The Follower

by Nicholas Bowling

  “I’m going to follow him,” she said.

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m going to keep going.”

  “Why? Didn’t you hear what the old man said?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “C’mon, Viv. We’re on the same team, aren’t we? You know this is all nonsense.”

  “I just have a feeling, you know—”

  “Jesus, Viv, this is not the time for a Road to Damascus moment.”

  “It’s difficult to explain.”

  Troy looked at her. He shone his torch directly in her face, and then back at his.

  “I’m freezing,” he said. “And I’ve got like seven per cent battery.”

  “You don’t need to come with me.”

  She didn’t want him to come with her, that was the truth. He seemed relieved.

  “Well. If you must. I mean, I’ve got what I need.” She wasn’t sure what he meant by that. “And I’m not exactly equipped to strike for the summit.” He pointed the torch beam at his huge sneakers. The rubber toe opened like the mouth of a puppet.

  “Can I take your phone?” Vivian asked.

  “Er.” He stood awkwardly for a second and blew into his hands.

  “For the torch.”

  “I think I might need that. To get down.”

  “Can I have the bag, then? With the food?”

  He paused again.

  “I guess so.”

  He slid his rucksack off his shoulders and handed it to Vivian. She hefted it and the bottles clinked inside.

  “Oh wait,” said Troy. “I should probably take those out.” A slight pause. “Reduce the weight.”

  She undid the top of the bag and took one of the bottles out and handed it to him.

  “What’s in these?” she said.

  He didn’t answer, and went about slotting them carefully into the huge pockets of his jacket. He also took out a cigarette lighter that he’d left in the bag.

  “Troy?”

  He patted himself, then he looked up, satisfied.

  “Good luck then, Viv. Don’t know why you’re doing this, but… well, I hope you find what you’re looking for.” She would have found him callous if she’d not been so desperate to be alone. “And if you don’t,” he added, “totally up for a road trip to Sacramento.”

  He gave her a strange one-armed hug, and she felt the bottles press against her ribs. He looked at Eenoo’s body one last time and shook his head.

  “Careful how you go, alright?” he said. “Page that old man in the motel if you’re in trouble.”

  He turned and loped back to the edge of the forest, the same way Mr Blucas had gone, the beam of his torch a few feet in front of him. He clinked all the way along the top of the ridge. Once he was out of sight, Vivian rubbed her hands together and found a weirdly slick residue on her fingertips. She sniffed at them and wasn’t totally surprised to find that the bottles had been filled with petrol, and that Troy was looking for a kind of closure all his own.

  22

  VIVIAN LEFT Eenoo where she was. It didn’t feel right to be shovelling rocks back on top of her, now she’d been discovered. She was in enough trouble as it was after the incident with Glenn, and the last thing she wanted to be doing was dragging bodies around the mountainside and getting prints and fibres all over the deceased. Best to leave the scene untouched, she thought. Or at least, best not touch the scene any more than she already had.

  The gully was obviously not the safest way up the mountain, so she looked for another route. She didn’t need Troy’s phone after all. There were stars and most of a full moon, and above her the peak looked like some vast and intricately sculpted dessert. The ribs and roots of the mountain were thrown into sharp relief, and it was to these that she was drawn. She managed to claw her way out of the gully onto a bright saddle of rock where the going was narrow but at least firm underfoot.

  Vivian was a few hundred feet above Eenoo’s body when she heard the gurgle of a diesel engine. The wind was stronger up here and she strained to listen. It was distant, but not so far away to be coming from town. The noise was followed by a spot of bright artificial light that suggested, at first, that Troy had come back with his torch.

  The light moved with some ease over the fractured terrain of the mountain, in time with the spurts of engine noise. It swept the landscape like a searching eye. A spotlight, fixed to the back of some kind of vehicle.

  Vivian huddled behind an outcrop and thrust her hands deep into her pockets. Not even two coats could keep out the wind’s savagery up here. The spotlight cast its gaze once or twice in her direction, and she sat motionless in the pool of shadow it cast. The truck came close enough for her to smell its exhaust and hear the irregularities in the cadence of its engine, and then it rolled into view in the gully below her. The spotlight rested on Eenoo’s tiny body.

  Two men hopped out of the cab – she recognised neither – and wordlessly hauled the corpse out of the rockslide and threw it in the back of the truck. Its elbows clanged against the sides of the flatbed. Then they got back in their seats and went on their way.

  Vivian watched the meat wagon until it was out of sight over the next ridge. It made no more stops, which she supposed was a good thing. How many more had there been, over the years? And where had they been taken? Were Jesse, and Nathan Carter, and everyone else waiting to be discovered in some abandoned quarry somewhere?

  The violet man would know. The violet man could answer everything. She was sure of that, sure in a way that she hadn’t been about anything for a very long time. It was a childlike certainty; the kind of certainty she used to feel about her parents, that whatever trouble she was in they would be there for her, no question, and could make it all better.

  Strong winds made for a treacherous ascent. Vivian went very slowly, sometimes on all fours, testing every foot placement three or four times before trusting her weight to it. After maybe an hour’s climbing the terrain levelled out into a boulder field covered with patches of snow that had melted and refrozen, iron-hard. There was no sign of him. In the time she’d taken to get up here he could have passed right over the summit and started down the other side. Perhaps the meat wagon had picked him up, too.

  She saw it when she was facing in the opposite direction. A faint rose-glow only detectable on the fringes of her vision. It came from a cleft in the rock where the boulder field met an icebound, unassailably steep face that went all the way to the summit of the mountain. She went on, over the broken ground. The refrozen snow patches were nearly fatal, polished to a high sheen by the wind, some deceptively thin and disguising deep crevices that could instantly break a leg or an arm.

  The light from inside the cave grew more distinct. Vivian was drawn onwards and found herself under the cliff face and out of the wind. She reached the opening in the rock and saw outside a handful of initiate rods arranged upright in the snow like punji sticks. Things hung from them, the spoils of some primitive cannibal. She recognised those things. A fleece, a pair of unfashionable trainers, a baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Surf’s Up!” and a picture of a dog in sunglasses riding a surfboard. She saw the design clearly under the snow crust, and her heart made one huge beat and then seemed to stop completely.

  She went inside. It was quiet and suddenly, impossibly warm. She heard voices ahead – no, a single voice, a woman’s, and one that by now she knew very well.

  “I brought you some books from your room,” Judy was saying. “I didn’t know which ones you wanted so I just got a selection. You like the chair? Better than being on the ground, all dirty and freezing.”

  Silence.

  “I don’t know how long I can do this for. Everyone’s talking about you. More and more people coming up here every day. Some people, they don’t know the mountain so well, and you know, well, they’re getting into trouble.”

  There was still no reply, but Vivian felt, with that same unshakeable certainty, another presence in the recesses of the cave.


  “So maybe, I was thinking – and I know it’s not my place, Telos forgive me, what with you being the Ascended Master and all – maybe you could, you know, show me the way, and I can pass on your teachings, and then, well, you wouldn’t need to be here, would you?”

  Vivian saw Judy’s shadow waver in the violet light. She seemed nervous.

  “Shiv’s just going to keep looking. And your sister. Oh my stars, I don’t even know what they did with your sister.”

  Vivian’s heart started painfully and she pushed through to where the cave widened, catching and tearing the sleeve of her coat on the rock. Judy turned and gasped. She was wearing several layers of robes, her sacred drum, and a woollen hat with earflaps that somehow contained all her hair.

  Jesse was sitting on a foldable chair in the middle of the cave. Pulsing. Irradiated. Angelic. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but the violet light seemed to pass through them almost unhindered, just leaving the silhouette of the sports logo on his chest. Vivian looked at him and her first thought was: his posture is better.

  “No, miss,” said Judy, holding up her hands as if to shield him. “No, no, no, you can’t be here. You can’t have him. I am so sorry, for what they did, but you cannot have him.”

  Vivian looked past her.

  “It’s me, Jesse,” she said. “It’s Vivian.”

  He angled his head slightly to look at her, and his face seemed a bright, expressionless vacuum.

  “What are you doing?” she said, and her voice sounded very loud, and the words somehow clumsy when put next to his serenity. She waved a hand vaguely in his direction. “How are you doing this?”

  Judy made a squawking laugh. “You think he’s just going to come right out and tell you? You think he’ll just give up the secrets of Telos like that?” She tried to snap her fingers under her mittens. “Miss, I know he’s your brother, and I am sorry for misleading you, but there’s just no way you can understand what’s going on here.”

  Jesse still made no reply. He seemed not to recognise his sister at all. Vivian’s eyes prickled.

  “What’s wrong with him?” she said.

  “Miss, there is nothing wrong with your brother. Really, nothing. I mean that very literally, with Telos as my witness. There is nothing wrong, and everything right. Are you hearing what I’m saying?”

  “I hear it. I don’t understand it.”

  “Jesse has ascended. Jesse has seen Telos. I mean, he has really been there. He has visited the Crystal City and has spoken with the Telurian Elders and he knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “Everything! More than knows! He has gone beyond knowing into pure being.”

  Vivian blinked a couple of times but had nothing to say to that. She looked at her brother again, sitting perfectly still, perfectly upright, his features showing – if anything at all – a very vague curiosity. Just the spectacle of him was incredible. So, what was it? LEDs woven into his clothes, like Piotr had said? Some kind of phosphorescent face paint? Maybe they were things you could buy from the Sanctuary gift shop, another little tributary of the Telos Inc. revenue stream.

  “Does he speak?”

  “Well now, miss, he’s not on our plane anymore so—”

  “He doesn’t need to, right, right. Communicates through violet waves or something.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  Vivian took another step towards Jesse. She wanted, more than ever in her life, to throw her arms around him, to cuddle him like a baby. But there was also something unsettling – more than that, frightening, unknown, unknowable – about the way he looked now. The receptionist made a half-hearted attempt to block her.

  “Now, I’ve told you, you can’t have him. Shiv can’t have him. No one can have him.”

  Vivian ignored her again.

  “Jesse, stop this,” she said to her brother. “I mean it.”

  She was doing her mothering voice, the one she sometimes used at home, as if that might reaffirm their old relationship. She was always the one who looked after him – properly looked after him, as opposed to her parents, who simply paid for his therapists and sometimes bought him a mindfulness colouring book or a model sailing boat to dismantle.

  “Jesse, this is stupid.”

  “You do not speak to an Ascended Master like that!” snapped Judy.

  It’s okay, said Jesse, and Judy put her hand over her chest and backed up against the cave wall and looked like she was having a heart attack.

  The voice was recognisably her brother’s, but also not recognisably human, and though he’d only said a couple of syllables they seemed not to match the movements of his bright, violet mouth. Judy continued a long, violent gasp that sounded like a sink draining, her drum clattering against the rocks behind her. Vivian waited for Jesse to say something else; waited for his light to go out, for his spine to bow into its customary curve, for his voice to reclaim its slightly infuriating nasal whine. A long time passed, but none of these things happened.

  She’s right, said Jesse.

  “Who’s right? About what?”

  She took steps left, right, forward, trying different angles to gauge whether it was, in fact, her brother. Of course it was. His Surf’s Up! cap was on a punji stick outside, the same one she’d bought him on their holiday to Santa Cruz, nearly fifteen years ago. Santa Cruz! It was only a day’s drive away. Had their father come to Mount Hookey then, too? Had that been a business trip? She couldn’t remember him spending much time with them at the beach…

  I figured it out, said Jesse.

  “Figured what out?”

  All of it, he said.

  Another long silence.

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Vivian. Why was she speaking so quietly? Her mothering voice had evaporated entirely. She had the feeling she was in church, addressing some higher power.

  “Tell us!” said the receptionist, suddenly, breathlessly. “Show us the way!”

  It’s not what you think, said Jesse.

  Still Vivian tried to read the expression on his face but found nothing. He seemed neither happy nor sad. Seemed beyond those things, in some way. Seemed to be sitting at a great distance from her, even though he was physically only a few feet away.

  “How are you doing this?” she said. “With the light?”

  I figured it out, he said again.

  “Figured what out?”

  The thing.

  Vivian remembered the scraps of paper she’d found in his jacket.

  “What thing?”

  The thing I was looking for. The thing everyone is looking for.

  “He means the Crystal City,” said Judy.

  It’s difficult to explain.

  “Well, I need you to explain,” said Vivian. “What will I tell Mum? Did you think of her? I’ve come a long way for you, Jesse. And this is all…” She looked around the cave and then back at the blank, radiant orb of her brother’s head. “I’m frightened. You are frightening me.”

  Don’t be.

  “Then tell me what the hell’s going on.”

  I can show you, he said.

  “Yes!” said Judy, now almost prostrate on the floor of the cave. “Show us! Show us!”

  Jesse considered this for a moment. He looked at his sister.

  “Alright, then,” she said. “But if this is some kind of prank…”

  It isn’t, he said.

  She believed him. It didn’t seem at all likely. Jesse had been a perennially serious child, and not the pranking sort at all.

  He nodded and then got up and made to leave the cave. His steps were deliberate, poised. Vivian watched and didn’t recognise him. She missed his clumsy flat-footedness. He both was and was not who he seemed to be – the kind of impostor she sometimes met in her sleep.

  “Oh my stars!” said Judy, also getting to her feet. She was still barely able to catch her breath. “Oh my goodness gracious! Miss, he is showing us the way! The way to Telos! Oh my heart!” She ran af
ter Jesse, then stopped, came back, folded up his chair. “Shall I bring this? What about the books?”

  Jesse kept going, out onto the frozen mountain. He was still in his shorts and T-shirt – barefoot, too – but seemed not to notice. He picked his way gracefully over the boulder field, with Vivian slipping and tripping and grazing her knees some way behind him. When she was close enough, she scrutinised his skinny body for wires, battery packs, paint smears. She saw nothing of the sort, and the longer she spent in his light, the more she considered the possibility that Piotr had been wrong, and Troy had been wrong, and this was no piece of theatre, and while that made no sense whatsoever she had no choice but to keep following her brother and lean into the dream.

  23

  WHEN THEY reached the edge of the gully where she’d found Eenoo, Jesse stopped and looked down. Vivian stood beside him, a little apart.

  “I’ve got your coat, by the way,” she said. “If you want it.”

  He didn’t. He wasn’t even shivering.

  “Where’s this thing, then? Somewhere up here?”

  He just stared down the mountain.

  “Can you give me a clue?”

  It’s difficult to explain, Jesse said again, and didn’t move. Vivian waited a minute or two.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  I’m not, he said. I don’t.

  Judy finally caught up. She’d had trouble keeping her balance with the drum strapped to her back.

  Jesse had obviously heard it before Vivian – or, perhaps, had had some sort of extrasensory premonition – because at the bottom of the scree slope appeared the meat wagon again, shuddering over the uneven ground with its spotlight.

  “Oh dear,” said Judy. “Oh no. That’ll be Shiv’s boys. They see you, they’ll take you away in the back of that thing.”

  “You know about this?”

  “Do I! Poor Shiv can’t catch a break.”

  “Poor Shiv?” said Vivian. “There’s a dead woman down there.”

  “I know. Such a shame.”

  “It’s a bit more than a shame.”

  “It’s their own choice to come up the mountain, miss. He tries to stop them. That’s the rule. You’re not allowed up here until you’re ready. But they try anyways.” She looked at Jesse and her eyes reflected him, teary from the cold or perhaps a deep spiritual love. “Who wouldn’t, if they knew he was here?”