Outer Dark

by Cormac McCarthy

Whoa now, he said. Which way we a-goin here? He recrossed the creek and picked up the man’s trace in a furrow of crushed ferns that led into the woods. Ah, he said. We a-takin to the deep pineys.

If crows had not risen from a field she might never have looked that way to see two hanged men in a tree like gross chimes. She stood for a moment watching them, clutching the bundle of clothes, wondering at such dark work in the noon of day while all about sang summer birds. She went on, walking softly. Once she looked back. Nothing moved in that bleak tree.

Everbody’s subject to get in a ditch sometime or an-othern, Holme said. I ain’t lookin for nobody to be sorry for me.

She closed the door and went down the path to the gate and into the road, shivering in the cold starlight, under vega and the waterserpent.