by Thomas Perry
Jane frowned. “Why are you making this up?”
Mary Perkins looked angry, but she seemed to be holding her breath. Finally she let it out. “I’m not sure. I guess I wanted to sound brave.”
“What really happened?”
“A Highway Patrol car pulled in beside us. I was too scared to even look at them. The cop saw I had been crying, so he knocked on my window and asked if there was something wrong. I told the cop I was turning myself in—that I left Los Angeles in violation of my parole.”
“Why did you tell him you were on parole?”
“I thought it was a stroke of genius. If I said I’d been kidnapped, they’d keep me there to testify. They could do it; I really was out on parole. Even if I did get these two convicted, what good was that going to do me? They might not have been telling the truth about Barraclough, but they were working for somebody. On their own, these two couldn’t have known all that about my trial transcripts and everything. They were maybe twenty-one or twenty-two years old, and dumb.”
“So what happened?”
“I figured the C.H.P. would just ship me back to L.A. for a lecture, and when that was over I could hop on a plane and disappear. Only wouldn’t you know it, when they identified these two characters, they both turned out to be convicted felons, so instead of a little scolding, I get to do ninety in L.A. County Jail. Consorting with convicted felons is apparently more serious than going out of town without telling your parole officer.”
“That was what you were in for when you saw me?”
“Yes. They let me out two weeks early, or else those guys would have had me before I got to the airport. But they must have a way of knowing when somebody is released early.”
“Not them. Barraclough does.” They sat for a time in silence, sipping their tea. The cold wind outside the old house was stronger up here on the second floor. The snow was falling harder now, as it sometimes did after nightfall, and the white flakes came tumbling into the light and ticked the window as though it were the windshield of a moving car.
Mary Perkins said, “What do you know about Barraclough?”
Jane stopped watching the snowflakes and turned to her. “He’s not what they all think he is. They think he’s a hunter, so he’s entitled to hunt. That’s the chance you take: if you run, there will be somebody like him who gets paid to bring you back. But he’s not that anymore. He’s a cannibal.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s not working for the system anymore, catching people and bringing them in and then getting his reward. He’s living by gobbling people up.”
“Who else?”
“The last one I know about is an eight-year-old boy.”
“Why was he after a little boy?”
“The boy inherited some money and disappeared. Barraclough heard about it and killed at least four people just because they were between him and the boy—killed them just to get them out of his way so he could get the money.”
“Did he get it?”
Jane shrugged. “The lawyers still have to do their audits and studies and sort out at least eight years of paper. When they finish, they’ll probably learn enough to charge an accountant who’s already dead with breach of trust or something. They’ll also find out that the money is gone. They don’t know that yet, but it is. Barraclough would never have killed the accountant if he didn’t already have it.”
“Why did you come back here?”
“Because I was one of the people who let him do it. I don’t want him to do the same thing to you.”
The night was cold and the oil furnace hummed in the basement two stories below them. Jane sat quietly in the corner of the room looking out the window and watching the feathery snow falling, first to fill in the icy ruts on the road and then to lay a blue-white blanket over it. No cars passed on the street to disturb it, and nobody had been out to leave human footprints, so it began to seem that she and Mary Perkins were the only ones left, adrift in a place where there was no motion and no time.
Mary stirred and walked into the kitchen. After more snow fell, Jane could smell food cooking and hear plates rattling onto the table. The roasting smell grew thicker in the air, and steam that carried the scent of vegetables fogged the window. There was the creak of the oven door opening and then the thump of it closing. Mary’s footsteps reached the doorway and she said, “Time to eat.”
On the table were a roasted chicken, asparagus, carrots, and potatoes, an excess of food cooked absentmindedly without regard to the number of people at the table. They ate sparingly and with formality. When they were finished they cleared the table and washed the dishes without speaking. They were like two strangers stranded together in the only way station in the empty wilderness, surrounded by hundreds of miles of howling winds and drifting snow—not because they had decided to be together but because there was no other shelter.
Mary walked into her bedroom for a few minutes and came out to set a pillow and a thick quilt on the couch, then went inside again and closed the door. Jane went back to the window to watch. The snow fell for another two hours before she stood up and walked to the couch, pulled the quilt over her, and fell asleep.
In her dream a light, powdery snow was falling while she trotted ahead of her companion through the forest. It was cold, but she didn’t feel the cruelty of it because she had worked up a light sweat. She ducked her head under spidery branches frosted with snow, knowing that if she bumped one, the snow would shower off onto the ground. Then pursuers would read that as clearly as a track, and the wind would be slower to cover it.
They were making their way south from Ann Arbor and she was watching for the rivers that fed into Lake Erie. First would be the Raisin, then the Maumee, then the Sandusky. This forest was wild country. Hunters from tribes from every direction came to get bear, deer, and beaver in the winter and passed through it in the summer on their way to kill each other. It had been full of armed men for a thousand years.
She listened to the breaths of the woman trotting along behind her, and at each breath there was more of her voice, more of a cry. Jane stopped and looked back. Mary Perkins had slowed down to a stagger, too tired to plant her feet in the trail Jane had broken for her, and now and then meandering to waste her strength fighting the deep drifts. Jane walked back in her own tracks and held Mary’s arm as they walked. Mary tried to say something, but Jane pulled her near and whispered, “They could be close, so save your breath. Nothing does us any good but moving.”
Mary didn’t try to answer, so she returned her attention to the trail. It was important that they cover as much ground as they could while the snow was still falling to hide the signs of their passing. As soon as she had completed the thought, the snow stopped. The air was frosty and still, and their feet made loud crunching sounds each time they stepped on the unbroken snow.
The ones who were following them would be able to keep up a fast pace, running in their footsteps in the flat places where the going was easy, and avoiding the depressions where their tracks had sunk in deep. Jane was always looking ahead, using the glow of the moon on the snow to search for any irregularity in the terrain that she could use to, hide their trail—a thicket or a fallen log or a frozen streambed leading to the next river.
Far behind, she heard the first call of the hunters. “Coo-wigh!” reached her in the still air, and it was answered by a whistle somewhere closer and to their left.
“We’ve got to run now,” she whispered to Mary Perkins.
They stepped into a jog with Jane at the front again, keeping her strides short to push aside the snow and make the going easier for Mary. She heard more whistles, and then the report of a rifle off to the left, and there were faint voices behind. She stepped into a deep drift and fell, then scrambled out of it and saw the stream. They ran along it for about a mile. As Jane came around a bend she saw the platform. It stood alone on the bank, a row of poles lashed ten feet above the ground between two saplings. She could see that its surface h
ad something on it, so she hurried to the thicker sapling and began to climb.
“What are you doing?” hissed Mary impatiently. “They’re coming.”
“We can’t outrun them,” Jane whispered. “They never get tired and they never give up. All you can ever do is fool them.”
The sapling was smooth and half frozen, with a layer of frost on the northwest side that held the snow to it, but she hoisted herself up high enough to see what was on the platform. There was a haunch of venison with the hide still on it, and a fat chunk of flesh that could only be bear meat. Some hunter had stored it there to keep it frozen and high enough to be out of the reach of animals. Then she found the two pairs of snowshoes. She tossed them to the ground and dropped beside them.
She knelt in the snow and tied one pair on Mary Perkins backward, so the long narrow shaft was at the toe end. “Stay here. Don’t move,” she said, then ran along the streambed and into the woods where the hunters’ trail began. She tied her own snowshoes on backward, made her way back to Mary Perkins and said, “Come on.”
They stepped along more easily now, the snowshoes holding them on the surface of the snow. Jane followed the stream to the right for a hundred yards to the first place where the low plants penetrated the snowpack enough to complicate their trail, then turned right again, toward the east. They made a trail that looked as though it led in the opposite direction and belonged to the hunters who had cached their game on the platform.
When the first sunlight caught them, they were in a flat, open valley. Their trail stretched behind them for miles, and as soon as the sun was high enough to stir the morning wind, much of it would be blown away. She said to Mary Perkins, “Just one more run, to get out of the open before they see us.”
They began to run due east, where Jane could see a row of evergreen bushes tall enough to hide the shape of a standing woman. She was tired now too. They had been moving silently for the whole night, never speaking for hours at a time, only concentrating on the awkward business of walking in snowshoes. They could see the end now, and it made Jane run faster. As soon as they reached the shelter of the bushes they would be able to sit and rest, maybe even sleep in turns while the wind blew across the valley and erased the shallow marks of their snowshoes. “Faster,” she said to Mary. Everything would depend on how they behaved for the next few minutes. They ran until their breath came in short gasps and their legs were numb.
The sun was rising now right behind the row of evergreens, glaring through the upper branches and making it hard for Jane to focus her eyes on them to tell how far they were. She clenched her teeth and kept running, and then they were there. Jane dragged Mary between the first pair of trees, then five more steps into thicker cover where the trees were small and close together, and they both let themselves collapse into the soft snow.
Jane lay there, breathing deeply, feeling the cold flakes against her cheek but not caring. She started to raise herself to her elbows, and her eyes rested on the bushes. All around her, they began to topple over. The men who had been holding them let go, and they fell to the snow with a low, whispery, ugly swish. All of the bushes seemed to change into men as warriors stood up from behind the clumps of brush they had tied into blinds or shouldered aside the small trees they had stuck into the snow.
Rough, hard hands clutched her arms, a heavy, leather-clad body threw itself across her legs, and another pressed her face into the snow so that she nearly smothered. They bound her hands behind her, dragged her to her feet, and jerked her ahead. One of her snowshoes came off, but when she tried to stop and look down a push that felt like a punch propelled her forward, so she limped along a few steps before the other one came off too. She tried to glance behind her to see what had happened to Mary, but a hand on the small of her back shoved her on with such force that for an instant she saw the sky.
They marched them to a path that led up over the hill into the next river valley. As Jane climbed, she tried to get her strength back, but they kept her moving too fast. She heard a language that meant nothing to her. The sounds were gruff, guttural, and alien. When she reached the crest of the hill her heart stopped for a moment, then began to beat hard.
Stretched out below was a squalid, sprawling settlement that seemed to have been laid out by a madman. There were a few longhouses that looked as though Hurons or Eries had built them with no intention of living there long, interspersed with Algonquin wigwams made of-bark and thatch, a few hide tents like the wandering plains people had, and in the center a clump of shanties made of boards. It was as though enemies of all of the wars of the Nundawaono had somehow survived in debased remnants and gathered here for the winter hunt.
As she stumbled down the steep path to the huge collection of ramshackle dwellings, she could see small shapes of people below, their shadows long in the bright dawn sunlight. One of them pointed upward and yelled something, and then men began to stream out of the shelters and gather in the center of the village. She could see them talking and pointing, and she could feel their excitement growing until, when she was dragged to the edge of the village, their voices rose in a shout that was harsh and deafening, full of hatred and glee. It grew louder as she moved closer to it, until she could feel her stomach vibrating with it, and the men started to fire their guns into the air, a ragged powpow pow powpow, like popcorn popping.
They prodded Jane and Mary across the dirty, mud-caked snow between the huts and pushed them into a big pen made of upright pine logs sharpened at the tops. Jane looked around her and saw to her surprise that there were dozens of other people already inside—men clinging to their wives and children, trying in vain to reach around all of them with their arms, other men who looked as though they had run the gauntlet on the way into the little pen, with limbs broken and faces streaked with blood from blows above the hairline, women with eyes swelled shut and missing teeth.
“What’s going to happen?” asked Mary.
Jane said, “The fighting has gone on forever. So many people get killed that the main reason for it now is to get prisoners to adopt.”
“Adopt? We’re grown women.”
“When people are killed they capture someone to take their place—their name, their work, their family.”
The gate across the pen opened and about fifty warriors streamed in, painted and armed as though they had just returned from battle. They were agitated and angry, some of them in a frenzy, dancing from one foot to the other like boxers and shouting in the incomprehensible languages of enemies. One by one and with reluctance, they took notice of something behind them and stepped aside to let the one Jane had been watching for pass among them to the front.
Jane hung her head like the captives around her to give her a chance to study him without attracting his attention. She looked from his feet upward. He was big and muscular, wearing a clinging, whitish leather shirt that seemed to have been stitched together from many small pieces. Around his neck and shoulders hung a gateasha of six rows of small white wampum beads. When she forced her gaze to move upward, she nearly fainted.
He was wearing a Face. It was a scalp mask, painted bright red, with round staring copper eyes and the clenched teeth that made it resemble both the rage of battle and the ghastly grin of a rotting corpse. It was terrifying to see a Face here. She could tell that this was an old Face, the features that a supernatural being had shown to some virtuous Seneca ages ago in a dream. The Seneca had carved to free the Face from the trunk of a living basswood tree, given it presents of tobacco, rubbed it with sunflower oil, and fed it the same mixture of cornmeal and maple sugar that the warriors ate on the trail to battle. It didn’t merely represent the supernatural being; it was the supernatural being. It gleamed with power strong enough to cure disease and change the weather, but on this man that power became the force of evil and witchcraft and death.
The Face approached and stared at her with its round, empty eyes. Jane could see now that the necklace was made not of little white shells but of human teeth.
As he moved on, she realized with revulsion what the leather must be: strips of skin flayed from human beings. The Face walked around the pen, stopping in front of each captive to turn its round-eyed, unreadable gaze on him for a second or two, then moving on.
Finally the Face came back to where Jane was standing. The Face stopped and pointed at Mary. At once a warrior appeared out of the mob and poured a bucket of black, greasy paint over Mary Perkins’s head. The paint streamed down to her shoulders and ran along her arms to her fingertips.
Mary gasped and sputtered. “Why did he do that? What is it, some kind of joke?”
“No,” said Jane. She could feel waves of nausea that started in her chest and moved down to grip her belly.
Mary shivered with cold. “It must be an initiation, right?” Her voice was tense and scared now, and a little sob was audible in it. “Why me?” she wailed. “What do they want me to do?”
Jane tried to speak, but what she would have to say was impossible to put into words. The black paint was the sign that a captive had been selected to be burned.
Jane awoke in the darkness with her heart pounding.
She walked to the window. The snow had stopped sometime during the night, and now the sidewalks and streets were white and still, but in the east the sky had changed enough to tell her there was no point in going back to the couch. She raised her hand to touch her forehead and rubbed away the beads of sweat that had formed there. She had been denying what she knew about Barraclough, and the knowledge was fighting its way to the surface in dreams.