He looked out at the lake, an endless black mass in the night. He allowed himself a brief tear before he tamped it back down. Regret and sadness would change nothing in this place. There was no comfort – only the trees, the lake and whatever it was that awaited them in the dark. He watched the snow fall gently into the dying fire.
Jonathan stood and brushed off the snow that had gathered on his back and shoulders. He took a flashlight and shone the beam through the trees to find more wood. He wanted to keep the fire going throughout the night, if only for comfort. He walked in a growing circle around the tent where Michael slept. He dusted the snow off a few more fallen limbs and placed them gently into the circle, careful to leave room for the flames to breathe. His light reached out into the forest and found only shadows and ghostly trees, which stood so still and quiet he couldn’t help but feel they watched him. He wandered far till he was lost in the darkness, and then he turned around to find the firelight of camp.
Behind him, farther back in the trees, a thick limb bent slowly until it snapped and fell to the ground. It was close to him, close enough to see if he turned his flashlight toward it. Jonathan stood still. There was only the sound of his heart beating and his lungs pushing warm, wet breath into the night. The fire and the tent were fifty feet away, the endless dark behind him. But he was paralyzed, unable to take a step toward the camp and unable to shine his flashlight on whatever waited for him out there. He was too scared. He didn’t want to look at it. He didn’t want to see the truth – he couldn’t. In that moment, he prayed for an end he was too cowardly to face.
Now it waited for him just a few yards away. He could feel it staring at him. He could feel its presence, but he didn’t want to accept it. It was the ultimate truth – a force that played on all their fears, insecurities and deceptions – and he could not yet face it. He feared it would break his mind. If he didn’t look, if he didn’t see it in its true form, then he could tell himself it was merely the product of his imagination; he could deny with skepticism and doubt, will himself to believe it was a bear or some other common creature, that it was a vixen or bobcat shrieking those awful cries in the mountains, that it was a mere accident that sucked Conner into the lake. If he did not look, maybe he could just dismiss the story of Thomas Terrywile as impossible; he could shrug off his visions at the cabin and beside the lake as nothing more than stress dreams. He could tell the world that it was all just an accident, another incident of Coombs’ Gulch hikers and hunters losing their way.
But if he shone his light out into the darkness and saw it unmasked, in all its strange and impossible reality, he feared he would forever be trapped in its gaze.
He thought of death. He feared it. But more than death he feared living with the vision of this thing that stalked him in the woods, that it would forever stalk him in the recesses of his mind. He thought of Mary and Jacob. He thought of what he would face back home. The lies and tortures would continue unabated for the rest of his life. It was not enough to overcome his fear of glimpsing it in that very moment. At some point there would be a turn – a shift – and this thing would move itself forward into the light, and there he would be – there they would all be. But not now, not here.
In the darkness came the sound of slow, heavy footfalls, soft on the snowy ground. They were not the gentle and precise touches of a deer or the lumbering shuffle of a black bear, but the upright steps of something humanlike, which sounded for a few moments before disappearing completely into the night. Jonathan walked back to the tent with the same slow and steady footfalls until he was once again in the light and warmth of the fire.
He dropped the timber from his hands into the fire and sent a volley of sparks into the air. They swirled about in the night like tiny suns. He moved quickly and quietly, at every moment tense and waiting for something to tear him apart. He took his rifle and checked the chamber. He switched on the safety, took his flashlight and crawled into the tent.
Michael’s dark mass lay in the tent, rising and falling with his troubled breath. The bottle of whiskey rolled empty on the ground. Jonathan lay down beside him and felt the comfort of another living person – the last person in the world who truly knew him. Jonathan pushed his body against Michael’s. He didn’t want to feel so alone and unsafe.
His eyes were wide open but he could not see. His heart pounded, but it was all merely a dream of life. He listened in the night.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Thoughts came to him during that dark night – thoughts of what could have
