Then Jud turned toward him, the hood seeming to surround a blankness, and for one moment Louis imagined that it was Pascow himself who now stood before him, that the shining light would be reversed, trained on a grinning, gibbering skull framed in fur, and his fear returned like a dash of cold water.
“Jud,” he said, “we can’t climb over that. We’ll each break a leg and then probably freeze to death trying to get back.”
“Just follow me,” Jud said. “Follow me and don’t look down. Don’t hesitate and don’t look down. I know the way through, but it has to be done quick and sure.”
Louis began to think that perhaps it was a dream, that he had simply never awakened from his afternoon nap. If I was awake, he thought, I’d no more head up that deadfall than I’d get drunk and go skydiving. But I’m going to do it. I really think I am. So I must be dreaming. Right?
Jud angled slightly left, away from the center of the deadfall. The flash’s beam centered brightly on the jumbled heap of (bones) fallen trees and old logs. The circle of light grew smaller and even brighter as they approached. Without the slightest pause, without even a brief scan to assure himself that he was in the right place, Jud started up. He did not scramble; he did not climb bent over, the way a man will climb a rocky hillside or a sandy slope. He simply mounted, as if climbing a set of stairs. He walked like a man who knows exactly where his next step is coming from.
Louis followed in the same way.
He did not look down or search for footholds. It came to him with a strange but total surety that the deadfall could not harm him unless he allowed it to. It was a piece of utter assholery of course, like the stupid confidence of a man who believes it’s safe to drive when totally shitfaced as long as he’s wearing his St. Christopher’s medallion.
But it worked, There was no pistol-shot snap of an old branch giving way, no sickening plunge into a hole lined with jutting, weather-whitened splinters, each one ready to cut and gore and mangle. His shoes (Hush Puppy loafers-hardly recommended for climbing dead-falls) did not slip on the old dry moss which had overgrown many of the fallen trees. He pitched neither forward nor backward. The wind sang wildly through the fir trees all around them.
For a moment he saw Jud standing on top of the deadfall, and then he began down the far side, calves dropping out of sight, then thighs, then hips and waist.
The light bounced randomly off the whipping branches of the trees on the other side of the.
the barrier. Yes, that’s what it was-why try to pretend it wasn’t? The barrier.
Louis reached the top himself and paused there momentarily, right foot planted on an old fallen tree that was canted up at a thirty-five-degree angle, left foot on something springier-a mesh of old fir branches? He didn’t look down to see, but only switched the heavy trashbag with Church’s body in it from his right hand to his left, exchanging it for the lighter shovel. He turned his face up into the wind and felt it sweep past him in an endless current, lifting his hair. It was so cold, so clean… so constant.
Moving casually, almost sauntering, he started down again. Once a branch that felt to be the thickness of a brawny man’s wrist snapped loudly under his foot, but he felt no concern at all-and his plunging foot was stopped firmly by a heavier branch some four inches down. Louis hardly staggered. He supposed that now he could understand how company commanders in World War I had been able to stroll along the top of the trenches with bullets snapping all around them, whistling “Tipperary.” It was crazy, but the very craziness made it tremendously exhilarating.
He walked down, looking straight ahead at the bright circle of Jud’s light. Jud was standing there, waiting for him. Then he reached the bottom, and the exhilaration flared up in him like a shot of coal oil on embers.
“We made it!” he shouted. He put the shovel down and clapped Jud on the shoulder. He remembered climbing an apple tree to the top fork where it swayed in the wind like a ship’s mast. He had not felt so young or so viscerally alive in twenty years or more. “Jud, we made it!”
“Did you think we wouldn’t?” Jud asked.
Louis opened his mouth to say something-Think we wouldn’t?
We’re damn lucky we didn’t kill ourselves!-and then he shut it again. He had never really questioned at all, not from the moment Jud approached the deadfall.
And he was not worried about getting back over again.
“I guess not,” he said.
“Come on. Cot a piece to walk yet. Three miles or more.”
They walked. The path did indeed go on. In places it seemed very wide, although the moving light revealed little clearly; it was mostly a feeling of space, a feeling that the trees had drawn back. Once or twice Louis looked up and saw stars wheeling between the massed dark border of trees. Once something loped across the path ahead of them, and the light picked up the reflection of greenish eyes-there and then gone.
At other times the path closed in until underbrush scratched stiff fingers across the shoulders of Louis’s coat. He switched the bag and the shovel more often, but the ache in his shoulders was now constant. He fell into a rhythm of walking and became almost hypnotized with it. There was power here, yes, he felt it. He remembered a time when he had been a senior in high school. He and his girl and some other couple had gone way out in the boonies and had ended up necking at the end of a dead-end dirt road near a power station. They hadn’t been there long before Louis’s girl said that she wanted to go home, or at least to another place, because all her teeth (all the ones with fillings, anyway, and that was most of them) were aching. Louis had been glad to leave himself. The air around the power station had made him feel nervous and too awake. This was like that, but it was stronger. Stronger but not unpleasant at all. It was-Jud had stopped at the base of a long slope. Louis ran into him.
Jud turned toward him. “We’re almost where we’re going now,” he said calmly.
“This next bit is like the deadfall-you got to walk steady and easy. Just follow me and don’t look down. You felt us going downhill?”
“Yes.”
“This is the edge of what the Micmacs used to call Little Cod Swamp. The fur traders who came through called it Dead Man’s Bog, and most of them who came once and got out never came gain.”
“Is there quicksand?”
“Oh, ayuh, quicksand aplenty! Streams that bubble up through a big deposit of quartz sand left over from the glacier. Silica sand, we always called it, although there’s probably a proper name for it.”
Jud looked at him, and for a moment Louis thought he saw something bright and not completely pleasant in the old man’s eyes.
Then Jud shifted the flashlight and that look was gone.
“There’s a lot of funny things down this way, Louis. The air’s heavier… more electrical… or somethin.”
Louis started.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Louis said, thinking of that night on the dead-end road.
“You might see St. Elmo’s fire-what the sailors call foo-lights. It makes funny shapes, but it’s nothing. If you should see some of those shapes and they bother you, just look the other way. You may hear sounds like voices, but they are the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It’s funny.”
“Loons?” Louis said doubtfully. “This time of year?”
“Oh, ayuh,” Jud said again, and his voice was terribly bland and totally unreadable. For a moment Louis wished desperately he could see the old man’s face again. That look-“Jud, where are we going? What the hell are we doing out here in the back of the beyond?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there.” Jud turned away. “Mind the tussocks.”
They began to walk again, stepping from one broad hummock to the next. Louis did not feel for them. His feet seemed to find them automatically, with no effort from him. He slipped only once, his left shoe breaking through a thin scum of ice and dipping into cold and somehow slimy standing water. He pulled it out quickly and went on, following Jud’s bobbing light. That light, floating through the woods, brought back memories of the pirate tales he had liked to read as a boy. Evil men off to bury gold doubloons by the dark of the moon… and of course one of them would be tumbled into the pit on top of the chest, a bullet in his heart, because the pirates had believed-or so the authors of these lurid tales solemnly attested-that the dead comrade’s ghost would remain there to guard the swag.
Except it’s not treasure we’ve come to bury. Just my daughter’s castrated cat.
He felt wild laughter bubble up inside and stifled it.
He did not hear any “sounds like voices,” nor did he see any St. Elmo’s fire, but after stepping over half a dozen tussocks, he looked down and saw that his feet, calves, knees, and lower thighs had disappeared into a ground fog that was perfectly smooth, perfectly white, and perfectly opaque. It was like moving through the world’s lightest drift of snow.
The air seemed to have a quality of light in it now, and it was warmer, he could have sworn it. He could see Jud before him, moving steadily along, the blunt end of the pick hooked over his shoulder. The pick enhanced the illusion of a man intent on burying treasure.
That crazy sense of exhilaration persisted, and he suddenly wondered if maybe Rachel was trying to call him; if, back in the house, the phone was ringing and ringing, making its rational, prosaic sound. If-He almost walked into Jud’s back again. The old man had stopped in the middle of the path. His head was cocked to one side. His mouth was pursed and tense.
“Jud? What’s-”
“Shhh!”
Louis hushed, looking around uneasily. Here the ground mist was thinner, but he still couldn’t see his own shoes. Then he heard crackling underbrush and breaking branches. Something was moving out there-something big.
He opened his mouth to ask Jud if it was a moose (bear was the thought that actually crossed his mind), and then he closed it again. The sound carries, Jud had said.
He cocked his head to one side in unconscious imitation of Jud, unaware that he was doing it, and listened. The sound seemed at first distant, then very close; moving away arid then moving ominously toward them. Louis felt the sweat on his forehead begin to trickle down his chapped cheeks. He shifted the Hefty Bag with Church’s body in it from one hand to the other. His palm had dampened, and the green plastic seemed greasy, wanting to slide through his fist. Now the thing out there seemed so close that Louis expected to see its shape at any moment, rising up on two legs, perhaps, blotting out the stars with some unthought-of, immense and shaggy body.
Bear was no longer what he was thinking of.
Now he didn’t know just what he was thinking of.
Then it moved away and disappeared.
Louis opened his mouth again, the words What was that? already on his tongue.
Then a shrill, maniacal laugh came out of the darkness, rising and falling in hysterical cycles, loud, piercing, chilling. To Louis it seemed that every joint in his body had frozen solid and that he had somehow gained weight, so much weight that if he turned to run he would plunge down and out of sight in the swampy ground.
The laughter rose, split into dry cackles like some rottenly friable chunk of rock along many fault lines; it reached the pitch of a scream, then sank into a guttural chuckling that might have become sobs before it faded out altogether.
Somewhere there was a drip of water and above them, like a steady river in a bed of sky, the monotonous whine of the wind. Otherwise Little God Swamp was silent.
Louis began to shudder all over. His flesh-particularly that of his lower belly-began to creep. Yes, creep was the right word; his flesh actually seemed to be moving on his body. His mouth was totally dry. There seemed to be no spit at all left in it. Yet that feeling of exhilaration persisted, an unshakable lunacy.
“What in Christ’s name?” he whispered hoarsely to Jud.
Jud turned to look at him, and in the dim light Louis thought the old man looked a hundred and twenty. There was no sign of that odd, dancing light in his eyes now. His face was drawn, and there was stark terror in his eyes. But when he spoke, his voice was steady enough. “Just a loon,” he said. “Come on. Almost there.”
