Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  “Looks like he got out and followed on foot, Sheriff.”

  “That’s how it looks to me.”

  “Think we can move this car?”

  “He didn’t leave the keys.”

  “We could tow it out of the way.”

  “We could try but I don’t want to spend the time. Go grab a torch, Donny, and lock up and let’s go.”

  “You want me to bring the shotguns?”

  “I guess one ought to be plenty.”

  The moment the deputy extinguished the headlights the woods grew deep in every direction. Tree articulating from tree and the steep expanse of mountain unveiled in the blue flood of moonlight. They saw where Billy had twice fallen and they saw his adjustment and they followed these strange impressions up the road with the flashlights off and no sound anywhere but their own footfalls and the faint hiss of wind in the boughs. When the sheriff’s two-way squawked he grabbed it and thumbed it into silence and the deputy did the same to his.

  59

  The wood split and there was the sudden edge of blade, the dull gleam of silver in the black face of the door. She did not believe it. A thing from the outside world had broken into hers. She stared at it, heart-stopped, waiting to see what it would do next. The sight of it awakened in her thin legs the memory of a day long ago on snowshoes—afloat on the deep snow, thighs full of blood, lungs stretched and burning and each step another step downslope, away from the shack, away from the cot, from the bathroom, from the chain. She watched the blade in the door and it didn’t move, and then she heard the pop of the gun, and she dropped to her knees, and the voice she heard next was the Monkey’s.

  She backed away, dragging the chain with her to her place on the cot and to the sour old sleeping bag, which for a moment she had let herself believe would never again touch her skin. She drew up her legs and cowled the bag about her and watched the dim edge of blade in the door, dully lit by the glow from the stove where her next-to-last log withered on its bed of coals.

  After a while he and Billy were quiet. Then he told her through the door that he would be right back, and there were a few more sounds, and she heard the sled runners cutting through the snow and away into the trees, and there was no more sound from out there and she didn’t move. She watched the edge of the blade in the door, staring so intently that it burned into her retinas—and it became in this uncanny way more than the edge of the ax but the edge of the outer world itself, as the thin blade of the crescent moon suggests the whole round moon, and she remembered a book she’d once loved about a circular being who was missing a piece of itself, like a slice of pie, and went rolling around the world singing, Oh, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece. The smell of the book’s paper and the smell of sawdust on her father’s shirt in whose arms she rested like a small circular being herself. The deep man-tremor of his voice down in his chest passing into her back and into her chest, and his heartbeat too, like a separate voice speaking in a register so low that only her own heart could hear it, and she knew by this memory, by her willingness to allow it to bloom inside her, that she would not see him again. Or her mother or her brother.

  So she sat thinking of each of them, all she could remember of them, while another part of her listened for the return of his footfall, the dragging of the riderless sled, the sound of the key fitting into the padlock. He’d told Billy he did not believe the sheriff was coming but he would not take the chance. It was time. And he would do what he should’ve done long ago and then he would come down from the mountain and never return to this place and he would never be found and she would never be found, nor her sisters before her nor the two men who had tried to help her. Her family would never know and she knew now that that was the worst thing of all, to never know, and she hoped that if there was no God or no heaven that at least she might be allowed to make herself known to them one last time, to tell them everything she’d not told them when she’d had the chance, and she began to tell them now, hastily, in a fevered whisper, for once more she heard the footsteps beyond the door, distant, then steadily louder, slogging heavily in the crusted snow. She did not hear the sled runners and she did not hear the jangle of keys as he reached the door, but instead the door shuddered and she saw the ax blade pulled from its place in the breached wood, and then there was no sound other than her whispers as she closed her eyes and spoke to her parents and to Dudley. These would be the faces she saw, not his, the faces of Dad, Mom, and Sean. She tried to see what he must look like now, her little brother. He would be the age she’d been back then. Taller, leaner, more like their father. No longer a boy but a young man. Lastly she imagined herself, not as she was now but as she had been. She put her own remembered face into this portrait and in this way they were reunited, complete once more, a fully round thing.

  In the next moment the wall behind her shook and her eyes leapt open and the edge of the ax was in the door again, more of it than before, rocking in the splintered wood. It withdrew again and she heard the wheezing effort of his backswing and the ax came crashing once more through the wood, the entire axhead now, wrenching in the ragged seam like the head of a panicked animal. Freeing itself, crashing through again. She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand. Had he lost his keys?

  The axhead fell again and pieces of wood flew across the room, and the axhead was jerked from the door and did not return. There was hole enough now she could see the white of the snow in the trees beyond, luminous in the moonlight. Then the hole was blacked out and she knew he’d blocked it with his head. She held her breath. White fingers sprouted in the black hole and gripped the wood. The door shook. The fingers withdrew.

  There followed another blow of the ax and this time the axhead did not stop but continued on its downward arc as the plank of the door split all the way to the floor and the entire door shook in its frame. For a moment all was still. Then the door banged violently once, and a second time, and at last swept open in an explosion of light and snow and shards of wood spinning through the air, followed by the man himself, crashing into the room like someone stepping through a rotted floor. He fell to his hands and knees and remained that way, gasping, the ax pinned to the floor under his right hand. He’d fallen in with the moonlight, and the longer he remained in this all-fours position the more he appeared to be captive to the box of light in which he crouched. When he looked up at last his face was ghastly in that light. Ghastly in any light. What may have been the very last of his blood ran in a black syrup from his mouth. Something rattled deep inside him, as though every breath passed through a wet cloth.

  She shrugged off the sleeping bag and Billy watched as she separated from the heap of bedding like bones from hide, so skinny, so pale in her thin rags. Dark hair snarled about her face, her filthy bare feet. The dragging chain and the padlock rocking at her ankle like some grotesque idea of jewelry. They each looked into the other’s eyes and saw there the pitiful thing they had become.

  She put a hand on his shoulder. The first touch of another human not him in so long. Kept her hand there, fighting the desire to wrench the ax away—Mine, give it to me.

  “Billy,” she said. “Where is he?”

  He spat blood and wheezed, then pushed himself to his knees and sat back on his heels. He knuckled the blood from his lips and looked about him. “My God,” he said.

  “Billy,” she began again, but then his balance gave out and he toppled backward, landing heavily against the doorjamb. His legs unfolded before him one at a time, and now the only part of him she could easily reach was his boots. She put her hand on the ax and slid it closer to her.

  He was blinking at her sleepily. The smell of him, like the moonlight and the cold, had invaded the room. He was the smell of cigarettes and car exhaust, of pine trees and snow and mud. Of unwashed hair and vomit and alcohol. He smelled of sweat and flesh and of cowhide and of something metallic and primal that she thought must be his blood. He smelled of the world.

  “Bi
lly,” she said again. “Where is he?”

  “S’who?” he said.

  “The man. The man who shot you.”

  His raised his hand in a vague gesture. “Stabbed.”

  “You stabbed him?”

  He nodded.

  “Is he dead? Billy, is he dead?”

  He sighed. He closed his eyes. “I don’t know.” His lips were blue; his teeth had begun to chatter.

  She looked beyond him, into the moonlight, at the trees and the mountain. She could not see high enough to see the moon but she knew it was up there, bright and whole.

  The room was growing cold but she didn’t feel it. She was burning up. Her heart was punching at her wasted ribs.

  “Billy,” she said. She grabbed his boot and shook it. “Billy.”

  He opened his eyes. Glassy, drowsing eyes struggling to focus.

  “Billy, you said the sheriff was coming. Is that true? Is he coming?” He winced, and she realized it was his ankle and eased her grip on it.

  He wagged his head. “Don’t know,” he said. “My phone.”

  “Yes?” she said, “yes? You have a phone? Where? Where’s your phone, Billy?” She reached out toward him.

  “Not here,” he said. “Down. In the car.”

  She stared at him, disbelieving. “Why would you leave it there?”

  “You go,” he said. “My car.” He shuddered. His gloved hand lifted from the floor and stabbed at his jacket pocket and at last found its way in. She heard the sound of keys and he brought out his fist and held it out to her. She could just reach it. Her hand touched his bloody glove and she had the keys.

  “My tracks,” he said. “Down the mountain. Understand?”

  She nodded. She clutched the keys. They were not the set of keys she wanted and he seemed to know it. Such sadness in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, shuddering. “Can’t chop. Anymore.”

  “It’s okay. You rest. I’ll get you some water.” She’d begun to stand but he raised a hand to stop her. He wanted to speak again.

  “Do you know,” he said, “what timezit?”

  She turned and looked instinctively for the coin of light on the floor but it wasn’t there.

  “Ten,” she said. “Maybe ten thirty.”

  He nodded.

  “Your people,” he said.

  She looked at him. She held absolutely still.

  “Your people,” he said again. “Down there still,” he said. “Still looking.”

  She bowed her head. She placed her hand on his boot again. Her thin small shoulders shaking. After a moment she wiped her face and looked up again and said she would get him some water.

  She dragged the chain into the bathroom and collected the quarter-full bucket, the last of her water, and returned to the outer room, and stopped short, and set the bucket down, for she could see from there that he was dead.

  Outside, the wind blew in the pines. A flurry of snow seethed over the floor and settled alongside his leg. She looked behind her at the dark stove, the last small chunk of firewood next to it. Then she looked beyond him, out into what she could see of the world in the corridor of door and moonlight.

  “Come on if you’re coming,” she said, and stood holding the ax.

  60

  She’d never used one before but the shape of the handle and the weight of the head told her how it must be done and she took her stance over the chain, raised the ax as high as the ceiling would allow and with all her strength brought it down. Sparks leapt and the axhead twisted and the handle convulsed from her hands like something alive. The effort left her panting and dizzy and furious with her body. She bent and gathered the chain in her hands and found no sign of the blow and only a scrape of raw steel in one tarnished link, the link itself unharmed, and she understood at once a combination of truths: the chain was too strong, the ax too dull, her body too weak. In the air was an acrid, ferric smell, like the smoke of sparklers that burns in the nose on the Fourth of July.

  She took up the ax again and this time aligned herself over the bolt plate in the floor, over the half hoop that was conjoined with the final link of the chain, that perversely enduring union that had defied her every effort to break it. She raised the ax and brought it down and the axhead did not twist but merely rang out a flat note and bounced back into the air, having struck the face of the plate an inch from the hasp.

  Dizzily she raised the ax again and brought it down again and the blade glanced off the hasp but she held on. She knelt to feel the hasp and the link but they remained bound to each other as ever. She turned the ax and drew her thumb along the nicked and blunted edge. Despair rose in her and she fought it down. She looked at the door, the thick wreckage of it, and she looked at the floor around the bolt plate. Having swung the ax she now understood what it had taken to break through the door, and what it would take to do the same to the floor, and she knew she could never do it.

  Cold air spun about the room. Snow continued to drift in and collect at Billy’s leg, a climbing dune. She knelt there watching it, shivering.

  What are you doing? said the girl—the strong one, the one she thought had abandoned her.

  “I’m thinking.”

  I hope you’re thinking how you’d better stoke this fire and get in that sleeping bag.

  “Fuck that sleeping bag.”

  The girl said nothing.

  Caitlin held the ax, listening. Then she said: “Do you think he’s coming?”

  Who?

  “Either one.”

  The girl was a long time answering and Caitlin knew what she would say.

  I think what I’ve always thought. There’s no one coming. There’s only us.

  Crystals swam in the air and landed cool on her face. Billy’s keys where she’d left them on the floor glinted blue in the light. Follow his tracks, that’s all. Get to the car. That’s all. She remembered snowshoes, the deep powder and her pounding heart, the Monkey in pursuit and no fall, no fall . . . He had bagged it all up, snowshoes and boots and jacket and gloves, took it away without a word. Bad girl.

  She held the ax. Her heart clocking away the seconds, the minutes. Now that she’d let the faces of her family into her mind she could not get them out. Faces of the life before. And they were down there still, he said, still looking. Still looking and what will they find?

  She listened for the girl—listened for anything. But there was nothing. Wind. The snow whispering along the floorboards.

  She got to her feet and opened the stove gate and with the last length of firewood prodded the length that preceded it, now nothing more than a smoldering black bone of itself which at first touch fell into glowing red cubes. Flames arose and she placed the new wood carefully atop them and closed the gate incompletely so that the air would draw and the wood would burn more quickly and intensely. She set the bucket of water next to the stove and the ax next to that, and then she went to the cot and picked up a flannel boy’s shirt, once red now gone almost to black, and she put this on and buttoned it to her throat. Lastly she got down on her hands and knees and reached far under the cot until she felt what she was looking for and dragged them out. They were dusty and gray and shrunken, like creatures who’d crawled under there long ago and died together side by side. She took one in each hand and clopped them sole to sole and the sound and the feel of this nearly made her sob. She clopped them and the red dust of the trail and the gray dust of the years fell from them like snow.

  There were no cans of food or snack bars or child’s boxes of juice or anything at all on the larder shelves and she dippered her hand into the bucket and drank three cold handfuls of water.

  She looked at the man named Billy on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she took him by the ankles.

  61

  The way became more trail than road and before long they reached the place where the tire tracks dove down into the brush and one set of bootprints became two and they raised their Maglites and probed the g
ully with the beams, but the light struck the thick latticework of brush and went no farther. They switched off the torches and stood in silence, in moonlight.

  “Want me to go on down there, Sheriff?”

  “I guess not, Donny. We’ve got two men afoot now and we’d best see where they’ve gone to. Though by the looks of these tracks I’d say they’ve already got there.”

  The deputy sniffled and looked back down the way they’d come, and up to where they were going. “What do you suppose made him do a thing like this anyway, Sheriff?”

  “I quit even asking that question a long time ago, Donny.”

  They went on.

  The two sets of tracks progressed in tandem up the narrowing trail, one set landing wide of the other as if out of some compulsion, or superstition. As if one man were loathe to place his foot where the other’s had been.

  “There ain’t no mistaking which is which, is there, Sheriff.”

  “Let’s go quiet, Deputy.”

  They came around a bend and, seeing only more trail, more tracks, stopped to get their wind. Kinney wanted a cigarette but put that out of his mind.

  They’d turned to go on when a sound reached them, traveling in echo from up the mountain. A dull flat chock, as of an ax blow to solid wood. They stilled themselves and listened. Less than a minute later the sound came again and after that there was no more sound like it nor any sound at all. The deputy looked at the sheriff and the sheriff nodded, and they went on.

  The trail grew more difficult and Kinney yielded the lead to his deputy so that he himself might concentrate on the surrounding woods, listening for any single thing which was not of the woods. They’d not climbed another fifty yards before he reached and put a hand on the deputy’s shoulder and they halted.

  The deputy looked where the sheriff pointed and he saw the small flare of color deep in the monochrome woods, simmering and orange and

  geometrical—a doorway. And seeing it he immediately smelled woodsmoke, as if one could not exist without the other.