The Beyond (5 page)

It was pitch-black, but, even in his distress, Cley noticed that the sound Wood's nails made against the rock echoed out, indicating they had stumbled onto another large chamber. He rolled himself to a sitting position and dug the matches out of his pocket. Sparking a match to life, he lit the candle he had been able to hold on to through the misadventure. The flame revealed what he had suspected: another cave, larger than the one above, and at the far end of it a tunnel of such size that he might enter it standing upright. Cley noticed that the warm breeze, which heated his own rock apartment above, was emanating from down the corridor that led farther into the hill. He started slowly forward, holding the candle out in front at arm's length, while Wood followed close behind.

The tunnel took a wide turn, and as they followed its curve, a blast of warm air extinguished the candle again. Cley cursed out loud, then noticed that there was another light source somewhere in front of him. Stumbling forward, using the rock wall for support, he finally stepped out of the passage and into a small chamber bathed in a yellow-green light.

At first, he thought it must be the sunlight streaming through a hole in the ceiling. The glow came not from above, though, but from below—an underground pool that generated its own fluorescence. The cave rippled with brightness from the water. The swirling glow was fantastic enough, but on closer inspection he saw that the walls had been decorated with drawings done in charcoal and a thick red paint possibly made of clay. Stylized images of men and women, animals, and strange humanoid creatures with fishlike heads filled the chamber. Here and there someone had left red handprints.

“What do you say to this?” Cley asked Wood, then looked around to see where the dog had gone. He whistled in order to locate him, and a bark answered from off to the right. Moving around a low wall of rock, he stepped into yet another small chamber. The glow from the strange waters did not extend to this new area, so he used another match and relit the candle.

The gleam of the flame was reflected in Wood's eyes. The dog was sitting upright amidst the remains of what appeared to be six or seven human bodies. There were dried flower petals and fragments of pottery scattered among these bones. It was obvious from the small, delicate nature of one skull and rib cage that an infant lay among the dead. Another of the skeletons showed evidence of a type of deformity—a vestigial fishtail protruding off the end of a perfectly preserved spinal column.

Set off a foot or two from the others were the remains of what obviously had been a woman whose long black hair had survived the ravages of time. The luxuriant tresses stretched out more than four feet from the skull, which still retained a large portion of withered flesh. She wore a necklace of white beads made from shells, and at the end there was a small leather pouch. The walls in this chamber were decorated with spiraled images of plants and vines and blossoms.

Standing in silence, Cley wondered how long they had lain, undisturbed in this secret place. “What lives did they live?” he asked himself, and felt the breeze of centuries passing, years turning to dust. Then, in an eyeblink his reverie became fear, and he was frantic to escape the underground for daylight.

“Let's go,” he said to Wood, noticing another smaller tunnel at the end of the burial chamber. The current of warm air flowed from it, passing around him. Before leaving, he knelt and worked to remove the woman's beads over her skull. As he tried to free them, her hair fell across the back of his hand, and the touch sent a wave of revulsion coursing through him. He pulled away with the necklace in his hand, and the sudden motion severed the fragile neck. The jaw came unhinged and dropped open. Her brittle ribs cracked, sounding to him like whispered gasps of pain. With the prize tightly clutched in his left hand and the candle in his right, he fled forward into the next natural corridor.

Wood grabbed Cley by his right pant leg just in time to prevent him from falling headlong into an almost perfectly round hole in the middle of the dark path. The toes of the hunter's boots were already out over the abyss. A blast of warm air rose from far below and lifted Cley's hair. He took a step back. Miraculously, the candle remained lit. This was the source of the tropical current that had kept their own cave temperate through the worst of the winter.

Both Wood and Cley vaulted the opening in the rock floor with ease. The passage continued on, twisting and turning and widening until it eventually broke clear into a cave with a tall, broad entrance that looked out on the day. From where they stood at the back of the chamber, it was as if they were in the rear of a theater, watching a play about a blizzard.

They slept that night back in the tunnel near the conduit of warm air. When he awoke the following day, Cley was mightily hungry and knew the dog must be, too. They left the tunnel, and upon entering the cave that opened on the opposite side of the hill from their home, they saw a glorious sun shining out over a vast plain. The sight of that flatland stretching out toward the north showed Cley the way to travel once the winter was over.

Out on the plain there were no trees, and it seemed a certainty that the demons would not hunt there. Escaping this threat would allow him and the dog to make headway north without constantly having to fight for their lives. He decided then that as soon as the days began to lengthen, they would resume their journey before the demons woke from hibernation. There weren't enough bullets left to survive another season against them, and he sensed that somewhere in the cold, dark time of winter he had lost his will for slaughter.

Two hours later, after traversing the circumference of the hill in hip-deep snow, at times clinging to tree trunks against the wicked pitch of the incline, they stood outside the entrance of their own cave. Luckily the sun was bright and offered enough warmth for Cley to have survived the arduous journey without his cloak or mittens. Then began the grim task of digging out the opening while hunger twisted their guts. Every few minutes, the hunter had to stop to blow on his frozen fists, but eventually they managed to clear enough snow so that the sun could shine directly onto the ice that had formed over the entrance.

Next, they set about gathering branches that had cracked under the weight of the ice and fallen to the ground. With these, he built a small fire as close to the obstruction as possible. As they waited for the fire to do its work, Cley warmed his hands over it and set one of his boots smoldering, trying to do the same with his feet.

Sometime later, a well-placed kick shattered the remaining inches of glazed snow. Reentering their cave filled Cley with a sense of peace and comfort. He and Wood greedily devoured the few cooked rabbit parts they had stored, and then Cley went to work on one of the raw, rotting sweet potatoes. The fire was moved inside the entrance and they settled down to rest for a spell before preparing to hunt. The dog insisted on a few words from the book, and Cley acquiesced in a weary voice.

The white deer returned to the forest. In many places the fallen snow melted and revealed the welcome face of the earth. Flocks of crows again perched in the treetops, and an owl took up residence somewhere close by the cave, haunting the nights with its call.

On a hunting expedition to the eastern pond, Cley heard the ice cracking in long, wavering echoes. The sound was a signal to him that he and the dog should soon begin their journey across the plain. Although he rejoiced at the fact that the sun now shone brightly in the afternoons, pushing back the night a few minutes each day, he wondered how long it would be before the demons came forth to hunt, driven by a season-long hunger. As he traipsed across the thawing ground, tracking a deer, he began to make plans.

There were a few things that distressed him about their coming trek across the open country. One was that the store of matches had been seriously depleted. He had one-quarter of one box left, which, optimistically, he surmised might last little more than two weeks. The other concern was shelter. Out on the grasslands there would be no caves or trees to offer a temporary haven against the elements.

He remembered that in the adventure novels of his boyhood, he had read of ways to start a fire without matches—rubbing sticks together or drawing a spark by knocking a flint against a rock. The thought of actually accomplishing either of these seemed to him more impossible than the daring exploits of those books' heroes. Still, he knew there was nothing else but to begin work on learning one of these skills. As far as the lack of shelter was concerned, he decided to take many deerskins and from them create a small tent that would at least keep the wind and rain at bay. It had to be something he could roll up and carry, but that would add extra pounds to his already heavy pack. Then the thought came to him that perhaps Wood might pull it behind him.

Cley's accuracy with the bow had become so good through the winter that he could fell a deer with just one arrow. He worked quickly, skinning his prey on the spot, and in this manner was able to take two or three skins a day. At night, he and Wood ate venison steaks and livers and began to regain much of the strength they had lost through the harsh heart of the winter. After dinner now they passed on the book, for the nights were filled with industry—treating the insides of the pelts and readying them to be sewn together. He calculated that he would need at least fifteen skins to make a tent large enough to cover both of them.

Killing a deer and carving it up was second nature for the hunter, and he enjoyed the work—at last a definite project other than merely surviving. It took his mind away, and he no longer sat morosely holding the green veil and staring into the past. When the tent was three-quarters sewn together, he realized he had not yet tackled the job of making fire without matches. The idea of rubbing sticks together to draw a flame seemed preposterous, so he instead opted for the technique that called for the banging of rocks.

Following the stream at the bottom of the hill, he and the dog set off one morning, searching along its bank for promising specimens. Every now and then he would stop, lift two rocks, smash them together as hard as he could, and study the results. By midday, he had broken nearly thirty rocks and smashed each of his fingers at least once without having produced a single spark. Wood grew tired of this fruitless pursuit and went off into a stand of shemel trees after a geeble.

“What idiot invented this technique?” Cley wondered, but drawing on the persistence that had kept him alive through worse trials, he continued. He knelt again by the stream's edge and brought up a large, black, heart-shaped stone. He was searching for another against which to smash this one when he heard a strange noise. It was something familiar but nothing he had heard in a long time. He stopped and listened more intently. All he heard was the sound of the tree branches scraping together in the breeze and the rushing of the water.

Minutes later, he reached out to take up another stone and heard again, from off in the forest, the distinct sound of someone weeping. He was used to the weird noises of the Beyond, but this particular one made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Listening closely, he was sure he heard a woman sobbing. Getting up, he called for Wood. The sound of his own voice dispelled the crying, and he stood perfectly still for a long time, listening.

“Hello?” he finally called but there was only the breeze.

“Who is there?” he yelled, and with this, Wood came charging out of a thicket of trees. He realized, upon seeing the familiar figure of the dog, how momentarily frightened he had been. Listening intently awhile longer, he finally decided it was nothing more than the call of a bird or the rushing of the stream over an obstruction.

In order to put the incident decisively out of his mind, he banged together the two rocks he held. A spark leaped out of the collision and landed in his beard. Moments later, a thin wisp of smoke curled away from his face, and a moment after that, he was on his knees again dipping his beard forward into the ice-cold stream. Wood nipped him on the rear end as he knelt with water dripping off his face.

On his way back to the cave, Cley looked up from his thoughts to see where the dog had gone. In the distance, a figure stood amidst the trees where the stream turned left toward the hill. He blinked and looked again. Whatever had been there was now gone. Pocketing the two rocks, he took out his knife and began running as quietly as possible. He was positive that what he had seen was not a demon because there was no sign of wings or tail. It appeared to be a person, standing still, gazing down into the moving water. When he reached the spot, he spun slowly in a circle, staring sharply into the trees.

“Show yourself,” he called out. He listened for the sound of breaking twigs or rustling in the underbrush. “A bear?” he wondered. Something inside told him to run, and he did, all the way back to the cave, Wood following at his heels.

He insisted upon using the rocks to start a fire. Because of this, they did not eat until the moon had risen in the star-filled sky. As he prepared his blanket to lie down, he heard the owl suddenly call from outside the cave. Although the bird came now almost every night, on this particular visit its cry set Cley's heart to pounding. The dog looked over at him and then toward the mouth of the cave, sensing his master's anxiety. For the first time since early winter, the hunter loaded a shell into the rifle's chamber. He kept the weapon across his knees as he read to Wood, and slept that night in a sitting position, his finger wrapped lightly around its trigger.

On the day that Cley took the last deer needed to complete the tent, he wandered back toward the cave past a stand of gray, barren trees he had passed at least a hundred times throughout the winter. On this trip, though, he noticed something he had never seen before. In among the trunks he spied an unusual object sticking up out of the ground. He moved cautiously over to it, and there he found, of all things, a pickax, its handle half-buried in the ground. Dangling from a strap off one of the points was an old helmet, tiny holes eaten through the rust.