The amber lights overhead were the cheap kind, strung tent to tent on extension cord, the bulbs the size of crab apples and the same color as cough drops. They swayed because the wind was up. Everything was swaying. The hand-lettered banners. The fringe on a fortune-teller's awning. A balloon octopus tethered above the funnel cake stand, bobbing like it wanted down.

Alex Chen had been on the festival grounds for forty-one minutes and had so far collected: three menus, one flyer for a lecture on cryptid taxonomy, the smell of fryer oil in her hair, and nothing she could file. She had her notebook out as a kind of social uniform. People talked to a person with a notebook. They stopped talking to a person with a recorder, which was the lesson she kept relearning and the reason her recorder, a thing the size of a disposable lighter, was at the moment sitting on a picnic table near the kettle corn line, red light on, capturing whatever it was capable of capturing without her.

Alex was thirty-two and had spent three years at a publication that paid her to drive to places like this and come back with a story. The stories were usually small. A man who claimed his barn was haunted by a Civil War mule. A woman who said the lake near her house breathed. Alex liked the small ones. You could fit your hands around them. You could check them. The Shadow People were not small.

She had heard the phrase six times since the gate. A teenager in a velvet cape said it to another teenager in a velvet cape, laughing. A man selling pewter pendants said it while not quite looking at her, the way you mention weather you don't trust. A woman at the cider stand said her cousin had seen one near the porta-potties on Thursday night, and then said cousin wasn't here tonight, and then changed the subject to apples.

The pattern Alex was noting, the one she had not yet written down because writing it down would commit her to it, was this. People brought it up. Then, the second she asked a follow-up, they stopped bringing it up. They smiled. They said something like, oh, you know how festivals are. They drifted toward the next booth. It was not refusal. Refusal would have been easier. It was something gentler and more practiced, a soft door closing. Her phone buzzed against her hip. Marcus. Anything yet. No question mark. Marcus didn't waste them. She was composing a reply that was honest enough to be useful and vague enough to buy her the night when a hand closed around the sleeve of her jacket.

The hand was small and very cold and shaking. The woman attached to it wore a crow mask pushed up onto her forehead, the beak pointing at the sky, her own face beneath it flushed and wet at the eyes. She was maybe twenty-five. She was maybe forty. The lights made everyone look like a different age every time they swung. There, the woman said. She didn't say hello. She pointed. Alex followed the point. Between two vendor tents, a stitched-leather one on the left and a tarot reader's on the right, there was a gap. A normal gap. The kind of gap you'd expect, three feet wide, grass underfoot, the back of the festival visible through it where the porta-potties stood in their blue row.

Except it was darker in there than the geometry allowed. The amber lights were right above it. They were swinging right over it. The light should have been falling into that gap and it was not. The gap held its own evening inside it, a small private dusk, and when Alex tried to look directly at it her eyes wanted to slide off, the way they slide off the sun, except this was the opposite of the sun. Do you feel it, the woman said. Do you feel how cold. Do you feel how your eyes don't want to. Yes, Alex said, because she did, and because saying yes was the fastest way to keep her talking. What did you see, Alex said. When did you see it. Was it tonight.

She was reaching, slowly, for the recorder, and then remembering the recorder was on the picnic table behind her, and then reaching instead for her phone, thumb already finding the voice memo app, and the woman saw the motion. The woman saw the motion and her face did something Alex would think about later, on the drive home, in the shower, at her desk. Her face closed. Not in anger. In apology. No, the woman said. No, no, I shouldn't. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have. Wait, Alex said. The woman was already moving.

Across the midway, on the picnic table by the kettle corn line, the small red light on Alex's recorder kept burning. A family sat down at the other end of the table with paper cones of popcorn. A kid kicked the bench. Above them, the nearest string light, the one directly over the table, gave a small dry tick like an insect, and a low hum moved through the air, not loud, not the generators, lower than the generators, a sound you felt in the bridge of your nose more than heard. The hum lasted maybe four seconds. The light ticked again and went out. The hum stopped at the same instant, clean, as if someone had lifted a needle. The family didn't look up.

Alex pushed through a clot of people in animal masks. She got back to where the woman had been, between the leather tent and the tarot tent, where the gap still sat doing its quiet wrong thing with the light. The woman was gone. In the trampled grass where she'd been standing, a single black feather lay on its side. The banners above were moving. The fringe on the awning was moving. The balloon octopus was tugging at its string. Down at ankle height, in the churn of footprints and mud and dropped napkins, the feather sat perfectly still.