The Follower

by Nicholas Bowling

  20

  TROY HAD an old canvas rucksack that he filled with bread and Twinkies and boxes of cereal from the kitchen, and he took a litre of the motel’s warm, eggy water in Minnie’s thermos. Then he zipped up his enormous, padded jacket, put in one earphone, and was, apparently, ready. Vivian didn’t know if she was ready or not. She could quite easily make it as far as the Blucas brother’s cabin in the woods, but if they were really going looking for the fountainhead, for Telos itself, they could be out in the wilderness for days. The peak of the mountain had snow on it. Troy was wearing tennis shoes, for crying out loud.

  The boy seemed upbeat, though.

  “Thanks for this, Pops,” he said to Jerome again. Jerome and Minnie were standing at reception, arms around each other’s waists, as if waiting to wave their children off to boarding school. “If anyone turns up looking for a room – I mean, they won’t – but if they do, just put them anywhere and I’ll sort it out when I get back.”

  “You still got the pager I gave you?” Jerome said to Vivian.

  She nodded. She had visions of trying to type on the stiff, rubber buttons while caught in a blizzard.

  “I got this,” said Troy, and waved his phone.

  “Careful with that,” said Jerome. “You don’t know who’s listening.”

  “Weren’t you going to call the police?” said Vivian.

  “Not on the phone. I’ve still got my police radio.”

  “Which he’s not supposed to use,” said Minnie. “They’ve told you, Jerome.”

  “No one’s going to need to call anyone, yet,” said Troy. “We’re just going to go and take a look around. Right, Viv?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Alright. Then mount up.”

  Troy went back to the room to say goodbye to his mother, and Vivian waited in the parking lot. He came back smelling of some sort of herbal skin cream that Shelley had rubbed all over him. His bag looked bulkier than before, and something made of glass or metal was clinking inside.

  “What is that?” Vivian asked.

  “What’s what?”

  “That noise.”

  “Just supplies.”

  He loped past her and struck out for the 55, into the trees, away from town.

  * * *

  Yet another bright and flawless day. The forest was in deep silence, the air dry and resinous and sweet-smelling. They walked until they met the creek that flowed through a concrete tube under the road, and Vivian hiked up into the trees. Birdsong and the crunch of pine needles. Troy’s music was hissing from one dangling earphone, and it made Vivian flush hot and cold with irritation. She would much rather have gone alone.

  “Why did you want to come with me?” she said.

  Troy looked up from his phone. “Huh?”

  “Why did you want to come up the mountain?”

  “I said. I want to know what’s up here too.”

  “You said you were going to settle something.”

  “Yuh-huh.” He didn’t elaborate on that. “Look, someone’s just filled my house with a couple hundred gallons of human shit. Wouldn’t you want to know what it is that would push someone to do that?”

  They walked on in silence for a bit.

  “What do you think it is?” Vivian asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “I mean, it’s not a Crystal City. Is it?”

  She hadn’t meant the last two words to come out as a question.

  “Maybe it’s a revolving restaurant. Gift shop. Must be something. Otherwise where’s everyone going? Where’s Jesse gone?”

  Vivian couldn’t and didn’t answer. She came back again and again to the vision of her brother dead from exposure, his bones and his baseball cap bleaching in a gully somewhere. Troy didn’t seem overly concerned. He’d put his other earphone in and was marching ahead and punching the air. He seemed fired up for something.

  After an hour’s walking they hit the treeline and were faced with a barren, Martian landscape of reddish rock and scree.

  “We’ve come too far,” said Vivian. “We’ve got to go back.”

  “What do you mean, too far? We’re on the mountain aren’t we?”

  “There’s someone we need to find.”

  “I know. Jesse.”

  “Mr Blucas.”

  “Blucas? What? Why?”

  “Different Blucas. His brother.”

  She told him about the last time she’d met him, and about the photo she’d found, though she omitted the part about her dad. Troy clicked his tongue and sighed.

  “Two Blucases. Unreal. This place, man.” He scanned the mountainside. “I need a smoke.”

  He lit one of his special cigarettes and drank some water from the thermos. When he was done smoking he put it out carefully with his fingers, unzipped his giant coat, and tucked what was left into the breast pocket of his plaid shirt.

  “I don’t get it,” he said, still surveying the upper portion of the mountain. “You can’t hide anything up here.”

  He was right. There was nothing besides bare rock and dirty snow and sporadic clumps of grass and lichen and wild flowers. If Telos was anything like the Sanctuary down in the town, it would be impossible to conceal.

  They tramped down again. Vivian kept thinking she saw paths through the forest, but they always lasted for a few paces and then met some impassable terrain. They came to a ravine that may or may not have been the same one she’d fallen into when she’d followed Judy. There was no way of knowing. It had been too dark, and she’d been unconscious when Mr Blucas had carried her back to his cabin.

  The light among the trees dimmed and Vivian began to feel hollow and hopeless. Just as she was about to suggest heading back to the highway, she heard rustling in the undergrowth. There was a squealing sound, so high-pitched as to be almost inaudible, followed by a grunt, then silence. A low muttering. Troy heard none of it because he still had his earphones in, and he looked confused when Vivian suddenly stopped.

  “Oh brother,” somebody growled.

  She turned around to see Mr Blucas – the second Mr Blucas – dressed identically to when she’d first met him, holding a limp rabbit by its neck. He squinted in the half light, sighed.

  “What is it?” he said. “Got lost on the way down, did you?”

  Then he was gone. Vivian watched the bushes springing back into place where the man had been, and it seemed for a moment that he had been another figment of her imagination.

  “Jesus,” said Troy. “It looked just like him!”

  “They are twins,” said Vivian.

  “I know, but I mean… it’s kind of amazing. It’s like someone gave Mr Blucas a bath and a gym membership.”

  She set off in Mr Blucas’s lumbering wake, with Troy some way behind her.

  “Mr Blucas,” she shouted through the trees. “I need to talk to you.”

  She found him again in a clearing, spinning around like he was lost. They faced each other.

  “Please, Mr Blucas,” said Vivian.

  He sighed again, so fiercely it sounded like a bark, and went over to the trunk of a cedar. He bent down, fished around in the dry needles, and uncovered a clump of mushrooms which he cut with a penknife and put in his knapsack. Then he went on to the next tree and inspected a snare he’d set. He adjusted the size of the loop. Troy was wise-cracking somewhere in the bushes but she wasn’t listening to him.

  “I need you to tell me about Telos, sir,” she said, while he rummaged in his knapsack. “I need you to tell me what’s up the mountain.”

  Mr Blucas stood up very suddenly.

  “I told you, missy, to get gone. There is nothing here. The mountain does not have the answers. I don’t have the answers. You’re wasting my time and you’re wasting your time. It is not real. None of it is real. This here—” he took the body of the rabbit out of his bag and waggled it in front of her face “—this is real. That’s all you’re going to find up here. Now. I told you to git. And if you don’t, Lord help me, I will b
e angry with you, and when I am angry I am liable to do you some unconscionable physical discourtesy.”

  Troy started laughing.

  “Well, I can see who got all the family’s brain cells.”

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “Friend of your brother’s.”

  “Get a haircut.”

  “That’s what your brother says!”

  “Please, Mr Blucas,” said Vivian. “It’s not what you think. I’m not just another hippy.”

  “You look like one.” He turned to Troy. “He sure does.”

  “I’m nothing to do with Telos,” said Vivian.

  “You had a rod.”

  “I know.”

  “So?”

  “I just pretended to join,” said Vivian. “To find my brother. That’s all. I’m not here looking for enlightenment or whatever.”

  “You sure about that?”

  She paused.

  “I’m just looking for my brother.”

  “And how the hell should I know where your brother is?”

  “He went to Telos. I thought you’d know what that was.”

  The man looked at her, then looked up at the sky. His face looked very old in the slanted, burned-out light of the evening.

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “You were there right at the beginning though, weren’t you? I saw it. In the paper. You and your brother and the other guy—” she didn’t want to say her father “—Mr Owens.”

  He frowned.

  “Graham? How do you know about him?”

  “Mr Owens?” said Troy.

  There was silence, then all three of them started at a sound that came from further up the mountain. A strange gurgling roar, not particularly loud. It sounded like someone doing a bad impression of a lion.

  “Damn it,” said Mr Blucas, and looked in the direction of the noise.

  “What is that?” said Vivian.

  “Cougar.” He turned back to them. “This was your plan all along, right? Filibuster till it gets dark and I feel sorry for you and I take you in for another night? Get another free meal out of me? You know what you are, your generation? You’re selfish.” He pointed a thick, calloused finger at her. “That’s why you all love Telos so much. Pretend you’re meditating on the great cosmic spirit, but all you’re doing is thinking about yourself all goddamn day.”

  The cougar growled again, closer.

  “You can come back to the house,” said Blucas. “But I’m not feeding you again.” He looked Troy up and down his full height. “You? I don’t even know if you’re gonna fit.”

  And he set off down the mountain without a torch, seeming to know his way by smell, and apparently not caring if Vivian and Troy kept up with him.

  “Mr Owens,” Troy said in Vivian’s ear. “Family? Right?”

  She said nothing.

  “Your dad?”

  Again she didn’t reply.

  They walked a little further and she finally said, “Don’t say anything to him,” nodding to the dark shape of Blucas.

  “No way,” said Troy. “No fucking way.”

  It was almost completely dark by the time they reached the cabin. They came at it from the back, and the window was four dull squares of orange. The wood burner was lit inside, and the smell of smoke was rich and peaty. Mr Blucas didn’t so much as show them inside as forget to close the door. He had taken up a seat by the fire and had stuck his knife into the rabbit before Vivian and Troy had crossed the threshold.

  “Like what you’ve done with the place,” said Troy.

  “You can go and sleep with the cougars if you don’t like it,” said Mr Blucas. He stripped the animal of its skin as easy as peeling a banana.

  “Gross,” said Troy. The boy was nearly bent double under the cabin’s roof. He went and sat on the bed and folded up his legs and looked like some kind of optical illusion. Out came his phone.

  “That goes away,” said Mr Blucas.

  “Why?”

  “It goes away, or it goes in the fire.”

  He dug the blade of his knife into the rabbit’s belly and the guts slopped into a metal bowl he had waiting. Troy did as he was told, and for once didn’t have some smart-alecky reply.

  Vivian watched Mr Blucas lever himself off his stool and spit the rabbit’s carcass and remove the top of the wood burner with thick gloves. He balanced the spit on top and turned it a couple of times. It was as though he was completely alone in the cabin. When the fat started hissing he turned it again, then poured himself something brown from a brown bottle and took his seat and spat on the floor.

  “So, you saw me in the paper,” he said. “And what paper was that?”

  “I don’t know. An old one. From the eighties.”

  “Right. Well. Good sleuthing, you found me.”

  He spun the rabbit on the spit and it seemed he had nothing else to say.

  “Please, Mr Blucas.”

  “Stop that. You’re not in middle school. My name’s Piotr.”

  “I need you to tell me what Telos is. Where Telos is. I’m just going to get my brother and leave. I’m not going to tell anyone about this. Or you.”

  “Damn right you’re not.” He wielded the spit like a cutlass and pointed it in Vivian’s face. “How do you know Graham?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It sure does matter. No one knows Graham. He made sure of that, the old bastard.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if he knows you know, then you need to watch your back. Jesus.”

  Vivian found she was clenching her jaw so tightly her whole neck and shoulders were starting to cramp up.

  “I don’t,” she said. “He’s dead.”

  “Dead? Then who’s in charge now?”

  “I don’t know.” Shiv, perhaps, Vivian thought.

  “How do you know he’s dead?”

  “I just do.”

  “Oh for crying out loud,” Troy interjected. “Just tell him.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I will, if you won’t,” said Troy. “Piotr, you’re looking at the heir apparent.”

  “What’s that?”

  Vivian wished, not for the first time, that Troy hadn’t come with her. She looked at him and shook her head, and he just splayed his enormous hands in a helpless gesture.

  “He’s playing hard to get,” he said. “We need to give him something.”

  “Baloney,” said Piotr. “You’ve got some mouth on you, boy.”

  Vivian turned back. “No. He’s telling the truth.”

  Piotr looked from Vivian to Troy and back again.

  “You’re his daughter?”

  She nodded.

  “And your brother, he’s signed up to the course?”

  “I haven’t heard from him in weeks.”

  “Your dad put him up to it?”

  “No. None of us knew anything about what Dad did.”

  Piotr Blucas looked at her steadily.

  “Figures,” he said. “Good God. That man.”

  He didn’t speak again for some time. He had two more slugs of his brown homebrew, then slid the rabbit from the skewer and, true to his word, devoured the whole thing by himself without offering anything to Vivian or Troy.

  When Piotr was finished he wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his plaid shirt and threw the bones out of the door. He came back inside and patted his pockets and sighed a heavy sigh.

  “One of these?” Troy said. He fished under the long black curtain of his hair and produced a cigarette he’d tucked above his ear. He held it out as a peace offering. His arm reached halfway across the cabin from where he was lying.

  Piotr regarded it, and Troy, with suspicion. He took it and grunted, and then spent a moment lighting the cigarette from the embers of the wood burner. He sat back in his chair and exhaled a cloud of smoke. It had the pungent, spicy aroma that followed Troy everywhere.

  Vivian was about to try coaxing him into saying somet
hing when he began of his own accord.

  “We were in at the ground floor, so to speak,” he said. “Me and Janek. That’s my brother. The money I made from that whole thing. Jesus, it does not bear thinking about.”

  Another very long pause.

  “We didn’t actually make up the Telos stuff. Well, the name maybe. That was Graham – your dad’s – idea, I think. I don’t even remember. But the mountain thing, that’s not new. Native Americans always used to think this place was spiritually significant. Then the Spanish claimed it as a holy site. Like a Mount Sinai of the New World. Then it was the Dutch and English and so forth. Then the hippies wanted it. In the sixties everyone started coming back here. I don’t even know why your dad wanted to start it in the first place. It might have been a joke. He might have even believed all this mountain spirit nonsense at the beginning. I don’t know. He was difficult to read.”

  “I know,” said Vivian.

  “Sure you do,” said Piotr. “At any rate, it was clear pretty quickly that he couldn’t keep the whole show on the road by himself. That was when he got me and Janek involved. Add a few more cast members.” He sniffed. “He thought three was a good number. You’ve seen all the triangles, right? And twins added a nice bit of mysticism.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  He took a long drag on the cigarette.

  “Grateful Dead concert,” he said.

  Troy sniggered from the corner.

  “Seriously?” said Vivian.

  “From way back.” He stared at Troy until he stopped laughing. “At first he just hired us for decoration, but then we all had jobs to do once the thing started making serious money. Graham was the visionary, I guess. He fine-tuned the mythology. He had all the ideas about how to monetise it. I’m a certified accountant, if you can believe that. Janek… I don’t know, he did the heavy lifting. Odds and ends. Manual labour. Debt collection sometimes.”

  “Debt collection?”

  “It happened.”

  “If you all made so much money then why are you here? And why is your brother… like he is?”

  Another couple of puffs on the cigarette. He looked at the lit end and frowned, as if unsure of what it was he was smoking.

  “Your dad was the real businessman out of all of us. If he was a hippy at the start, he sure as hell wasn’t after a few years of profit. He was the one who took Telos public. That was the beginning of the end.”