right-a heavy Sonoma County red. Not as good as whiskey but it would have to do.
I got the foil wrapping off the neck. Screw top. Good. I took a tumbler from one of the cupboards, transported it and the wine to the bedroom. Poured the glass full, choked down a third of it with four aspirin and four Dristan capsules, drank the rest in quick little gulps. The heat of it spread immediately, took away some of the chill and eased the trembling. The alcohol went straight to my head: Within seconds I was woozy and I had to sit on the bed.
Lie down, I thought. You’re dead on your feet, it won’t be long before you pass out.
I got up long enough to toss sheets, pillows, other blankets from the wardrobe to the bed, then crawled under the pile, still wearing the slipper-socks and the gloves. Poured wine, drank it, then tugged sheets and blankets around and under me until I was completely covered, wrapped up like a bug in a cocoon. Pretty soon I didn’t feel the cold anymore. The last of the chill gradually went away and then the shaking quit altogether. And at last the warmth and the wine and the medicine combined with exhaustion to drag me down toward unconsciousness.
I didn’t fight it; I was safe enough here. The snowfall would have obliterated most of my tracks by now, and without them to make somebody curious, no one but the owners would have any reason to come here; and why would they show up in the middle of a near blizzard? Sleep was what I needed most right now-the rest of today and tonight, a dozen hours at least. With that much rest, with the self-doctoring I had done and would keep doing, I should be well enough to travel again tomorrow morning…
The Third Day
I didn’t go anywhere in the morning. Or at any time during that day. I was not even able to get out of bed for more than a couple of minutes until late afternoon, almost twenty-four hours after I first lay down.
The first time I woke up, it was pitch dark outside and I was sweaty, feverish, so weak and achy that I could barely lift up to pour more wine, shake out more aspirin and cold capsules; and swallowing was a torment. The second time I woke up, morning light had seeped in through the window shutters and I felt marginally better: still sweaty and feverish, with a headache from the wine, but my throat was less sore and I wasn’t quite as weak or stiff. I got up to use the toilet, and thought about staying up, getting dressed, but I didn’t try to do it. The storm had blown itself out during the night, and the sun had put in an appearance; but it was still cold and windy. Going out into that wind and wading through the snowdrifts in my condition would have been suicidal. So I took more medicine, with just enough wine to wash it down, and rewrapped myself in the blankets and slept again, fitfully and with jumbled dreams. And when I woke up the third time I was drenched in sweat, the headache was gone, there was that broken-fever feel in my body when I moved, and I was wolf-hungry.
Yesterday’s battle with the elements hadn’t damaged my watch; the time was 3:35. I lay there for a minute or so, listening to the wind beat at the cabin walls, watching my breath come out in round white puffs. Then I sat up, took the glove off my left hand to examine the little finger. The tiny patch of frostbite was still there but it hadn’t spread and the skin around it looked less inflamed; and when I touched the tip I had feeling in it again. I put the glove back on, drew the slipper-sock off my left foot. The two frostbitten toes looked better, too, though the top edge of one was still numb.
I swallowed two more aspirin and two more Dristan with the last of the wine. Swung out of bed, stood up on legs that creaked and ached dully but seemed to work well enough. The wardrobe provided a thin turtleneck sweater, the lumberman’s shirt, and a pair of faded and patched Levi’s. Tight fit on all of them, but not so tight that my movements were restricted.
My own clothes, the ones I had worn for more than three months, were bunched up on the floor where I’d dropped them. I remembered the journal pages and bent to the overcoat, reached a hand into the pocket. They were still there, damp and crumpled. I pulled them out, saw that the writing was still legible, if a little smeary, and spread them out individually on the floor to dry. The only other thing I wanted from those clothes was my wallet and keys. He’d let me keep those, and why not? He’d expected to bury them along with my corpse. I had no idea how much money the wallet contained, so I counted it. Sixty-nine dollars. Not much, but enough to get me by if I was careful. I ought to be able to use my credit cards for most things I would need, without anyone recognizing my name. My disappearance had likely been publicized statewide, because of its bizarre nature, but there wouldn’t have been any media mention for at least a couple of months, and people have short memories.
I set the wallet on the bureau, threw a blanket around my shoulders for added warmth, and went out into the kitchen. The wind wasn’t as sharp today, blowing in along the areaway, and it wasn’t bringing in any snow. But it had brought in plenty during the past twenty-four hours: There was a long white carpet on most of the areaway floor and halfway across the kitchen.
The propane stove wasn’t hooked up, and there was no way to hook it up; it didn’t contain a tank, nor was there a tank in the larder or anywhere else that I looked. Cold food, then. The larder yielded two cans of sardines, a can of mixed vegetables, another of peaches, and a second bottle of red wine. I found a can opener in one of the drawers, took it and the other stuff into the bedroom, and sat on the bed to fill the hole in my belly.
When I was done I opened the shutters over the bathroom window to let some light in there. The cabin had been virtually invisible from the road, so there didn’t seem to be any risk in that. It took me a while-two minutes or so-to work up enough courage to face myself in the mirror, but it had to be done and so I did it.
Christ! Wild tangle of beard and hair, both gone grayer than I remembered, almost white in spots; unhealthy grayish pallor, sunken eyes with things shining in them that I didn’t want to see, refused to focus on. The whole of the face had a partially collapsed aspect from all the weight I’d lost, as if some of the skull structure itself had eroded away. It struck me that I could reach up and take a handful of my features, bunch them up in my fingers the way you can grasp and bunch up an animal’s fur.
I clutched at the sink, staring at the face in the glass, and the hate welled up in me until I was bloated with it. I had to turn away before long. I felt that if I didn’t turn away I would continue to swell until the hate burst out of me like pus out of an overripe boil.
I stood with my back to the glass until I had myself under control again, my emotions screwed down under a tight lid. Then I opened the medicine cabinet and took out the cuticle scissors and safety razor I had seen in there yesterday. I made myself look in the mirror again-at the beard and hair this time, only those. I couldn’t leave here with either one as wild as it was. And because it would be painful to try to do a complete shave without water, my only choice with the beard was to trim it to a respectable size and shape. Keeping the facial hair was probably a good idea anyway. Combined with how leaned down I was, it made an effective disguise. For all I knew a disguise would be beneficial when I went a-hunting.
The beard trim took me ten minutes. I spent another couple scraping off edge-stubble with the razor to even it out. There was a comb in the wardrobe, and I used that to work the snarls out of my hair. Then I trimmed it as best I could. There was nothing I could do about its filthiness, except to cover my head with a cap or hat when I left here. There had to be some kind of headgear in the cabin.
When I was finished I looked… what? Less frightening, less like a man who had suffered through ninety days of hell. Reasonably normal as long as you didn’t look closely at the eyes. But there was nothing I could do about them, either, not externally.
The afternoon light was beginning to thin and fade. I closed the shutters against a battalion of shadows creeping among the white-clad trees outside. My legs had begun to ache again, and the scratchiness was back in my throat, and I was starting to feel the cold through all the things I wore. Almost time to get back into bed, drink a little more wine, sleep for another few hours. But not quite yet. There was still something I wanted to do first.
Among the utensils in one of the kitchen drawers was a big, thick-bladed butcher knife; I got that and took it into the main room, to the redwood cabinet I had noticed yesterday. The lock on the cabinet doors was the kind you could loid with a credit card. Using the knife I had it sprung and the doors open in fifteen seconds. Gun cabinet, just as I had thought. Enough rack space for four rifles or shotguns, but the only weapon of that type it contained was a Kodiak bolt-action center-fire rifle. On the shelf at the bottom were three boxes of ammunition, two for the rifle and one for a.22 handgun. The piece that the.22 cartridges fitted was on the shelf too, wrapped in chamois cloth: a High-Standard Sentinel revolver, short-barreled, lightweight, with a nine-round cylinder capacity. Not much of a weapon, really, except at close range-and even then it wouldn’t have much stopping power. I broke it open, spun the empty cylinder, checked the sights and the hammer and trigger action, peered inside the barrel. At least it was
