“Whose tracks are these?” he asked again, pointing to the footprints left behind by the revenant Jonathan had seen in the night. They trailed off into the maze of forest, longer steps than any man could take. Jonathan followed the tracks with his eyes. He should have known, and wondered to himself how he could have made such a mistake.
“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. It was all he could think to say. A stiff wind from off the lake pushed up against his back.
“Where did they come from?” Michael’s voice was flat and dead, as if he were only speaking and not thinking – a talking doll whose cord was pulled.
Jonathan didn’t want to be left alone – he couldn’t be left alone. It was more than he would be able to bear. They were out of food and out of time. They needed to get back to the cabin if they were to survive and needed to somehow face the world together. “I said I don’t know. They were just here this morning. Maybe they’re mine from last night. I had to look for firewood, you know.”
Michael stumbled down from the tent and shuffled through the ash of the fire. He stared down at the tracks and then followed them into the distance. His mind worked, picking apart the possibilities, the mechanics of it.
“They start here,” he said, pointing at the small ledge between the shore and the forest soil. “And they head in that direction. No other footprints coming or going. They aren’t yours. They came from the shore.”
“No, Michael. That’s not it.”
“Do you see any other explanation? There are the tracks, the evidence right in front of you. Where did they come from?”
“I was out looking for firewood…”
“You looked for firewood up there,” Michael said, pointing behind the tent, “and over there. I know that because your tracks wander around and then come back to camp. Those tracks just go straight out and never come back, and it looks like they were running.”
“Michael, we need to leave and we need to leave now. We have to get back to the cabin today or…”
“Or what?”
“I don’t know. We need to get back and tell somebody. Get help. I don’t know. Things aren’t right out here. You know that.”
“I know there are human boot tracks starting here and leading out there. You have no explanation. Want to hear mine?”
“No. No, I don’t.” Jonathan started walking back up to the tent. “What we need to do is break down this tent and leave. Now.”
“My explanation is Conner made it to shore down that way where the lake empties into a stream and then walked up the shoreline here. He was probably freezing, disoriented and walked off into the woods in the middle of the night. He got turned around, lost in the snow.” Michael reached into the tent and pulled out his jacket and his rifle. “And now we need to go find him.”
“We can’t!” Jonathan yelled. “We have no food. We’re miles away from anywhere, and more weather is moving in. We won’t be able to survive much longer out here!”
“You can go for days without food.”
“Listen to me. Even if what you said was true, he’d be frozen to death by now. He couldn’t have made it.”
“He could make it. We have to look. We have to know we tried.”
“He’s gone, Michael. You know that. There’s no way he could have survived the water, the cold. There’s no way he could have made it that far. He would have just come back to the tent.”
“Maybe he did,” Michael said. “Did you see anything last night? Hear anything?”
Jonathan pursed his lips and looked back out at the lake.
“I thought so.”
“We need to leave and get help. That’s the best way, even if what you say is true. We could get a search and rescue team, helicopters, anything…”
“And what are we going to tell them we were doing up here?”
“Hunting, fishing. The same thing everybody does up here. We’ll tell them we got lost. It doesn’t matter; we can think of something, but we need to go get help. If we leave now, we can get to the cabin in time.”
“In time for what? If he’s dead, what would time matter?”
Jonathan said nothing.
“What did you see last night?”
“I didn’t…”
Michael turned his rifle in his hands. Its barrel swayed back and forth, lazily pointing in Jonathan’s direction. Michael gripped it tighter and the barrel pointed directly at him. “We’ve been friends for a long time,” he said. “Tell me now what you saw last night. I know you’re lying. You’re not good at it unless you have three other people doing it for you.”
Jonathan stared at him and at the rifle. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret. You’ll have a difficult time explaining a gunshot wound to the authorities.”
“I didn’t have to explain anything to anyone last time there was a gunshot wound up here,” Michael said. “There’s no burying this one in a box and hiding it in the ground.”
Jonathan waited a moment. He searched for words, an explanation, but nothing came. His mind was at a loss. “I don’t know what I saw.”
“Was it Conner?”
“It looked like Conner, but it wasn’t him. Not like this. It wasn’t alive. It made strange sounds out of its mouth. It wasn’t Conner. It was something pretending to be Conner.”
“Spare me your nonsense and suit up,” he said.
“He’s dead. It came walking up out of the water. What in God’s name do you think could have survived in there for that long?”
“What did he say?”
Jonathan’s voice caught in his throat. The words – the sound of the words – came back to him, and he couldn’t repeat it. There was no way to tell Michael what he heard. “What did you see when we opened the box, huh? Tell me what you saw.”
Michael was quiet for a moment. “I saw a boy being taken to a place in the woods. I saw three
