A GREAT SADNESS filled the house. There was an emptiness, not only in the corners but even in the areas where we stood or sat. Even when the rooms were full of us, they felt vacant. The sadness coated everything, like the dust or the shadows that deepened as darkness fell.
I followed Sarah through the front door into an old kitchen, the counters warped and yellowing around the edges, the cabinets misaligned with doors that didn’t close quite right. Beyond that was a kind of dining area, as sparse as you can imagine, with a small round table and four chairs. The walls were yellow, whether by choice or due to age, I couldn’t tell.
Karon had already sat down, his mouth scrunched together, his old, watery eyes looking past me through the door that Sarah had left open. She walked in a kind of glide, never in a hurry, and pointed toward a chair, indicating I should take a seat. But I didn’t sit down right away—I put my hands on the back of the chair and stood there. I watched her sit down, quietly, calmly.
The two of them were quite a sight.
“Why are you here?” I asked again. I realized in that moment that they had given me the seat that would leave my back facing the still-open door, and something else followed me into the house along with the dust and the sadness and the emptiness—a pinprick of fear that started in my gut and moved outward, threatening to make my hands tremble. It was the same fear I had felt ever since the woman had come into my house. Was she out there somewhere?
Sarah took a deep breath, looked at me and then over at Karon, glanced past me almost imperceptibly, and rested her hands on the table, one on top of the other. She had wonderful posture. She sat there like an etiquette teacher.
“That’s not important,” she said.
“Well,” I began, but she interrupted me.
“We have been here for a long time. A very long time. From the beginning, in fact, and now time has nearly run its course. The important question is, why are you here? You do know you are walking the wrong way?”
Again, the hint of cynicism—or was it sarcasm or genuine amusement?—crept in around the corners of her mouth, the edges of her eyes. I decided to be completely truthful with her, and it was a strange sensation, this letting go of all the lies I had clung to for so long.
“I don’t remember seeing you here when I left the mountain the first time,” I said.
“You wouldn’t,” she said. “The condition people found themselves in when they were leaving was . . . overwhelming. It would have been difficult to pay attention to anything but your pain and your guilt.”
I nodded slowly, accepting her explanation. “I’m here for my brother. He’s the last one, the only one left.”
She looked at Karon as if he might want to weigh in on the subject, something that surprised me, considering his inability to speak. She turned back to me and stared hard into my eyes, looking for something. Maybe trying to detect truth from lies? I couldn’t tell.
“Have you considered that it might be important for people to leave this place under their own volition? Under their own motivation?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I can motivate him.”
This time she smiled for real, a smile full of pity. “Oh my.”
“What?” I asked.
“This is not a place you can be rescued from.” She hesitated. “That’s not exactly the right way of saying it. Maybe this is closer to the truth—this is not a place where someone can come and whisk you away.”
“What kind of a place is it?” I asked, not sure what she was getting at.
“It’s the kind of place you have to leave on your own. Everyone who has ever left has battled their own way out. In this place, our guilt consumes us.”
“Do you mean guilt as in that sense of feeling guilty, like shame, or as in being found guilty? A guilty verdict?”
The old man practically roared at this one, and I jumped at his outburst. Sarah reached over and held his shoulder in a gentle grasp, but she did not look away from me.
“Yes. Both. It is through the maze of guilt that someone must find their way out.”
“So, it’s some kind of motivation? Determination?”
“Do you really remember nothing about this place?” she asked. Something about it felt like an insult, but I didn’t feel offended as much as embarrassed.
“No. Nothing,” I mumbled.
She clenched her jaw and shook her head in a barely perceptible way. “The only thing that can rescue anyone from this deep darkness is grace.”
“Grace?” I asked. That didn’t sound like anything nearly strong enough to bring my brother out safely. But I didn’t say that. I stared down at the table. If I somehow managed to find my brother in this hellhole, was I sure I could persuade him to come with me? Doubt made its way inside of me and settled, a seed.
The three of us sat there in the silence. Karon worked his mouth from side to side and up and down, his lips twisting in on themselves something fierce, so heavy was his hatred toward me. Or so I imagined. Sarah sat completely still for long periods, her unflinching nature interrupted occasionally by deep sighs, during which she closed her eyes and tilted her head back.
A strong breeze blew through the canyon, coming from the direction of the plains, the direction I had come from. It rustled the leaves of the trees, at first gently, then sending them into a chattering panic. It was a loud, roaring sound, one that the stillness could not sweep away. I looked at Karon once again, and for the first time he seemed calm. Perhaps by the sound. His shoulders slumped and his eyes crept toward closing.
A grayness came with the wind, a tangible dimming of the light, and a weightless substance like flakes drifted around and through the house. It was like ash or a very fine dust. I reached up and caught an especially large piece, and it disintegrated in my hand.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The old wasps’ nests,” Sarah said.
When the wind subsided, the gray flakes were everywhere—on the table, the countertops, the floor, even our shoulders and the tops of our heads. Sarah stood and brushed herself off, but most of it clung to her clothing until she ground it in with all the brushing. I did the same. But old Karon just sat there, the lighter-than-air wisps resting on him, fluttering slightly even after the breeze had passed.
“How do you expect to get to your brother?” Sarah asked.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have much of a plan except to go back in, all the way, and then go all the way down.
“There’s only one way in, isn’t there?” I asked.
“Yes. But there are . . . obstacles.”
“Like what?”
She picked up a larger piece of nest, a shred resting on the table, and it disintegrated. “Only one that we might be able to help you navigate,” she said, glancing at Karon.
Again he began huffing and puffing through his nose and toothless mouth. His indignation only minutes ago had terrified me, but now I realized there was something endearing about it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You don’t remember?”
I tried to think back, but there were still so few distinct memories of my time here in the mountain. I shook my head.
Karon rested his knobby, weathered fists on the table. His knuckles were like knots in thin branches, and all the ash-like wasp paper that he hadn’t brushed off drifted backward as he leaned forward suddenly.
“The river,” he said in short gusts of breath.
He barely moved his mouth, so at first I wasn’t sure what he had said. I glanced at Sarah, but she was still looking at Karon.
He erupted again, this time incorporating a kind of groan that added body to his words, if not clarity. “The . . . river . . .”
A sense of drowning overcame me, and the smell of blood, and the warmth of muddy water, and a desperation to rise, rise, rise. I stood up in response to this overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, and my chair fell over backward. Had his words awakened a memory? Or a kind of nightmare?
A premonition?
I turned to pick up my chair, and the open door caught my eye. All of the light had fled, and I realized that complete darkness had descended, the kind I had only ever seen and felt in the canyon during the previous night. Or was it two nights ago? Or more than that? I exhaled with disappointment. I had wanted to make more progress before the light left. I had so far to go.
“You will spend the night here,” Sarah said. “Tomorrow, at first light, Karon will take you to the river and help you cross.”
What could I say? The darkness was so thick outside that the opened door looked like a portal into an ocean of black mercury. There was a small lantern lit on the kitchen counter, and I didn’t know if she had only just lit it or if it had been burning when I first walked in. Its light was tepid.
“What has happened to you?” I asked. I stood behind my chair, and the dark doorway behind me felt like another person, someone else I needed to be mindful of. “Why are you here?”
She stared hard at me again, as she had been doing almost the entire time. I was becoming used to her gaze—something about it grounded me in reality, kept me from becoming lost in the dizziness and the dark. If she saw me, then I was.
“Sit down,” she said. “I can tell you a little.”
I eased into the chair, and at the same time, Karon stood. He stared at me, his mouth wrenched into that same old scowl. His breathing had dimmed along with the light, so that each exhale seemed to illustrate his weariness, deflating him slowly. He turned and thumped his way into another part of the house, and all went silent.
“He doesn’t like to talk about this,” Sarah said, her voice suddenly kind. “Where did you go when you left the canyon?”
“Not far,” I answered, shaking my head. “I stayed in the same town, the one barely outside. I wanted to wait for my brother.” My weak words vanished quickly in that dark soundlessness.
“I know the town. If you stayed there, you understand how many people traveled through. Karon and I have waited here for a long, long time. He has helped more people cross the river than either of us could ever count. This was what we chose.”
“Why didn’t you ever come all the way out?” I asked.
“We took a few steps out, once. I saw your town. But we have been waiting for a long time too, and this is where we decided to do it. You understand how this feels. Some time ago, a woman came along, worse off than many, perhaps not as bad as some. But she bore a great resemblance to the one we were waiting for, and Karon immediately went to her and brought her into the house. Once I saw she was not who we had hoped, I thought we should send her on her way. It didn’t make sense for someone to stop here. There is nothing here, in this house or in this canyon, for anyone.”
I began to ask if there was anything there for her and Karon, but I stopped. I felt like I was asking too many questions.
“We nursed this woman to health, against my better judgment. This is no place to grow healthy. It’s much too close. But we did it, we took her in and helped her, and the past is the past.”
I heard Karon’s knocking again. At first I thought he was protesting our conversation, but I realized it was the thudding of him walking the floor above us from one end of the house to the other.
“Her name was Kathy, and she soon became like a daughter to Karon.” Sarah said this with great loneliness in her voice, and deep regret. “For a long time she stayed here with us, a very long time, and when she was well she took care of us. I began to doubt my doubt, so to speak. I wondered if I had misjudged her. She was very pleasant, and Karon was happier than I had ever seen him.”
I found it difficult to breathe. I knew what was going to happen.
I knew who she was talking about.
“She began going out whenever someone was passing by, someone making their way out of the canyon. She would walk up to them and have long conversations, even though they were barely rational. It seemed to me that she was asking a lot of questions, and again, I thought it inappropriate. Karon and I had always let these passersby go along their way. Of course, Karon helped them along the river, but after that, they were free to go. But Kathy would sit with them. Some of them became disoriented after talking with her, wandering the woods here around the house, calling out the names of people they were looking for. Sometimes I can still hear them.”
Her voice had not changed, but her face was pale.
“I spoke to Kathy about this. I told her she shouldn’t distract the people walking by, that they were on the right road and would find their way. Once across the river, they did not require our aid or intervention. Do you know what she said to me?”
I shook my head.
“She smiled a nice smile and whispered, ‘Through me you pass into eternal pain.’”
A chill spread from my neck all the way down my arms. I swallowed hard.
“Soon after that, people stopped coming. I assumed no one was left. Or very few. Once the flow of people stopped completely, only recently, she left us alone.” Sarah stared vacantly past me, over my shoulder. “Karon fell into a bottomless sadness, not because he missed her but because he was convinced she had passed beyond the canyon in order to bring people back into this place. He thought we should have stopped her. And so we remain, no longer helping people leave but guarding the way back.”
“Why do we let our guilt consume us,” I whispered. It was not a question but a kind of statement.
I felt a numbness moving throughout my body. The woman didn’t seem to notice my distress. She kept talking.
“This is why Karon was so upset by your appearance. You are the only person to ever come back through the canyon. He assumed she had sent you back this way. His hatred for her is difficult for him to contain.”
Finally, she looked at me, and her gaze was piercing. I could tell she wanted to ask if I had returned because of Kathy. I felt frozen in place. I was thinking of all my friends outside the canyon, our destroyed village. I suddenly wondered if Kathy was trying to convince any of them to come back in as well. Perhaps to save me?
As we sat there, I felt a kinship with her and Karon. If I had not been on a search for my brother, I would have stayed with them for a long time, perhaps forever. It was lonely there, and dark, but there was a peace to be found among the shadows of the trees, and the confines of the canyon seemed a welcome enclosure. The feeling I had identified as a deep sadness was something else, something I couldn’t put a name on, but it wasn’t entirely negative.
“You can stay here, but you can’t live here,” Sarah said, as if she could read my mind. “There is no life here. Only dim light and ash.”
“But you’re living here,” I said.
“Not much longer,” she whispered. “Come.” She stood up from the table and walked into one of the side rooms. I followed her, and miniature clouds of dust swirled up under each step, as if the world was decaying and its remains were rising in slow motion, trying to re-form it into something new.
It was a tiny room, more like a closet. There was a dingy window, the glass so dirty I doubted I’d be able to see through it even during the day. On the floor was an unrolled, navy-blue sleeping mat an inch thick. I did not think of myself as being tired, but as soon as I saw the mat, a weariness split my marrow and my eyelids sank. Again I tried to remember if I had slept for one or two nights in the canyon on the pebble-strewn ground. I was fairly certain it had only been one. But I couldn’t be sure.
I turned to look at Sarah, and I realized she had moved closer to me. I saw for the first time what it was that made her beautiful—those flat gray eyes, in the dim light, were like horizons. I felt myself leaning toward her, falling in, so tired I needed someone to lean on. But she lifted her hands in the space between us, held me away from her, held me up.
“Lie down,” she whispered. “Sleep.”
And from there I descended, yes, down onto the mat, but I went deeper than that. Deeper than the floor of the house, deeper than the foundations of the canyon, deeper than dreams or nightmares or memories. I stayed there in that depth, and I slept like I never have before and will probably never sleep again, there on the edge of the river Acheron.
WHEN I WOKE up, I rose up through all of those layers of darkness, back up to the floor of the house, back up to where I slept on the mat, back up to the canyon. I realized something hard was jabbing me. First it prodded my leg, so I pulled my leg away, and then it was in the middle of my back, a straight rod grating against my spine. I rolled over, and the thing rammed my eye. I howled, reached up, and grabbed it. Karon was scowling down at me. We both held tight to the cane, and I could feel his anger trembling through it.
“The river,” he said. Whether it was because I had heard him say it before, or because a good night’s sleep had cleared up his speech, or because he wasn’t as angry as he had been, I could understand him. The words even sounded like actual words people use in real sentences.
I released his cane. He looked me over as if trying to decide where next to deliver additional pokes, then let out a burst of air, disgusted at my laziness or some other shortcoming, and turned, limping out.
I sat up. A dusty light came through the window. I stood, walked to it, and peered through the dirt, but all I could see were smudges of dark trees and the empty spaces in between them.
The room where we had sat the night before felt new, completely different. Because of the light, it was almost cheery. Someone had spent a good amount of time mopping and cleaning the countertops and dusting the high spaces, evidenced not only by the shining room but also by the four wooden pails of dirty water sitting beside the open door. There was a loaf of bread on the table, but the house didn’t smell like someone had done any baking. I tore off a piece. It was stale but I was hungry, so it tasted delicious. I gulped down a cloudy glass of water.
The air outside was somehow new. Sarah and Karon sat on the chairs on the front porch, staring out into the dim day and the rustling trees, now clean.
“What happened to all the dust? And the wasps’ nests?” I asked.
“Didn’t you hear the wind last night?” Sarah asked.
I shook my head.
“You must have slept well,” she replied, that small smile finding the corners of her eyes and mouth. “A strong wind blew for most of the night.”
“Does that happen often?”
It was her turn to shake her head. “No. Very rarely, in fact. And it’s a beautiful thing when it does. Karon thinks it’s a good omen for you.”
The trees seemed not so dead in that early morning. The forest was actually quite beautiful now that everything had been cleared away—the brittle leaves were gone from the forest floor, the dust had been removed from the leaves, the remains of the nests no longer clung to the roots and the trunks.
I sighed. I needed to leave. I didn’t want to, but Sarah’s story about Kathy concerned me. I didn’t know how much longer it might be until she convinced the others to follow me, and I needed to find Adam before they did.
“I have to go,” I said. “I want to stay, but I have to go.”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “We’re ready.”
They walked off the porch and I followed. I kept looking behind us, down the canyon path that cut through the mountain to the town and the plains. I kept waiting to see someone walking out from among the rocks or emerging from behind a tree. I listened. But I knew I wouldn’t hear them until they were right up next to me, not with the way sound died so soon in that heavy air.
I turned to see where Sarah and Karon were going, and they had already stopped, the house still visible through the trees. In front of us was a river more wild and alive than any I had ever seen.
“We never expected to take anyone this way, back over the river,” Sarah said quietly. She paused, and it seemed to me she still wasn’t sure about helping me go back, farther into the mountain.
“Have you always done this?” I asked. “Have you always helped?”
“One day we were standing here, the two of us, and we saw someone approaching from the other side.”
I peered across the raging water. It was hard to see the far bank.
“I turned to Karon to see what he thought we should do, but he was already in the boat, pulling himself across. When he returned, he had a young man in the boat with him. The boy was badly beaten. We didn’t ask him what his name was or what he was doing. He simply climbed out, crawled a short distance on the ground, rose up on shaky legs, and continued along the path.”
Sarah smiled. Even Karon seemed to have a pleasant look hidden among the deep wrinkles on his old face. “The river,” he said.
“Yes,” she said in a whimsical voice. “The river. After that, we came down every day, and if someone was at the far bank, Karon went over and brought them across.” Tears were in her eyes, but she didn’t move to wipe them away. They sat there like diamonds. “Soon we were bringing them over in boatloads, every day, twice a day, three times a day. Sometimes all through the night. Yes, even in this inky darkness. We could hear their cries.”
The sound of the river was loud and alive. I thought the cries must have been very loud, to hear them all the way from the other side.
“If you want to know why Karon looks so old, it’s because he worked so hard for so very long.”
I looked over at him, his white hair, the wrinkles etched in curving lines around the movement of his face. He stared back at me, and this time he didn’t growl. He seemed content to let me stare at him, to let me explore, but I couldn’t hold his gaze for long.
“Even after Kathy arrived, we kept bringing more people over, although by then the flow had slowed to a trickle. She was here, as I already told you. And after she left, there were no more from the far bank. Now, you.”
Karon’s mouth curled up in anger and he snorted, but it wasn’t so scary now that I knew his anger was not aimed at me.
“I’m ready,” I said.
Their faces held a subtle pity that said, You can’t possibly be. Karon looked embarrassed by my ignorance. He turned away and bent over, and I realized he was reaching for something. I had not noticed the boat, shallow and gray, bobbing against the bank. Mist from the raging water had partially hidden it. When Karon moved toward it, I nearly laughed, thinking he must be joking. There was no way that boat would make it across. I might as well hurl myself into the water and hope for the best.
If Sarah noticed my doubt, she ignored it. “Over there, that’s where it truly begins,” she said. “This is nothing. This darkness, this ash, this dust: it’s only the wild edge of what’s waiting for you. Once you cross, you will see things you can never unsee. You will hear sounds and silence that will split you in two. It is a horror.” She paused. “I will ask you this only once.”
I saw again the beauty in her gray eyes. Again I wanted to stay. “What?” I asked.
“Will you please reconsider? Stay with us. Wait here for your brother. When he is ready, he will come out.”
In that moment, it wasn’t her gray eyes that struck me, and it wasn’t the fact that she reached out and put her hand on my arm. It wasn’t even that, when I glanced over at Karon, he had tears in his eyes. What struck me was the sound of the word “please,” the way it sank into me, the way it latched on to my better nature, my best self. It was the “please” that was so convincing. I couldn’t say no, but she could see it in me, I guess, because she turned away.
I helped Karon drag the boat to the bank. The ground was slick with mud, and as we struggled with the boat, Sarah put something around my neck. It was a knapsack made of burlap, and heavy. We situated the boat so that it pointed down into the water.
“Food and water,” she said. “For your journey. It won’t last long.”
I nodded my thanks. I didn’t know what else to do, what else to say. Karon grunted, motioning for me to sit at the front of the boat, and I climbed clumsily aboard. The inside was wet. There was a small bench that ran across, up toward the front. I sat down and realized I was terrified. I gripped the sides and closed my eyes, trying to breathe slowly. I looked over my shoulder to see if Karon was going to push us off, and I caught him leaning toward Sarah, kissing her cheek. They were both crying.
The boat shifted backward as Karon crawled in, bearing a long oar. “The river,” he growled, and we slid down the short bank and into the rapids.
The water immediately lashed our boat to the right, downstream, and I nearly went overboard in those first moments. The front of the boat rose and fell once, smacking the water. I shouted my alarm, holding even tighter to the sides, leaning forward so as not to get tossed into the muddy, churning rapids. We moved from side to side, mostly facing downstream but also making our way to the far bank. I heard a loud sound from Karon.
He was laughing. His white beard was wet and blown to the side by the strong wind that now swept over us. His wide eyes burned with a strange fire, and he was smiling a fierce, almost delirious grin. Every time a large wave hit us and I thought we would turn over or take on too much water, he would laugh uproariously, his eyes flashing. He was no longer the bent old man from the dusty house in the canyon—he was Karon, some kind of seafaring master. Something not human. Something beyond human.
I turned back around, and the boat slammed into another huge wave. I pitched forward, striking my head on the bow. Everything went black.