by Andrew Pyper
Wasn’t that what Bridge had remembered Dad said to her when he brought her here as a child? The crucial decision on the direction we ought to take.
Where does the path lead after it ends?
He must have meant something more than encouraging his daughter to be courageous. It was about having to go so far in whatever you set out to do that you encountered a border. And once you did, what was important was to forge your own passage through it.
Lauren finds the camp before I do.
“There,” she says, and goes forward into the clearing without pausing.
I take mental note of everything as if there were some chance that it had been folded up and taken away since I was here. The horseshoe pit, the shabby dining hall. And just as Bridge noted but that I hadn’t seen last time, a swing set in the forest’s lengthening shadow, lopsided and seatless, the chains swinging slightly as if someone had given them a push before disappearing into the trees.
Bridge leads us into the dining hall. She doesn’t look up to read the Belfountain sign over the door, but Lauren does, glancing back at me. It feels essential that we make as little sound as possible, so I merely mouth the words Just wait and follow her inside.
I watch as Lauren takes in the scripture written on the rafters, along with the demonic messages on the tables and walls. Satan hear our Voice. None of it slows her advance toward the kitchen. WE Sing for YOU. And then she finds herself standing in the center of the pentagram burned into the floor. It holds her in place like a magnet, pulling her earthward.
“What is this?” she says, raising her arms out to her sides, and for a moment, she actually appears to be sinking, her legs dissolving into darkness.
“Just kids, probably,” I say.
“What kids?”
“I don’t know.”
“What kind of people would—I mean, Aaron, this is—”
“In here.”
Bridge stands waiting for us at the kitchen entrance.
“It’s in here,” she repeats, and slips inside.
41
THE WALK-IN FREEZER’S DOOR IS open. Had I left it that way? or did bridge pull it free herself, in silence, before Lauren and I joined her where she stands at its pitch-black threshold? I want to ask, but the words are too heavy to be spoken, their uselessness announced in advance.
We will enter the freezer no matter what. It’s our fate. Our father’s will.
Bridge flicks on her headlamp, and Lauren and I do the same. Gather around the open trapdoor leading into the ground, the three of us like mourners at a funeral.
“This isn’t right,” Lauren says. It isn’t clear what she’s referring to at first, but then I hear it as meaning everything. The hole. The camp. Us. We’re not right to be doing any of this.
“I’ll go first,” I say, and step down into the stairwell.
The air is cooler beneath the surface, yet my skin feels hotter, an oily sweat that glues my shirt to the tops of my shoulders. The dark pushes back at the bluish spray of LED light, diluting it.
“Hey, Aaron?” Lauren says from what sounds like a hundred feet above and behind me. “Maybe we shouldn’t be here?”
All of us hear the tremor in her voice. The fear of being the first to come into contact with whatever we might release. Whatever might already by waiting for us.
I don’t answer her.
It’s so much narrower than I remember from my first trip down, the walls almost bulging inward like an inflamed throat. At the bottom, the steel door holds me back at the deepest point. The moisture shining and nippled on the smooth surface.
“Here,” I say, pushing my back against the wall so Bridge and Lauren can see it.
“Looks serious,” Bridge says.
“Not a vault or anything like that,” Lauren agrees. “Custom-built. And it would’ve been hell cutting and squaring it into the ground like that.”
Nobody has to ask me to try the key but I hesitate as if it’s a required step. When I pull the key out and come close to the door, I hear Bridge and Lauren move away. I wonder, if it opens, if whatever awaits on the other side will be slowed enough by what it will do with me that they will have time to make it out.
The key slides in and clicks into place.
It takes a little effort to turn it. There’s an internal thump, a single, amplified heartbeat, when the key is rotated as far as it can go. I’m expecting I’ll have to push or pull the door free, but it slides to the left, a smooth grating of metal against metal until it stops with a muffled crash.
The smell comes first.
Mold, primarily. Followed by the antiseptic sourness of a hospital waste bin, ammonia and soiled bandages, bodily discharges in paper bundles. Maybe something else. Something no longer alive.
A short hallway. I lean back again and let Lauren and Bridge look down the ten feet to its end.
“Another door,” Bridge says.
This one is different from the sliding steel one. There’s no keyhole for one thing, only a numerical pad on the wall next to it. For another, there’s a porthole window, small and high, no more than a foot in diameter.
“We go back now, right?” Lauren says.
Bridge doesn’t reply, just passes by me.
I hesitate, trying to think of a way to secure the steel door so that it doesn’t slide shut on its own somehow—or can’t be pulled shut by someone who waits behind us in the walk-in freezer—but there’s nothing that will hold something so heavy as the door if it started to move. The thought of being closed in here almost hijacks my body completely, the urge to bolt overcome only by the idea of Bridge being trapped on the other side and me not able to get to her.
We approach the second door without asking what it might mean. It’s the porthole window. The promise of the glass, the world within.
Bridge is there first, but because of the window’s height she can’t see through other than the glimpses she catches as she jumps up and down. The slap of her shoes on the cement floor resounding like smacks to exposed flesh.
“Let me,” Lauren says.
She rises up on her toes. The reflected glare of her headlamp dazzles her, so she turns it off. She circles her face with her hands to shield the glow of our lights from her eyes.
“It’s hard to see anything.”
“Is there electricity?” I ask. “Lights?”
“There must have been at one time, but not now. The only light is coming from these—I don’t know—these tubes on the ground here and there. Hold on. I can see a little better now.”
“Is it a room?”
“A hallway. Chairs, desks, paper. It’s all trashed. And there’s—”
“Lauren?”
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
“There’s blood. Lots of it. Like something’s—”
She stops again. I expect her to pull away but she only presses her face closer to the glass.
“What’s going on?”
“There’s something in there,” she says, and only now does she pull away and look at us. “Something moving.”
42
LAUREN TAKES A FULL STEP back from the door, a reflex of fear as much as to allow me to look inside. There’s no choice but to slide closer. Draw my hands up the cold steel and stare into the darkness on the other side.
Not quite darkness.
There are half a dozen glowsticks, each of them radiating the greenish yellow of streetlights in fog. They reveal a wide corridor leading straight ahead through gaps of shadow to a wall at the far end, maybe sixty feet away. Doors on either side, most of them ajar but at least one still closed. Office furniture, leather-bound log books and files along with random metal equipment of some kind, boxes overflowing with spiraled wires, power cables, most of it overturned and scattered.
“I don’t see any blood,” I say.
And then I do.
So much of it I think at first it’s part of the vandalism, cans of paint thrown against the walls and left to congeal in po
ols on the floor. Something dragged through it, leaving a diminishing trail of lines. A kind of haphazard musical staff that approached the door before fading.
Not something. A body.
This comes instantly, certainly. It could be nothing other than a human body. Lying at the end of the hall.
“How about now?” Lauren asks from what sounds like a great distance behind me. “On the walls? Spread out—”
“I see it.”
“What do you think went on in there?”
“Just a sec. I’m trying—”
The body moves.
A moment ago it had the jagged outline of a figure lying on its side—the jutting shoulder lowering to the elbow, the rounded hip—and now the line is bending. Rising up from the floor. Its head. Turning and locking into place when it finds me.
“Aaron?”
“There’s someone in there.”
“Someone?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Bridge moans. “I want to go now.”
The figure stands. A woman. The hair so long and straggled it appears like a hood around her face. A face that comes into greater detail as she takes her first step forward, then the next. Moving into the light from one of the glowsticks.
“It’s her,” I say, but it comes out sounding like someone else’s voice entirely.
“Please, Aaron. Let’s go.”
The old woman from the woods. Now lengthening her stride the closer she gets to the door, a bare foot slipping as it touches down in a pool of blood but immediately recovering, leaving new prints behind her.
“Aaron?”
I’m already moving back from the window. Not triggered by Lauren or Bridge’s demands but so as not to be close to the door when the old woman reaches it.
But we don’t leave yet. The three of us watch the porthole, waiting. Telling ourselves we’re safe and convincing ourselves just enough not to run.
“You said it’s ‘her,’ ” Bridge says. “Who’s in there?”
I’m about to answer when the old woman’s face appears against the glass.
Lauren utters a low exhalation in place of a scream. Yet even now the fear nudges me forward instead of turning me away. Compelled by a force stronger than curiosity, a need to know and see and feel so great it’s as if my life turned on my experiencing all of it.
“Who are you?” I ask, and the old woman cocks her head as if she registered my voice but couldn’t make out the words.
I try again, louder this time.
“What’s your name?”
She closes her eyes. I take it as a flinch against pain. But the longer she stays that way I read it instead as an effort to concentrate, to remember. The eyes open. Her mouth stretched into an uncertain grin.
“Do you know who you are?”
She frowns, as if suspecting a trick.
“Are you alone?”
The old woman looks behind her, then back at me. Both what was left of the grin and the suspicious frown disappear. Replaced by wide-eyed worry, her arms hugging herself as she starts to rock slightly from side to side.
“Let me in,” I say.
She might be shaking her head no. She might just be shaking.
“Maybe you can do it from your side. Put your hand on the handle and turn.”
“What are you doing?” Lauren says.
“We need to get inside.” I turn to her, then to Bridge. “Everything that’s happening to us—it has to do with what’s already happened in there.”
“Already happened? I can make a guess,” Lauren says. “Someone was killed, Aaron. That’s human blood on the floor. And this woman wasn’t the one who did it.”
“So how is she still alive?”
Lauren doesn’t answer. She looks at me as if I’m the one she should be scared of, and takes another step back.
But Bridge stays close to me. “You’re right,” she says before looking back at Lauren. “The only way out is in.”
I look through the window at the old woman once more, her expression unreadable because it keeps changing, sliding from anxiety to confusion to suppressed mirth.
“Try the door,” I tell her. “I’ll make sure—I’ll protect you from whoever else is in there with you.”
She almost laughs at this.
“How do you get in and out?” I shout at her. “I’ve seen you. Out in the woods. Is there another way?”
She’s afraid now. Her head looking over her shoulder as she backs away.
“Don’t go!”
The old woman walks backward from the door. Her eyes held on mine in pity, as if I’m the one locked underground, not her. What did I say that made her go away? Nothing. It wasn’t me. It’s something she’s heard. Inside. Something that’s coming.
“What happened to you?” I shout into the glass, and the question blasts back at me, demanding the same explanation of myself.
The old woman is ten feet away, fifteen, walking through the same pool of blood as before, leaving a new line of footsteps.
As she goes, she does something odd. Every time she passes a glowstick she bends to pick it up and tosses it into one of the open rooms. Each time she does the hallway darkens in grades, swallowing her.
“What’s she doing?” Bridge asks.
“Putting out the lights.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s—”
“There’s something she doesn’t want you to see,” Lauren finishes for me.
The old woman reaches the end of the hall. Only one glowstick remains on the floor, but she doesn’t reach for it. Her head turned to the right, watching, as a new shadow plays over the wall.
A shadow that bends down and picks the glowstick up.
For a second, the two of them stare down the hall at me. The old woman and the Tall Man floating in a circle of underwater green. His one gloved hand on the glowstick and the other on the silver hatchet, the corner of its head notching into his thigh over and over without him seeming to feel it. The steel coming away shining and black.
“Oh no. Oh Jesus—”
He hides the glowstick behind his back and it turns them into outlines. Paper cutouts you’d see taped to school classroom windows at Halloween.
The two of them start forward. The bogeyman and the witch, coming for the door.
43
THE STAIRS HAVE MULTIPLIED SINCE we came down them. Not only more of them in number but also stretched out like an accordion, so that each step demands something near a full leap.
Lauren reaches the top first, then Bridge. By the way they stand there, I assume the freezer door has been closed. Entombed. The word arrives like the name of an old girlfriend or childhood pet, intimate and particular.
Once I join them, I see that it’s still open, and we start forward again. We rush out into the kitchen and, for the first time, one of us speaks.
“Wait,” I say. “We should close this.”
I throw the freezer’s door into the latch and it locks shut with the loud pop of a pistol shot.
The three of us listen for a voice or pounding from the other side. There’s nothing for long enough that I start to believe that we are hearing something. The Tall Man listening for us just as we listen for him.
• • •
When we’re in the forest again I tell them what I saw. I’m as quick as I can be about it, because the falling dusk has me worried about the Tall Man coming after us and also because I want Lauren and Bridge to agree not to tell the others what we found.
“I don’t think I can do that,” Lauren says as we make our way along the trail. “And I don’t understand why I should.”
“Because they’ll see it only as a threat. They’ll go hunting. But they’ll fail. And that place—it’s not just where those—” I almost say creatures before correcting myself. “Where those people live. Whatever we need to know is in there.”
“You want to keep this a secret so you can play detective? Satisfy your curiosity?”
“No. I want to keep this a secret so all of us have a chance to survive.”
It doesn’t make a lot of sense as I hear myself say it, but there’s not another way I can come at what I believe. I can only hope that Lauren feels the same way Bridge and I do.
“If you’re right, how do we get around the guy with the gloves?” she asks.
“We know he and the woman are out in the woods most of the time.”
“So we go in when they’re not there?”
“That’s it. We have to find the other way in—because there has to be a second exit that—”
“Quiet.”
Lauren and I look at Bridge. She nudges her chin, pointing along the trail. The lodge is now coming into view, the kitchen windows a band of yellow like a monobrow. It’s not the structure itself she’s alerting us to, but the figure standing at the bottom of the steps by the front door.
We turn off our headlamps. It makes it harder to not step on anything that might make a sound, but we crouch low and proceed closer.
“I think I heard something out there,” the figure says to someone just inside the lodge’s door.
“It’s Ezra,” Lauren says. “Ezra!”
“Lauren!”
The three of us come out of the trees, and Lauren runs to her brother, briefly inspecting him as if to make sure he’s whole. Jerry joins them, his eyes on Bridge and me.
“Anything?” he asks.
“We didn’t find her. You?”
“No. I’m so sorry.”
Lauren looks back at us. She’s going to tell them about the camp and she’s silently apologizing. Then she looks at Bridge. I can’t see my sister’s face but whatever it conveys changes Lauren’s mind.
“Let’s get inside,” she says, slides her arms around her brothers’ waists, and guides them up the steps into the light.
• • •
We gather in the kitchen but none of us eat. There’s the inspection of the last few apples and oranges in a bowl on the counter, the shaking of a bag of bread crusts—all the rituals of food inspection without the appetite. Jerry is the last to hold an apple in his palm and replace it before he speaks.