Errantry: Strange Stories (22 page)

Philip didn’t know how long they walked. Hours, perhaps. The moon never seemed to move from where it shone above the far shore. Snow blew across the moonlit path, but no more fell from the sky. The birds no longer sang, though Philip still felt the rush of untold wings. He was neither tired nor chilled; whenever his hand brushed Suru’s, cold fire flashed through his veins.

The snow grew very deep, so powdery it was like swimming through drifts of cloud. Overhead, evergreen branches made a pattern like frost crystals against the stars. The trees grew taller, and Philip now saw that each had been slashed as with an ax, two deep grooves that formed a V. Suru touched one, withdrew a white finger glistening with sap and fragrant as balsam.

“These mark the border,” he said. “We are within Tuonela now.”

They walked on. Gradually, the distant shore came into view. A long rock-strewn beach and towering pines, stands of birch larger than any Philip had ever seen. Behind the beach rose a sheer black cliff hundreds of feet tall, dappled silver where moonlight touched fissures and ragged outcroppings.

Suru halted. He stared at the desolate trees and that impassable wall of stone, the onyx waves lapping at the beach. Above the cliff countless birds circled restlessly. The great pines bowed beneath the wind of their flight.

“We are nearly there,” said Suru.

He turned to Philip and smiled. The flesh melted from his face. Sparks flickered within empty eye sockets; his mouth opened onto a darkness deeper than the sky. He was neither boy nor swan but bone and flame.

Yet he was not terrible, and he bowed as he took Philip’s hand, indicating where a deep ravine split the ground a short distance from where they stood. A stream rushed through the channel, tumbling over rocks and bubbles of ice, before plunging in a shining waterfall that spilled into the lake. A fallen birch tree spanned the cleft. Ribbons of mottled bark peeled from its trunk, and there were jagged spurs where branches had broken or rotted away.

“I will cross before you,” he said. “Wait until I have reached the other side. Do not look down.”

Philip shook his head. “I can’t.”

His tongue seemed to freeze against the roof of his mouth as he stared into the ravine, those knife-edged rocks and roaring cataract. At its center a whirlpool spun, a dreadful mouth gaping at the moon overheard.

Suru lifted a fleshless hand. “You must. All things make this crossing.” He pointed to where the birds wheeled against the sky. “That is their road. This is mine. No living thing has ever taken it with me. That is my second gift to you.”

Before Philip could reply, Suru turned. His arms stretched upward, all bones and light as he crouched, then leapt above the chasm. For an instant his skull merged with the moon, and a face gazed pityingly down upon the man who remained on the shore.

Then moonlight splintered the cage of bone. Feathers unfurled in a glory of wings that rose and fell, slowly at first, then more and more swiftly, until the night sky fell back before them and light touched the clifftops. The great pines kindled red and gold as thousands upon thousands of birds dove toward the surface of the lake and landed, the cliffs ringing with their cries.

“
Come!
”

Philip looked up to see the great swan hovering above the far shore, its eyes no longer black but blazing argent. The terrifying joy he’d felt earlier returned. For a second he closed his eyes, trying to summon every memory of the world behind him.

Then he walked to the tree, lifted one foot, and carefully stepped onto it.

Icy spume lashed his face as dread jolted him along with bitter cold. He looked up, terrified, but was blinded by needles of ice; shaded his eyes and took a second, lurching step.

Beneath him the great birch trembled like a live thing. Philip gasped, then edged forward. He could no longer see the other shore; could see nothing but a glittering arc of frozen spray as he inched across the fallen tree. When he was halfway across, he glanced down.

At the edge of the waterfall a figure knelt, her skin white as birch, her head bowed so he could only see a cascade of long black hair tangled in the whirlpool. As Philip watched she grasped her hair with both hands and began to drag it back through the frigid water, as though it were a net, then hoisted it upon the frozen shore, so that he saw what she had captured: countless men and women, infants and children, their eyes wide and staring and hands plucking uselessly at the net that had ensnared them.

With a cry Philip stumbled and nearly fell. The woman looked up, her eyes empty sockets in a barren skull, mouth bared in a rictus of hunger and rage. Philip righted himself, then lurched toward the other bank.

Something coiled around his ankle, taut as a wire. He gave a muffled shout, looked up to see the great swan still hovering above the shore. The bank was yet a few yards off. Another strand of black hair snaked toward him, writhing as it sought to loop around his wrist.

“
Jump!
” cried Suru.

Philip raised his arms, felt his balance shift from shoulders to calves to the balls of his feet. Faint chiming sounded in his ears: cracking ice, the ballet mistress’s bell when he was a boy; the tree beneath him splintering. Pain sheared his foot as he arched forward; and jumped.

His face burned, his eyes. The chiming became a roar. Around him all was flame but it was not the air that was ablaze but Philip himself. His skin peeled away in petals of black and gold, embers blown like snow.

But it was not snow but wings: Suru’s and his own, beating against the air. Far below, the black waters erupted as wave after wave of birds rose to greet them, geese and hawks and swallows, cranes and swifts and tanagers, gulls with the eyes of women and child-faced doves: all swallowed by the sunrise as they mounted the sky above the cliffs, and two swans like falling stars disappeared into the horizon.

It was several days before Joe Moody checked on the camp. The storm had brought down power lines, but he assumed that Emma’s friend would be fine, what with the generator and four cords of firewood.

He found the lodge deserted, and Philip’s rental car buried under the snow. There were no footprints leading to or from the lodge; no sign of forced entry or violence. Emma and her husband were notified in Key West and returned, heartsick, to aid the warden service and police in the search. Divers searched the frigid waters of Lake Tuonela, but no body was ever found.

Only Emma ever noticed afterward, year after year, that a pair of swans appeared each spring—silent, inseparable—to make their slow passage across dark water before vanishing in the mist.

Winter’s Wife

Winter’s real name was Roderick Gale Winter. But everyone in Paswegas County, not just me and people who knew him personally, called him Winter. He lived in an old school bus down the road from my house, and my mother always tells how when she first moved here he scared the crap out of her. It wasn’t even him that scared her, she hadn’t even met him yet; just the fact that there was this creepy-looking old school bus stuck in the middle of the woods, with smoke coming out of a chimney and these huge piles of split logs around and trucks and cranes and heavy equipment, and in the summer all kinds of chain saws and stuff, and in the fall deer and dead coyotes hanging from this big pole that my mother said looked like a gallows, and blood on the snow, and once a gigantic dead pig’s head with tusks, which my mother said was scarier even than the coyotes. Which, when you think of it, does sound pretty bad, so you can’t blame her for being freaked out. It’s funny now because she and Winter are best friends, though that doesn’t mean so much as it does other places, like Chicago, where my mother moved here from, because I think everyone in Shaker Harbor thinks Winter is their friend.

The school bus, when you get inside it, is sweet.

Winter’s family has been in Shaker Harbor for six generations, and even before that they lived somewhere else in Maine.

“I have Passamaquoddy blood,” Winter says. “If I moved somewhere else, I’d melt.”

He didn’t look like a Native American, though, and my mother said if he did have Indian blood it had probably been diluted by now. Winter was really tall and skinny, not sick skinny but bony and muscular, stooped from having to duck through the door of the school bus all those years. He always wore a gimme cap that said WINTER TREE SERVICE, and I can remember how shocked I was once when I saw him at Town Meeting without his hat, and he had almost no hair. He’d hunt and butcher his own deer, but he wouldn’t eat it—he said he’d grown up dirt-poor in a cabin that didn’t even have a wooden floor, just pounded earth, and his family would eat anything they could hunt, including snake and skunk and snapping turtle. So he’d give all his venison away, and when people hired him to butcher their livestock and gave him meat, he’d give that away, too.

That was how my mother met him, that first winter fifteen years ago when she was living here alone, pregnant with me. There was a big storm going on, and she looked out the window and saw this tall guy stomping through the snow carrying a big paper bag.

“You a vegetarian?” he said, when she opened the door. “Everyone says there’s a lady from away living here who’s going to have a baby and she’s a vegetarian. But you don’t look like one to me.”

My mother said no, she wasn’t a vegetarian, she was a registered certified massage therapist.

“Whatever the hell that is,” said Winter. “You going to let me in? Jesus Q. Murphy, is that your woodstove?”

See, my mother had gotten pregnant by a sperm donor. She had it all planned out, how she was going to move way up north and have a baby and raise it—him, me—by herself and live off the land and be a massage thera-pist and hang crystals in the windows and there would be this good energy and everything was going to be perfect. And it would have been, if she had moved to, like, Huntington Beach or even Boston, someplace like that, where it would be warmer and there would be good skate parks, instead of a place where you have to drive two hours to a skate park and it snows from November till the end of May. And in the spring you can’t even skate on the roads here because they’re all dirt roads and so full of potholes you could live in one. But the snowboarding is good, especially since Winter let us put a jump right behind his place.

But this part is all before any snowboarding, because it was all before me, though not much before. My mother was living in this tiny two-room camp with no indoor plumbing and no running water, with an ancient woodstove, what they call a parlor stove, which looked nice but didn’t put out any heat and caused a chimney fire. Which was how Winter heard about her, because the volunteer fire department came and afterwards all anyone was talking about at the Shaker Harbor Variety Store was how this crazy lady from away had bought Martin Weed’s old run-down camp and now she was going to have a baby and freeze to death or burn the camp down—probably both—which probably would have been okay with them except no one liked to think about the baby getting frozen or burned up.

So Winter came by and gave my mother the venison and looked at her woodpile and told her she was burning green wood, which builds up creosote, which was why she had the chimney fire, and he asked her who sold her the wood, so she told him. And the next day the guy who sold her the wood came by and dumped off three cords of seasoned wood and drove off without saying a word, and the day after that two other guys came by with a brand-new woodstove, which was ugly but very efficient and had a sheath around it so a baby wouldn’t get burned if he touched it. And the day after
that,
Winter came by to make sure the stove was hooked up right, and he went to all the cabin’s windows with sheets of plastic and a hair dryer and covered them so the cold wouldn’t get in, and then he showed my mother where there was a spring in the woods that she could go to and fill water jugs rather than buy them at the grocery store. He also gave her a chamber pot so she wouldn’t have to use the outhouse, and told her he knew of someone who had a composting toilet they’d sell to her cheap.

All of which might make you think that when I say “Winter’s wife”
I’m referring to my mom. But I’m not. Winter’s wife is someone else.

Still, when I was growing up, Winter was always at our house. And I was at his place, when I got older. Winter chops down trees, what they call wood lot management—he cuts trees for people, but in a good way, so the forest can grow back and be healthy. Then he’d split the wood so the people could burn it for firewood. He had a portable sawmill—one of the scary things Mom had seen in his yard—and he also mills wood so people can build houses with the lumber. He’s an auctioneer, and he can play the banjo and one of those washboard things like you see in old movies. He showed me how to jump-start a car with just a wire coat hanger, also how to carve wood and build a tree house and frame a window. When my mother had our little addition put on with a bathroom in it, Winter did a lot of the carpentry, and he taught me how to do that, too.

He’s also a dowser, a water witch. That’s someone who can tell where water is underground, just by walking around in the woods holding a stick in front of him. You’d think this was more of that crazy woo-woo stuff my mother is into, which is what I thought whenever I heard about it.

But then one day me and my friend Cody went out to watch Winter do it. We were hanging out around Winter’s place, clearing brush. He let us use the hill behind the school bus for snowboarding, and that’s where we’d built that sweet jump, and Winter had saved a bunch of scrap wood so that when spring came we could build a half-pipe for skating, too.