Resurrection Pass

by Kurt Anderson

  Ahead of him, something scraped against a spruce and limbs crackled. It sounded very high up, like a falling object crashing through the branches. At the same time, he could hear the sound of feet padding through the grass and brush at ground level, not thudding but swishing, the light tread of a hunter. No, Jake thought. Please.

  It came on.

  It was within thirty yards. He peered out through the latticework of branches and needles and saw nothing but blackness and the sawtooth horizon of treetops, and above that, the faint glow of the Milky Way. His breathing sounded very loud and he could not control it, could not stifle it without threatening to make his next breath all the louder. The woods crackled again, and a large spruce backlit by the starlight lurched forward and then back, the pointed tip bobbing back and forth. The wind sighed, and Jake grimaced at the low and fetid reek in the air. It was the scent of life, but on the ragged edge of decay—the smell of the valley, unmistakable even here, in his nest of pungent evergreens.

  Another spruce tipped forward, then another. It was moving in a straight line, the same direction he planned on following when darkness lifted, the one that would lead him to the Big Glutton River and then to Highbanks, a place he had not been in years. It would be far from a safe haven, but it would be where Rachel was and where his mother would be, too. He could not quite bring his mother’s face into focus, but he knew she would be older now and perhaps sadder.

  But Highbanks, most importantly, was civilization, a place where the chaos of the bush was held at bay. He thought of how the shape had seemed to recoil under the flashlight beam, had seemed to thrive—to grow, perhaps—when it was lost in the shadows of the blowdown.

  The brush crackled. Far in the distance a loon gave off its yodeling cry.

  It’s just Darius and Henry, he thought. Be quiet and let them pass. Your breathing isn’t as loud as you think. Just let them pass.

  His fists were curled into tight balls, pine needles and some twigs pressing into his palms. He felt them biting into his skin and tried to concentrate on the sensation, on the pain. Pain was okay.

  “Jake.”

  The voice came from what sounded like a high spot in one of the tallest trees. The wind had dropped as the night wore on, and the sound of the voice was throaty and musical, a rough and sighing timbre. He seemed to hear much more than his name in the voice; he heard a story, a promise of what could be.

  “We could have run. We could have run so far and so fast it would be like flying. We could have roamed for centuries, our sustenance coming from the burning dawns over a thousand smoking swamps, from the darkest of winter nights when trees crack from the cold and there seems to be no warmth left in the world save what we harbor in our own bodies. We will be there when the blood is spilled and eyes grow wide with terror—bird and hare and man—and we will rejoice in this, in all of this.”

  “Jake.”

  One moment it sounded like Henry, the next it sounded like Darius. And when it spoke his name for the third time it sounded like neither of them. Jake told himself that it was a trick of the air, that whoever had spoken must have turned away or covered his mouth with a hand. Because the third time, the voice sounded like something that might be coughed out of the mouth of a bear or a lion, his name bastardized by vocal chords not accustomed to human language.

  “Jaaaaake.”

  Three times, Jake thought, his mind going back to Sunday school and the lessons out of the Old Testament, when Samuel had repeatedly been called out by God in the night. Three times I called out for you.

  He was tempted—tempted to climb out of his sanctuary and just . . . go. There was something incredibly alluring in the call, something entangled with the way he had felt with his father when he was very young, when some of the mysteries of the great north woods had begun to reveal themselves. That was when he had begun to understand that there were secrets to be unlocked, and that unlocking them gave you entry into a sacred world that most would never even guess at, treasures that could not be measured in pelts or antlers alone. But those experiences had been pure, clean, in a way this journey would never be. He knew that.

  “No,” he murmured into the forest floor. “No.”

  Laughter hissed out of the woods, simultaneously mocking and disappointed. It was the disappointment that affected him, for whatever it was out there was not acting. It was truly sad to not have him with it. This was not because it needed him; it was, at its core, a creature of abject loneliness. It thrived on the loneliness, and nothing could accompany it for long, but it wanted a partner, someone to run with, if only for a while.

  The laughter faded. He waited to hear the thing move, to come toward him or continue on its way. But there was nothing, no sound at all. He waited, and the woods were quiet, quiet, not even the loon calling out again, nothing scurrying in the detritus of the forest floor, not even the buzz of some late-season insect which had weathered the cold front and now sought to fill its belly with hot blood. There was only silence, and on the air the smell of the valley, wafting in puffs and eddies, hinting at a presence that might still be there . . . or that might have departed, leaving only this residue of stink behind.

  He lay under the spruce for what seemed like hours and may have been. He did not crane his head upward to stare at the heavens, attempting to try to track the time by the cartwheeling constellations. Neither did he look toward the east for sunrise. He waited, he breathed. From time to time he said no, although his name was not called out again.

  Some interminable time later the darkness began to lift. As the first gray light filtered through the branches around and above him, he heard something move off through the woods. It moved quickly and in a straight line, due west. As soon as the footsteps faded the birds began to sing around him, the chickadees and then the crows, and finally, just when it was light enough for Jake to move, the jays began to vocalize.

  He climbed out from underneath the spruce and brushed the needles from his clothes. He had only the roughest idea where he was, but the sky was clear and the sun was almost up. All he had to do was head southwest and he would find the river, and then he would go upstream or downstream to the Braids. Somewhere along the line he would pick up Rachel’s track.

  He headed west. The other had passed a bit to his north, and after paralleling that trail for a while, after the sun had risen completely above the horizon, he cut to his right to intercept the trail. After a few minutes he saw the dark side of an overturned leaf on the ground. He looked around him in all directions and knelt, studying the leaf and the exposed soil it had covered. To the west he could see more overturned leaves, nearly impossible to see except here, at ground level. Whatever had passed was dragging its feet slightly, as though injured. It was not Rachel’s track.

  He stood undecided in the gray morning woods. After a moment, he started down the trail of overturned leaves, occasionally spotting a sliding footprint on the forest floor. For all the creature’s sloppy footwork, it was moving in a straight line. After a while Jake began to trot, the fresh pain from his cuts a welcome distraction from the thought pounding in the front of his mind, the question that returned time and time again.

  What was he following?

  In an hour, he had not caught sight of anything save a few squirrels, chattering at him from high in the spruces. Then he crossed a small gully, and on the top of the other side he saw a body lying flat on the ground next to a decaying log. The person had fallen in such a way that Jake knew he was dead. He knelt beside the corpse and turned it over. Henry’s milky eyes stared vacantly up to the pines. There were a few small red ants crawling across his face, and Jake wiped these away with the pads of his thumbs. Henry looked shrunken, and his fingernails and his hair looked much longer, as though he had been a corpse for weeks instead of hours. There was some kind of horrible wound in his abdomen, and his shirt was plastered with black blood. A light gray growth had spread across one of his arms, and Jake studied this for a moment but did not touch it.

>   He looked around and saw that the trail of shuffling feet ended here. Unlike Jaimie’s, Henry’s boots were intact, although soaked through and plastered with mud and leaves, the sign of a man who has stumbled, rather than walked, for miles through the woods. He was just a host, Jake thought. Old and weak, with a bad heart. It didn’t need him, not once Darius joined up.

  That had been part of the invitation. You didn’t just run with it, you ran for it, like Jaimie, careening around the valley, her lungs full of its foulness. Running and running, until your feet fell from your legs. But Henry hadn’t been able to run.

  He stood. The trail did not end here. A broken twig was pressed into a nearby depression of decaying leaves, as though someone had knelt here before Jake, perhaps to lay Henry down, or to take something from him. Jake rose and walked in a circle, expanding outward in an ever-increasing spiral. He had almost given up when he saw a flattened goldenrod, twenty feet from Henry’s body. He knelt next to it. Whatever had broken the goldenrod stem had left a large depression, too big for a footprint, although to Jake that’s what it looked like. Thirty feet ahead of it was the only other sign: a spray of needles had fallen from a large spruce. There was a broken limb halfway up the tree.

  Jake looked from the ground to the tree and back to the ground. Then he went back to Henry’s body and began to unlace his boots.

  Jake’s pants were still in the blowdown, stuffed with leaves to replicate his legs, the final temptation that had led Weasel into the trap. He pulled Henry’s pants loose after his boots and stepped into them. The pants were a good fit, as were the boots. The pants were smeared with mud and blood, and the boot leather had been soaked by Henry’s passage through the woods. Jake took a few steps, wincing, his feet rebelling against this new pressure.

  “Pain is okay,” he said aloud, his voice shocking in the stillness. “But it’s getting pretty damn old.”

  He cinched Henry’s belt tight. There was a slight bulge in the side of a pantleg, and Jake reached into the front pocket and withdrew a small jackknife, identical to the one Jake had used as a trapper. There was a small nick near the base of the blade. He remembered holding the edge of a blade—this blade—to the throat of his stepfather, the same nick caked with gore from skinning muskrats. He remembered Coop’s mewling protests, the thick funky odor of the muskrat blood drying on the knife blade, how Coop’s veins throbbed just below the edge of the knife, only a few centimeters of thin air between skin and steel.

  You’ve come full circle, Jake thought, sliding the knife back into his pocket. You and me both.

  He started toward Highbanks. It was eight o’clock in the morning.

  * * *

  He reached the river in the early afternoon and made his way down the Braids. The sun had come up, briefly warming him, and then clouds had come scudding in from the west, and he knew it would rain again soon. The mudflats that normally ran along the riverbank were covered by the water. There were no tracks of any kind. The river was swollen, and Jake stood looking at it, wondering if Rachel had really swum this cold river alone and gone up the other side. The alternative was that she had missed it and was lost somewhere behind him.

  He turned and walked back upriver. The Braids were three quarters of a mile in length, and by the time he had reached the upper end, the river had risen another inch. All of the rain from the day before was just now reaching the larger rivers, and they would continue to climb until all of the small sandbars and islands would be covered with water, until the rapids downstream would sound like thunder.

  “Rachel.” He had meant to shout it, but his voice came out a hoarse whisper. He breathed in deeply and tried again. “Rachel!”

  The sound of the river swallowed her name. He yelled twice more and waited for a return call, but there was nothing. After a few minutes, he knelt down and started to unlace Henry’s boots. Then he retied them and stepped into the river. He had had enough of bare feet.

  The water was icy. It pressed into his myriad wounds, his breath shortening with every step. It was deeper than he thought, and soon he was swimming again, his boots kicking in the heavy current. He very nearly missed the first sandbar, entering the calmer water of its downstream eddy just in time to avoid being swept into the next braid. He stood and wiped the water from his eyes, panting. The next island was almost directly across from him, and he walked to the upper end of his current sandbar, then waded upstream at a quartering angle until the current was to his waist. Then he pushed off, swimming hard for the island. He reached it at the middle of its length. He crossed the island and repeated, his breath coming in ragged gasps by the time he crawled up the far bank.

  He sat in the mud of the riverbank. It was only eight miles to Highbanks, and for the first time he wondered what he would do when he reached it, what warnings he would give that might be heeded.

  He pressed a finger against one side of his nose and blew, then repeated the process, clearing his nostrils of river water. It didn’t matter. Rachel, when he found her, would need no convincing. His mother . . . well.

  Concentrate, Jake.

  He climbed up the bank and made his way through the alder thicket that flanked the western edge of the river. The ground grew higher, and soon the alder swamp gave way to poplar highlands. There was a disturbance in the higher ground, a long scrape of upended leaves, the dark forest loam forming a ragged scar on the earth. He stood at the edge of the disturbance, dripping river water from his tattered clothes. He squatted on his knees and studied the sharp edges of the smaller boot heels and the other imprints, larger, from which it was impossible to discern shape or size or direction, as amorphous as the bush around him and the shifting clouds above him. The tracks became somewhat clearer at the end of the disturbance, leading toward Highbanks in great leaping strides.

  Jake stood. There was a single hair caught in a fold of bark at the base of one of the poplars, an ashy-blond hair ten inches long. He looked at the hair but did not remove it from the tree trunk.

  It was only a hair. The rest of her was somewhere up ahead.

  Chapter 17

  When Jake reached Highbanks it was dusk, and the first houses he passed were dark: rectangular windows limned with aluminum frames, the metal catching the glow of the rising moon, the panes black. To Jake, the village had a sense of being not only vacant but abandoned, and long-abandoned at that. The trail in the woods had petered out a mile back, fading as the light in the woods grew dim. He strode up to the first trailer house and pounded on the thin door.

  In the silence that ensued he heard some faraway thudding, barely audible—felt it more than heard it. It was a sound he mistook for his own heart, and he was surprised to hear it beating so slowly. He pressed a thumb to his wrist and found the throb; his pulse was still hammering along, from the exertion of his final push to Highbanks and the knowledge that the end of the trail was very, very close. He cocked his head, the thudding finally making sense: they were drums, coming from the other side of town.

  He stepped down from the porch. There were other houses in sight, two trailers on the left. Farther down, on the right side of the road, was a stick-built cabin, the typical A-frame construction used to ward off snow buildup on the roof. It looked even shabbier than the aging trailer houses. It had been his childhood home, before they had sold it and moved in with Coop.

  He started trotting down the main road. It was just a dirt road mixed with some coarse gravel, but it felt like a superhighway after all his trudging through the underbrush. He reached the center of the village, stopping for a moment to rip one of the posters tacked to the side of the community center building free. The flyer was for the First Dance, Highbanks’ annual powwow, the time when all the parents from miles around brought their children in for their first taste of bear meat, their first hesitant steps in the packed earth around the central fire. It was tonight, Jake realized—the biggest festival of the year, the time to celebrate the end of the growing season, the beginning of the killing season.
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br />   And as it had since he had crossed the Braids, the question—the Question—returned. Not what to do when he found Darius. That was simple—he would finish the job he had started the night before. If he still could.

  Because that was the Question—How can you kill what’s already dead?

  He let the flyer drop from his hands, the sound of the drums now making perfect sense. He thought about Henry’s story about how the people had ended the plague of cannibalism and madness more than a century earlier, the story of how they had put the old monster to sleep. Now that monster was locked in Darius’s addled mind, his brain and body infested with the poisonous, half-dead presence trapped for decades in the soils beneath Resurrection Valley.

  And now the great wanderer had found a medium. But it wasn’t a complete override of Darius, Jake realized. Whatever the underlying mechanism—the distillation of violent instincts in the promethium, hopping from an underground fungus to one person, then the next, or a possession from the old demon of the north woods—it did not discard what was there. It took what was bad and used it. Amplified it. Jake glanced around, looking for a car or an ATV he might commandeer, but all the rigs in Highbanks, large and small, would be parked at the dancing ground. The headlights would be turned on to keep the area well lit, to keep the toddlers from wandering off into the woods. Jake ran down the road, pausing when someone shuffled out from a building ahead of him.

  “Hey!” he called out. “Hey!”

  The person continued on, not even sparing him a backward glance. Jake ran forward, calling out as he went. Still the figure shuffled along, neck bent and shoulders bowed, wrapped in a long dark green cloak. Jake grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around, an old man, his eyes widening in shock. There was an ancient, yellowed hearing aid in his ear. He looked to be full-blooded Cree and very old, his face filled with multiple and finely-formed lines, his eyes rheumy. He looked familiar but Jake couldn’t place him, a man who would have been advanced in years when Jake left here, decades ago.