by Andrew Pyper
A boot on one foot, the other uncovered, the skin swollen to the point of rupture.
The mouth. A black oval ready to bellow an announcement or bite or suck in all the air of the forest for himself.
“My God, my God,” Lauren whispers in her prayer voice again.
She is spellbound by her terror, just as I was by mine. But watching her take in the Tall Man pulls me out of it.
“We have to run,” I say, and the sound of the word offers a counterspell of its own. Run.
With his bare, torn-up foot the Tall Man shouldn’t be able to match our pace. I try to listen for him—his step on an unearthed tree root, his wet breath, whatever words he might want us to hear—but there’s only the tidal rush of panic in my ears.
A moment later another sound joins it. Hissing. When it stops, I realize it was a scream that failed to make it out of Lauren’s throat. She gasps and swallows a new breath.
She’s looked back. Just as I do now. Sees that he’s faster than us.
The cabin comes into view.
Lauren bolts ahead of me. I try to make up the ground between us and realize I can’t. My legs, already burning from the run this morning, harden into planks. No matter what I do I can’t manage more than a toe-dragging shuffle.
It’s not far to the cabin door. If it’s unlocked and Lauren opens it, I should be able to throw myself inside right after her.
Her fingers are around the handle. Is it turning? Or is it only her hand sliding over the brass? A second later I see it’s neither. She’s looked back and seen the Tall Man behind me.
“Open it!”
I don’t sound like myself. I sound like a child. A little boy witnessing his house burn down with his family inside.
“Don’t look at him! Open the door!”
I don’t see her do it, but she must turn the handle—or lean her weight into the already opened door—because one second she’s there and the next she’s swallowed into the cabin’s interior darkness. Then I’m there too. Slamming into the door and crashing into the murk.
Lauren is on the floor. I almost come down on her but skid on one foot instead, holding an unlikely balance.
I watch as the door swings hard against the wall and starts its return. But slower than when it opened. Long enough to see the Tall Man launch himself forward.
I do the same.
Elbows, thumb, cheeks, teeth—random parts of me landing against the wood and propelling it closed. I don’t lock it. I can’t. Not from where I am after I slide down to the floor.
I wait for him to make contact. But there’s nothing.
I bring myself up onto my knees, searching for the handle. When my fingers find it, I click it locked.
“Is he there?” Lauren whispers.
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t he trying to get in?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh shit. Shit—”
Scratching.
A slow stroking over the outside of the door from the hinges to the handle. Growing louder as it goes. Harder.
His gloves. The ones so big his hands must be glued into them. Now dragging over the outside of the door, side to side.
“What do we do?” Lauren asks, though it’s unclear whether it’s a question addressed to me or herself.
“Find something to fight with.”
“Like what?”
“The kitchen. Maybe there’s something we could—”
“Stop.”
I listen for what Lauren has heard. It takes a moment to realize there’s nothing to hear.
“He’s still out there,” she says.
“How do you know?”
“I can feel it.”
Time itself can be painful. There is nothing other than time that touches us as we wait on the cabin’s floor for the Tall Man to find a way in. Time burning against our skin, inside and out.
“He’s gone,” Lauren says finally.
How does she know? It would be impossible to hear him leave. It can only be wishful thinking on her part. And yet, as soon as she says it, I join her in the same wish.
“You sure?”
“No,” she says. “I just—”
“You feel it.”
“Yeah.”
I start to crawl over toward the sofa set against the wall under the nearest window facing out front.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking a look.”
The Tall Man can look in at me more easily than I can look up at him, given the way I have to climb up onto the cushions and nudge the curtains apart with my nose before I can cast my light through the glass.
“Is he there?” Lauren asks.
“Not that I can see.”
I walk back from the window, stepping over where Lauren still lies on the floor, into the kitchen. Pull a cheese knife with a decoratively curled point from the drawer. Come back into the living room and grip my hand on the locked handle.
“What are you doing?”
“Testing those feelings of yours,” I say, and pull the door open wide.
18
IT’S STUNNING.
For the first time since coming to Belfountain, the rain forest—now, in the night interrupted only by my headlamp’s bulbs—presents itself not as an enclosure but as a beautiful garden, magnificent and wild. The trees reaching out to each other, swaying to an undetectable music.
“He’s not out here,” I say.
Lauren comes to stand behind me. Scans what can be seen from over my shoulder.
“Okay,” she says. “What’re our choices?”
“Stay or go.”
“You think we should wait until morning?”
“No,” I say, thinking only of Bridge. Of the Tall Man making his way to the lodge. “We should go back.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Let me get a knife first.”
“Take mine.”
Lauren grips the cheese knife and frowns at its stubby length, the tip curved up like an elf’s slipper. “Really?”
“It’s the best there is.”
“Aren’t you bringing one?”
“This will come down to running, not fighting,” I say, and it sounds like something imported from the outside, a logic that may not be applicable in this world. Here, it may be that running takes you where you least want to go.
• • •
We don’t see the Tall Man on the hike back to the lodge. More than this, it’s as if the return from the cabin peels away the memory of him, diluting his reality, so that when we step out of the trees and approach the front door, we’re both clearing our throats with embarrassment. What will we say?
A skinny, homeless-looking man followed us in the woods.
So what? There were two of you, one of him.
He didn’t seem right.
Did he say anything?
No.
So how do you know he wasn’t right?
It’s reassuring. But then we come inside and I see Bridge and Franny and Mom huddled together on the sofa as if clinging to a raft adrift in the great room, and the fear returns. The idea of them seeing what we’ve already seen.
We tell them what happened. I try not to dwell on the Tall Man’s physical details, but they keep asking about him, and my hesitation ends up making him sound even worse. What did he want? This is what they demand to know next, but it’s the one thing we can’t answer. He came at us. He stroked his gloved hand against the door. But he didn’t touch us, didn’t attempt to force his way in.
“Was it him?” Franny asks me.
“I’m guessing it was, yeah.”
“Was it who?”
This is Bridge. When I’m done telling her the full story of what Franny says she saw in the woods the night before, Bridge weighs the options in her head. It doesn’t take her long. She decides to forgive me.
“We said no more secrets,” she says.
“I know. But I told you I saw something.”
�
�You didn’t tell me everything.”
“Full disclosure from now on. I promise,” I say, and though the four of them are all present to hear it, it’s one I make to Bridge alone.
Mom takes the report of the Tall Man the hardest. There aren’t the nervous tears or blank-faced shock that would be consistent with her repertoire, only coldness. She removes herself to a corner of the room. Her lips moving noiselessly, as if teasing out a set of possibilities.
“You okay?” Franny asks, putting her arm around Mom’s shoulder and pulling her close.
“I just thought, after today, there couldn’t be anything new under the sun,” she says with one of her feeble laughs. She looks at me. “What do you propose, Aaron?”
I’d hoped it would be enough to disclose, to share our disturbing experience with others and have them say it’s over, we’re all awake, there’s nothing to be afraid of. But now I see it doesn’t stop with that. It’s not a dream that concludes with its telling.
Lauren asks if we should go warn Jerry and the twins. All of us look at the solid darkness outside the windows.
“First of all, there’s probably nothing they need to be warned about,” I say, sounding calm, which goes some way to actually calming me. “We should wait until morning. At first light, I’ll head out to the Green cabin where Jerry is. Come up with a plan. How’s that sound?”
Vague. Improvised. But nobody suggests anything else.
I offer to sleep on one of the sofas; Lauren will take the unoccupied room, Franny another, and Bridge will huddle in with Mom. These are the decisions we make out loud. But none of us move. In the end we stay where we are, sleeping in chairs with Mom and Bridge on a sofa. I tell them I’ll keep watch through the night, that nothing will get in without me stopping it. This time it’s a promise I make to all of them.
19
THERE ARE ASPECTS OF IT that remind me of a slumber party. The discomfort of sitting tense and alert, for instance. The unfamiliar sounds and smells of a night spent in a strange house, the snoring bodies all around and me the only one awake.
Except this isn’t some Mercer Island high school kid’s birthday party.
Except the man wandering around outside, his face a portrait of emptiness, is the opposite of the bogeyman we told stories about and pulled the sheets up to our chins to protect ourselves against. Because we knew those monsters weren’t real. And I know the Tall Man is.
I make myself some toast, and by the time I return to the great room, the rest of them are stretching and asking what time it is.
“Early,” I say.
“You want me to come with you?” Lauren asks when she sees the chef’s knife, an upgrade from the cheese thingy, in my hand.
“No, I’m good. Stay here. Someone will send word.”
I’m hoping for something from Mom, an emboldening gesture for the walk ahead. But she only looks my way with a combination of pity and dread, as if an aura of disaster surrounds me and she doesn’t want to come close enough to enter it.
Bridge follows me to the door.
“You’re going to be okay,” she says. But as I step outside, she locks the door behind me before I can reply.
• • •
Was it a better idea to do this in daylight?
I walk across the parking area toward the Green trailhead feeling exposed, even if the relative brightness reveals nothing waiting for me. But how would I know? Judging from the way the Tall Man had come down the hill, ignoring the course of the switchbacking trail, he knows how to travel through the forest, how to hide and track and survive in it. This is his element, not mine.
I make a point of not pausing before starting down the path to avoid running back and banging on the door to be let in. If I’m not capable of genuine courage, then the appearance of courage will have to do. Maybe this is all there is anyway. The soldiers storming out of their foxholes, the child promising her mom that today she’ll find a friend at her new school. All of them finding bravery by faking it.
You pretend to not be afraid for this step, then the next. In time, you come to the Green cabin’s door.
I’m about to knock but Jerry’s voice sounds through the wood first.
“What are you doing out here?”
“We’ve got to talk.”
“Why are you holding a knife?”
“That’s what we’ve got to talk about.”
He’s not going to let me in. The doorknob doesn’t turn, there’s no call of Just gimme a sec. There’s nothing.
“Jerry. This is serious. Open the goddamn—”
The door is pulled open a third of the way so I have to edge in sideways before it’s shut again.
“Was it you?”
It takes a moment for me to find Jerry in the gloom. Standing off to my right and also holding a chef’s blade in his hand, though his appears rustier than mine.
“Was it me what?”
“Walking around outside last night.”
“No.”
“But you know who was.”
“A man I’ve never seen before. He followed Lauren and me on our way to her cabin.”
Jerry lowers his knife, and I realize mine has also been held out in front of me, so I do the same.
“She okay?” he asks.
“She’s fine. She’s at the lodge.”
“What do you mean he followed you?”
“One minute he wasn’t there, and then he was.”
“Could he have just been an employee? A maintenance guy or something?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
Because he looked like the most lost thing I’ve ever seen.
“Because he wasn’t,” I say.
Jerry’s eyes dance between the cabin’s front window and the door, and back to me.
“Okay,” he says. “So. What did he look like?”
“Tall. Dressed like he dug his way out of his own grave. His face. Mouth open like a shotgun wound. This stunned expression, as if he were searching for something but he didn’t know what it was.” I hear myself say this last part and it comes at me fresh, as if it were somebody else’s thought altogether.
Jerry takes a step back and bumps his legs into the sofa. Instead of moving away from it, he lets himself fall back into its cushions.
“What’s going on here, Aaron?”
“I don’t know. He could have tried to break into the cabin, but he didn’t. He could’ve hung around until we came out, but didn’t do that either.”
“You think it’s all a game? Something Dad put together?”
“I guess it’s possible. Being made to stay out here for a month—it’s a game in itself, right? And then—surprise!—a second family he didn’t tell any of us about. Why not throw another curveball into the mix?”
I don’t know what I’m expecting. Some more pondering, probably. But without anything more to say, Jerry is up.
“You coming with me?” he says as he passes me and opens the door without checking to see if there’s anyone on the other side.
“Where are we going?”
“To find this guy.”
Unlike mine, Jerry’s bravery performance is convincing. It’s possible that, for him, it isn’t a performance at all.
Jerry heads out and I follow him. My hand grips the knife so tight my fingers lose all feeling, and somewhere along the trail, it falls to the ground without my noticing.
20
JERRY HAS THE AIR OF a hunter about him. An authority as he pauses to study a print in the mud or a bent branch that suggests he knows more about searching for a predator in the woods than I ever will. Then again, given the twins’ vocation, acting could run in his family in a way it doesn’t in ours. It could be that Jerry is nothing more than a gym teacher who’s used to ordering teenaged boys around and applies this confidence to every aspect of his life.
We work our way closer to the lodge at a tiptoed pace for fifteen minutes or so before Jerry detects a side trail I hadn’t no
ticed on the way in. At first it doesn’t look like much of anything. But twenty feet or so deeper, there’s an evident pattern of pushed aside branches and indented grass underfoot that indicates a repeated course of travel for a large animal or man.
“There’s another game Dad might have wanted us to play,” Jerry says out of nowhere, as if we’d been conversing about the same topic without interruption since leaving the cabin.
“What’s that?”
“Family Feud.”
“Sorry?”
“Us against you. The two Quinlan teams. Only the strongest and smartest make it to the end and win the prize.”
“You’re not being serious,” I say, even though it’s pretty much what I was thinking.
“Look at us. This is some pretty crazy shit. And no offense or anything, but I don’t even know you.”
“Sure you do. I’m your long-lost half brother.”
I try to keep my tone light. What Jerry is saying could be suspicious, or he could simply be explaining how unnatural this is. It’s impossible to tell which is his intention, as he maintains a tone as half-jokey as mine.
He turns to face me. Smiling apologetically, but standing with his feet wide apart, rooted to the ground.
“How can I be sure of that, Aaron? How can I really know who you are?”
“You can’t. We can either trust each other or not. Do you think I’m lying?”
“No. I don’t.”
“So I say we work together. We’re family. It’s an advantage we have.”
“I agree. Believe me, I’m not accusing you of anything,” he says with a sigh. “I’m trying to sort this out, that’s all. I’m thinking how Dad might have thought.”
“And how’s that?”
“What?”
“I’m curious how you understand Dad’s way of thinking.”
It’s a harmless query. But because we’re out in the woods, possibly being watched—because we’re invoking the presence of Raymond Quinlan—it comes out sounding loaded.
“If he’s had a hand in this, it’s going to be a jack-in-the-box,” he says eventually. “We keep turning the handle until something pops out.”
“That’s an interesting way of looking at him.”