Tunnel Vision (42 page)

Instead, he turned off the headlights. The woods were a solid black. No receding light from the van. No distant lights from the road. Nothing but uncompromising black. He turned off the car’s engine.

“What’re you doing?” she squealed. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“They’re gone.” He opened his door.

“Zach, get back in and take me home.”

“That’s not what we came for.” He snatched the keys and got out.

“Goddamn it, get in.”

As she continued protesting, he said nothing and sauntered to the end of the lane where he had turned the car around.

Above, the stars still winked through the treetops. But he could see a thin layer of cloud begin to haze the light. He could also feel a drop in temperature as the wind picked up, laced with the scent of rain.

Sarah got out of the car and slammed the door. “What the hell are you doing?” she said, coming up to him.

“We’re not finished.” He felt the crowbar pulse in his grip.

Suddenly the woods filled with a hideous otherworldly cry that raised a yelp from Sarah and nearly stopped Zack’s heart.

“What’s that?” she cried.

“Only a loon.” Someplace else, another answered in the same hysterical warble.

She grabbed the front of his shirt. “I want to get out of here. Now!”

“Then go.” He dangled the car keys in front of her. “Take the car and leave. You’re free, the road’s clear. I’m not turning back.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Tell me, Sarah, what exactly do you believe in, huh? Is everything serotonin and God lobes?”

“What?”

“Isn’t it possible that there are things unseen in this world?”

“Zack, please…”

“I’m asking you a real question. Isn’t it possible you could be wrong? You want hard evidence? Well, you’re looking at it: me.”

“But…”

“But what? I’m delusional? Psychotic? Crazy?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He put the keys in her hand. “Go home, Sarah. Go back to clean, well-lighted Cambridge.” Then he turned and walked away, his head filling with the musky, piney odor from the trees and decaying leaf mash. And something else.

Man sweat.

And something else.

Wood smoke.

Zack froze in place and turned his head as if it were an antenna looking for a signal.

They were surrounded by a continuous wall of trees making a chiaroscuro thicket around them against fading starlight. He slipped the crowbar into his belt and moved into the tiny clearing where he had turned the car.

“I’m not leaving,” Sarah said.

He said nothing but stopped in his tracks. Then, inexplicably, something in the depth of his brain made a click. He turned to his left and stared at the black ground.

“I can’t see a thing,” she muttered.

He aimed the light at a spot on the ground. “This way.”

85

“How will we find our way back?” she whispered.

“No problem.”

“What do you mean, ‘no problem’? And where’s your compass?”

“I’ve got it.”

“Where?”

But he didn’t answer. Instead he turned off his torch and led them on while she kept hers trained on the path in front of her. Through the canopy, the fading starlight made a vague diorama of branches and tree trunks. Ground visibility was minimal. Yet Zack moved through the thicket of brush and trees as if radar directed. And Sarah plodded behind him, saying nothing.

As they moved deeper, he felt the temperature drop even more. In spite of their movement, a chill cut through his jacket and sweatshirt. It occurred to him that if they got lost, no one would find their remains for years. If ever. The woods were crawling with night creatures—coyotes, bears, bobcats—that would strip them to bone in no time. And anything left over would be consumed by bugs and worms. Death and total recycling.

And he could hear them—the chittering and trilling and chirping, an occasional grunt or wheezing breath. In the distance, the hysterical yodels of loons. And in the even greater distance, coyotes yowling at the heavens.

God, give a sign.

When Sarah tugged at his shirt to ask where they were going, to beg to go back, he simply said, “Trust me.”

The path was narrow and covered with tender shoots like the hope pushing up in him. Silently he led Sarah through the growth. At one point, she let out a cry when some ground-nesting birds were startled up from nowhere, the flurry of their wings reflecting in their flashlights like banshees.

But something else was out there. Something alive and aware. He could feel its presence even if he couldn’t hear it. Every so often, he would stop and listen.

The woods were electric with the scrapings of a million metallic cricket legs, charging the air with a fierce expectancy. Unfortunately, the air was also alive with stinging flies that got in their eyes and ears and turned the Maine woods into a buzzing hell. And they had no repellent. But the wind had picked up and blew them away.

A sign? Maybe the wind,
he thought.

Against Sarah’s protests, they moved deeper. “Sarah, we’re fine.”

“I’m not fine, goddamn it.”

But he disregarded her and moved through the brush like a bloodhound. He wished he could explain. He wished he could find the words. But this was beyond language. And she was too much the rationalist, living within the confines of Cartesian logic and Newtonian physics. The way he used to be. But something had happened—something not dreamt of in her philosophy. For the last several hours—or weeks, come to think of it—things had come together with a sublime inevitability, like the working out of prophecy, that was culminating in these woods where the trees rose like cathedral spires.

Suddenly Zack stopped in his tracks.

“What?” Sarah gasped.

“Listen.”

Everything around them had become utterly silent—as if someone had turned off the audio. No chittering of crickets; no rustling or chirps of night critters; no squawking flutter of startled birds; no coyotes yowling. Not even the hush of the wind in the treetops. It was as if the forest were holding its breath.

“What’s happening?” Terror was strangling her voice.

“Nothing.” Zack looked behind them. Even if he wanted to go back, they could never make it, not in this muzzy dark. Besides, the trampled brush behind them was already snapping back into place. And a cold drizzle began to fall.

“We’re lost,” Sarah whispered. “We’re fucking lost, and you don’t have a compass. You lied.” She was crying.

Sudden doubt clenched his heart. What if he was wrong? What if he had talked himself into believing? What if the instinct pulling him along was a figment of a brain rotted on tetrodotoxin? What if she was right, that it was all in the head—that nothing lay beyond all this? No transcendent mind. No higher awareness. Just the cosmic joke of hope.

“Zack!”

He turned, and behind them the ground was burning with green fire—as if alien lava were seeping out of the ground. The path in front of them was still black, but behind them their tracks left an incandescent trail, as if they’d been walking in liquid radium.

He pulled Sarah forward. The stuff stuck to their shoes and the bottoms of their pants like phosphorescent mites. Aglow with millions of them. She stomped her foot, and her running shoe lit up.

“What the hell is that?”

A sign
.
Thank you
.

He gripped her shoulders. “Sarah, calm down. It’s called fox fire. Will-o’-the-wisp. A chemical reaction that takes place in fungus and wood rot. A chemical phosphorescence. Pure biology.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Faerie fire,” his father had called it, and it all came back to him for real. The last time he was up here, his dad had walked him and Jake down this same path one night. He had turned off his flashlight to show them the phenomenon. “My father.”

They moved ahead. Behind them the fox fire followed them, silhouetting sods of dirt, saplings, and fallen limbs and splashing with each footfall as if just below the surface were a thin lake of Day-Glo fire.

“You see?”

She nodded, looking back at their glowing trail, fading slowly in the dark.

“You okay?”

She didn’t respond. He took her hand, which was cold and wet, and he pulled her along. The drizzle was making a cold aspic of his skin. They went another several feet when she stopped dead.

“I can’t go on. I can’t.”

“I understand,” he said, and hugged her. She didn’t understand. How could she? “We’re almost there.”

“You keep saying that. I wanna go back.”

“Please trust me. Just five more minutes. I promise for real.”

They stumbled on, and soon the faerie fire disappeared, leaving only black woods. He followed his flash as a worm of doubt slithered across his chest again.

Please, don’t abandon me.

Suddenly Sarah stopped. She was trembling, and in the light her face was a tight white mask of itself. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “No.”

“Just a little ways more.”

“No, and you’re scaring the shit out of me.”

“Smoke.”

“What?”

He snapped his head around. “I smell smoke.”

“I don’t fucking care.”

He walked a few feet into the dark. “There.”

In the distance was a dull orange glow. He looked back at her. She was standing with her hands clutched to her breast, her hair matted by the falling rain. She looked as if she had turned to stone. He went to her and held out his hand.

For a long moment she stared at him, then she put out her hand. They walked maybe another thirty yards, following his light.

“My God,” he whispered. “I’m home.”

86

“Is this it?”

Zack looked at the cabin with a shock of recognition. “Yes.”

He could barely believe what his eyes were recording. He hadn’t been here since he was a child, and the trees had probably increased their girth, but it all rushed back. The cabin—a dark brown box of vertical wooden planks, the pitched roof—the rough, thick tangle of woods, the old oak stump for splitting logs, a long-handled spiked ax embedded blade down, a sharpening wheel beside it, the stack of wood alongside the cabin. Also an artesian well his father had built, drawing water from an aquifer from the nearby creek.

To the right of the front door was a small window, glowing from interior light. Smoke rose out of a chimney pipe someplace in the rear. As he was taking it all in and trying to sort out recall from psychic flashes, Sarah whispered his name. He looked, and she was aiming her torch on something. He moved to her. Sitting in the circle of light was the same black van.

Zack moved to the front door and tapped. No answer. He tapped again. “Dad, it’s me, Zack.”

Nothing.

He tapped again. “Nick Kashian. It’s your son, Zachary. Please open up.”

Someplace in the distance a loon cried out.

“It’s locked,” Sarah whispered.

A stainless-steel combination lock hung from the latch. He slipped his fingers under it and held it up to Sarah’s torch. He tried the tumbler. Then, as if his fingers had a mind of their own, he turned it to the right three times to 24, then once left to 8, then twice right to 14, and the lock opened up.

“How did you know?” Sarah asked.

He shook his head. The numbers just came to his fingers. He removed the lock from the eyehole and pushed open the door.

The interior was lit by a single kerosene lantern. And the immediate impression was clutter. Stuff collected over years of occupancy. Empty plastic kerosene containers hung in clusters from a ceiling support beam maybe ten feet up. From another beam hung slabs of dark dried meat and fish wrapped in cheesecloth.

A makeshift bed sat against the left wall, a gray pillow and rumpled soiled bedding covering it. A small wood-burning stove sat at the far wall. He could feel its heat.

The air was laced with the odor of sweat, smoke, and musty wood. One wall held shelves full of canned goods, jars of food, cooking pots, a few hand utensils, dry goods. His father’s old Nikon. Telephoto lenses sat in cylindrical cases.

On another wall were three racks, two holding shotguns. Boxes of ammo sat on a nearby shelf. Near the door hung sheathed knives and a machete. And from wall pegs, hooded jackets, tops, and a pair of wading boots. A small workbench and chair sat in the rear right across from the bed. Several tools were lined up on a pegboard.

“Zack.”

Sarah shone her flashlight on some discolored photographs pinned to the wall above the worktable. Photographs of him and Jake or the four of them—the same family portrait that sat on his mother’s fireplace mantel. One of them was a shot of Zack as a young boy proudly holding up a brook trout nearly as big as he was, a body of water in the background. He’d never seen that photo. It had to have been taken someplace around here.