The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “And Driscoll was on Hyldekrugger’s hit list? One of the targets?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Vivian. “One night I woke up and Richard was getting dressed. This was one in the morning, maybe closer to two, and I asked him what the hell he was doing. Hyldekrugger had contacted him, just like that, out of the blue. They used burner cell phones and pagers, didn’t trust Ambient Systems. Richard said the Devil told him to kill a guy named Peter Driscoll, that Driscoll was part of the ‘chain.’ So I went with him, tried to talk him out of the hit. But Richard wanted me in deeper with Hyldekrugger, and he thought if I was the one who killed the guy, I would prove myself to them. I had no intention of killing Dr. Peter Driscoll.”

  “You didn’t know that Driscoll was a witness for the FBI,” I said.

  “He was just a name to me,” said Vivian. “I didn’t know anything about him other than his name. I wasn’t part of the world then, didn’t know who this guy was. Richard had been told where Driscoll lived, this huge house out in Virginia, out in the hills. He parked on this private road, and we came up through the woods, scaled the gate, and just rang the guy’s doorbell. I was giving Richard a long leash, wanted to keep my cover if I could, but things happened so quick. Dr. Driscoll opened the door and fired several shots, like he was waiting for us. Hit Richard in his chest and neck, killed him right away. Hit me, too, in the leg. He was going to kill me. He was standing not more than three feet from me, and you know how fast things can turn. I pulled my weapon. His was a .357 Magnum, nickel-plated, a showy thing. Seeing his weapon is the only thing I remember clearly from that moment. Three feet away when he fired.”

  “He missed,” I said.

  “Three shots, all misses,” said Vivian. “The gun was too big for him, and if he was trained on it, he wasn’t using what he’d learned. Once he saw my gun, he started backing away. No stance, holding the weapon with only one hand. I returned fire.”

  “Hit him eight times,” said Nestor.

  “I was using a Glock 23, got off all those rounds in the first three seconds of the engagement. I managed to call 911 but was bleeding heavily. I passed out.”

  She fell silent, rubbed her face with both hands. I saw the cleft of her left hand was marked with a tattoo, the same black circle with twelve crooked spokes I’d noticed on her hand as we’d walked through the orchard in our other IFT.

  “What is that symbol?” I asked. “On your hand?”

  The question seemed to startle Vivian from her memory. She looked down at the black circle, held it up for me to see clearly. “Die Schwarze Sonne,” said Vivian. “The Black Sun. Hyldekrugger mythologizes what they’re doing. He related the terrorism to all these stories. Harrier learned them while he was in prison. He’d repeat them to me, like it was his religion. Hyldekrugger believes that there were once two suns, in a past beyond memory. The sun we see, Sol, and a second sun, Santur—the font of pure blood, the source of power for the Aryan race. The two suns warred in heaven, and Santur was extinguished. It became the Black Sun, burned out, the void of the sun, the shadow of all existence, the reverse of everything in this world. Hyldekrugger says we’re on the brink of Santur’s return, the end of the world.”

  The White Hole, I thought. Naval Space Command had named the phenomenon but the crew of Libra wouldn’t have known that name. They were the first to see it; they might have thought it was a second sun. Hyldekrugger must think of it as the Black Sun.

  “Hyldekrugger allows this mark once you reach a certain rank within their group,” said Nestor. “We’ve seen it before, not always on the hand like this.”

  “Receiving this tattoo was the deepest I ever penetrated,” said Vivian. “I was told this symbol was a map.”

  “To where?” I asked. “Where does the map lead you?”

  “Harrier said the last step of initiation was learning about the Gate and the Path. Harrier hoped they’d tell me, but they never did.”

  “The Vardogger,” I said.

  “That’s right,” said Vivian, her eyes uneasy at the word. “The Vardogger is the Gate and the Path. How do you know about that?”

  “You know what this is?” asked Nestor. “You understand this?”

  “I know what the Vardogger is,” I said, trembling, thinking of Marian, and Marian’s echo describing the mirror girl she would sometimes see, thinking of the FBI groping at references to this place, occult symbols, tattoos. Nestor hadn’t known of Marian’s echo; he wouldn’t know the girl was still alive. “I know where the Vardogger is, but it’s a dangerous place. People die there. People vanish, sometimes they return.”

  “I was told there is a path through the Vardogger. I was told this symbol is the map,” said Vivian. “Harrier thought that if I was ever at the Vardogger, this symbol would show me the way through.”

  I took her hand, studied the symbol. Concentric circles with twelve crooked spokes. Were the spokes paths? “We can go there,” I said. “I can take you to this place.”

  “Where is it?” asked Nestor.

  “West Virginia,” I said. “In the Monongahela National Forest.”

  “We can go right now, today,” said Nestor. “Give me a few minutes to cancel my other appointments.”

  Preparing to lose myself again in that place, the ashen white trees repeating, wondering if Nestor would think of his father and his father’s dream of the eternal forest, doorways in the trees leading to other forests and other doorways in other trees. Left alone in the office with Vivian, hesitant to revisit these words and memories that had caused her such pain. She’d killed Driscoll, had to justify herself; she lived under the weight of murder.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked.

  Her question startled me. Had we known each other before? But how would that be possible? How would she remember my memories of things that never were? Thinking of the first time I’d seen her, shucking corn in the orchard’s side yard.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to place her.

  She said, “You asked me to help you out once. Maybe twenty years ago. That night changed my life. You said I should look into law enforcement.”

  “You had blue hair,” I said, speaking the words before the image of the young woman had fully formed, a teenager with a shock of electric-blue hair. The fizz of recognition was tickling. The young woman who drove me in a golf cart through the early-hour dark of the Blackwater Lodge cabin trails had aged twenty years. “I remember you,” I said. “My God, of course I remember you.”

  “I probably told you my name was Petal, or Willow,” she said.

  “Petal, that’s right.”

  “Hippie days.”

  Her life had turned on a comment I’d made. “You must be my lucky penny,” I said. “You turn up whenever I need you.”

  “You look incredible,” said Vivian, relaxed now. “Everyone always tells me that law-enforcement officers have a lower life expectancy than the general population, but you’ve figured something out.”

  “Scandinavian bones,” I said. Biologically, we were a similar age, but I should be decades ahead, in my early fifties, she would think, or close to sixty. “Believe me, I feel old.”

  “When I saw you, I wasn’t sure if I actually recognized you—I couldn’t believe it. You look . . . absolutely identical to how I remember you.”

  “I dye my hair,” I said. “All the gray.”

  “I’d talked to William Brock that night out at the lodge,” said Vivian, “told him about finding that body with you. He told me that I’d been brave. A few days later, I watched the news out of Buckhannon. And when Brock died—”

  “I remember Brock,” I said.

  “The news hit me, hard. I’d just met this man everyone was calling a hero. I remembered what you said, about law enforcement, and went to an FBI info session . . . That night was a fork in the road,” she said. “You choose one path or another, and your whole life hinges on what you decide.”

  —

  We took Nestor’s truck, a g
ray Toyota with an extended cab, Vivian in the back. I-70, northeast Virginia cutting into West Virginia, a drive of several hours, most of it spent in silence or catching up about our lives. I kept thinking of the way Nestor had referred to Nicole as Cole—a pesky nit, like I was jealous, but I chewed on the casual shortening of her name. I’d called her Cole only after I’d known her, only after all those nights in the May’rz Inn. Cole. Reality television, scratch-off lotto cards, taking her home with me to watch her through overmedicated and drunken nights. We entered the Monongahela National Forest. Cole. They would have met when Nestor first interviewed her, days after Vivian and I had found Mursult’s body in the Blackwater Lodge. Deeper into the forest, the sensation like drowning in shade and hemlock. Nestor and Nicole. A relationship grown between them maybe. Maybe in other futures, too. My heart caught: Nestor’s link to Buckhannon. Nestor buying Ashleigh Bietak’s house at Buckhannon, because of Nicole. They had met when Nestor interviewed her about Marian, and a few months after that she’d contacted him, asking him for help. They had met, they had grown close. Nestor and Nicole, together. Cole.

  “Slow down a bit,” I said. “There’s an access route here, or there used to be. It’s easy to miss. There, there it is.”

  Nestor pulled to the access route, pushed the gas, and drove up the steep path that would lead to the clearing, the same place he’d driven me in another future, to show me where Marian’s bones had been found. Nestor had said something that night, our first night spent together, that the eternal forest was deeper than Christ.

  “We’re near the Blackwater Lodge,” said Vivian. “If you hike down the hill, you’d get there.”

  “We have to get higher up to see the Vardogger,” I said. “But park here, there’s a clearing ahead. It’s the farthest you’ll be able to drive.”

  The clearing was ruined with growth and weeds but was flat enough for Nestor to park. I climbed from the cab, careful of my step. I wasn’t wearing clothes for hiking, but my shoes would be fine, the sturdy, skid-resistant work shoes I usually wore for balance. Vivian climbed from the rear of the cab, stretching out her knees.

  She was wearing clogs, thick-soled, but nothing would keep them on her feet if she stepped in mud. “Are you sure you’ll be able to walk?” I asked. “We have a little bit of a hike. Not too bad, but it’s mostly uphill.”

  “I should have worn something else,” were Vivian’s last words.

  Nestor drew his sidearm and shot her point-blank in the side of her head. She dropped to her knees, moaning, nothing intelligible, just the brute, wet sounds of a dying animal. All life was gone even though she was alive, mewling. Spit and blood burst from her mouth, her hands waving in front of her like she was warding off insects. I reached for my weapon, but Nestor kicked the knee joint of my prosthesis, toppled me. He struck me in the side of my head with his gun. My jaw clacked. Nestor knelt over me, cuffing my hands behind me. He took my weapon, cleared the bullets, and tossed it in the back of his truck. Vivian was groaning; cascading blood veiled her.

  “Kill her,” I said. “Just kill her.”

  Nestor put his weapon to Vivian’s forehead and shot her a second time. The gunshot echoed like the crack of a falling branch. Vivian flopped backward, dead against his tire.

  Think—think. I was cuffed, and he’d taken my gun. This was all too easy. Vivian’s body gurgled death sounds. Vivian is a girl named Petal, I told myself. Vivian is a girl at the Blackwater Lodge who calls herself Petal. She’s still alive, at a hotel desk in 1997. I could maybe get to my knees, but I’d be so slow through the woods. Even if I had a head start, he’d catch me quick.

  Nestor got back into his truck, left the driver’s door open. I saw him with a walkie-talkie, finding a channel. “I’ve got something for you down here,” he said. I couldn’t hear the responding voice through the static. “Yeah, a woman named Shannon Moss,” said Nestor. “I had to take care of someone she brought with her. I can’t put her in my truck.” A moment later he said, “All right.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Nestor, please—”

  “Keep your wits about you,” said Nestor. “I bet they won’t do anything to you.” He pulled me up, made sure I had my footing. “They were interested in you, for years they were interested. We have a little ways to go,” he said.

  “Don’t do this.”

  “Go,” he said.

  He shoved me forward. I walked with him, and he guided me through a slender breach in the trees, along a snaking path and up a steeper climb. We’d come to the narrow runnel that led to a descending slope, the creek that had run dry, the mud speckled with smooth stones mostly overgrown now with weeds.

  “You and Nicole were together,” I said.

  “For a time,” he said. The duplicity raked at me, realizing the people I’d thought were orbiting me had been orbiting each other all along.

  “What did you and Nicole talk about?” I asked. “What did she tell you?”

  “Cole, she . . . she showed me things.”

  “I can help you,” I said.

  “She might be up here,” said Nestor. “I don’t know if she’ll come.”

  The sound of rushing water, the Red Run. Nestor guided me through a thicket of hemlocks, and we came to a fence, chain-link topped with coils of barbed wire. Orange signs along the fence: POSTED. NO TRESPASSING. HUNTING, FISHING, TRAPPING, OR MOTORIZED VEHICLES ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

  “They abandoned this place years ago,” said Nestor, guiding me to a spot in the fencing that had been cut away, the egress hidden by trees. We ducked to get through, and once inside the perimeter I saw the ashen white tree, the thin space. This had once been a Navy installation. A concrete shed stood nearby, a garage, empty now. Nestor brought me to the tree.

  “On your knees,” he said. “Over here.”

  I hesitated, and he struck me with his gun again, this time against my back, enough of a jolt that I stumbled forward and complied, dropping to my knees in front of the Vardogger tree. He unlocked one wrist from the handcuffs. This is what happened to Marian, I thought, Nestor pulling my arms around the thin trunk, my face and chest pressed against the cold, smooth bark, like I was hugging it. He brought my wrists together and cuffed them around the tree. I pulled at the cuffs, thinking, One Marian had been tied with twine, the other had been tied with wire.

  “What did Nicole show you? What could make you do this?”

  “She took me through here, she led me through this tree,” said Nestor. “She led me down the path, and I saw things. I don’t know what I saw. I saw myself forever, I saw that everything was ice. I saw the end of everything, Shannon.”

  “Not the end of everything—”

  “You said I was religious when you knew me? Religion isn’t the right word now. I called out to God in that ice, Shannon, and when he answered, I learned that the voice of God is worse than his silence. Nicole said, ‘Open your eyes,’ she made me keep looking, and I saw the image of Christ crucified, but an upside-down reflection of the cross, an eternal forest of crucifixions grown in the air. Not the end of everything, you’re right about that. I believe in eternal life, but not like I used to. I have no soul, none of us do. I’m organs and tissues and fluid but no soul. God is a parasite that lives in your blood, Shannon. I saw all those crucifixions, God’s doing. Those people will never die, they’ll suffer forever. Eternal life through God? Worse than death.”

  Nestor hung the handcuff keys on one of the branches. “I think I loved you once,” he said. “You might not believe me, but I loved you. When I first met you, those first few days working with you. Maybe things would have been different if you hadn’t disappeared, I don’t know. But the hour’s late.”

  “Don’t leave me out here,” I said, but Nestor had already left me. I heard his footsteps padding over the hemlock needles and soon lost his sounds to the wind. Marian was tied here, but she escaped, I thought. She came through
the river and saw herself here. I wondered if I was here, too, handcuffed to this tree—another me, reflecting forever, an echo in echoing worlds.

  Hemlocks shredded the burnished orange of late afternoon. After a time I heard men approaching. They appeared through the trees as wary as stags scenting hunters: Cobb and another man I didn’t recognize, a man with blond hair and a shaggy beard. They wore tawny clothes, green camo and boots, both men with AR-15s slung over their shoulders.

  Cobb bent down, looked me in the eye. Beefy, his eyes dull. “It really is you,” he said, smirking. I held his gaze until he looked away, spat. Defenseless, my arms stretched around the trunk, hands cuffed. Cobb said, “It’s her,” and reached back and swung his hammer hand, struck my face. I felt my nose break and the deep sting radiate through the back of my skull. I was bleeding—my blood spurted onto the white tree, ran down my nostrils into my mouth. The other man laughed, and Cobb swung again, smashing my mouth.

  “This is the bitch that killed Jared,” he said. He swung again, another pulverizing blow to my face. I couldn’t move, couldn’t shield myself from him.

  “She’s only got the one leg,” said the other, who was content to watch, grinning. I saw my teeth in the blood on the roots of the Vardogger. I was cowering, pain flooding through me, knowing I was exposed, knowing that Cobb could kill me if he’d wanted. But he said, “Get the cuffs.”

  My hands were released, but they pulled my wrists together in front of me, replaced the cuffs.

  “Help me with her,” said Cobb.

  The two men lifted me, dragged me, but Cobb said, “Can you walk?” and I knew to walk, fearing what they might do to me otherwise. I’d given myself up to them, surrendered—three swings had broken me. My face rained blood down the front of my clothes, more blood than I would have thought possible. My vision was dark at the edges, as if shadows encroached wherever I looked. Cobb pulled me sharply away from the tree, downhill toward the sound of rushing water. Instead of one ashen white tree surrounded by pines, I now saw a line of white trees stretching out toward some distant vanishing point, identical white trees.