I studied the man's words with a skeptical squint. He didn't turn toward me, focusing instead upon the tree at the edge of the clearing, as he had since his arrival. I wanted to say that he was too old for me, that he had stumbled, quite literally, into the wrong (or right, depending how you looked at it) territory.

No, I thought, not too old. Not yet, never too old for this. And I'm picking up the slang of the trade. I'll be getting that from Dr. Trent soon, I'm sure of it.

He didn't turn to look at me, though he must have heard my sigh.

"I am tired," I said. "What would be the point of these fantasies? You'd just disappoint us both."

"Your fantasy is my desire," he said, still facing away from me, and he quoted that old line from the outside world with the same whispered reverence as if he had been an initiate for fifty years. "If your fetish could speak, she'd tell you exactly the same."

I snorted. "Listen to yourself. You have the literal poetry of a harem boy. How do you expect me to believe this?"

"You don't," he said, and then he turned. I winced at the sight of his face. He was old, but he was not an old man. His face was not blemished and it was not dressed in scars. He had a good complexion and he had a good build, just from looking at him. But his eyes were old, gray-filtered and heavy-drifting, and they swam with the same haunted vagueness as all the rest of him. To see those eyes in the face of a man barely out of his twenties was a shock; to see any eyes at all rendered that way, that was a shock.

All the same, they were worse than his face. His face was human, as human as mine was. I had seen him in mirrors, by the way, and he undeniably looked like the kind of man you would want to have as a friend, if you did not mind that people would tell you that you were wrong for him. His face was atypical, yes, but not that atypical; not weak or unsure. His mouth was not a broken row of scars into which he had once fixed a smile.

"What could I tell you?" he said. "Is this better than silence?"

"And if I still don't believe you?" I said.

"If you don't believe me," he said, "then you'll never believe me."

I pressed my teeth into the inside of my cheek. There was an infinitesimal ridge of bone there, irregular and jagged, prickling my tongue. Ick, I thought. Ick, ick, ick.

"Let's sleep on it," I said, and I turned away.

"It'll only get worse," he said.

"Let's sleep on it," I said again.

In the morning I found him awake at the edge of the clearing, staring at our tree with a look of incredulity.

"It moved," he said.

"It does that. It's an old tree," I said. "It has a mind of its own."

"There were people in the forest yesterday," he said. "There were house-keepers, and they ate."

"The people can't last long," I said, though the look on his face changed the word to worse. "It's not that far. A few trips from the clearing and you'll be over your head."

"There was only one woman," he said, and he looked up at me, eyes wide, wanting me to comment.

"And she took our clothes," I said. "They really like this wood, you see. They like to take away all the things."

"You move forward and they come and they kill you," he said, and the wonder and beauty of his voice, even in this fearful tone, fueled my distraction. I liked the way he spoke. I liked the way it felt to hear the words, coming from him, to hear him speak. "Do you know anything about the plants here? Are they poisonous? What do they do once they take your clothes?"

"I don't have any answers," I said, and I looked away, into the forest, and there was nothing to see. "I don't know why they do that. I don't know why the trees move. They can't get you if you run away, and if they do take away your clothes, at least you can still run away."

"We're stranded here now," he said. "We'll be here a long time. Until you answer me, we live here. You can't answer my questions now anyway."

I moved on.

He followed me and I could not stop looking at his face as he stalked beside me. His eyes were so green and aching; only he seemed able to see past the trees and into the forest of his own feelings, toward anything real and true.

"I believe you," I said, and I patted his shoulder. I moved on again.

"You don't know anything," he said, and his voice was soft and menacing, and I pulled away from him, but he snaked out his arms and he moved around my side and he was on the path, and he passed me.

Icy spider slime. Icy, icky slime.

The path stood straight and empty.

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