It had taken all this time, but Jonathan now knew he was the one being skinned. All the time and effort and pain was merely his skin being removed, leaving him open and exposed. There would be only truth at the end, stripped of all its garments, and the truth was not sane.
A darkness fell over him, a feeling of dread. The things he’d seen in that ghastly vision were of past and present and future – history and prophesy. But he could change it. He knew he could.
The blood seemed to drain from his body, his arms and legs tired and limp. Relieved of the burden of the coffin, he and Michael could make better time, but now even his backpack felt like a paralyzing weight. He breathed the heavy, cold air and it hurt his lungs. The four inches of snow made the slope perilous and slick. His boots slipped off unseen rocks and roots buried under the snow. He fell and stood up again. He pulled himself up the hill on all fours at times. The snow melted on his coveralls, and his clothes soaked through. He grasped trees to pull himself forward, slid downward, fell and pulled himself up. The muscles of his legs burned. Michael persisted forward, farther ahead now. He didn’t stop or turn back.
The clear sky disappeared behind low cloud cover. The flat, gray light hid the contours of the slope. Jonathan could no longer discern indentations in the ground, the small bumps of rocks and roots. All he knew was that he trudged uphill, slipping, regaining, straining, wanting to call out for Michael in that gray limbo and wondering if Michael would even turn back to see him.
Jonathan cried out and Michael finally stopped to wait. His legs ached. The peeling birches were everywhere. He leaned against a tree. His lungs hurt.
“There’s something out there,” Michael said. His voice seemed lost in the impenetrable gray. “It’s way out there, pacing us. Hard to see. Just past where you can’t see any farther.”
Jonathan tried to catch his breath. He looked into the maze of ghostly birch.
“You see it,” Michael said.
“I don’t,” Jonathan said, barely able to talk.
Michael stared. He seemed almost to smile. His mind worked some kind of angle, seeing something in his own way the rest of the world could not comprehend, breaking it down, piece by piece, to find what was broken. Jonathan was no longer there. It was only Michael and whatever he saw in the trees.
“What does it look like?” Jonathan asked. His mind flashed to Conner, dead white and dripping, walking from the bottom of the lake to stare at him in the night and speak in the voice of a seven-year-old boy.
“It doesn’t look like anything right now,” Michael said. “Maybe in a little bit it will look like something else. But it’s there, waiting for us to move. It’s like a reflection in the snow, the light hitting it a certain way, the trees bending with it.”
Michael raised his rifle and stared through the scope. Jonathan took his Remington and did the same, but saw nothing. Perhaps what Michael saw was no different from what Jonathan experienced the night before while gathering wood – the knowledge that something was there without laying eyes on it.
There were only hints, no real answers.
“It’s like when you go to a kindergarten play,” Michael said. “Me and Annie went to one last year. It was Brent’s first school play. You remember the one? I think Jacob was in it, too.”
Jonathan nodded. He remembered the play. Little kids garbling lines, trying to follow teachers’ directions from the wings while parents cooed and laughed and snapped pictures.
“Before the play began you could see the stage curtain moving and rustling as the kids took their places. Their little hands and feet pushing against the curtain, trying to find their way out into the light where people could see them. That’s what it looks like. The curtain is moving.”
Michael stared intently into the trees. He had not moved. His voice was flat, far away. “It’s breaking down.”
“What’s breaking down?”
“All of it,” Michael said. “Whatever it is we’re in. There’s a way in and out. That’s where Conner is.”
“Conner is dead.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to believe, but you saw him back there on the beach.”
Jonathan stood up straight now and stared at Michael. “We need to keep moving. We can’t be stuck here. Michael? Do you hear me? We can’t stay here. We have to get back to the cabin. I have to get home. I have to.”
“We’re behind the curtain as well…”
Jonathan grabbed Michael by the shoulders. He was a larger man, but Jonathan turned him like a top. “How many more miles to the cabin?”
Michael stared in silence for a moment, and Jonathan quizzed him again. “Do the numbers in your head. How many more miles to the cabin?”
He blinked and paused for a moment, looking as if he was trying to reach into his memory, retrace the outline on the map. “Six, I think.”
“How long will it take us to make that trip? C’mon. Do the
