The Starlight Claim

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  The man sniggered. “Hell, you can say that again. Stupid chump. Course it wasn’t just him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The stranger smiled behind his black mask, revealing that glint of gold again. “I’d have thought you’d know,” he said. Then, for the second time in less than an hour, he took his leave, chuckling to himself as he closed the door behind him.

  Nate stood there seething. Somehow this guy knew he wasn’t Dodge, but instead of calling him on the lie, the man had poked at him with a stick — tried to get a rise out of him. He settled down. There were more important matters to attend to. Waiting just long enough for the stranger to make it back to the other camp, Nate ran to the door and opened it carefully, stepped out onto the stoop. The man was nowhere around. So far, so good. He could commence Operation Polaris right away. He turned back into the house to get his outdoor gear and was shutting the door when he stopped in his tracks. Slowly he turned around to look out at the stoop. His snowshoes and poles were gone.

  Okay, get a grip. It wasn’t far to the snowmobile shed. It would take a good few minutes to get there in snow that had drifted up to his waist in places. So all it meant was that he would need to start off earlier. No big deal. And when he got to the trailhead, he’d have to drive the Polaris right down to the track since he wouldn’t be able to walk too well without snowshoes. When the train came, he could pull right up alongside it and climb off the sled onto the step. Leave the sled there, by the tracks. It might be treacherous, but it was doable.

  Then again, he’d probably have to drive along the railbed — keep moving — until the train came. The idea made him go cold inside. There were places where there wasn’t much in the way of shoulders to the track; the railbed got so steep, you couldn’t ride it, no way. And if a freight train was coming through, a hundred cars long . . . Well, they didn’t stop for anything.

  “This is officially a sixteenth-assed plan, Numbster.”

  “Put a sock in it, Dodge!” Nate shouted to the empty house. “If you can’t say anything constructive, shut up.”

  He waited for a comeback. Dodge didn’t like to let anyone have the last word. But again, there was only silence.

  The Budd car would come. And however far he got, it would stop for him. He’d abandon the snowmobile — nothing else he could do. And now he figured his life really was in danger so abandoning it was okay — it wasn’t irresponsible. They’d come back for it. Him and his dad. He swallowed hard.

  This was not looking good.

  He needed food. He needed to be charged up.

  There wasn’t a lot of choice. The good stuff was at the head of the trail. So it looked like mac and cheese again. Comfort and carbs.

  But before he ate, he took Masked Man up on his suggestion. Easing his way around the camp, hard by the walls, he made it to the front, where he took down both of the picture-window sets of shutters. There were four in all, two per window. Back inside, the light made a huge difference. He moved a big easy chair so that it faced south, and ate looking out at the snow-covered lake, sitting beside the fire, piled high and pumping out the heat. Things could be worse. He thought about Dodge out there under all of that whiteness and shuddered.

  Damn fool gamble, if you ask me.

  Yeah. The worst kind of gamble. Gambling away half your family. But what was it he’d said? I’d have thought you’d know. What was that supposed to mean?

  Nate’s meal hardened into a stone in his gut. The light was good but it didn’t really change anything. The moment he stepped off that train out at Mile 39, he had entered a white nightmare. Whatever could go wrong probably would.

  No! He had to fight that idea.

  His eyes wandered over toward the place where he suspected the quadcopter had gone down. The wind was digging into the snow cover as it poured down over the hill, making the trees all around the camp lean and sway. No falling snow yet, just the wind, which seemed to be picking up.

  He didn’t bother packing.

  He filled his pockets with a water bottle, granola bars, and a couple of juice boxes. He found the keys to both the shed and the Polaris in a matchbox in the back of the food cupboard. He dressed up warm again and headed out to make his way across the yard.

  You had to take as large a step as you could manage and then kind of dive forward, use your arms to pull your body up out of the snow — swim, crawl if you could, where the crust of an earlier snowfall had been revealed by the wind — then take another step, another dive. After only ten yards, he was already tired. He looked toward the stand of trees that separated the two cabins, expecting to see Masked Man again, enjoying the show. All he could do was keep moving and hoping. The wind in his face didn’t help.

  And then he was there, though it had cost him a lot of the energy he’d just consumed. His trembling hands dug into his pocket for the shed key. At first, he couldn’t find it, and he freaked out thinking it had fallen from his pocket in the perilous journey across the yard. In which case, nobody would find it until spring. But then he laid his hand on the wooden fob and pulled it out. He turned to the doors and stared at the big Yale padlock that held them closed.

  Except there were two locks.

  The Yale, for which he had the key, and an industrial-grade Master. He pulled on it. It didn’t budge. There was no key for a Master lock in the Hoebeeks’ place. There had never been a second lock on this door. He undid the Yale, pulled it off. He wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe because he’d fought his way here across the snow and this is what he’d come to do. But the Master wasn’t going to go away.

  And then it dawned on him, something else the masked man had said. Don’t thank me yet, boy.

  Nate swore again. He slammed his hand against the doors of the shed. Slammed it again and then looked toward the other camp — his family’s camp that his father had built, every damn log of it. The camp where three criminals were holed up, probably having themselves a good old time right about now, laughing themselves sick. The tears came then: tears of rage, tears of exhaustion, tears of fearful loneliness.

  He was a prisoner.

  He might just as well have been thrown in jail. The snow was as good as any walls if you were trying to pin somebody down, keep them in one place. If he tried to set out for the track right away, he’d be lucky to make it there by one the next morning, by which time he’d have long since died of exhaustion and exposure. Only his ghost self would be standing out there by the tracks waiting for the friendly whistle of the Budd as she came barreling around the bend. He didn’t think they stopped for ghosts.

  He fumed. Swore a lot. Recovered. Clamped his mouth shut and looked across the yard toward the H-house. He took a deep breath and plunged in. His anger, like a wave, carried him back. He slammed the door and punched the kitchen wall. Then he leaned on the counter and squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to scream.

  When he’d gotten himself together, he loaded up the fire and curled up in the ratty old easy chair to look out at the lake.

  What are you doing here?

  He tried to remember how the masked man had said it when he first arrived. He’d sounded surprised to see him. Which was weird, because he’d already guessed someone was in the cabin based on the tracks, the snowshoes outside the door. He knew someone was in the building. But he’d been surprised by who he saw, as if he hadn’t expected to see Nate. How did he say it? “What are you doing here?” Or had it been “What are you doing here?”

  Whatever he’d said, he knew Nate wasn’t Dodge Hoebeek. He seemed to know a whole lot about way, way too much.

  Around 1:00 p.m., the old man came around again. It was hard to tell if he was grinning behind his ski mask, but Nate figured he must be.

  “Why don’t you take that thing off?” said Nate without thinking, too angry to stop himself.

  The man stared at him. The rheumy eye looked worse. He blinked, once, twice. “You know who those boys over there are?” Nate didn’t answer, but his face must have given something
away. “Yeah, I figured as much. You guessed, di’n’t ya.” It wasn’t a question.

  Nate thought about it. What more did he have to lose? He nodded.

  “Well, that’s something. You’re not quite as stupid as I thought. So, here’s the deal, kid. You play this right and you just might get out of this mess alive. And when you do, you’ll have yourself a story to tell. But see, I don’t want to be part of that story. I don’t want you givin’ no description of the third man in the operation. Y’hear me?”

  Nate nodded.

  The man nodded back. He was leaning, his hand on the counter, favoring the leg that made him limp.

  “Seems like you took a little stroll,” he said, barely keeping the laughter out of his voice. “How was that for you?”

  Nate toyed with the idea of telling the man where he could shove his ski mask. Instead, he just turned toward the window and looked out at the lake, his hands stuck deep in his pockets, watching the snow stirred up into a fury now by the incessant wind out of the north. A wind that was bringing nothing but trouble.

  “Eh?” said the man. “You waiting on that de Havilland Beaver with your weekend buddies onboard?” Nate didn’t turn, didn’t answer. “Man, oh man, I’d love to see Chuck Belanger wrestle that plane down into this wind.”

  Nate stared through slits out at the snow racing away from him toward the islands and the narrows. This guy knew everyone. Everything.

  “Assuming Chuck was even around. Which he ain’t, by the by; he’s down in Florida. Smart man.” He waited, and now Nate couldn’t talk even if he’d wanted to because tears were seeping from his eyes. Partially it was at the news that there was no one at Lauzon, so his dad wouldn’t be coming in by plane even if he had gotten the message. And partially because every lie he’d come up with was being thrown back in his face, one by one.

  “I’m talking to you, boy,” said the man, his voice surly again. “Dodge,” he said, with no attempt to conceal his scorn.

  Nate just stared out at the day clouding over, obliterating the sun, bringing with it another night in this place of memories he didn’t want to have to deal with. The man strode across the room, and before Nate could do more than hunch his shoulders, the guy had his neck in a vise-like grip from behind.

  “You should be polite to your elders, kid.” The words came out like bullets from between his teeth. “I saved your scrawny ass just now, whether you know it or not.”

  Nate reached up with both his hands to try to release the man’s grip on his neck.

  “Let me go!”

  But the man bent down close to his ear, close enough for Nate to smell his breath; it was as if a muskrat had crawled into the guy’s mouth and died. Then with one more pincer-like squeeze, the stranger let go, pushing Nate’s head forward so that his face almost smashed into the windowsill.

  Nate swung around to look at the man. “You’re pretty tough for a guy who hides behind a mask.”

  The slap came out of nowhere, so lightning fast Nate couldn’t have ducked if he’d tried. His face twisted in agony. His cheek burned. New tears threatened but he forced them back. He wasn’t going to give this man the satisfaction. But when he reached up to feel his cheek, he realized that his face was already filmed with wetness.

  The stranger stepped back. “I come over to make sure you wasn’t hatchin’ no more little plans.” He waited. His voice didn’t sound so harsh anymore. He was breathing hard, as if maybe the slap had taken something out of him. “Like I told ya, those boys over there . . . man, you do not want to mess with ’em. You try any other stunts like that . . . well, I won’t be able to do nothin’ for you.” Again, he waited. What was he waiting for, another thank you? Nate took his chances and turned away again. “Ya hear me?” said the man, coming nearer, lowering his voice as if there were people nearby listening. “You keep quiet. Keep your head down. And like I said, you just might make it out of here alive. You got that?”

  Nate turned to look at him. “Got it.”

  “Good.” The man’s hard hands rubbed the wool of his mask as if it were itching his face something terrible. He rubbed the wetness out of his bad eye. Nate wasn’t fool enough to mistake the moisture for tears. He straightened up, stretched a crick out of his back, and turned to leave. “The Bird just saved your bacon. Don’t forget that.”

  “What?”

  “You wanted to know who I am? The Bird, that’s who. All you need to know.” He limped toward the door.

  Nate’s mind was racing. A chance to get out of here without the bird. He had thought they were talking about the helicopter. But . . .

  “They want to get rid of you, too,” said Nate.

  The man stopped. He turned around slowly.

  “What’s that?”

  Nate stood up and faced him. “When I first got here, I spied on the camp over there. One of them had been up the hill to this old miner’s cabin. You can get recep —”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know the place. What’d you think you heard them say?”

  Nate stared the stranger in the eye. With the light on his covered face, Nate could see the glint there. “The one who stayed at the camp came out to meet the other guy. He said he’d talked to someone named Kev?” Nate waited. The man gave nothing away. “Anyhow, the guy said ‘they’ couldn’t come. But there was a chance the guys could get out without the bird. Something like that.” He paused and then, as if Dodge were right there whispering in his ear, he said something else. “They made it sound like they really didn’t like you much.”

  Just reading his body language, it was possible for Nate to see that his words had landed.

  “You’re full of crap.”

  “No, I’m not,” said Nate, feeling bold. “At first I thought they were talking about the chopper — like a whirlybird. They weren’t. Those guys don’t need you. Not anymore.”

  The next thing Nate knew, he was falling back into his chair with the man hovering over him, one hand on each of the easy chair’s armrests, his face inches from Nate’s. “Wha’ do you know?”

  “I only know what I heard,” said Nate.

  “I wanna hear everythin’!”

  Nate turned his face away. The stench of the man was making him gag. An insane fantasy came to him: he’d deposited the filleting knife down the side of the easy chair and now all he had to do was pull it out and thrust it up into the man’s guts. His belly was right there! So close. Nate could imagine the thin blade slicing up through the man’s bib overalls, slicing into his flesh, his innards, so that they spilled out all over him like in a scene from The Walking Dead. He shuddered, had to fight the urge to throw up.

  The man pulled away, but didn’t walk away. He stood, his arms crossed. “Talk to me,” he said.

  Nate looked up at him. Looked into his eyes, one clear, one not. There was something going on here, something he didn’t understand. This guy was not like the other two. He was nasty, all right, but Nate had obviously struck a nerve. He might get himself slapped again, but this man might be the closest thing he had to an ally.

  “Those are the guys who escaped from the Sudbury Jail, right?” The man neither nodded nor shook his head. “I recognized them from TV. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what they said.” He paused, swallowed. “They were hoping for the helicopter to come for them, but it couldn’t. I’m guessing that’s because of the storm.”

  Nate looked at the masked face, trying to assess if the man was going to lash out at him again. “When I was getting the water, I noticed a round kind of hollow in the snow. And I wondered if it was like the . . . I don’t know, the downdraft from a helicopter.”

  “The rotor wash.”

  “Yeah. And I remembered watching the video of the men trying to climb into the helicopter, and it was just hovering there, stationary, and it dawned on me that that’s how they got here. They were dropped off, but the helicopter couldn’t land on account of the snow.”

  The masked man sniffed, rubbed his nose. “More like what might be under t
he snow,” he said.

  “Solid ice.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, copter pilots don’t like what they can’t see. This time of year — and this close to shore — there’ll sometimes be slush under the snow sittin’ on top of the ice.” He stopped and cussed, as if he’d said too much.

  Nate picked up where he’d left off. “So from what they said, I figured they were either going to have to wait out the storm and then clear a spot on the ice, or get out some other way. And you were the only other way out. But maybe not anymore.”

  “You’re full of it.”

  “Maybe. But you’re the one who found them this place, aren’t you? It was a place you knew about — I don’t know how.” Nate waited a moment, but it was unlikely this guy was going to tell him anything more. “Except that now it sounds like they’ve found some other guy who can help them get out of here and bypass you. Cut you out.”

  The man looked at the lake, dabbed at his rheumy eye again. It was leaking bad. He scratched his arm, tapped his foot. And a strange thought occurred to Nate. It was as if now, this man, the Bird, were somehow a prisoner as well.

  If he was going to have to stay the night in a house next door to two criminals with their boxers in knots, Nate decided he had better get out of his funk and do some planning.

  Which meant sleeping upstairs, first and foremost.

  There were three small rooms. The best one for his purposes was probably Dodge’s because of the attic above the bunks. He climbed up on the top bunk and pushed at the trapdoor. It was tight; he had to put his back into it. There wasn’t a full attic, just a crawl space, and there was no real flooring, just a couple of planks laid across the rafters, one to either side of the opening. Even before the Hoebeeks moved in, Dodge had plans for that attic crawl space.

  “We’re going in.” Dodge stares at the new camp under construction. His family is living in a couple of tents this summer — truly camping out — sharing the facilities at the Crows’ place. But everyone’s gone on an expedition this fine morning, except for him and Nate. The camp was supposed to be finished by early July, but with one thing and another, it’s still a work in progress. The work crew is also gone for the day, down to the south end.