A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (22 page)

Look at me, Uncle Lud!

Here's a story for you: a true-life tale of metamorphosis, in which your nephew wakes to discover he's been turned into an old cedar log, an elegant golden slab, striated with red, a majestic specimen propped within a circle of stacked, flat rocks.

It's okay, I whispered to my newest friends, those great handfuls of broken sticks, those heady fans of cedar brush who held me high as if I were an offering. The transformation, their humming laments, tells me it's not quite complete. I got the gist. I am a mountain kid, after all.

Hey, it's okay, I assured them, the fire's out.

But even as I made my declaration, jewel-like embers, tiny red pulses below, gained purchase, tickling into flame.

It's a story, I reassured all, just a story. But then my fingers blackened and when I tried to lift myself from this embrace and run away, those fingers, then my wrists, then my forearms crumbled into sooty lines of charred wood.

That's not me, I told Bryan, who was close, I was sure.

Be quiet, Bryan warned, pressing a heel against my side so that the branches below me scratched my cheek as they burst, one after the other, into flame.

Play dead, Bryan said, leaning close to my ear.

I am, I whispered back. Bry, oh, Bry, I
am,
I am so dead.

I woke to the sound of metallic thunder, piercing and steady, beating behind my head. The back of my throat cracked so dry, I had to silently whoop for air, whoop and whoop again, until I finally managed a clean breath and could calm. I had been curled into myself, my face against a backseat window, alone in a car I did not recognize, at least from the inside. My eyes were streaming, too, as if weeping uncontrollably, but it wasn't until I managed to sit up, my head swimming, that I realized I wasn't wearing my glasses. The last thing I remembered was GF shaking his head, and the Brit closing in on the other side.

My left hand seemed to be asleep, but my right hand, sore as hell, went into my hoodie pocket and came out with my glasses, beautifully intact. The skin on my face felt sticky and raw, but I gingerly lifted my glasses into place, wincing as the frame edge touched skin. And now I knew exactly where I was. Crap everywhere. Greasy food wrappers, bits of frayed rope and duct tape, oil-stained rags, beer cans, empty cigarette packages, and that plastic headless baby doll with her fingertips burnt off hanging from the rearview mirror. The smell of sweat and piss and something even more rancid, which seemed to be coming from me. I was in the Nagles' Matador.

The thunder cracked. Started again. After a bit of scrambling and jostling my left shoulder against the door, I managed to get out of the car, falling much farther than I imagined should be possible to reach the ground, where, suddenly aware that whoever had brought me here—GF or the Brit or even Flacker—might be ready to attack again, I crept as fast as I could, bent over into a crawl, just far enough to get a good picture of what I'd escaped and where I had landed. I needn't have bothered. I was completely alone. But where? And where was everyone?

Too close, I could hear a low swoosh like a distant train, and just like that, I knew.

I was on the mountain—on an old access road that had once been flooded out, then cluttered with blown-down branches, a maze of debris that no one would clear since the reason for this road no longer existed, likely miles and miles from home in a gulley filled with dry kindling, a lit match closing in.

And underneath it all, that thunder, which now I began to believe in my dull fancy, came from the car itself, that same old orange Matador that had brought me from Flacker's. The car had been driven up this steep incline and shored in place with heavy rocks dragged behind the rear tires. One of them must have followed behind in another car or the Brit's own rusty jeep, picked up the driver, and finished the chores Flacker had set out—get rid of the car, get rid of me.

The air on the mountain was dense and visible, so utterly strange, dusky and yet, almost as if the air twisted, light would appear in undulating ribbons. I had a moment of disconnect. Leila Chen should see this, I thought, then she'd understand. But understand what? Yes, the air was thick with smoke and soil and sown through with what Uncle Lud would call the mountain's own particulates. Still, visibility wasn't as bad as it might have been. Vaguely, I felt a problem could be proposed and solved here, if I had been smarter, if I had studied. As if to mock my seriousness, a falling branch, not much more than a sturdy twig, knocked me on the head, and I swore I heard Jackie teasing.

Hey there, Leo, better rattle those smarts, eh?

Behind the car's perch, a kind of rough road began, a deeper set of tracks in the dust. The tire marks were large but close together, like those on equipment. Occasionally, Bryan would make an excursion up a service road to siphon gas from whatever rigs had been left in place. The Nagles had taught him that as well. They weren't above stealing a rig to get them back to town. Following those tracks back was the only chance I had. I leaned against the Matador and lifted my shirt against my face and breathed as deeply as I dared. I had no idea how far I'd have to walk—or if I would be able. I might have started running like a scared fool if just then the thunder hadn't begun anew, causing me to snap back into my body, because this time, I knew just where that sound was coming from.

The trunk's catch was partly busted, and at first, I thought I'd have to give up. It had to be Bryan. I was sure of it. No way he would have let them bring me here without a fight. He must have arrived just after they knocked me out. The knuckles on both my hands were scraped and raw and the cut I'd given myself with the chainsaw blade—just yesterday?—had opened again, so that even as I struggled with the trunk lock, blood smeared across the trunk's dusty edge. The sight of it spurred me on. I would slam rocks at the lock. I would pry at the metal until my hands really did fall off, but I wasn't leaving Bryan inside. No way.

“Hey, hey!” I shouted. “I'm trying. I'll get it. Hold on.”

None of the trash in the car could help me. I tried levering with a heavy stick. Nothing. Then I remembered something Uncle Lud had shown me once. Instead of yanking harder on the catch, I pushed and pushed until I felt a shift, the lock knocked partway out of its groove, the trunk rising just far enough for me to shove in the stick and seesaw back and forth until, even as I could feel the wood splitting, the lock clicked free, and I opened the trunk to find not Bryan, but a battered, barefoot Tessa, her mouth taped shut, her hands bound together into one broken fist. She was soaked from head to toe in sweat.

I don't think I had ever moved so fast.

Another broken latch in a day of broken latches. Why should Ursie be surprised? In fact, she almost greeted the fallen screen door, the splintered wood, the break where GF Nagle's foot had pushed through. But that was only the beginning. They'd upended the house, torn it apart. A knife had ripped open the couch and chair, great piles of white stuffing littering the linoleum. The glass on their family photographs was smashed in, and torn scraps of paper had been flung from one end of the room to the other. She felt, more than saw, the disaster in the kitchen, every last relic of her mother's in shards. A long brownish smear marked the floor along the hallway and for a moment, the punch in her chest gave way to mean elation. They'd hurt themselves. They'd bled. She knelt by the stains, ran her fingers gleefully along each horrible splotch. She still had that nasty taste in her mouth from Keven Seven's cocktail. Worse, she wanted more.

Those bastards, she laughed as she sat up, she hoped they'd bled to death.

Did she think that? Whose words were those? Whose voice?

The blood on her fingers itched. Itched and burned and stank. She wiped her hands on her jeans, but her fingers remained stained and, as if punched in the chest, she suddenly remembered Tessa's little face, all those bruises and cuts.

Madeline had sworn she'd tucked Tessa into bed. Groggy Ursie heard her aunt's singsong promise. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “She's all tight and safe.”

But when Ursie staggered to her room, the bed gaped empty, another center broken and streaked with more blood. And she swam again to the surface, slowly and oh so painfully. Who had done this? Where was Tessa? Where was Bryan? He must have come to the P&P to get her. Unless something had happened to him as well.

In the ruin of her house, Ursie began to shake. It was the end of days. Her mother gone. Her father gone. Her brother gone. And Tessa—Tessa, too.

When Albie had discovered that Room 11 had been occupied by a Nagle brother, she tried to imagine how Tessa had come to be in his company. Even now she struggled. And Bryan's warning began to thump in her head:

If they come here, don't hesitate.
They
won't
.

If they come here, don't hesitate.
They
won't.

Amazingly, the Nagles had missed the rifles hung on the hooks behind the curtains. Ursie eased both down into her arms, checked again to make sure they were loaded, and went outside. Whatever was coming next, she wanted to be out in the open for once, ready.

The porch steps, swept just that morning, were rimmed with fresh black soot. Ursie's hands shook as she set down the rifles, and she had to steady herself, one palm on the siding of the house, as she made first one then another attempt to turn on the outside faucet. The hose jumped under her fingers, a darting snake she barely managed to hold steady as she washed the steps until the soot became a thin black stream that curled and leapt and finally arched and fell into the scabby, heat-burned grass. Ursie struggled to follow the wiggle and dart, and then it was gone, gone, gone, a snake in the grass. She did not remember turning off the faucet, but the hose was dry, and she was sitting at full alert on the stained, damp step, one rifle across her lap, the other leaning beside her. Her heart empty, her lungs full of smoke, she waited for the devil to appear.

And she was not disappointed. Bits of captured light bounced among the cottonwood leaves, always dying, never dead. The heavy sky pressed down and she, too, might have succumbed, lying insensible, sideways on the step, if he hadn't arrived so swiftly, so clearly. Ursie's hands began to steady, that old familiar skill arriving with a rustling, a brazen animal approach through the woods. She would barely let him reach the edge of the yard. She could not stand to see him in the clearing. Oh yes, she was suddenly desperate to hurt so that the pain would never end, but linger as hers would. She'd shoot clear through his heart, she decided. Without the slightest hesitation, she raised the gun, aimed. Yes, almost as steady as ever.

A single shot, that's all it took—she truly was an excellent shot—and Markus Nagle fell, fell back into the shadows, fell away from Ursie and Bryan and their mother's prized house, where there was no more damage to be done, fell away, too, from any dreams he might have had for himself and the girl with the red shoes. For the first time since she'd left Keven Seven and the P&P, Ursie felt herself again, and calmly she left her perch on the porch step to tuck the rifles back behind their curtain. Then, without a backward glance at the figure on the ground, Ursie began walking, slowly. Her neighbors would be home by now. She would call someone from there to come and collect him. But not too soon. Not too soon. He had some suffering to do, just like the rest of them.

The roads up on the mountain, like the gnarled roots of old trees, meander into twisted mazes, dead-ends, swamp land, even sudden unreasonable uphill runs that break off as if someone had been planning an idiot run heavenward. Even the logging companies have lost track of them and have to rely on old maps and an occasional helicopter geographer. Tessa was limp. She had barely enough strength to keep her arms around me as I lifted her from the trunk and undid every scrap of the black electrical tape that held her. We were both in tears as we surveyed each other. Tessa was in worse shape than me and as disoriented and sore as I was. I felt a surge of pure rage.

“Your face,” I started.

Her hand fluttered to the soiled bandage flapping on her cheek, and she peeled it free.

“Brice,” she whispered. “A fit.”

“Not the Nagles?”

Tessa tried to take a breath, coughing with the effort.

“The Nagles did that to
you
?” she managed. “Why?” she said. “Why would he do that? Where are we?”

“I don't know,” I said miserably.

“It was at Flacker's,” I tried. “And Bryan . . .” But the rest, whatever it was, made no sense to me. I shook my head. The route to this godforsaken spot was as inscrutable to me as it was to Tessa.

“My shoes,” Tessa said, taking stock. “My . . .”

She winced as she searched her pockets and her sore hand emerged empty. Gingerly, she lifted her T-shirt just high enough for both of us to see the deep purple bruise GF Nagle's boot had made on her left hip. In the quiet between us, a low, distant hiss reminded us of the fire we could smell coming. There was no sky. The sky had vanished. And the two of us were shifting before each other, graying into ashy shadows. As Tessa was sinking, I managed to catch her and get her up to the car's front seat. Almost immediately, she pushed out of my arms and knelt on the ground, throwing up or trying to.

“Leo, you'll have to drive,” she said when she could raise her head again.

“Drive?” I said. “Tessa . . .”

A crazy thought, but it turned out whoever had left us both here had also left the key in the ignition. The car started right up, a strange miracle. Still I couldn't imagine how I would move the car without flipping it over.

“Turn it off,” Tessa commanded in her small, still voice. Then at her whispered direction, with my heart leaping, I shifted her into the driver's seat, where she held the brake with her bare toes, her leg shaking with the effort while I kicked and kicked and finally loosened the rocks shoved behind the rear tires. Almost the same moment, she slipped into the passenger seat and let her foot—bare and dirty and scraped—ease off the brake pedal, the car slid slowly backward, away from the precipice, and I dove behind the wheel and held tight.

We bounced, the car sweeping dangerously close to a cliff edge before I learned to be gentler with the steering wheel and harsher with the brake. With no place to turn around on that needle stretch, we backed down blind for what seemed like miles in that bucking car, Tessa kneeling and facing backward, holding tight to the seatback, and calling out instructions as her eyes tracked the tire marks that were our only guide. Bent sideways, I hardly saw the road through my crooked glasses as I swerved and sweated until finally Tessa yelled at me to turn the wheel hard, hard, hard to the right. I did, and we flipped left so fast, she fell into the door and the steering wheel leapt out of my hands.

“Now, stop! Stop!” Tessa shouted. And, God help me, two feet slammed on the brake pedal, I did. In another moment, we'd have lost our chance.

What I had taken for smoke cleared—an achingly slow descent of dust, and we could see that the Matador had landed on another flat precipice, hardly larger than the car itself, but this time the drop was behind us and the road lay ahead and we had a clear direction to move. Another meter backward, and we would have been lost, tumbling clear off the side of the mountain. It seemed a miracle that we had avoided that fate, I thought. Even if I had been driving forward and knew where I was going, the smoke, the dust, the curves, the broken edges—well, yes, a miracle.

“Okay,” Tessa said, breathing hard, “okay, okay. Now put it into drive.”

Going forward was only marginally easier. Ruts and roots and black dust. Despite the fact that only one route appeared possible, the tire marks that had led us had vanished. I kept my foot partway on the brakes, which began to emit a worrisome burning stench. Occasionally, I pressed the accelerator too hard, too fast, so that the car briefly lofted on the rough road and I had to struggle to wrestle it back. At times the track ahead vanished too, real smoke obscuring our way, and we could only inch along, scraping suspension and muffler, wondering if we were driving straight into an inferno, but then we'd make out a single curve, a bank of scrub trees emerging, and gradually we would breathe again. We passed one turn-off after another, and sometimes it seemed we weren't going downhill at all anymore, just sliding sideways on old gravel, like a slalom racer in agonizingly slow motion. Every time another narrow fork came into sight, splintering into more possible routes, we gambled against the fire's route, Tessa always calling the turns.

Be careful what you wish for, my mother liked to tell me, as if wishes must carry at least a clear inch of pain within them. For years, this was all I desired: to be with Tessa in a car almost like this—a quiet back road, with me at the wheel, Tessa's trembling hand resting lightly on my shoulder. Now, my arms ached from the effort of holding a steering wheel. The cut on my finger had opened again, stinging a slick thread of blood. My right knee jiggled uncontrollably and my foot arched painfully as I navigated accelerator and brake pedals. No wonder my mother was such a menace on the road. Driving hurt.

How long could we manage with no guarantee of escape? We might simply be weaving between the same logging roads again and again. The thought might have crossed both our minds moments before we hit what would turn out to be the last blind curve and the road opened into a dry patched lane of gravel and dirt, more groomed than anything we'd come upon before. The dead trees thinned to scrub. A tight breeze ruffled the dust beyond us as we eased into one last series of gentle switchbacks and knew we were heading downward for sure. Glimpses of a familiar sky appeared, still burdened and beleaguered, yet a harsh welcome glint. Both of us held an image of the road to the refuse station, a route we knew in our bones, and we began to relax. We could almost see the intersection ahead where, with Bryan, we'd drop off Jackie before turning right toward town. But when we finally—too fast—did come to a level stretch, we were on a far better road, one Tessa and I didn't recognize or anticipate, a road that appeared to head for a vast green plain. It was as if the world had inverted itself, and as if to emphasize that point, we were suddenly enveloped in mist, real rain, shushing across the filthy windshield, blinding me. I hit the brakes too late and too hard, and the car rolled onto that swell of endless perfect lawn even as a new wave of heavier rain tippled over us. I couldn't stop the car now, not even when Tessa leaned across and yanked the hand brake. The car pressed forward, out of our control, hydroplaning over that flawless field. We floated through an impossible rain, in one graceful twirl after another until Tessa flew, a ragdoll weight, out of her seat and landed twisted across me, her head settling against my chest.

Not for the first time, I wondered if I was already dead, in a version of heaven not even Uncle Lud could dream up. The two of us inverted, Tessa gazed down at me and with her bandaged hand touched my cheek.

“Your face,” she said, suddenly tearing up.

“It's okay,” I said, holding her tighter. “It's okay.”

Still, it would take me several more long beats to recognize the intermittent showers as coming from sprinklers, the vast green lawn as a golf course, and, ever so slowly, even the irate figure running in our direction, and know for certain I was telling Tessa the truth: we were safe.

• • •

We had heard about the Scotsman and his private golf course, the clever network of expensive irrigation, that velvet sod. We had heard about the Scotsman, an introvert, obsessed by a game he played alone. He had wolfhounds. My mother had met one when the animal wandered away. But until we saw him approaching, a lean, livid man, flanked by a pair of equally lean wolfhounds, we had never given him much thought. Any curses he'd been about to heap on Tessa and me burbled away once he got a good look at us. His mouth gaped open then.

“Can ye walk?” he asked, his brogue purling with concern.

I had to laugh because the Scotsman sounded like none other than Alexander McAfee, the BBC fox who had so enchanted Uncle Lud.

“I mean,” he continued, “if ye could get yerselves . . .”

Tessa, too, began to silently shake and for an altered moment I supposed my laughter was infectious.

“The poor little gull,” the fox was saying. Was he wringing his hands? I couldn't quite tell. The light had gone dim again, the whole car shivering. A siren rounded, circling closer and closer.

“The poor little gull,” the fox repeated.

Those hills are full of gulls,
Hana broke in.

No, no, I protested, no, not
this one,
as doors flew open around us and Tessa was lifted out of my arms.