Above the Light

Jesse Bullington

 

Like many a questionable practice, we got into it when we were young. We didn’t have a name for it, didn’t even really talk about it. It was just what we did.

We met at Swift Creek Middle School, in the yeasty armpit of the south that is Tallahassee, Florida. We were both weirdoes. He was cast from the shy-yet-sly mold, with a mountain of curly dark hair like a tween Eraserhead. I was even more awkward and less inclined to socialize, but Caleb drew me out with his charming dorkiness. Initial points of mutual interest were B-movies, Douglas Adams, and Vampire the Masquerade, which it turned out we both owned but neither had ever successfully cajoled another person into playing. Within a couple weeks of being seated next to each other in Pre-Algebra we were getting thick, and that inevitably led to the first sleepover. I rode the bus home with him on a Friday.

For a recent New England transplant, even my suburban neighborhood felt a little wild, with a thickly wooded lot abutting our property and deep swamps bordering the edge of the development. But Caleb’s place was positively primeval. The bus let off kid after kid after kid, sometimes alone and sometimes in herds, until we were the last ones aboard, rolling down a narrow road, the boughs of the ancient, moss-draped live oaks forming a canopy overhead so it felt like we were sliding down a living tunnel. The bus finally let us out where the paved road juked to the left. Caleb led me down a dirt track into the woods as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

The Miccosukee Land Co-op was what you’d call an intentional community these days—a bunch of hippies who went in on a group-buy for a ton of acres of Florida swamp. Most of the houses we passed on our walk were pretty mundane affairs set back in the trees, but then we left the dirt road and crossed a long wooden boardwalk that threaded across the thickly wooded bog. It was a strange, sepia-toned realm where everything from the placid pools to the bald cypress rising out of them were the same shades of brown. I had never been anywhere like it, and I was already in love with the rural commune before we even reached Caleb’s place, which sat at the end of another serpentine boardwalk over still, tannin-stained waters.

Caleb’s house was far bigger than any of the ones we’d passed, resembling a wooden castle whose three-story wings were joined by a screened porch and long hallway. Blue tarps covered most of the windows on the right wing. His dad was an architect and the place had been a work in progress ever since Caleb was born, with additions and more boardwalks and a nearby guesthouse springing up over the years. As sprawling as it looked from outside, the inside was cozy enough, with exposed wood and stone tiles and bookshelves everywhere. His parents weren’t home, and we set up in a kitchen that was like something out of a fairy tale, with cast iron pots hanging over the gas stove and jars of herbs and teas everywhere. We came up with Vampire characters at the scuffed and scored wooden table, and, when we got hungry, Caleb introduced me to tofu, tamari, and nutritional yeast. It was better than I expected, almost cheesy with a crispy pan-fried exterior.

Later, he introduced me to something even more savory.

“Want to go for a walk?”

It had been dark for hours, but we had already established that we were both the sort of sensible person who stayed up as late as possible on weekends, rather than squandering our precious freedom with anything as mundane as sleep.

“Sure.”

By the time you’re twelve you have a pretty good idea of whether or not you like the night. I definitely did. Stargazing, huddling around campfires, playing manhunt—all that good stuff. Yet just heading out the door for a nocturnal stroll had never occurred to me. Probably because I didn’t really get along with any of the kids in my neighborhood, and, unlike this swamp child I was hanging out with, the thought of being alone in the night still creeped me out a bit. It still does, even as an adult; but then that’s all part of the charm, isn’t it? Fear can be fun. Euphoric, even.

And then there’s the satisfaction of subduing your apish instincts, of reminding yourself that you’re not ruled by animal fear of the unknown. The natural world hasn’t just been conquered, it’s been beaten into a coma—all the mysteries have been hunted down and shot for sport, and the once-terrifying night harbors little peril. That’s what you tell yourself, anyway, when you’ve moved far beyond the light and hear a far off sound in the midnight woods…far off, but never far enough.

The only threat I had to contend with was myself—if I wasn’t careful, I might twist an ankle, tumble off a boardwalk, or even step on a snake when I crunched through an unseen carpet of dead leaves. There were no more panthers or wolves in North Florida, I didn’t think, and any bears were few, far between, and in the words of our favorite author, mostly harmless.

There are worse things than mundane animals in the night, as every small child knows, but by twelve you’ve either gotten good at talking yourself out of the monster spiral or you’re not going to be the type who enjoys being out after dark anyway.

I don’t remember what we talked about on that first night walk, though monsters almost definitely came up. We were twelve, after all. What I do remember was the moment after we’d crossed the first boardwalk, when Caleb flicked off the flashlight that had illuminated our path and stowed it in his pocket. How he carried on as if it were the most normal thing in the world to set off down a dirt road in the deep dark woods with only a thin hook of a moon lodged between the upper boughs of an oak to light our way. And how satisfying it felt to hustle after him, tripping over the occasional shadowy root, but otherwise finding the sandy track as easy to follow under the moon as it had been under the sun.

As my eyes adjusted, the impenetrable walls on either side of the road splintered into individual trees and bushes. When we reached the next boardwalk Caleb didn’t take his flashlight back out. I was glad for it. We must have walked many miles that night, all over the sleeping Co-op, but that’s the moment I still feel the keenest, down all the years—how happy it made me when I realized we didn’t need the light anymore.

How at home.

 

 

Easy jetlag avoidance: book a red-eye, stay up all night the night before, and don’t close your eyes until the cabin lights dim on that transatlantic flight. You’re so excited to wake up in a new country, you barely notice that you feel kinda like shit.

We hadn’t lived in the same state since high school, so our night hikes were a rare indulgence even before Caleb married Claudia and followed her back to Germany. That made them all the more precious. We’d both taken other people out over the years, but never with any regularity. And most nights after dinner I’d go for long walks out along the Boulder Creek Path, through the industrial barrens east of town where the stars burned bright in the vast prairie sky. But that wasn’t the same, either. For something that loomed so large over who I was—who we both were, I suspect—night hiking was a difficult appetite to regularly sate; imagine living in rural Kansas and constantly craving sashimi.

Dreams were a different story, though. Ever since I was a kid, I probably spent one night a week trekking through my dreams. Sometimes Caleb was there, but mostly I was by myself, or with those dream companions you know so well on the other side of sleep but have never met in the waking world. Regardless of whether I traveled alone or with those imagined comrades, there were always other figures hiking the trails. In places, throngs of them as thick as you’d find on an easy trail in Yosemite or Rocky Mountain National Park in peak season… when the sun is high, that is.

It was always night in my dreams, and I was always in the mountains. Not familiar mountains, either…or not real mountains, I should say, because while I never dreamed of places I’d actually been, those imaginary landscapes were as mundane and well-known to my dreaming self as the Flatirons are to my waking mind.

That was where I went while my body cramped up in a window seat—to the range of my dreams. The city I departed was the largest in the high country. There were wide winding lanes, coursing down like a cataract amongst the buildings built out of the solid slope of the white-stoned mountain. I pushed open a wrought-iron gate in the low wall on the upper edge of town and followed the trail up to the crest of a high arched bridge, spanning a gushing creek. From there I had my vantage and could see the moon-crowned dome of the summit leering over the lantern-lit burg below, its ridgeline smooth as an egg and just as full of possibility. A milky lake lapped at the foot of the slouching peak, feeding the stream below me. There were figures clustered on the bank, but I couldn’t tell if they had just emerged from the pool or were bracing themselves to enter it. Above them, more black silhouettes moved against the grey face of the summit, navigating the web of trails. But were they climbing or descending?

I felt an eagerness, then, and acted on it, rushing down the other side of the bridge and ahead up the trail. It’s idiotically dangerous to hurry on a night hike, especially in the mountains, but this thought only came to me as the vision dissolved into a too-bright airline cabin, seatbacks and tray tables returning to their upright positions.

 

 

Caleb met me at the baggage claim. He had left Dresden in the middle of the night to make it down in time, and had bags under his eyes about as big as the Kelty pack I pulled off the carousel. We hugged, shot the shit, and hustled out of the busy airport and into his little green continental ride—an Elf, naturally. The Austrian village Caleb had found us was only a few hours from Munich, and we spent the first leg of the drive catching up. He was finally swapping out the hell of online academia for plain old programming, Claudia was teaching, their cats were catting. I’m sure my tales of insurance underwriting thrilled him to no end, and we were both relieved when we neared the Austrian border and the mountains commanded our full attention.

Far more poetic souls than I have tried to capture the majesty of the Alps in words, but until you’ve passed through and over and occasionally under them yourself there’s just no way to get it. The way the rolling countryside swells and swells, fields and forests rising steeper and steeper around you, hoisting up the picturesque towns and country churches and even crumbling castles, the blue and white of the distant peaks freeing themselves from the camouflage of the cloud-streaked sky.

“There’s something I forgot to mention,” Caleb said, when we finally got around the blocky tour-bus that had been cramping our view for the last dozen kilometers of long alpine valley. “Galtür seems especially down on our little hobby, so be sure not to let any locals know that we plan on being out after dark.”

“Yeah?” Over the last couple of decades we had night hiked together on every continent save Antarctica, and, while we’d ended up in some remote locations, we had always established local connections who knew where we were and when to expect us back. Most of said locals tried to talk us out of wandering off into the night, of course, but we always came to an arrangement.

“The frau at the first hoff I was going to book freaked out on me when I started laying some groundwork. Mentioned how I’d heard the trails around here were so well-marked you couldn’t get lost even in the middle of the night, but she cut me off with the riot act. Said Tyrol even passed a law against hiking after dark.”

“They did?” I’d assumed Caleb had chosen Galtür out of convenience, since it was so close to his adopted home, but committing our precious annual holiday to the one place on earth that had actually outlawed night hiking didn’t seem particularly convenient.

Caleb laughed his low little chuckle. “Of course not, I checked it out and she was full of it. But her story was good! She had this whole lecture prepared right down to the thousand euro fines. The fragile alpine ecosystem is apparently under serious threat from tourists stomping all over their precious edelweiss in the dark. I suspect the real reason she tried to scare me off was to minimize the chances of bringing bad press to town—they’ve had a few hikers go missing over the years, and an avalanche back in the Nineties killed something like fifty people, I think. Last thing the local tourism board wants is some dumb American falling into a crevasse on a moonless night. Anyway, I thanked her for the information and booked somewhere else. I didn’t say nichts about nachtwanderen at the next place just in case they’re all in on it.”

“Oh, sure, that all makes perfect sense,” I said. “Just like it makes perfect sense to go night hiking somewhere new without telling anyone what we’re doing.”

I wasn’t actually worried. How could I be, with those beautiful rugged ridges boxing us in? The trails would be clear as day up there above the pines, even by starlight alone. We’d planned this trip for a new moon and so my only concern was that the trails might be crowded with amateur astrologers. The solitude isn’t the only charm of night hiking, but it’s definitely one of them.

Our road carried us alongside a muddy river that coursed through the laurel green meadowland in the belly of the Paznuan valley. As I eyed the deeper, darker shade of the forests that rose up on either side of us, something Caleb had glided over jumped back out at me. “You said people have gone missing out here?”

“Sure, I guess. People go missing everywhere.” We crested a knoll and zipped past a whole family in fluorescent performance gear walking a path that ran parallel to the road. Caleb slowed down before I could ask him to; we were entering another of the pretty little towns built off the only major road through the region.

“People go missing everywhere,” I repeated. “Perfect tagline for our found footage horror movie.”

“You think every single person who starts the PCT or even the Appalachian arrives safe and sound at the other end? And those are the biggies; day hikers disappear, too. Not just a few, either, we’re talking hundreds of people vanishing every year in state parks alone, and some estimates put it even higher—thousands, gone without a trace.”

“You’re taking advantage of the fact that I can’t get a signal to google that,” I said, double-checking my phone and confirming that even in town I wasn’t getting any bars. All these little villages were essentially off-season ski-resorts, but less Aspen Extreme and more Sound of Music—we passed a cheese shop, a bakery, and a butcher, all on the main drag. “Gonna need a source on those numbers, buddy.”

“Claudia,” said Caleb. If I hadn’t known him as well as I did I would have missed the hiccup in his joviality, but there it was, between his wife’s name and what came after. “She’s not crazy about the night hiking, either, and has been inflicting me with all kinds of articles. Backcountry horror stories, you know the type. Little does she know that reading about dummies being dumb only makes me feel smarter.”

“That makes one of us.” Then we were out of town again, climbing up and up the valley. We passed a kilometer marker for Galtür. “But whether or not she loves it, Claudia knows where we are, right? You guys have your daily calls or whatever planned?”

He hesitated, a mischievous smile quirking the corner of his mouth, and we both fell into that immature giggling that only best friends can draw from one another, and usually when they’re both off their heads. In our teens it would’ve been from pot and bad jokes, in our twenties from booze and worse ones, and now at forty it had come full circle, to the same pure source we had first discovered as kids—sleep deprivation.

We’d made good time from the airport, so after lunch we could nap until dinner. A lot of hikers apparently take a day or two for their bodies to recalibrate after skipping over that many time zones before hitting the trail, but Caleb and I always jumped right into it—partially because weather can be such an issue. Dense cloud cover alone can put the kibosh on a night hike, so you have to take every opportunity, in case you don’t get another one. The other reason we didn’t waste any time was not something we have ever articulated to one another, but which I was sure Caleb felt as keenly as I did. Night hiking was the only time I really felt fully awake anymore.

 

 

Rain had drilled the Langtang region all day, but by midnight the moon had dried out the clouds, cracking them apart into a mosaic of ghostly blue light. We made the slippery trek away from the holy village of Gosaikunda, alive in a way that only summiting a nearly 15,000-foot Himalayan pass in the middle of the night can make you feel. A lone hut sprouted like a mushroom on the side of the flinty trail, its roof sparkling—the salvaged wing of an airplane that had crashed into the side of a peak. We took extra care to mind our step passing by the tarp-hooded doorway of the hovel, just as we did whenever we slipped through sleeping villages, alongside dark barns, or neared silent temples.

Night hiking transforms you. You are invisible. A spirit. So long as you obey the covenants, you preserve the spell.

It also transports you. This is someplace else. This is always someplace else. The night is an open door to another world.

Down in the terraced fields, gazing across the open valley just as a quarter mile expanse of the far hillside gave way. A black wound erupting on the face of the countryside, shimmering like blood as it rushed down the slope and erased the trail we would have been climbing at that very moment, if we hadn’t lost the trail back in the misty pines for over an hour.

I thought the mudslide sounded like rain. Caleb told me it sounded to him like a crackling fire. We had talked about it over and over again, confirming and reaffirming for the other that the nighttime trail had indeed been empty, at least as far as we could see. But now, that far path was crowded with figures when the mudslide came crashing down over it. I know two of those doomed silhouettes must have been our possible selves, the ones who hadn’t been too stubborn to use flashlights after getting lost in a Himalayan forest and thus made better time reaching the valley floor—but who were all the others?

Behind us, above us, came a noise like rain, like crackling fire, figures scrambling up the muddy steps of the trail that wound down through the terraced fields, but before I could look back to see the chthonic tidal wave falling over us Caleb knocked again, waking me up.

I blinked in the twilight of my room. We had checked in, but I couldn’t remember anything about the interaction. Nothing unusual about that; such elisions in time, in detail, were a mildly bothersome bug in my daily routine—the inevitable consequence of not getting enough rest. I hauled myself up from the bed. Staring out the rustic framed window at the bluish mountains in the gloaming, it felt like my whole life had been spent trying to catch up on missing sleep.

I rubbed my eyes and called out to Caleb to quit with the knocking. I was awake. Or getting there. The mountains grew darker as I watched.

 

 

The dining room at the Gampeler-Hof was cozy, brightly lit, and crowded with strangers speaking foreign tongues. A dark-haired woman in an honest-to-god dirndl seated us against a back wall. After she bustled off to bring us beer, Caleb informed me she was none other than the landlady herself. The pension offered three choices for dinner every night, none of them vegetarian. Caleb had apparently worked something out in advance, though, because when I eventually received my schnitzel our hostess brought him a platter of pasta drowned in vibrant yellow cheese sauce.

“Nothing like authentic Tyrolian cuisine,” Caleb said, spearing a goopy forkful. “Here comes Magnus. Remember not to say anything about what we’re doing tonight.”

“Magnus?” I glanced over my shoulder just as a tall mustachioed man in lederhosen bore down on me from the direction of the kitchen. I don’t think I had ever seen a real person in lederhosen before. He clapped me on the back as if we were old friends, releasing a torrent of German so swift I was instantly washed away and doubted even Caleb could find footing in the flow. He finally managed to get in a few words edgewise, though, and I hoped to Christ that kaffee was indeed what it sounded like.

“Grüss Gott!” Magnus said as last, giving me another hardy slap on the back as he charged away toward the kitchen.

“Grüss Gott!” Caleb called after him.

“Grüss Gott,” I parroted. “That’s the regional auf weidersen, I take it?”

“Not really,” said Caleb. “It’s more of a catch-all hello/goodbye around here—what you tell people when you pass them on the trail.”

“Something about God?” I guessed.

“Yeah, God greet you, go with God, something like that. It’s a country thing—if you try that on someone in Dresden they’ll say something smartass about not being in a hurry to meet God.” Caleb grinned. “My people!”

“Are they really that religious down here?” I hadn’t noticed an overabundance of crucifixes or other iconography in the quaint, family-run hotel.

“Compared to most Germans I’ve met, sure, but they’re not exactly Southern Baptists,” said Caleb. “You get the feeling that the Reformation never quite found the right path into these little mountain towns. Probably not amenable enough to incorporating the old ways.”

“Ah yes,” I said. “Catholicism gobbling up paganism, a tale as old as time.”

“Who can say who gobbled whom,” said Caleb, and then lowered his voice, though as far as I could tell we were the only English speakers in the noisy dining room. “I didn’t say one word about night hiking, but Magnus brought up that same bogus law against walking the trails after dark. I don’t know how, but I think he’s onto us. I’m one step ahead of him, though—I moved my car down in front of the church while you were napping, so we can sneak out later and walk back to it without anyone in the hoff realizing we’re gone.”

“Very smart,” I said, smiling at how silly—and familiar—this all was. My parents were far less amenable to their teenage son and his friend haunting the neighborhood than Caleb’s folks, so we’d always had to sneak out when he spent the night at my place.

The hubbub of the dining room grew louder, making me ache for quiet paths through dark woods. As if sensing my dismay, the landlady appeared and refilled my stein. A relief—alcohol was about the only thing that made me capable of acting like a human, the cold beer rich and malty on my schnitzel-scoured tongue.

Magnus burst out of the kitchen, singing a boisterous song as he delivered a carafe of coffee to our table. The conversations died down and all focus turned to our host as he serenaded the dining hall. Extending a hand to a keg-shaped matron seated with her equally stout family, he drew her off the bench and they began to dance. Clapping spread around the room as they found the rhythm of his ballad. I looked at Caleb, barely able to believe the provincial scene unfolding before us, but his eyes were on Magnus and the crone, his hands clapping in time with all the others, his lips moving as if he knew every word of the bewildering song.

 

 

By day there had been a fair amount of traffic on the valley road, but now ours were the only headlights drilling through the darkness. I kept my eyes on the grassy curb, as I always did when driving in the country. When Caleb and I night walked at my place as kids, we would always hide when cars approached, throwing ourselves facedown in the ditch if there were no trees to skulk behind. Nobody ever stopped, which I used to think meant nobody ever saw us. Granted, when you’re driving you’re often on autopilot, and the human eye is good at skipping over things it doesn’t expect to see… like a prone figure in the tall grass on the side of a road. But considering how many cars must have passed right by us over the years I have to wonder: how many people did catch a glimpse of us lying there, but elected to keep going. How many of them sped up?

“Do you remember our plan after we watched Near Dark?” Caleb asked as we wound up the valley road, high beams shining off rocks and scrub.

“Probably best we never actually tried that,” I said, smiling at the memory. We’d decided that after we graduated high school we would go on a vampire road trip: tape tinfoil over the car windows and see how long and how far we could go without ever being in the sunlight. “We were such weirdos.”

“Was that the same night you climbed the tree outside Mrs. Beck’s? And almost fell out of it when the lights came on?” Caleb flicked on his turn signal even though we hadn’t seen another car since slipping out of the quiet hamlet. We left the main road, climbing the northern slope of the valley.

“You know I don’t even think that was her house?” That memory brought a grimace instead of a grin. Mrs. Beck was our 8^th grade English teacher. We liked her, and when we discovered she apparently lived somewhere in my neighborhood set out to find where. I’m not exactly sure what our motivations were, other than it gave a purpose to our night wandering. In retrospect, scaling the elm to try and peek through a darkened upstairs window was just about the creepiest possible way of confirming it, and I made enough noise hauling myself up into the branches that I woke up the house. We fled into the night before the front door could open to reveal Mrs. Beck, a shotgun-wielding stranger, or a shotgun-wielding Mrs. Beck.

“What’s her line at the beginning?” asked Caleb as we flitted through another stand of dark trees, back out into the stunted scrubland of the high country.

“Mrs. Beck?”

“No, the girl in Near Dark. When she takes Caleb out into the fields.”

“I forgot he was Caleb.” I never forget Lance Henriksen’s character’s name, though. “Oh, I know what you mean. About the night being blinding.”

“No, right, it’s deafening.” Caleb slapped the steering wheel as our headlights caught the vast gleaming surface of a lake up ahead. “They get out of his truck in the middle of nowhere, and she asks him if he can hear it, and he asks what, and she says the night. It’s deafening.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s that, too.”

As we followed the curve of the shore I made out a cluster of dark buildings on the opposite bank, but didn’t call Caleb’s attention to them lest he get paranoid about being observed by the locals and kill the lights. Night hiking was one thing, night driving was another thing entirely. The road crossed a land bridge between this first lake and a far larger body of water that opened up before us. We climbed again, skirting the northern bank of what Caleb informed me was a reservoir. The inky expanse filled the bowl of this final valley nestled amidst the bald ridges and peaks that loomed to the north and south.

There was a parking lot up ahead, but before we could reach it a metal gate jumped into our headlights, blocking off the access road. Caleb stopped the car. “Here we are!”

“It’s safe to just leave it here?” Now that we had made it I was finally waking up for what felt like the first time in months. “What if we get towed?”

“By who? Magnus?” Caleb laughed. “This is only a little thirteen kilometer warm up anyway. We’ll be out of here hours before dawn. Tomorrow night we start the real trek—I found a circuit over the mountains where we’ll hit over twenty kilometers a night, with alm huts to crash in during the day. It’ll be like that summer on the Kungsleden, only with more cheese, better beer, and real beds.”

That sounded an awful lot like heaven. By the glow of the domelight we settled our packs onto our backs. Then the doors of the car clicked shut, the light went out, and we were alone on an empty mountain road just before midnight. I closed my eyes, the only sound the cool wind rustling my Marmot.

We helped each other scale the metal barrier and tromped across the wide, empty parking lot. There was a little ranger station or something at the edge of the reservoir, and passing the dark building, I pulled my hood down to cover my face in case they had cameras trained on the concrete walkway that spanned the wall of the reservoir. Night hiking. See everything, but don’t be seen.

Part of what makes being out in the wilds after dark so satisfying: the cognitive transformations you undergo as your eyes adjust, your ears prick up. Walking along the reservoir, toward the wooded far shore and the muscular ridge that blocked off the southern horizon, I felt the familiar change come over me. No moon, no clouds. Stars so thick you’d think the sequined cloak of night was on loan from the Liberace estate.

We paused before entering the trees, slowly looking back and forth from the radiant sky to its drowned twin trapped in the waters at our feet.

Neither of us spoke. You either feel it stronger than you feel anything else, or you don’t understand what it even is to feel. Some of us are just born for the night.

The band of wood was quieter than I expected, silent other than the creak of the ever-present mountain draughts through the pine boughs. The breeze wasn’t exactly balmy, but summer still lingered here in Tyrol, even after dark. We followed the shadow-smudged trail up the wide face of the mountain, the cool air refreshing against my flushed skin. We weren’t in the trees for long, not tall ones, anyway, ascending through stubby brush that made it a bit easier to find the path.

Veteran hikers don’t put a lot of conscious thought into where they step most of the time, their eyes and feet long accustomed to working in tandem without bothering the brain with every niggling detail. That all changes in difficult terrain, and there’s no terrain more difficult than that which you cannot see. Night hiking forces you to be in the moment, paying close attention to every step through a maze of starlit leaves. Up and up we went, until our switchbacking led us above the stunted shrubs and into the proper alpine environment of exposed grasses, wildflowers, and scattered rocks and boulders. We still had a stern climb ahead of us to reach the ridgeline, but with the trail plain and open at our boots we were able to make far better time.

“What’s the name of it again?” I asked when the wind died down. My voice was hushed, as if my parents might overhear us here on this desolate mountain high in the Alps.

“The Breitspitze.” Caleb paused and took a pull on his Nalgene bottle. The stars were so bright I could see the sweat shining on his face.

“Don’t tell me that’s our warm-up,” I said, pointing to the peak that jutted up from the eastern end of the ridge to dominate the horizon. We’d been making good progress and I felt more invigorated than I had in ages, but no amount of summit fever could make that jagged, ice-rimmed monster seem attainable. Not our first night out, anyway.

“Hell no!” Caleb laughed. “We go right at the top and just follow the ridge from there. It ends in a cliff, so hard to get lost. Gotta be halfway there already.”

“Yeah?” I looked back the way we’d come. The silver and ebon landscape shimmered like the surface of the reservoir as the wind brushed its invisible palm across the mountain’s face. A sapling at the edge of the treeline swayed more than its brothers or sisters in the breeze, the waving of its stubby boughs making my heart skip a beat…it then cleared half a dozen more, as the silhouette detached itself from the pines, stepping out into the starlight. It was like something from a nightmare.

 

 

At some point I listened to a podcast where the host said if you’re ever unsure whether or not you’re dreaming you just need to read something, look away, and then reread it. Our sleeping brains can do a pretty slick job at convincing us what we’re experiencing is real, but one thing they can’t do is keep text consistent in the middle of a dream. Even something as basic as a street sign will lose its cohesion if you turn away and then refocus on it.

Ever since I learned that trick I constantly find myself double-checking everything from emails to cereal boxes in the grocery store, but so far I’ve only ever confirmed I was awake.

This was all part of a dream I had, weeks ago. The irony makes me smile—the dreamer dreaming of ways to test whether he is dreaming but never employing them, instead calling up memories where the tests failed. This was where my sleeping mind wandered even as my sleeping feet carried me purposefully up the ghostlit trail, away from that teeming ivory city that I forever seemed to be leaving behind in pursuit of new adventures. I had an apartment high in one of the crooked spires, a curio-cluttered garret where my shadow friends and I plotted our treks over black maps whose inconstant golden paths slithered like snakes, but not once in all my life had I ever dreamed of homecoming, only ever departure. Lying in bed the following morning with tears streaming down my cheeks I wondered what that said about me…but in the night, in the moment, I was simply giddy to be off gallivanting again, accompanied by dozens of my nocturnal peers. They were my people, I knew this in my heart even if I could never quite make out their faces, but the high dark places we journeyed, and those star-kissed summits…

Considering how majestically my dreams towered over the low, dull range of my life it might seem odd that I never told anyone about them beyond the broadest strokes, not even Caleb. He also dreamed about night hiking, but from the one time he broached the subject I gathered his were not nearly so pleasant as mine and so I quickly changed the topic. The heart of the matter is that while I don’t consider myself superstitious in general, on some bone-deep level I feared that if I talked about the visions it would amount to flinching away from them, that doing so would somehow change the dreams, or put a stop to them altogether. Never take your eyes off that which you love, even for a moment, or suffer the consequences.

 

 

I squinted, willing the black shape I had spied down the mountainside to bleed back into the shadows, a trick of my night-strained eyes. But the shape defied me, coming into sharper relief as it left the thicket. An animal, the thought sharing the shape of a prayer, but the persistent starlight disavowed me of that impression. The figure was still a long way off down the slope, but it was without question another night hiker, climbing the trail after us. They were making good time, too.

Over the years we had encountered other night hikers, of course. Most were either stargazing tourists or locals in hot climates who preferred to travel in the cooler hours. It always gave you a start, though, to run into a fellow traveler deep in the night, where you presumed you had the run of the world. I turned to point out our comrade to Caleb but he had already started hiking again. Hurrying after him, I considered how odd it was that here, in the high country, where even distant headlights should have commanded our attention, neither Caleb nor I had noticed another car threading its way along the reservoir. Then again, it was at our backs…

I’m not a competitive person, I don’t think, but whenever I’m hiking and notice someone coming up the trail behind me I pick up my pace to try and stay ahead of them. It’s one of those instinctive responses that’s so deeply wired that it took me ages to even notice I was doing it. Most of the time it’s a lost cause—if someone is making good enough time to catch up to you on a long hike, chances are they simply have a stronger stride and will inevitably overtake you. But knowing all this doesn’t make it any easier to tame that impulse, and I climbed as quickly as I could up the gritty trail.

My closing the distance on Caleb must have triggered his own, similar instincts, because he too began moving more quickly, until we were both nearly trotting up the steep track. Sweat burned my eyes, the Milky Way bouncing atop the crooked spine of the ridge. At the back of my burning lungs thrummed the exultation that I had first experienced as a child, walking through the night with my only friend. A thrilling cocktail: the faceless fear that comes from being out after dark when anything might be creeping and the delight one feels at being the creeping thing. Many a high beam had glided over our hiding places, many a sudden porchlight had glanced off the soles of our fleeing shoes, but in all our many nights we had never been caught, and we would not be caught now.

Caleb’s boot skidded out from under him as he rounded a switchback. His arms pinwheeled and he crashed down onto his side. The boulder-strewn slope wasn’t terribly steep at this stretch, and instead of rolling down to the reservoir in a broken heap he just lay there panting in the grass. I caught up with him, trying to smother the grin that our jog up the mountainside had conjured. In the starlight his skin looked as pale as the moon-hued flowers he had crushed.

“You all right, man?” I asked, extending a hand to help him up. “Guess there’s a reason night running never had quite the same—”

“Shhhh!” He grabbed my hand and jerked himself to his feet. He wasn’t looking at me, or even the rip in the flank of his cargo pants, but back down the mountain.

I followed his gaze and my heart jumped another little hurdle when I made out the dark silhouette of the other hiker. I’d forgotten all about them when Caleb took his tumble, but now it was impossible to tear my eyes away—there was something about the figure’s swift gait that was almost hypnotizing. It was hard to tell, but they must have been extraordinarily tall… and as I stared they abruptly stopped, twin white sparks flashing in the blank lump of their head. Starlight reflecting off their eyes, or more likely, I supposed, glasses. The hairs rose on my neck as I had the distinct impression the night hiker was looking straight at us…

—why shouldn’t they be staring at us just as we stared at them? And like all childish fears, acting like an adult would easily vanquish it. I began to lift my hand in greeting to our fellow pilgrim, but Caleb seized my elbow so fiercely I felt his fingernails through my wicking layers. He looked even more upset than before; I wondered if he’d really injured himself.

“Move,” he hissed, pushing me ahead of him up the trail. “And don’t look back.”

On a day hike this strange behavior would have demanded an immediate accounting—at the very least, I would have made sure Caleb hadn’t banged his head. But alone on the flank of the Breitspitze, save for the glittering stars and the dull black figure below, I did as Caleb bid.

We finally crested the ridge, great slabs of limestone rising up around us like armored plates along the crooked spine of the mountain. After stumbling through the shadows of a flinty hillock, our trail joined the track that ran from east to west along the ridgeline. The wind picked up, piping through chinks in the giant’s cairns—during our climb the crest had looked relatively uniform, but up here we could see it was both wide and rolling, the trail snaking off in either direction around, and sometimes over, the lichen-coated outcroppings. My legs ached almost as badly as my chest, my head spinning, but when I tried to sit on a rock Caleb prodded me forward.

“We’re not there yet,” he wheezed, passing me and hurrying ahead. He was limping a little. “Fast as you can.”

“What gives? You think that’s Magnus, chief of the night hiking police?” I glanced back down the trail, but we’d come too far in on the wide ridge to catch a glimpse of our pursuer on the slope below. At least that meant he wasn’t right on top of us.

“I’ll tell you if you hurry up—I told you not to look back!” Caleb was at the top of the little rise, outlined against the stars. I’d worked up a lather on our pell-mell climb, but shivered at the uncanny sight of him perched there above me, rendered as blank and black by the angle as the night hikers I passed in my dreams. The sensation wasn’t quite déjà vu but something tangential, and only intensified when I caught up to him, and saw how the trail led us down beside a shallow pool that caught the stars in its glassy web. The next line of mountains to the south seemed far more remote than either the stars blazing above or those captured in the water below…

“Seriously, man, talk to me!” I called after Caleb as he began sliding his way down the rugged trail to the bank of the starry pool.

“You don’t have to believe me…” Caleb’s insistence on not raising his voice beyond a clandestine rasp ensured I matched his unsafe pace, splashing through puddles. The trail grew harder to follow down in these little dips. “You just have to humor me. No matter what. Agreed?”

“Sure,” I said, nearly twisting my ankle on the unseen path.

“Have you ever had dreams come true?” he asked. “I mean literally. You dream something, then later, maybe much later, it happens?”

“I don’t know,” I said, wondering if maybe Caleb had eaten a pot brownie or something and failed to mention it to his hiking buddy. Under normal circumstances I would’ve been highly interested in such a subject, but everything was already too eerie. “I…I don’t always remember all the details, when I’m dreaming.”

“But you told me…that time on the High Lonesome trail…you told me you dream about night hiking…too,” he panted as we scrambled up out of the bowl. “You’ve never dreamed this place?”

“Yeah, those…” I humored him, squinting to make out the otherworldly terrain of the ridgeline. I wanted there to be some memory or scrap of dream I could jog loose, so that I could be right there beside Caleb, sharing the burden of whatever was freaking him out. Instead, he had it all to himself, and his panic was freaking me out—after all these years of thinking I was the one with an unhealthy preoccupation with his dreams it turned out my best friend had it way worse. “I don’t think so, man. They’re not real places, in my dreams. Just… amalgamations, probably? Platonic ideals of mountains.”

“Yeah, well, not mine,” said Caleb, plunging right over the crest of the next rise. From behind it looked like he’d stepped off the edge of the world. I followed him, trusting the trail to materialize beneath my feet. A tide of clouds had begun to roll in across the sea of stars, and like it or not we had to move slower as the night deepened around us, the trail fading into the well-tromped grass. “I’m not great at remembering them either. My dreams, I mean. But a couple of times they have come true, and then I remember I dreamed it. And right now, I’m remembering this nightmare I’ve had, for years and years. Us, being up here, of this happening.”

“Of what happening?” I asked, a chill penetrating my jacket and my heart pounding from more than our pace. The clouds choked off more of our light, wraiths of mist trailing us along the undulating ridge. I fought the urge to look over my shoulder, keeping my eyes on the dim trail.

“It’ll be okay,” Caleb breathed, his voice so low I didn’t know if he was trying to reassure me or himself. “Just remember: when it catches us, pretend it isn’t there. Don’t look at it. Don’t acknowledge it at all. Definitely don’t run. No matter what. Keep your eyes on the trail, keep moving, keep silent. Do that until we can touch the cross and we’ll be okay. I think. Just don’t look at it.”

“What?” Now I had to look behind me, I had to, but, as if sensing my intentions Caleb stopped short and turned and grabbed the sleeve of my Marmot. I nearly walked into him on the narrow trail. Even chest to chest and up on an exposed scarp it had grown too overcast to make out more than the pale blob of his face, the whiter shine of his teeth as he grimaced.

“No. Matter. What. Please.” He sounded on the verge of tears. “Humor me, and we’ll laugh about it later.”

“Sure, man, sure,” I said, hoping to hell if I could calm him down it would calm me down in the bargain. “Anything you say.”

“Don’t say anything,” he whispered, then laughed, a strangled birdcall of a sound. “Claudia’s pregnant.”

The way he said it made it sound like I should offer condolences instead of congratulations. Everything just felt so strange and terrible, and I went to put my arms around my tortured friend when the clouds lifted enough for me to see his watery eyes widen. He spun around on his heel and began marching slowly and carefully down the trail with none of his former franticness. From behind me came the faint clattering of displaced pebbles sliding down a mountain path. I froze, the struggle to keep my neck fixed forward instead of reflexively looking back over my shoulder so intense it commandeered every other muscle in my body. The mountain wind died down to nothing, and coming up the trail just behind me I made out the distinct sound of ponderous, snuffling breath.

It was all I could do not to ignore that cardinal rule of night hiking and break into a run. Instead, I took a deep breath and briskly picked my way down the trail after the dark silhouette of my friend. Caleb reached the bank of another shining pool, the trail winding between it and a wall of moss-striped limestone. Heavy footfalls were so close at my heel I expected to be tripped up any moment. The air had gone stagnant, but I saw the wildflowers and grasses all along the shore bend near to breaking, as if a gale ripped through the still hollow.

I stole a glance at the pool of bobbing stars, but as I did the waters churned, the reflection distorted into an inky wave that slapped against the far bank. I stumbled but caught myself. I had never felt so scared, or so alive.

Caleb’s backpack hopped around on his shoulders, his whole body hunching as he staggered forward. I think he was probably crying, but he never looked back so I couldn’t be sure. The path was too narrow for two to walk abreast without bumping into one another, but still I sensed my new companion striding beside me every step of the way, looming impossibly tall and impossibly thin, luminous eyes twinkling in time with the stars overhead. The inexorable pull to look at my fellow night hiker grew and grew, that dread compulsion that makes you want to leap off the sides of bridges, into the path of oncoming trains. I had always felt that night hiking was like entering a waking dream, and now that I was inhabiting Caleb’s nightmare it was obvious I must fulfill its expectations.

I pretended we were back in the misty cowfields beside the Co-op, or scaling the moonscape of the sand dunes at Cape San Blas. Tried to tell myself that we were alone and this was a dream.

It didn’t work.

Caleb gasped. Looking up from the phantasmal path at my feet I saw he had broken his own rule, stopping in the middle of the trail and looking back. Not at me, but beside me, at that which no night hiker should ever behold. Not those who want to find their way home, anyway.

Behind Caleb the ridge fell away on all sides, an enormous wooden cross rising from the end of our peninsula amidst the stars. How the Austrians mark their summits, apparently. Caleb was only a dozen yards ahead of me and the cross was no more than another twenty behind him. All we had to do was touch it, he’d said, but as hard as I willed him to start moving again his legs buckled underneath him and he collapsed to his knees.

The black figures cavorting around the cross all ceased their gambol, eyes like blazing stars turning toward the newest arrivals. One dangled from the arm of the cross and another perched atop it, limned against the night sky. It wasn’t their eyes that sparkled like stars, but their teeth.

Awareness came upon me then, as sudden as sleeper starting awake from a night terror—I had dreamed all this before, just like Caleb, only I had forgotten everything until this very moment. Or perhaps my dream began where his ended? It didn’t much matter, for like the song goes, even awful dreams are good dreams, if you’re doing it right. And besides, we were both awake now, more awake than most people will ever be. Anything that came after was worth the cost, and I gladly surrendered myself to the rushing current of the night.

I passed Caleb, suppressing the obscene urge to wish him Grüss Gott as I neared the crowded cross he couldn’t bring himself to approach. A part of me shuddered at this coldness, but that section of myself was fading faster than the details of a dream on a busy morning, and would be gone for good the next time I went looking for it. I was dimly aware my shadow had fallen behind as well, turning its attention to Caleb. The rest of the assembly either welcomed me or tried to ward me off, I wasn’t sure which—I wasn’t looking at them.

I was looking to where the cliff fell away on the far side of the cross, to the distant winking lights of a village far below, like stars sunk in a deep, dark pool. I touched the cross, the wood cold against my clammy fingers, and I saw my eyes had been playing tricks with me again—instead of ending in a sheer drop to the valley floor, the ridge actually continued up, winding its way to a familiar city built into the ivory shoulder of the highest peak in the range. Countless figures moved along that star-cobbled mountain trail. I would miss night hiking with Caleb, but I knew other, older friends waited to welcome me home.

I didn’t look back.