“Too far of a shot,” he said, but his voice was dead.
“But what is it?” Conner asked again.
“We should go.”
“Just take the shot anyway, goddammit.” Conner took the rifle from Michael’s hand. Michael didn’t resist. His limp body let the sling slide off his shoulder. He stumbled and swayed slightly in the wind. Conner raised the rifle toward the shadow atop the meadow, but it was gone, and there was nothing but the rounded horizon.
“I don’t see it,” Conner said. He slowly scanned the cold field for any sign of movement, life, but there was nothing. “What did you see? A person? A bear?”
Michael stared off into the trees, as if seeing something in the air, in the spaces between. “I don’t know what it was. It was too far off.”
“Bullshit,” Conner said.
“We should go now,” Michael said.
Conner looked at Jonathan and then back to his brother. “Let’s just get this done,” he said and lifted the side of the box. Jonathan took up the other side. Michael stumbled into the forest. They lost sight of the lake when they dropped below the tree line. It wasn’t far off.
They moved quicker. They ignored the pain in their legs and shoulders. The new forest opened up and swallowed them, and they were lost in a limbo of thick trees. They kept a quick pace. There was no undergrowth to slow them down. The downward slope carried them, but it seemed endless, and they could not see more than fifty yards in any direction. Time and space seemed to stand still. Jonathan thought they passed the same rock outcropping several times. Nothing changed; the forest scrolled past them like a broken film. The deep blue morning sky faded, and the sun was now hidden behind a desert expanse of low gray clouds. The colder air came quick and sharp. Sweat seeped out from beneath Jonathan’s wool cap and froze to his cheek.
“We won’t beat the snow,” Michael said.
“We will,” Conner said.
The cold air brought a heavier wind. The tops of the trees danced and swayed, knocked against each other. The sound came from above them and in every direction and echoed hollow, cold and dead. Michael and Conner carried the case now. Jonathan kept the rifle ready. Behind the clatter of the tree branches was the sound of heavy footfalls. Jonathan motioned for them to stop. He turned and watched the trees behind them and was lost in the cascading maze. He felt something but saw nothing. He looked through the scope, but it made him more blind, limiting his vision and perspective. There were only hints of movement, something sliding behind the wall of forest, nothing more than a fleeting shadow from the corner of his eye or the sound of a tree limb snapping or a branch breaking free of its moorings. He let the brothers move ahead and waited for what followed; he waited for what had uttered those words to him the night before and what stood at the crest of the meadow staring down at them.
He wished for other times and places, for other lives where that night ten years ago had not happened, where the bullet was five inches to the right and missed the boy completely. Everything inescapable hinged on precise moments, tiny factors that change the world. He watched and waited and felt something beyond the trees calling to him.
He whispered something to the trees.
He heard Michael and Conner calling for him in the distance. He turned with his rifle and began moving quickly down the mountain toward their voices, which seemed far away, lost in the wilderness. He rounded a tree and saw them, rifles raised, sighting the barrels directly at him. He stopped dead and thought they would fire. The two brothers could keep a secret for eternity, no matter what haunted their lives. Their faces were stone cold, expressionless. Jonathan raised his hands gently, and they lowered their guns.
“Yell out when you’re coming,” Conner said.
“We’re here,” Michael said.
The trees thinned out, the ground turned to wet stone and frozen mud, the smell of condensation and dead fish. Jonathan stared down at the box with the dead boy inside. A mirage of dark and haunting water called to them from between the trees; the surface of the cold lake wavered and rippled and gave way to its depths.
Chapter Twenty
A narrow and rocky shoreline traced north and south from where they stood, bending in and out of sight and then jutting far out into a peninsula before disappearing. It was a thin line of dark gray before the water, which ran black beneath the gathering clouds. They placed the box at the water’s edge and sat down to collect their breath. The damp rocks penetrated through their coveralls, touched their skin, but they sat anyway. Jonathan filled his canteen with water from the lake and drank. The water was cold, near freezing. The daylight temperature was below thirty now, and already he was shivering after hauling the coffin down the slope. They stared out at the lake, and it seemed suspended in air, as if a dark, flat cloud hovered in the mountains. The peaks on the other side rose to the sky. All was silent. The water rippled slightly in a breeze.
“It goes down at least a hundred feet from here,” Conner said. “It feeds the river that runs down through Pasternak. It isn’t going anywhere.”
The lake seemed prehistoric, outside of time and beyond the reach of civilization.
“It will stay secret here,” Conner said, but neither Jonathan nor Michael replied. Jonathan was hungry, drained from the past two days. He looked in his pack. There were only two sandwiches left, and he ate them both, shivering in the wet air. He could smell the approaching snow.
Michael and Conner ate. Conner looked at the sky and said, “We need to get this over with.” He unstrapped the portable raft from his pack and spread the flat, thick rubber over