Chapter Nine

The morning Conner and Michael picked Jonathan up for the trip, the air itself seemed suffused with a shade of blue. Jonathan woke early, unable to sleep. The sun had not yet fully risen, but the air glowed as if through a colored lens. He kissed Mary goodbye, and she gave a half-hearted smile, while busying herself with coffee. Jacob wandered down the stairs as Jonathan gathered his rifle case and pack. Always a bit groggy in the morning, the boy was rubbing his eyes. “Are you leaving?” he asked.

“Yeah, buddy, but I’ll be back in a couple days.”

“Are you going to shoot something?”

“I don’t know, buddy. Maybe.” Jonathan faked a smile, trying to let the boy know everything was okay. He pulled his son close and hugged him, the boy’s head just above his waist. Jacob let himself be hugged but was too tired and unaware to fully reciprocate. It was okay, Jonathan thought. This is all for you anyhow.

Conner’s SUV pulled up the driveway. Mary stopped him as he was walking out the door. “You forgot this,” she said and lifted his rucksack with all his hunting supplies, minus the rifle. Jonathan was lost for a moment and then took the rucksack from her hand, his charade momentarily interrupted like an actor forgetting his line for a split second. Mary looked at him, suspicious, knowing something was off. “What kind of hunter would you be without this?”

“Not much of one, I suppose.”

“I found it still locked away downstairs. You didn’t even bring it up. Were you not planning on taking it at all? No bullets, no knife, anything? You’re not even taking your tree stand.”

“Don’t use stands up there. We’ll be on foot.” He stared into her eyes and she stared back through his soul. He had no more lies left to give. The truth was too close, it was burning through his skin.

After a moment of looking into him, she said tenderly, “I hope you find peace out there.”

And because he could not lie anymore, he only said, “Me too.” He kissed her for what felt like the last time of their marriage and then walked out the door to the waiting Suburban. Maybe he was confronting it, but then maybe he was burying it deeper. He was confused. He no longer knew if what they were doing was right. He had lost sight of what was right long ago. He only knew what was wrong, particularly what was most wrong for himself and his family. Nothing in any of this was right, but the boy being found by the authorities would be the most wrong thing that could happen to him. Nobility and morality had been buried ten years ago; only half-truths and survival remained.

He loaded his rifle and gear into the back of Conner’s SUV. It was packed mostly with camping gear and the small inflatable raft – a tightly wrapped piece of canvas and rubber that could be hauled on a backpack – they would use to bring the coffin to the center of the lake before sinking it to the bottom. His stomach dropped as he shut the door and Conner started the engine. There was no turning back; they had stepped off the cliff and were being pulled by gravity toward their final destination.

The three were silent in the morning hours, contemplating their ugly purpose, feigning tiredness as an excuse not to speak. Conner’s SUV was new, a big Chevy Suburban outfitted nicely with leather and all the accoutrements of modern life, a testament to his success in the insurance industry. Money to spare and show. Jonathan knew he was the third wheel in this equation. Even in silence the unspoken, psychic connection between the Braddick brothers filled the space between them. Jonathan attempted small talk, trying to rekindle the friendly, jovial banter they’d enjoyed as children and young men, and Conner did his best to accommodate, while Michael stayed largely silent. Jonathan finally turned and watched the passing landscape, wondering what else lay beyond their grasp of reality. Michael turned on the radio and scanned through static to the self-assured voices and music that had been popular when they were kids.

“Sometimes I wonder if we’re just stuck in a time loop,” Michael finally said. “Same damn music has been playing for twenty years. It never disappears, just keeps playing on some other channel.”

He finally shut it off.

They stopped for coffee before getting on the Mass Pike. They drove west into New York and then shot straight as a bullet up I-80. It was the longest part of the trip, an easy five hours even with the sparse traffic. Albany was the last glimmer of civilization before the southern half of the state locked its doors and the land began to heave – first hills, then mountains where double-hitched tractor-trailers struggled up inclines and barreled down long, winding passages, nearly out of control. The hills just north of Albany were still colorful, filled with the red, orange and shades of brown that paint autumn. Farther north, along Lake George, the leaves fell away. The bare trees reached bone-gray branches into the sky, coating the mountains in a deadly dull pallor. In the old days, it would have been a thing of beauty to the three of them, the leafless trees making it easier to spot a deer. Now it just added to their desperation.

On a long, straight stretch of highway, as the engine climbed a lumbering incline, Conner told Michael to reach in the glove box. Michael pulled out some maps. He looked at them briefly and then unfolded one like a small accordion. Jonathan could see from the back seat hundreds of lightly colored lines lying on top of each other at varying degrees of separation, revealing the topography of the mountainous region around Pasternak. The map was marked with a line running west from a region of depressed elevation to a splotch of blue buried between two steep peaks.

“That’s the route we’re going to take, as best as I can figure it,” Conner said. “I used satellite images to find the location – our starting point. At least I think it is. Hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure I remembered it right.”

Jonathan sat up in his seat, poking his head between the two front seats so he could see over Michael’s broad shoulder. The route was traced with blue marker. The cabin was marked north of Pasternak at the edge of the negative depression of the Gulch. Not far from the cabin was an X – the body. From there the blue line followed the lowest country available to the lake. Even on the map it looked long.

“The cell service is shit up there,” Conner said. “So I thought we should all have identical maps in case we get separated for any reason.”

“Separated?” Jonathan asked.

“You never know,” Conner said. Jonathan couldn’t imagine these two brothers, who had been each other’s best friend since the day Conner was born, ever being separated. Even after the incident, as they all drifted away from each other to erase the past – as Jonathan slipped into loneliness and Gene tried to drown his memories – Conner and Michael never separated. It wasn’t in their nature; they worked in tandem.

“This looks rough. A long haul,” Michael said. “You remember what that country was like. Dragging that case with us, getting through that thick ground cover. It isn’t going to be easy.”

“It’s seven miles,” Conner said. “Even if we’re only doing forty-minute miles, we can make it in a day. I kept our path in the lowest elevation possible so we’re not climbing those mountains. If you look, there’s a corridor between two of the peaks on the western ridge. There’s a field there, just tall grass, as best I can tell. We can make good time there.” Michael traced the route with his finger until he found the flattened section of meadow before a slower, more casual descent toward the lake.

“If we start in the morning, we can make it to the lake by nightfall. Camp there, head back and then get the hell out of town.”

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “It’s going to be tough, slow-going. Might actually be a day and a half’s hike with everything in tow. Tents, guns, food, the box.” Michael took out his phone and pulled up satellite images of Coombs’ Gulch. He focused in on the passage between the peaks. “It’s thick brush. It won’t be easy no matter what.”

“Let’s not make this longer than we have to,” Jonathan said. “Early up, get it done. Don’t stop moving till it’s over.”

“It’s the best route,” Conner said. “The only way there is between those two peaks, unless you feel like climbing a mountain – which I don’t. It’s kind of the long way around, but any other route would be too dangerous, too difficult.”

Michael was still on his phone. “There’s going to be bad weather moving in by day three,” he said. “Should be all right till then, but that gives us three days before the temperature really drops, and it’s either rain or snow, depending.” Michael dropped the phone and then stared at the topographic map with its hypnotic lines and swirls that masked the true nature of the place. “I don’t like it,” Michael said. “Can’t say why.”

“Nobody likes any of this, Mike,” Conner said, and for the first time Jonathan felt a tension between them that seemed almost murderous in its betrayal. He remembered how fast tempers can flare between brothers who have everything to lose between them. “The plan will work. The route will work. I’ve been planning this out for months. We just need to man up and get through it. I never said it would be easy, but it has to be done.”

Conner’s SUV ate gas fast enough to warrant two stops, the first just past Albany as civilization began to stretch thin. They pulled off at a quiet Shell station overlooking the highway as double-rigged tractor-trailers passed below, burning diesel and rattling jake brakes in their descent. The few cars on the highway echoed in the cold, sharp air. The sun was bright but without warmth, and there were few shadows. Jonathan crawled from the back and stretched his legs. It was a lonely place. The sound of the highway died in the trees and every second seemed like the last.

Michael and Jonathan walked inside the small store while Conner gassed up the Suburban. Jonathan retrieved a soda and pawed at some bagged snacks but didn’t have much of an appetite. He looked at the newspaper headlines, national and local, but at this point nothing could occupy space in his head.

Michael came around the corner of the aisle. He carried a case of canned beer and was loading up on chips and pretzels. “It’s gonna be a long trip. Probably another couple hours and then another hour or so to get Bill and get to the cabin. Might as well be stocked up.” Michael had an edge to him, as if the small rift between him and his brother ran deeper than Jonathan realized, or at least shook Michael enough to put him in a foul mood.

“Really?” Jonathan whispered. “I don’t think…”

“Do you really want to be dead sober this whole time? You of all people? Do you really want to remember all this?” Jonathan felt that old dread wriggling at the back of his mind, an excitement that welled up within him at the thought of drowning out reality, even if only for a short time. He took a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and gave it to Michael. Conner saw them walking from the store with the beer and seemed annoyed he would be chauffeuring them through the mountains like he had ten years ago.

Jonathan stayed stretched out in the back seat, drinking the beer, letting his brain go numb and thoughts cloud over as they continued past Lake George. His mind softened and returned to dark ideas. Jonathan hadn’t told the brothers anything about his most recent online searches, about his insane suspicions, a line of thought he toyed with for no other reason than a lack of options. He had searched for so long, through so many missing person reports, that he’d finally veered off the well-worn path of rationality and spun a fact-based fiction. He had a creative mind; he knew he was subject to an imagination easily dismissed by someone with the opposite tendency like Michael, for whom the simplest explanation would always suffice. Jonathan could picture Michael’s response already and couldn’t blame him. Michael had been known to become visibly angry when confronted with irrationality – emotions and stupidity set him off like gasoline to fire. Conner would probably dismiss any explanation out of his need to just be done with it and get back to his life. But Jonathan needed some kind of reason, some rationale as to who the boy was or what he was doing out there on his own. It was like following a pathway as far as it would go, only to find that it led to the edge of an abyss. Was it Nietzsche who said something about the abyss staring back?

So Jonathan decided to stare into the abyss some more. While Michael rifled beers in the front, Jonathan began searching through children who went missing further in the past than any of them had bothered looking. He found websites that preserved old missing files from decades before the internet and transferred them into searchable data. He pushed further and further into the past – news articles, bulletins, photographs of ‘missing’ posters, grainy, pixilated photos on the back of milk cartons. His eyes sagged from the beer and the early morning. The images blurred. He kept scrolling and scrolling; the pictures flashed by like television commercials.

And then, like a dream, the moment came to him – the moment that had eluded him for so long. A flash of recognition, a clenching in his gut before his mind could even register the tiny image on the screen. His face. Young and flesh-colored and whole. Jonathan saw him smiling with small white teeth, boyish hands soft and curled in his lap of corduroy pants. His plaid shirt in muted, earthy colors, born out of the Seventies when every color seemed a shade of yellow and brown. It was a school photo of Thomas Terrywile, and it was attached to a newspaper article from the Desmond Dispatch out of Pennsylvania, dated 1985. The headline read, ‘Local Boy Missing, Police Find Signs of Cult Activity’.

Thomas disappeared after school on April 28 over thirty years ago. He was last seen walking home from school, setting out across the football field behind the Edward McNally Middle School in Desmond, PA. His home was a short quarter-mile walk on a path through a small, crooked finger of trees connected to an expansive forest to the north. He took the path to and from school every day, not uncommon at the time. Several other schoolchildren took the same path, all hailing from the same small neighborhood, but this day he was walking alone. Some kids noticed him leaving but paid little attention, a small figure disappearing down the path, nothing out of the ordinary. But by eight o’clock that night, his mother, Candace Terrywile, called the school, friends, neighbors and finally the police.

A search party with flashlights turned up nothing that night. The next morning came the dogs that followed his scent from the school, along the path through the woods and then somehow lost the trail. The search expanded into a massive town-wide undertaking by the third day. Helicopters brought in by the Pennsylvania State Police hovered low over the forest, and police were taking tips from anybody and everybody who could offer some kind of information.

Rumors and whispers started trickling into the police and washed like a flood across the town – people in the forest at night, the sound of chanting carried on the wind, strange glowing lights that emanated out from the trees, strange individuals clad all in black with wide eyes and ugly skin seen roaming through parking lots at the edge of the trees. It was a dark time during the history of the nation. The papers and television were rife with claims of killer cults, Satanists who would kidnap children and sacrifice them in occult rituals. The rumors and stories reached the blood-sucking media, and soon national news helicopters joined the Pennsylvania police search and ran over miles of forested land that stretched out beyond the town. Headlines splashed fantastic rumors and speculation; special detectives were called in from other counties.

The hysteria of Thomas Terrywile’s disappearance finally culminated in some grainy photos of a clearing in those woods. The supposed site of some kind of cult ritual. The leaves were clearly raked out of a circular area. Rocks, partially set in the ground, were arranged in a circle surrounding a rather elaborate geometric design, and then formed a series of crisscrossing lines – some of which extended beyond the edge of the circle, with a final, rectangular space in the center. The detectives were at a loss to explain the design. It was not the typical pentagram found on heavy-metal album covers and spray-painted on abandoned bridges. An altar was set to the side, built with stones placed one atop another and stained with a dark brown substance. Supposedly occult symbols were carved in the trees, small animal bones were piled together to form particular, peculiar designs, and there was evidence of a fire. The police found a small, ramshackle cabin beyond the clearing. Syringes on the ground, more strange symbols spray-painted on the plywood walls, candles dripping dark wax. There was children’s clothing on the floor of the cabin, but none of it matched up to Thomas Terrywile. Fingernails had carved deep gouges in the wood walls. The police did the usual for the time – rousted some of the local teenagers and weirdos with long hair and black T-shirts and questioned them, revealing sordid tales of marijuana use and rebellion against the moral majority. But there was no sign of Thomas Terrywile anywhere. No one the cops questioned could explain the symbols in the woods. None of them had any connection together, despite a desperate search for a larger conspiracy. In the end, there was nothing. Thomas Terrywile was gone without a trace.

And then, like a shooting star, the story disappeared. The media moved on to the next big headline, satisfied with an answer that was not an answer at all. Jonathan found a final article about Thomas Terrywile – not so much about him but about his mother, left afraid and alone. It was one of those ‘still looking after five long years’ stories, and pictured in that newspaper was Thomas’s mother. She was only thirty-seven years old but looked fifty, lips caving into her dry and withering mouth, her big, Eighties-style perm translucent in an obvious and sad attempt to cover up her hair loss. Even in the photograph, Jonathan could see her scalp. A dress from the dollar-store rack hung from her shoulders. She looked like a ghost, and her words, though printed, were the words of the dead and defeated. Reporters asked her if she was still looking. “I’ll never stop looking,” she told them. “I still get people calling me every year saying they saw him. In a crowd in the city. In a park all alone feeding some ducks. Walking through a campground in Nebraska. He’s out there somewhere, I can feel it. It’s like he’s there and gone at the same time; it just depends on when you look. I just feel like the whole world blinked and he was gone. But maybe if we all blink again, he’ll be there.”

Jonathan forced Conner to pull to the side of the road. He fell out of the back seat onto the cold asphalt and the sparse, dying grass that smelled of rubber and oil, and vomited up whatever was left in his stomach. He wished he could purge more just then – organs, blood, memories.

Michael was still drinking a beer in the passenger seat, and Conner was mumbling something to himself, his normally cool facade giving way to a brooding anger and frustration. The brothers looked down at him in a mixture of annoyance and disgust. It was an impossibility; Jonathan knew they would never believe him. He didn’t believe it himself, but he knew it was the same boy – something primeval in his mind screamed in recognition. His hands dug at the pebbles on the side of the road; his mouth sucked in cold air tinged with bile. The wind shook the trees.

Jonathan turned and looked back at them in horror.