probably better than a mile to the nearest neighbor, more miles to the nearest town, and at that I couldn’t just walk up to somebody’s door, looking and smelling as I did. I’d be turned away, or somebody would insist on calling a doctor or the authorities. Contact with a law-enforcement agency was the last thing I wanted right now-word to get out that I was alive and of my ordeal. Avoid people, except in case of an emergency, until I got myself cleaned up and presentable again-that was a priority item. There would be a way to manage it. There are ways to do just about anything if you’re determined enough.
And after the outside of me was spruced up so that I didn’t frighten women and little children? Visit the neighbors then, find out if any of them knew anything? No. It would take too much time, and chances were it wouldn’t get me anywhere. Most mountain cabins are deserted in winter; and people who do choose to live in one year-round like their privacy and aren’t always acquainted with their neighbors, especially if the neighbors are summer residents and haven’t occupied a place in more than a year. Even if somebody could supply a name it was doubtful he’d have a current address to go with it, or any idea of where the owner could be found.
Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating was my best bet, at least for starters. If it turned out to be a dead end, then I could come back up here, wherever
One way or another, I would find out who the whisperer was and then I would find him.
And then I would kill him.
Bad night.
Dreams, ugly and distorted and mercifully unclear. I woke up once sweating and believing I was still shackled to the wall, and something like a wail came out of me before I groped at my left ankle, felt nothing there, separated illusion from reality. Another time I came awake thinking I had heard something, thinking he’d come back, he was there in the cabin with me. I jumped out of bed and caught up a piece of cordwood and prowled the rooms for ten minutes, listening to night sounds and the cry of the wind. Nobody here but me. I ached when I finally accepted that: I couldn’t put an end to it here and now, in the very same execution chamber he had built for me.
Bad night, yes, but I had had so many bad nights. And it didn’t really matter anyway.
All that mattered was that I was free.
The Second Day
Eight-thirty A.M.
Cold and gray again today. More snow had fallen during the night-there was a layer of fresh, ice-filmed powder over everything-and there would probably be more flurries before the day was finished. Dry out there now, though, and not much wind.
I turned away from the window, restless and impatient to be on my way, to put distance between myself and this place. But there were preparations to be made first. And I wanted the temperature to rise a little higher, to take the knife edge off the chill of night and early morning.
I put water on to boil for tea, opened the last two cans of chili and emptied them into the saucepan, and set that on the other burner to heat. I had no appetite but it would be foolish to go out into that snowy wilderness without fueling up beforehand.
The snowshoes caught my eye. I went and got them, sat on the bed to see how they fitted on my feet- something I should have done yesterday. The foot straps on both were all right, but on one the things that evidently fastened around the ankles were badly frayed; one good tug and they would break. Was there something among the clutter on the rear porch that I could use to replace or reinforce them?
Yes: some twine that had been used to tie up a bundle of old issues of
The chili and the water were boiling by then. I made a cup of strong tea, gagged it down with the food. The need to get out of there was urgent in me now, almost a physical hurt. I held it down by force of will. If I left without taking precautions I might well regret it later.
One corner of the pillow casing had a tear in it, revealing the foam-rubber entrails. I widened the tear, ripped the casing in half and then into strips; took off my shoes, tore up some pieces of cardboard, and bound those around my socks with the strips for added protection against the cold. Then I wrapped both blankets around my body, over my regular clothing, and buttoned and tightly belted my overcoat to hold them in place. I had lost so much weight that even with the two blankets I did not quite fill out the coat. In the bathroom I tied the larger of the hand towels over my head and under my chin, like a babushka. Not much protection against wind and snow, but I had no other kind of headgear and I needed to wear something.
Almost ready.
There was a package of Fig Newtons left, the only remaining item of food that wasn’t canned; I stuffed it into one overcoat pocket. Into the other one I put the journal pages, all of them, torn off their cardboard backings and folded in half. I didn’t want the whisperer to find them if he came prowling before I caught up with him. They were for my eyes only. No one, I had decided, would ever read them except me.
That was the last thing; now I was ready. I caught up the snowshoes, went to the door, and walked out into the chill morning.
Whiteness carpeted everything within range of my vision. Downhill to my left, an avenuelike break in the spruce forest marked the probable course of the access road. After I had gone forty yards or so I stopped and turned to look back at the cabin, to fix in my memory its exterior design and its exact location. I hoped to Christ I would never have to come back here; but if I did I wanted to be able to recognize it easily from a distance.
The snowpack was slippery but the drifts didn’t become a problem until I was in among the trees, where there was a series of little ridges and hollows. In the low places the drifts were calf-high and it was like trying to wade through a dense mixture of water and sand. When I came onto a section of higher ground where the snow was only a couple of inches deep I strapped on the showshoes and tied the thongs around my ankles. It took me a couple of minutes, and a near fall, to get the hang of walking on them. You had to keep your legs wide apart to prevent stepping on one showshoe with the other, and you had to swing your legs in a kind of waddling gait to maintain balance. Otherwise, snowshoeing wasn’t much different from normal walking.
Once I got used to them I made good time, following the winding break through the spruce forest. The wind had picked up and I was conscious of its steady whine and rattle in the stiff tree branches; but it was behind me and it didn’t penetrate the warm layers of fabric around my body. Because I had no gloves, I kept my hands bunched down deep in the overcoat pockets. The cold got to them anyway, and seeped under and through the tied towel to numb my ears, but there was no pain or discomfort yet. On the contrary the cold gave me a muted sense of exhilaration. It was different from the cold I had felt inside the cabin all those weeks, refreshing, invigorating-a reaffirmation of the freedom that was mine again.
The long downslope ended in another hollow, this one much wider and flat-bottomed and deep-drifted. The second hillock, steeper than the one I’d just descended, rose on the far side. The trees thinned out ahead and most of the upslope was bare, so that I couldn’t be sure of where the road continued up and over. I made a guess and started up.
Snowshoeing was more difficult on an incline; I began to get tired before I had reached the halfway point. I tried moving in a zigzag pattern and that made the going a little easier. Near the top and directly ahead of the course I had set, dwarf fir and the tips of jagged ice-rimmed rocks poked up out of the snowpack. This couldn’t be where the road was, then. I veered away from the rocks, diagonally to my right.
I was forty or fifty yards from the top when a hidden outcrop snagged my right snowshoe and pitched me off balance. Reflexively I thrust the other shoe forward to catch my weight but it slipped on the icy surface of another rock, angled down through the drift and into what must have been a cavity between the rocks. There was a sharp snapping sound and I went down sideways into deep snow that billowed up and half buried me.
In frantic movements I jerked my right leg free and struggled around onto my buttocks, spitting snow and wiping it out of my eyes. When I tried to get up there seemed to be nothing beneath me to put my weight on. I rolled over, shivering; particles of snow had gotten under the collar of my coat, gone slithering down my back and
