Hark! the Herald Angels Scream

by Hark! the Herald Angels Scream (retail) (epub)

  One entire wall of the room was lined with shelving, and on those shelves were hundreds of model reindeer, all of them similar to the gift he held in his hand. The man scanned along the shelves, and he knew that every one had been made by Old Bob. He knew also that he had placed each gift here, a safe place to leave it, protecting them all from the dangers outside.

  “Thank you, Old Bob,” the man said, and he wondered what the creature’s true name was. If he was a younger, fitter man, perhaps he might remember, but even then he doubted it. All that was so long ago. There were at least three hundred model reindeer on the shelves, maybe more.

  He moved slowly forward, chose his place, and put the model down. That’s another year gone by, he thought. Same again next year. And the year after. And…

  “And forever,” the man said, shrugging his heavy old red jacket tight. His vision filling with eternity, he closed his eyes, readying himself for their journey back into the dead, cold world.

  HIKING THROUGH

  MICHAEL KORYTA

  Anytime you end up in trouble in the night woods with snow falling and a cold wind blowing, it was probably a trip that started in the sun. It might be hard to remember by then, but I’m convinced it’s true. Stories like that don’t start in the dark.

  They just end there.

  What I saw on Christmas Eve—or maybe it was Christmas morning by then, because time got hazy on me there in the snow and the dark—actually began on a sunlit summer day. I was working maintenance for a camp in western Maine and training for my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, my last gasp at putting off adulthood for one more year. There were plenty of people looking at me sideways by then, because I was five years out of Bowdoin and hadn’t found anything approaching full-time work. But I knew plenty of twenty-seven-year-old slack-asses with Bowdoin diplomas on their walls and their feet up on coffee tables, checking their social media feeds and writing wry, disaffected posts about the state of the world while their trust funds kicked over solid monthly payments. At least I was swinging a hammer. That’s better, right? Unambitious, maybe, but not coasting, not freeloading. Just getting by.

  At least that’s what you tell yourself until one of your Bowdoin buddies invests those trust-fund dollars into a start-up that’s making a fucking water filter or some shit and they end up grossing a billion dollars and saving lives in Sudan. Then the hammer doesn’t feel quite so pure, and you remember the way the world really works—it’s money, honey, we all know that—and saying that you don’t need it is just a haughty way to defend laziness. I don’t care for material possessions; I am one with the wilderness.

  But, hey, call it what you want, that summer I didn’t care much for material possessions and I was working hard on being one with the wilderness. I pulled four-day shifts, then had a three-day weekend, and each weekend, rain or shine, black flies or mosquitoes, found me on the trail. I was trying to get to the point where I could do fifteen miles per day easily. My plan was to walk the Appalachian Trail in reverse, leaving Maine in the early fall and heading south. Most people who walk the whole two-thousand-mile show do it the other way, arriving at Mount Katahdin weary and spiritual, approaching the place like pilgrims. Most of us probably think we are just that, to be honest. People don’t hike the A.T. just to get away. They’re looking for something.

  It was June and there were still traces of snow in some of the shadowed rocks when I first heard about the witch. It was a dumb story, but I filed it away, because by nature I’m not the most extroverted guy and on the trail you’re always meeting strangers, so you need material to break the ice, or at least I do. The story about the witch was a good one, to my mind, because you could tell it any way you wanted to; you could adjust for the audience. You could make it campy and cheesy and go for the laughs, or you could bring in the tragic truth of Geraldine Largay, who’d died just off the trail in the Maine woods, surviving for a month while searchers combed the area but never found her. A couple years later, they found her body in a tent, and journals indicating just how long she’d survived. Everyone who walked the A.T. in Maine knew about Geraldine Largay, which meant you could spin the witch story into a commentary on the types of assholes who would create a story like that in the wake of a tragedy. You see what I mean? It was a flexible story. Versatile. And with the right crowd on the right night, all the necessary elements present, you could make it scary. Yeah, I was pretty sure of that. There was a way to spin it for chills.

  The first place I heard it told was at one of the lean-tos just north of the New Hampshire border. It was a Saturday night and I’d covered twenty-six miles in two days and I was bone tired. Maine is rugged. A lot of people don’t believe that, particularly your southwestern hombres who ration water and your Boulder microbrew bros who think altitude is all that matters, and God forbid those people who fly somewhere exotic just to walk briefly around with their backpacks on, out in Argentina or Thailand or whatever. If you say “Maine is rugged” to those types, you’ll get an eye roll, I guarantee you. Because it seems too settled in their mind’s eye, a part of the friggin’ East Coast, and what is lamer and less rugged than the East Coast? They’ll grant you that it’s cold, they’ll nod about the tough winters, but what they won’t truly believe is how hard the hiking is. Not enough altitude, not enough elevation change, whatever. But before you roll your eyes, you ought to look at a map. Go ahead, pull up a map of Maine.

  Part of the East Coast, are we? Well, check out that Atlantic Seaboard, my friend. We’re jutting way up and out there, aren’t we? Farther from New York City than you remembered. Farther from Boston, even. And what about all those blank spaces? So many of them on a simple map, not so much as a single town in an entire quadrant, or series of quadrants. Go ahead, scroll, zoom in, do what you’d like—that map is staying blank. Makes Wyoming look populated; makes Nebraska look downright cosmopolitan. Then remind yourself that this state had numerous settlements as early as the 1600s, centuries before Lewis and Clark set out, centuries before the California gold rush…so why isn’t that Maine map filled in? Why are all the towns huddled along the coast like they’re clinging to the rocks, and why aren’t there any highways at all in the northwestern portion of the state? There’s just the one interstate, and 95 starts on the East Coast, heads north, and then bends back east like it’s running away from something, like it’s in a hurry to get to New Brunswick—and who in the hell was ever in a hurry to get to New Brunswick? On the other side of 95, the western side, you’ll see there’s not a whole lot going on in our quaint, summer-people state. They’ve had four hundred years to turn this particular paradise into a parking lot, and they’ve done a damn good job of that work in most of the country already. So why hasn’t it happened in Maine?

  I already said the word: rugged. It’s no joke. You think about all that the next time someone tells you that Maine is rough country, dangerous country, and you’re ready to roll your eyes. You think about how early the Europeans found their way here, and then about all those blank spaces, and ask yourself why they’ve stayed so blank for so many years.

  Twenty-six miles in two days in Maine is fucking earned, you’d better believe that. I was in good shape and had good boots and an ultralight pack, but the night I came to that lean-to where a group from Tennessee already had a fire going, I was sporting blisters and bruises and I was punch-drunk tired. The group from Tennessee had just crossed over into the state. Not thru-hikers, but summer hikers, working slowly and patiently from New Hampshire and toward Baxter State Park, a very slender cut of the A.T., but a difficult one. None of them had ever been to Maine before, and since I was genuine local product, born in Bangor, educated at Bowdoin, and currently swinging my hammer in Rangeley, I was a bona fide tour guide as far as they were concerned. They had the questions you’re used to from summer people if you grew up here—how cold is the winter, how much do we pay for lobster rolls, who has the best lobster roll, have you seen a moos
e, have you eaten a moose, have you seen a moose eating a lobster roll, and if so, how much did the moose pay for it?

  All of this Q&A was easy enough for conversation and surely made me feel better about enjoying the warmth of their fire and sharing in the dehydrated pasta and smoked sausage they offered. I had my own food in my pack, of course, but they were offering, and, hell, I was the state’s official welcoming committee on this night.

  And on that night, like pretty much all nights when hikers met on the Appalachian Trail in Maine in the summer of 2016, the conversation found its way to Geraldine Largay.

  Because that was the year they’d found her bones.

  Geraldine’s story had given the whole country chills. You didn’t need to have ever lifted a backpack to your shoulders for that one to make you shudder. She’d been walking the A.T. with a friend for a couple months, and then the friend bailed out for a family emergency, and Geraldine decided to keep at it. She did not have a compass, and she was scared of two things: being alone and being in the dark.

  A few hours after leaving a lean-to much like the one the Tennessee contingent and I were enjoying, she left the trail for a bathroom break.

  She never made her way back to it. She was alone in the dark by sundown.

  In the month she survived, she never saw another soul, so far as anyone knows.

  The search for Geraldine Largay was the largest and most expensive in the history of the Maine Warden Service. They canvassed the woods, sent up choppers, brought out bloodhounds. Everything you could think of to do in a search, they did that and brought a plus-one to the party, and when they found her body three years later, she was less than two miles off the trail. Less than two miles, and still they hadn’t been able to find her, and she’d never heard the searchers.

  Remember what I said about rugged country?

  When they called off the search, the rumor mill was jammed up with theories, but the professional opinion was that she’d have died within a week in those conditions. Then they found her body, spring of 2017, and found her journal, which told the world she’d approached death with stronger spirit and more grace than most of us could hope for—and that she’d survived alone in the woods for nearly a month.

  There were five in the group from Tennessee, three girls and two guys, and it was—inevitably and indubitably—one of the guys who brought up the witch. His name was John and he had an acoustic guitar with strings that glimmered near-silver in the firelight and I’d been wary of him from the first, because there’s nothing scarier at a campfire than an amateur armed with an acoustic guitar. All this time I’d been afraid he was going to play something, probably an off-key Neil Young or Dylan cover to start, and then, God save us, he’d say, “I actually have a few of my own if anyone wants to hear them…” and I’d start rethinking my hiatus from marijuana in one hell of a hurry.

  Instead, he never so much as glanced at the guitar, just said, “Some of the people we met hiking south? They said there are legends about a witch up near here. An old woman alone. Always alone, and always walking. They say she doesn’t talk, but just keeps on hiking through, even if you scream in her face. You can do anything, but she doesn’t break stride. She’s an older woman, gray-haired, with a single hiking stick, nothing modern and fiberglass or whatever but more like something carved out of an old dead tree, and she’ll look at you as if she wants help, but if you ask what she needs or try to talk to her, she won’t stop, won’t so much as slow. It’s like she can’t stop walking, you know? She wants help, or wants guidance, maybe, but she can’t stop long enough to find it.”

  The girl closest to him, a pretty brunette named Liz, made a sour face and slid a few inches away, as if physically repulsed.

  “That’s an awful thing to make fun of,” she said. “What that poor woman went through, she deserves better than that.”

  “Well, to be fair to the people who told us about it, nobody was pretending that it’s Geraldine’s ghost or anything like that,” John said. “At least not in the group we talked to. I agree, that would be pretty terrible.”

  “Talking about an old woman walking around lost and looking for the trail, after what happened with Geraldine, is nothing but a cruel child’s joke,” Liz said, unconvinced.

  John nodded, as if in total agreement with her, though I think he was just trying to preserve notions that he might not have to solo in his sleeping bag that night. So that was both the first time I heard the story, and the first way I understood how it could be told, how it could land with one kind of audience. Isn’t this awful, that was one option. Then John pivoted nicely and promptly showed me the second option.

  “Tell you what I think,” he said. “Do you remember the guy that had the camera?”

  The others in the group nodded.

  “You saw his goatee, you heard him talking about PBR like it was the nectar of the gods. He couldn’t just say ‘Man, I want a beer,’ he had to say ‘Man, I want a PBR so damn bad.’ And nobody has ever wanted a PBR that bad. It is not a beer associated with passionate desires, and I can speak with full knowledge on this matter. Not once in history has anyone done anything but settle for a PBR.”

  That drew some smiles, and he’d managed to shift Liz’s mood back toward the warm side, which I think was his intent.

  “Now,” John said, “there is the hipster exception, of course. The kind who find that pisswater beer worthy of ten or twelve dollars a can. That goatee, and that apparently unquenchable thirst for a PBR leads a wise man like me to suspect that he was, in fact, a hipster—perhaps from Park Slope but more likely an imposter from someplace more Cincinnati or Indianapolis in nature, and a wise man like me further observed that he was not only telling stories about a witch but carrying a camera. So I observe all of these things and put them together for my deductions, and do you know what I fear?”

  The second guy in the group was a big boy named Wade, one of the fatter men I’d ever seen on the trail, and he had a rich, deep voice like a blues singer. He said, “Heaven help us, John, you fear we have an aspiring filmmaker on the trail—and even worse, one who has not yet seen Blair Witch, or Blair Witch 2.”

  It wasn’t a great line, but his delivery, in that mellifluous bass voice, somehow sold it, and suddenly we were all laughing our asses off like it had been a true howler of a joke. It’s not uncommon; I’ve never laughed as hard in my life as I have around a campfire. Every emotion is heightened at night in the woods, but none more than humor.

  Well…maybe fear. Sure, fear runs high, and that’s probably why the humor does, too. We all laugh harder around a campfire, because we don’t want to acknowledge that some part of us is deeply concerned about what’s out there just beyond the reach of the firelight.

  But that night it was humor that won, and the big boy with the B. B. King voice had given us the giggles and it took a while for them to taper off, with everyone throwing in a line or two of their own, either imitating this hipster with the camera giving art direction or quoting lines from Blair Witch, or, at its most effective, blending the two together, and we all had a hell of a laugh.

  So that was the second way I saw how the story of the witch could be told. It could be offered as something awful and cruel, a real woman’s tragedy used for sport, an example of the very type of human behavior that you’d come to the trail to escape, or it could be parody material, done for laughs. I thought then, as I enjoyed their company and considered my many months among strangers once I set out on my thru-hike, that it was going to be a useful story. You’d have to assess the crowd, but it would work with either the serious types or the slapstick types.

  Of course, I hadn’t heard the third version, yet. I had not heard anyone go for the goose bumps.

  In fact, I don’t think I even considered the option that night. In the campfire light, surrounded by friendly people, with sure knowledge of where I was and with only four mil
es left to do in the morning before I was out of the woods, I don’t think fear ever even entered my mind.

  That happened later, when I was alone.

  I didn’t put so much as a mile of my thru-hike on the board that fall. Don’t worry, it wasn’t because I got a job—it was because I fell in love.

  In late summer, a girl from Florida joined the staff at the camp in Rangeley. I’d had instant crushes before—shit, who hasn’t?—but this one, this was more than a crush. The sight of Gina Garcia seemed to envelop me, soak through my skin, and crawl through my bones. She was five feet nine inches of sculpted Cuban beauty, with hair that shone like oil on water and a smile that reduced me to a stuttering fool.

  And, for some reason, she saw past that. For some reason, Gina Garcia was willing to give me a chance, and my dreams of long weeks on the Appalachian Trail vanished in a blink. The idea of being anywhere other than Gina’s side for hours, let alone months, suddenly seemed laughable. What thoughts of the future I did have were all wrapped up in what we could be, and what she wanted, but truthfully I didn’t think much about the future at all. I’d never been so content with the present.

  Except when it came to the idea of summer ending, and Gina leaving. That made me think of the future. And it scared me more than any horror story ever had, or could. I started pricing apartments in Fort Lauderdale, where she lived, and scouring job sites online, looking for anything that could keep me close to her. Then, on Labor Day weekend, laying on a blanket beneath the pines and a million stunning stars, Gina Garcia told me that she’d fallen in love with Maine in the way she’d fallen in love with me, that because I was in Maine, she would be in Maine.

  And for three months, she was. For three months, it was as good as life can get when you’re twenty-seven. I was with a gorgeous, intelligent girl, in a beautiful place, and we had enough money to get by with the kind of life we wanted. For three months, I couldn’t have imagined being any happier.