Chapter Sixteen

The earth sloped gently at first and then grew steeper. The pitch changed their trek from a slow walk to an uphill battle. Like infants, they crawled on hands and knees up the incline, dragging the box behind them, grasping saplings for purchase to pull themselves higher, boots slipping in the blanket of dead leaves covering the ground. They were too tired to keep their heads upward to look up the mountain, so sheer rock ledges appeared as if out of nowhere, suddenly stopping them in their tracks and forcing them to either backtrack and circle the ledge or attempt to scale it with their gear and the box.

Conner climbed to the top of a rock face and lowered a rope. Michael and Jonathan tied the case by using the handles, and Conner pulled it up while they watched below, fearful it would break loose or burst open and rain down its contents. They circled around the small cliff and met him at the top. The brief repose left them colder now; the sweat soaked into their underclothes chilled them to the bone, sapped their energy. Their legs burned. The rocks were slick with wet moss, their feet slipped, and they went on all fours again like animals. Conner sat on the ground beside the coffin, waiting for them, panting heavy. They could make out the stream below through breaks in the trees. They rotated carriers again and moved up toward the pass. The black spruce trees were slowly replaced by yellow birch, hardwoods, which had shed their leaves during autumn. Their bony fingers reached into the sky and swayed slightly in an unfelt breeze. Bursts of dead honeysuckle and crawling tendrils of witch hobble tripped them. The sun moved closer to the horizon and shone in their faces. Blind, they stumbled up the mountain, backs bent, heads down, the case just a few inches from the ground. Their stops became more frequent. Each rotation was like a runner’s last burst of energy at the end of a marathon. The mountain grew rockier, the pitch increased, and they strained under the heft of the thing, which felt like hundreds of pounds now and forced them to stop every few minutes. Fallen limbs rolled underfoot and caused them to stumble. The air was tinged with decay, the faint smell of fire somewhere in the distance. Time raced and stood still.

“We have to make the field,” Conner said. The sun cut through the trees, stabbed at their eyes. They couldn’t see anything ahead. There was no hope of making the lake by nightfall. “At least there we’ll be in the open.”

With every step, they traveled farther from that place, that place of belief and ritual, where the hands of man tried to convey some kind of meaning.

They stopped for a moment. Jonathan turned around to look back. The land fell away in a long, downward slope. Shadows reached out from behind the trees. The air around them seemed a dull blue, suffused with remnants of daylight sliding into dusk. The depths of the Gulch were already deep with shadow.

“What do you think it all meant down there?” Jonathan asked.

“Nothing. It meant nothing,” Michael said, but then he was quiet.

“We still have time,” Conner said.

The trees thinned out ahead. The pitch was steep but there was less underbrush. Through shards of light the forest opened, and long brown grasses swayed in the evening breeze from off the mountains. The closer they came to the meadow that crested the mountain pass, the stronger the wind became, and now the trees chattered and moved like deadened wind chimes. Their branches knocked together, hollow and flat. The trees seemed to speak.

“Time is a veil to the shattered world,” Jonathan said.

“It’s metaphysical bullshit,” Michael said. “Something someone read in a book.”

“Why would they write it in a place like that?”

“How should I know? Time is just a measurement,” he said.

“A veil?”

“It’s what we see, but not what’s really there,” Michael said.

“So what is really there?”

“Nothing. God, if you want. Something eternal. Whatever you imagine, I suppose.”

“This is pointless.”

“Something that’s eternal would see everything, all of time, at once. Everything from the big bang to however things end up would all exist simultaneously,” Michael said. “Time wouldn’t make any difference. The sun going down –” he gestured to the sky “– day, night, years, millennia, none of it would make a difference. It would all just happen at the same moment.”

“Maybe that’s what it’s about.”

“Stop.”

“The shattered world?”

“Who knows? It has no application. It’s meaningless.”

“Like firing a shot in the middle of the night?”

“Shut up with that.”

“We never actually talked about what happened.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. It is what it is.”

“Didn’t look like they were hoping to find God down there.”

“I’d say not.”

Jonathan waited a moment, thought about that night, his memory of it. Things got murky. None of them could understand or agree on what happened, how a boy was wandering the woods at that time of night. Did that make it fact or fiction? Jonathan stood and lifted a side of the case to feel its weight again. The contents moved.

“I can see the field up ahead,” Conner said. “We can make it to the top.”

In the short time they sat on the forest floor, it had grown darker.

“The opening is up ahead. One last push. Tomorrow will be easier.”

The sun had passed below the horizon of the mountains, and the field seemed to glow. Just a bit farther and they could rest for the night, put it down for a time and then put it down forever into the lake. Jonathan wanted it over now. The trek purged him. He was too tired for guilt, fear and remorse. It poured out of him like sweat.

The forest was dark and cold. Somewhere below them, a tree bent and snapped, breaking slow at first and then falling fast to the forest floor, dry wood exploding and crashing against other trees. The sound died in the valley.

They stood now. Conner and Jonathan let go of the case and took up their rifles. Michael had his eye to the scope. He stood at the edge of a rocky outcropping that jutted outward from the mountain like a stone face. They listened, but there was only the sound of the tree branches touching in the evening breeze. The dense forest of the Gulch lay before them like a pit.

“I can’t see anything through all this shit,” Michael said. He watched deep and hard, looking for breaks, looking for the things that could fall apart so he could sweep it away. Dead silence again. Nothing to see but the gray bark of countless trees melded together.

“Bear?” Conner said. “What else would take down a tree like that? Can’t be a person.”

“I don’t see anything. Maybe a deadfall.”

“Fire a shot,” Jonathan said. “If it is a bear, maybe it’ll turn tail and run.”

“No,” Michael said. “Let’s wait, let’s move, let’s get in the clear. I don’t want a warning shot; I want a kill shot.”

“Stay back,” Conner said. “Keep an eye while we get out and then follow.”

Michael kept his eye to the scope, the barrel of his Remington tracing slow arcs across the dead expanse of Coombs’ Gulch below. “Go,” he said.

Conner and Jonathan shouldered their rifles, took up the box and began to move quickly up the hill, leaving Michael behind to stand watch. Jonathan could nearly count the yards till they reached the field. The birch trees thinned into small saplings. The last remnants of the forest grabbed their clothes, scratched their faces. Jonathan and Conner pounded up the slope another thirty yards into the full blaze of the sun. The dry air smelled of dying grass and released the damp cold from their lungs. The massive, open land rolled like ocean waves toward the crest of the hill.

They reached the top and stopped, dropped the case, fell to their knees in the last light of evening. Their lungs screamed, hearts raced. From here they could see down into the Gulch to the east, and to the west they could see glints of sunlight dancing across the surface of the lake. Mountain peaks rose high above them to either side.

Below, in the darkness, Michael followed. His back was turned to them, and he scanned the tree line with his rifle.

Finally, he lowered the gun, turned and began to jog slowly up the hill through the field.

Behind him the forest twisted and turned in the dusk. From his knees, Jonathan raised his rifle, put his eye to the scope and looked just over Michael’s shoulder. Something moved in the darkness of the tree line.

Another strange scream went up from the valley, and they turned to look all around them, to the sky and field and trees, as if it originated from the air itself. It sounded so human, and yet, in its pain, it took on an animal ferocity.

The forest behind Michael gave way to something he could not see – it shifted in the shade and underbrush.

The scope lifted from his eye as Conner tipped the barrel of Jonathan’s rifle skyward.

“What are you aiming at?”

“Nothing,” he said. “No shot. Just making sure.”