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The following years, I wandered the deep forests, searching. I combed through hunting grounds during off season. I thought of those moments, those images of lost children captured on hunting cameras, glowing eerie and strange in the night, appearing out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere. I thought back to the visions I’d had of Thomas Terrywile, the moments he was given form and shape again to wander in the wilderness, the moments when he would see campers or a vacationing family and try to reach out to them. It was like he had no voice to speak. Or maybe it was the people who had no ears to hear or eyes to see. Maybe everyone was looking at something else.
But I knew what I was searching for. I knew I could see them, because I knew where to look. I knew how to look, because I had been there. I had seen that evil presence. I had seen the beyond. I had glimpsed the horror underlying it all.
I wandered the hills, the mountains, everywhere for years, and I came to understand Rich’s experience in the tundra as much as I understood my own experience in the mountains. I was being watched, followed, tricked into looking at one thing while being savaged by another. The police were long gone. They could never be bothered to follow me out so deep into the wilderness, so far away. But there were others watching me in those deep forests, when I would spend days and nights surrounded by nothing but mountains and the maze of trees.
I would see them every once in a while, looking at me from a distance. Or their faces might appear from behind a tree. Michael, Conner and Gene waited for me out there, their faces distorted, their bodies moved by some unseen force. They were both dead and alive. Perhaps they were dead in this life but alive in another. Perhaps their corporeal forms were possessed with that cold blackness of the netherworld, forced to wander the world and do its bidding. I could feel that darkness in myself, as well. A core of cold that spread through my veins and grew like a cancer, changing me, influencing me, corrupting my thoughts. As I camped in the wilderness at night Michael, Conner and Gene would whisper to me, sitting just outside my tent, their strange voices penetrating the thin fabric and boring into my mind. Four friends brought together again. They told me what I must do. How I could win back my boy, my Jacob, and somehow make everything right again. Perhaps I had flashed forward, like Rich said. Perhaps this was all just a dying dream and I needed to wake.
I could hear them walk through the trees around my campsite. They would move things and sometimes take them in the middle of the night. They gave offerings at times, dead animals, whose carcasses would lie at the entrance to my tent. Offerings, trades; I knew what they wanted.
I found the perfect spot in the Appalachians, just beyond a small hunting town in Maine. It was a clearing in a sycamore forest, where the trees seemed to part in a natural circle and left the ground bare. I knew it was the right place because I saw, just for a moment, Jacob standing there in the center of it, staring at me with a quiet, pleading fear on his face, dressed in little boy clothes – the same outfit he wore when Mary sent him to school that day. He hadn’t aged a day. I looked like a crazed and ragged vagrant who’d been sleeping in the woods for weeks, but he recognized me. Then he was gone like a ghost or hallucination. I vomited right then out of shock and longing. I wished I could switch places with him. I would happily give my life for his. I walked into the center of that clearing, fell to my knees and felt his presence, as if he were standing just over my shoulder where I could not see him. I turned around and around, but he was always just out of sight.
I snatched six-year-old Ryan Temple from the edge of a soccer field while his family watched his older brother play a heated match against a rival town. I hadn’t made much of a plan, but everything just fell into place. I knew from the whispers outside my tent that I should be there, hidden in the bushes at the far edge of the field, which fell toward a brook and a small wood, a tentacle from the large forest beyond where my stone altar waited amid the sycamores. Ryan was a good-looking boy, skinny with a mop of hair, which seems to be the style for children these days. He was dressed well and had big brown eyes that sparkled with curiosity as he wandered along the wooded edge of the sports field.
He just disappeared from the world and into my arms. His parents were distracted. Everyone was looking away at just the perfect moment. Maybe they were watching the game. Maybe they were lost in the eyes of the strange-looking figure stalking near the parking lot on the opposite side of the field from me. Maybe they were wondering what such a horrid man was doing near their children, near a place where wholesome families gathered to reaffirm their lives were worth living, trying to create purpose in small, meaningless games. Ryan was drawn over to the far edge of the field by a moment of curiosity, sparked by something he perhaps saw or heard. I don’t know. But there he was, and I
