Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  Before him in the smallest of clearings sat an unlikely structure, so squat and spare, so colorless and rough-hewn and artless, that if not for the weak pulse of light in the seams of the door he never would have seen it. And but for the light never would have believed it to be anything but some crude and temporary shelter that rightly should have rotted back into the mountain a century before.

  There were no windows that he could see, and even the pale vine of woodsmoke rising from the roof pipe, hardly distinguishable from the snowfall into which it climbed, seemed a sign of abandonment and disuse.

  He stood almost within the spruce, pulling the air into his lungs as quietly as he could. He looked for signs of the man he’d been tracking and saw none. No footprints before the door of the shack and no visible trail or footpath in any direction. There was the hunkered little structure and there were the trees all around it and there was the vast, snowbound mountain. He watched the seam in the door to see if anyone would pass between it and the source of light within but no one did. He looked all around him through the trees, alert to any sound. He reached into his pocket and brought out the nine-millimeter and, muffling the sounds with his gloved hands, chambered a round and thumbed off the safety. He removed his right-hand glove and stowed it in the opposite pocket with the whiskey bottle, restowed the gun carefully, and stepped away from the spruce.

  Crusted snow lay under the new powder and his boot steps announced him to the woods but there was no help for that and he moved ahead unhurriedly, favoring the bad ankle, until he reached the cabin. He raised his fist to knock on the door and it was then he saw the lock, a large outdoor Master, the fat boltshackle passed through an equally fat staple of a heavy-gauge hasp, which was itself fastened to door and jamb not with screws but lags, or perhaps through bolts. In the moment he took to consider such hardware he understood from its gleam and the smell of oil that it had been used recently and would be used again soon. Then he struck the door a few knocks with his bare knuckle and called out Hello as casually and quietly as he could.

  He lowered his hand and found the gun grip inside his pocket. Held his breath, listening. The ticking of the snow on his shoulders, the faint pop of firewood on the other side of the door. He glanced around the clearing and it seemed even smaller now that he was at its center, the woods that shaped it more immense and dark. He let go of the gun and raised his hand again but then held it still. There was a sound from the other side of the door, as of a chain, as of chain links unspooling over a wooden floor, like a hound hauling itself to its feet, some old mountain breed chained up against doing damage or breaking free in its master’s absence. And then the hound spoke. It spoke in the voice of a girl and it said, thinly, “Hello? Is someone there?”

  Billy swallowed.

  “Who’s in there?” he said.

  The chain dragged again and came to rest.

  “Who’s out there?” said the girl. Nearer to the door but still some distance from it.

  “What’s your name?” he said, and waited, his heart pumping. He asked again, and she said: “A man is keeping me here. Please help me.”

  He took hold of the gun again. “Is the man in there?”

  “No. He’s gone. Please help me.”

  “I’m trying, darlin. Just tell me your name. Please.”

  She was silent. The chain was still.

  Then she said her name. So quietly that Billy wondered if it had been his mind that said it.

  55

  After dinner the boy got into his jacket and went down the porch steps and out onto the April snowfall. He headed for the barn, stepping again and again into his own blue shadow, until abruptly he stopped and looked up and saw the full moon burning overhead. For all its wintry sharpness the night smelled of the thaw the snow had covered, of loam and grass and pitch. As he neared the barn he smelled the hay bale he’d busted open earlier, and he smelled the horses and the saddles, odors as pungent as they’d be on a hot day in the summer. The mares stretched their necks and snorted as he unpocketed an apple and held it out to be smacked up by one mare and then he did the same for the other. They snuffed up the apple scent from his palm and, finding only scent, permitted him to stroke the warm ridge of bone from forehead to muzzle. On the rail before the tack wall sat the two saddles, and he put his hand on the seat of one, feeling along the smooth cool curve of it.

  He’d seen her just once, since: dark-haired and pretty in her black dress at the old man’s funeral . . . looking up to find her looking at him. But that was not the time to talk to her, that was not the time, and what did it matter anyway?

  When he got back to the house, his father had broomed off the porch steps and was sitting on the top step, smoking a cigarette. The boy sat beside him and took one of his cigarettes and leaned toward the offered flame.

  “You ever look at that old man’s throat?” his father said.

  “Yeah, I looked at it.”

  “But it made no impression.”

  “It made an impression.” He drew on his cigarette. “I’ll quit when you quit.”

  Grant looked at him and looked away. “All right.”

  One of the mares whinnied and stamped in her stall.

  “They’re going to miss you,” Grant said.

  “Who?” said the boy. Flicking his ash.

  “Those horses. Who did you think I meant?”

  The boy shrugged. “Thought you meant the horses.”

  “Then why’d you ask who?”

  The boy said nothing. They smoked.

  “Maybe we should make an offer,” Grant said. “Take them with us. The horses, I mean.”

  “Take them where?”

  Grant lifted his cigarette and drew on it. Across the blue clearing sat the old man’s house, dark and silent. There was no wind or movement or sound anywhere. The El Camino had been gone all day.

  “You think he’s coming back?” said the boy.

  Grant straightened his arm to tip his ash. “It doesn’t much matter now, does it?”

  “It never did,” said the boy. “Not to me.”

  Grant looked at him in his wrist cast, looking up at the moon. The moon in the very middle of the sky, in the black bowl of stars shaped by the snowy ridgelines all around, the ridgelines themselves bright and stark and close in the moonlight.

  “It’s going to snow again,” Grant said.

  The boy scanned the sky. “There’s not a cloud in a hundred miles.”

  “That’s a halo moon.”

  “So?”

  “So that means more snow.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says everybody.”

  The boy glanced at him. “You were watching the news,” he said, and Grant nodded.

  “It’s snowing in the mountains and headed this way.” He pointed his cigarette at the moon. “But anybody can see that.”

  The boy shook his head.

  To the north above the ridgeline a falling star burned and died, leaving a faint scratch on the black lens of sky.

  Did you make a wish, Daddy?

  Yes I did. Did you?

  Yes.

  Shoulder to shoulder in summer’s grass, a concert of summer’s insects in their ears. The dizzying, burning heavens.

  How many stars are there, Daddy?

  Too many to count, Caitydid.

  Will they all fall?

  No, just a few.

  Where do they go when they fall?

  I don’t know. Where do you think?

  “Did you see that?” he said to his son.

  “What?”

  “Falling star.”

  “It wasn’t a falling star.”

  “Sure it was.”

  “Stars don’t fall. It was space debris. A piece of rock.”

  Grant looked at him.

  “What?” said the boy.

  Grant looked to the north again. As if where one star fell there would be another.

  The boy drew on his cigarette and surveyed the sky all around. “See th
at little group of stars there, just above the ridgeline?” He was pointing to the southwest.

  Grant shook his head.

  “Right under Cancer?”

  Grant looked at him.

  “That little cluster,” the boy said, “right there, above that high point of trees?”

  “All right,” said Grant. “I see it.”

  “That’s Hydra, the water snake. Its head, anyway. Longest constellation in the sky. It was charted by the Greeks over two thousand years ago, and guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Not one star has ever fallen out of it.”

  Grant nodded. “What else?” he said.

  The boy told him that Hercules had fought the water snake as one of his twelve labors, that the snake had many heads and each time Hercules chopped off one head, two grew back. Grant asked how Hercules solved this problem and the boy told him that each time he chopped off a head, his nephew came along with a hot sword to burn the stump.

  They were quiet, each looking up, as if watching such things unfold. The boy turned to the north and pointed again. “See those five stars up there? Looks like an upside-down house?”

  “Sure,” said Grant.

  “That’s Cepheus, the king.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He had a wife who bragged about her beauty so much Neptune sent a sea monster to destroy his kingdom.”

  “Did it?”

  “What?”

  “Destroy his kingdom.”

  “No. As a sacrifice to the sea monster the king chained his only daughter to a rock by the sea.” The boy tipped his ash.

  Grant sat studying the distant lights. Distant cold debris field of falling objects and her hand so warm, so small in his, her grip so strong.

  I think they turn into little children, she said.

  Like you?

  No. Little children who don’t live in houses. And who know magic. And who no one can see but God.

  Are they angels?

  No, Daddy, I told you. They’re just little children.

  56

  Billy pressed his bare hand to the grain of the door. “Caitlin?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Caitlin, my name is Billy.”

  “Are you with the police?”

  “My brother is the sheriff, Caitlin. Sheriff Kinney.”

  “Is he with you?” These words spoken with such desperation, such

  hope.

  “I’m gonna get you out of there, Caitlin.”

  He took the big lock in his fist and felt its heft. He doubted the nine-millimeter’s capacity to damage it; heard in his mind the shot replaying all over the mountain.

  “Does he hide a key out here?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Is there another way in?”

  She told him about the window but that it was boarded and locked from the inside, and he limped around the shack and found the small window at head height and the glowing little sparrow-hole in the batten and he thought to look in but did not. Instead he continued around the shack and on the last unseen side he came upon a scrap of blue tarpaulin, and underneath the tarp he found an ax embedded in the face of a log. The blade popped loose with a tug and was in his hands, the handle smooth from use, the head weighty. Then he saw the sled—old-fashioned wood sled propped against the wall, long enough for three, maybe four sitting children. A heavy towrope and runners of bright red. He could make no sense of it.

  He carried the ax back to the door and looked slowly about the woods. “Caitlin?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I found an ax. I’m going to try it on the lock.”

  She didn’t answer. Then she said, “Billy?”

  “Yes?”

  “There was another man. Last spring. A hiker.”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “He shot him, Billy. He killed him.”

  Billy held the ax. He grinned at the door, at the lock. “Thanks, darlin. Now please step back.”

  He struck the padlock dead on the boltshackle with a ringing blow and the blade threw sparks and delivered a hard shock through his hands and up to his shoulders. He squared off with the door and struck again with another burst of sparks, another jolt of pain in his hands. He swung twice more and took the lock in his fist. Invisible burrs pricked his skin but the lock and the hasp were solid. He thumbed the ax blade, but he hadn’t checked before and couldn’t say how much of the nicked dullness was his own doing.

  He glanced around and once again squared off, and this time he began to chop at the door itself near where the hasp was bolted. But either the blade was badly dulled or else the wood was aged and hard and thick beyond any wood he’d ever experienced, for the ax merely dented and gouged but did not sink or give any sign of splitting the wood.

  He held the ax, getting his breath.

  The girl made no sound. He asked if she was all right and she answered that she was.

  He raised the ax and resumed his work, trying each time to strike the same spot just to the right of the hasp where a pulpy kind of cleft was forming. He learned the best stance and swing and angle, and after a dozen blows to this deepening seam there was a cry of rupture and the ax head sank into the door and stuck. Immediately after, from the trees behind him, something rustled and he turned and reached for the nine-millimeter. but all he saw was the shape of a large night bird winging through the boughs. He watched the place in the trees from which he thought the bird had launched but nothing more stirred save the snowfall. No sound but the deep, thick valving in his ears, which was his own blood.

  If you’re there, what are you waiting for?

  He turned back to the ax handle, and as he did so something bit deeply into his back and he pitched against the door and heard bounced back from it the small flat report of the gun. The bullet had entered him high in the ribs and to the right of his spine, punching a hole in his right lung coming and going, the lung already collapsing, but all he knew was that he’d been shot and could not get his breath.

  Fallen against the door, his forehead to the wood, he heard on the other side of it the chain dragging on the floor. She said his name but he didn’t answer. He became aware of the approaching footsteps and began fumbling in his pocket for the gun but before he could get it in his grip he felt the pressure at the base of his skull, the dull cold hardness of metal.

  “I know what you’re looking for and I’d leave it if I were you.”

  Billy withdrew his hand and placed it flat to the door. He waited for the sound that would be the last. It didn’t come. Nothing did. Then the pistol barrel lifted from his skull and he received a blow that sent a white-hot rod coring through his brain. Wave upon wave of pain he’d never imagined and he slumped to the ground, piled against the door. He reached for his head and rolled against the door until he blindly faced the man. Nausea swept through him and he rolled again, his guts convulsing. The heaving brought fresh waves of pain, and fresh nausea followed that and he lay for some time retching up the last of it, and then he lay wheezing through his punctured chest, his body rocked by spasms.

  In the midst of this the man took and pocketed the nine-millimeter and he found the whiskey bottle and took that too. Now he grabbed Billy by the shoulder and rolled him back against the door to look at him squarely. He dropped into a squat and sat regarding him, the gun hanging loose between his thighs.

  “I figured it was you.”

  “Did you,” Billy wheezed.

  “You asked a lot of questions, bud.”

  “So did you, Steve.”

  “I told you my name’s not Steve. Look what you did to my door. I waited one too many to pop you.”

  “What were you—” He sucked in a cold length of air. The hole in his back rattled like the strange new gill that it was. “Waiting for.”

  “I wanted to see if this door would hold up.”

  “It held pretty good.”

  “Better than you. You don’t look so good, Billy.”
r />   “Don’t feel so good. What’d you shoot me with?”

  “Nothing but this little pop gun.”

  “Tell you what, Steve.”

  “What.”

  “You take off now you might get away.”

  “Get away from what?”

  Billy spat again. “Sheriff.”

  “Sheriff,” said the man. “Sheriff that’s your brother? Sheriff Joe?” He studied Billy’s face. He looked at the door, as if everything beyond it were visible to him.

  He said: “If I thought Sheriff Joe was on his way up here, what chance of living would you give this girl?”

  “Same chance,” Billy said.

  “Thought that through, did you?”

  “Wasn’t hard.”

  The man smiled. “No, I bet not.”

  Billy knew that the moment the man had seen him on the mountain, the girl’s fate was decided: sheriff or no sheriff, he would not remain up here and he would not let her live. Billy’s only hope was that the man would panic and run. It was not even a hope.

  Thin light rippled along the man’s teeth. “You know how I know you’re full of shit, Billy? The fact of this ax stuck in my door. Why would a man do a thing like that if Sheriff Joe was on his way? Why wouldn’t he just sit tight and wait?”

  “ ’Cause he’s dumb and reckless.”

  They were silent. No sound on the other side of the door but the soft popping of firewood. The snow had stopped, and the clouds above the clearing were infused with light, as if beyond them lay a bright city. Billy coughed and spat and the effort raised red blots to his vision. The ground beneath him moved like a bed of rolling logs.

  The man glanced up at the ax again. “Before you go, Billy, why don’t you tell me one thing.”

  Billy said nothing.

  “Why don’t you tell me why you came up here? What’s this girl to you?”

  “Nothing. I know her people.”

  “I’m her people, Billy.”

  “Her daddy might not agree.”

  “The same daddy who let her go off by herself up in those mountains?”

  “Wasn’t by herself.”

  The man huffed. “Might as well of been.”