The Tent: A Novella (7 page)

He tries to push himself free of the creature, tries to get his feet beneath him, but this, he suspects, is part of the creature’s design, a backup plan in case of attack. It has been here for however long, squatting over the hole, safeguarding it, staying close to the only form of egress that makes any sense
, while luring in idiot humans.

And how like an idiot Mike feels now as h
e continues to slide, the foul stench of it filling his nose.

When did it first come
, he wonders?
When did it crawl from its subterranean lair, and what did it see when it did? Was it frightened, determined, hungry?
He imagines it waiting in the dark, studying the only other source of light in the dark woods—a yellow tent with a light burning within. Perhaps despite being a creature of the Stygian dark, light is a language it understands. And so it adopts the pose of a tent and sends out its signal in the hope of communicating with this other strange creature. But its only response was to send along the creatures that were hiding inside it. And perhaps once it devoured them, it mulled over the gesture and considered it a gift, for indeed it had been starving.

The creature flails; Mike slips further, hands scrabbling madly for purchase where there is none to be found. The orangey-red light burns crimson. He has wounded the parasite, he’s sure of it, but his only reward for his boldness, will be death. 

He has time only to pray for a mankind who never knew him that the day will never come in which such creatures grow bold enough to leave this place, and then he is clawing at the wing, thrusting his feet out toward the edges of the ragged hole in one last attempt to save himself, his efforts undone as the creature rises up on its side at the behest of the parasite.

But I did it
, Mike thinks, with one single moment of shining pride.
I attacked it, wounded it, maybe killed it. I didn’t run. For once, I didn’t run.

There is a brief tantalizing moment in which his fall is halted, the heel of one foot pinned by his own weight
and impetus against the grassy edge of the dark hole, his back braced reflexively against the creature’s bulk. His mind goes blank. No thoughts, only a flat-line of primal dread laced with acceptance, and a cold electric current that hums through him from groin to sternum, until the parasite bids its host to move again, his foot slips, and the world opens like a hungry mouth beneath him and he is falling.

The fall seems to last for an eternity, the abyss endless and impenetrably dark. As the air whistles past his ears, he hears first the walking stick, then his phone, splash against the bottom, and is absurdly relieved to know there is one. That there’s water suggests he might survive the fall. The odds are not good that he won’t simply shatter himself against the rocks, but any odds are better than none.

He is no longer afraid, no longer anything but an empty vessel with one word left on his lips:
Sorry
.

The word is meant for Emma, for Cody, for himself, until he has the opportunity to tell them face to face
in whatever follows oblivion, assuming anything does.

The promise of it gives him a smile.

Sixty feet down, a tall thin stalagmite abruptly halts his descent, punching through his stomach, shattering his lower vertebrae, and suspending him there in the dark like a fly on a needle. The pain feels like something bestowed upon someone else. He is already dying, finally ready to exit a world that was Not His Department.

Soon, h
is beloved mother comes and mercifully mutes the world for her little boy, one last time.

On the opposite side of the clearing, unexplored by Mike or his ill-fated wife, the hill slopes downward through another two miles of dense, tangled woodland. A disused and therefore untrustworthy slatted wooden rope-bridge crosses a narrow river which, if followed south for another quarter-mile, leads to the approved camping ground Mike eschewed despite the camp attendant’s instructions.

As the sun rises on the new day like a swollen, burning pumpkin,
turning to sparkling diamonds the beads of water left in the wake of the storm and coaxing veils of mist up from the sodden earth, Greg Kohl, a fifty-three year old college lecturer, emerges from his tent and stretches. Refreshed despite a sleep frequently interrupted by volleys of thunder and the howling wind, he sets about making coffee for himself and his girlfriend, Karen, a girl who is ten years his junior, a revelation in the sack, and the third girl he has brought up here in the past ten months. With no one to answer to up here but his own ego, he permits himself a satisfied grin, and, as he sets up the camp stove, replays the memory of Karen’s nubile body, and the various creative ways in which she let him use it.

When he realizes there is a kid standing less than two feet away from him, he starts, almost burns himself on the camp stove and curses, then, as he takes in the face of his visitor
, immediately wishes he hadn’t.

The kid looks like something from a documentary about
the Serbian war. His clothes are caked in mud and soaking wet, as if he spent the night in the woods, in the rain. He is shivering violently, his teeth making audible clicking sounds. In the oval of his dirty face, his eyes are wide, the pupils amid the blue shrunken down to pinpoints. The kid has his arms down by his sides, the index fingers of both hands tapping against his palms, as if he thinks he’s playing a videogame.

“Hey,” Greg sa
ys, and rises. “You okay, kid?”

It’s a ridiculous question, because clearly the kid isn’t, but he’s not sure what else to say. Greg swallows, tries to think, something
that’s never easy for him in the pre-coffee stages of his mornings, and especially with the hangover that’s pounding against the walls of his skull like a lunatic inmate. But something is wrong here. The kid before him looks the very definition of haunted, so he knows he has to do something, become the conscientious, helpful adult, even though he’d rather just crawl back inside the tent and curl up beside the lovely Karen Wilkes.

“What’s your name?” he asks, because that seems a
s good a place to start as any.

The kid just stands there, lips dry and cracked and se
aled like a scar, watching him.

“Did something happen?” Another dumb question, but Greg is at a loss. So he raises a finger, as if he has lost his voice too, or as if he thinks the child might respond better to
non-verbalized communication, indicating that the kid should wait, and he ducks back inside the tent. It reeks of sex, stale perfume, and alcohol. Karen, little more than a tangle of blonde hair on her inflatable pillow, moans and rolls over, squints up at him, her mascara smudged around her eyes, making her look significantly less attractive than he found her last night. Her sleeping bag is wrapped tightly around her, but there’s no missing the half-moons of her large, surgically enhanced breasts over the material. It’s the first time he’s been with someone who has fake breasts, and he does not consider himself a fan. Wild horses could not drag that admission out of him, however, for Greg is a man who is thankful for the women his charm and money and position of authority affords him, particularly in light of his ugly, and ongoing, marital dissolution.

“What’s going on?” she mumbl
es, throwing a hand with French-manicured fingernails over her eyes.

“I need a blanket,” Greg tell
s her. “Some kid’s in trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Yeah. Go back to sleep. I’ll take care of it.”

“And
then me?” She smiles sleepily, another hint of the neediness she has been displaying on and off since they violated the teacher-student rule and became an item.

“Yeah, and you,” he promises, and y
anks the spare blanket off her.

“Boo. So co
ld,” she says, and rolls over.

Ever the humanitarian
, Greg thinks, and exits the tent.

The kid is right where he left him, still standing there shivering and looking shell-shocked. Greg can’t help wondering about the nature of his ordeal.
Was he in a car crash? Get lost in the woods? See something terrible? Or is he just some local yokel’s kid, wandered down out of the mountains to bug the regular folk for money or food. The theme song to
Deliverance
twangs through his head and he has to struggle to suppress a smile.

“Here kid,” he says and holds the blanket up to ind
icate his intent.

The kid
backs away. Greg stops, frowns.

“You’re freezing. Let me put the blanket on you and we’ll get you some coffee and figure out what to do next, okay?”

The kid gives no sign that he understands, which leads Greg to the conclusion that whatever the boy has been through, it was pretty bad. He decides the best course of action after getting the kid warm, is to get to the camping office down the trail and either wait for the attendant to show, or see if there’s an emergency number he can call. Someone has to be looking for the kid, after all.

Again he tries to swoop the blanket
like a cape around the kid’s shoulders, and almost manages it this time, one half of it coming down on the backpack that’s slung over the boy’s shoulders. But as soon as the material hits the pack, the kid winces and backs away. It is the first sign of emotion the child has shown, and it alarms Greg, who takes it as an indication that the boy is wounded. After a moment of indecision, he lets the blanket fall to the ground.

“Okay,” he says. “Will you let me take a look? If you’re
hurt, I might be able to help.”

How
he might be able to help when his area of expertise is American History is anybody’s guess, but he needs to get the kid to trust him, to let him at least gauge the extent of the trouble he, and by association, Greg, is in.

“Easy now.”
As he starts to move slowly and carefully toward the boy, hands raised to show he means no harm, he finds himself surprised at the situation in which he has found himself, for while he’s reluctant to call himself a selfish man, the last few years of his life have definitely seen him dedicating the lion’s share of his efforts to pursuits designed solely to benefit nobody but himself. Call it the fallout from a life spent trying to be fair and equal, with little reward. That he didn’t immediately try to slough the responsibility for this kid off on someone,
any
one else, or just go back into the tent and zip it up when he first encountered him, is certainly not in keeping with his character.
My good deed for the day
, he decides.

A quick look around at the campsite reveals that all but one of the other couples have already packed up and left, and the only sign of life from the remaining tent is a soft, droning snore. Greg wonders if he should rouse the other couple. He recalls the wife being pretty hot too, even if she was closer to his age and showing every last bit of it. The husband was a quiet type, so maybe the wife might be impressed by Greg’s heroics and therefore amenable to a little
three-way extra-marital fun with Synthetic Karen, assuming they could find a way to get rid of hubby for a while.

Jesus
, he tells himself.
What’s the matter with you?