“I can’t see anything through all this shit,” Michael said. He watched deep and hard, looking for breaks, looking for the things that could fall apart so he could sweep it away. Dead silence again. Nothing to see but the gray bark of countless trees melded together.
“Bear?” Conner said. “What else would take down a tree like that? Can’t be a person.”
“I don’t see anything. Maybe a deadfall.”
“Fire a shot,” Jonathan said. “If it is a bear, maybe it’ll turn tail and run.”
“No,” Michael said. “Let’s wait, let’s move, let’s get in the clear. I don’t want a warning shot; I want a kill shot.”
“Stay back,” Conner said. “Keep an eye while we get out and then follow.”
Michael kept his eye to the scope, the barrel of his Remington tracing slow arcs across the dead expanse of Coombs’ Gulch below. “Go,” he said.
Conner and Jonathan shouldered their rifles, took up the box and began to move quickly up the hill, leaving Michael behind to stand watch. Jonathan could nearly count the yards till they reached the field. The birch trees thinned into small saplings. The last remnants of the forest grabbed their clothes, scratched their faces. Jonathan and Conner pounded up the slope another thirty yards into the full blaze of the sun. The dry air smelled of dying grass and released the damp cold from their lungs. The massive, open land rolled like ocean waves toward the crest of the hill.
They reached the top and stopped, dropped the case, fell to their knees in the last light of evening. Their lungs screamed, hearts raced. From here they could see down into the Gulch to the east, and to the west they could see glints of sunlight dancing across the surface of the lake. Mountain peaks rose high above them to either side.
Below, in the darkness, Michael followed. His back was turned to them, and he scanned the tree line with his rifle.
Finally, he lowered the gun, turned and began to jog slowly up the hill through the field.
Behind him the forest twisted and turned in the dusk. From his knees, Jonathan raised his rifle, put his eye to the scope and looked just over Michael’s shoulder. Something moved in the darkness of the tree line.
Another strange scream went up from the valley, and they turned to look all around them, to the sky and field and trees, as if it originated from the air itself. It sounded so human, and yet, in its pain, it took on an animal ferocity.
The forest behind Michael gave way to something he could not see – it shifted in the shade and underbrush.
The scope lifted from his eye as Conner tipped the barrel of Jonathan’s rifle skyward.
“What are you aiming at?”
“Nothing,” he said. “No shot. Just making sure.”
Chapter Seventeen
Michael stood on the crest of the field in the last light of dusk, patient, immobile as a statue, the binoculars at his eyes.
“There’s something there,” he said. “I see something in the trees, but I don’t know what it is. Doesn’t want to show itself.”
“How can you tell?” Jonathan asked.
“Just can. It’s like it’s there and then it’s not.”
The case with the boy’s body sat atop the rolling brown meadow. Their gear sat in the tall grass where they had dropped it. They breathed heavy for a long time and waited until they’d mustered enough strength to set the tent. The grass was above their knees and moved with a dry, grating rustle.
“Fire a shot. If it’s an animal, it will either run or be dead,” Conner said.
“And if it’s human, we’ll be dragging two bodies off this goddamned mountain,” Jonathan said.
“I want to draw it out,” Michael said.
“What animal behaves like this?” Conner said.
“Bear would be my guess,” Michael said. “Seems different, though. Hard to tell if there’s anything really there or I’m just imagining it.”
“I thought everyone said this place is dead. No deer, no bears, no nothing,” Jonathan said.
“No forest is ever dead,” Michael said. “Not completely. There’s always something.”
The meadow seemed huge and lonely in the dying light, as if nothing in the world were so large, and the three of them small and without consequence. The tree line appeared miles off across the rolling pasture; the withering stalks shimmered in the evening breeze. Far below, Coombs’ Gulch changed color. The dull gray of the leafless birch trees darkened. The temperature dropped, and they could see their breath and shivered in the gathering cold – sweat-soaked, wet to the bone.
Across the Gulch the moon seemed to appear in the sky like a specter slowly rising from the grave, full and huge, hanging just over the eastern peaks. It cast a ghastly glow over the field, leaving the tree line a black barrier to the unknown.
“Why does it change size like that?” Jonathan said. “The moon. Sometimes it seems so huge and other times small and far away.”
Michael still watched the trees. “It’s an illusion,” he said. “The moon looks bigger near the horizon. No one is really sure why. It’s a trick of the light.”
“A million miles away and it looks right on top of us.”
“Later it will look no bigger than a dime.”
“Can’t trust your own eyes, I guess,” Jonathan said.
Jonathan took his cell phone from his jacket and turned it on. He waited a moment, and then it buzzed and chimed with messages.
“You have service?” Conner said.
“Some.”
A message from Mary asking that he call home as soon as he received it. A photograph of the front door of his house – a heavy oak door stained dark, but through the middle of
