The Follower

by Nicholas Bowling

  “But he’ll leave if you’re with me.”

  “Then I’ll go to Telos and wait, and you bring him to me. You hear me? He owes us.”

  Vivian saw the man, Shiv, go around the other side of the desk and haul Judy out of her seat. He pulled her towards the exit and she stumbled in her heels.

  Vivian backed away and loitered around the bear as the couple came out of the door and approached the black car. The man opened the door, and there was a brief exchange. No one got in. He slammed it shut again. The man was handsome, Vivian noticed, honey-skinned and silver-haired. He wore a white turtleneck and sports jacket. An unlikely representative of “Telos”, but if he knew where it was then he was worth talking to. Judy was still in the clothes she’d worn the previous day and there were bits of pine tree in her hair. Vivian wanted to talk to her, too. They abandoned the car and marched off around the side of the motel to where the pool sat stinking. Vivian followed, then hung back behind the generator shed and watched until they had crossed the strip of scrub and disappeared into the woods. It was already getting cold and the sky was a deep and lonely blue. She put her brother’s coat on, over her own, and zipped it up to the top. It was difficult to move her arms at the elbows, but she liked the cocoon-tightness of it.

  She followed the sound of the couple’s footsteps and their quiet, snippy exchanges. She couldn’t hear the words but they spoke in tones that suggested they knew each other well, and argued a lot. Married, probably. They looked roughly the same age. They looked like they had the same hairdresser, too. Occasionally, Vivian got close enough to see the flash of Judy’s jacket, the glint of an enormous earring, and was forced to wait in the undergrowth until they were both out of sight.

  Half an hour passed. Maybe more. Vivian didn’t know. There was no discernible path. She hiked up the mountain at a slight angle, through spongy, trackless wastes of pine needles and endlessly repeating ranks of mast-straight trunks. The branches overhead were black and thick and gave only glimpses of the dimming sky, the glowing mountain. She took deep lungfuls of dry air, spat flies and spiders’ webs.

  Vivian got tired. She worried that her panting and stumbling were too noisy, so she stopped to catch her breath and pinpoint the couple up ahead. The pines made a cool, dark cathedral around her, and the silence echoed with the rattle of a woodpecker, the rustle of some mammal on the forest floor. She couldn’t hear Judy or Shiv at all.

  She ran a little further up the mountain, stopped, listened again. Tracked left and right. Nothing. She sat down. Even under a fleece and a jumper and two coats, she could feel her sweat congealing. She wished she’d brought something to eat or drink. She felt foolish.

  She found a fallen trunk to perch on and sat twirling her new initiate’s rod and tried to gather her thoughts. She pulled up both hoods. The darkness in the forest deepened.

  At some point she realised that her hands had gone numb and she thrust them into the pockets of Jesse’s jacket. They were full of paper, torn and balled and folded. That was no surprise. Jesse was always writing things down. Their house had been full of his papers and notebooks, aspects of the world that he observed and questioned and figured out. He’d been like that at school, too, his exercise books and textbooks black with illegible scrawls. When paper was lacking he’d been known to write on walls, clothes, other people’s hands and arms. All the other students at the school knew him and knew the signs of him – symbols and equations and questions posed to whoever happened to find his little artefacts. The sort of boy who was too strange to be worth bullying. The sort of boy who probably wouldn’t even have noticed if someone had bullied him. Poor Jesse.

  Vivian withdrew her hands and a few pieces of paper fell to the forest floor. She fumbled around to retrieve them, and as she squatted the slope to her right brightened suddenly. A pinkish glow among the barcode of the tree trunks. She tried to blink it away like a sunspot, but it wouldn’t go. Not a torch – it was too big and had no beam. More like a streetlamp. She crammed Jesse’s notes deeper into her pockets and watched as it floated here and there among the pines. For the longest time she assumed it was the product of her fatigue, until she saw it was not simply a light but a figure. Her mind went to the next likely explanation: Judy again, in her horrid fuchsia jacket. The figure emitted its own light, though, making sharp silhouettes of the bushes and branches.

  She slithered down from the tree trunk and walked down the slope. It was definitely a person. A man, though the light made his features impossible to discern. He may or may not have been clothed. He walked steadily and easily, without any real purpose, as if he was out for an evening stroll and it was the most normal thing in the world. Vivian thought of the front cover of The Violet Path, of the man whose face had been plastered all over the walls of the Sanctuary. He was the right colour, at least.

  The man drifted out of sight behind a stump. She’d had lucid dreams before, lots of them. Considerably more since the business with her father. Her usual reaction to one was to do everything and anything to make it disappear, but this felt different. Vivian was suddenly full of an inexplicable dread that it might end, that she might lose him. She ran to catch up.

  It was only a handful of steps before she tripped. The ravine was definitely not in her imagination. She cracked her elbow, then her head, and there was flare of violet light and it felt like she had fallen from the summit of the mountain to its base. She caught the briefest glimpse of the stars and then the pain started and she was grateful to find herself losing consciousness.

  7

  WHEN SHE came to, the stars and the sky were gone and she was staring up at a ceiling, a nicer ceiling than the one in her motel room, which she was sure contained asbestos or something worse. This was the kind of ceiling she’d expected Cedar Lodge to have – sturdy wooden beams and snugly fitting boards and an oil lamp hanging from a chain in the middle. She was in a low bed, under an old blanket. She smelled woodsmoke and vinegar.

  Vivian raised herself on an elbow and her whole head seemed to split like an overripe plum and she slumped back onto the mattress. It was old, too, and thin, and she felt the slats of the bed against her spine. She rolled from one side to the other.

  The cabin was a little smaller than her motel room. Looking between her feet she saw a table and a single chair, and the remains of what looked like whittling. In the corner opposite the bed was a wood burner and a stove. A cupboard, open, filled with ancient cans of food. Little else besides, and no running water, it seemed. Her Telos rod was leaning against the doorframe as if it was the owner’s walking stick.

  She touched her forehead. The lump was enormous, and a little sticky. Combined with her black eyes she must have looked a complete ruin. She flexed her elbow and got a jolt of pain and sucked her teeth.

  There were footsteps outside the cabin, a crunch of pine needles, and the door opened. There was a flood of mountain air, chill and dusty. With it came Mr Blucas.

  He looked quickly at Vivian, then stomped around the cabin in his heavy boots, stoking the fire, opening a can of something. Vivian drew the bedclothes around her and waited for the smell to hit her but it never came. He looked different. Cleaner shaven, and slightly thinner. He was wearing his woolly hat properly, pulled down over his ears. And his bags – where were all his bags? Perhaps this was what a sober Mr Blucas looked like, first thing in the morning.

  He emptied the can of beans into a pan and then turned to face her properly.

  “How you feeling?” he said.

  Vivian didn’t know what to say. She was surprised by how much stronger his voice sounded.

  “You’re welcome,” he muttered, when she made no reply.

  He went back and prodded the beans.

  “If I had a dollar for every damn hippy I saved from dying on this mountain, I’d be a millionaire.” He made a noise that might have been a cough or a laugh. “Again, I mean.”

  “Mr Blucas?” said Vivian. She still wasn’t sure it was him.

  He turned
and glared at her. “So what if I am?”

  “You live up here?”

  The glaring intensified. “So what if I do?”

  She held her tongue, and her head throbbed some more. He emptied the beans into two chipped bowls and brought one of them over to her. She ate them too quickly and scalded her tongue but didn’t mind.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Time is just a construct,” he said in a sarcastic voice with his mouth full of beans, twirling his spoon in mock reverie. “Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what the Telurians say?”

  “The what?”

  He put his bowl down and wiped his mouth and went over to the door. He hefted her initiate’s rod in one hand, then in both, then spun it between his thumbs and forefingers.

  “No crystal, huh?” he said, looking at the notch at one end. “You’re a real newbie, then.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “I’ll help you understand,” he said, and he cracked the rod over his knee and tossed each half into the wood burner. “Forget all this crap. There’s no Crystal City up here. There’s no John of Telos. There’s no goddamn salvation, no matter what anyone tells you. You hear me? Here is my teaching, and Telos’s blessing be upon it: go back to town, pack your bags, and get the hell out.”

  Only when he mentioned John of Telos did Vivian remember the figure she’d seen in the woods. The sunlight from the grimy window, the burn on her tongue, Mr Blucas’s brusqueness – it all made it much harder to believe what she thought she’d seen. She hadn’t slept enough. That was the truth of it. Too much time in the presence of people like Shelley and Glenn and Eenoo. Maybe there really had been something in the blue tea. Maybe she’d touched something she shouldn’t have in Eenoo’s trailer.

  “I’m not like the others,” she said. “I mean, I’m not a hippy-type person.”

  “Sure you’re not,” said Mr Blucas. “You’re just keeping that rod for a friend.”

  “I’m looking for my brother.”

  Mr Blucas pointed his spoon at her.

  “Don’t talk to me about brothers.”

  “What did you mean when you said—”

  “You done with that?”

  He nodded at her bowl. She handed it back.

  “You’re welcome,” he said again.

  She watched him go back to the table and pick up his whittling knife. Her heart convulsed for a moment, then he took his seat and start working on a half-carved spoon. His hands worked strongly and steadily. They were clean. His fingernails were pared. He’d tidied himself up to the extent that he looked a completely different person.

  He looked up from whittling and met her gaze.

  “What are you waiting for? Dessert?”

  “No. Sorry. I just—”

  “You just?”

  “You’ve changed.”

  “’Course I’ve changed. What do you expect?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “I don’t have any answers for you, hippy. Not anymore. Now git.”

  “Git?”

  “Go! You’ll live. Now get out of here.”

  Without getting out of his chair he kicked at the door and it opened.

  Vivian swung her legs out of the bed, stood up, nearly fainted. The wood burner had made the cabin uncomfortably hot, and she was still wearing both her and her brother’s coats. She was thankful for that. The injuries to her elbow and forehead would have been a lot worse without the padding. She steadied herself, hands on knees, swaying in time with her pulse. Mr Blucas glanced at her but made no move to help.

  When her head had cleared she went to the door.

  “Well,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Mr Blucas grunted.

  “What’s the best way back to town?”

  “Down,” he said.

  “Down?”

  He sighed and threw his spoon on the table and gave her a weary stare.

  “Just go straight out the door and down the mountain. Fifteen minutes you see a creek. If you don’t get yourself in some hippy trance on the way. Follow the creek all the way to the bottom and you’ll get yourself on the 55.”

  “The 55?”

  “The highway. My God, they really melted your brain, didn’t they? Or are you concussed?”

  He folded his arms. Vivian took a step sideways, and then went out into the woods. She felt a pleasant thrill in the cold breeze. A jay scampered in the undergrowth and tossed some leaves and flew up into the branches. It beat the Cedar Lodge parking lot as the first sight of the day. After a moment or two she turned back to the door, which Mr Blucas was trying to close with his toe again.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “What now?”

  “Have you really seen my brother?”

  “I see a lot of people around here. I just try and make sure they don’t see me.”

  “But yesterday, you said—”

  “Yesterday?”

  “When you spoke to me in the cafe.”

  “What cafe?”

  “Steaming Pete’s. The fishing place.”

  “My God, you are half gone. You poor, stupid girl.”

  Vivian flushed.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know you. We’ve never met. First time I saw you, you were lying on your back in the creek with blood pumping out of your head.”

  “But—”

  “Git! I’m done with you. And don’t go telling anyone I’m up here, because I can whittle this into something sharper if I have to.”

  He slid down in the chair, kicked the door, and it slammed in Vivian’s face. What did he mean? Perhaps he had been drunk, and really didn’t remember meeting her. Or maybe she’d imagined that whole episode, too.

  She started down the mountain and touched every tree trunk as she went, pinching the bark. The coldness and hardness reassured her. She licked the moss and dirt from her fingers. This was real. The mountain was real.

  Ten minutes had passed and she was nearly at the creek when she thought, suddenly: his teeth. The Mr Blucas she had just left behind had a full set of teeth.

  8

  AFTER ANOTHER hour’s hiking, Route 55 appeared out of nowhere. A lost highway, reclaimed by the forest. Vivian didn’t see a single car on her walk back into town. The clouds rolled in and Mount Hookey was completely concealed. By the time she rounded the last bend and saw the stoical bear of Cedar Lodge and his neon sign – from the other direction, this time – the sky seemed impossibly low and claustrophobic. It started to rain. She hurried into the lobby as if escaping the cloud of an erupting volcano.

  Troy was on reception, even though it wasn’t the night shift. She heard the hiss of his earphones before she saw him. Judy hadn’t come back.

  Vivian went over and stood at the desk. He obviously knew she was there but he didn’t look up. She dinged the bell but he just raised his purple-ringed eyes at her and shook his head, and went back to looking at his phone. Today he was wearing a T-shirt that said “No Future”, over the top of a second, long-sleeved T-shirt. He smelled of marijuana and deodorant.

  “Judy still not here?” said Vivian.

  He didn’t reply.

  “You weren’t wrong,” she said. She paused. “About this place. Getting in your head.”

  She saw and heard him raise the volume on his phone. She took a step backwards, formed another word with her mouth, but didn’t say it. He clearly didn’t want to talk.

  “Well,” she said. “I’ll see you round.”

  “You didn’t have to tell them about Mom,” he said suddenly, when she was halfway across the lobby. She stopped and came back.

  “Tell who? About what?”

  “You know who.”

  She thought for a moment. She remembered Glenn, whispering to Carl. Carl, hopping into his pickup.

  “The thing with the book?” she said.

  “See,” said Troy. “There you go.”

  “What happened?”

  “Mom got screwed, tha
t’s what happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He didn’t reply while his thumbs hammered the phone screen. A few messages came and went. He finally plucked out his earphones and leaned forwards in his chair, arms jointed like a praying mantis.

  “How much money do you think your brother spent here? How much do you think he’s still paying?”

  “I don’t know,” said Vivian, and she genuinely didn’t. At least as much as the university fund his father had set aside for them both. That was the deal to begin with, since he didn’t go to university. But she was pretty sure he’d exceeded the cost of his education by now. If her parents had been anything less than obscenely wealthy, they would have cut off the payments years ago. Chances were, though, they probably didn’t even notice the money leaving the account. Especially not now Dad was gone.

  “You don’t know because you don’t know, or you don’t know because you can’t even imagine how much he’s pumped into this place?”

  She shrugged.

  “This is something you’ve got to understand about Mount Hookey, Vivian. They’re hippies, yes – but free love? Forget it. You’ve got to pay for communion with the Great Spirit. And when there’s that much money flying about, people get competitive. Everyone’s out to screw everyone.”

  Vivian thought about the burned-out church. They got what was coming to them.

  “So what happened to your mum?” she asked.

  He smiled at her pronunciation, but only briefly.

  “Mom’s been operating off-radar, you could say.”

  “Off-radar?”

  “Illegally. The Telos thing is kind of a franchise, and she’s not meant to be teaching.”

  “A franchise?”

  “Sure. You can teach yoga or meditation or hypnotherapy or whatever the fuck, but you can’t use the word ‘Telos’ unless you’ve been approved.”

  “Approved by whom?”

  “I don’t know. John of Telos?” He sniffed hard. “He’s probably got an office on the Upper East Side somewhere.”