by Ronald Malfi
The figure lowered itself to all fours, its back arching, and assumed the shape of a large black wolf. Those green eyes flashed again. Then the wolf disappeared into the forest.
None of that just happened. I’m hallucinating. I’ve got a fever, and I’m freezing out here. That wasn’t real. I did not just see that.
He closed his eyes for what felt like just a minute or two, but when he opened them, the moon had repositioned itself halfway across the sky. The Northern Lights were still there, now as a pulsing purple artery overhead. A sheen of snow now covered the ground. The quality of the light was different now, too, and when he looked around, he didn’t recognize his surroundings. He was no longer crouched on the ground leaning against a tree, but perched on a large boulder surrounded by twiggy saplings.
He sensed that the figure—the wolf—was still somewhere in the vicinity, watching him. But he couldn’t see it. It hurt to turn his head on his neck now.
He closed his eyes.
Inhaled.
The freezing air burned his lungs.
* * *
At one point, he opened his eyes to find himself sitting on a deadfall, watching himself from a close distance. This alternate version of himself wore no shirt or shoes, only a tattered, blood-streaked pair of chinos. The blood looked black in the moonlight.
As Paul stared at himself, the figure who was him stared back. Other-Paul leaned forward, revealing eyes blazing with madness and a wide grin filled with too many teeth. This alternate version of himself then stood and cut a path around him. Paul could no longer turn his head to follow the thing’s progress. He felt it moving behind him, very close now. Close enough so that he could feel the thing’s hot breath against the frozen nape of his neck.
It whispered something to him, but he couldn’t make it out.
He thought maybe he screamed.
* * *
All of a sudden, he and Danny were eleven years old again, and breaking into an abandoned house in their neighborhood. It had been abandoned for years, and no one could recall who the family had been who’d once lived there, or whether anything tragic had ever taken place within those walls to account for its vacancy. There were birds’ nests bristling and bulging beneath the eaves; the sharp green, weedy shoots sprouting from the cracks in the slate walkway; the busted carriage lights bookending the front door, with its peeling paint and curse words sprayed in garish neon colors across it. A large piece of flagstone had been used to smash one of the rear windows. Yet before they crawled inside, eleven-year-old Danny looked at him, and Paul was terrified to find that there was a massive gash bisecting his brother’s neck, and that the blood that dribbled down from the wound had soaked the front of his bright white T-shirt. There was a bullet hole in the side of Danny’s head, too, the hair tacky with gore and small bits of skull. His brother’s face was—
(bone white)
—drained of color. And when Danny’s mouth opened, Paul saw that it was black inside, as if Danny had ingested some terrible poison that was rotting him from the inside out.
—You’re dying, Paul. You’re dying.
“That’s okay, Danny,” he said. “You’re dead, too.”
The words were like nails scraping along his throat.
* * *
And then there was a blaze of heat—a fireball exploding just beyond the trees, turning the night into a dazzling, brilliant orange. Paul staggered toward it, the heat from the great conflagration wringing sweat from his pores and stinging his eyes. When he inhaled, he tasted smoke; it coated his tongue and made his mouth feel as if it had been upholstered in flannel.
When he arrived on the scene, he saw the tail section of a Cessna jutting at a 45-degree angle from the burning ground. Behind it, a fiery contrail blazed on the surface of the snow. Thick columns of smoke rose up beyond the trees and into the multicolored sky. Something continued to watch him from high up in a tree—a thing whose eyes blazed an unnatural green.
Paul ran toward the inferno and, through the flames, could make out the crushed cockpit and a shower of glass. The cockpit’s door hung at an angle and smoke purled out of the opening. With his boot, he kicked the door aside. It struck the shattered windshield of the cockpit, then surrendered itself into the steaming snow.
A figure lurched out of the opening, a man with his face and hair on fire, his clothes nothing but smoldering, charred tatters. The figure’s mouth opened, and a banner of black smoke spiraled up and into the air.
“Paul . . .”
Paul grabbed the man and dragged him free of the flames. Paul’s own hands burned and the sleeves of his shirt caught fire, while between his fingers, pieces of the man’s burned flesh sloughed off in ribbons.
He shoved the man into the snow and rolled him around, rolled him around, rolled him around, until the black husk of him was left steaming and smoldering in a muddy crater in the earth. Paul could smell the man’s burning flesh—a stink that singed the hairs in his nose.
“Paul . . .”
“No,” Paul groaned, shaking his head while backing away from the blackened skeleton leaving smoke trails in the air. “No. No.”
You were supposed to look out for him, Paul. You were supposed to look after your brother.
Paul screamed.
* * *
When he opened his eyes again, it was morning. Pale gray daylight filtered down through the tree branches above. He was no longer perched on a boulder or leaning against a tree, but sprawled out on the snowy ground, as if he’d fallen asleep in the middle of making a snow angel.
He knew this wasn’t a hallucination because he was in pain. His whole body burned with fever. The snow around him should have been steaming. When he sat up, he felt a terminal weakness at his core. His muscles were twisted into painful knots. His throat felt abraded. The headache was gone, having once more been replaced by a hollowness, the distant susurration of desert wind. He didn’t feel all there.
Somehow he managed to stagger to his feet, maintaining his balance by leaning all his weight against a nearby tree. The lack of need to urinate told him that he was dehydrated. The overheated, prickly sensation of his flesh beneath his clothes warned him that he was close to hypothermia. Though it was tempting, he resisted the urge to strip off his coat, unbutton his shirt, and roll around in the snow.
Shivering, he lowered himself to the ground, cupped some snow in his numb, shaking hands, and sucked it into his mouth. He did this over and over again.
Hugging himself, his teeth rattling in his skull from the cold, he managed to rise to his feet and plod a few yards in no discernible direction. Snow had managed to permeate his boots, and his feet were now wet and starting to grow numb. He could no longer feel his toes. Yet despite the cold, he was burning up. Droplets of sweat wrung from his pores and glistened across his forehead. His mouth tasted like pulverized rock.
A figure, blurry and indistinct, materialized out of the white. It was a man, and he moved toward Paul. At one point, the figure doubled . . . then tripled . . . but then Paul’s vision realigned itself.
Paul was maybe ten feet from the man when his legs gave out and he crumpled to the snow. His head was thudding to an inaudible rhythm, and he tasted blood now in his mouth, mixed with that powdery, pulverized-rock taste. He had dropped onto his back, his legs bent at awkward angles beneath him. Above, the sky was a meshwork of intermingled tree branches. He raised his right hand and saw it was slick with blood.
The figure appeared, standing over him—a dark, featureless blur that swam in and out of focus.
Paul tried to speak, but could only manage a dull clicking sound near the back of his throat.
“Don’t talk,” said the figure.
The visage became clear again, and this time Paul could see that the man had the barrel of a rifle pointed down at him. The man’s breath steamed the air, his face hidden behind a mop of hair and a bristling black beard. Yet the man’s eyes were clear, lucid.
Paul just lay there, incapable of move
ment. His heartbeat pulsed in his ears.
The figure lowered the gun a fraction of an inch. He lifted his head from the stock.
Paul tried to raise his hands again, but the muscles in his arms felt frozen. His teeth wouldn’t stop chattering.
“Paul,” said the mountain man. The barrel of the gun lowered by increments as the wind whipped the man’s long hair across his face. “Paul, is that you?”
Paul couldn’t respond. He couldn’t move. He thought he just might close his eyes and sleep for a while.
The figure approached him, circled partway around him, pausing just a few feet away from him.
“Jesus Christ,” said the man.
The wind blew the man’s hair off his face.
It was Danny.
PART THREE
KEEPER OF THE GATE
26
There was pain, and there was sound. The pain was all-encompassing, like a storm raging within the fibers of his muscles and along the rigid bands of his tendons. He felt himself contract and pull in on himself—a tightening at the center of his body that consisted not just of muscles but (it felt like) a collapse of bones. A breaking; a death.
The pain became cyclic, in that it beat like a pulse, with breathy pauses of soundlessness between the beats. In these spaces, these pauses, between the contractions of his body, he glimpsed a dewy and dimly lit peacefulness. Golden. Warm. It was like running past a fence and glimpsing a beautiful flower garden in the spaces between the rotting, splintered boards. He found himself diving for those spaces when they came, ejecting himself into that garden. Sometimes he made it. Sometimes he didn’t.
Whuh-WHUMP-whuh-WHUMP-whuh-WHUMP!
The sound was unreliable. He sometimes heard a man speaking through a fuzzy PA speaker (or so it seemed), while other times—most of the time—there was nothing but the empty howl of the wind, both near and far at the same time, in tandem with the rhythmic whuh-WHUMP of his heartbeat. The creaking of old wood shuddering in the throes of a terrible storm. The gritty tap dance of small, hard pellets flung against a sideboard.
The sound said, doon nokay yore doon nokay. A record played at the wrong speed.
Glimpses of that garden. Lilac petals. Palm fronds. Cadres of tiny, multicolored birds taking flight across an azure sky. There was a sun that burned like ice. A sparkle of gold atop a fishpond. And he was—
—doon nokay yore—
—sometimes there, sometimes not.
Floating in the memory of memory.
* * *
A cool hand on his burning forehead—
“Doing okay. You’re doing okay.”
* * *
He awoke to a dim orange light floating in spectral darkness. Sensation filtered back into his arms and legs, his fingers and toes. His body felt like a pincushion. At the center of his head pulsed a throbbing heartbeat, each beat underscored by bright flashes of light behind his eyes; each pulse seemed to stretch the bones of his skull out of proportion, as if his bones were made of rubber. And even given all of these very real sensations, Paul wasn’t sure whether he was awake or snared in the midst of some panicked, irrational unconsciousness.
It took some effort to turn his head. The motion caused the pounding in his skull to advance to a steady hammer-strike that made his back teeth ache. He focused on the gaseous shimmer of orange light somewhere in all that blackness with him—a tiny sun bleeding its energy out into the cosmos. Bands of light radiated from it, paling to a wan yellow before the light was devoured by the darkness.
Erin Sharma was here with him, although he couldn’t see her. She stood off to the side of that dazzling orange sun, her body turned into a living absence of light by contrast. Other times, she was the sun, and this, for whatever reason, comforted him. When he looked at her, he could see she was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t hear her. Her mouth moved, but no words came out. Whatever she was saying was lost to him. This troubled him on some deep, spiritual level, because he believed that what she was saying was important. Was a warning.
Yet he wasn’t floating in space. Erin Sharma was not there. There was something hard yet yielding beneath him. Something he had been lying on. He ran a hand along it and felt a springy coverlet that was gritty and porous. Like foam. He lifted a corner of the foam and felt rough wooden planks beneath it. His hand trembled.
When his vision cleared, he saw that the burning orange sun was actually the smoldering embers of a fire. As his eyes adjusted to the limited light, he saw that he was in a room with a barren, wooden floor of twisted and splintered boards. The embers glowed from within a potbellied stove in the middle of the room, its cast-iron grate swung open. He could smell the fire . . . and he could smell an earthier smell beneath it, dark and ripe like unwashed flesh. As caustic as a chemical spill.
More details were coming to him now. He was in a room just slightly larger than a toolshed. Thin staves of moonlight slid through cracks and gaps and poked through knotholes in the wall at the opposite side of the room, creating a zebra-like pattern of alternating light and shadow on the buckling floorboards and in the corners where the stove fire did not reach. There was a door rimmed in silver moonlight, but no windows. He leaned his head back and felt the wall behind him covered in silken fur. He wondered whether or not he was dreaming. A moment later, he discerned figures standing in a lineup along the opposite wall. They didn’t so much frighten him as rouse a sense of deep perplexity in him. A moment after that, he realized they were just heavy woolen coats hanging from wall pegs.
He tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea and stomach cramps crippled him. He leaned over on his side, coherent enough to know that he didn’t want to choke on his own vomit. But all he did was dry heave, his agonized moans sounding like a sea lion’s dissonant bark, his fevered breath blossoming into great magnolias of cloudy vapor in the cold air of the room. He couldn’t hear himself. It was as if someone had packed his ears full of cotton.
A figure materialized in front of him. Blurry.
“Can you hear me? Can you hear my voice?”
He wasn’t sure whether he answered the man or not. His eyelids eased closed and there it was again—that magical garden between the slats in the fence. Animated Disney animals capering on green lawns. Birdsong like angels’ trumpets.
And just like that, he was gone again.
* * *
And then he was standing outside in the snow, shaking against the cold. His face numb, the tears at the corners of his eyes frozen to diamonds. Beyond the trees and the crescents of snowcapped hills, dawn broke in a ribbon of pastel hues.
He looked down and saw footprints leading away from him in the snow.
He blinked his eyes, and found that he’d followed the footprints to the cusp of a rocky ledge. He peered down into a ravine and saw that the footprints continued down there. They led straight to the hillside, and vanished into a yawning dark maw in the face of the hill. It looked like a mouth. It looked like an eye. He stared at it for an impossible length of time, his whole body growing numb, the frozen tears at the corners of his eyes spearing into his flesh every time he blinked. Drawing blood.
There was a figure standing down there. It was a sheep-headed boy. Dead black eyes stared up at him. The prints in the snow around the thing were small, circular divots. Hoofprints.
“No,” said a man’s voice, very near to him. He felt a strong hand tighten around one bicep. The sensation of being pulled—being dragged—backward. He shut his eyes and heard nothing but the grinding of footfalls on hard snow. Nothing but the clicking of his own teeth.
When he opened his eyes, he saw the tiny sun again. Maybe he smiled. At least he was warm now. A little, anyway.
* * *
“Doing okay. You’re doing okay. Stay with me for a second longer, Paul.”
He felt something touch his lips. Cold. Wet. He didn’t so much drink as open his mouth to allow a brilliant stream of water to sear a passageway down the heated, constricted pipe of his throat.
He gagged. Sputtered. Fireworks went off behind his eyes. The sound of his cries sent the Disney animals scattering like bowling pins.
“Drink slow,” said the voice.
Air hissed out of his lungs. He felt his entire body deflate. He thought maybe he could open his eyes and sit up—that he could use those burning embers in the potbellied stove as an anchor to keep the room from spinning—but just as he had this thought, he felt his mind plummet back down into a dark and bottomless sea.
* * *
The tiny orange sun was back again. He made a life inside it. Stayed there, warm and protected. It was better than the garden. It was safer: a mother’s embrace.
Paul stared at it for a countless amount of time before he realized that he wasn’t dreaming. There was still a symphony warming up in his head, but he found that he had better control over his motor functions now. He lifted a hand in front of his face. Flexed the fingers. Felt a sinister numbness along the back of his hand, dull pain beneath it. The joints were stiff. There were two butterfly bandages covering up a wound on the palm of his hand.
He sat up like someone waking from a coma. He was still in that dark room with the burning sun at its center, so he kept his eyes trained on that smoldering orange ember to maintain his balance. He managed to stiffen into a sitting position, his head resting against the fur-lined wall at his back. Small, strange trinkets hung from the ceiling joists, indecipherable in the firelight.
Oh Jesus oh God oh Jesus my feet . . .
He rolled his legs over the side of the makeshift bed and planted his feet on the floor. His boots were off, but his feet were wrapped in something warm enough to cause them to sweat. He realized that his entire body was a conundrum—simultaneously sweating and shivering, achy yet numb, swollen but emaciated. He tried to stand, but vertigo struck him back down on his buttocks, his heartbeat in competition with the thump-thump-thump of his headache. Strike up the band, kids! His entire body felt cold while the center of his guts boiled within some sludgy stew.