One summer evening, after the sailboat is anchored and the campfire lit, they watch the beam from the lighthouse at the end of the pier.  Sit on the beach near the fire.  The girl and her siblings, all five of them and her mother with curled brown hair and the father too,  put marshmallows and hotdogs on sticks for roasting as a beam of light sweeps over them. Her father says there is a ghost in the lighthouse. He thinks it is the ghost of a long drowned sailor – one that wakes every night to shine his beam.    He  may be an angry ghost or a forlorn ghost but a ghost,   and  hungry too – looking for children to eat.

There are so many things that want to harm them or eat them or take them away. Or so it seems, to her, the girl on the beach with her family.  She had a habit of devouring children, the girl reads in one of her  books.  In another story children are left by their parents to wander the woods.  A witch finds them and locks them in a cage. The children were starving and finally there is milk and bread which they  eat up greedily.  But the food  is  for their plumping – so they’ll be good for the roasting. That’s what the witch cries as she pokes at them to see if they’re fattened enough.

The girl finds many stories of this, children led deep into the forest, to hunt for berries or bundle sticks for firewood, only to be left behind. Sometimes the children are clever and put white pebbles in their pockets or crumbs to leave on the ground so they can find their way out of the woods,  find their way back home.

The girl reads in another book about wolves chasing a sleigh through the Russian woods all white with snow.   The wolves close in, lean emaciated creatures, with spittle flying, as a mother throws a baby off a sled. The girl stares at the picture with the story, at the swaddled baby in the mother’s arms,. The wolves. She searches the mother’s face, the eyes, runs her finger along the straight line of the mother’s mouth. Studies the firm set of her lips.

Sometimes, when she runs with her friends in the woods, she thinks she hears moaning.  The trees shaking in the wind,  leaves all a flutter, but there is nothing. After the leaves have fallen, she thinks it is  crying or talking she hears. Or a sound like the silverware against porcelain, as if people were dining. There she is alone in the woods with a cold wind starting, and the clouds low and threatening snow. She knows the story about the kids that got lost and met the woman of woods. She’s all beautiful, with pale blue eyes. They think she will help them find their way but instead she leads them to a pond covered in thin  ice.  She tells them to follow the path across the pond. She says it will bring them home. But it doesn’t.

Children disappear. Usually always far away, and long ago but one time she reads about the hungry people in a not so far away place and not so very long ago. Right here in her local woods when the country was newly born. Or so the story goes.   When the hunger ends so many children gone. Some starved, sure, but others?

Her father points to the lighthouse, to the  moon shining  right into the light house, shining right where the ghost is standing.  She sees it, briefly. They all do, a sliver of a figure, seemingly hunched over in the moonlight. They scream, the kids. They see a something and the moon behind and then it is gone, the moon and its light and whatever it was, covered by cloud.  Gone is the ghost, her father says, gone from the lighthouse. And if not in the lighthouse then where could he be?

It is the  book about the mother and the wolves that bothers her most. It’s not so much a story as a history, supposedly all real. She wonders how it is they decide. The woman on the sleigh, was it rash and regretted?

She listens to water lapping the shore after they go to sleep in their tents, after they leave the fire; the girl and her siblings and her mother and her father. She stays awake a long time, thinking of the sailor and the beam of light.     She thinks of how her father always loves to tell a scary story. How it makes her lay awake, thinking of things in the dark, in the moonlight, in the woods.  She thinks of how they’ve gone deep into the woods, so many times, she and her siblings, her father and mother, to pick berries, to gather wood, to look for birds in the bushes.

She listens to the snoring. Could they? And she, if the wolves were chasing, if the winter was cruel, the food gone, what would she do? You know?