Chapter Twenty-Three

Thoughts came to him during that dark night – thoughts of what could have been, what should have been, and in that deep darkness he wondered if he was capable of love, if the ability to love had survived his guilt and regret. He claimed to love Jacob and Mary more than anything in the world; it was something he told himself but now doubted. He thought of the hunters in the past who’d become lost in the Gulch, and he wondered if he was already listed among the vanished, or the dead. He was lost in himself. His past had stripped away all things like a hunter pulls away the hide. The bullet that killed Thomas Terrywile had killed them all. After that they were strung up and slow cut.

Outside was silence. The snow was gentle, light through the trees. The evening wind died down and the whole world seemed still. There was only the sound of Michael beside him.

He thought of the night he screamed at Jacob for urinating in the closet during one of his trancelike night terrors. Jonathan held back tears thinking of it, wishing he had done something different, wishing that moment was not burned into eternity. The poor boy; he woke from a nightmare to the reality of Jonathan looming large over him, furious and angry about something the boy could not comprehend. It was like a monster from the boy’s dream made real. Perhaps it was not that different from the creature that loomed over Thomas Terrywile, the thing that followed the boy as he wandered unknown forests, the thing that stole him away into that dark and cold void.

A child in pain – lost, cold and alone with no one in the world searching for him; it pained Jonathan to think about it. It seemed there could be nothing more tragic and awful.

He remembered when Jacob was three years old. It was a weekend and Jonathan was home from work. Mary had gone for the day; he couldn’t remember where she had gone or why. Perhaps it was some kind of social event, those things that normal people do, people adjusted properly to life. But it was just Jonathan and Jacob. The boy played by himself, and Jonathan sat on the couch, a sensation creeping in on him, the feeling of a tiger in a cage. Something wormed in his soul, something trying to break free. The prospect of a long day set in, the sad banality of his quiet little house on this quiet little street in a small town with only one traffic light and a seemingly endless amount of daylight. It stretched over him, oppressed him. He waited for as long as he could. He watched cartoons with Jacob. He fed him peanut butter and jelly like any other normal, cookie-cutter parent. But it was all a lie and a farce. At times, he tried to distract himself by staring into the computer, scrolling through other people’s lives – happy, well-adjusted, beautiful lives – and it all melted away until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

Jonathan made it until noon that day before he pulled a bottle of vodka down from above the refrigerator and poured his first drink. He drank fast; he always did. It always took too long to set in, and by the time he felt the first effects it was too late. One, two, three…it was never enough to quiet that lonely, aching thing. It was never enough to tamp down the feeling that none of it was right.

He poured his drinks. The sun was bright that day. It was a mild seventy degrees. A day when normal people – the parents who populated this normal town – would have their children outside, playing with them, doing the things magazines and social media posts said you should do. He let things blur and numb. He waited and watched and wondered at what was wrong with him. He sunk, lost in it.

The boy was somewhere. The last he remembered, Jacob had been playing with his toys in the living room. A television program was on, the screen filled with bright, puffy colors and rounded shapes. Jonathan was writing something on his computer. He was unsure now what it had been, but it was something, some effort to reach out and find that other life, the other self, that had escaped so long ago. Escape. He thought of that feeling – the tiger in its cage. The hunter held back, trapped, but always pacing, always watching for that moment when your back is turned. All was hunting, he thought. All was dealing some kind of death, small as a beetle, large as the world. In this life, he played a role. He worked his job, he paid the bills, he came home every night to the same thing, but it was not his. It never was. It belonged to someone or something else. That night in the Gulch took it from him, led him down a path not of his own making. He was carried along by death and brought somewhere deep inside the forests of his soul to be sacrificed.

Even now, the memory of that day came in pieces of a half-remembered dream through the haze. He was suddenly in his home again, suddenly aware of the kitchen table where he sat with his laptop opened, suddenly aware the television no longer played that program with the shiny colors and singsong voices, suddenly aware that something priceless was missing.

The sliding glass door that led to the back porch, the backyard and the woods was half open. Outside air poured through, touched the back of his neck. He turned and looked for Jacob, but he was gone.

Jonathan stumbled to the door that day. The sun was bright. He looked in the yard, but Jacob was not there. He looked toward the darkened trees extending out behind the house, but saw nothing. He saw nothing and heard nothing. It was empty space, a void made of grass and trees and sun and air. His heart began to race, and he tried to think how long it had been. When was the last time he had seen his son? How many hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds since he had been conscious enough to see his boy and know that he was there in the house with him, safe and present? The panic began to set in – the fear, the guilt. His mind tried to tell him that it would be okay, but his gut knew he had just crossed an unseen line.

He gasped at first. “Jacob?” It came out as nothing more than a question, as if he were hearing the name for the very first time and not comprehending it. No answer came back. No explanation. The universe heard, but held back. Then he said it louder and louder still, but there was no reply. Jonathan ran through the house, checking the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the basement until there was no other logical place his son could be except outside. He ran to the front yard, to the street, and looked up and down the road. There was nothing – no cars, no neighbors, nobody about their business, no Jacob. Then he was screaming like a lunatic in the daylight, trying his best to keep his footing, still under the alcoholic haze, the caged tiger disappeared, replaced with something weak and helpless against the world – a gut-shot fawn, a chick fallen from its nest, a child alone in the woods.

Even then, his skin was being peeled back, his center cut from stem to stern, his arms and legs tied upon the rack. He was opened to the world. His true reality stumbled through the daylight, broken and dumb, lost and guilty – a drunk who’d lost his only child.

Then came a shout – a voice at once familiar and with a tone of assurance and salvation, something he envied. He heard the voice call his name again, and Jonathan looked around dumbly, turning his head, his floating eyes trailing behind. He walked around the house to the backyard, and he saw his son, hand in hand with his neighbor, Rachael. Jacob ran to his father and Jonathan picked him up. Rachael stood back, arms crossed, staring at him. Her children were older, already well beyond the wandering-off phase of their childhood.

“He was in the woods behind our house,” she said. Her voice was flat, harsh. “It was lucky I saw him.”

“He went out the sliding glass door,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. Thank you.”

“It happens, I suppose,” she said and stared at Jonathan a little longer. “Are you okay? Do you want me to watch him for a couple hours until Mary gets home?”

Jonathan’s stomach tightened. She knew. Everyone knew. He turned his eyes downward. “No. No. Everything is fine. He just got away while I wasn’t looking.” He tried his best, but she could see straight through him, all his protections against the world gone. She said nothing, turned, and walked back through the woods toward her house. Jonathan kept Jacob in his arms and brought him inside.

That night he felt a change in Mary. She came home so angry there were tears in her eyes. Rachael had called her – they were friends – and Jonathan expected as much. But she wasn’t just angry. She had been angry before, but this was something deeper, more primal. “You could have lost him,” she said, trying not to cry. “Something awful could have happened to him, and where were you? What were you doing? You’re a fucking mess.”

Everything changed after that day – the day Jacob wandered into the woods while Jonathan was lost in drink and guilt. The rest of their marriage unraveled and stagnated and then unraveled some more. They didn’t leave each other. He hung on to the idea of family, even though being home with Mary now was like being alone. She grew so distant and cold it was as if she were a million miles away while sitting in the room. Jacob grew up in a chill between his mother and father that would probably hang like a cloud over his adult relationships.

Yes, that had been a turning point in Jonathan’s memory. That was when the true descent began, when he couldn’t hide the fact there was something wrong anymore – not from his wife, not from the neighbors, not from anyone. From there his desperation, sadness and isolation grew, leading him inexorably back to Coombs’ Gulch, to the start of it all.

The Gulch had claimed another of his oldest friends, the second person who knew the truth. Now there was only Michael.

He lay in the silent darkness, in this small cocoon with the night world turning endlessly around him, and wondered why Jacob had wandered into the woods that day. What had prompted his young boy to open the sliding glass door and walk alone into trees dark with shade, instead of staying in the yard with his toys or wandering toward the road, the way so many children seem drawn to the flat, asphalt strips of civilization? The same awful scream echoed across the mountains in the night.

He listened to the scream die off in the trees, and then he heard something else. The water in the lake was moving, sloshing against the rocky shore as if something large disturbed its black surface. The small waves broke on the rocky beach. Then came the sound of dripping, something rising up from water.

Jonathan stayed silent and waited. He could see his breath inside the tent. The disturbance in the water grew closer to shore. In the silent darkness, the sound was like a waterfall, but it was distinctly familiar – the sound of something emerging from the lake. The dripping and sloshing continued, grew closer and louder and faster. He recognized the sound of legs pulling themselves up and then stepping back down, of a living body struggling to walk to shore as the water sloughed off in dripping streams. It grew closer; moving through the shallows, the steps grew quicker. The water poured off onto the rocks of the shore now, and finally he heard it emerge from the lake completely. Rocks moved under its weight; the gravel crunched hard and wet. He heard footsteps moving toward the tent, settling into the snow with a wet, muffled crunch underfoot.

Then it stopped and all was silent again. But the presence remained there, watching, waiting. He could feel it in his gut, the realization he was being watched, eyes staring a hole through the tent. Jonathan took up his rifle and flashlight and moved slowly toward the front of the tent. The presence did not move or make a sound. As far as Jonathan could tell, it stood at the edge of the trees, where the forest met the rocky beach. It stood in silence and waited, and Jonathan waited with it, barely breathing, heart racing.

In the silence he heard a light and innocent voice: Daddy. Daddy, come find me.

He felt the same panic as the day Jacob wandered away from the house alone. It was like a hook pulling at his heart, overwhelming and desperate. He tried to tell himself it was not possible, that it was some trick of his imagination, a waking dream, a night terror of his own in the forest. But he felt the clammy cold of his skin; he felt the heft of his rifle and the cold of the air.

Daddy. Daddy, come find me.

Jonathan unzipped the tent. The empty night air blasted his face and he looked out toward the lake. There were four inches of snow on the ground, and it glowed with a soft, deathly light. The trees shot straight up in deep, black lines to the night sky. He looked at the dead fire and then beyond to the lake. It was out there, just beyond the limit of his sight. He heard something shift in the darkness.

Jonathan turned on the flashlight. The sallow circle of light rolled over the trees and the ground, capturing them for a moment in its pale eye and then letting them disappear back into the unknown.

Conner stood at the edge of the tree line, his skin dripping, cold and blue white. He did not seem to support his own weight. Instead, he looked like a marionette held upright by strings from the darkness above. His mouth hung wide open – far too wide – as if he could swallow a human head whole in his mouth. His jaw appeared broken, merely skin and sinews keeping it from falling to the ground. His clothes dripped with water from the lake. His eyes were dead white.

From the black hole of his unmoving mouth came Jacob’s voice: Daddy, do you see me now?

Jonathan’s skin ran with pinpricks, and the blood drained from his limbs like a cut artery.

In that moment, he could think of nothing; he could do nothing. He merely sat staring in wonder, paralyzed by the sight, terrified at what he beheld. As he stared, the skin on Conner’s face seemed to slip just a little, threatening to slide off and fall to the ground.

“You aren’t real,” Jonathan said. “You’re only a disguise.”

The thing that was Conner moved sudden and fast. It bent toward him and stretched out its arms in a fit of rage, animated and life-like, and from its mouth came that ghastly high-pitched scream, full of all the terror and pain and helplessness of the infinite. The sound overwhelmed him, so loud he felt his eardrums would burst. It seemed nothing on Earth could create such a sound.

With sudden swiftness, it bounded off into the night faster than any deer Jonathan had ever seen. Its strange limbs moved awkwardly, pulled up and down by some unseen force. It disappeared into the trees. Jonathan could hear it bounding – its leaps and footfalls – as it faded into the darkness until all was silent again.

Jonathan sat there in the night, unable to move. He waited and listened in the deep and heavy night with only his breath and heartbeat.

Then something much softer and quieter whispered in his ear.

Daddy. Daddy, come find me.