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"Don't push it," he says. "You've been shoving all night. That never works."

"That's the most annoying true thing you've ever said."

"Stop holding it."

"How?"

"Same way you'd stop holding anything." His thumb moves once across my knuckles. My blood is humming.

"Decide it's not yours to carry."

So I do.

It isn't a release. It's a drop.

Everything I've been paying out for three days comes back into me at once, all of it, with nowhere to go, and for about two seconds I’m the biggest thing in this county.

I can feel every line for a mile.

Every doorway, every window sash, every property line, the seam under the road where the old town used to end, the closed places under the frost. Wards laid decades ago by people who are dead now, still holding, still humming. Hundreds of them, a whole net of held breath thrown over this town like a sheet over furniture.

It's the most beautiful thing I’ve ever touched and I don't have enough hands for it.

Outside, six wolves go down on the grass at the same time.

Every window in the house drops in its sash. The wood stove gasps. Sid comes off the third stair sideways with all his hair up.

And out at the edge of it, at the top of the hill on the west side of town, there's a line so big the others are string next to it, and it's already open about a finger's width.

Then it lets go of me and I'm on Gage's kitchen floor.

You are extremely bad at this. Sid's voice, from somewhere near my ear.

Sit up before he carries you.

The Hollis mansion looks like someone ran out in the middle of getting dressed.

Half the ballroom is under dust sheets and half of it is candles. Two men on ladders are running wire along the picture rail. Someone's playing a radio. There's a folding table by the door with a coffee urn and a box of the bakery's day-old cider donuts, and a woman with a clipboard tells me four separate times that the masks are what everyone's been asking about.

I hand over eleven crates of masks and I don’t look at the floor.

I’ve looked at the floor twice. Underneath the parquet, under the joists, under whatever's under that, the line I felt from Gage's kitchen goes wall to wall like a river seen from a plane.

Two days out from a night when the veil goes thin, this town is holding its masquerade directly on top of the biggest seam in it.

"Nobody knows," I say to Gage in the doorway. "They're serving donuts."

"They've held it here for forty years."

"That's not comforting in the way you think it is."

Cass takes the empty crates out front and pulls away with a wave and one finger off the wheel. Gage and I take the last two around the back, past the kitchen door, out to where the truck sits at the edge of the gravel with the orchard behind it.

It's four in the afternoon and going dark already. That's the part of October that I never liked. You lose most of the day while you still need it.

"You want a donut," Gage says.

"You bought donuts?"