by Jeffrey Ford
It took all of his remaining energy to build another fire, and he heaped on their entire store of kindling and branches so that he would not have to tend it through the night. With his hunting cloak and mittens still on, he wrapped himself in the blanket and passed out by the shaft at the back of the cave. He slept hard, without dreaming, for what seemed an entire day, before waking to the sound of his own voice, shouting. Immediately, he fell back to sleep again.
He came to, late in the morning, but of which day he wasn’t sure. His leg and arm muscles ached fiercely, but he was pleased to find that all of his toes and fingers had survived exposure to the storm. Wood approached and he put his arms around the dog.
“Venison, for you,” he said, and laughed at the thought of having beaten the Beyond one more time.
Passing the cooling embers of the fire, he walked through the entrance of the cave and into the day. The sky told him that snow would fall again before night. He dropped to his knees and began digging through the ice-crusted white in order to uncover the meat he had hastily buried. The lack of tracks indicated his kill had been safe from scavengers. After digging to the frozen earth in one spot, he found it wasn’t there, and realized he had misjudged the hiding place. He set to digging in another spot a few feet away. Again, nothing was revealed. Frantically, he worked in spot after spot with twice the vigor. An hour later, the entire area of a six-yard arc in front of the cave mouth had been exhumed. Throughout the entire excavation, he found not a single drop of blood, not a single hair from the hide that would have covered one side of each steak.
Cley cursed angrily. The dog came out of the cave and stood in front of him, but turned to the side, looking out of the corner of his eye.
“Did we not kill a huge buck last night?” he asked Wood.
The dog didn’t move.
He thought back to the scene in the moonlit clearing—the shadow of the creature, its breath turned to steam, the perfect accuracy of his shots, the sound of its last breath when he cut its throat. Reaching down into his boot, he retrieved the stone blade and inspected it for any evidence of a recent kill. It was spotless.
From all through the forest came the sound of branches cracking beneath the newly fallen snow—the sound of the Beyond, laughing.
Wood recovered fully from his wound, though it left a jagged scar across his chest. The days came and went with a lethargic monotony—tending the fire, hunting, sitting through long hours in the cave, staring out at a perfectly white world. Wild imagination was more abundant than food, and the companions’ diet consisted of hunger occasionally punctuated by a thin rabbit haunch and snow soup or a geeble stew that when thoroughly cooked was no more than fat pudding. Now and then they dined on roots or, if luck was with them, a large crow. In addition to daydreaming and not eating, they spent their time reading the nameless book of the soul. The tome had lost all meaning for Cley, but he continued with it, as it was the closest thing he had to a human conversation. Each night, the dog took its weight in his jaws and carried it over to the hunter. Wood had grown dependent on the whispered droning of the words in order to fall asleep.
After the dog dozed off, Cley sometimes took the green veil from his pack, rolled it into a ball, and held it out in front of him in the palm of his hand. Occasionally, he was so enchanted by the tattered scrap of material that he forgot to tend the fire. These eruptions of emotion, of memory, were like tiny islands in the overwhelming sea of sun-starved boredom that was the winter. It was repetition and mundane ritual that kept them alive. They partook of these with a stoic determination that eschewed even the vaguest desire for spring.
Cley opened his eyes and looked to the cave’s mouth to catch a glimpse of the weather, but all he could make out was a dim, blue glow. The rest of the den was cast in deep shadow. A wall of ice had formed, separating them from the world. It seemed impossible that so much snow could have fallen in a six-hour period. The fire had gone out, and ice was beginning to form along the walls where the opening had been. He took his knife in hand and attacked the frozen boundary, chipping away in hopes that it was merely a thin crust, on the other side of which he would find soft snow.
After an hour of hard work, it became clear that the knife was useless. All he had to show for his effort was an indentation the size of a fist. It was obvious that the temperature outside had plummeted below anything they had yet experienced. He turned his head and put his ear to the frozen barrier. Somewhere, far away, as if in another world, he heard the fierce cry of the storm blowing through the forest.
“Buried alive,” he said to Wood as he slid the knife back into his boot. The dog walked over and stood next to him.
He considered lighting a fire in an attempt to melt the smooth blue wall but realized that if it did not melt fast enough, he and the dog would be suffocated by the smoke. He entertained the possibility of waiting until the storm ended, hoping the sun would thaw the obstruction. That could take days, though, and they had nothing to eat but a few scraps of cooked rabbit and a handful of wild sweet potatoes, already beginning to rot.
Going to his pack, he retrieved a candle and lit it. The glow of the flame pushed the dark into the corners and alleviated the grave nature of the situation for a few moments. He let a pool of wax drip onto the floor and fixed the candle in it. With legs crossed, he sat back against the rock wall and tried to concentrate while Wood paced at the entrance, growling at the ice.
He knew he did not want to wait the storm out. There were no guarantees that the sun would free them before they starved to death. Besides, he imagined that the wait would be so boring, he might be forced to shoot himself. Thoughts of the rifle brought to mind a bizarre scheme that entailed his emptying the remaining bullets of their powder and creating a bomb with which to explode a passage to freedom. There were only a dozen bullets, though, and an image of his blowing his own hand off quickly followed. Desperation began to set in. The safe haven of the cave had become a prison that would soon become a tomb. He yelled angrily at Wood to stop pacing, and the dog lifted his leg and urinated on the ice.
“Nice work,” said Cley, and Wood began pacing again.
Although the candle generated light, it offered no warmth. Dressed only in his overalls and flannel shirt, Cley moved back toward the shaft to catch more of its subtle warmth. Now that the normal egress was cut off, he began to think more keenly of that dark aperture that led down into the hill. The hole, though narrow, was still large enough to accommodate the width of his body with a few good inches on either side. He leaned toward the tunnel, trying to peer into the darkness, which revealed nothing, and wondered if it connected to another opening in the hill or a sheer drop to the center of the earth.
His decision was made when Wood carried the book over and dropped it at his feet. The dog lay down and prepared for the long wait he now somehow understood was before them.
“No thanks,” said Cley. “I’ll take the shaft.”
He got a box of matches and another candle from the pack and put them in his pocket. Then he tore the lit candle off the floor. Before crawling forward into the darkness, he looked back and emphatically told the dog to stay put. He took a few deep breaths as if about to dive under water, then inched slowly forward, the flame flickering in the warm breeze that moved up around him.
Five yards farther in and the tunnel narrowed even more. He was forced to lie on his stomach in order to proceed. The shaft pitched downward at a forty-five-degree angle, and from what little he was able to see ahead, it seemed to continue that way for quite a distance. If it didn’t open up and present a place where he could turn around, it would be difficult wriggling up that slope backward. He decided to go on a few more yards. Moving like a snake, he continued as the walls of the tunnel closed in around him.
He stopped to rest and noticed how warm it was in the shaft—a pleasant place simply to lay his head down and sleep. Then he remembered this was exactly what the winter wind had told him the night he had been lost in the storm. Before h
e began to move again, he heard something up ahead—water dripping or loose pebbles tumbling. Suddenly, Wood was behind him, barking. The candle guttered in a strong gust from below, and everything went black. The dog panicked and tried to scrabble past Cley, unknowingly clawing the hunter’s legs.
“Easy, easy,” he called out to Wood, and lunged forward, trying to escape the frantic dog. In doing so, he moved himself out over an unseen ledge and the two of them fell. Cley screamed, thinking he was headed for a mile-long descent, but his cry was abruptly cut off when he hit solid rock five feet below. He landed on his side, smashing his elbow, and the wind was knocked out of him. Wood came down on top of him, and then sprung off unharmed. The hunter rolled on the hard rock, working to catch his breath.
It was pitch-black, but, even in his distress, Cley noticed that the sound Wood’s nails made against the rock echoed out, indicating they had stumbled onto another large chamber. He rolled himself to a sitting position and dug the matches out of his pocket. Sparking a match to life, he lit the candle he had been able to hold on to through the misadventure. The flame revealed what he had suspected: another cave, larger than the one above, and at the far end of it a tunnel of such size that he might enter it standing upright. Cley noticed that the warm breeze, which heated his own rock apartment above, was emanating from down the corridor that led farther into the hill. He started slowly forward, holding the candle out in front at arm’s length, while Wood followed close behind.
The tunnel took a wide turn, and as they followed its curve, a blast of warm air extinguished the candle again. Cley cursed out loud, then noticed that there was another light source somewhere in front of him. Stumbling forward, using the rock wall for support, he finally stepped out of the passage and into a small chamber bathed in a yellow-green light.
At first, he thought it must be the sunlight streaming through a hole in the ceiling. The glow came not from above, though, but from below—an underground pool that generated its own fluorescence. The cave rippled with brightness from the water. The swirling glow was fantastic enough, but on closer inspection he saw that the walls had been decorated with drawings done in charcoal and a thick red paint possibly made of clay. Stylized images of men and women, animals, and strange humanoid creatures with fishlike heads filled the chamber. Here and there someone had left red handprints.
“What do you say to this?” Cley asked Wood, then looked around to see where the dog had gone. He whistled in order to locate him, and a bark answered from off to the right. Moving around a low wall of rock, he stepped into yet another small chamber. The glow from the strange waters did not extend to this new area, so he used another match and relit the candle.
The gleam of the flame was reflected in Wood’s eyes. The dog was sitting upright amidst the remains of what appeared to be six or seven human bodies. There were dried flower petals and fragments of pottery scattered among these bones. It was obvious from the small, delicate nature of one skull and rib cage that an infant lay among the dead. Another of the skeletons showed evidence of a type of deformity—a vestigial fishtail protruding off the end of a perfectly preserved spinal column.
Set off a foot or two from the others were the remains of what obviously had been a woman whose long black hair had survived the ravages of time. The luxuriant tresses stretched out more than four feet from the skull, which still retained a large portion of withered flesh. She wore a necklace of white beads made from shells, and at the end there was a small leather pouch. The walls in this chamber were decorated with spiraled images of plants and vines and blossoms.
Standing in silence, Cley wondered how long they had lain, undisturbed in this secret place. “What lives did they live?” he asked himself, and felt the breeze of centuries passing, years turning to dust. Then, in an eyeblink his reverie became fear, and he was frantic to escape the underground for daylight.
“Let’s go,” he said to Wood, noticing another smaller tunnel at the end of the burial chamber. The current of warm air flowed from it, passing around him. Before leaving, he knelt and worked to remove the woman’s beads over her skull. As he tried to free them, her hair fell across the back of his hand, and the touch sent a wave of revulsion coursing through him. He pulled away with the necklace in his hand, and the sudden motion severed the fragile neck. The jaw came unhinged and dropped open. Her brittle ribs cracked, sounding to him like whispered gasps of pain. With the prize tightly clutched in his left hand and the candle in his right, he fled forward into the next natural corridor.
Wood grabbed Cley by his right pant leg just in time to prevent him from falling headlong into an almost perfectly round hole in the middle of the dark path. The toes of the hunter’s boots were already out over the abyss. A blast of warm air rose from far below and lifted Cley’s hair. He took a step back. Miraculously, the candle remained lit. This was the source of the tropical current that had kept their own cave temperate through the worst of the winter.
Both Wood and Cley vaulted the opening in the rock floor with ease. The passage continued on, twisting and turning and widening until it eventually broke clear into a cave with a tall, broad entrance that looked out on the day. From where they stood at the back of the chamber, it was as if they were in the rear of a theater, watching a play about a blizzard.
They slept that night back in the tunnel near the conduit of warm air. When he awoke the following day, Cley was mightily hungry and knew the dog must be, too. They left the tunnel, and upon entering the cave that opened on the opposite side of the hill from their home, they saw a glorious sun shining out over a vast plain. The sight of that flatland stretching out toward the north showed Cley the way to travel once the winter was over.
Out on the plain there were no trees, and it seemed a certainty that the demons would not hunt there. Escaping this threat would allow him and the dog to make headway north without constantly having to fight for their lives. He decided then that as soon as the days began to lengthen, they would resume their journey before the demons woke from hibernation. There weren’t enough bullets left to survive another season against them, and he sensed that somewhere in the cold, dark time of winter he had lost his will for slaughter.
Two hours later, after traversing the circumference of the hill in hip-deep snow, at times clinging to tree trunks against the wicked pitch of the incline, they stood outside the entrance of their own cave. Luckily the sun was bright and offered enough warmth for Cley to have survived the arduous journey without his cloak or mittens. Then began the grim task of digging out the opening while hunger twisted their guts. Every few minutes, the hunter had to stop to blow on his frozen fists, but eventually they managed to clear enough snow so that the sun could shine directly onto the ice that had formed over the entrance.
Next, they set about gathering branches that had cracked under the weight of the ice and fallen to the ground. With these, he built a small fire as close to the obstruction as possible. As they waited for the fire to do its work, Cley warmed his hands over it and set one of his boots smoldering, trying to do the same with his feet.
Sometime later, a well-placed kick shattered the remaining inches of glazed snow. Reentering their cave filled Cley with a sense of peace and comfort. He and Wood greedily devoured the few cooked rabbit parts they had stored, and then Cley went to work on one of the raw, rotting sweet potatoes. The fire was moved inside the entrance and they settled down to rest for a spell before preparing to hunt. The dog insisted on a few words from the book, and Cley acquiesced in a weary voice.
The white deer returned to the forest. In many places the fallen snow melted and revealed the welcome face of the earth. Flocks of crows again perched in the treetops, and an owl took up residence somewhere close by the cave, haunting the nights with its call.
On a hunting expedition to the eastern pond, Cley heard the ice cracking in long, wavering echoes. The sound was a signal to him that he and the dog should soon begin their journey across the plain. Although he rejoiced at the fact that the
sun now shone brightly in the afternoons, pushing back the night a few minutes each day, he wondered how long it would be before the demons came forth to hunt, driven by a season-long hunger. As he traipsed across the thawing ground, tracking a deer, he began to make plans.
There were a few things that distressed him about their coming trek across the open country. One was that the store of matches had been seriously depleted. He had one-quarter of one box left, which, optimistically, he surmised might last little more than two weeks. The other concern was shelter. Out on the grasslands there would be no caves or trees to offer a temporary haven against the elements.
He remembered that in the adventure novels of his boyhood, he had read of ways to start a fire without matches—rubbing sticks together or drawing a spark by knocking a flint against a rock. The thought of actually accomplishing either of these seemed to him more impossible than the daring exploits of those books’ heroes. Still, he knew there was nothing else but to begin work on learning one of these skills. As far as the lack of shelter was concerned, he decided to take many deerskins and from them create a small tent that would at least keep the wind and rain at bay. It had to be something he could roll up and carry, but that would add extra pounds to his already heavy pack. Then the thought came to him that perhaps Wood might pull it behind him.
Cley’s accuracy with the bow had become so good through the winter that he could fell a deer with just one arrow. He worked quickly, skinning his prey on the spot, and in this manner was able to take two or three skins a day. At night, he and Wood ate venison steaks and livers and began to regain much of the strength they had lost through the harsh heart of the winter. After dinner now they passed on the book, for the nights were filled with industry—treating the insides of the pelts and readying them to be sewn together. He calculated that he would need at least fifteen skins to make a tent large enough to cover both of them.