Chapter Nineteen

The high mountain lake shone through the leafless trees in the light of the cold, early dawn. Jonathan, Michael and Conner stood at the crest of the meadow and saw the water sparkling, and, for a moment, everything seemed beautiful and good. They turned to look at the black case sitting in the long grass, tinged with frost, and the air seemed to grow dark around them. They pulled out the tent stakes, folded the rods and rolled the tent back up, but they couldn’t get it right. They tried again until Conner finally stuffed it into its carrying case. Jonathan rolled his sleeping bag. It was sloppy. He let it be and strapped it to his backpack. He was too tired to care. Michael stared with his cold eyes at the lake.

“What do you say? About a mile?” Michael said.

“Mile and a half,” Conner said.

“We should have been walking back by now,” Jonathan said.

Michael looked at the sky. “Snow is coming.”

They searched again for animal tracks around the tent and near the coffin, but there was nothing. Jonathan tried for a cell phone signal, but it was gone.

“We should just bury it here,” he said.

“With what? We left the shovels back in the Gulch,” Conner said.

“Fine. Then just leave it and go,” Jonathan said.

“Just out in the open? No. We finish this. Stick to the plan.”

“Are we even going to talk about what happened last night?”

“I don’t know what happened last night. I don’t know what that noise was. But what I remember most is you acting insane.”

“I heard something.”

“We all heard something. An animal, the wind, doesn’t matter.” Conner picked up one side of the case. “Let’s get on with it. Mile and a half and we’re done. We can be back by nightfall.”

Jonathan looked back over the meadow to the Gulch and shook his head. It was cold, even through his coveralls. Beyond the mountains to the west the sky seemed to be building toward something; there was a gray haze where the deep blue disappeared into a fog. He walked to the other side of the box. His legs were sore and he walked slow and stiff. He picked up the side and tried to walk and then put it down to catch his breath. “It’s heavy as hell.”

“We’re just tired, is all,” Conner said.

Jonathan waited a moment and then picked it up again, and, together with the weight of his pack, clothes and rifle, tried to start walking with Conner. Their steps were awkward. The case bumped into the side of his knee, the same raw and bruised spot as the day before, and he became angry again. They walked down the slope toward the lake. Gravity pulled them through their steps. They walked together like a broken animal, stumbling, hobbling down the hill. The long grass scraped against the underside of the case and moved around them, and it sounded like a crowd of people speaking in hushed tones.

He tried to hear it. He tried to make words out of the long, rustling grass the way one might try to discern conversation in a crowded room. The sound seemed to come from everywhere, carried down from the mountains on the cold, open breeze. He stared at the tree line; long, broken fingers, a maze of pale trunks and branches, reached up to claw at the distant sun. He heard the whisper of the grass against the plastic case again. It sounded like the voice of a child, and he listened harder.

He looked at Michael, but Michael was staring into the trees. He looked at Conner beside him, but his head was turned, looking into the distance. There were no faces, and he suddenly felt as if he were alone with this burden. Jonathan turned to look everywhere, to the whole expanse of field and mountains, but he saw nothing. The world seemed like a picture or a painting. It looked so unreal that, for a moment, he wondered if it was all an elaborate hoax, a maze for lab rats. The wind moved the trees and the tall grass. He reached out his hand to try to touch it, but there was only air and distance. The boy in the box shifted, sloshed to the other side, and the weight of it pulled him sideways.

The lake disappeared behind the tree line and Jonathan sweated in the cold sun. The dark trees rose up before them. They stopped at the edge of the field and waited, breathing heavily. The woods seemed to slide up to meet them, and they peered inside. The ground was rocky and covered with leaves and devoid of underbrush, which had choked and died long ago. The tree trunks were thicker and spread apart. Lichen grew patchworks on the bark. It smelled wet. The tall branches were thick and darkened the ground, and roots rolled above and beneath the surface, like thick snakes.

They weren’t walking now, but the whispering grew louder. It sounded familiar. They tried to look past the trees – another mile to the lake, but they waited, catching their breath before taking the final plunge. Jonathan thought of Thomas Terrywile in the box; the thought of dropping it into that lake forever suddenly terrified him more than being caught, than living with it.

The end somehow seemed worse. He wondered if there was an end.

Jonathan turned away from the trees and looked up toward the top of the field, to the ridge of the meadow, the sky pouring across the horizon, and saw a humanlike figure standing dark against the sky, staring down at them. From this distance it was a small, erect shadow, but he could see it. He could feel its eyes. He heard the whisper through the meadow, through the trees and through the box by his side. Something spread across its unseen face.

Jonathan tapped Michael and Conner and nodded up the slope. “About five hundred yards off.” They turned and looked. The wind pushed against them. Michael raised the rifle and looked through his scope. The figure at the top of the meadow did not move. Michael stared through the scope for a long time but kept his finger on the hilt.

“What is it?” Conner asked. Michael was silent. His face paled; the skin around his eyes softened as he opened his left eye and slowly lifted his head from the scope.

“Too far of a shot,” he said, but his voice was dead.

“But what is it?” Conner asked again.

“We should go.”

“Just take the shot anyway, goddammit.” Conner took the rifle from Michael’s hand. Michael didn’t resist. His limp body let the sling slide off his shoulder. He stumbled and swayed slightly in the wind. Conner raised the rifle toward the shadow atop the meadow, but it was gone, and there was nothing but the rounded horizon.

“I don’t see it,” Conner said. He slowly scanned the cold field for any sign of movement, life, but there was nothing. “What did you see? A person? A bear?”

Michael stared off into the trees, as if seeing something in the air, in the spaces between. “I don’t know what it was. It was too far off.”

“Bullshit,” Conner said.

“We should go now,” Michael said.

Conner looked at Jonathan and then back to his brother. “Let’s just get this done,” he said and lifted the side of the box. Jonathan took up the other side. Michael stumbled into the forest. They lost sight of the lake when they dropped below the tree line. It wasn’t far off.

They moved quicker. They ignored the pain in their legs and shoulders. The new forest opened up and swallowed them, and they were lost in a limbo of thick trees. They kept a quick pace. There was no undergrowth to slow them down. The downward slope carried them, but it seemed endless, and they could not see more than fifty yards in any direction. Time and space seemed to stand still. Jonathan thought they passed the same rock outcropping several times. Nothing changed; the forest scrolled past them like a broken film. The deep blue morning sky faded, and the sun was now hidden behind a desert expanse of low gray clouds. The colder air came quick and sharp. Sweat seeped out from beneath Jonathan’s wool cap and froze to his cheek.

“We won’t beat the snow,” Michael said.

“We will,” Conner said.

The cold air brought a heavier wind. The tops of the trees danced and swayed, knocked against each other. The sound came from above them and in every direction and echoed hollow, cold and dead. Michael and Conner carried the case now. Jonathan kept the rifle ready. Behind the clatter of the tree branches was the sound of heavy footfalls. Jonathan motioned for them to stop. He turned and watched the trees behind them and was lost in the cascading maze. He felt something but saw nothing. He looked through the scope, but it made him more blind, limiting his vision and perspective. There were only hints of movement, something sliding behind the wall of forest, nothing more than a fleeting shadow from the corner of his eye or the sound of a tree limb snapping or a branch breaking free of its moorings. He let the brothers move ahead and waited for what followed; he waited for what had uttered those words to him the night before and what stood at the crest of the meadow staring down at them.

He wished for other times and places, for other lives where that night ten years ago had not happened, where the bullet was five inches to the right and missed the boy completely. Everything inescapable hinged on precise moments, tiny factors that change the world. He watched and waited and felt something beyond the trees calling to him.

He whispered something to the trees.

He heard Michael and Conner calling for him in the distance. He turned with his rifle and began moving quickly down the mountain toward their voices, which seemed far away, lost in the wilderness. He rounded a tree and saw them, rifles raised, sighting the barrels directly at him. He stopped dead and thought they would fire. The two brothers could keep a secret for eternity, no matter what haunted their lives. Their faces were stone cold, expressionless. Jonathan raised his hands gently, and they lowered their guns.

“Yell out when you’re coming,” Conner said.

“We’re here,” Michael said.

The trees thinned out, the ground turned to wet stone and frozen mud, the smell of condensation and dead fish. Jonathan stared down at the box with the dead boy inside. A mirage of dark and haunting water called to them from between the trees; the surface of the cold lake wavered and rippled and gave way to its depths.