winter cave

Sheer beauty, violet elixir, medium of dreams …

To think that I once dragged Cley from this drug’s clutches, haughtily crushing vials, and admonishing, with comic asides, against his desire to sleep his life away cocooned by its illusions. What I knew then was poison for him, I know now, in my desire to conjure him from the elements of the Beyond, is the sap that will drive his story from the root that lies buried in my mind, down my arm, across my wrist, through my fingers, out of the pen, and into the sunlight of clean, white paper.

It bubbles my veins, ripples the convolutions of my brain, and sets fire to the five chambers of my demon heart. Here, the first tendril of ink begins to sprout, curling inward and out, wrapping around nothing to define a spiraling plant that grows with the speed of light. It is everywhere at once, bearing heavy white fruit that splits open amidst the rushing wind of passing seasons, releasing a flock of screaming, blind birds. They fly upward with full determination to smash against the ceiling of the sky and vaporize into a thousand clouds that form one cloud. It rains, and the green land stretches, in mere moments, into a wilderness so immense that it is impossible even to conceive of crossing it.

There, like a tiny insect on the head of a giant whose brow is the mightiest of mountain ranges, is Cley, where I left him, in a clearing of tall oaks. Beside him, that insignificant black dot, is Wood, the dog with one ear.

Closer now and closer still until I can make out his broad-brimmed black hat, sporting three wild-turkey feathers, reminders of his first kill in the Beyond. Beneath it, his chestnut hair is long and twisted together in the back to form a crude braid tied at the end with a lanyard that was once a demon’s tendon. A full beard descends across his chest. Amidst this profluent tangle jut a nose and cheeks, the left scarred by the nick of a barbed tail. He stares northward with unnerving determination, as if he can already see, thousands of miles ahead of him, his destination.

I have seen scarecrows in the fields surrounding Latrobia who are better dressed than this hunter. Old brown coat, removed from a skeleton back in the ruins of Anamasobia, like the hide of some weary, wrinkled beast. The flannel shirt, dark blue with a field of golden stars, he found in the intact dresser drawer of one Frod Geeble’s rooms, which lay behind the destruction of a tavern. A pair of overalls. The boots have been Cley’s all along, and in the left one is the stone knife he assured me cut with more grace and precision than a physiognomist’s scalpel. The rifle, luckiest find of all, is for him like a marriage partner. He sleeps with it, whispers to it, cares for it with a genuine devotion. When it comes time to kill, he kills with it, his shot growing truer and truer until he can drill a demon in midflight, dead center between the eyes, at a hundred yards. His backpack holds boxes of shells, but the Beyond is limitless.

That dog, potential insanity on four legs, can be as calm as a dreamless sleeper until danger drops from the trees and then his placid, near-human smile wrinkles back into a snapping wound machine. The crafty beast learns to lunge for my brethren’s unprotected areas—wing membrane, soft belly, groin, or tail. I, myself, witnessed that hound tear off an attacking demon’s member, slip through its legs, and then shred a wing to tatters in his escape. He has an uncanny sense of certainty about him in all situations, as if in each he is like a dancer who has practiced that one dance all his days. Wood reads Cley like a book, understands his hand signals and the subtle shifting of his eyes. There is no question he will die for the hunter, and I am convinced he will go beyond death for him—a guardian angel the color of night, muscled and scarred and harder to subdue than a guilty conscience.

The hunter whistled once, moving off into the autumn forest, and the dog followed three feet behind and to the left. In the barren branches above, a coven of crows sat in silent judgment while a small furry creature with the beak of a bird scurried away into the wind-shifted sea of orange leaves. From off to the south came the sound of something dying as they proceeded into the insatiable distance of the Beyond, their only compass a frayed and faded green veil.

The contents of Cley’s pack as they were dictated to me by the Beyond: 1 ball of twine; 4 candles; 2 boxes of matches; 8 boxes of shells (1 dozen bullets per box); 1 metal pot; 1 small fry pan; 1 knife and 1 fork; thread and needle; a sack of medicinal herbs; a book, found among the charred remains of Anamasobia (the cover and first few pages of which have been singed black, obliterating its title and author); 3 pair of socks; 4 pair of underwear; 1 blanket.

The days were a waking nightmare of demon slaughter, for they came for him from everywhere, at any moment, swooping out of trees, charging along the ground on all fours with wings flapping. He felled them with the gun, and, when not quick enough with this, he reached for the stone knife, smashing it through fur, muscle, and breastbone to burst their hearts. Wild blood soaked into his clothes, and he learned to detect their scent on the breeze. Claws ripped his jacket, scarred the flesh of his chest and neck and face, and when he met them in hand-to-hand combat, he screamed in a fearsome voice as if he too had become some creature of the wilderness.

The spirit that fired his intuition so that his shots were clean and allowed him to move with thoughtless elegance when wielding the knife was a strong desire he did not fully understand and could not name. It forced him to overcome great odds and demanded with an unswerving righteousness that he survive.

Cley hid beneath a willow and aimed at a white deer drinking from a stream. Cracking branches, the prey bolted, a moment of confusion, and a demon dropped from above onto the hunter’s back. The rifle flew from his hands as he smelled the rancid breath and deep body stink now riding him, searching for a place to sink its fangs. He supported the weight of his attacker long enough to flip the beast over his head. It landed on its wings as he reached for his knife. The demon whipped at his forearm with barbed tail, and the sting weakened his grip. The knife fell and stabbed the earth. The dog was there, seizing in his jaws the demon’s tail. The creature bellowed, arched backward in agony, and this moment was all the hunter needed. He retrieved the fallen blade and, with a brutal slice, half severed the creature’s head from its body.

From that point on, no matter how many he killed in an ambush, no matter how long the process took, he decapitated each and every one. The thought of it makes me nauseous, but I see him cracking their horns from their foreheads and piercing their eyes with the points of their own weaponry. “Even these foul creatures can know fear,” he told the dog, who sat at a distance, baffled by the curious ritual.

He had learned that demons do not hunt at night. At twilight he built a fire next to a stream. Placing six or seven large stones in the flames, he would leave them until they glowed like coals. Before turning in, he would fish them from the fire with a stick and bury them in a shallow pit the length of his body. Their heat would radiate upward and keep him warm for much of the night.

Dinner was venison along with the greens he had gathered in his daily journey. Vegetation grew scarcer by the day as autumn dozed toward winter. He shared the meat in equal parts with the dog.

When the stars were shining in the great blackness above, he took the book without a name from his pack. Then he lay down by the fire, the dog next to him, and strained his sight, reading aloud in a whisper. The curious subject matter of the large volume made little sense. It dealt with the nature of the soul, but the writing was highly symbolic and the sentences spiraled in their meaning until their meaning left them like the life of a demon with a knife in its heart.

The flames subsided and he made his bed with the stones. Lying always faceup—it was his belief that one should never turn one’s back on the Beyond—he searched the universe for shooting stars. Falling branches, bat squeals, ghostly birdcalls like a woman with her hair on fire, snarls and bellows of pain were the lullaby of the wilderness. The wind wafted across his face. A star fell somewhere hundreds of miles to the north, perhaps crashing down into Paradise, and then he was there in his dreams, watching it burn.

There were trees so wide around the trunk and so insanely tall that they were more massive than towers that had once stood in the Well-Built City. The roots of these giants jutted out of the ground high enough to allow Cley passage beneath them without his bending over. Bark of a smaller species was a light fur that felt to the touch like human flesh. Another tree used its branches like hands with which to grab small birds and stuff them down into its wooden gullet. A thin blue variety rippled in the breeze; a thicket of streamers with no seemingly solid structure to keep them vertical. Most disturbing to Cley was when the wind passed through these undulating stalks—a haunting sound of laughter that expressed joy more perfectly than any word or music ever had.

The forest was teeming with herds of white deer, and even an errant shot had a chance of felling one. Flesh from this animal was sweet and very filling. Cley discovered that its liver, when stuffed with wild onions and slowly roasted, was the finest thing he had ever tasted.

Adders with rodent faces. Wildcats, the color of roses, emitted the scent of cinnamon. Small-tusked wolves covered with scales instead of fur. The wilderness was a beautiful repository of bad dreams that often rendered monsters.

Cley had lost track of how many demons he had slain, how many wounds he had dressed, how many deer livers he had devoured. He was startled from his gruesome work on the corpse of an enemy by a tiny fleck of white that moved before his eyes. Looking up, past the barren branches overhead, he watched the snow falling. “Winter,” he said to Wood, and with that one word, he felt the cold on his hands, the chill of the wind at his back. His breath came as steam, and he wondered how long he had ignored the signs of autumn’s death, so caught up, himself, in killing.

The icy presence of the new season now made itself doubly known in payment for the hunter’s previous disregard. The frigid wind stole the feeling from his hands, and he prayed he would not have to fire the rifle in defense against an attack. It seemed as if ice had seeped inside him and was forming crystals in his bones. His mind yawned with daydreams of the fireplace back at his home in Wenau.

The only shred of hope the winter brought was the disappearance of the demons. For two days following the first light snow, they were strangely absent. He wondered if they were hibernating.

He and the dog gathered dry branches with which to build a fire. They heaped them up in front of the mouth of a cave, and then he rummaged through his pack for a box of matches. Cupping his hands and using his body as a shield, he managed to ignite the barest tip of a stick. Once the tongue of flame took hold, the fire’s hunger overcame the winter’s best attempts to extinguish it. Smoke swirled upward as he carefully placed the box of matches back in his pack.

He fashioned a torch from a large branch and stuck its end in the fire till it burned brightly. Taking the stone knife from his boot, he edged forward into the opening in the hill. The thought of discovering hibernating demons in the closed, dark place made him shudder and begin to sweat.

It was warm inside. He called out, “Hello,” in order to judge the size of the vault by the echo it produced. The sound blossomed out and returned with news of considerable space. As if his voice had lit the chamber, upon the word’s return, his vision cut through the dark. A perfectly empty rock room with a ceiling tall enough for standing. Continuing forward, he found, after twenty feet, that the opening narrowed in height and width as he proceeded into the hill. Following the shaft to where it turned sharply downward into blackness, he was satisfied that the cave was free of beasts. He turned and looked out through the mouth. There, in the gray light of day, sat Wood, head cocked to one side, staring at the hole that had devoured his companion.

Cley carried his pack inside and moved the location of the fire to just inside the cave’s entrance. He wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down on the hard floor. The dog followed him but whined and sniffed every inch of rock. To ease Wood’s uncertainty about being within the earth, Cley took the book from his pack and read a few pages out loud. As the words streamed forth, the dog stopped pacing and curled up beside his master.

Snow fell, and the wind whistled through the forest, whipping the face of the hill. The demons were asleep, and the cold could not sting him in the shelter of the rock womb. His bones began to thaw. Now that he did not have to kill, all he could think about was the killing he had done. In the wind he heard the savage war cry he had used when rushing toward demons with only his knife.

“What have I become?” he asked the dog, who was already asleep. He put the book away and searched through his belongings to find the green veil. The feel of it clutched in his fist told him he would never return from the Beyond.

Four or five armfuls of branches and kindling had to be gathered every day to feed the flame’s appetite. At times, the wind forced the smoke back into the vault instead of carrying it away, and it grew so thick that Cley and the dog would have to leave in order to draw a decent breath. Still, they tended to it scrupulously like a beloved infant. It was a marked tragedy when it died, for with each instance of its failure the store of matches was reduced.

The blankets and belongings were moved to the very back of the chamber, where it narrowed, and the shaft led down into the unknown. A warm current of air traveled up from deep in the earth. At times, Cley removed his shirt and lay about in just his overalls. Outside, the world was brutally cold. The sun barely generated enough heat even at midday to cut through the frost and bitter winds. The days were brief, and the nights seemed to last for weeks.

The store of bullets was quickly diminishing, so Cley cut a long, thick branch from which to carve a bow. When it was finished, he strung it with deer sinew. Through endless and uneventful nights, by the precious light of a candle, he perfected the craft of shaping arrows. To the backs of them, he tied feathers to balance against the barbed tips he carved from animal bone. The bow was tall and powerful, and over a week’s time, he became accurate with it. Still, it could not kill as decisively as the rifle.

This change in weaponry heralded a change in diet from venison to rabbit, squirrel, and the meat of a slow-moving amorphous blob of a furry mammal with a tapered snout and pitiful, human eyes. Cley named this slothful beast a geeble after the tavern owner from Anamasobia. Its meat was bland and fatty, but its coat made a fine pair of mittens and warm leggings.

They were returning to the cave from the eastern pond through a stand of blue, wavering trees. Cley was preoccupied with thoughts of the nameless book. The soul it had told him was that irreducible, ineradicable essence of one’s being that was both the element that defined individuality and also the very mind of God. He thought of delicate dandelion seed on the wind, of laughter, of omniscience atomized like a spray of perfume, a floating ghost egg, a fart. The concept slipped through his ear and away on the wind.

Wood barked, the clipped near-whisper sound the dog used to indicate danger. Looking up, Cley reached toward the geeble-hide quiver he wore across his back. An animal stood twenty yards in front of him next to the undulating trunk of a blue tree. The sight of it brought him up short and set his heart racing.

It was a cinnamon cat, one of those illusive red-coated lynx that Cley had only seen out of the corners of his eyes on a few occasions. He knew it better by scent than sight, because in its wake it left a sweet aroma like those he remembered emanating from the bakeries of the Well-Built City. Even in dead of winter, he smelled its disarming perfume, and it spoke more of home and safety than the presence of a predator. The cat crouching before him now was larger than any of the others he had glimpsed briefly. He raised his right hand to indicate to Wood to remain still.

Nocking an arrow in place, he pulled back on the bowstring. He was unsure how dangerous these cats could be, but he had on occasion come across the results of their hunting—corpses of deer that held the sweet scent with bellies split open and all the internal organs devoured. The arrow flew. Cley smiled until the shaft bounced off harmlessly onto the snow. The cat never moved. Another arrow traveled as true a path as the first and also dropped to the ground.

“I think it’s dead,” Cley said.

The dog barked, and together they slowly approached. He slung the bow over his shoulder and leaned down for his knife. Wood was the first to reach the lynx, and he licked the creature’s face.

“Frozen solid,” the hunter said as he stepped up and tapped the cat on the head with his blade. It was like hitting the head of a marble statue. “Winter’s trophy,” he said. The corpse was too heavy to carry back to the cave, so he marked the spot and the trail he followed home.

The following day, he returned, started a fire next to it, thawed it, and carefully removed the skin. This process took him the better part of a day, but he did not rush, hoping the pelt would make a good-sized cloak when he was finished. Back at the cave, he cured the inside of the hide with hot ash. When he was finished, he had a beautifully scented garment with a tooth-fringed hood, bearing pointed ears and empty sockets. The dog sometimes wrestled it around, unsure if it was dead since neither of them had killed it.

The deer had disappeared. All he carried was the carcass of a starved squirrel. Cley stood in a thicket of trees at sunset, listening to the wind. He marked the ever-decreasing length of the days, the relentless drop in temperature, and wondered if the wilderness was inching toward total, static darkness, like death. Then the dog barked, and he continued toward the cave, realizing that for a moment he had forgotten who he was.

On a frigid afternoon, when the sun had made a rare appearance, a black reptilian wolf dashed across the clearing where Cley had felled a rabbit and snatched it away. The hunter yelled at the injustice, and Wood gave chase. The lizard skin of the creature’s body offered a good defense against the dog’s teeth and claws. The rivals rolled in the snow, one snapping and growling, the other hissing and spitting—a confusion of black in a cloud of white powder.

Striking with the speed and cold cunning of a snake, the wolf gored Wood in the chest with one of its short, pointed tusks. The dog dropped to the snow as Cley shot an arrow into the sleek marauder’s side, sending it yelping into the underbrush. The hunter lifted his companion from the ever-growing pool of blood. Through deep snow, he trudged over a mile back to the cave, with the dog draped across his arms. By the time they reached their sanctuary, Wood was unconscious, and Cley feared that the wolf’s tusk might have held some poison.

He treated the wound with an herbal remedy he had carried from Wenau. Then he fed the fire and laid the dog down on his blanket next to it. Stroking Wood’s head, the hunter begged him not to die.

Late in the night, the dog began to shiver violently, and Cley suspected that death was very near. He removed his cat cloak and draped it over the blanket. Then, from out in the dark, as if at a great distance, came the wind-muffled sound of a dog barking.

“Come, boy,” Cley called, and whistled as he always did in the forest to call his companion to his side. He yelled frantically for hours. As the day came on, the barking subsided, and then suddenly was gone.

Wood survived the attack, but could do nothing but lie on the blanket near the fire and stare straight ahead. Cley felt guilty leaving him alone, but they needed food. He discovered that an integral part of the process was missing when he hunted alone. The frustration marred his aim, and he cursed out loud, scattering whatever game might be nearby. He was embarrassed to return to the cave in the evenings with only a geeble or a few crows.

Although he was weary, he fed the fire and cooked whatever pittance he had brought. Dicing the meat as small as he could, he fed the dog one piece at a time, then poured a little water into his companion’s mouth with each serving. By the time Cley had a chance to eat, it was late and he had little appetite.

Wood was most at ease when the hunter read. On the night he recited the section of the book that made the argument that thoughts were as real as rocks, the dog stirred and sat up for a few moments.

An enormous thicket of giant, gnarled trees grew so closely together that in order to pass between their trunks, the hunter had to turn sideways and wriggle through. Inside the natural structure, which arched overhead like the domed ceiling he remembered from the Ministry of Justice building in the Well-Built City, there was a huge clearing where the wind was all but forgotten. The branches tangled together forty feet overhead, and the trunks were like walls. Here, there was only a dusting of snow on the ground, whereas outside it was piled three feet deep. As little of the morning sun penetrated as did the snow, but in the dim light he saw, hanging above him from the roof of arching limbs, odd brown sacs, hundreds of them, each a man-sized fruit. He felt a tingling at the back of his neck, beads of sweat broke on his forehead, as his eyes adjusted to the shadows. They were demons, sleeping, suspended upside down and draped in their wings.

Slowly, without breathing, he stepped backward and, as quietly as possible, slipped out between the trunks where he had entered. Once clear of the nest, he smiled and began to search for kindling. As he gathered fallen limbs and twigs, he wished the dog was with him.

An hour later, fifty yards from the enclosure, he had a small fire burning on a plot of ground he had cleared of snow. He thrust the end of the torch he had made into the flames until it caught. His eyes were wide, and his chest heaved with excitement. Turning, he headed back toward the natural dome. As he approached the wall of trees, he stopped and reached the torch toward them. Before the fire could lick the trunks, he hesitated. Minutes passed and he stared at the flame as if hypnotized. Then, sighing, he opened his hand and let the glowing brand fall into the snow. A thin trail of smoke curled upward, and he walked away.

The eastern pond was frozen solid, and his luckless excursions in search of game took him to its side most distant from the cave. One day, he tracked through the snow the prints of what appeared to be a type of deer he had not yet encountered—something much larger than the white variety. The promise of its size drew him farther into undiscovered territory. A few hours after noon, a storm suddenly swept down from the north. At first, he hoped the weather might pass, and he kept going since he had not killed anything. The sun receded, the storm grew in intensity, and he finally realized he would have to turn back empty-handed.

Hours flew by before he reached the edge of the pond. In order to save time, he decided to cross it. Somewhere in the middle of that frozen tract, the snow began to drive down so fiercely that he couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him. He pushed on, never knowing if he had left the pond or where he was in relation to the cave. Like a sleepwalker, he lurched along without direction, and as the snow drifted upon the drifts that had already begun to harden, walking became difficult. Fear mounted in his mind, and all he could picture was the frozen corpse of the cinnamon cat, whose pelt he wore on his back. The sky grew dark with night as he inched along, unknowingly turning in wide circles.

Thoughts became clouds as dreams and memories flew together and then melted into snow. The wind insisted that he lie down and rest. “You are tired,” it said, “and the white bed is soft and warm.” Above the howl of the gale, he heard the distant sound of a dog barking, and it frightened him, because he knew the phantom noise meant the approach of death. “You must continue,” he told himself, but the wind was right. He was tired, and the snow at his feet appeared a pure white comforter in which he might wrap himself. The bow fell from his hand, and he dropped to his knees in a deep drift that held him upright in that position.

Death came for him, blowing down from the north—a swirling swarm of darkness mixing in with the falling snow. He saw it in his mind’s eye, he heard its soothing voice above the roar of the storm. It gathered itself up before him where he knelt, becoming a statue for the Beyond. The ice on his eyelashes cracked as he opened them to see the hunter whose prey he had become.

Wood bounded forward and rammed Cley in the chest, knocking him onto his back. The dog licked his face, thawing the ice jam of his confusion. The hunter grabbed his bow and found the strength to stand. Whistling weakly, he called, “Come, boy,” but the dog was already in the lead, showing him the way to safety. The faster they traveled, the more body heat he generated, reviving the circulation to those extremities that had begun to go numb. The relentless sting in his hands and feet was a welcome sign.

No sooner, it seemed, had they begun their journey home than the wind eased and the snow diminished to the lightest flurry. Before long, the moon glared down, offering light by which to mark their way. Wood stopped for a moment in a clearing in order for Cley to rest. The Beyond was hushed with that certain calm that follows the rage of blizzards. The trees were fringed with white, and the drifts were wind-curled at their tops like ocean waves.

As they were about to push on, Cley saw something moving among the trees to his right. The figure was large and shadowy, and the only thing that gave an indication as to what it might be was the reflection of moonlight off the bone white of its antlers. “Could this be the beast I was tracking all day?” he wondered as he let his mittens drop and reached for an arrow.

His hands still had little feeling, but the bow was so familiar that he was able to place the arrow. Wood noticed what he was doing and immediately crouched in the snow. Pulling the bowstring back was difficult, and his arm shook with the exertion. The thing in the woods blew a gust of air from its nostrils, and judging from where that cloud of steam gathered in the glow from above, he figured the distance to the chest, aimed, and released. A deep, rasping squeal cut the stillness of the night.

Wood was off like a shot, circling in among the trees to drive the creature out so that Cley could get off another shot. An enormous buck broke into the clearing just as the hunter was drawing back on the bowstring. As the stag got its footing and crouched to dash off to the left, he saw his other arrow jutting from the animal’s thick neck and aimed lower. The new arrow hit the mark, directly between shoulder blade and ribs. The animal went down hard, sending up a shower of new snow. Kicking its back legs, it squealed miserably in a strange, near-human voice, and thrashed back and forth.

In an instant, Cley had the stone knife in his hand. As soon as the stag rested from its death throes, he approached it from behind. The legs of the creature gave a few more quivering kicks, and then the hunter lunged in and sliced it across the throat. The life had barely left it before Wood lapped at the blood-dyed snow.

The carcass was too heavy to carry back, and it was a certainty the wolves would devour it by morning. It was as big as a small horse, with a rack that numbered ten points on either side. Cley had no choice but to take whatever he could carry. There was no telling if the Beyond might serve them venison again until spring. He cut two enormous steaks from its flanks, enough for a week’s worth of meals, and they trudged back toward the cave.

It took all of his remaining energy to build another fire, and he heaped on their entire store of kindling and branches so that he would not have to tend it through the night. With his hunting cloak and mittens still on, he wrapped himself in the blanket and passed out by the shaft at the back of the cave. He slept hard, without dreaming, for what seemed an entire day, before waking to the sound of his own voice, shouting. Immediately, he fell back to sleep again.

He came to, late in the morning, but of which day he wasn’t sure. His leg and arm muscles ached fiercely, but he was pleased to find that all of his toes and fingers had survived exposure to the storm. Wood approached and he put his arms around the dog.

“Venison, for you,” he said, and laughed at the thought of having beaten the Beyond one more time.

Passing the cooling embers of the fire, he walked through the entrance of the cave and into the day. The sky told him that snow would fall again before night. He dropped to his knees and began digging through the ice-crusted white in order to uncover the meat he had hastily buried. The lack of tracks indicated his kill had been safe from scavengers. After digging to the frozen earth in one spot, he found it wasn’t there, and realized he had misjudged the hiding place. He set to digging in another spot a few feet away. Again, nothing was revealed. Frantically, he worked in spot after spot with twice the vigor. An hour later, the entire area of a six-yard arc in front of the cave mouth had been exhumed. Throughout the entire excavation, he found not a single drop of blood, not a single hair from the hide that would have covered one side of each steak.

Cley cursed angrily. The dog came out of the cave and stood in front of him, but turned to the side, looking out of the corner of his eye.

“Did we not kill a huge buck last night?” he asked Wood.

The dog didn’t move.

He thought back to the scene in the moonlit clearing—the shadow of the creature, its breath turned to steam, the perfect accuracy of his shots, the sound of its last breath when he cut its throat. Reaching down into his boot, he retrieved the stone blade and inspected it for any evidence of a recent kill. It was spotless.

From all through the forest came the sound of branches cracking beneath the newly fallen snow—the sound of the Beyond, laughing.

Wood recovered fully from his wound, though it left a jagged scar across his chest. The days came and went with a lethargic monotony—tending the fire, hunting, sitting through long hours in the cave, staring out at a perfectly white world. Wild imagination was more abundant than food, and the companions’ diet consisted of hunger occasionally punctuated by a thin rabbit haunch and snow soup or a geeble stew that when thoroughly cooked was no more than fat pudding. Now and then they dined on roots or, if luck was with them, a large crow. In addition to daydreaming and not eating, they spent their time reading the nameless book of the soul. The tome had lost all meaning for Cley, but he continued with it, as it was the closest thing he had to a human conversation. Each night, the dog took its weight in his jaws and carried it over to the hunter. Wood had grown dependent on the whispered droning of the words in order to fall asleep.

After the dog dozed off, Cley sometimes took the green veil from his pack, rolled it into a ball, and held it out in front of him in the palm of his hand. Occasionally, he was so enchanted by the tattered scrap of material that he forgot to tend the fire. These eruptions of emotion, of memory, were like tiny islands in the overwhelming sea of sun-starved boredom that was the winter. It was repetition and mundane ritual that kept them alive. They partook of these with a stoic determination that eschewed even the vaguest desire for spring.

Cley opened his eyes and looked to the cave’s mouth to catch a glimpse of the weather, but all he could make out was a dim, blue glow. The rest of the den was cast in deep shadow. A wall of ice had formed, separating them from the world. It seemed impossible that so much snow could have fallen in a six-hour period. The fire had gone out, and ice was beginning to form along the walls where the opening had been. He took his knife in hand and attacked the frozen boundary, chipping away in hopes that it was merely a thin crust, on the other side of which he would find soft snow.

After an hour of hard work, it became clear that the knife was useless. All he had to show for his effort was an indentation the size of a fist. It was obvious that the temperature outside had plummeted below anything they had yet experienced. He turned his head and put his ear to the frozen barrier. Somewhere, far away, as if in another world, he heard the fierce cry of the storm blowing through the forest.

“Buried alive,” he said to Wood as he slid the knife back into his boot. The dog walked over and stood next to him.

He considered lighting a fire in an attempt to melt the smooth blue wall but realized that if it did not melt fast enough, he and the dog would be suffocated by the smoke. He entertained the possibility of waiting until the storm ended, hoping the sun would thaw the obstruction. That could take days, though, and they had nothing to eat but a few scraps of cooked rabbit and a handful of wild sweet potatoes, already beginning to rot.

Going to his pack, he retrieved a candle and lit it. The glow of the flame pushed the dark into the corners and alleviated the grave nature of the situation for a few moments. He let a pool of wax drip onto the floor and fixed the candle in it. With legs crossed, he sat back against the rock wall and tried to concentrate while Wood paced at the entrance, growling at the ice.

He knew he did not want to wait the storm out. There were no guarantees that the sun would free them before they starved to death. Besides, he imagined that the wait would be so boring, he might be forced to shoot himself. Thoughts of the rifle brought to mind a bizarre scheme that entailed his emptying the remaining bullets of their powder and creating a bomb with which to explode a passage to freedom. There were only a dozen bullets, though, and an image of his blowing his own hand off quickly followed. Desperation began to set in. The safe haven of the cave had become a prison that would soon become a tomb. He yelled angrily at Wood to stop pacing, and the dog lifted his leg and urinated on the ice.

“Nice work,” said Cley, and Wood began pacing again.

Although the candle generated light, it offered no warmth. Dressed only in his overalls and flannel shirt, Cley moved back toward the shaft to catch more of its subtle warmth. Now that the normal egress was cut off, he began to think more keenly of that dark aperture that led down into the hill. The hole, though narrow, was still large enough to accommodate the width of his body with a few good inches on either side. He leaned toward the tunnel, trying to peer into the darkness, which revealed nothing, and wondered if it connected to another opening in the hill or a sheer drop to the center of the earth.

His decision was made when Wood carried the book over and dropped it at his feet. The dog lay down and prepared for the long wait he now somehow understood was before them.

“No thanks,” said Cley. “I’ll take the shaft.”

He got a box of matches and another candle from the pack and put them in his pocket. Then he tore the lit candle off the floor. Before crawling forward into the darkness, he looked back and emphatically told the dog to stay put. He took a few deep breaths as if about to dive under water, then inched slowly forward, the flame flickering in the warm breeze that moved up around him.

Five yards farther in and the tunnel narrowed even more. He was forced to lie on his stomach in order to proceed. The shaft pitched downward at a forty-five-degree angle, and from what little he was able to see ahead, it seemed to continue that way for quite a distance. If it didn’t open up and present a place where he could turn around, it would be difficult wriggling up that slope backward. He decided to go on a few more yards. Moving like a snake, he continued as the walls of the tunnel closed in around him.

He stopped to rest and noticed how warm it was in the shaft—a pleasant place simply to lay his head down and sleep. Then he remembered this was exactly what the winter wind had told him the night he had been lost in the storm. Before he began to move again, he heard something up ahead—water dripping or loose pebbles tumbling. Suddenly, Wood was behind him, barking. The candle guttered in a strong gust from below, and everything went black. The dog panicked and tried to scrabble past Cley, unknowingly clawing the hunter’s legs.

“Easy, easy,” he called out to Wood, and lunged forward, trying to escape the frantic dog. In doing so, he moved himself out over an unseen ledge and the two of them fell. Cley screamed, thinking he was headed for a mile-long descent, but his cry was abruptly cut off when he hit solid rock five feet below. He landed on his side, smashing his elbow, and the wind was knocked out of him. Wood came down on top of him, and then sprung off unharmed. The hunter rolled on the hard rock, working to catch his breath.

It was pitch-black, but, even in his distress, Cley noticed that the sound Wood’s nails made against the rock echoed out, indicating they had stumbled onto another large chamber. He rolled himself to a sitting position and dug the matches out of his pocket. Sparking a match to life, he lit the candle he had been able to hold on to through the misadventure. The flame revealed what he had suspected: another cave, larger than the one above, and at the far end of it a tunnel of such size that he might enter it standing upright. Cley noticed that the warm breeze, which heated his own rock apartment above, was emanating from down the corridor that led farther into the hill. He started slowly forward, holding the candle out in front at arm’s length, while Wood followed close behind.

The tunnel took a wide turn, and as they followed its curve, a blast of warm air extinguished the candle again. Cley cursed out loud, then noticed that there was another light source somewhere in front of him. Stumbling forward, using the rock wall for support, he finally stepped out of the passage and into a small chamber bathed in a yellow-green light.

At first, he thought it must be the sunlight streaming through a hole in the ceiling. The glow came not from above, though, but from below—an underground pool that generated its own fluorescence. The cave rippled with brightness from the water. The swirling glow was fantastic enough, but on closer inspection he saw that the walls had been decorated with drawings done in charcoal and a thick red paint possibly made of clay. Stylized images of men and women, animals, and strange humanoid creatures with fishlike heads filled the chamber. Here and there someone had left red handprints.

“What do you say to this?” Cley asked Wood, then looked around to see where the dog had gone. He whistled in order to locate him, and a bark answered from off to the right. Moving around a low wall of rock, he stepped into yet another small chamber. The glow from the strange waters did not extend to this new area, so he used another match and relit the candle.

The gleam of the flame was reflected in Wood’s eyes. The dog was sitting upright amidst the remains of what appeared to be six or seven human bodies. There were dried flower petals and fragments of pottery scattered among these bones. It was obvious from the small, delicate nature of one skull and rib cage that an infant lay among the dead. Another of the skeletons showed evidence of a type of deformity—a vestigial fishtail protruding off the end of a perfectly preserved spinal column.

Set off a foot or two from the others were the remains of what obviously had been a woman whose long black hair had survived the ravages of time. The luxuriant tresses stretched out more than four feet from the skull, which still retained a large portion of withered flesh. She wore a necklace of white beads made from shells, and at the end there was a small leather pouch. The walls in this chamber were decorated with spiraled images of plants and vines and blossoms.

Standing in silence, Cley wondered how long they had lain, undisturbed in this secret place. “What lives did they live?” he asked himself, and felt the breeze of centuries passing, years turning to dust. Then, in an eyeblink his reverie became fear, and he was frantic to escape the underground for daylight.

“Let’s go,” he said to Wood, noticing another smaller tunnel at the end of the burial chamber. The current of warm air flowed from it, passing around him. Before leaving, he knelt and worked to remove the woman’s beads over her skull. As he tried to free them, her hair fell across the back of his hand, and the touch sent a wave of revulsion coursing through him. He pulled away with the necklace in his hand, and the sudden motion severed the fragile neck. The jaw came unhinged and dropped open. Her brittle ribs cracked, sounding to him like whispered gasps of pain. With the prize tightly clutched in his left hand and the candle in his right, he fled forward into the next natural corridor.

Wood grabbed Cley by his right pant leg just in time to prevent him from falling headlong into an almost perfectly round hole in the middle of the dark path. The toes of the hunter’s boots were already out over the abyss. A blast of warm air rose from far below and lifted Cley’s hair. He took a step back. Miraculously, the candle remained lit. This was the source of the tropical current that had kept their own cave temperate through the worst of the winter.

Both Wood and Cley vaulted the opening in the rock floor with ease. The passage continued on, twisting and turning and widening until it eventually broke clear into a cave with a tall, broad entrance that looked out on the day. From where they stood at the back of the chamber, it was as if they were in the rear of a theater, watching a play about a blizzard.

They slept that night back in the tunnel near the conduit of warm air. When he awoke the following day, Cley was mightily hungry and knew the dog must be, too. They left the tunnel, and upon entering the cave that opened on the opposite side of the hill from their home, they saw a glorious sun shining out over a vast plain. The sight of that flatland stretching out toward the north showed Cley the way to travel once the winter was over.

Out on the plain there were no trees, and it seemed a certainty that the demons would not hunt there. Escaping this threat would allow him and the dog to make headway north without constantly having to fight for their lives. He decided then that as soon as the days began to lengthen, they would resume their journey before the demons woke from hibernation. There weren’t enough bullets left to survive another season against them, and he sensed that somewhere in the cold, dark time of winter he had lost his will for slaughter.

Two hours later, after traversing the circumference of the hill in hip-deep snow, at times clinging to tree trunks against the wicked pitch of the incline, they stood outside the entrance of their own cave. Luckily the sun was bright and offered enough warmth for Cley to have survived the arduous journey without his cloak or mittens. Then began the grim task of digging out the opening while hunger twisted their guts. Every few minutes, the hunter had to stop to blow on his frozen fists, but eventually they managed to clear enough snow so that the sun could shine directly onto the ice that had formed over the entrance.

Next, they set about gathering branches that had cracked under the weight of the ice and fallen to the ground. With these, he built a small fire as close to the obstruction as possible. As they waited for the fire to do its work, Cley warmed his hands over it and set one of his boots smoldering, trying to do the same with his feet.

Sometime later, a well-placed kick shattered the remaining inches of glazed snow. Reentering their cave filled Cley with a sense of peace and comfort. He and Wood greedily devoured the few cooked rabbit parts they had stored, and then Cley went to work on one of the raw, rotting sweet potatoes. The fire was moved inside the entrance and they settled down to rest for a spell before preparing to hunt. The dog insisted on a few words from the book, and Cley acquiesced in a weary voice.

The white deer returned to the forest. In many places the fallen snow melted and revealed the welcome face of the earth. Flocks of crows again perched in the treetops, and an owl took up residence somewhere close by the cave, haunting the nights with its call.

On a hunting expedition to the eastern pond, Cley heard the ice cracking in long, wavering echoes. The sound was a signal to him that he and the dog should soon begin their journey across the plain. Although he rejoiced at the fact that the sun now shone brightly in the afternoons, pushing back the night a few minutes each day, he wondered how long it would be before the demons came forth to hunt, driven by a season-long hunger. As he traipsed across the thawing ground, tracking a deer, he began to make plans.

There were a few things that distressed him about their coming trek across the open country. One was that the store of matches had been seriously depleted. He had one-quarter of one box left, which, optimistically, he surmised might last little more than two weeks. The other concern was shelter. Out on the grasslands there would be no caves or trees to offer a temporary haven against the elements.

He remembered that in the adventure novels of his boyhood, he had read of ways to start a fire without matches—rubbing sticks together or drawing a spark by knocking a flint against a rock. The thought of actually accomplishing either of these seemed to him more impossible than the daring exploits of those books’ heroes. Still, he knew there was nothing else but to begin work on learning one of these skills. As far as the lack of shelter was concerned, he decided to take many deerskins and from them create a small tent that would at least keep the wind and rain at bay. It had to be something he could roll up and carry, but that would add extra pounds to his already heavy pack. Then the thought came to him that perhaps Wood might pull it behind him.

Cley’s accuracy with the bow had become so good through the winter that he could fell a deer with just one arrow. He worked quickly, skinning his prey on the spot, and in this manner was able to take two or three skins a day. At night, he and Wood ate venison steaks and livers and began to regain much of the strength they had lost through the harsh heart of the winter. After dinner now they passed on the book, for the nights were filled with industry—treating the insides of the pelts and readying them to be sewn together. He calculated that he would need at least fifteen skins to make a tent large enough to cover both of them.

Killing a deer and carving it up was second nature for the hunter, and he enjoyed the work—at last a definite project other than merely surviving. It took his mind away, and he no longer sat morosely holding the green veil and staring into the past. When the tent was three-quarters sewn together, he realized he had not yet tackled the job of making fire without matches. The idea of rubbing sticks together to draw a flame seemed preposterous, so he instead opted for the technique that called for the banging of rocks.

Following the stream at the bottom of the hill, he and the dog set off one morning, searching along its bank for promising specimens. Every now and then he would stop, lift two rocks, smash them together as hard as he could, and study the results. By midday, he had broken nearly thirty rocks and smashed each of his fingers at least once without having produced a single spark. Wood grew tired of this fruitless pursuit and went off into a stand of shemel trees after a geeble.

“What idiot invented this technique?” Cley wondered, but drawing on the persistence that had kept him alive through worse trials, he continued. He knelt again by the stream’s edge and brought up a large, black, heart-shaped stone. He was searching for another against which to smash this one when he heard a strange noise. It was something familiar but nothing he had heard in a long time. He stopped and listened more intently. All he heard was the sound of the tree branches scraping together in the breeze and the rushing of the water.

Minutes later, he reached out to take up another stone and heard again, from off in the forest, the distinct sound of someone weeping. He was used to the weird noises of the Beyond, but this particular one made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Listening closely, he was sure he heard a woman sobbing. Getting up, he called for Wood. The sound of his own voice dispelled the crying, and he stood perfectly still for a long time, listening.

“Hello?” he finally called but there was only the breeze.

“Who is there?” he yelled, and with this, Wood came charging out of a thicket of trees. He realized, upon seeing the familiar figure of the dog, how momentarily frightened he had been. Listening intently awhile longer, he finally decided it was nothing more than the call of a bird or the rushing of the stream over an obstruction.

In order to put the incident decisively out of his mind, he banged together the two rocks he held. A spark leaped out of the collision and landed in his beard. Moments later, a thin wisp of smoke curled away from his face, and a moment after that, he was on his knees again dipping his beard forward into the ice-cold stream. Wood nipped him on the rear end as he knelt with water dripping off his face.

On his way back to the cave, Cley looked up from his thoughts to see where the dog had gone. In the distance, a figure stood amidst the trees where the stream turned left toward the hill. He blinked and looked again. Whatever had been there was now gone. Pocketing the two rocks, he took out his knife and began running as quietly as possible. He was positive that what he had seen was not a demon because there was no sign of wings or tail. It appeared to be a person, standing still, gazing down into the moving water. When he reached the spot, he spun slowly in a circle, staring sharply into the trees.

“Show yourself,” he called out. He listened for the sound of breaking twigs or rustling in the underbrush. “A bear?” he wondered. Something inside told him to run, and he did, all the way back to the cave, Wood following at his heels.

He insisted upon using the rocks to start a fire. Because of this, they did not eat until the moon had risen in the star-filled sky. As he prepared his blanket to lie down, he heard the owl suddenly call from outside the cave. Although the bird came now almost every night, on this particular visit its cry set Cley’s heart to pounding. The dog looked over at him and then toward the mouth of the cave, sensing his master’s anxiety. For the first time since early winter, the hunter loaded a shell into the rifle’s chamber. He kept the weapon across his knees as he read to Wood, and slept that night in a sitting position, his finger wrapped lightly around its trigger.

On the day that Cley took the last deer needed to complete the tent, he wandered back toward the cave past a stand of gray, barren trees he had passed at least a hundred times throughout the winter. On this trip, though, he noticed something he had never seen before. In among the trunks he spied an unusual object sticking up out of the ground. He moved cautiously over to it, and there he found, of all things, a pickax, its handle half-buried in the ground. Dangling from a strap off one of the points was an old helmet, tiny holes eaten through the rust.

He lifted the headpiece to see if affixed to the front there was a device to hold a candle. When he found what he was looking for, he knew he had discovered one of the graves of the explorers who had struck out years earlier from Anamasobia. It had been told to him by Arla Beaton that they had been dressed in their mining gear, on a quest to discover the Earthly Paradise. He remembered the story—sixteen of them, and the only one to return was Arla’s grandfather. Cley could not help but smile at the ridiculous equipment they had brought, as if they had intended to excavate miracles from the Beyond. The wilderness had wasted no time in turning their tools into grave markers. Still, the hunter felt a sense of camaraderie with the fallen miner and knelt before the crude memorial. He tried to think of something to say, but remained silent. A minute later, he took up his pelt and whistled for Wood.

On a clear patch of frozen ground, he scratched out with his knife a crude design for the tent carrier he imagined. It had to be light with thin runners since it wouldn’t be pulled over snow but instead the grass of the plain. He determined that the perfect branches for the device would be those of the carnivorous tree that devoured sparrows and starlings, since they were long, straight, and pliant enough to shape.

It was one thing to draw on the ground with a knife and quite another to hack the limbs off a tree with a volition to eat flesh. The one he chose to attack was not strong enough to lift him and stuff him down into the opening at the top of its trunk, but it tried to. He could hear the tree’s digestive juices bubbling within as he hacked at its limbs. The grasping twigs at the ends of the constantly moving branches kept pulling at him, and it hurt madly when they wrapped around his hair and beard. All the time Cley worked, Wood paced nervously a few feet away, barking at the giant with which his friend appeared locked in combat. Occasionally the dog charged in and tried to bite the many-armed enemy but was unsure as to where to sink his teeth.

After much struggle, the required branches wriggled on the ground like a brood of snakes. From their cut ends oozed a dark green sap.

“That’s the damnedest thing,” said Cley, waiting for their life to drain away.

He began construction and decided that the limbs of the hungry tree were the right choice for the job. They were sturdy, but could be bent to make the frame and runners. Using dried strips of deer hide, he tied the joints fast, then bowed one long stalk into a perfect loop to fashion the harness that would fit around Wood’s chest. The work took him the better part of the day, and he enjoyed the complexity of the task.

It was early evening when he finished, and pleased with his creation, he took the time to double-tie all the joints. During this process, he looked up to find where the sun was in its descent and saw a woman, dressed in skins, standing in front of him. The fact that there was someone there, watching him, was startling enough, but it was her otherworldly presence that made him reel backward onto the ground. Her form was slightly transparent, wavering like a heat mirage, though the air was still cold. Her eye sockets were perfectly empty and dark as any tunnel through the underground. She appeared a magic-lantern projection from another time—her hair blowing behind her in a phantom wind, her flesh shrunken against her cheekbones and pulled tight in a thin scrim across her forehead.

“What?” he yelled, his entire body trembling.

When she put her arms out toward him, as if pleading, he knew instantly who she was. Reaching into the cloak by his neck, he pulled out the beaded necklace he had worn since the day he discovered her grave. Slowly, as in a dream, she dropped to her knees and began digging at the thawing earth. From everywhere, came the sound of her sobbing. Cley got to his feet and backed away. She reached toward him again, then motioned back to the ground.

He had never thought to see what was in the pouch because it had always felt empty, but now he understood that it contained something that was important to her. Nervously, he lifted the beads to get at it. Pulling apart the gut drawstring, he turned it over onto his palm. Out rolled a small, green seed half the width of a thumbnail and tapered at either end. Fine roots like hairs grew from each of the tips. He looked back to her, holding it forward, but she had vanished, leaving behind only the diminishing sound of her sorrow.

Cley shuddered as he lifted his knife off the ground where it lay next to the sled. He knelt and dug a shallow hole in the earth. Very carefully, he dropped the seed in and gently covered it over, tamping the cold dirt with his palms. As soon as he was finished, he leaped to his feet and gathered his mittens and rifle. Grabbing the sled by its harness, he whistled for Wood and set out quickly for home.

When they arrived at the cave, he did not bother to remove his cloak but went directly to the back, to the shaft that led down into the burial chamber, and threw the necklace in as far as he could. Even after an hour had passed, he still sat against the rock wall, staring out at the sky.

Before the sun rose, he made an inventory of his belongings and placed them neatly in his pack. Since the temperature had risen in recent days, he rolled up the cat cloak, the mittens and leggings, and stuffed them also into the pack. He was pleased to be able once again to wear only his overalls, shirt, jacket, and the black hat adorned with wild-turkey feathers. Once he was fitted out for the journey, he slung the bow over his shoulder and took up the rifle. Before leaving the cave, he looked back into it once with a perverse sense of nostalgia.

He had rigged the tent to the sled the night before, and now all that was needed was to get Wood into the harness. It took some doing to convince the dog that dragging the weight was a good idea. For this purpose, he had saved a few strips of venison from the previous night’s dinner, and with these he was able to coax his companion into the job of mule. Cley felt a measure of pride when the rig slid over the ground with ease.

They started around to the other side of the hill, and had not gone fifty yards, when they found a demon blocking their path. It lay facedown on the ground, unmoving, its wings folded in as if it was either asleep or dead. Cley stopped and brought the rifle up in front of him. He was wary of the beast, knowing the demons were not beneath a form of simple trickery. Wood was beside himself in the harness. Unable to attack, he growled in warning and frustration.

Cley advanced slowly, keeping a strict aim on the head of the creature. A wing lifted slightly, and without a second passing, the hunter fired, missing the base of the skull and instead chipping off the tip of the right horn. Then he realized that the movement of the wing had been caused by the wind. He walked over and, using his foot, flipped the body onto its back. The face the demon wore was so horrific, Cley almost fired again out of fright. Its eyes protruded as if momentarily frozen in the act of exploding, and its bulging tongue draped down across its chest. He knelt and touched the carcass. It was still quite warm, and he figured it had probably been killed within the past half-hour. Now he noticed the necklace of shell beads wrapped tightly around its throat, cutting deeply into the windpipe.

They navigated the hillside with minor difficulty and reached the plain by late morning. Out on the huge expanse, they moved quickly, half-fleeing the forest of demons, half-rushing toward the promise of the future. A sweet breeze blew in from the east, and beneath their feet were the first signs of green, sprouting out of the mud.