The rope creaks. “I’m sorry, Gene. We don’t have to talk about this anymore.”
I think that’s the end of the conversation. But I surprise myself when I start speaking again. At first, the words come out halting and uncertain, one word, two words, a sentence. Then something catches, a momentum builds, and thoughts and memories flow out of me. Until it no longer feels like I’m pushing words out, but like an outpouring, a catharsis, a confession. And when I finish, my voice fading, she doesn’t say anything. I fear she has fallen asleep.
Then she whispers: “I wish I could hold your hand.”
Snowflakes descend softly past my face, blinking out of view as they drift downward into the darkness beneath my feet.
10
SISSY IS RIGHT. We surface the next day, the opening to the vertical tunnel surprisingly close.
Minutes after the chamber fills with sunlight, jolting us awake, we start climbing. Our arms and legs are cold and stiff, but the light gushing down butters us warm, lubricating our joints. Soon we forget about our blistered hands and bleeding fingers and concentrate on grabbing the next rung. And the next. Until, like newborn babies, we pour through the opening and into a clearing, gasping in the fresh mountain air, our eyes squinting against the sunlight.
We’re in the palm of a verdant valley, sheer granite cliffs rising on all sides like craggy fingers. A light haze hovers low inside the valley, filtering in and out of the dark woods that encircle us. Trees emerge from the fog like individual minions of the hinterland coming out to greet us. Or warn us away.
Towering over everything is the mountain peak. It lofts up high and arrogant, its face craggy and gnarled, as if squinting angrily at the brightness of the sun. Or at us, walking on its broad shoulders. Halfway up, a distant waterfall spouts out of a sheer wall, ribboning down thousands of meters, fraying into a mist at the bottom. A faint rainbow arches within the sprays.
Exposed in the open as we now are, the cold temperature slices into our bones. The breeze, though slight, slips through our clothing and porous skin, frosts our rib cages. Another coughing fit seizes me, and I double over, phlegm ripping up my pipes like thumbtacks in acid. I touch my forehead. Hot as a branding iron shooting off blasts and flares. The ground slants, shifts, the mountain and sky spinning around me, my own private avalanche.
“To the woods,” I say, “away from this wind.”
“Hold on,” Sissy says. She kneels down at the opening of the tunnel and starts studying the circumference.
“What are you doing?” Ben asks.
“Over here, look,” she says, pointing to the only portion of the lip where the grass is matted down. “Whoever’s been using this tunnel has been coming and going in this direction. We head off in the same direction through the woods, I say.”
The woods are a nest of warmth. The wind dies almost as soon as we set foot among the trees. A delicious aroma of vanilla butterscotch causes our stomachs to rumble. We stumble around before finding, amidst a bed of pine needles on the ground, the faintest trimmings of a path. We follow it, our excitement building.
But after only fifteen minutes, we stop to catch our breaths, leaning against a lichen-dabbled tree. We’re unaccustomed to the thin mountain air. A jay lights upon the branches high above us, its black head jerking snappily from side to side. It calls out with a grating, scolding skareek, skareek as if chiding us for our lack of vigor. Chilled quickly, we move on but at a more deliberate pace. Twenty minutes later, we stop.
“The trail just died on us,” Sissy says, looking around with worried eyes.
“We should find a place for tonight, yes? Get a fire going?” Epap says, teeth chattering.
“We have to hurry,” Sissy says. “Because this cold means business.”
“You and me forage for wood, Ben and Gene stay here—”
“No,” Sissy says, cutting Epap off. “We do everything together now. We don’t separate, not for a second, you hear? This forest wants to tear us apart, I sense it.”
We all do. We walk clustered together, arm sometimes brushing against arm, shoulders bumping. We don’t mind.
And then, just as the forest is threatening to condense into the blackness of thick tar, we break into a clearing. The curtain of trees and darkness falls away. On the far side of the clearing, the land completely drops off, plummeting down a sheer cliff. From where we stand, I can see glacial lakes and meadows in the valley far below. But my eyes are quickly distracted by something else.
In the middle of the clearing, bathed in sunlight, is a log cabin.
11
THE CABIN WINDOWS are shuttered, black lids tamped against the window frames. The front door is painted black and shut so tightly it looks to be hermetically sealed.
Sissy steps forward into the clearing, her shoes stepping into the plush snow.
“Sissy!” Epap whispers.
She turns around, signals for us to stay. As the boys retreat into the woods, I catch up with her.
“You’re going about this the wrong way,” I whisper.
She stops. “How’s that?”
“Don’t walk up to the front door—”
“Oh please. It’s not like I was going to knock.”
“Don’t even go up to the front porch. It’s likely to creak.” She doesn’t respond but I know she’s listening. “I’ll take the right side, you take the left. After five minutes, if we hear nothing, we’ll meet around the back. Only if the back’s clear, we try the front door.”
She nods and splits off.
The snow is encrusted hard on the ground and I’m careful to step slowly into it. Once at the side of the house, I slide cautiously toward the shuttered windows. I wait for a long time before placing my ear against the shutters. Not a sound.
The cabin feels empty.
After five minutes, I step carefully to the back of the cabin. Sissy is already there, ear pressed against the shuttered window. She holds up her hands, shaking her head. No one inside. She raises her eyebrows. Shall we go in?
The front porch creaks under our weight despite our efforts to tread softly. At the door, Sissy takes hold of the knob, flinches at the cold, then grips it firmly. Her hand turns, and the door swings open with surprising quiet.
We step in, swiftly close the door behind us. Best to cut off the light streaming in as quickly as possible. Let sleeping dogs lie, if there are any. We step into a dark, narrow hallway, and wait for our eyes to adapt to the darkness. We wait for sounds we do not want to hear: skittering, scratching, hissing. But there is only silence.
Shapes emerge only gradually. We tiptoe into the room to our immediate left, the floorboards creaking under our boots. Our eyes scan the ceiling first; at the first hint of anyone sleeping up there, we’ll backtrack immediately out of the cabin and race away. But it’s empty, just a few crossbeams. A bare table and large storage closet furnish the otherwise empty room.
We venture cautiously to the room across the hallway. The ceiling is similarly clear of any sleeping, dangling bodies. A wooden stool sits in the corner, its circular seat like an open eye staring at us. It’s a tumbledown room, bereft of any other furniture, tinged with the smell of mold. Long eaves above us, oddly ominous. Something bad was done in this room, I think to myself, and shiver. We slink out.
There’s only one room remaining, located at the very end of the hall. Sissy is two paces ahead of me and her head snaps back as she enters the room. Her face lights up with hope.
It’s a bed. A flimsy mattress sitting on a narrow frame, a small blanket tousled against the pillow like shed snakeskin.
I walk to the windows, find a lever for the shutters. The shutters grate noisily upward. Daylight pours in, brighter than I remembered even though thick clouds now completely coat the sky. I now see a curious contraption hung against the far wall of the room. It looks like some kind of humongous kite, a monstrous moth nailed into the wood.
Sissy is at the bed, inspecting the mattress.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“I think this place has been empty for quite some time.” She sniffs, trying to detect lingering odors. “We bunker down here tonight. Hunt some game, build a fire, replenish our energy reserves, get a full night’s sleep. At first light tomorrow we’ll look around, see if we find anything else.”
“What if this is it? The Land of Milk and Honey.”
She walks to the window, stares out. “Then it is.”
I look at the bed. “Then where is he?”
12
LATER AT NIGHT. They are asleep in the bedroom: the boys squeezed on the mattress, feet dangling, Sissy curled into a wooden chair. I walk down the hallway, into one of the other rooms. We’d debated after dinner—a pair of hunted marmots cooked over fire—whether to close the shutters. In the end, we opted—the claustrophobic black tunnel apparently still affecting us—to risk keeping them open. I’m glad we did. The wintry landscape, cast in a silvery moonlit hue, is soothing. Even the looming mountain peak bestows a regal calm.
I wrap a parka jacket tightly around me, appreciating the warmth. It’s one of a number of clothing items we’d found stashed away in a wooden chest. Ben found the chest under the bed, and he’d shouted with glee when it opened to coats lined with rabbit fur, scarves, wool socks, and gloves. And an odd-looking vest, weighed down by hooks and carabiners attached top to bottom.
The house creaks constantly, the wooden beams shifting in the dropping temperatures. The noise—cracking loudly at times—frightened Ben as he settled into bed for the night.
Everything is okay, Ben, I can still hear Sissy’s voice in my head, everything is just fine.
Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps this is it. The end, the destination, the Promised Land. This cabin, this clearing, this mountain. And any moment now, my father will come hiking out of the woods and into this cabin.
Footsteps in the hallway. The sound startles me; as I spin around, my fingers scrape across the splintery windowsill. A stab of pain and I flinch my hand away. Warm beads of blood prick out of my finger.
It’s Epap. He peers drowsily into the room, moonlight hitting him flush in the face. I’m hidden in the shadows; he doesn’t see me. His face folds in puzzlement. He’s about to turn away when he sees something outside the window.