here. And I think that maybe, it may help keep you with us. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, little sparrow? To stay here with us?” She made a sweet cooing sound as if to answer: Yes, Mama. Yes!

Then, I wrapped her back up. Before leaving, I filled four large canning jars that I’d brought along in a satchel. We began the long walk back to the trees that blocked the road. Will took out the flashlight to help guide us. I kept thinking I heard something behind us: footsteps, the sucking sound of shoes moving through mud. But when I turned, I saw nothing, only shadows.

“Should we look for a hotel?” I asked once we were back at the car at last.

“I don’t think there is one anywhere nearby. Let’s drive back.”

The drive home was slow and tedious. There were no other cars on the road.

The canning jars full of water clanked together in the backseat. Margaret, breathing easier now, squirmed on my lap, making contented little sounds.

We arrived back in Lanesborough near midnight. I brought Margaret in and undressed her, got her ready for bed. Her hands and feet were pink, her breathing was normal. And she was hungry.

“Good to see she’s got her appetite back,” Will said.

“It’s not just her appetite,” I said. “Look at her, Will—she’s all better. The water has cured her.”

Will tightened his jaw and nodded. And for an instant, it wasn’t just wonder or disbelief that clouded his eyes, but the faint glimmer of fear. I was sure I saw it there, flickering like a tiny fire starting to catch hold.