by Rio Youers
Nothing. A breathless stretch of black between the foot of the mountain and Point Hollow’s pretty lights. No sign of Matthew’s flashlight bobbing hesitantly between the trees. Had he feared it would be seen and turned it off? Had he made it back to Point Hollow already?
Oliver’s heart throbbed at the thought. Pain zigzagged from his damaged skull. He staggered, slipping from the radical centre and into his human circle. Behind, beneath, within him, the mountain roared. Oliver chased along the crooked path as fast as he was able, fighting to hold on to the place where the circles intersected.
“Please . . . please . . .” Hurting, human sounds. And then he screamed. A violent cry that didn’t sound human at all. Frightened birds took flight, scattered against the mauve sky, but Oliver barely noticed them. His attention was drawn to a flicker of light between the trees. Matthew’s flashlight. He’d obviously been startled by the scream, too.
Less than half a mile away.
Oliver was getting closer.
He grinned and eased back into the radical centre, where pain didn’t exist.
———
The gun. He clutched its grip—could almost smell the oil coating its tiny pins and springs. The mag held seven rounds, and he’d used five. Two remaining. Perfect. He’d shoot Matthew when they were back inside the mountain. In the stomach. Not as significant as the knife, but he would die slowly and the mountain would be satisfied. Oliver needed the other bullet to persuade Matthew to walk that twisted path one final time. If he refused, Oliver would shoot the little boy—or the girl, it really didn’t matter—in the face. He would only refuse once.
Oliver grinned. He reached the foot of the mountain and veered southwest, moving as quickly as he was able toward his prey.
Chapter Eighteen
“I’ve got you,” Matthew said to the boy in his arms. “You’re safe now.”
But moments later Ethan started to tremble and wheeze. I’m going to feel him die, Matthew thought. A shocking possibility.
“Courtney,” he said. “Your T-shirt.”
“It’s too dry,” she said.
“Then we need to find water.”
They were heading west, toward Point Hollow (they could just see the pink sky through the trees and used it to guide them, keeping their backs to it), but now Courtney ducked north, following her ears, and brought them to a coruscating brook.
“Good girl,” he said. He lay Ethan down on the soft pine needles and indicated the water. “Have a drink, then rest. There’s still a ways to go.”
She nodded and took a drink. Matthew washed dry blood from his hands, scooped water into them, and formed a spout from which Ethan sipped—barely wetting his lips to begin with, but then his dull eyes crept open and he drew on the water with a weakly pulsing mouth. His throat clicked as it worked and before long the wheeze was gone from his chest.
“Am I going home?” he asked, only moments later.
“Yes.” Matthew smiled and lifted the boy into his arms.
That was when they heard the scream. Terrible and piercing and much too close.
“What was that?” Courtney’s eyes were wide and pale.
Matthew reeled toward the mountain. Not possible, he thought, recalling how Oliver’s skull had cracked open, and how he’d folded to the ground like a wet sheet.
“Was it him?” Courtney jerked the flashlight every which way, even up, as if he would descend from above. A terrible bird.
Matthew shook his head. It couldn’t be him. Yet he saw—between the silhouettes of trees and boulders—a narrow cone of light. Coming their way.
“Go,” he said. “Don’t stop.”
“You said he was dead.”
“Just go.”
Courtney shone the flashlight west and they moved on, but all too slowly—a limp, shambling pace that reminded Matthew of trying to run in a dream. His legs threatened to buckle every third or fourth step and the boy trembled in his arms. Courtney kept looking over her shoulder, her eyes magnified by tears.
“Keep going, honey.”
“Is he coming?”
“Just keep going.”
They pushed through branches and ferns, veered around boulders and between the trees. Matthew looked behind him again and saw the light almost immediately. A trembling, poisonous eye floating in the darkness. Closer now.
“A little faster, Courtney. Come on, sweetheart.”
“I’m going as fast as I can.”
They rounded a cluster of moss-covered rocks, then stuttered down a gradient bedded with roots and creepers. Slow going, having to choose their steps carefully, but they made it to the bottom without falling, then waded through a snarl of foliage that scratched their bare arms. The ground levelled, and then ascended, a long incline that Courtney scrambled up on her hands and knees.
“Faster, Courtney.”
“I can’t.”
Matthew took the flashlight so she could use both hands. She grabbed thick roots and used them to hoist herself up. Her small back heaved and her hair hung in dirty red coils. She cried, slipped, pulled herself up again. Matthew cradled Ethan and teetered behind Courtney. The torn sleeve he had used as a bandage had come unravelled, hanging loose. A damp red streamer.
“You can do it.” The flashlight trembled in his hand.
She mumbled something. Her small hands clawed and grabbed.
“Not far, Courtney. Almost there.”
“Almost . . .”
“Yes.”
The little girl nodded and dragged herself up the last few feet of the incline. She tried to stand but fell—crawled on her hands and knees for a moment, and then collapsed on her stomach. Matthew scrambled up behind her. He had hoped to see the lights of Point Hollow twinkling ahead, but saw only a dismaying sprawl of dark forest. He turned around, and there—flickering in the darkness less than a hundred yards away—the glaring eye of Oliver’s flashlight.
“Courtney,” Matthew gasped. “You need to get up.”
She pushed herself to her knees . . . crawled . . . fell again.
“Please, sweetheart.”
“Can’t.”
“You have to.”
Matthew watched as Oliver turned the flashlight on himself. A ghost, naked and shimmering. He threw back his head and howled.
He had the .45 in his hand.
“Was that a wolf?” Courtney whimpered.
“No,” Matthew uttered, thinking, Worse than a wolf.
“Was it him?” She pushed herself to one knee. “The bad man?”
“Yes.”
“He sounds close.”
“He is close.”
Courtney nodded. She struggled to her feet and wiped her eyes. Matthew handed her the flashlight and she shone it into the woods ahead. Feet dragging, she carried on, shoulders hunched as the bad man howled again.
———
This was his heartland. All his life he had bathed in its cold waters and flown above the treetops. Little wonder he caught up to Matthew and the children so quickly, even with a fractured skull. As they shuffled around boulders and fallen trees, Oliver strode through clearings, crossed shallow streams, slithered through pockets of ferns and weeds. No hesitation. No pause to regain his line and make sure he was moving in the right direction. The land was his body and he swept through it as effortlessly as drawing breath.
Or so he believed. In his mind he was the radical centre—a between-creature drawing on primal energy and the secrets of the earth. In reality he was a shattered mortal infused with the endorphins of lunacy, not running like a wolf, but lurching . . . dying.
And—much like an injured animal—at his most dangerous.
He could see them. The cone of their flashlight, the little girl sprawled on the ground. Close enough that he could spread his wings and draw them in. Abraham’s Faith mad
e angry music and the ghost in his head danced. Oliver howled. A haunted wail that made the darkness tremble. For one beautiful moment he knew how it felt to be the mountain.
He scented the crisp morning air and howled again.
———
They needed to change their strategy.
Following Courtney, watching her dirty Crocs trudge across the forest floor, Matthew knew two things for certain. The first was that the flashlight—useful though it was—gave away their position. The second was that, even if they could outpace Oliver, they had no hope of outpacing a loaded .45.
He turned around and saw Oliver crawling down the gradient (disturbingly, on all fours, like an animal), edging from view. This meant that Oliver, for however long he was down there, couldn’t see them.
“Courtney,” he whispered. “Give me the flashlight.”
She kept walking.
“Courtney?”
“What?”
“The flashlight.”
She stopped and looked at him. Nothing in her face but pain and fear.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We have to find a place to hide.”
“Like hide and seek?”
“Yes.”
She dragged her eyes left and right, following the flashlight’s beam. “Hide where?”
“Anywhere.”
“I’ll find a place,” she said.
They veered south, cutting through a crop of spruce and around a pond with rags of mist drifting over it, caught in the light like lame swans. Matthew kept looking behind, trying to gauge how long it would take Oliver to clamber up the incline. They needed to be in their hiding place, with the flashlight switched off, before then.
“How about there?” Courtney asked, pointing at an old pine tree that had collapsed against a boulder, forming a natural lean-to. The trunk had sagged and there wasn’t much room between it and the ground, but its dead branches covered the nook like a curtain. Matthew thought it might be too obvious a hiding place, but they were running out of time and he couldn’t be sure they’d find anywhere better.
“It’ll have to do,” he said. “Quickly.”
They lumbered toward it, gasping and dizzy with hurt. Courtney reached the pine first. She dropped to her knees, pushed aside the branches, and crawled into the space beneath. Matthew eased Ethan into the gap, then clambered in beside him. The branches drooped back into place and he pulled the children close.
“The flashlight,” he said to Courtney. She flicked it off. The darkness was complete and terrible. They couldn’t even see the dawn.
“How long do we have to stay here?” Courtney asked.
“Until the bad man has gone.”
“He’s like a monster.”
“Yes, he is.”
“I hope he dies.”
“I hope so, too.”
Matthew made a part in the branches with his fingertips and peered out, back the way they had come, his eyes slowly adjusting, seeing the shapes of trees. And there . . .
“Courtney?” he whispered.
“Yes?”
“You need to be really quiet now, okay?”
“Shhhhh . . . super quiet.”
A flicker between the trees. Maybe fifty yards away. Darkness. Another flicker. And then a bold shaft of light and the partial silhouette of a man poised on all fours. Matthew lowered the branches and felt Courtney’s thin body curl closer still.
“He’s out there.”
———
No sign of them.
Oliver growled deep in his throat. He swept the flashlight’s beam from left to right, then dropped to all fours, searching for tracks, trampled plants, drips of blood, anything that indicated direction. He used his animal sense to hunt and his human intelligence to deduce. There were three possibilities: that Matthew and the children had quickened their pace and were out of sight; that they had switched off the flashlight and were fumbling forward in the dark; or that they were hiding. Oliver believed the latter most likely.
“Where are you, little boy?”
The mountain, for all its god-like force and wisdom, offered no suggestion, while its angel, Bird, flickered uncertainly at the edge of his mind. Oliver snarled and pawed forward. The flashlight’s beam swayed in a cool semicircle, probing trees and bushes. He scurried right, his face close to the ground, but there was no hint that they had come this way. He paused and listened. Maybe he would hear the children crying. But no . . . only birdsong, and a breeze making the upper boughs creak. Oliver scowled and changed direction, moving south, covering ground quickly.
“Find you . . .” Mumbling through his broken jaw, pink frothing at the corners of his mouth. He was about to resume a westward track when he noticed something slick and S-shaped lying on the ground. Snake, he thought at first, crawling toward it, expecting it to slither away, and when it didn’t he thought, Dead snake, and it was only when he got within touching distance that he saw it was Matthew’s shirt sleeve. Torn from the white, sensible shirt he had worn to Bobby’s funeral. Not so white and sensible now. Covered in blood, in fact. Did you lose this while you were looking for a place to hide, Matthew? Oliver grinned, setting down the .45 so that he could pick up the sleeve, lifting it to his face and inhaling the mixed odours. Blood, yes . . . but sweat, too, and a trace of aftershave. Monsieur Musk, perhaps. Or Brut.
“Find you,” he growled.
Oliver sniffed the sleeve again, then tossed it away, grabbed the .45, and got to his feet. He shone the flashlight in the direction Matthew’s sleeve had been pointing and limped along.
Ready or not . . . Oliver cracked a smile and the birds sang.
———
Courtney had curled so close to Matthew, with Ethan between them, that it felt like they were one body. They shared each other’s heartbeat and breathed in hurting gasps. Sweat trickled from Courtney’s hairline and Matthew felt it on his cheek. She tasted his tears, and cupped her hand over Ethan’s mouth when he murmured in his semiconscious state.
One body, small and terrified.
Oliver’s flashlight glimmered beyond the screen of branches. They watched it swell and grow brighter. He was coming their way.
“He’s going to find us,” Courtney said, a whisper, quieter than breathing.
Matthew touched her damp hair and said nothing.
“I’m so scared,” she said.
He wanted to assure her that the bad man wouldn’t find them and that everything would be okay, but the words weren’t there. The belief wasn’t there. He squeezed the bony knur of her shoulder. It was all he could manage.
Courtney started to pray, her lips moving silently, warm breath puffing against Matthew’s cheek. He closed his eyes and tried a prayer of his own. It began “Jesus, please” and ended “Amen,” but the words between were rushed, hollow. When he opened his eyes, he saw his hand on Courtney’s face, her glistening eyes. It was lighter in their little hideaway, morning pushing slowly through the trees.
We won’t need the flashlight, Matthew thought, if we make a run for it. That’ll make it harder for him to follow us.
They heard him now, dragging his feet through the needles, wheezing like a dog on a tight leash. Courtney’s breath hitched in her throat as if she were about to scream—to vent all her fear and anger, unable to restrain it any longer. Matthew covered her mouth, maybe a little too firmly, because she moaned, but breathed again, and he kept his hand there and felt her tears.
“Find you,” they heard him say.
They waited, hearts trembling. A ragged, dismal trio clinging to prayer. Matthew peered through the branches. Rosy light filtered through the trees, enough for him to see Oliver stalking closer. He had the flashlight in his left hand, the .45 in his right.
“Here I come.” Ugly words amid a bac
kdrop of birdsong.
Matthew watched him limp closer. He’s going to find us, Courtney had said, and she was right. Oliver wouldn’t stop until he had what he wanted—until the mountain had what it wanted. Matthew’s breathing became shallower. He felt Courtney’s eyelash tickling his cheek. Her lips moved against his palm. She was trying to say something.
“Quietly,” Matthew whispered.
She nodded.
He lowered his hand, cupped her face.
“We can’t stay here,” she hissed.
Matthew looked at Courtney, then beyond her, at the branches covering the other side of the hideaway. Thick, but brittle. They could push through easily. The fallen pine and boulder would obstruct Oliver’s view.
They might even get away.
Jesus, please, he thought, the start of another prayer.
“We have to leave,” Courtney said. Tears flashed down her face in the stained light. “Right now.”
Matthew nodded. “Amen,” he said.
———
Every so often the flashlight found a drop of blood on the forest floor, like a trail of polished copper pennies, easy to follow. Not that Oliver needed a trail. He knew every possible place to hide. The shirt sleeve had given him a starting point, and the rest was easy.
However, walking . . . breathing . . . not so easy. The circles had faded considerably; the radical centre had once been a booming heart, but was now a weakly flexing button. He tried to hold on to it, but in truth he didn’t know what he was anymore. Not animal, bird, or human. The lines were indistinct—floopy, was the word that came to mind—and he knew that he was dying. A dying, floopy thing without structure, but still driven by the mountain. It occurred to him that all life existed thus, frail and brief, governed by intangibles—a way to look; to think; to act. Everybody has a mountain.