He left the thick timber behind and walked among the tall grasses, the flatland that lined the stream, the place where it had all begun with that single gunshot. Everything was dead under the snow. The moonlight poured down, and everything glowed bright and ghastly and cold. He heard whispering again. It came stronger now, heavier, carried on the air; the voices became more human, but still he could not make out the words. It sounded like a small group of men talking, plotting, just out of listening range, the way voices mingled together in a crowded pool hall or downtrodden dive bar. He thought about the night at the East Side Tavern when Michael and Conner approached him with this plan. The strange bar patrons who somehow looked familiar, how they watched him even though he did not know them. It was like the entire world was in on some kind of joke and he was the mark, left to spin and cry in his ignorance.
Perhaps the voices were just a ghostly recording, the sound of men standing over the bloody body of a boy with a star-shaped hole in his eye, plotting how to bury him in a box. It played over and over again, like songs from the past on endless radio repeat. The past and present blended seamlessly into a new reality – a nightmare into which he was waking. The Gulch was an eternal recurrence and his life nothing but a minor detail, twists on the truth, a ruffling of the veil.
Jonathan stood at the edge of a hole. A deep hole, square shaped, a couple of yards long and about one yard wide. There was a pickaxe and shovels on the ground, partially covered in snow. It looked strange now, this hole near a stream in the middle of the Gulch. It seemed to be drawing him closer. He wanted to lie down in it. He was tired, so very tired. Clouds rolled overhead. The moon disappeared, and snow began to drift silent and steady across the land.
He could feel many things watching him. They were just over his shoulder, just hidden in the darkness of the tree line, just out of sight. He could not see them, but they were there.
He looked again into that hole and saw his own body lying there, head broken open, limbs at strange angles, eyes wide and partially set free from his skull – straining to see something in the sky, just before the bullet tore through.
Jonathan looked out into the distance, where the tall grass of the wetlands met the trees. A pair of yellow eyes shone in the darkness, high off the ground, bright as the moon, glossy and sinister. Someone spoke to him from the trees.
“Where is Jacob?”
He turned to look, but no one was there. The tree line was dark and impenetrable. He looked back to where he had seen the eyes shining in the night. They were gone. He walked to where they had been and stared up into the spiraling spikes of a dying black spruce tree. They seemed like a staircase or ladder climbing up into the darkness of space. Or perhaps he was at the top and they led downward into the earth. He was too tired and dizzy to know the difference anymore.
He walked to the southern edge of the valley and stood before the blackened trees as the land sloped gently upward toward the cabin. It wasn’t much farther now. He could hear the sound of the electric generator turning, a horrendous sound rendered soft by distance.
The broken spikes of tree limbs plunged into him like knives and scraped his numb face and bruised his hollow chest. He lumbered up the hill like it was a mountain, dragging his body along. There was whispering again in the trees, the sound of men’s feet running through the forest like a pack of unseen wolves closing in on an injured buck. He heard the padding and crunching of the snow, breaking branches, cursing and giggling, like children with low, gruff voices. They were everywhere in the darkness. Jonathan stared straight ahead. Through the trees, he could make out the faint glow of electric light from the rear of the cabin.
He pushed on farther. The light grew steadily brighter, reached into the trees and cast shadows across the snow. Large flakes of snow fell from the sky, drifting lazily through the pine canopy.
A face appeared from behind a tree, poking out into the light. A beefy man with a round face and fire-shocked beard. He laughed like he was playing a game, his smile ruddy, red and giddy. For a moment, Jonathan recognized him – the man from the bar in Pasternak, who had mumbled those strange words to Michael before the fight broke out.
“Where is Jacob?” he said and then disappeared from view back behind the tree.
Then another face appeared from behind a different tree. He was tall and gaunt, half-hidden in shadow. He smiled like death, his voice deep and cavernous. “Where is Jacob?”
Then another and another and another, all appearing momentarily from behind tree trunks, their faces suddenly visible like apparitions, giddily asking, “Where is Jacob?” and laughing to themselves before disappearing into the darkness as if they were playing a game of hide-and-seek. They moved around him, shifting places, breaking branches, but he could not see them until they popped a head out from behind a tree and whispered that same, awful taunt: “Where is Jacob?”
He recognized them all from that night in Pasternak, their elbows on the wooden bar of The Forge, half-finished beers falling over, faces bloated and heavy, secretive smiles and calculating eyes, sizing up the world for a fight. They looked different now in the winter night, cast in shadow and dull light. Their skin was gray and pockmarked, their
