Pulling into the lot at the head of the Howard’s Point trail provoked a far stronger reaction than he’d anticipated. If returning to his nest down in the gully had made him feel like a spirit coming home, stepping out of Henrickson’s Lexus made him feel like his own grandfather. The journalist had parked on the opposite side of the lot to where Tom had come to rest—and fallen, for the first time—but that somehow made the layering effect even more unsettling. When the clunk of his car door closing echoed tightly off the trees, the view seemed to have a shivery fragility, as if it had been quickly painted over some other scene. Some emotional charge had changed. Of course the last time he’d been here he’d been drunk, whereas now he was merely slightly hungover, and feeling a bit sick, and there was a lot more snow than before.
“Jim, you know it’s going to be very hard to find the place.”
“Of course.” The reporter had ditched his suit and was wearing an old pair of jeans and a tough-looking jacket. His boots spoke of proper walking experience. He looked hale and fit and altogether more prepared than Tom felt. “You were out of it, and it was nearly dark. Not the end of the world if you don’t find the same exact spot. Just . . . it would be good if you could.”
“Can’t you just tell me what we’re looking for?”
Grin number sixteen. “Don’t you like a surprise?”
“Not so much.”
“Trust me. It’ll be great for the book. ‘Kozelek leads the way back to the spot that changes history and biology and what the hell else as we know it. His fearless scribe points out the final proof. They share a manly hug.’ It’s a buddy thing. Hug’s optional, of course.”
Tom nodded, wishing not for the first time that he hadn’t mentioned the idea of writing a book. Henrickson had claimed not to be trying to get him drunk, again, and he believed him; yet by the end of the second evening Tom had spilled pretty much everything there was to know about himself. Pretty much.
“I just don’t want to get lost again.”
“We won’t. I’ve done hiking. I have a compass. And if you didn’t have a serious sense of direction, you’d be dead now.”
“I guess so.”
Tom swiveled his ankle gently. It still hurt, but the new boots seemed to help. He shrugged the backpack on. This time it held bottled water and a flask of sweet coffee and a couple of flapjacks. There was probably still glass at the bottom too, but that was okay. He brought it along because it was from before. The glass was from before too. He had an idea that he might try to dump the bag in the forest somewhere, to try to leave behind everything it represented.
He walked over into the top corner, hesitated a moment, and then stepped over the thick log that formed a boundary to the parking area.
Henrickson waited until the man had made it a few yards up the trail, and then turned to look back across the lot. For just a moment he’d felt something in the back of his neck, almost as if he was being watched. He panned his eyes slowly around, but couldn’t see anyone. Strange. He was usually right about that kind of thing.
He looked back to see Kozelek had stopped. Now that he was started, the man’s enthusiasm for the trip was growing fast, as Henrickson had known it would.
“It’s this way.”
Henrickson stepped over the log and followed him into the forest.
THOUGH THERE WAS A BANK OF CLOUDS OVER TO the west, the sun was strong and bright. It cast strong, attractive shadows in the undisturbed snow. The two men walked for a while climbing slowly, without saying much. By this time the road was a good distance behind them, and there was no noise but for the sound of their breath and feet.
“You seem pretty confident, my friend. You remember coming up this way?”
“Not remember. Just . . . I recognize the shape. Sounds stupid, maybe, and I’m really not much of an outdoors person, but . . .”
He stopped, and indicated the layout of the trees and hillside around them. “Which other way are you going to go?”
Henrickson nodded. “Some people, they got no sense of direction at all. Like some kid’s windup toy. Let them go, and they walk in a straight line until they hit a wall. Others, they feel. They just know where they are. Works with time, too, matter of fact. What time do you think it is? Take a second. Think about it. Actually, don’t: feel it instead. What time does it feel like?”
Tom considered. It didn’t feel like any time at all, but it was probably about a half hour since they started out.
“Half past ten.”
The man shook his head. “Closer to eleven. About five to, I’d say.” He stretched his wrist out of his jacket and looked at his watch. A grin, and then he held it out to Tom. “How about that. Four minutes to.”
“You could have checked earlier.”
“Could of, but didn’t.”
Tom stopped walking. They were coming to a ridge, and he was momentarily unsure of which way to go. Henrickson took a few steps back and looked the other way. Tom realized the man was giving him a chance to work things out, to feel the way, and felt an absurd rush of gratitude. It had been a while since someone had trusted him, had been willing to think of him as someone who knew things. William and Lucy had grown old enough to see him as someone with faults, rather than qualities. Sarah knew him all too well. He was a given. The curse of the middle-aged man was knowing—or believing—that he’d told all he had to tell. Soon as you suspected that, you started wanting something, anything, to prove it wasn’t so: and that’s where the mistakes started, when the bad things happened.
“It’s this way,” he said, turning right.
“Feel the force, Luke.”
The next twenty minutes were hard going, and it was a while before either had spare breath to talk. Then the way started heading down the other side of the ridge, with a much higher climb ahead. None of it looked familiar to him, but it seemed to be the way to go.
Tom glanced across at the reporter, who was walking alongside and matching him with easy strides. “You’ve been looking for Bigfoot a long time, haven’t you?”
“Surely have.”
“How come nobody believes in it?”
“Oh, they do,” he said. “Just, it’s one of those things that’s hard to make work, if you believe what we’re supposed to believe. Nobody wants to look stupid, which is another way They work. You’re prepared to look a little dumb once in a while, the world opens like an oyster.”
“So what is it?”
“What do you think?”
Tom shrugged. “Some big ape, I guess. Something that lived here before humans arrived, then shrank back into the forests. There’s plenty of space out here. Right?”
“Half right,” Henrickson said. “Personally I believe they’re the last surviving examples of Neanderthal man.”
Tom stopped, stared at him. “What?”
Henrickson kept walking. “Not a new theory, actually. Only problem is getting the detail to work. You know what archaeologists are like—or maybe you don’t. Blah, there’s no evidence; blah, the fossil record; blah, my professor says it ain’t so. Way I see it is this: You’ve got Neanderthal man, one of the best-adapted species the world has ever known. These guys had spears four hundred thousand years ago. They spread out over half the world, including into Europe when that’s no place you want to live. The ice age is still frosty, there’s animals with very big teeth, and there is nothing, repeat, nothing, to make life easy for them. And yet they survive for hundreds of thousands of years. They have burial rituals. They have dentistry, which must have been horrible without Front Page to ease the wait. They make ornaments and jewelry and they have trade ties that spread the stuff over Europe. Cro-Magnon man eventually turns up—that’s us—and for a while the two species sort of coexist. Then the Neanderthals die out, bang, leaving about enough bones to fill a handbag. And apparently that’s all she wrote.”
“So what did happen? According to you?”
“They never died out. There were never that many of them. They just got good a
t hiding.”
“Hiding? Where?”
“Two kinds of places. First is deep forests, out in northeastern Europe, Finland—but also here in the good old U.S. of A. The prehistorians claim there’s no way Neanderthals could have got here, but I think that’s underestimating them. Could have hugged the coast over from Russia, managed to get across the big icy water down to the Northern Territories, then just kept coming down the coast until they found somewhere habitable. Then when we finally arrive in force, they just head up into the forests. What better place? You’ve got thousands of square miles of wilderness that people still don’t trouble much even now. Throughout Native American culture in this region there’s some nice little hints. The Chinooks have tales about the ‘ghost people’ who lived in their own places, who the tribe had a working relationship with. Then you got the ‘animal people’: the Okanogan lived right in these mountains and they believed there once were ‘animals’ that had culture before the ‘people’—by which they mean humans—had got themselves together at all.”
“And the second place? The other place they hid?”
“Right under our noses. What’s the most common type of legend all over Europe?”
“I don’t know.” Tom also wasn’t sure he was going the right way anymore. They were past the bottom of the divide, and starting to head up again. The increasing harshness of the terrain was familiar, but nothing else, and the ground was getting steeper in just about every direction, so that didn’t count for much. For the time being, he just kept going, and Henrickson kept on talking, with the smooth flow of someone who’d been over something many times in his head. And, if Tom was honest, with the confidence of someone who wasn’t quite as bright as he thought.
“Ogres. Elves. Trolls. All of which, according to me, are also examples of surviving Neanderthal man. Creatures that lived here before we did, and had their own strange ways. Who were common at first but then got more and more rare—until hardly anyone saw them anymore. But we remember them. Language works in strange ways. ‘There were giants here in these days’? I think ‘giant’ didn’t mean ‘big in body.’ It meant incomers found a previously existing species that was powerful and accomplished—that was culturally big, like the Okanogan’s animal people.”
“But they died out.”
“Not completely. What else do we hear a lot about, all over the world? Ghosts. Shadowy presences. And what else? Aliens. The grays. Who, incidentally, seem to land their ships in forests quite often, which is a weird approach to aviation, don’t you think? Grays, fairies, spooks are all ways of explaining strange stuff that we see every now and then. Ways of explaining away a whole species they claim died out, but which just faded into the background—and creeps around us, keeping out of our way.”
“But none of those things look remotely like Neanderthal man,” Tom said.
“No, for two reasons. First is tales swelling in the telling. Over hundreds of years, a couple of thousand, the legends take on their own weight, their own rules and trappings and visual references. Second is that Neanderthal man has a way of clouding our minds.”
“What?”
“They reckon the species’ throat and mouth maybe wasn’t up to fully articulated speech. Yet they managed to do all this stuff, so obviously they could communicate—and in a way that body language and a system of grunts ain’t going to achieve. My theory is that they did it at least partly through telepathy. They still do, as do we. Telepathy is just empathy turned up a whole lot. And when they’re confronted by something they think is dangerous, like us, they throw shapes into our heads. We see the pictures already in our own minds. They reflect our imaginations right back at us.”
“This is all nonsense,” Tom said, distractedly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t buy a word of it.”
“If I’m right, and we’re looking for a Neanderthal, why does everyone say Bigfoot is eight feet tall? They make us think they’re tall because tall is scary. And why do so many people—like you, Tom—report a vile smell? Why should they or any other creature go around smelling bad? No reason. They just make us think they do, as another protection mechanism, one of the simplest in the book. They hide by putting smoke in our minds. That’s why they’re so hard to find. Nearer to civilization, we think we’ve seen a ghost. Out here you see something closer to their true shape, because part of us has always known they’re still out here.”
Tom stopped, and turned to look at the journalist. The man wasn’t grinning, for once. He was deadly serious. Though Tom was pleased to have someone on his side, he’d have much preferred it if the man just thought there was a hitherto-unknown primate on the loose, rather than a rationale involving pixies and mind control.
But for the time being, that was a secondary concern. He had news of his own.
“I’m completely lost,” he said.
AN HOUR LATER THINGS WERE NO BETTER. HENRICKSON had been patient, often walking a little distance away to let Tom try to get his bearings, encouraging him to walk ahead and saying he’d catch up if Tom shouted to say he was back on track. Tom wasn’t on track, however. The farther he walked the less he felt he knew where he was. In the end he came to a halt.
Henrickson called from behind, “We getting warmer, good buddy?”
“No,” Tom said. “I don’t know where the hell we are.”
“Not a problem,” Henrickson said, when he came up level. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a trail map. He unfolded it, consulted the compass attached on a string to his coat, and then made a small circle on the map. “We’re round about here.”
Tom looked. “Here” was an area of white space with some tightly grouped topographical lines—the last half hour had been an up and down struggle. “Middle of nowhere.”
“Not quite. This here is a stream,” the man said, indicating a wavering line. “You reckon we’re close enough that this could be your gully?”
“I really don’t know. I guess we could look.”
“Let’s do that.”
About twenty minutes later they began to hear a steady trickling sound. They came around a large rock formation to find a rocky stream, about five feet across, coursing hectically between shallow, mossy banks.
Tom shook his head. “This isn’t it. And my ankle is beginning to ache.”
Henrickson looked upstream. “Could be steeper-sided up that way.”
“Maybe.” Tom felt foolish, though he’d known this was going to be hard to impossible, and had warned the reporter. “I just don’t know.”
Henrickson was looking as fit and hale as when they started, but hadn’t produced a grin in quite a while. “Know what you’re thinking, my friend,” he said, however. “And it’s not a problem. Like you’ll have gathered, I really want to find this critter. And hey—what else am I going to do? Go back to the city and sit in traffic? Rather be out here walking. Let’s follow this one a little while. We know we’re looking for something like it, and the map doesn’t show any others real close. But first, I’m about ready for a java boost.”
Tom started to shrug the bag off his back, but Henrickson held up a hand. “No need. I’ll get it.”
He undid the fastenings, and Tom heard the other man’s hand rustling inside the top of the bag. “Careful,” Tom said. “There’s glass in there.”
“Okay. But, um, why?”
“There’s a couple of broken bottles from when I came out here the first time. I didn’t clear it out properly. It should be down the bottom, but . . .”
He sensed the other man wasn’t listening, and that his hands were no longer in his backpack. “Are you okay?”
There was no reply. Tom turned to see Henrickson was holding something that wasn’t the coffee flask, and looking at it.
“What’s that?”
“You tell me. It was in your bag.”
Tom looked more closely, and saw a tiny bundle of bedraggled-looking plant matter. “I have no idea.”
“Probably nothing. Must have just fallen in y
our bag, I guess.”
He looked up at Tom, and this time his grin split the man’s face in two. “Let’s get going, what do you say? Upwards and onwards.” As they walked on, sipping hot, sweet coffee, Tom noticed that the other man seemed to have an extra swing in his stride.
Another forty minutes took them several hundred feet higher. They followed the stream through rises and falls, around outcrops. The banks didn’t seem to be getting any higher. This time it was the reporter who stopped.
“Not liking the look of this,” he said. He pulled out his map again. “We must be over here by now”—he pointed at another patch of white space—“which is farther east than I’d like to be. From what you said.”
“What’s that black line?”
“A road. Now, it’s entirely possible that you just missed it when you were trying to find your way back, but . . . look at the lines. Looks like it’s downhill to there, which you’d likely have been attracted to. Which case you wouldn’t have taken two days to get home. So . . . what? You okay?”
Tom was standing with his mouth slightly open. He slowly shut it again. He spoke reluctantly. “Yes. It’s just . . .”
“I’m sensing inner turmoil here. Bad for the guts.”
“The woman. Patrice. The one who had the boots.”
“What about her?”
“She was there. She saw my pack and, according to her, left the footprints. Connelly said she lived up in a division around here somewhere. Which means . . .” He stopped.
“She’ll know where the place was, and maybe be able to just walk right to it. That what you’re saying, Tom?”
Tom nodded.
“You really didn’t think of this earlier? Or perhaps you just didn’t want someone else coming in on the story.”
The Upright Man Page 23