He whispered something to the trees.
He heard Michael and Conner calling for him in the distance. He turned with his rifle and began moving quickly down the mountain toward their voices, which seemed far away, lost in the wilderness. He rounded a tree and saw them, rifles raised, sighting the barrels directly at him. He stopped dead and thought they would fire. The two brothers could keep a secret for eternity, no matter what haunted their lives. Their faces were stone cold, expressionless. Jonathan raised his hands gently, and they lowered their guns.
“Yell out when you’re coming,” Conner said.
“We’re here,” Michael said.
The trees thinned out, the ground turned to wet stone and frozen mud, the smell of condensation and dead fish. Jonathan stared down at the box with the dead boy inside. A mirage of dark and haunting water called to them from between the trees; the surface of the cold lake wavered and rippled and gave way to its depths.
Chapter Twenty
A narrow and rocky shoreline traced north and south from where they stood, bending in and out of sight and then jutting far out into a peninsula before disappearing. It was a thin line of dark gray before the water, which ran black beneath the gathering clouds. They placed the box at the water’s edge and sat down to collect their breath. The damp rocks penetrated through their coveralls, touched their skin, but they sat anyway. Jonathan filled his canteen with water from the lake and drank. The water was cold, near freezing. The daylight temperature was below thirty now, and already he was shivering after hauling the coffin down the slope. They stared out at the lake, and it seemed suspended in air, as if a dark, flat cloud hovered in the mountains. The peaks on the other side rose to the sky. All was silent. The water rippled slightly in a breeze.
“It goes down at least a hundred feet from here,” Conner said. “It feeds the river that runs down through Pasternak. It isn’t going anywhere.”
The lake seemed prehistoric, outside of time and beyond the reach of civilization.
“It will stay secret here,” Conner said, but neither Jonathan nor Michael replied. Jonathan was hungry, drained from the past two days. He looked in his pack. There were only two sandwiches left, and he ate them both, shivering in the wet air. He could smell the approaching snow.
Michael and Conner ate. Conner looked at the sky and said, “We need to get this over with.” He unstrapped the portable raft from his pack and spread the flat, thick rubber over the round, wet river rocks. He took out a battery-operated air pump, and the small machine roared to life with the sound of a large vacuum cleaner. The rubber began to move the way a carcass left long in the sun will start to undulate slowly with life eating away at the insides. The raft slowly took form as Conner filled it with as much air as possible. It became a large, dark gray oval and seemed to hover in the air just above the rocky shore. “It will hold up to three hundred pounds,” Conner said.
They turned and looked at the box sitting crooked and uneven on the rocks.
Conner nodded toward it. “We’re gonna have to open it up, weigh it down with some stones and then cut some holes in the sides so it sinks.”
“Who’s rowing out there?” Jonathan said.
“I am,” Conner said.
“You sure it will hold?”
“I’ve fished in it before. Had Brent out in it with me. I might get a little wet, but I’ll be okay.”
Michael looked to the sky. “Let’s hurry,” he said. Jonathan kept feeling the insides of the box moving back and forth like swamp mud as they had carried the case across the mountain, the way one’s body remembers the rocking of the ocean after a day on a boat. They all stood over it in a triangle with the makeshift coffin for Thomas Terrywile in the center like an all-seeing eye. The metal fasteners were covered in dirt and rust from a decade in the ground. The wind whispered through trees. Jonathan looked up into the forest but saw nothing. Everything had grown dark with cloud cover. He looked back down at the coffin.
“I want to see,” Michael said. They turned and looked at him, but he was focused on the box. He bent down and tried the first fastener, but it did not give. He took out a hunting knife and wedged the tip between the handle and the case itself and tried to wrench the metal latch upward – at first gently and then with a growing anger – until it squeaked and groaned as he unfastened the latch and lowered the metal hoop that held the lid to the body. He moved to the second latch and used his knife again and then moved on to the side latches. They all came unwillingly. Finally, the case sat unlocked, seemingly relieved of a massive tension.
Jonathan looked to the sky but couldn’t see the sun. His watch said 10:32 a.m.
Michael reached into the pocket of his coveralls and took out a camouflaged hunting mask that covered his whole head, mouth and nose. Michael and Conner buried their faces in their collars. They watched as Michael kneeled at the box and lifted the lid.
A great rush of gasses poured out of the case and rose into the air, dirty green and speckled with swirling particles like black stars. A wretched, humanlike scream rose up from the mountains, carried over the lake and echoed, so it seemed as if the whole earth were screaming in a terrified rage. The smell overtook them, sunk like liquid through the fabric of their coveralls, into their nostrils and down their throats. Jonathan gagged. His stomach tightened with nausea. He backed away for a moment, choking, hacking, and then, when his body stopped convulsing, he waited a moment and walked forward. He looked into the blackness of the coffin – the black sludge of what had once been a boy. It was so dark that no light escaped, and in it, he could truly see.
Jonathan felt his body drift upward, as if in a dream. He saw the three of them lying on the rocks, faces upward, pale and cold, the open box in the center, its contents still and dark. He felt himself rising away from his body, prone on the riverbed, like the stories told by men and women who have died, only to be brought back to life. He was drawn into the trees. The world twisted and turned like mirrors in a carnival funhouse. He was pulled by a great force through the forest they had just traveled – up the slope, across the meadow and plunged back into Coombs’ Gulch. He stood in the center of that strange, occult design, the white stone lines intersecting before him and firing out to the edge of the circle. He looked up at the perfect ring of sky. The clouds were stripped away as if erased by an unseen hand; the sun disappeared, and there was only the blackness of Thomas Terrywile’s melted body.
A face took shape in the darkness, merging together like spots of color behind tightly closed eyes. It gazed down on him, and its strange mouth spread wide as a severed throat. It shifted and changed and swirled. Now it was his own face staring at him from the darkness of the spaces in between, but it was distorted and strange, like a rubber mask slipping down from the skull of a child.
Jonathan suddenly found himself back in Collinsville at the Halloween parade. He stood alone among a thousand children, and they all wore a Jonathan mask, and they squirmed about his legs, pushing and shoving through, writhing like maggots, slippery and wet and covered in some kind of decaying slime. They were packed so tight against him he couldn’t lift his legs to move. He looked out over the whole town. The land itself seemed to move with those children, like so many ants bearing his face – skittering, running, moving together. Then they began to fall apart; a limb would drop, a leg collapse, the skin of a tiny hand slide off the bone to the ground – a thousand little lepers all falling to pieces. They did not make a sound; they did not take off their masks.
And as they fell apart and dropped to the ground, he saw one child still standing at the top of the hill beneath the cemetery. His little hand reached to the top of his head, and he pulled the rubber mask away. It was Jacob, and he was falling apart, melting away. The mask dropped to the ground along with his small, delicate hand. Jonathan screamed and tried to get to him, but there were too many bodies, too many little arms and legs and heads, and he could not force
his way through the mass grave of faceless children. And then the demon-god rose out of the muck and mire, its expressionless, wooden mask staring down at him, seemingly held aloft by puppet strings from the dark storm clouds that rolled overhead.
Then he was gone from that place, and now he saw only a single dull light bulb illuminating a smoky stage. Mary was there in the circle of light. She started to move, to dance, undulating and gyrating like a cheap stripper. She removed her clothes. Her shirt fell to the ground, then her bra. He could see her breasts – sagged from childbirth, nipples rigid and calloused from breastfeeding, her stomach still fleshy and loose, but lovely all the same. Her underwear dropped to the stage, and she swayed and danced in all her human imperfection. Amid the sexual farce, she dug her fingernails into the skin of her forearm and pulled. Her skin peeled back and tore loose with a soft, rubbery snapping sound. Blood poured out, and she quietly and calmly dropped the strip of skin to the floor. Jonathan cried out like a drunken barker from the audience, but she kept stripping away her skin, slow and bloody, like the dance she performed beneath the dull spotlight, until her body was stripped bare, down to muscle and tendons. In the dim light he could see her face wet with tears, but she did not make a sound; she did not utter a word. She stood before him, open to the world.
Then he was back in Coombs’ Gulch. Michael and Conner were spread out in pieces across the spiked branches of the black spruce trees. They were alive and in agony, and he heard their cries and saw their anguished faces distort with pleas for an end, but no end came for them. They moved their heads and somehow moved their feet, even though their lower limbs were spread ten feet away on another tree. All the feeling was there, all the pain, every inch of their bodies ran with it like blood. A cold wind swept through, and the trees swayed back and forth and pulled their desiccated bodies in different directions. They screamed, but the sound was lost in the woods. He reached out to pull their bodies down, but he could not reach them.
Then Jonathan felt himself fall into nothingness, the silence deep and thick. He felt his eardrums would explode from the silence. He heard his breathing; he heard his heart beat, the rhythm louder and louder till it was all he could hear. Then he detected something else, another sound behind the beat of his heart – something deeper down within, so deep it seemed a million miles away.
Screaming. Fatal, terrified screaming.
He understood it then. Hell is not a place. It distorts all time and space and dimension. Hell is within – deep down, filled with the agonized screams of everyone we love.
Jonathan stood again in the center of the occult design in Coombs’ Gulch. All was silent and dark and cold but for the white stones, which glowed like lights on an airport runway. He could feel a terrible presence with him, and he turned to look. He saw the outline of a distorted and massive figure standing at the edge of the circle. Its wooden mask glowed in the moonlight, its arms and legs vaguely human, but with rootlike tendrils crawling up and over and changing the demon-god’s form.
It spoke with a deep, garbled and croaking attempt at human language.
Do you see?
Jonathan was silent – dead with fear, shaking and alone.
This time, its voice boomed over the mountains and rose up from the earth.
Do you see!
“I see!” Jonathan screamed out, but then the figure was gone and there was no one there to hear him.
Suddenly, he was in the light of day again. A sunlit afternoon in a quiet hamlet of forest at the edge of a school sports field. The day was warm but promised a cool night, the air sweet with moisture and decay. The sky was a deep, autumn blue. And Jonathan was there. He felt the light on his skin; he breathed the air and smelled the turning leaves and the grass giving up its life. He was walking, but not of his own volition. He was trapped behind a pair of eyes, an observer. He walked through a cheap football field toward the trees, which stretched along the field and then up a hill, spreading like a blanket over the land. He wore jeans and an old shirt. He carried a backpack, and his sneakers were old, a design from decades ago. His hands were small and light, unblemished by years. His hair was thick and shaggy, full of life. He found a path into the trees and started down into a patch of forest. The trees had not yet given up their leaves, and the short stretch of forest was darker and cooler. He could see the houses of a neighborhood up ahead, with the sound of cars rolling over pavement, and his eyes were set on that place. He moved with a lighthearted happiness.
On the ground near the edge of the path was a small clump of fur in the leaves. He stopped and wandered closer. He picked up a stick to poke the furry thing gently, to make it move, but it did not move. He pushed harder with the stick until it finally flopped over and showed its exposed and hollowed insides, crawling with maggots and other infestations. He dropped the stick and jumped back in disgust. A smell rose up and overtook him. Then a shadow fell over him and a heavy, dirt-laden hand gripped his shoulder. He turned slowly and looked up. A bearded man in a dark hood with wild, shining eyes stared down at him. The man leaned down close, near to him, and whispered, “Do you see?” and his face seemed to move and swell and deflate, as if those same infestations were moving beneath his skin. Two other hooded figures appeared behind him, as if materialized out of the trees.
Jonathan tried to scream, but that heavy hand, ripe with dirt and oil, clamped down over his mouth. The figures picked him up and carried him through the trees. He fought and struggled and cried, but the grip was so strong – the arms a vise over his small body – it was useless. They seemed to fly through the trees. They traveled far, far into the woods, and he struggled until shock finally set in and his body went limp. His eyes were open, but he could not move. The procession went on endlessly into the night. Darkness swelled up from behind the trees.
They took him to a place, a clearing where everything was silent and still, and white rocks gleamed in the moonlight in a circle with lines tracing through, which formed an empty square in the center. They set him down in the center. He stood with the man behind him, each of his powerful hands clamped on Jonathan’s shoulders. The three figures began to chant in words he did not understand, their dark hoods over their heads, their faces writhing and crawling.
The rocks glowed in the night. The chanting filled the cold air until it was all he could hear.
And then there was a new presence in the circle with him, massive and stinking with death. He felt it, heard its strange breath. The man released his grip on Jonathan’s small shoulders, and two long arms with clawed hands reached around and embraced his tiny body.
Then he was gone – gone from this world, gone from time and space. The sharpened tips of its claws danced over his body, and he seemed to melt, spreading out into those interstitial spaces. It was all like a never-ending dream, or perhaps a nightmare, in which he was everywhere and nowhere at once.
He faded in and out of reality, in and out of places and times, materializing in strange forests and disappearing again. He would see people – campers, hunters, hikers at various times – dressed in clothes he did not recognize. He could see them, but he was far from them. He would scream out and cry for help, and they would turn to look but never see.
Other times he came to in a forest at night, and he would wander, trying to find his way home, lost and terrified. But the woods were not his own, the places cold and endless. He wandered through these forests in the night, and it would walk behind him like some strange guardian making sure he did not run off. He could feel the branches and leaves; he could touch the cold ground and breathe the scented air. He could see the animals that stared at him and then bounded off in fright. His clothes were not enough to keep him warm, and he trembled and cried and shivered in the darkness.
Then he would disappear again, melt into time and space, and his small body was racked with pain; there was nothing but frozen, empty space. His eyes could see, but there was nothing – absolutel
y nothing – to be seen. He couldn’t tell if those blank spaces lasted seconds or millennia. The incomprehensible pain overwhelmed all time and thought. It was as if his bones were trying to escape his flesh. He cried for his mother during those times, but there was no answer, only more cold and pain and timelessness.
He wandered along a brook in the night, with the presence following his steps as if marching a slave. It was freezing. He shivered and walked to stay warm, but all he truly wanted was to lie down somewhere and die so the endless torture would end. He wandered near a giant bush, and suddenly, in the darkness, he saw a bright light. It was like looking down a long and dark tunnel. The light turned toward him, blinding white, and he turned away for a moment. The creature behind him croaked in a deep and unknown language. There was a flash of fire in the distance, and something struck the back of his head. Then, suddenly, he felt release and freedom, freedom from pain and bondage and suffering.
For a moment – an immeasurable increment of time before he was finally released – he heard the sound of men’s voices whooping and cheering in the night.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jonathan woke with relief and terror, shivering and cold like poor Thomas Terrywile on that night. His back was wet with lake water from the small pools nestled between rocks on the shore. The water soaked through his jacket. Small, light snowflakes fell from an expanse of gray clouds, which rolled like ocean waves overhead. He woke with a gasp, terrified that he was still alive, like being born again, from one hell into another. Now he was among the living, though unsure what that meant. Here in the cold, he could feel the gravity of the world again and realized now the trap laid for them – the trap they had built themselves, stick by stick with guilt and fear throughout their lives. They had imprisoned themselves for the hunter.
Jonathan had never even put up a fight.
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