Excerpt: THE WINTER FOLK by Jen Julian

Part I

Chapter 1

Moth

I’ve come back to the mountains to look for ghosts.

Not the kind you’re thinking of. I mean ghosts that are more like small animals, black and dirty-white, about the size of weasels. Biting and hissing ghosts. Vermin.

Our neighbors used to shoo ghosts off their decks or away from their trash cans, but they thought they were only possums. I knew better. If you paid attention, you could tell that sometimes the possums had a strange shape, with their sunken-in eye sockets and the row of sleek scales that glimmered like mica and clinked like coins on their bellies. That was how you knew you were looking at a ghost and not a possum.

The ghosts arrived in this valley along with the Winter Folk, which, judging from the stories my mother told me, would’ve been around the time of Mama Eve Thornhill, her great-grandmother, who was born before the Civil War.

Actually, we probably have the regular sort of ghosts here, too—sad dead people haunting old mills and mine shafts—though I’ve never seen one. This place was once run by a copper mining company. Thug union busters smashed bricks through my great-granddad’s windows. Then the TVA flooded the valley in the ’30s. My other great-granddad drowned because he wouldn’t abandon the homestead. By the time I was born, they had sifted the pollution out of the lake—twice already—and the whole county was overrun with tourists and snowbirds Jet Skiing over my ancestors’ bodies. Monstrous, multimillion-dollar cabins crouched on the mountains overlooking the lake, one winding gravel road away from rotting trailers and meth dens. Families from the suburbs paid stupid prices for sepia-tinted pictures of themselves wearing headlamps and holding pickaxes.

All that banality drove whatever magic remained here deep into the woods. If you wanted to find it, you had to really, really need it.

My name is Moth.

Let me say that a different way. I would prefer, listener, that you think of me as Moth.

Moth is the name I received while serving the Winter Folk, the only name in the world that has ever felt like it belonged to me, much more so than Vera, the schizophrenic great-aunt my mother named me after, or Stoker, handed down through my father’s erudite Germanic kin, or Whitfield, my husband’s name, which I carry around now the way one carries ID, with perfunctory privilege. My mother said it was a curse to let the Winter Folk name you, but she stopped telling those kinds of stories before I was even old enough to know how valuable they were. I’ve lost count of how many of her lessons I’ve ignored since then.

As I tell you this story, I’m vacationing in the same place I fled over twenty years ago, renting an Airbnb with my husband and our daughter, Cass. Our cabin is on the south side of a mountain called Piggin’s Peak. The cabin’s name—which greets us on a smug signpost at the bottom of a windy gravel driveway—is Once Upon a Pine.

It is not lost on me that I’ve become one of those bourgeois assholes I always despised.

The view from the back deck is something else, though. You can see all the way from the east end of the valley to the west, with the town of Little Gunning nestled on the lakeshore like a toy display. It’s December; Christmas lights speckle the mountain, and the air is sharp. The lake catches cold pink light after sunset, silver-gray in the early morning, when the sky overhead is velvet-black and you can barely see the horizon. Right now, Martin is in bed, still asleep. When I slide my way out, he immediately flings his arm over the empty spot I leave behind, like he’s trying to catch hold of me before I go. To my relief, he doesn’t wake. I carry my hiking clothes out to the living room, where I can dress without disturbing him. Across the way, the door to Cass’s room is ajar, and I see a blue light shining against the wall, hear the click-clack of keys. On her laptop. The girl never sleeps. Fortunately for me, it’s likely she has her headphones on and is fully locked into whatever keeps her glued to that screen. I don’t think she’s heard me.

Still, I lace up my hiking boots as quietly as I can and sneak my way out the door.

I figure I can get in a couple hours of searching before breakfast.

In the mountains, it’s hard to go anywhere in a straight line. Little Gunning, while plainly visible from our Airbnb’s lofty perch, is still a twenty-minute drive away. To get around to the north side of Piggin’s Peak, you have to go almost to town, then back up across the pass and over the ridge. The north side of the mountain flattens into a grizzled rockface that gives the peak its name.

When we drove in yesterday, Martin flailed with delight upon seeing it.

“Would you look at that,” he exclaimed, pointing over the steering wheel. “It really does look like a face.”

“Yep,” I said. “That’s Old Man Piggin.”

“Look, Cass, do you see the face? Old Man Piggin’s checking us out!”

Cass, sealed off inside her headphones, did not reply.

I couldn’t help but think of the stony contempt Old Man Piggin seemed to have for my husband’s enthusiasm, the way he looked down over his bumpy nose, complete with nostrils and scrubby nose hairs.

Or maybe I was projecting a little. Martin has a way of, we’ll say, overshooting. Yesterday alone he asked a store clerk, a traffic cop, and a middle-aged gas station manager if they remembered me, and I had to smile politely as these men pondered and squinted, waiting to see if they could make out the surly scrap of white trash that, for a brief time, gave the town something to talk about. Martin might as well have driven down Main Street with his head out the window like an Irish setter, his hair catching the wind: “My wife’s from here! Did you know my wife is from here?”

Cass, meanwhile, has spent the entire trip in a monk-like state of silence, head bobbing to the robotic trill of her music, eyes closed. Her eyelids flutter like she’s stuck in a perpetual REM cycle—or seizing, it’s hard to tell—and the only time she has broken from a pattern of blank yes/no answers was when her laptop failed to connect to Once Upon a Pine’s dusty wireless router.

“It’s not working,” she said in the kitchen, holding the laptop toward me in an almost accusatory manner. “Hotspot’s not working either.”

“We haven’t even unpacked the car yet,” I told her.

“There’s a meetup in fifteen minutes. If I don’t show, they’ll start the campaign without me.”

“Surely,” I said, stuffing our copious groceries into a very modest fridge, “they can afford you a grace period.”

Before Cass could reply, here came Martin, bumping past us with two large canvas bundles in his arms.

“Are those tents?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling big.

“Why’d you bring tents?”

“I thought we could set ’em up on the deck. Sleep under the stars. Brought the camping stove, too, so we could do s’mores and weenies and make hobo packets—”

“Martin,” I said gently. “It’s going to drop below forty at night. Also, we have beds.”

“Aw, come on, Stoker. Where’s your sense of adventure?” He shunted open the sliding glass door and dumped the tents outside on the deck. “Man!” he exclaimed. “That view—just incredible!”

And as he went back to the car to bring in more stuff, Cass followed me around while I organized the kitchen cabinets, wordlessly bumping the edge of her laptop against my side. Eventually, I turned to her and said, sharper than I meant to, “I can’t do anything about that right now, Cass. Why don’t you be useful and go help unload?”

She gave me a dark look but complied. An hour or so later, after Martin had tried and failed to properly set up the tents on the deck, Cass returned to the living room and thunked her laptop forcefully on the coffee table in front of us.

“Easy there, kiddo,” said Martin. “Don’t damage it.”

“I’m going to damage something,” she said.

We couldn’t figure out the connection ourselves, so Martin called the owner, who called the internet company, who solved the problem, at which point Cass could safely do whatever it is she does online with such intensity. It’s what she would’ve been doing back home in Marietta anyway. She has not emerged from her room since, and while she’s certainly aware of the fantastic view off the back deck, the way Martin’s been going on about it, it’s possible that she hasn’t looked at a single goddamn mountain since she’s been here.

I know this sounds like I’m complaining. Like I don’t enjoy my family’s company and have fled to the woods to avoid them.

But this early-morning hike is not about them.

The trailhead parking lot is empty. Quiet. My headlights shine off the glittery eyes of deer in the trees. The trail curves to the right, but I take off to the left through the dim, foggy chill, not so cold that there’s frost on the ground, but cold enough to warrant gloves and earmuffs. Most of the underbrush has died back, flattened into a carpet of brown leaves and brambles. I tramp straight through it. I have my phone in case I need a compass, but I probably won’t. The shape of the valley is etched into my brain.

No earmuffs for me, despite the cold. I keep my ears open for sounds of movement.

Jingling coins in the brush.

If I hear ghosts or catch sight of their scurrying, they are a sign that one of the Winter Folk’s doors is nearby.

Which might lead me back to Deerhaven and Mr. Oslin.

As with most hikes in the Appalachians, there aren’t many overlooks here. It’s just up and down, up and down. My thighs burn as I climb and tremble as I descend. I’m out of shape; a stitch settles into my ribs after the first mile. Nothing but a wall of woods to either side—mountain laurel, hemlock, white oak, felled and rotting trunks padded with cushions of lime-green broom moss. Claustrophobic smell of wet leaves, pine, skunk, cold earth.

All that memory, stinging like ice.

You could see Old Man Piggin’s face from Mr. Oslin’s terrace. Or at least sometimes you could. Deerhaven moved around the valley. It was also sometimes in places that were not anywhere near the valley and sometimes was in both the valley and in some other place at the same time. Mr. Oslin kept the lodge in a fluid space so that ordinary folk wouldn’t find it.

But I remember. I have stood on that stone terrace in the blue winter starlight, staring into Piggin’s flinty, far-off eyes, the glow of the dining hall warm at my back. Was it the celebration kicking off the season? Or that final night before the staff went home, when we ate from the feasting tables and drank mulled wine that sparked on our tongues? It must’ve been then when I felt Mr. Oslin’s presence beside me and was suddenly all goose bumps, a hungry shiver colliding with the heat of the drink in my gut.

Then I pointed into the dark and traced my finger along the length of Piggin’s nose. “I heard a story that he was once a man. He turned a witch away from his home, and as punishment she turned him into a mountain.”

“Yes,” Mr. Oslin said. “This happens often in stories. It teaches us that hospitality is very important.”

“Do you think that story is true? About Piggin?”

“I’m not sure, Moth.”

“What would happen, do you think—if you turned someone away at Deerhaven?”

“I would never do so,” he said. “I’m obligated to welcome anyone I can accommodate. Anyone who wants to be here. But you know that, Moth. You have the instincts of a Host.”

I turned and smiled at him. A serene warmth flowed through me, a sense of freedom, fueled by love and wine. I could see my own face in the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses.

“Could I ever be a Host?” I asked.

He smiled at me. “It’s difficult work. I’m sure you’re aware.”

“I know that,” I said. “But for the sake of speculation, if you owned Deerhaven, and I were the Host, what would we do? What’s the first thing we would change about this place?”

Mr. Oslin lifted his head and looked out thoughtfully over the mountains.

“The drapes,” he said. “I have never liked them.”

I experienced all this in a cloud of tipsy pleasure, but I was half serious, too. And as I stood quietly next to him, I thought about what a wonder we could make of Deerhaven together, how we could protect its staff, keep it safe from the darkness that plagued the Winter Folk, make it the true haven it was meant to be. And if Mr. Oslin were the Owner, I would work under him, hosting guests and recruiting workers, as he had recruited me, until the end of time.

“I’ve heard the rumor,” I whispered to him.

He glanced down at me, a small line between his eyebrows. “What rumor, Moth?”

“That you can make us greater than we are. Make us like you.”

His eyes softened then, yielding to tenderness. I could feel his awareness of my desire, warm as a hand on my shoulder.

“Everything is possible,” he said, “within its limits.”

Now, picking my way through these woods, watching and listening for anything familiar that could help me find my way back, I can’t shake the feeling that that was my purest self, right there on that terrace, at twenty-two years old, with Mr. Oslin at my side.

Birch and I used to speculate why we could never speak about Deerhaven to anyone who’d never been there. I thought it was because Mr. Oslin had cast an actual spell to tie our tongues, but Birch didn’t think he ever needed to, seeing as nobody would’ve believed us anyway.

Nowadays, I think she was partly right, though for me it’s more complicated. It’s not just fear of being disbelieved that ties my story in knots.

It’s that the story is easiest to tell specifically when it’s in my head.

When I find myself picking through it in the middle of the night, it’s straightforward, clean as a fairy tale. But bringing an audience into the mix—that’s the challenge. Even now, I can feel things becoming circuitous. Now, listener, I must decide what to say to you in what order so that it makes sense. I must have a point, whatever that is.

For instance, I’ve mentioned Birch just now. You might be thinking, Who is that? And now I’m thinking about whether I should tell you more about Birch and what happened to her, or our friend Crow, or any of the other staff whose time at Deerhaven intersected with mine.

Or are you wanting to know more about Mr. Oslin? Did you hear the scene I just described on the terrace and think, It sounds like she fell in love with this man. I’m guessing that’s the point of this story. Something-something-something love.

Maybe. I don’t know yet.

But I know it didn’t start with love. If I really think back, it started with stories. The ones my mother used to tell.

Like I said before, her ancestors lived in these mountains since before the Winter Folk. She boasted mixed blood, as most people here do—Scotch-Irish, German, a thread of Cherokee surviving through assimilation. She was superstitious, charming, mistrustful, ethereal in her way, but not impractical. She would string roasted onions around my neck to soothe a sore throat, then make a hot toddy—black tea, lemon, rose hips, sage honey, a little whiskey.

Those were the times when stories slipped out of her like precious eggs, the tale of Old Man Piggin among them.

But once, when I was six or seven, I listened in a haze of fever as she told me about the Deerman, my favorite story of all.

She said, “He can make himself like any other deer—till you get close. If you see a deer that won’t run when he hears you, don’t look in his eyes, and don’t smile, and don’t dare say a word. Any word you speak, he’ll catch it and keep it, and if he turns his head to the side, and you see the white of his eye, you’re good as gone.”

But where does he take you?

“To a nowhere place, with the other Winter Folk. If the Deerman takes you there, they will own you, and name you like an animal, and bid you work their halls. They are a heartless, wild folk—not like us.”

But how do you know it’s true?

“I saw him once. He tried to get me, like he tried to get so many other girls. My own mama told me all the tricks to avoid his eye, so I kept myself safe from his wiles. But my cousin Birdie weren’t so lucky. She went off in the woods one day looking for chanterelles and never came back. And next to her wicker basket, they found hoofprints—a set of two. We knew it was the Deerman, ’cause sometimes he walks upright, looks like a person.”

What does he look like as a person?

“Very white and very thin. Eyes black as coal. Orange hair, like a poisonous mushroom.” She reconsidered. “No—a deeper color than that. Like cinnamon. But he don’t smell like cinnamon—he smells cold and clean, like something glassy.” She paused again, and I saw her face drift into a strange expression. In that moment, she seemed magical, a sage, a priestess off a tarot card. Long hair, black and heavy like mine, a moon face with huge green eyes, bright as a luna moth, a thin red thread of a mouth whispering stories.

Even then, I could feel the yearning in her words, even if I didn’t understand yet what yearning was. It wasn’t just that the Winter Folk were dangerous. It was that they made you want them as much as you feared them.

“Promise me,” she said, smoothing back the hair from my sweaty forehead, “if you ever see one of them Winter Folk, don’t you even open your mouth.”

I told her I promised.

But that was before.

Fast-forward. I was ten years old, and it was November. Two jack-o’-lanterns sat rotting on our porch, their grimaces distending. My parents were still married, but barely. In the evenings, they would fight, or rather, my mother would do something destructive, like burn all her paintings and chainsaw art in a big pile in the backyard, and my father would harden and go quiet and retreat into himself. And sometimes my mother would drink whiskey and play “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” over and over on the turntable—a song I can’t stand to this day—until it drove my father from the house. Sometimes he would leave silently, and sometimes he would mutter under his breath about how he had given up a career, a life, to move here and marry her, and now she was making life unbearable.

“Leave me, then,” she’d scream at him. “What difference will it make?”

And she might’ve said those words exactly that night or some other night, it doesn’t matter. I only remember for sure that my mother was crying in the kitchen, and I was sprawled out on the living room floor, drawing pictures of castles and trying to ignore her. It was dark outside, and a quick movement caught my eye through the sliding glass door: a skinny animal darting out of the woods and across the yard, its white face catching the light from the living room. In the pauses between my mother’s angry sobs, I heard a strange jingling noise, like coins clinking in a bag.

I went outside. To my right, the primrose trellis shivered.

Then I heard someone approaching through the trees: a tiny, dollish woman, not much taller than I was. She was wearing a gigantic black coat, which swallowed her, and her head, framed in a silky wreath of white-blond hair, floated lantern-like in the dark. Her face was pointed, with a little mask of red across her nose and cheeks, and her eyes were wide and overlarge. And she was beautiful. As is the case with many of the Winter Folk.

Her name, I would come to learn later, was Celosia.

Or Lo, to the staff at Deerhaven.

“Did you see a ghost come through here?” she asked. She had a clipped, singsong accent, which I did not recognize.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

She held her tiny pink hands a foot or so apart. “About this size? Kind of like a weasel or a little dog?”

“You mean an animal?” I pointed to the primrose trellis. “I saw some kind of animal run in there.”

“I didn’t mean animal, but go on.” She tilted her head toward the trellis. “Why don’t you go and see?”

You’re one of them, I remember thinking, and my heart raced. I wasn’t scared yet, though, only excited, like I’d expected this to happen, like my mother’s stories had prepared me for this moment.

I went to the primrose trellis, and yes, I could see, inside the shriveled leaves and rose hips, a tiny clawed foot grasping, and a hairy white tail, like a rat or a possum. The creature hissed, its wormy breath rattling the leaves.

“Go ahead and get it out for me,” Lo said.

I inched one of the rose brambles aside. I was expecting something like a mouse or a weasel, a recognizable critter I could grab up easy, but when I caught the thing’s eye, an empty black socket stared back at me, a face of bare bone and dried scraps of flesh, a jaw hanging by a thread of blue tendon. I cried out and jumped away. Behind me, Lo laughed.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “It’s only a ghost. Just grab its face and yank it out of there.”

The creature clicked its naked jaw at me. She was right; this was not an animal. This was something else. In the chill of my terror, I knew that I was being tested, and it felt unjust, which was a terror of a different kind. Why hadn’t I been allowed time to practice, to prepare? My eyes were getting hot.

Still, I reached a shaky hand through the brambles. The skull snapped at me. I drew back. Something in the eye socket glimmered, a cloudy spark of white, like a marble.

Lo groaned. “Come on, you better move quicker than that.”

I tried again. This time, the skull face bit me, little needle pricks on the knuckle of my ring finger, but I didn’t cry out. Somehow, while the thing had its teeth in me, I found in myself a miraculous dexterity and strength, clamping my hand over its head so hard its body went limp. It clicked its bones, but it didn’t struggle.

Lo swept forward, holding up a black bag. “Quick, throw it in here,” she said, and I did. The skull face fell into the bag, curling and writhing, as if it were tumbling down a well. Lo and I watched it get smaller and smaller, before its white face winked away.

“Not bad,” she said. “For an amateur.”

I looked up at her. You’re one of them, I thought again.

“I thought ghosts could pass through walls,” I dared to say. “I thought only people and dogs could be ghosts.”

“People and dogs!” she laughed. “What a pathetic thing to say. No—the ghosts wriggle in through the cracks in our doors, no matter how carefully we make them. Little vermin spreading madness.” She clicked her tongue and examined my hand. On my finger, two drops of blood shone black in the light from the living room. “See there—now you’re going to lose your mind.”

“I’m what?” I said.

“Or maybe not. The old Sifter women, they take ghosts and boil off their flesh and grind up their bones into powder. Then they snort it. They say you can see the dead that way.”

I stared at her, still deeply concerned about the bite on my finger.

“Hey,” she said, jostling me. “Why do you look so miserable? Stop that, will you?”

“Sorry,” I said, and attempted, pathetically, to smile.

“You have such a dirty, pinched little face for a girl. Here.”

She leaned forward, bowed her lips to the bite, and gently sucked at it. I could smell her. Her big black coat, or maybe her skin, her hair. A soapy, clear-as-glass smell, as my mother had described it. Lo then raised her lips, opened her bottomless bag, and spat my blood into it. Just like that, the bite was gone, leaving only a little pulse of faded pain and a coolness on my skin.

“I’d say not to tell anyone,” Lo whispered. “But who would believe you?”

A shadow moved across the floor of the living room. I heard my mother shout my name, and the sound of her voice made me want to crawl out of my skin. Lo fled, a will-o’-wisp of white-blond hair gliding away through the dark of the trees, so uncannily smooth and fast I couldn’t make out a stride to her run. In her absence everything that had seemed wondrous about the moment dimmed back to its normal state.

My mother threw open the sliding glass door, her face swollen from crying.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

She stared at me. At first, it seemed like she was trying to sniff out a lie, but then her face crumpled, and she sank down on the threshold.

“Your daddy’s fixing to leave us. I don’t know when, but that’s where we’re headed.”

“I know,” I said.

It was my habit back then to say I know to almost anything, whether I knew or not, but my mother forgot that. She heard that remark as encouragement, a show of solidarity. Me and her against the world. She reached out to take me in her arms, saying, “Oh—but we’re still here, baby, that’s all that matters.”

Her smell overwhelmed me—lighter fluid and woodfire from when she’d burned up her art the day before. I screamed out an involuntary “No!” and pushed her away. I’m not even sure why. Then I leapt off the deck and ran into the woods.

I know she must’ve taken it personally.

I don’t remember how long I was out there, or how long I looked for Lo. I didn’t find her, of course. I went all the way out to the neighbor’s meadow, to the licheny stargazing rock a mile down the hill, where my father had taught me the names of the summer constellations, and my mother had told me the myths behind them, not Greek myths, but rather ones her grandmother had told her about magic animals and weeping women. Her stories always made my father say something like “You better listen to your mom. She knows these mountains better than I do,” but teasingly, like we all knew the stories were fiction.

Anyway, I sat there on the stargazing rock and stared at the strip of sky over the mountains for what must have been hours. It got cold. I began to shiver. I think part of me hoped Lo would come back and whisk me off to wherever she’d gone, but another part of me was already wondering if she had been a dream, or something I’d seen on TV half asleep.

For days after, my hand would feel chilled where Lo had sucked at it.

And when days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, and Lo never came back, and no strange ghoulish animals ever reappeared in the yard, I thought, Well, whatever that was, it sure didn’t change anything.

A year later, my mother’s prediction would come true: My father did leave her, and me, and then he retreated to a remote cabin deep in another valley three counties over. Didn’t see him much after that. Back then, I didn’t blame him. Like I said, he wasn’t even from here. He had arrived as a graduate student in the early ’70s to survey salamanders in the local creeks, and I don’t think he’d ever married my mother so much as he’d married a place. Now he’d surrounded himself with that place and was satisfied to be alone in it. Or rather, in the company of salamanders.

My mother, in the meantime, was impulsive and inconsistent. I don’t think she ever kept a job for more than six months. She’d work at a motel, then a casino, then a real estate office, then she’d fall in with a crew of artist friends and have a burst of productivity and sell her work, or she’d sell a little bit of it and destroy the rest in a fit of disgust. She possessed, despite her instability, a remarkable talent for making money out of thin air, whether through wheedling others or running schemes, solo or with the help of shady friends who came and went from our house. If she ever told stories anymore, it was only in service to our financial survival, and she never brought up the Winter Folk again.

In the meantime, I metamorphosed from a sad, pale, pinch-faced child into a sad, pale, pinch-faced teen. Whether Lo had been real or a product of my imagination, I thought, just to be on the safe side, that I should reject my fellow humans before they had a chance to disappoint me. I cut off my long black hair. I kept all my mother’s guardedness and distrust and disavowed her charm, which I didn’t think I had inherited anyway.

All this to say, I cultivated some hard qualities. I was not—am not—likable. I’m telling you all this now so that it doesn’t surprise you later.

Something else you need to understand about me: I’m cursed.

My mother started it. She seeded a want in me, likely before I was even born, and ever since she told me those stories, I’ve been relentlessly dissatisfied with my circumstances. I believed I was destined for better.

That’s why it meant so much to be close to a wondrous and dangerous thing.

I haven’t seen Mr. Oslin or any of the Winter Folk since my expulsion twenty-two years ago. Now I am striving to find my way back. I know my own story, but I don’t know yet how to tell it, or whether I understand it, and you should know that I’m astonished, truly astonished, at how much I still yearn for that place. Even after so many terrible things happened there.