Chapter Seventeen

Michael stood on the crest of the field in the last light of dusk, patient, immobile as a statue, the binoculars at his eyes.

“There’s something there,” he said. “I see something in the trees, but I don’t know what it is. Doesn’t want to show itself.”

“How can you tell?” Jonathan asked.

“Just can. It’s like it’s there and then it’s not.”

The case with the boy’s body sat atop the rolling brown meadow. Their gear sat in the tall grass where they had dropped it. They breathed heavy for a long time and waited until they’d mustered enough strength to set the tent. The grass was above their knees and moved with a dry, grating rustle.

“Fire a shot. If it’s an animal, it will either run or be dead,” Conner said.

“And if it’s human, we’ll be dragging two bodies off this goddamned mountain,” Jonathan said.

“I want to draw it out,” Michael said.

“What animal behaves like this?” Conner said.

“Bear would be my guess,” Michael said. “Seems different, though. Hard to tell if there’s anything really there or I’m just imagining it.”

“I thought everyone said this place is dead. No deer, no bears, no nothing,” Jonathan said.

“No forest is ever dead,” Michael said. “Not completely. There’s always something.”

The meadow seemed huge and lonely in the dying light, as if nothing in the world were so large, and the three of them small and without consequence. The tree line appeared miles off across the rolling pasture; the withering stalks shimmered in the evening breeze. Far below, Coombs’ Gulch changed color. The dull gray of the leafless birch trees darkened. The temperature dropped, and they could see their breath and shivered in the gathering cold – sweat-soaked, wet to the bone.

Across the Gulch the moon seemed to appear in the sky like a specter slowly rising from the grave, full and huge, hanging just over the eastern peaks. It cast a ghastly glow over the field, leaving the tree line a black barrier to the unknown.

“Why does it change size like that?” Jonathan said. “The moon. Sometimes it seems so huge and other times small and far away.”

Michael still watched the trees. “It’s an illusion,” he said. “The moon looks bigger near the horizon. No one is really sure why. It’s a trick of the light.”

“A million miles away and it looks right on top of us.”

“Later it will look no bigger than a dime.”

“Can’t trust your own eyes, I guess,” Jonathan said.

Jonathan took his cell phone from his jacket and turned it on. He waited a moment, and then it buzzed and chimed with messages.

“You have service?” Conner said.

“Some.”

A message from Mary asking that he call home as soon as he received it. A photograph of the front door of his house – a heavy oak door stained dark, but through the middle of it were five claw marks, deep and broad, as if a human hand had somehow torn into it. He looked closer at the image and saw small drops of blood; whatever it was, it had clawed itself bloody.

He called and the phone broke between static and her faded voice. He heard Mary’s gentle, calm voice for a moment, and then she was gone; he wished he was with her now, wished he was with his son and that they were all home and all of this was over or had never been.

He turned atop the high meadow in the Adirondacks and said her name again and again into the phone until her voice came back to him.

“You’re breaking up,” she said.

“I can hear you now. Is everything okay?”

“Everything is fine. Something was at the door last night. I called the animal control people. They think it was a bear.”

“Bears have four claws,” Jonathan said.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“Never mind. Did they find anything?”

“No. You know how these things go.”

“Is Jacob all right?”

“Jacob is doing just fine.”

“Be careful. Don’t let him outside alone.”

“I won’t. He’ll be fine. He’s in school all day tomorrow anyway.”

“I forgot tomorrow was Friday,” he said.

“Are you okay out there? Are you guys having a good time?”

“We’re fine, just out of range most of the time.”

“Will you be okay when you come home?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he looked out at the trees and watched them move gently, imperceptibly.

“I want to tell you something, but I don’t want to ruin your trip,” she said, and Jonathan closed his eyes, worried that she would tell him she had filed for divorce.

“Tell me anyway,” he said. “I don’t think anything could ruin this trip.”

“It’s going well then?”

“Perfect. What do you need to tell me?”

“Something strange happened here in town. Someone dug up Gene’s body. It’s gone. The whole town is in an uproar about it.”

“Dug it up?”

“It’s in all the papers and the local television news,” she said. “His poor mother.”

Jonathan looked at the two brothers, checking their own phones, trying to call their wives.

“I have to go,” he said. “I want you to keep an eye on Jacob.”

“Of course. It’s all gruesome.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. The usual night terrors, though. He slept in bed last night with me. It was the only way I could get him to calm down.”

That somehow made him feel better.

“I love you,” he said into the phone.

“I know,” she said, and then her voice was gone and he was alone again with the brothers on the top of a lonely field in the freezing night. He looked at the phone in his hand, angry and afraid. The brothers wandered aimlessly and stiff-legged in the field, their phones to their ears, trying to find the sound of their wives’ voices, talking in low, conciliatory tones.

The cold evening wind seemed to carry the darkness down to them. They tamped down the long grass and rolled out the tent. Michael took a large flashlight from his pack, nearly bright enough to light a sports field, and sat waiting in the darkness, flashing it out to the tree line, scanning the field. They watched the long, dry grass bend and roll and rustle in the light, their shadows like a thousand worlds hidden behind each stalk. His breath billowed out in the cold air. The moon was far away now, a distant pinprick of light.

It was below freezing and they shivered and shook. The grime of the day froze to their bodies.

“We can’t build a fire,” Conner said. “The whole field would catch.”

“Should we leave someone to stand guard?” Jonathan said.

“And see what?” Conner said. “Even if there’s something out there, we won’t be able to see it in time. Whoever is standing guard would just be bait. Better if we’re all inside. Whatever it is would have to come through the tent first.”

They took their rifles with them into the three-man tent and crowded in close in their sleeping bags, each of their bodies pushed up against the other’s.

Jonathan’s body was tired, already asleep, but his eyes kept moving, seeing, as if in a dream. He thought of his son and the boy’s nightmares – when he would scream while staring at the world, at his parents who were trying to comfort him. The tall grass brushed against the canvas of the tent and seemed to whisper to him. Jonathan stripped down to his sweatpants and sweatshirt, previously soaked with sweat, now just cold and stiff. He lay in his sleeping bag, Michael’s bulk pressed against his back. The darkness inside the tent was deeper than it was outside. Jonathan’s rifle, cold and hard, lay beside him. He folded his arm beneath his head and closed his eyes and listened to the sound of their breathing.

He thought of Gene’s grave. He wondered if the stone was overturned. He wondered at the piles of dirt that would have been removed to dig down to the casket. He wondered at the willpower of such an act, what drove such depravity. He remembered the night when the boy was killed. Michael and Conner had left to bring the airtight case, and he was alone with Gene, standing guard over the body. Gene was shaking, racked with panic and guilt, tears pouring down his chubby face. “I never wanted this,” he said, voice trembling, staring out into the dark trees. “I never wanted any of this. It’s not right. None of it is right. Something is wrong. It’s all wrong.”

Gene’s words stayed with Jonathan through the years. He thought about them and wondered, years on, what exactly Gene was saying that night, what he was talking about. Was it just the boy? Just the shot he fired? Or was it something more, something bigger?

Jonathan woke in the deepest part of the night. His eyes could not see, but he felt the damp cold of the tent canvas reaching through his skin, and he could hear Michael’s harsh whisper in his ear – “Stay quiet.” He realized the brothers were awake; he could feel them sitting upright in the tent, tense, breathing quickly, staring at the zippered entrance.

There was a sound outside like a great rushing wind, swirling around the tent as if they were caught in a tornado. The canvas wall bulged inward, then shuddered and rippled. Outside, the rush continued, and he could feel vibrations in the ground beneath him and remembered the night in Coombs’ Gulch when it had seemed every animal suddenly came awake and stampeded through the darkness. Suddenly it seemed like time was repeating itself over and over – a different situation, but the same nonetheless. It all kept coming back. Michael slowly chambered a round in his rifle. The tumult swirled outside. The tent shook.

Then Jonathan felt hands – small, but immensely powerful and cold. He turned his head toward the tent wall beside him, which glowed in the moonlight. Two palms and ten small fingers pressed through the canvas harder and harder, reaching inward for him. Beneath the sound of the swirling force that rushed through the grass, a whisper came, slight and high-pitched, childish and achingly familiar – “Daddy.”

Conner and Michael tried to stop him as he rushed for the opening of the tent. They pleaded in desperate whispers, but Jonathan felt something deep in his core pulling him outside, something he could not deny, something that did not know fear or trepidation. It moved inside him, twisted like a worm impaled on a hook. They pulled at his arms, but he thrashed against them.

Jonathan fell out into the darkness, onto his hands and knees, the long grass brushing against his face, slowing his movements like water, and he screamed Jacob’s name into the night like an insane man might cry out at a hallucination.

But all was silent and still. There was no wind. There was no noise or stampede of animals. He was alone in the night, only his own frenzied breath falling into the air. He scrambled to his feet and ran around the tent, searching and screaming, but there was nothing. The distant moon cast a ghostly pallor. The field seemed to stretch on forever. The grass shone and sparkled with frost in the pale light. Jonathan’s voice died in the distance.

Then Michael and Conner were outside with their rifles raised. Jonathan stopped, like a man suddenly waking from a dream, returning to the mundane world. They waited in silence, breath exhaled in clouds of mist, cold overtaking their bodies.

“What the hell happened?” Conner said.

“It was him,” Jonathan said. He struggled for breath. “It was Jacob; I heard him. He was here. He spoke to me.”

Far off in the field was a deep, throaty chuff and heavy footsteps through the grass. Michael raised the flashlight, but it did not reach far enough into the night. They listened as it moved east, back toward the Gulch, slouching at a slow, heavy pace down the slope of the meadow. A vixen scream went up from deep within the valley and reverberated in the air. It sounded more human than animal now. Jonathan felt cold hands close around his heart. There was no air. He could not catch his breath.

“I don’t know what that is,” Michael said.

He took the flashlight and searched the field around the tent for tracks, but the sea of grass was undisturbed; it swayed lightly in the cold breeze, whispering, as it had for a thousand years.

“We didn’t just dream that, did we?” Conner said.

“I can’t tell anymore,” Michael said.

Somewhere in the depths of the Gulch, the high-pitched scream rose again, shocking and anguished, full of fear and longing.