Murder. That’s what she accused our father of: murder-suicide. She believed, or claimed to believe, that he had shot my mother in cold blood, using the gun he had kept hidden in the velvet-lined box in his shed, and then turned the gun upon himself. To my dismay but unsurprise, it was this same interpretation that the police had chosen to believe, as did the few acquaintances my parents had had.
Of course my father had killed himself. There was no question of that: when his body was found, the gun lay inches from his hand, on the floor beside the overturned chair he had sat down upon to do the deed.
But my mother’s death was another matter entirely, and I refused to believe that my father, for all his flaws, would ever have taken the unimaginable step of murdering her. It was true that they had fought, that their marriage was weak. And there was no denying that the same weapon which killed my father had killed her as well.
That, however, was the only evidence of murder, and there were ample grounds for believing that my mother’s death had, in fact, been an accident. Take the gun, for instance. It was an Enfield No. 2 Mark 1, a British firearm of 1930s design, commonly used by the French during the Second World War. This gun was a revolver, practically an antique, and at such an advanced age, and in the hands of such an inexperienced user, must have been spectacularly unreliable. Adding to this was the fact that, on the table he had been sitting at when he died, there lay a greasy cloth, a bottle of lead remover, and a bronze barrel brush. My mother, meanwhile, was found crumpled in front of the sink, into which water was still running when a neighbor discovered the bodies. She was wearing her striped kitchen apron and her hands were wet. Obviously, my father had been cleaning the Enfield (which I later learned he had brought home from his postwar service in the army) while my mother stood nearby, washing the dishes. While he was reassembling and loading the weapon, it had gone off, the result of either a malfunction or his own error. The shot had killed my mother, and my father, driven to despair by the horror he had inadvertently caused, raised the gun to his head and shot himself.
Such a scenario seemed likely to me at the time, and even likelier the more I learned about weapons and how to handle them. But the police were not interested in my interpretation of events, and my sister even less so, and it was about this subject that we argued on the day of their burial. Now, crashing through the underbrush, I pictured my sister’s flushed young face, rubbery with drink; I imagined punching her over and over, as I might have done—but restrained myself from doing—on that day, and her nose running with blood. The face changed to that of the ruined woman she had become today, laughing at me in my own home, a cigarette dangling from a corner of her mouth. How dare you impugn my father? I said to her in my mind, and soon I was saying it aloud, shouting it as I leaped the deadfall and splashed through the mud: “How dare you! How dare you!”
It was as I was screaming this that the ground gave way beneath me and I tumbled headlong into darkness.
I landed on my side, and my head soon followed, thudding against a smooth stone lodged in the mud. I was not knocked unconscious, but the wind was driven from me, and it was at least a minute before I had gathered myself enough to determine where I was and what had happened to me.
I was lying at the bottom of a pit approximately ten feet deep and six feet in diameter. It was very quiet here, and cold, with snow and ice still covering the ground, and the walls near my head hoary with frost. The pit gave the impression of having been dug with hand tools, not by a machine, and the walls had been scraped smooth and any protruding rocks or roots removed. Slowly, carefully, I tried to get to my feet. My head throbbed, my neck ached, and my muscles, bruised by the fall, protested. But I was able to stand; and, bracing myself with my hand against the earthen wall, I gently probed the painful spots to determine if I had broken any bones.
To my relief, the answer seemed to be no. There were many tender areas around my midsection, and it was possible I had fractured a rib, but no debilitating breaks were apparent. I was, I knew, lucky. I had allowed my emotions to overwhelm my good sense and had made a tactical error. In less benign circumstances, a mistake like this might have resulted in more serious injury, even death. I took a minute to catch my breath, and to stifle my feelings of embarrassment and inadequacy. Then I turned my attention once again to my surroundings.
Scattered about the floor of the pit were the remains of the false ground cover I had fallen through: a few broken twigs, some pine boughs and stones, and a lot of leaves. More startling, however, was what poked out of the ice and snow underfoot: thick branches, carefully whittled sharp, and positioned to do grievous harm to anyone or anything that should land on them. Most of these branches had slumped over and lay on their sides, but some stood straight, and it seemed a minor miracle that I hadn’t landed on one. I might have been killed.
The sharpened sticks had provided me with another piece of luck, I could see now: they could be driven into the dirt walls of the pit, and used to help me climb out. Having noticed this, I wasted no time. I tugged several out of the snow, along with a palm-sized flat stone that had fallen down with me, and began to pound them into the earth. Ten minutes later, I heaved myself up and out of the pit and lay panting on the damp forest floor.
The relative warmth of the surface was a great comfort, and I tipped my head back onto a mossy log and took a moment to think. Two things were clear to me. One was that this was a trap intended for men, not animals. There were easier ways to kill a deer, for instance; and even if a prospective hunter wished to use a pit, he would not have to dig it nearly so deep. This begged the question of who, then, had dug the pit, and why—but I had more important things to do at this point than to indulge in idle speculation.
The second obvious thing was that this trap was not carefully maintained, and might even have been entirely forgotten. The circle of false floor I had crashed through had developed its own layer of natural humus; it had been very well built, and had lasted a long time, perhaps a decade or more.
Surely, no one had come this way in years. Nevertheless, I suddenly felt paranoid. I jumped to my feet, body crying out in protest, and looked around me. I saw nothing and no one, save for the trees. The sun was lower in the sky, and a faint fog appeared to be rising up from the ground, but that was all. No one appeared to be watching.
I realized that the going would be rougher now, that the bruises and scrapes I had just endured would grow more painful as the hours passed. I briefly considered returning to the house. It seemed so inviting to me: the roaring furnace, a hot bath, a comfortable bed. But I have never been one to indulge in creature comforts; the only real comfort was success. I straightened my pack on my shoulders, consulted my compass (mercifully unbroken), and continued on my way, stepping more carefully now, with my eyes locked on the treacherous ground.
I made it another hour or so before I stopped. The sun had sunk further, and its slanting rays no longer found their way through the canopy above. In addition, the fog had thickened, and it had become difficult to see clearly more than a few feet in front of me. And finally, my fall was beginning to take its toll, with exhaustion and pain overwhelming my conscious thoughts. It was time to make camp for the night.
I found a lightly wooded area and began to clear it of debris. This proved more difficult than I had anticipated, as my rib cage ached, and the years of deadfall had become intertwined and grown through with vines. I made heavy use of my small hatchet, hacking away at everything that could not be pulled apart, and half an hour later I had managed to create a large circle of bare ground. The earth was very wet, of course, but I had packed a thin tarpaulin, and I laid this out carefully where I wanted my tent to go. The tent, a water-resistant one-person pod with inflatable headrest, came together without difficulty. By now it was nearly dark. I made a quick circuit of the area around my camp, gathered up as many dry or semi-dry branches as I could find, and built a small fire. When at last I had it blazing, I unpacked my food and sat down to a meal of trail mix
, dried meat, and water.
Where, I wondered, did the time go? It seemed to me that it had only been a few hours since I’d left my house, yet somehow the entire day had managed to pass me by. Furthermore, I was puzzled once again by the apparent disconnect between the amount of time I’d spent walking and the amount of ground I ought to have covered. It took only an hour to circumambulate the entire wood on paved roads. Even allowing for the thick underbrush and mud, I ought to have been able to traverse the area twice over by now. Perhaps I had been walking in a circle—but the compass suggested the contrary, and I couldn’t remember encountering the same piece of terrain more than once.
These thoughts led nowhere, and my mind entered into the same state of confusion it had suffered earlier in the day. I looked up and found that the fog was impenetrable now: it reflected the light of my fire back at me, as if I were sitting in an igloo. The silence of the forest, already unnerving, had deepened, and a shudder ran through my weary body. The only thing to do was sleep, and hope that the fog lifted in the morning.
I removed my boots, crawled into my tent, unpacked my sleep sack, and slid deep into it, shivering and aching. A tightness in my throat suggested that, as if my misfortune were not already great enough, I might have contracted a cold. With a deep sigh, I closed my eyes and tried to plot out the morning’s progress. But the fog that blanketed the woods crept quickly into my conscious mind as well, and I was soon fast asleep.
I woke with a start in the night, as if from a frightening dream—though I remembered nothing of it—and cried out, in part from fright, in part from pain: my bruises and lacerations ached in earnest now, and my tent was eerily illuminated by the campfire’s remains. I paused a moment, caught my breath, calmed my racing heart. The pain was sharpest just below my left kidney: I probed the area, certain now that I had cracked at least one rib. I was just about to lie back down, to ease myself back into sleep, when I heard a noise outside my tent.
I froze. There was another sound, a rustle of brush. And then the light changed: it flickered and dimmed, and slowly a shadow appeared, elongated, on the tent wall. An animal.
For a moment, I was terrified. And then the animal moved, and I could see that the distorted shadow was that of a deer. I let out breath, and the shadow raised its head, and it bounded away. I heard its footsteps on the wet ground, and the cracking of twigs, and then silence returned. Reassured, I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again—mere moments later, it seemed—the tent was flooded with daylight. Effortfully, I unzipped the tent door, crawled outside, and stood.
The fog had lifted. The air was clear. Directly in front of me, about fifty feet ahead, visible between the trunks of trees, stood a solid wall of stone, reaching up beyond the canopy and out of sight.
SEVEN
I resisted my instinct, which was to run to the rock without hesitation. Instead, I broke down my tent, rolled it into my pack, and removed my climbing shoes, gloves, and helmet. Faintly trembling, I scattered the remains of the previous night’s fire and covered them over with dirt; then I sat down and scraped the mud off the soles of my mostly dry boots with a twig. At last I shouldered my pack and strode calmly to the rock, taking care not to trip and fall.
The work of breaking camp had loosened my stiff muscles, but the scrapes and bruises from my accident had ripened, and I winced with every step I took. My blood, however, was flooded with adrenalin, and my fingers and toes were warm. Above the forest canopy, the sun shone brightly. I imagined myself basking in its light when I attained the summit, and a shudder ran through me, a quiver of excitement that I did not fully understand, nor wish to. My mouth went dry, my palms were moist, and my skin prickled with anticipation.
In a few moments, I had reached the monumental stone. Its face was nearly sheer; it was smooth, and cold to the touch. Its composition was utterly unlike the brittle shale that comprised most of the local landscape; rather, it appeared to be nothing less than an enormous granite boulder, a massive foreign ship that had sailed here, fifteen thousand years ago, on a sea of glacial ice. I pressed my body to it and tipped my head back, enduring a wave of nausea and pain. The swollen knot on my forehead throbbed.
Between the trees and the rock I could make out a blinding blue strip of sky, which a small white cloud slowly traversed. The wall was very high, and footholds were few. There was little chance I could scale it, given my age, lack of experience, and aching ribs. As important as confidence in matters of personal safety is an understanding of one’s own limits, and there was no question that this climb was beyond mine.
I began to walk counterclockwise around the rock, hoping that the southern face would offer a clearer path to the top. For the first time since I entered the forest, the going was easy: the rock’s huge shadow disinclined vegetative growth, and the ground at its foot was flat, dry, and clear. Within a few minutes, then, I could see that my hopes would be fulfilled. The sheer face gave way to a pronounced slant, its angle decreasing gradually as I moved along. When at last I reached the southernmost point of the rock, it became clear that its overall shape was similar to that of a boot, with a low “toe” end sloping upward to a steep “ankle” at the north. I would likely have little difficulty until I reached the ankle—indeed, I was able merely to lift my foot and hoist myself directly onto the “toe” without even using my hands.
Nevertheless, I took my time, alert to the possibility of further injury. Here on the lower end of the rock, there were deep fissures where lichens and hopeless maple and pine saplings grew. Smaller boulders were seemingly held to the face by will alone, and I was eager not to upset them; depressions in the stone held pools of slimy green water in which I made certain not to slip.
As I rose up out of the woods, the air seemed to clear, and I breathed more easily. I was still underneath the long morning shadow of the trees, but the sky was full and blue above me, and my aches and pains receded in a wave of enthusiasm and hope. And a further detail caught my attention: a conifer, as tall as thirty feet, which appeared to be growing directly out of the solid rock. It was the last major feature before the rock arched skyward at the “ankle,” and I made my way toward it, eager to discover how this natural wonder had come to be.
A few moments later, I stood before the tree. I am no arborist, but it appeared to me to be a member of the family Pinaceae, a common pine, with broad flat boughs of short, sharp needles, and large, woody cones. It stood in a wide depression in the rock, which in defiance of the odds had developed its own miniature ecosystem—a bowl of humus-covered soil rich with mosses and smelling strongly of vegetative fecundity. There was even a small subdepression, perhaps three feet in diameter, partly attached to the main one, that was filled with rainwater. The water looked extraordinarily clean, rippling gently in the breeze and reflecting sky, and I had to resist the strong (and probably dangerous) impulse to kneel down and drink deeply from it. Instead, I removed my canteen from my belt and took a few sips.
I walked slowly around the tree, marveling at its singularity, until I noticed something incongruous lying half-buried in the compost, something small and yellow and unnaturally straight. I crouched at the edge of the depression and pulled it from the soil. It was a pencil.
Specifically, it was an inch-long stub, the sharpened end blunted by use, the eraser end missing entirely. It was the kind of pencil you might find at a library, in a cup on top of the card catalog, or at a miniature golf course. It was aged by the elements, but not much: the process of its subsumation into the earth had only just begun, with the paint still largely intact and the wood only beginning to grow soft. As I had upon escaping from the pit, I stood up straight and looked around suddenly, as if someone might be watching me, assessing my reaction.
Of course, this was silly. The pencil might have been dropped here at any time in the past few years. It could even have been left by a crow. And while these woods were fairly remote from any large town, they lay bounded by paved roads, in the middle of an inhabited
region of the state. In fact, I should have been more shocked, on this little expedition, not to have encountered some human artifact. But given my solitude over the previous twenty-four hours, and for that matter over the preceding several weeks, coupled with the alarm and injury I’d suffered in the pit, it was only natural that a hint of paranoia should once again steal over my consciousness. I chuckled at my all-too-human reaction and slipped the pencil into my pocket. Then I turned to the “ankle.”
It was a monolithic chimney of solid rock, rising about seventy feet from where I stood; and while its face was hardly as imposing as the north face of the rock proper, it still presented a considerable challenge to the amateur climber. I breathed in and out, assessing its surface, plotting a path of ascent. Its angle was approximately seventy-five degrees, a not inconsiderable grade, but surmountable. The stone here had suffered more from the elements than its northern counterpart, giving me a distinct advantage, in the form of cracks, outcroppings, and ledges. I paced back and forth, examining the surface from every possible vantage point, and after ten minutes or so of consideration, a clear route presented itself to me.
I pulled on my gloves, changed into my climbing shoes, and fastened my helmet. After a moment’s thought, I laid my pack down on the rock, next to the pine tree. Though I had filled it judiciously, to avoid excess weight, the pack was large, and its absence from my back gave me new confidence. I flexed my fingers, stretched my arms over my head, and took hold of a crack in the rock.
Within a few minutes, and despite my injuries, I had climbed twenty feet into the air. The hand- and footholds I had spied from the base of the wall had proved even more effective than I had dared hope; up close, the rock face was everything a climber could desire. I paused to catch my breath on an outcropping, and, with one hand wedged into a crack, I hazarded a glance over my shoulder. I had nearly reached the forest ceiling. Below me the pine tree betrayed a slight lean to the south; I saw my pack lying forlornly on the ground beside it. The sun was on me now, and I was sweating; the air would doubtless reach sixty degrees today.
Castle: A Novel Page 9