Red Mountain

by Dennis Yates

  “I’m sorry I lied to you, Will. But this thing is really bad. I promise you I’m going to tell you everything that’s happened.”

  Will gnawed his lower lip. His eyes were filled with tears.

  “You can tell me all about it later. Right now I think we better get the hell out of here. Before any more of your friends show up and try to kill us.

  CHAPTER 33

  Peggy was growing concerned. The highway was much further down the basin than she’d realized. In fact the headlights they saw earlier may have come from aircraft flying low on the horizon. Or were they the glow of distant forest fires? This was the time of year when lightning committed its random acts of arson. It burned up acres of drought-stricken pine forests and darkened once green mountains.

  Still, there had to be a main road somewhere. With the night sky as clear as it was, there was hope they’d see passing vehicles before long. Early stars began to light up the sky. Bats darted overhead catching moths.

  They’d only stopped running a few minutes ago. For the moment Peggy was satisfied no one was following them. Their pace slowed as their lungs worked overtime. It gave them their first opportunity to talk.

  “My name is Peggy by the way. And this is Connor.”

  A worried smile stretched across the woman’s thin face. Dark circles around her eyes told Peggy she hadn’t slept much lately.

  “It’s nice to meet you both. I’m Jan, and my daughter’s name is Krista. Can you tell us where we’re going?”

  “We’re looking for the highway. And to be honest with you, I don’t have any idea how far it is from here.”

  “When did they take you?”

  “Two nights ago. It was really late. They broke into our house. My husband tried to stop them but he’d been hurt in a car accident.”

  “Have you heard from him?”

  “Only once. The following morning.”

  “Did you find out what’s happening? Did he mention my husband?”

  “No. He only had time to ask how we were. Then they took the phone away. What about you. How long ago?”

  “Three days. My husband went to the store to buy some ice cream. He’d left the door unlocked, thinking he’d be right back. Then these men came into the house wearing ski masks. Krista and I didn’t stand a chance. They tied us up and shoved us in a van. When Steve got back we heard them ambush him. It sounded really bad…”

  Jan began to sob. Peggy took her hand and squeezed. Connor was still walking beside her, softly humming one of his own compositions. It was his habit when he was trying to calm his nerves. He’d been doing it since he was a baby. Krista had glanced curiously at Connor, and after awhile she began to join him. They were coping with the situation much better than Peggy had expected. She hoped it would stay that way.

  “Listen Jan, we’re going to find help. And as soon as we do, every cop car in this county is going to be screaming toward that old farmhouse.”

  “I just wish I could understand what this was all about. We’re good people. We didn’t do anything to deserve this. If it was ransom they wanted, then they’ve got the wrong family. We work hard, but it’s not like we’re rich.”

  “It has to be something else. But I don’t believe this was a coincidence. No, this was carefully planned and executed. There must be a connection of some kind, but I’ll be damned if I can find one.”

  Jan took some deep breaths and wiped her face.

  “I want you to know I appreciate what you’ve done for us. You’ve got a lot more guts than I do, Peggy.”

  “Please don’t say that. I’m just as scared as you.”

  “You didn’t have to get us. You took a big risk by doing that.”

  “There’s no way I would have left you two behind.”

  “Well I hope when this is over you’ll be able to meet Steven. I’m sure he’d want to thank you.”

  Peggy nodded and stared out at the dozens of new stars appearing in the night sky. It was taking every ounce of her being to stay optimistic, to believe the worst was over. And yet the undertow beneath her emotions seemed to indicate just the opposite, that even more fearful things lay waiting for her arrival.

  I’ll still take my chances, she thought. Anything was better than being gassed to death inside a crummy trailer.

  CHAPTER 34

  Before Jared Horn was welcomed back to Wrath Butte, and before his carvings sent the town into a brief period of madness, only a handful of local hunters had known about his frequent visits to the mountain.

  At the time Horn tried to keep to himself if he encountered others on the trail, but the hunters would rarely let him be without inflicting some form of abuse. Whether it was destroying his camp, threatening to hang him from the nearest tree they could find, or stealing what game he’d killed, Horn was unable to find any sanctuary from Brandon Duke’s wicked lies.

  When the town finally had a change of heart toward Horn and welcomed him back in the community, no one suspected he’d been planning his revenge all along. By all appearances, the now broken and nervous man seemed forgiving to all those who’d caused him harm. The town embraced with opened arms what they saw as an authentic Christian attitude, and those who felt particularly guilty about how they’d treated Horn in the past became extremely generous with their purses.

  Wrath Butte, in fact, became obsessed with paying off their sins, the same as when the town’s founders tried to compensate the local Indians they’d once terrorized and slaughtered. Hence was the origin for the town’s name, after a mortally wounded medicine man climbed to the top of the prominent rock that overlooked the town and laid down his curse.

  Brandon Dukes remained unrepentant. He jeered at his fellow townsfolk for their stupidity, warned them to beware of Horn’s trickery. His drunken behavior often landed him in jail, and those who passed his cell window at night reported hearing him mutter his same old lies.

  During the period of reconciliation, Horn’s visits to town almost always included an invitation to dinner, and on the occasions he accepted he was known to present the hostess with a gift carved by his own hands. Soon all the households in Wrath Butte had something special to boast about, a figurine or a scene carving that was guaranteed to be one of a kind.

  People continually asked Horn where he drew inspiration for his fine work. As always, he would politely smile and stroke his beard and tell them about how after several days of not eating and trying desperately to hunt game for his family, God suddenly revealed to him an aspect of nature he’d never witnessed before.

  “It was like a giant candelabrum of burning wicks had lit up inside my mind,” he’d say to the mesmerized crowd sitting at dinner. “And as I observed these hidden wonders, my hands sought my knife and a piece of wood in which to capture it.”

  This was the version the townsfolk were anxious to believe, for although they had treated Horn so poorly, God had stepped in and made things right again. The truth, however, would have shaken them to the very core. Horn held his tongue and waited...

  ****

  In late summer two years earlier, Horn began roaming higher and higher into the mountains. He began taking camping supplies with him so he wouldn’t have to make the return trip home in the evening. Being around his family had become difficult for him. It broke his heart to see his wife’s declining health, his children losing teeth for lack of food. If he’d been able to afford to repair the wagon he would have moved the family to Portland where they might start over.

  On a cloudless afternoon he followed a wide stream up to timberline where it met with a glacier, and was immediately awestruck by the grand scale of the place. Something spoke to him at some point, a voice on the puffs of wind that came down from the mountain and showered his face with cool kisses. Overcome with a variety of new emotions, he ran up the glacier, screaming and laughing and shoving handfuls of the pure ice into his mouth.

  He was hooked from that moment on.

  The next morning he went up again, bringing his miner
’s pick and some other tools he’d fashioned next to his campfire the night before. He was obsessed with climbing as far as he could up the river of ice, of gazing down into its deep furrows. Being from Kansas, Horn hadn’t grown up around mountains. No one had ever taught him about the deadly tricks they can play on naive visitors.

  Snow had fallen on the glacier the night before, and had helped to hide the brittle ice bridge that covered the width of a deep crevasse. Horn hadn’t seen the signs, and when he crossed the ice bridge the ground below him gave way and he fell as far as his waist before he shot out his arms and caught himself from going any deeper. His legs swinging freely below him, Horn had tried digging in his boots but the inner surface of the crevasse was as smooth as glass. Soon his thin arms began to spasm with the stress of holding himself up. He thought he heard distant laughter and when he glanced up at the mountain’s peak he screamed in despair.

  He’d been betrayed. The mountain had been lying to him all along, had seduced him.

  The fall was quick.

  Horn felt his body slip down between giant molars of carved blue ice. Down he went, feeling it tear at his back and batter his face again and again until he expected to be nothing but a gory pile of flesh by the time he hit bottom.

  ****

  It was the sheer cold that finally woke him up, shivering and numb all over. And although it was a hot August day, he hardly felt any warmth at all. He felt like he’d fallen to the bottom of a blue bottle made of ice, and the sun he saw above was nothing more than a watery point of silver light.

  Suicide had crossed Horn’s mind many times before but now death seemed like an inevitably. He’s always known in his heart that he’d never have the nerve, but now nature and his own stupidity had managed to push him up against that very wall. To be able to climb out alive would be a miracle. To suffer a cruel death seemed more than likely.

  Fortunately he still had his pickaxe and some food and water. But he quickly found he didn’t have the strength left to climb up through the gaping mouth directly above him, and after the third time that he fell back with hands and face bleeding, he saw the narrow opening of a tunnel and followed it until it emptied into a large cavern at the bottom of a crevasse further up the mountain.

  The clear walls of ice stunned him. It appeared as if he were looking through miles of glacial ice, at a hidden world no mortal was supposed to ever see. He forgot about his predicament then, about death marching toward him with his bloody scythe.

  He didn’t see Maynard at first, thought that what he was looking at had been only a fracture-shadow in the ice. After wiping away some grit with his arm, Horn couldn’t believe what he saw. Less than a couple feet deep into the ice he saw Charlie Maynard suspended in front of him, perfectly preserved from the day of his final showdown with the vigilantes. Except now there was one very important difference. The great layers of ice had sheered apart at one time, neatly slicing Maynard’s upper torso from the rest of his body.

  Poor son of a bitch, Horn thought. But I guess it no longer matters to you much anymore. It’s not like it’s going to make any difference to you if the ice ever melts. You’re still as dead as a fish at market.

  And what’s this?

  What Horn had initially thought were reflections in the ice finally dawned on him. Surrounding the man in equal stillness were saddlebags bursting with coins. Gold coins. One hung suspended close to Horn’s face, and after a few minutes work he dug it out with his pickaxe.

  Excited now, he sought out other coins he could retrieve easily. While the sun passed overhead, he managed to get quite a few. He told himself he would return home and buy food for the family table as soon as he could. The trip into town might be dangerous, but he still knew a few people in Wrath Butte who might be persuaded to help him.

  As the sun passed over the last of the glacier, Horn was jarred back to the fact that he had not yet found a way out of the crevasse. Maynard looked even closer than before, reminding him of the traveling wax museum he’d once seen as a child. Maynard seemed to be smiling too, welcoming Horn to the coins suspended around him. But when Horn saw the two dark shapes next to Maynard’s stilled corpse, his blood froze. The things looked like twisted clouds of smoke, but somehow gave the impression of once being alive.

  “I’m going to leave now, sir,” he told Maynard. “But I’ll try and come back soon and take you up on your offer.” After biting down on a coin, just to feel the gold between his teeth once more, Horn smiled and tipped his hat at the man who’d been dead for a few years. “If I don’t make it back, I want you to know I’ve appreciated the little taste.”

  Warmed now by his reversal of fortune, Horn left Maynard and the frozen cache of gold and followed the tunnel until it eventually rose up close enough to the surface were he could safely climb out. He drew a map on calf skin so he could remember how to get back and kept it hidden in a wooden box he’d carved the winter before.

  ****

  In the end Horn became less interested in pursuing gold coins than spending his time sitting in front of Charlie Maynard and staring into his frozen eyes. For Charlie had begun talking to Horn. Not with his mouth of course, but by some power Horn could never accurately describe.

  Horn became the perfect pupil too, even sometimes lighting candles and bundling himself up in animal fur and spending whole nights at the bottom of the crevasse. At first he began carving wood just so to keep his fingers warm and his mind alert, but gradually he felt as if Charlie was working through his hands and he no longer needed to watch what he was doing.

  He didn’t understand right away what Maynard was supposed to teach him. He listened patiently to the man’s stories about his life and adventures, up to the time when he fell into his icy tomb.

  Horn listened and carved. Asked questions when appropriate. And all along, his hands kept busy without him having to look away from Maynard’s eyes.

  The first set of carvings scared him to death. They were the size of chess pieces, and captured in the soft pine were the grotesque caricatures of Wrath Butte residents. It wasn’t this aspect that upset Horn, for he’d seen such things in the newspapers. What got to him were their expressions of terror, as if he were seeing their images just before they died violent deaths.

  What am I doing?

  Hands trembling, Horn set each figurine on the ground and smashed it to pieces with his hammer before turning and striking the ice in front of Maynard’s grinning face.

  “I will not be party to evil,” he’d shouted. “I might have good reason not to believe in a god, but don’t you ever tempt me to accept this as a substitute. I do not wish to burn in hell…”

  Horn’s words fell on deaf ears, for before he realized what he was doing, he picked up the knife where he’d dropped it and pushed it up tight against his own throat and held it there until his arms ached. And he didn’t move again until the will to resist Maynard’s power faded from his mind…

  Horn never brought up the subject again, and when winter came on he returned home full time to be with his family. He worked on his crafts in the cellar, turning out beautiful objects of wonder day after day, knowing all along they were not what they appeared, but actually seeds of destruction in a pretty disguise.

  Although Horn didn’t want to admit to himself that he was preparing his revenge upon Wrath Butte, he knew deep down that it was exactly what he was doing. He felt an unusual power growing inside him, and his hunger for more caused him to return to the glacier before winter was over.

  He’d taken Maynard’s offer to lend him one of his servants. It took several days to chip the block containing the shadow from the ice and more to haul it in a wagon back to his home. With Maynard’s instructions he’d thaw it and learn to control it for his own use. Never again would he or his family have to live in fear, Maynard promised. Not again for as long as Horn lived…

  Horn hadn’t expected the vigilantes to come and hang him from the giant cottonwood so soon. But he’d had a feeling trouble was
brewing, and he’d sent his wife and children away with plenty of gold coin so they could join the next wagon party headed south. He’d instructed them that if he didn’t find them in three days, they must assume the worst and proceed to San Francisco where his wife had a sister.

  No one knew that Horn’s younger son would steal a horse and ride it back to the farmhouse to warn his father of the posse he’d seen watering horses down at Trout Lake earlier in the day. Once back to the farm, he helped his father gather wood for the stove so they could melt the block of ice, but the process was taking too long. Then they heard the sound of hoofs beating around the house and breaking glass. Men began shouting at Horn to come out or they would burn his house down.

  Before he ordered his son to leave he remembered to give him the bundle of slender wooden boxes with the calf skin maps to Maynard’s body. He told his son to take them with him and head out through the tunnel in the secret basement and once he caught up with the wagon train he was to give the boxes to his older brother.

  The men were pounding on the front door of the house.

  “Run,” he said to the boy crying at the bottom of the ladder. “They’re going to come looking for you after they’ve finished with me.”

  But after Horn closed the trap door behind his son, the boy went back to the block of ice to see if it had melted some more…

  CHAPTER 35

  “When we get back to town, I’ll call someone to go out and pick up your truck,” Will said.

  The front of Will’s El Camino was tight, especially with Nugget squeezed between them, panting and fogging up the windshield. Driving as fast as he was, Robert wondered why Will wasn’t worried about attracting cops.