THE MIST GREW more and more dense as we made our way down, and the ledge became narrower. My toes reached over its edge at some points, with only my heels finding space to stand. Lucia and I leaned back into the cliff face. I didn’t know how much farther we could go. I kept peering into the fog, hoping to see a place where the ledge opened up again to something the size of a normal path, but I could see nothing beyond the next ten feet.
“Are you okay?” I asked Lucia over and over again, looking back at her, hoping she had enough bravery for the both of us. She nodded, nothing more than a twitch of her head. Sometimes she looked at me, her soft eyes almost smiling.
Smiling. And there it was again: hope.
I could still hear the voice calling my name, but it was much more distant now, faint, and I wondered if it was a real person or some trick of the mountain.
“Dan!”
It called to me like something from the past.
“Dan!”
When we reached the bottom, at first I thought the ledge had vanished. I thought we had gone all that way for nothing and would now have to shuffle our way back up to the path or jump. But the ledge hadn’t left us stranded. It had led us to the bottom. There it was. Flat ground.
The fog still hung about us, but now it held a sickening smell like rotting mud. It was the smell of composting vegetation and dead fish and lingering water. We stumbled off the ledge and I fell to the ground, my legs trembling. Looking up, I could see nothing but mist. The walls of the abyss, the sheer cliffs, spread out and away from us on either side.
How long had it taken us to get to the bottom? A day? Two days? A month? Without any change in the light, it was impossible to say. We stood there for a moment, both of us completely still. I tried to peer into the fog to see if our tormenters would show up, come racing out of some cave and tie us up, carry us away. But after all the time we had spent in the pit so far, I hadn’t seen signs of anyone. It was so strange.
“Now where?” I mumbled, but Lucia was already off and running, plowing through the fog. I hoped she wouldn’t run into anything or over any other cliffs, but I could hear her feet in the distance, and they were a continual patter. Searching. Wandering.
“Come back!” I shouted, and immediately covered my mouth, not wanting the voice that was following us to know we were there, that we had reached the bottom. I had hoped that the narrow cliff would prove to be too much for the person to navigate. But there was no response to my shout. The bottom of the abyss seemed to have the same sound qualities as the area around Sarah’s house—the sound of my voice was immediately swallowed up.
Lucia emerged from the fog and grabbed my hand, pulling me after her.
“What?” I asked. “What did you find?”
I followed her into the haze, and when the ledge disappeared behind us, and then even the walls of the cliffs, I felt disoriented. There was nothing around us but the swirling mist. No sound. Even the light seemed too dim, so that we were cloaked in a grayness. The ground went from rock to packed clay to pebbles on a kind of wet dirt, but we hadn’t walked far before the mist cleared a bit and I saw the water.
I couldn’t tell if it was a river or a lake or an ocean, although I would have guessed lake because the water wasn’t moving. Reeds grew along the bank, oozing up out of the muddy mess. Beyond them, the water seemed a bit deeper, but still very brown and full of silt, a gray kind of mud. In front of us, as if placed for our purposes, was a small rowboat.
Lucia bent over and lifted an object out of the mud. It came up like something peeling and hung from her hand. It appeared to be a shirt coated in the gray muck. She threw it out into the reeds and it spun end over end, making a wet slapping sound where it landed. I realized the whole bank was coated in mud-covered clothing. I had thought they were only strange shapes in the mud. I bent over, grabbed a wrinkled ridge of mud at my feet, and lifted a pair of jeans up.
We moved closer to the boat grounded among the reeds.
“Can we get to it?” I asked.
The boat was only ten or fifteen feet out from us, but the mud was oozing and liquid, nothing that could support us. I shuddered. It seemed a particularly horrible way to go.
I took in our surroundings, paying closer attention. There were tiny white flowers growing up around the reeds, barely out of the mud, concentrated in circles. The sheen of their spiky white petals, even in those dire surroundings, was not beautiful. The bright red stamens rising from their throats looked hazardous. I glanced down at my feet to make sure I wasn’t getting close to any of them.
The reeds were brown and jagged, the same color as the mud, or perhaps a bit more yellow. I touched one to see if we could perhaps lay them down as a kind of bridge to the boat, but their edges were sharp and slicing, like upright blades. The air was almost unbreathable, and I coughed, trying to hide the sound in the crook of my arm. I listened again for the one coming behind us.
A strange coldness pooled at our feet, moving in like a breeze, and the slow pace of it made it seem sentient, as if it was picking its way along, choosing where to go, where not to go. The cold unsettled me, but it did seem to clear the air, the mist rising above our heads so we could see farther in both directions.
Lucia gave a quiet coughing sound as if the air was catching in her throat after her run, but soon she was off again, this time along the edge of the undefined bank between land and mud. She bent down and seemed to be pulling article after article of clothing from the mud, throwing them over her shoulder. Was she digging a hole?
“Lucia,” I said, trying not to be too loud. “What did you find?”
I walked carefully in her direction. This place had that effect, with the ascending and descending mist, the creeping cold, the knowledge that all around us, the cliff face rose hundreds of feet, thousands of feet, with the only way out being that narrow path. The voice behind us. The always-present question about what had happened to those who had tortured us. And the bog. Even the bog seemed to hate us, to hold a seething animosity. I wondered if anything living swam in its dark depths, out in the middle.
A long-lost phrase came to mind like a memory. I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. I could not remember where those words had come from.
Lucia was down on her hands and knees, tugging at something, wrestling a shape from the mud and the clothes and the smell of the bog. I arrived where she was and reached out to touch it, my fingers sliding along the muck. It looked like an oar, the long kind a gondolier might use to direct a flatboat along a shallow canal.
“How did you see that in the mud?” I marveled.
She didn’t quite smile, but it was there in her eyes.
I followed her back along the soft bank to where we had stood staring out at the irretrievable boat. She dropped the oar to the ground and worked over it, wiping as much of the muck from it as she could, leaving small piles of mud that sank back into the earth without a sound. The wood, partially cleaned off, was quite light colored. It reminded me of pine.
Lucia placed the oar between us and the boat and walked on it, balancing herself above the mud. Moving along it like a water bug, she got to the end and hopped into the front of the boat. When she turned to look at me, her eyes were wide with exhilaration, almost joy.
The cold came in deeper, approaching from the far side of the water, and it was rising, no longer swirling around my ankles but rising to my waist, my shoulders. With it, the bog smell lessened. But it was cold. Very cold. I clutched my arms to my sides.
Lucia’s smiling face flattened out in a way that said, Come! Hurry! She reached over the side, lifted the oar, and laid it back down in a new spot so it wouldn’t be implanted in the mud. All around us, the little white flowers seemed to bloom in the cold, opening their petals, turning toward the swamp like rotating red eyes. The reeds made a whistling sound, or seemed to, even though there wasn’t a discernible wind. I could see no far bank.
The cold was deeper, up to my chin. I could feel it the same way someone who cannot swim would feel the rising tide gather over their shoulders, their neck, their mouth. I could still breathe, but my exhale clouded out of my mouth. I glanced at Lucia perched at the very front of the boat, looking as though she was prepared to jump out and retrieve me if I fell off the oar and sank. She made me brave, though I doubted she would be strong enough to pull me from the muck.
I took a few steps out onto the oar. It was slick, and one of my feet slipped off, went into the mud. I pulled it out, back on the oar, another step.
Lucia looked at me anxiously.
Another step, another. The oar was sinking in the mud. I walked faster, arms out at my sides for balance, feet sliding here and there, one step off the oar, quick back on before it sank, another step.
The shout came from behind me.
“Dan!”
It was Miho. I knew it. I looked back. I had to see her. And because the cold had driven away the mist, I could see all the way across the flat space, all the way from the edge of the boggy lake to the cliff wall and the thread of the tiny ledge.
Miho edged her way down quite quickly, twenty feet from the bottom. Fifteen feet. Ten. She jumped from there, hit the ground hard, fell, stood, and came running.
I turned back toward Lucia. I slipped but then reached the boat. Her skinny arms pulled me in and I fell into the bottom, hitting my shoulder on one of the crosspieces. She leaned out over the edge and I clung to her legs to keep her from falling in. She hauled in the oar, and it was longer than I remembered—it didn’t even fit in the boat.
I sat up on the seat and watched Miho come running. Closer, closer. Lucia’s eyes filled with questions, and she thrust the oar into my hands. I nodded without really knowing what to do, but I wedged the oar into the mud and pushed, leaning against it with all of my might.
“Stop!” Miho shouted, standing on the bank only fifteen feet away, close enough that I could see the tattoo that edged her hairline. I missed her. An ache filled me, and I wished I could go back and do it all differently. I wished I would have told Abe the second I saw Kathy coming down the greenway. I wished I would have shared my memory with Miho.
She didn’t look well. She was so thin I could see her collarbones clearly, and her arms were sticks. Her eyes were weary, and she kept giving her head a little shake as if trying to wake up. But even with her in that condition, even with the affection I felt rising in me, I knew we couldn’t bring her along. I had no idea how Adam’s actions had hurt her or what she would do to him given the chance.
“Don’t stop,” I whispered to Lucia, though she wasn’t doing anything. “Keep going. We have to keep going.”
She stood and grabbed the oar below my hands, and we both pushed. The boat edged backward, away from the bank.
“Dan, I’m coming to you,” Miho said in a determined voice, as if she couldn’t believe I would leave her there. She took a few steps toward us into the mud. Her feet sank immediately, down to her shins.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Again I leaned against the oar with Lucia, we both pushed, and the boat moved. The farther we went, the less muddy the water and the easier we moved.
Miho took another step. She sank up to her knees. “I’m not stopping, Dan,” she said, and her voice was calm. “You can’t do this. You have to come back. You can’t bring Adam out. He has to do it himself. You know it’s true!”
“Why don’t you want him to come out!” I screamed, and emotion split my voice. I was crying and I didn’t even know why. “Why do you want to keep him here?”
I had so many more things I wanted to say, but I knew if I kept speaking, I would lose the argument. I shook my head, a poor defense against the sadness and doubt gathering inside of me. The reeds made a rasping sound against the wooden sides of the boat. We went through a pool of white flowers, and their stamens burst in a cloud of red pollen.
“Dan!” Miho shouted. “Dan!”
“I can’t!” I finally said. “I’m sorry!”
I watched as she wrestled her way backward and fell onto her back, her arms sinking in the mud. For a moment I thought she might be going under, and I grabbed Lucia’s arm, holding the oar still.
“Dan!” Miho screamed, and there was an edge of terror in her voice. One arm vanished into the mud all the way up to her shoulder, but she wrestled backward, rolling, plunging, like a wild animal struggling to stay up out of a swamp. Eventually she dragged herself back onto the bank. She was covered in the brown-gray muck, and she stayed there on her hands and knees. I could tell she was sobbing, though I couldn’t hear it.
“How could you leave me in that?” she shouted, but the mist around us swallowed up her words.
“I’m sorry!” I shouted again, my voice cutting short, and there were so many things I was sorry about that I didn’t even know which one I was apologizing for. But the bog swallowed up my words too, and I didn’t think she heard my apology.
The boat drifted slowly away through water almost completely clear of any reeds. Above us, the mist descended again. The cold grew sharper.
I let go of the oar. Lucia pushed us out, one hand over the other, the oar reaching deep. Then she sat, and the oar trailed in the water as some current tugged us away. I put my forehead against her back and wept.