“You can choose a house. There are some empty ones. But we still have a long way to go to get there. You were at the very bottom.”
Adam turned around and faced me, leaned back, and wedged himself into the bow. I could tell he was on the edge of passing out.
“You know what I miss the most?” he said, his voice weak and see-through.
“What?”
“The birds,” he whispered. “The swallows swooping down over our heads like bats, the pigeons in the barn, the doves in the eaves, the robins hopping along, eating worms.”
“I never knew you liked birds.”
He nodded. “I stared into the sky for years here, or decades, I don’t know, just looking for the birds.”
“Mother loved birds,” I said quietly.
He nodded. He leaned his head back on the point of the bow and spoke toward the flat clouds above us. “You know, I remember how Mom used to stand beside the window and watch the birds.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
“One day I saw her standing there, and there was such love in her eyes. She held a cup of coffee close to her face, and the steam moved around her mouth, cheeks, and ears. I had never seen such love before. I wondered if she was looking out the window at Dad, but we both know that wasn’t what it was.” He gave a wry chuckle. “I walked over to stand beside her and see what she could possibly be looking at with such love, such fondness.” He laughed as he said “fondness,” as if he knew it wasn’t a word he usually used. “Do you know what she was looking at?”
I shook my head.
“She was looking at you, Dan.”
The oar stopped in the water, and our forward motion slowed. For a moment we were adrift, and the boat, because of the distribution of weight, an underwater current, or something else, slowly spun, pointing us back toward the far bank, the path through the gate, the frozen river, and Adam’s rock.
She had loved me. And yet, I had only ever been concerned about my father’s love.
I gripped the oar and braced my weight against it, sending us in the correct direction, back toward the muddy side of the shallow brown lake. When we weren’t speaking, there was nothing but the sound of the boat in the heavy water, the oar dipping in and drops falling from it when I lifted it out.
I did not want to tell him that there were no birds in the plains.
“Have you seen Father in any of your travels?” Adam asked me.
I shook my head. “No.”
“So, he found his way out.”
This was something I could not contemplate. If he had left the mountain, if he had been in this place and fled, it must have happened before I had found my way to the village, because I had seen many hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people come through, but never him.
“I guess.”
“I thought I saw him here, once,” Adam said. “But it was from a distance, and it was when there were still a lot of us. I don’t know. Probably my imagination.”
Now Adam was looking right into my eyes. He scared me, because I couldn’t tell if he was sane or not, if all this time in the abyss had unhinged his mind or if this was the brother from my childhood. If it was him, I didn’t recognize him.
“I hated him,” Adam said, his words reluctant to come out. “I don’t remember much about this place. I’ve been here for so very, very long. But I do remember that I wasn’t always so deep inside the mountain. It was my hatred for him that drove me down here, looking, searching. I wanted to find him. I planned on killing him. But this place . . .” He motioned all around us. “This place was so full of people moaning, screaming, pulling on me, needing, needing, needing.”
He ran his hand through his long, tangled hair and winced, gritting his teeth. He was getting himself worked up. I wanted to say something that would calm him.
“I wish you would have come out. I wish you would have joined me.”
He shook his head, put his face in his hands, and sat there like that for so long I thought he might have fallen asleep. But then he spoke.
“I do too. When I heard your voice, and the voice of that imaginary girl, it was like all of that hate broke up inside of me. The fog lifted. I don’t hate him anymore.” He paused. “Do you, brother? Do you hate our father?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had barely thought of him, except perhaps when my memories came back to me. I was so focused on Adam that my history with our father slid easily through my fingers, but here, deep in the abyss, I could feel that hatred rising. It threatened to pull me down.
I shook my head uneasily. “No,” I said, frowning. “I don’t know.”
I didn’t want to talk about our father anymore.
“What else do you remember? What else do you miss?” I asked.
He looked at me, squinted, and I knew I had been found out, that he could tell this was me grasping for a change of subject. But he went along with it.
“I miss the sunrise. Remember when we had that airplane business and I’d go on an early morning run? The plane lifted easily off the runway, barely clearing the trees, and there it was—the sunrise. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to keep flying, all the way into it.”
I was amazed at how many memories he had. I was amazed at how quickly he seemed to be recovering, transforming from that torn man kneeling on the rock, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him. This place we were going to had no sunrises—only the soft dimming of light in the evening, which was beautiful and peaceful but was no sunset, and the dark of night, and the early morning brightening, which was gentle and quiet, but it was no sunrise.
Would we ever get out of this place? Would I ever see the green grass of the plains stretching out in front of me?
I felt a nagging sense of fear that something was coming for us, that I should have locked the gate no matter what that might have meant for Lucia. The desire became so strong that I nearly turned the boat around. Again I scanned the horizon for any sign of our tormentors. I dug in the oar, and now it was a struggle to pull it out, because it sank into the muddy bottom. Bubbles rose in the water every time I lifted it. I scanned the bank for Miho. Nothing.
We got the boat as close as we could. I told Adam to avoid the reeds and the flowers. After we had struggled to push the boat farther through the mud, we lay in the bottom, exhausted, panting. I arranged the oar the same way Lucia had placed it, on top of the mud, stretching out to the bank.
“You have to walk along it or you’ll sink,” I said. I took off my shirt and threw it to the bank. “In case you need an extra step.”
Adam scurried along the wooden oar, his feet slipping, and he did not have to step on the shirt. I followed him, and the oar sank in. My last few steps were in knee-deep mud, so tight, resisting each step with such powerful suction, I thought I might lose the skin on my legs. But soon we were resting on the bank, the bog and the gate and the icy hollow behind us. Now there was only the long, steep ledge, the climb to the top, and the river Acheron.
But . . . Miho. Where was Miho?
Maybe we didn’t see her coming because we were exhausted. Maybe we didn’t sense her approach because she was still covered in mud, blending in with that whole place. Maybe I didn’t want to see her, frightened of what her presence might mean. But she was there, and she came out of nowhere. Before I knew what was happening, she had leaped onto Adam, pulled him backward onto the ground, and had her arms tight around his neck, choking him. Adam’s eyes bulged out of their sunken sockets. He held tight to her forearm, the one that was choking him, but he didn’t have the strength to pull it away.
25 Leaving
WE BECAME A blur of bodies, of arms pulling and scratching, of lungs gasping for breath. Someone bit me. I grabbed hair and pulled. A rake of fingernails tore lines in the side of my face, and I yelped, turned away, kicked with both legs. Three of us, on the ground, and Adam barely fought back. Miho wasn’t going to let go—she was like a python, squeezing, squeezing, even after death. The only thing I could
think to do was to put her in a choke hold as well, and soon she released Adam’s neck and started hitting me.
This was what I remembered about this place. This was the abyss—not the quiet passing over water or the insistence of cracking ice. But this. This fight to stay alive. This confusion. This self-preservation. This pain.
I fell away and rolled over again and again, trying to create distance between us. She heaved three loud sobs, let out a scream muffled by her own hands, and ran to the cliff wall, wedging herself into a narrow space in the rock beneath the ledge. Her body shook with cries and tears and sobs.
I glanced over at Adam. He was curled up on his stomach, twitching as if he had the hiccups. Moaning. I took a deep breath and sank onto my back, relieved that it seemed to be over if only for a few moments, staring up into the gray sky. The cold air swirled around us, but there were touches of something warmer.
What was happening to us?
I reached up and held my face, touched the cuts, then looked at my fingers and saw thin clouds of blood. I could taste it in my mouth too, perhaps from the shot I had taken to the lip. I spit it out. I searched for the knapsack, picked it up, and crawled over to Adam.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He nodded without looking up, without moving.
Miho was ten yards away, still crying, still pulling on her short hair. This place would destroy us. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did. We had to get out.
“Miho,” I called out.
Adam looked up slowly, not in fear but in resignation. He had bright red marks on his cheeks from where someone had struck him—it very well could have been me in the confusion. I didn’t know. One eye was swelling. His neck was raw, and he kept rubbing it, gently clearing his throat.
“Miho,” I said again.
She stilled herself and sat down, her knees pulled up to her chest, her face down. The three of us sat in that silence for a long, long time. I focused on my breathing. Adam lay back down on the ground. I stared out across the water, thinking of when my father had left me in the lake. Thinking of Adam waiting for me on the pier. Thinking of Lucia going under.
Miho’s silence turned again into sobs, and her voice choked out words in a strange rhythm. I stood on shaky feet, held the knapsack over my shoulder, and shuffled toward her.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
I sat down wearily beside her. I didn’t care anymore if she hurt me. I was too tired to care.
“Miho,” I whispered, “we have to leave. We have to get out of this place.”
Adam made his way over to us and sat beside me, so that all three of us were resting in the shadow of that cliff. Again I thought of the long, narrow way out. My muscles were so weary they trembled and cramped every time I tried to move. I couldn’t imagine how we would ever make it up.
“I hated you for so long,” Miho said.
“Me?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Him. I hated him for what he did. He killed her. My mother. She was at the store the morning the plane crashed. She was killed along with all the others you heard about. She was the sweetest, kindest woman.” Miho paused. “I tortured myself for years over that, blaming myself for not taking her inside the store faster. I wished I hadn’t agreed to watch the child—if we only would have gone in, she wouldn’t have been there when it happened. I couldn’t get the sound of it out of my head for years. Any loud sound would send a panic through me.”
She took a deep breath. “I always had a hunch that I was staying in the village because I was waiting for someone. It was this idea hovering at the edge of my mind. But after the memories came back that night, I realized I was waiting for your brother. And once I realized that, once I remembered his name and all that he had done, all that he had taken from me, I hated him.”
“What changed, Miho?” I asked. I was so tired.
She looked at me without any expression. “I hated him until I saw him here on the bank, and I saw you.”
“If you didn’t—” Adam began.
“I attacked you because I couldn’t hate you anymore. That made me so angry. The thought of revenge had sustained me, but when I saw you, I knew I couldn’t hate you anymore.”
“Why not?” Adam asked.
“Because of love.” She said this simply. Matter-of-factly. “In the village, I came to love Dan. Even though my love wasn’t for you, love changed me.”
I felt many things in that moment. I felt a rush of love for Miho, the old feeling that had grown between us. But I also had a sense that it was leaving, that everything that had happened was putting a small crack in the glass, and anything special we’d had between us was slowly fading away.
“What happened in the village?” I asked her. “What happened after the fire?”
“The rain came. A woman walked toward us through the embers and the ash.” She looked at me as if she knew I would never believe something so ludicrous. “She said she had just come through the canyon, but I knew she was lying because she seemed fine. She didn’t look tortured at all. She looked rested and, well, good, like she had been out for at least a few days. Maybe a week. She told us we should all go after you, because she saw you going into the canyon. She said you told her you were going to look for your brother, but that we should go in after you and stop you. She asked if any of us had a key.”
Miho spoke in short bursts. She sounded confused by her own story, even though she had been there.
“I don’t know, Dan. It was all so strange. But she was adamant. We needed to go in after you. All of us.”
“I think I know her. This lady,” Adam said.
We both looked at him.
“There was a woman, when the place really started to empty out. She was actually trapped in the ice all the way up to her chest. She never made a sound, but I saw her digging at the ice until her hands were bloody. Clawing at it like some kind of animal, or like a machine that couldn’t feel any pain. I shouted at her a few times and told her to stop, she was hurting herself, but she didn’t listen.” He nodded softly to himself. “That’s her. That’s who you’re talking about. She broke free somehow. I don’t know. She found a rock or a shard of ice and picked her way out with it. She was the last person I saw down there.”
I looked over at Miho. I didn’t want to dwell too long on Kathy. I didn’t want them to know that I had kept her in my house, sheltered her, helped her.
“And only you came?” I asked Miho, my voice timid.
“We all went up to the entrance. You know, beside the signpost. We had a long conversation about what we should do. Abe was saying that it wasn’t smart for all of us to go in. Po said he wouldn’t go in anyway, whether it was smart or not. Most of the others didn’t seem to think they could make the trip. They were too afraid. John wanted to come with me. Lucia, the girl? She ran in before any of us could stop her. We all ended up having a terrible fight about it. I wanted to follow her in. Abe said to wait. John wasn’t sure.”
She paused, and I looked up. The clouds were coming down.
“That woman was there the whole time,” she said, “not saying a word.”
“But you came,” I said.
She nodded, shrugged, as if her trek here was nothing worth mentioning. But then her eyes lit up. “Lucia was with you in the boat.”
“What?” I asked.
“When you left me on the bank. Lucia was in the boat with you.”
A surge of panic raced through me. Somehow I had completely forgotten that.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said quietly, firmly.
“This place will mess with your mind,” Adam whispered.
Miho looked at me, glanced away. “I could have sworn I saw her.”
“It’s strange you both would have seen the same thing,” I admitted, trying to sound confused by their visions of a young girl. What would they do if they found out I had left her behind?
“What about everyone else?”
I asked, trying to steer the conversation back. “Where did they go?”
“Everyone else went east. They said they had waited long enough. They thought Adam was probably dead, and even if he wasn’t, they were ready to move on. Kathy kept saying these things that tugged at all of us, things that made it hard to walk away. But eventually they did. Then it was only her and Abe and me. As I walked into the canyon, I could see the two of them there, standing side by side.”
Adam’s voice sounded groggy. “What do you mean, they went east?”
“I’ll explain later,” I said. I couldn’t imagine trying to explain one more thing to him. I closed my eyes, rubbed my temples. The scratches on my cheek were stinging, and I rubbed them gently with the very tips of my fingers.
“Are you sure you didn’t see her?” Miho asked Adam.
“See who?” Adam asked.
“A girl. Lucia. She’s only a teenager.”
“The person you were just talking about is a girl?” Adam was suddenly alert, leaning forward so he could see Miho on the other side of me.
She nodded. “She showed up a few days before all of this happened.”
Adam’s voice was full of confusion. “I saw a girl when Dan came for me. She crossed the icy water and helped me to the bank. When she ran back out to the rock, I lost sight of her.”
I shook my head. “I told you, Adam, it was your imagination. You were seeing all kinds of things down here. Kathy in the ice up to her chest?”
“What did she look like?” Miho interrupted me, throwing the question at Adam.
“Thin. Light brown hair. A pretty face. A soothing voice. When we were out on the rock, she told me I could do it—I had to do it. It was time for me to leave. And for some reason, I believed her.” Adam gave out a half laugh, disbelieving. “So I did.”
“What’s going on, Dan?” Miho asked, turning to me.
“I have no idea,” I said emphatically before sighing. “Anyway, Lucia couldn’t speak, remember?”
This seemed to turn the tide of Miho’s belief. “True,” she said.
“We have to get out of here,” I continued. “We shouldn’t be waiting here. When you stop moving in this place, it’s so hard to get started again.”
These Nameless Things Page 21