Chapter Fifteen

It was more difficult than they imagined. Their shoulders burned with the strain. The case was heavy. It knocked into their knees as they hobbled through the underbrush. The sludge inside would shift and move in slow waves as they rocked back and forth. Although it was only eighty pounds between two men, the constant weight pulling down, the need to shift it up and over shrub brush and rock outcroppings and desiccated branches that could impale a body, turned eighty pounds into a hundred, then two hundred, growing heavier the longer they traveled. They worked in half-hour, three-man rotations, switching sides to give each shoulder a break, keeping one man free with the rifle. They kept pace and time through the rotation, and it quickly became the only time in the world worth measuring – a clock kept by pain and weariness.

The terrain changed. At first they followed the creek, keeping to the soft ground before it gave way to the rocky creek bed. The long grasses disappeared and were replaced with the dark expanse of the coniferous forest, with visible root systems spread like spider veins, popping from the soil to trip them, before plunging back below the surface. Dying ferns, shrunken and brown, carpeted the forest floor. Were it spring or summer, those ferns would form an impenetrable green blanket over the whole area; now their boots crushed them to dust underfoot. Massive boulders from the last ice age appeared like gray ghosts, sheer rock faces wet with lichen or moss, dotted with small, thin, impossible trees whose roots wrapped like hands over the stone and sprouted at strange angles toward patches of sunlight.

The case knocked into the side of Jonathan’s knee, which was already raw and bruised. They had hiked for three full rotations, and the constant jostle and bump of the case against his knees, the heavy tugs on his shoulders when Michael or Conner walked out of pace with his own gait, had grown to a point of eruption. They continued to follow the creek, stepping down occasionally into the rocky creek bed to navigate around underbrush. The slippery rocks twisted their ankles, caused them to stumble and splash into small pools of cold water.

The strain of the journey pushed Jonathan to his limit. Branches swiped at his face, thorn patches gripped and tore at his sleeves, and all the time there was the shifting slosh of the boy in the box. His breath was heavy and hard. Sweat soaked into his hat until he finally removed it, and then his head froze in the air. The soles of his boots bent and slipped. The case pulled again at his shoulder and rammed into the side of his knee. He felt a murderous rage and then marveled how easily the desire to kill fell upon him, how such a minor thing could drive a man insane like the slow drip of water torture.

They dragged that thing over rock, water and earth for three hours, passing in and out of darkness and light.

They were already carrying at least eighty pounds of camping gear on their backs and now the case with the full weight of the boy’s body inside. This was US Marine Corps stuff – not for a few guys who rode desks for a living. In the months leading up to the trip, Jonathan had thought little of the physical strain of the hike, but now it seemed impossible. When it was his turn to be free of the box and walk in the rear, he felt a small modicum of relief – just enough to renew his spirit and body for another rotation.

The creek became thinner – the water slowed to a trickle between rocks. It twisted snakelike through the trees, took long, undulating curves and then returned to them. They followed it for hours. Conner kept watch on the mountain peaks above, waiting for the point when they would stop and turn west to climb the mountain and reach the pass. It would be a harder leg of the journey, but at least it would be progress. He felt like he could gather more energy if they could just move in a new direction. But even a renewed energy would not be good enough. There was a growing knowledge between them; their pace was too slow.

“How far have we come?” Jonathan asked.

“About three miles,” Conner said. “We’re almost there.”

“I don’t know if we’re going to make it,” Michael said. “Not today anyway.”

Conner sighed long and heavy again.

“Three more hours of this shit and I’ll be near dead,” Michael added. He breathed heavy; sweat and steam poured from his head.

“I know,” Conner said. “Just a little farther. We need to get to the passage. At least that. If we need to we can camp there for the night. The rest is downhill toward the lake.”

“Weather is coming,” Jonathan said.

“It’s at least another day out. We’ll be okay.”

Michael was calculating their chances of making the journey in his head. Jonathan could tell; his blank eyes were lost, his mind running logistics. Michael knew the actual chances of making the journey free from injury or death, the chances of not getting lost or getting caught in the coming snowstorm – diminishing numbers.

They switched for another rotation. The case rocked against the side of Jonathan’s knee again. They kept hauling through the woods. Everything seemed so far away now. They were beyond the point of no return.

Conner stopped them. “Here. That’s far enough north.” He was looking at his map and then trying to see through the canopy of spruce trees to the mountains. “Let’s stop for a bit,” he said. “Eat, take a break.” He checked his watch – nearly 2:00 p.m. It would be dark by 5:30. “Just a few minutes. It’s not far to the pass but it’s uphill. We have to at least get there by dark.”

Jonathan and Michael unceremoniously dropped the case and collapsed. They all scrambled away from it to find a place to sit – a rock or fallen tree. Conner began to hike up a ledge to get a better look at the ridge of mountains to be sure they were in the right spot. Jonathan dropped his backpack and felt the soaked back of his shirt lift from his skin, sending shivers down his spine. He took two sandwiches from his backpack and ate quickly.

Michael stumbled off into the underbrush, and Jonathan was left alone in Coombs’ Gulch. He sat back on a fallen pine tree till his face caught a sliver of light in the shadow. He put his head back and stared into a patch of sky. The trees seemed like dark gray lines, the blue of the sky so deep it seemed to give way to space, stars. His mind flowed upward, away from the earth. In his exhaustion, all was stripped away.

Then a voice called to him, at first from a distance, and then closer. Michael’s voice telling him to come down to where he was, closer to the mild trickle of the stream.

“Down here!”

Jonathan sat up. Conner came bounding down from the rock ledge. Jonathan saw him and paused, blinking his eyes, trying to come back to reality.

“Down here,” the voice came again.

They followed the sound of Michael’s voice toward the stream with their rifles. They pushed aside saplings and dense, sharp underbrush.

Michael stood in the center of a large clearing completely devoid of plant life, brushed clean of any fallen leaves or pine needles. The forest seemed to stop dead at its borders; the trees and bushes surrounding it formed the barrier of a perfect ring that reached into the sky. Even the tops of the trees refused to extend into the range of its circumference. Conner and Jonathan approached the center. The air felt thin, as if a portal in the atmosphere formed a single, strange vacuum. Michael stood in the center of an elaborate design formed by rocks embedded in the ground. Jonathan recognized it, a circle of white stones the size of footballs, with parallel lines of rocks running through the middle, crisscrossing in geometric design, an empty space in the center. Michael stood near the center, staring down at the remnants of a fire – ash, soot and blackened pieces of burnt wood. At the far northern end of the clearing was a rock face and, below it, three large, flat stones arranged to form a flat, table-like surface. Above the stone table was written ‘TIME IS A VEIL TO THE SHATTERED WORLD’ in a faded white paint, scrawled with a childlike hand, as if the author had just learned to form letters.

Jonathan’s stomach twisted. Like a ghost from the attic of his subconscious, the grainy black-and-white photo from the newspaper article detailing Thomas Terrywile’s disappearance sent panic coursing through his body. It had been difficult to make out the images in that old report, but the basics were there – a clearing in the woods, a stone altar, symbols that hinted at occult practices.

“What the hell is this?” Michael said. He appeared dumbfounded by it, as if he’d just opened a door and found himself at the edge of a cliff, staring into the drop. “This can’t be possible.” But it was the fact anyone would believe in something enough to make a ramshackle altar in the woods that truly baffled him.

“This far out here?” Conner said. “This can’t be right. Who would go this far?”

“We’ve gone this far,” Jonathan said.

Michael was turning himself in circles now as if he was searching for something.

“Who would travel this far out here to do this?” Conner said.

“It could be old.”

Jonathan thought of that night ten years ago, thought of the box of remains sitting just a few yards away. “Maybe that’s what he was doing up here,” he said. “We thought there was no way in hell anyone would be this far out in mountains at that time of night. Maybe there were people up here. Maybe this is what they were doing.”

“That still doesn’t make any sense,” Conner said.

“These kinds of things never make any sense.”

“They said it to me,” Michael said. “They said it. I didn’t know what they were talking about.”

Conner crossed into the body of the star and took Michael by the arm. “Hey! Hey! Get it together. What are you talking about?”

“In the bar,” Michael said. “Those guys. They said it to me.”

“You said they were saying weird things,” Jonathan said.

“They told me to stay out of the Gulch. They told me something about this place. I don’t know; I can’t remember exactly. It all sounded fucking crazy. I thought they were drunk or high or something. Then he said, ‘Your face looks familiar, boy. I’s seen you before. It’ll be your bodies they’re hauling out of there next.’ That’s when I shoved him.”

Your face looks familiar, boy.

It rang like a deep and terrible bell in Jonathan’s mind. So much familiarity, repetition, motions repeated over years and years, the reappearance of lost children.

“It makes no sense,” Conner said.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to us,” Jonathan said. “If they were out here that night, if they saw us, if this is where they come.”

“You’re just telling us this now?” Conner said. “Fuck this redneck bullshit. There’s no trails leading here. There’s nothing out here!”

“Except for this,” Jonathan said. “They know we’re out here. They could be following us.”

“We would have noticed.”

“Why? Because we’re such expert woodsmen? These guys live up here.”

Michael stepped through the circle and wandered, dazed, to the stone altar set at the base of the rock face. The stones were stained with a rusty brown color. “What does this look like to you?” he said. The stains were thick and circular, with lines that flowed down and over the sides of the flattened stones. “I can tell you what I think it looks like.”

Everything seemed still in that moment. Jonathan looked to the ground where the white stones lay in their terrifying design. He saw something he mistook for rocks but was actually a twelve-inch section of deer spine, the vertebrae still linked together, picked clean and bleached white from the sun. He bent down and nudged it slightly.

“This is…I don’t know what this is.”

“It’s nothing, is what it is,” Conner said. “It’s a bunch of hicks goofing around in the woods, pretending they’re Satanists or pagans or whatever you call the people that do this shit. We need to keep moving. We’ll keep a close eye out behind us for any signs someone is trailing us. It’s doubtful, but we need to get moving.”

They each turned in their respective spaces, took a last look around and then pushed through the underbrush toward their gear and the heavy, black coffin.