Chapter Twenty-Nine

Jonathan wandered through the forest in the dark. He could not tell if he was man or ghost. He still felt the ground underfoot, felt the frozen air chafing his cheeks, felt the fear and desire to return to his wife and find his lost boy. But something lay dead in the Gulch. He followed the stream because it was the only thing he could think to do, as if his body were on autopilot to return to the cabin, get home and face…he didn’t know what anymore. The future was nothing more than a gray fog drifting toward him. It brought nothing but more pain, yet all he could do was continue onward. He stumbled. His legs weren’t working correctly anymore, tired and dead from three days of heavy hiking through the mountainous terrain. His gait was awkward; only the last remnants of his willpower dragged his body through the trees. Anyone who saw him would think a corpse had risen from the grave and stalked through the trees. He turned to see if his body still lay dead and faceless on the ground. He could see it – a black stain in the pale snow.

He did not know what time it was anymore. Time had lost all meaning. Time didn’t matter for Jacob – if indeed he were trapped in that terrible, lonely limbo like Thomas Terrywile – and time no longer mattered for Jonathan. He was dead. Whether it was spiritually or physically, it no longer mattered. All blended together, all was the same. The curtain had been pulled back momentarily, and he saw himself dancing on the stage, his own movements controlled by an unseen puppeteer. It was almost laughable, except he was the lone audience.

The snow ceased momentarily and the moon shone full and bright in a break between the passing clouds. The mountain ridges glowed, each a reflection of the other. He followed the stream but couldn’t be sure he was headed in the right direction. All he could do was keep on moving – keep living, if that was what it could be called. He saw identical places a thousand times over. He saw the stars turn. He heard branches move and break in the darkness, first on one side of the stream and then the other. The sounds and movements were too quick to be just one person or animal; it had to be many, all of them closing in. For what, he did not know, but he moved forward anyway. From behind came the sound of heavy timber being uprooted and thrown to the ground, heavy crashing sounds of thick, splitting wood. He looked to the moon, but it was half-hidden behind the canopy of black spruce trees. There was another sound – something on the cold air that moved like ghosts through the bracken.

He left the thick timber behind and walked among the tall grasses, the flatland that lined the stream, the place where it had all begun with that single gunshot. Everything was dead under the snow. The moonlight poured down, and everything glowed bright and ghastly and cold. He heard whispering again. It came stronger now, heavier, carried on the air; the voices became more human, but still he could not make out the words. It sounded like a small group of men talking, plotting, just out of listening range, the way voices mingled together in a crowded pool hall or downtrodden dive bar. He thought about the night at the East Side Tavern when Michael and Conner approached him with this plan. The strange bar patrons who somehow looked familiar, how they watched him even though he did not know them. It was like the entire world was in on some kind of joke and he was the mark, left to spin and cry in his ignorance.

Perhaps the voices were just a ghostly recording, the sound of men standing over the bloody body of a boy with a star-shaped hole in his eye, plotting how to bury him in a box. It played over and over again, like songs from the past on endless radio repeat. The past and present blended seamlessly into a new reality – a nightmare into which he was waking. The Gulch was an eternal recurrence and his life nothing but a minor detail, twists on the truth, a ruffling of the veil.

Jonathan stood at the edge of a hole. A deep hole, square shaped, a couple of yards long and about one yard wide. There was a pickaxe and shovels on the ground, partially covered in snow. It looked strange now, this hole near a stream in the middle of the Gulch. It seemed to be drawing him closer. He wanted to lie down in it. He was tired, so very tired. Clouds rolled overhead. The moon disappeared, and snow began to drift silent and steady across the land.

He could feel many things watching him. They were just over his shoulder, just hidden in the darkness of the tree line, just out of sight. He could not see them, but they were there.

He looked again into that hole and saw his own body lying there, head broken open, limbs at strange angles, eyes wide and partially set free from his skull – straining to see something in the sky, just before the bullet tore through.

Jonathan looked out into the distance, where the tall grass of the wetlands met the trees. A pair of yellow eyes shone in the darkness, high off the ground, bright as the moon, glossy and sinister. Someone spoke to him from the trees.

“Where is Jacob?”

He turned to look, but no one was there. The tree line was dark and impenetrable. He looked back to where he had seen the eyes shining in the night. They were gone. He walked to where they had been and stared up into the spiraling spikes of a dying black spruce tree. They seemed like a staircase or ladder climbing up into the darkness of space. Or perhaps he was at the top and they led downward into the earth. He was too tired and dizzy to know the difference anymore.

He walked to the southern edge of the valley and stood before the blackened trees as the land sloped gently upward toward the cabin. It wasn’t much farther now. He could hear the sound of the electric generator turning, a horrendous sound rendered soft by distance.

The broken spikes of tree limbs plunged into him like knives and scraped his numb face and bruised his hollow chest. He lumbered up the hill like it was a mountain, dragging his body along. There was whispering again in the trees, the sound of men’s feet running through the forest like a pack of unseen wolves closing in on an injured buck. He heard the padding and crunching of the snow, breaking branches, cursing and giggling, like children with low, gruff voices. They were everywhere in the darkness. Jonathan stared straight ahead. Through the trees, he could make out the faint glow of electric light from the rear of the cabin.

He pushed on farther. The light grew steadily brighter, reached into the trees and cast shadows across the snow. Large flakes of snow fell from the sky, drifting lazily through the pine canopy.

A face appeared from behind a tree, poking out into the light. A beefy man with a round face and fire-shocked beard. He laughed like he was playing a game, his smile ruddy, red and giddy. For a moment, Jonathan recognized him – the man from the bar in Pasternak, who had mumbled those strange words to Michael before the fight broke out.

“Where is Jacob?” he said and then disappeared from view back behind the tree.

Then another face appeared from behind a different tree. He was tall and gaunt, half-hidden in shadow. He smiled like death, his voice deep and cavernous. “Where is Jacob?”

Then another and another and another, all appearing momentarily from behind tree trunks, their faces suddenly visible like apparitions, giddily asking, “Where is Jacob?” and laughing to themselves before disappearing into the darkness as if they were playing a game of hide-and-seek. They moved around him, shifting places, breaking branches, but he could not see them until they popped a head out from behind a tree and whispered that same, awful taunt: “Where is Jacob?”

He recognized them all from that night in Pasternak, their elbows on the wooden bar of The Forge, half-finished beers falling over, faces bloated and heavy, secretive smiles and calculating eyes, sizing up the world for a fight. They looked different now in the winter night, cast in shadow and dull light. Their skin was gray and pockmarked, their eyes like beads on the face of a doll, their movements jerky and broken, like his own. He saw Daryl Teague among the pines. His massive body and head reached high into the tree limbs. He whispered, “Where is Jacob?” and raised his clawlike hand with only three fingers to his mouth to stifle a laugh. His strange eyes stared right through Jonathan as if he were sleepwalking, like Jacob during his night terrors – eyes open to the world, but trapped in his mind, simultaneously existing in two different worlds. Perhaps they were all trapped, animals who constructed their own prisons over time and suddenly realized what they’ve done. Their laughter sounded strange – an animal-like cackling of anger, pain and insanity.

Jonathan felt it somewhere out there – true reality. He had been half asleep for so long, trapped within his guilt and terror. His body moved, but he fell deeper and deeper. Something tried to wake him. He could feel it now.

Daryl Teague’s face pulled from both sides into a grin, and he stepped back into the darkness.

Jonathan could see the firepit and oakwood bench where they found Bill Flood’s body. He could see the doorway of the shed where they’d hung the deer and stripped it of skin and meat ten years ago. He could smell something gentle on the wind that moved softly through the trees and caused the snow to dance.

Where is Jacob?

He was out of the Gulch now and stood beneath the electric floodlight, facing the wooden wall of the cabin. He could see the driveway from here. He saw Conner’s Suburban parked in the driveway, large and heavy, the light glinting off the body, the tires new and polished. He turned and looked again into the doorway of the shed, its entrance black and beckoning. The snow fell silent through the shadow and light. He still heard them in the trees; he heard their rustling feet, their whispers and taunts. He waited and breathed and then turned to look.

In the light of the overhead lamp his own footprints leading from the trees to the cabin were the only ones he could see. The tracks curved slightly with the small incline, showing a line of indentations and slash marks where his right foot dragged like an animal with a broken leg. The wind pushed the snow sideways for a moment but then ceased, and the snow fell dead and straight again. He waited there in the night for what seemed like hours, and they waited in the trees, watching.

He heard a tree snap somewhere in the darkness. He unslung his rifle and waited. All went silent, and he could hear only the beating of his heart – it sounded a million miles away.

A face appeared from behind a tree like a mannequin pushed slowly into his range of vision. It showed no movement or life – a wooden mask painted by a disturbed child who saw the world in flashes of carnival terror. It stared with unblinking black eyes. Atop its head was a crown of antlers. Its impossibly tall body was clothed in a Druid robe. It floated farther out from behind the tree and faced him directly. Then it began to float toward him over the snow.

Jonathan chambered a round in his rifle and raised it to his shoulder, aimed and fired. The sound echoed off the mountains and disappeared.

The figure did not flinch or move, as though the bullet hadn’t touched the cloth of its robe. It simply continued to float silent and unmoving toward him. It didn’t look real, but it was there, in front of his eyes. He could see it – the light landed on its wooden mask, which grew larger and larger with its approach. It existed, and yet it did not because it could not be killed.

Jonathan chambered another round and fired again. The figure continued toward him. It grew large in Jonathan’s eyes, coming so near now it seemed he could reach out and touch it.

It was what hid behind the veil of this dream world. It was where Jacob, his little boy, would be taken to suffer with this unspeakable thing keeping watch over him like a monstrous father figure, reveling in the terror of a child woken from a dream, plunged into a cold, empty hell.

He chambered another round and fired again and again till the rifle was empty and there was nothing but the hollow click of the firing pin.

The figure stood before him now, face-to-face. An arm like the broken branch of a tree rose up from beneath its robe. A long, bony finger reached up to the wooden mask and pushed it aside. A deep, croaking and guttural voice rose up from the darkness, as if the land itself had cracked open and, from a great crevasse, its words filled Coombs’ Gulch and poured down into him.

“Do you see?”

Jonathan stared into its true form. He could see. It was all he would ever see.

He could not look away.