Or was the owner of the box a backwoods hermit who’d simply found a souvenir at a local flea market? Lots of Nazi and other war paraphernalia were showing up at flea markets and sidewalk sales. Soldiers were coming home with duffel bags full of Nazi knives, rifles, helmets, bayonets, medals, and even boots. But what did some hermit have against Dad and Pop? Unless he was slightly deranged and saw them as trespassers. The land where our cabin stood was sold to Pop by a friend of his back in the twenties. Maybe the hermit, secluded from social life and current events, hadn’t heard about the transaction and thought the land was his. Maybe in his mind he was just protecting his property. Or maybe he’d taken Dad to care for him, nurse him back to health.
But the last option that spun through my mind was the one that sent shivers through my weary muscles. Maybe the owner of the box was a Nazi sympathizer and collector of all things Third Reich. Maybe he was a supporter of Hitler’s “pure” Aryan race philosophy—that any blood other than that flowing through the veins of white Germans was polluted. Maybe he secretly hated all Americans for our melting-pot mentality and had vowed to exterminate us one by one if necessary. I had no idea if such people even existed, though I presumed in a nation as varied as America such a mindset surely had to have some supporters.
With all this running through my head I suddenly missed home and its familiarity. I missed the aroma of bacon and eggs and toast in the morning as it wafted up the stairs and lured me into the kitchen. I missed the smell of freshly cut hay and barley and alfalfa as it rode an afternoon breeze from the far field, across our yard, and through open windows. I missed the crow of our rooster in the morning and the chatter of the chickens while I fed them. I missed Miss Molly and Moses our horses, Baxter our coonhound, and the community of unnamed cats that grew more and more populated each year.
I longed to be home, sitting in my favorite chair, listening to the sounds of the farm, reading about how the Israelites entered the land of Canaan, that strange land in which they were foreigners, and relied on God to settle their fears and give them strength. But I tripped on a protruding root and reality quickly reminded me that I was here, in my own foreign land, battling my own fears and wishing, hoping God would visit on me the strength he’d provided for His children millenniums ago.
Henry slowed so I could come alongside him. Massaging the stock of the gun with both hands, he cleared his throat, glanced my way, then said, “Is it my fault Dad got . . . taken?”
I knew he thought it was his fault, I could detect the pain in his tight voice, but he wanted me to assure him it wasn’t. “First,” I said, “we don’t know if Dad was taken, or Pop, we just know they’re missing is all. And if he was taken, how could it be your fault?”
He started to say something then paused. He’d stopped massaging the gun, but his eyes darted back and forth along the trail. “You wanted to take him back to the cabin and when he fussed I didn’t support you. I let him have his way and stay out there by himself because I was afraid of disappointing him. Afraid of him. You were right. We should have taken him back even if we had to hogtie him and drag him by his feet.”
“But even if we had taken him back, whoever did that to the cabin would have found him there just as easily as they found him by the tree. I don’t see the logic there. And we could have been in the cabin when they came . . . who knows what would have happened. We might all be dead right now, on that cabin floor, all full of lead.”
Henry stopped and stared at nothing in particular to his right.
“What—”
He held up a hand, silencing me mid-sentence. He’d heard something. I noticed his chest had stopped rising and falling. After a few seconds he lowered his hand, looked at me, then glanced one more time back into the woods. “I thought I heard something.”
He started walking again and I followed.
“If he was in the cabin,” Henry continued, “he could have defended himself with the guns. Could have put up a fight at least. And if we were there, we could have put up a fight, protected what’s ours. They took him from right under our noses, Billy. We didn’t even hear anything.”
I hadn’t thought of that before. I took my mind back several hours. We were combing the area where we’d last heard Pop’s groans, kicking leaves around as we walked, making a lot of noise. Possibly too much to hear someone restraining Dad and carrying him off. Dad was a big man, though, and it would take more than one person to subdue him unless they knocked him out cold first . . . or killed him. That last thought sickened me. My imagination immediately conjured an image of some devil sneaking up behind Dad and slitting his throat, then throwing him over its shoulder and carrying him away as he left a trail for us to follow . . . possibly to meet the same fate.
While we were kicking up leaves, looking for anything that would clue us into Pop’s whereabouts, I’d found the pillbox. Gott mit uns. We’d immediately abandoned the search to return to Dad and show him the box. We ran to him, again making enough noise to deafen us to a struggle that may have been taking place only yards away.
It was stupid of us to make so much noise. We should have known better. I should have known better. I didn’t dare share my sentiments with Henry, though. He’d already beaten himself up with guilt and was toting a heavy enough burden. I didn’t need to pile more blame on him.
“We were making a lot of noise,” I finally said. “We had no idea he was in danger. How could we have known?”
Henry kept walking and didn’t say anything.
About a half hour later he stopped and pushed around some leaves with his boot. “It’s gone. The trail.”
I bent over, rested my hands on my knees, and studied the ground. Sure enough, no leaves were disturbed, no marks of any kind on the exposed soil.
Henry looked behind us, back down the mountain, scanning the path we’d just forged through thick underbrush and over rocky ground. “I don’t know how long ago we lost it,” he said, his voice thick with despair and near-panic.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve been thinking about things, trying to figure all this out, and just walking. I don’t know how long we’ve been walking and I haven’t been following any trail. Just walking.”
Again, I knew he blamed himself. He was really giving himself a whipping.
I approached him, stood by his side, and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Henry. Really. I wasn’t paying attention either. Let’s just backtrack until we pick it up again. There’s still plenty of daylight. If we go back down the same way we came up we should run into the trail, right?”
By then the sun was nearing its full height in the sky and was almost directly overhead. Its rays filtered through the canopy of leaves and dappled the ground with a mosaic of spotted light. Birds chirped cheerily in the trees above us, to our right a squirrel chattered angrily, warning us away from its secret nut stash. If not for the dire circumstances that necessitated our hike, and if not for my fear of being left alone in the woods again, it would have been an enjoyable afternoon spent in the woods.
Henry agreed and we returned back down the mountain the way we had come. After some time we both realized we’d lost our way again. With no clear trail marking our progress and the tangle of brush and shrubs that covered the ground it was easy to meander off course and lose our bearings.
After roaming around for nearly the whole afternoon, looking for anything that would point us in the right direction—a blood droplet, a scuff mark, a road sign—and after watching the look of frustration and hopelessness deepen on Henry’s face, I started to feel like our rescue mission was a miserable failure. I reasoned that when we didn’t return home the day after tomorrow as planned, Mom would worry and tell Uncle Will (who was manning the farm while we were gone) to go to the cabin and retrieve us. He would find the cabin empty and pillaged, go for help, and a search party would be assembled. If we could survive that long, help would be on the way. If we could survive that long. Watching Henry slide deeper and
deeper into a miry pit of anguish, I wasn’t sure he’d last another night. His guilt and self-loathing would rapidly grow weightier. It was only a matter of time before, out of sheer desperation, he did something reckless and endangered both of us.
I was about to offer some words of encouragement in hopes of allaying the impending storm when Henry suddenly stopped and stooped low, holding a hand behind him to stop me. He looked back, held one finger to his mouth, then pointed up ahead. I followed his finger and peered through the columns of oaks and maples. There, in the distance, about fifty yards ahead, was a small clearing, and off to the left of the clearing stood a house.
9
We approached the house with all the caution we would if it were a living, breathing thing, an animal in the wild, maybe a lion. Padding from tree to tree, we used the density of the woods to conceal ourselves.
The sun was an orange, swollen disc and well into its downward arc by now, almost touching the horizon. Sunset comes early on the eastern side of the mountain. Nightfall would not be a friend to us.
When we reached the clearing I got a better look at the house. Someone’s seasonal hunting cabin it was not. With two stories, a cellar, and an expansive front porch, it was at least as large as our farmhouse. The architecture was sharp and straightforward, unpretentious like our house. Asbestos siding wrapped the house in a green cloak, the glass in the windows was bubbled and wavy, and a thick layer of moss covered the eastern side of the slate shingled roof. The white paint on the porch and window framing was blistered and peeling, like the house had a bad case of sunburn. Two of the steps leading to the porch were obviously rotted, the boards having been offered up as a peace offering to a horde of pitiless termites. A deeply rutted, partially overgrown lane wove in from the far side of the woods and ended next to the outside cellar doors. No lights illuminated the windows. There were no automobiles parked outside, no horses or sign of horses anywhere nearby. The place appeared abandoned.
Henry stopped at the edge of the clearing and crouched behind a serviceberry bush. His eyes shifted from side to side, taking in the surroundings. Finally, he said, “Let’s go take a look.”
Take a look? My heart sank into my belly. What if the place wasn’t abandoned? Appearances can be deceiving. What if someone was home? What if the someone was the same someone who raided our cabin and possibly abducted Dad and Pop, the same someone who lost the Nazi pill box. The sympathizer. I didn’t want to go near the house let alone look inside. “You go ahead,” I said, my voice shaky. “I’ll stay here and keep watch.” I knew it was something a coward would say and something a coward would do.
Henry looked at me like he was ready to slap my face. “You’re coming with me. Dad and Pop could be in there. I don’t want any argument out of you now, Billy.” He sounded just like Dad, and his command struck the same cord of respect and fear in me that it would have if Dad himself had uttered it.
I looked at the house again and it really did appear to be alive, welcoming us with a friendly, safe, innocent smile but with every intent of gobbling us up and swallowing us whole. It rose out of the ground like a devious fiend, tired and affable on the outside, hungry and evil within. My intuition screamed no, danger, run, but my mouth was too dry to protest. Knowing Henry and the fact that he was more Dad than I probably realized, he’d drag me to that front porch by my ear if he had to. And I wasn’t about to subject myself to that kind of humiliation while the house watched on and laughed at me.
“Okay, okay,” I finally said. “I’ll come with you.” I tried to comfort myself with the idea that if the house was empty and not haunted or alive, it might make a good place to bed down for the night. If it was haunted or alive, I’d have to reconsider, of course.
We stayed low, crossing the clearing like two rats scampering across an open floor, Henry in the lead with the gun, me close behind with the flashlight. When we reached the porch, we lightly climbed the four stairs, stepping around the termite-battered boards, and hurried across the sagging oak planks to the front of the house. Pressing ourselves against the siding, we sidestepped to the nearest window. Henry got there first and poked his head around to peer in through the wavy glass. When he turned his head back around, he nodded and said, “Looks lived in.”
I would have much rather heard “Looks abandoned.” Lived in meant there was a good chance the occupants were home, waiting with shotguns loaded and pumped and aimed at the front door for the trespassers to enter their haven.
I stepped around Henry, ducked low as I passed the window, and came up on the other side. When I leaned around and stole a glance at the interior of the house I was surprised to see a fully furnished living area. The place was a wreck, though. Sofa cushions had been tossed on the floor, pictures dangled at odd angles or lay shattered on the wood below where they hung. The woven rug was half rolled; an oil lamp lay on its side, the globe broken and jagged. Across the large living room I could see into the dining room where a china closet was splintered and broken, glass littered the floor like a million diamonds. The large farm table was tipped and two chairs had fallen backwards, looking like dead animals with their legs sticking up in the air.
Henry looked at me, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it, so I said it first. “You want to go in, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Looks like the same people that trashed our cabin visited this place.”
Or the same people lived here and they were just slobs, or lunatics who practiced trashing their own home.
Henry turned toward the front door.
“Wait,” I said, stopping him. He swung around and glared at me with a don’t-try-to-stop-me look. And that was exactly what I was going to try to do. “What if they’re still in there?”
Henry narrowed his eyes, and his stubbled jaw muscles flex. He gripped the shotgun with both hands and held it up to me. “That’s what this is for.”
“What if they have one too? You want to get into a shootout?”
“It never stopped cowboys, the good guys.” If Henry had one obsession, and I wouldn’t even call it an obsession but it was as close to one as he was ever going to get, it was western novels. He didn’t read much but when he did his nose was sure to be buried up to his eyebrows in a Zane Grey novel.
“And what am I supposed to do?” I said, straining my voice to keep it somewhere around a whisper. “Blast ‘em with my flashlight?”
Henry shrugged. “Keep your head down.” Then he made like he was tipping his cowboy hat and turned and tip-toed to the front door.
Surprisingly, or not surprisingly considering the condition of the house, the door was unlocked. Why would anyone living this far from even the hint of civilization need locks on their doors? Though I didn’t intend it as a question needing an answer, the answer came to me anyway: Someone who wanted their privacy but didn’t trust the rest of mankind. And judging from the interior, their mistrust was warranted but should have been better heeded.
Henry opened the door just wide enough to slip his broad shoulders through then waved me in. Regretfully, hesitantly, and with much trepidation, I followed and quietly shut the door behind me. The inside of the house smelled like tobacco and body odor. The damage was much worse when standing in the midst of it. Splintered pieces of wood and shards of glass littered the floor. Books had been thrown about and now lay, pages wrinkled and torn, across the wide-planked pine floor. Deep gashes scarred the walls where furniture collided after a short flight. Rectangles of grime framed empty spaces where pictures, now broken on the floor, once hung.
I gripped the flashlight tightly in my left hand. Despite the cool temperature outside and here in the house, my palms were sweaty and my heart bounced in my chest. This wasn’t right. Something was wrong. My intuition had taken a voice and was now screaming in my head: Get out! Get out!
“Henry,” I whispered. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t like this. This isn’t right.”
Henry was on the far side of the living room, near
the dining room entrance and cellar door. He turned and held up a finger. Sighing deeply, I crossed the room and stood beside him.
A floorboard creaked above us.
Then another.
My heart jumped, and I looked at Henry. His eyes were wide, lips parted.
Then came voices from the second floor. Men’s voices, two of them, in casual conversation. My pulse thumped all the way to my fingertips. We were caught. The voices grew louder, and I knew the men were standing at the top of the staircase. If they came downstairs . . .
One of the men laughed and his voice rose in volume. It was then that I noticed they weren’t speaking English. He said something else, and I recognized it as German but couldn’t make out what he had said. I wished I hadn’t goofed off so much in Mrs. Lauer’s German class. The pillbox was hot in my pocket again. The Nazi symbol, the looting, speaking in the German tongue—they were Nazi sympathizers. Probably Germans who had immigrated to America but still held allegiance to their motherland.
I swallowed hard and looked back at Henry. He leaned his left shoulder against the cellar door and held the shotgun close to his body. His eyes were two full moons, forehead glistened with sweat.
A heavy footfall landed on the top step of the staircase, then another one, and another.
10
Henry grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the cellar door. He then swung open the door, careful not to allow it to creak on dry hinges. For a second we paused at the top of the stairs, staring down into the abyss of darkness, the bowels of the house where mold and mildew and monsters that only resided in my wildest imagination hid, waited for someone just like me to wander down the wooden steps, right into their evil trap. The waning sunlight that illuminated the first floor spilled down the steps only three quarters of the way. Inky darkness hid the bottom of the stairs in a cloak of mystery. I could only imagine what lurked in the shadows down there. But I didn’t want to imagine it. Rats, mice, snakes, spiders, they all sent tiny legs crawling across my skin.
Fear Mountain Page 5