She reached out into the abyss, and something awful reached back.
Epilogue
I am being watched. I think, perhaps, since the first day of my life, but certainly since we buried Thomas Terrywile in Coombs’ Gulch. And I am being watched by others. For a long time I was locked in a hospital where I was on ‘suicide watch’, and nurses, accompanied by big orderlies, would come to me with needles when I tried to tell them the truth. The injections made me dizzy and tired. I would sleep for days, drifting in and out of this world and finding myself back in the Gulch, seeing visions of Jacob trapped in the dark nothingness. In those long hours of unconsciousness, I relived my previous life, over and over again. I made different decisions; I walked various paths. But each time, I ended in the same place. Our lives are preordained nightmares. Our strings are attached to the puppeteers and cannot be cut. I would wake and try to tell them, tell them about Jacob, tell them about me, and each time it was another needle and a return to the darkness. I drifted in and out of alternate realities that all ended the same, and behind it I sensed the horrid truth.
I was watched by them for a long time until I finally learned to shut up and keep the truth to myself so they finally let me out.
Mary was gone by then. I tried to reach her, but she was gone from me, from everything, I suppose. I went to the house. The locks were changed, and it was empty. There was a For Sale sign in the front yard.
The police watched me for a long time. I would spot an inconspicuously dressed man or a dark-colored sedan behind me at various intervals, keeping track of where I went and what I did. They followed me when I drove out to that place in the forest where they had followed Jacob’s scent to the very end. The design of rocks had been removed to discourage the curious public, but I found the spot and knew that I was in the right place. I could feel it. Standing there, I closed my eyes and felt close to it – to that place where my boy was trapped, to the demon-god that kept him there. I could practically see it, and in that moment I heard a distant whispering. Something in the trees urging me to action, to do something terrible.
Do you see?
I saw.
The police tail didn’t last long. Jacob’s case went cold for everyone but me. I think even Mary gave up after a couple of years. I would occasionally call her, but her voice was dead and distant. There was nothing between us anymore. Perhaps Jacob was all that really held us together – our tether – and once he was gone, Mary and I were connected by nothing more than an absence. Once, I tried to tell her what I knew, but she immediately launched into histrionics. She didn’t want to hear it. It was insane, a product of a broken mind. “What were you doing out there in those mountains?” she asked once, but I did not have an answer that anyone wanted to hear or believe, so I said nothing.
But I understood what she was asking in that question: How was I connected to Jacob’s disappearance? Did I do what everyone suspected, but could not prove? She once told a television reporter that I was a good man, that I had nothing to do with Jacob’s disappearance. She had steeled herself, set her jaw and told the world that I could never do something like that. But the answer to Mary’s question wasn’t so simple. I was responsible. Looking back over all the difficulty I put my family through leading up to that awful day, I was responsible for so much. Sometimes, I felt I was partly responsible for every damn horrible thing that happened in the world. And maybe I was. Maybe we all are. Maybe that’s why I can’t look at anyone with a straight face.
Mary still does interviews every now and then, typically on the anniversary of Jacob’s disappearance, which has some imaginary importance media outlets can make a headline out of – two years, five years, ten years.
A few years after I was released from the hospital, I found Rich, the old hunter I had once asked about the most dangerous animal to hunt. He lived in the same place and was very familiar with the circumstances and stories surrounding what had happened to me and Jacob. I looked ragged. I was practically homeless, sleeping in some no-name motel on my earnings as a line cook for a wedding hall, a place where young men and women start their lives together like gears being milled for work in an unknowable machine. Those days were filled with regret, the constant reminder of all I had lost. I looked on those couples and wondered what secrets they hid from each other that could eventually rise up and swallow them whole.
Rich answered the door and looked at me like he might kill me. I told him I wanted to hear more about the polar bears, about the white tundra of the North Pole, about what made him so uneasy hunting them.
“I didn’t hunt them,” he said, his voice insistent and animated. “I was a contractor for an oil company working in the Arctic Circle. My job was to keep the workers safe, keep the executives with their two-thousand-dollar parkas from being eaten by the wolves or the bears, or kicked to death by an angry mama moose. Even back
