Hold the Dark: A Novel

by William Giraldi

  She rose to answer a knock on the rear door. It was the boy of the Yup’ik hunter they’d seen earlier; he handed her an unwrapped slab of the moose calf, no larger than her palm, and she thanked him.

  When she returned to the sofa Core said, “The others here love you.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not love. It’s just what we do. Everyone shares with everyone.”

  “It’s not common where I’m from.”

  “I left a quilt and pillow here for you, Mr. Core. I see you’re tired.” She rose from the sofa and placed her mug on the countertop. “Thank you for coming here. I can’t pay you anything.”

  “It’s all right,” he assured her.

  “Is your daughter expecting you?”

  “I’m not sure what she expects, actually. I might call when I’m done here. Or just go. Thank you for the soup and coffee.”

  She fed the fire wedges of axed wood. “You’ll get cold in the night when this fire dies. That heater there works, when the electric works. You’re free to use it, just roll it to you. Or I can start up the stove for you.”

  “I’m all set,” he said.

  “Good night, Mr. Core.”

  She clicked off the lamp before turning into the back room. “To bed, to bed,” he heard her say, and the door clicked shut.

  * * *

  In the dark beneath the quilt he felt the fissure filling in him, sleep his sole respite against the strafing day. He was still disoriented in this place; he wanted badly to remember where he came from, and why he had come.

  He heard the howl of a wolf seconds before sleep would drag him down into darkness. It was mournful through the iced black of night—an uncommon howl, an appeal he could not identify: part fury, part fear, part puzzlement. The female gray he had tracked and killed so long ago howled at him—he knew the howl was at him—from across three miles of flat expanse, from the center of that stripped abundance.

  Many nights he expected to be jarred awake by dreams of the wolf he’d killed, by the sharp crack of the rifle round. And when he slept soundly through till dawn, he woke feeling remorseful that his rest had not been disrupted.

  With sleep wafting in now he thought he heard the mutters of Medora Slone from the back room, the incantations of a witch, songs whispered through sobs. He knew what haunted meant. The dead don’t haunt the living. The living haunt themselves.

  An hour into sleep, somewhere at the heart of an errant dream, he woke to light knifing out from around the bathroom door, to the sound of water running into the tub. He sat up on the sofa and listened. She had not closed the door completely, and in his wool socks, slick on the wood floor, he crept to look, terrified by what he was doing, by the chance of being seen by her, but helpless to ignore this. He could hear her muttering, and when he crouched by the door and looked into the crack of light, he saw her sitting in the steam of the tub, scrubbing herself raw with a bath brush, her expression one of pained resolve. Ashamed, he returned to the sofa and raised the quilt to his chin.

  But soon he woke again, and he saw the naked figure of Medora Slone silhouetted before the window. She’d pulled away the plastic sheeting and stood now motionless with her hand on the glass opaque with rime, moon-haunted, it seemed to Core, but there was no moon anymore. The firelight had died and the blue-white night was unnaturally intense around her. He saw the folds of her waist, the weighted breasts falling to either side of her rib cage, the tiny cup of flesh at her elbow. He lay unmoving in a kind of fear looking at her over his cosseted body, his breath stifled lest she hear him watching, lest he disrupt this midnight vigil.

  “Is he up there? Or down there?” Her voice, no more than a murmur, came to him as if from across an empty chamber.

  “Mrs. Slone? It’s late, Mrs. Slone. Are you all right?”

  She turned to see him lying on the sofa. He could make out only half her face. If he sat up he could reach over the cushioned arm and stroke her hip, her breast, no more than a yard away.

  He rose to stack more wood in the hearth, then wheeled the electric heater near the sofa. When she moved toward him, he instinctively peeled back the quilt and shifted to make room. She fit into him imperfectly, the sofa sank more, then he covered them in the quilt and clutched her quaking body.

  With her back to him, she took his hand and brought it to her throat, folding it hard around her windpipe, trying to will his grip to squeeze. He tried to retrieve his hand but she held tighter, then slid it down and placed it between her thighs, on a woolly patch of yellow hair. Arms around her again, he held her till she passed into the twitch of a nightmared sleep.

  II

  On patrol through the western sector of the city Vernon Slone saw pyramids of tires flaming on street corners in their own weather of black smoke. A market bombed and abandoned, fruit on the stones like vivisected bellies, the buildings behind the market reduced to irregular mounds of rubble, some of them unrecognizable as former houses or places of ware. Another afternoon’s creep, the cool of dusk an impossibility only dreamed of.

  Their vehicle crawled and stopped and crawled again, not knowing where it wanted to be in a spread-out train of trucks snaking through these streets. First his wishes of being in the snowed-over scape he knew, then his teary-eyed vision from the fires. He searched for movement, for men among the wreckage, anything with life left to end. On the road the top half of a man’s charred body, snipped through at the waist, entrails in a fly-feasting pile, his one arm outstretched as if trying to swim the torso back to his bottom part.

  And then the rapid snaps from rifles on a rooftop. Or from the maw in a bombed building. He knew that one round had entered his right shoulder, had just missed his vest. He could feel the blood, the heated honey in his armpit hair. An explosion from under the vehicle in front of his. It lifted sideways from force of flame and burned there in front of him. A soldier on fire limped from the wreck, one arm missing like the jagged end of driftwood, his other waving somebody to come near, to extinguish this new thing upon him. But no one came and he dropped to burn in the road.

  Slone scattered the .50-caliber rounds into bricks, into doors, into a disabled pickup with a missing front axle. Movement on a roof and he fired there. A face-wrapped man with a rifle darted from behind the abandoned pickup and tried to make the alleyway. Slone hit him before he reached it. The rounds punched his back and split his head, strewed the beige building with a flare of red. For an instant it looked to Slone almost like a painting, the lustrous spray of it something he once saw in an art book.

  The other gunners in his line of trucks were unloading now in a din of machine gun fire. To his right behind a mound of rubble, another face-wrapped man. Slone trained on him as he moved, the rounds hacking off pieces of him as if from axe blows.

  The burst in his neck then felt like the release of steam or gas—not even a spark of pain. When he slumped down expecting the mantle of black, he thought of Bailey in front of a television: Dad, look at this, look, and on the screen were trapeze artists breaking free of gravity, soaring, their bodies unnaturally elastic but strong. And then the trapeze artists were gone, the tent’s top blew off, dispensed in smoke, and the boy’s face turned an iced-over blue, mouthing slow words to Slone he could neither hear nor lip-read. But he imagined his son saying Remember me and he tried to reach out for the boy but could not.

  Some time later—he couldn’t tell how long, each minute a grain of sand dropping in an hourglass—he awoke on a gurney, worked on by others, rough hands mending his shoulder and neck, a corporal grinning down, “You lucky fucker, you’re going home.” His said his son’s name and the corporal told him, “Soon, you lucky fucker, you’ll see him soon.” The small-caliber round had missed both his pharynx and spine.

  “Nothing but a hickey, man,” someone said, and he felt the pinch of a syringe and sleep then lowered him into a grateful dark where he could not dream.

  * * *

  Core woke in this winter dark before a belated dawn, Medora Slone still as
leep and nude beside him on the sofa, the electric heater and their bodies an able source of warmth, the quilt a caul he wanted to remain in. Soon he built a fire, started the woodstove. She dressed and cooked and watched him depart with the AR-15 rifle and a pack of provisions and snowshoes. He wore her husband’s boots and one-piece of caribou hide—a winter suit she’d crafted herself for the unholiest cold. She covered the end of the rifle barrel with masking tape. Core asked her why.

  “To keep snow out of the gun,” she said.

  “I won’t get snow in the gun.”

  “You will when you fall.”

  “I’m not planning to fall.”

  “Everyone falls in the snow, Mr. Core. If you feel yourself starting to sweat, rest until you’re dry.”

  “What’s wrong with sweat?”

  “Nothing till you’re wet through. Wet and it freezes to your skin when you stop moving.”

  “I’ve been in the cold before,” Core said.

  “Not like the cold that’s coming here.”

  She opened the door for him and he stepped outside, his face angled up into the flakes falling slant the size of quarters. She remained against the doorframe and tied her robe closed.

  “I thought it might be too cold to snow,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?” she asked.

  “Too cold to snow. I’ve heard that. Though I’ve never understood it.”

  “Maybe where you come from. But here it’s never too cold to snow. There’s something off, something wrong with the sky here.”

  Core looked up into the dark, looked for whatever it was she might have meant.

  “Do you know if the snow is coming heavy today?”

  “I don’t tell the weather, Mr. Core. It will tell me.”

  Core thanked her, left her framed in a soft glow at the door of her cabin.

  He saw the lightening sky through a splayed reach of trees. At the perimeter of the village, in the copse near the hill where the path wound up and around, he suddenly spotted a back-bent Yup’ik woman with a circular face burning items in a rusted drum.

  He glimpsed her through the spiderweb of tree limbs and twigs. He stopped on the path to see if she would notice him. When she did she waved him over to the fire. He saw the red-orange radiance on her jowls, her creature garment thick and soiled, pungent-looking in the firelight, an anorak a century old. Her feet and shins were sheathed in moose-hide mukluks. He could not tell what blazed in the drum. He guessed she was burning household trash, but why at this dead hour? Seniors the world over woke before first light as if to win some contest with the sun.

  She said, “I thought you were something wicked coming my way.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I’m heading into the hills.”

  She had a man’s voice, teeth missing. “To get a wolf’s tooth, I’ve been told.”

  “Yes,” he said. “How do you know?”

  “We’re a small village. We’ve had trouble enough here.”

  “The wolves. I know, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

  “Ah, you know? No, you think you do. I mean trouble since the start. Trouble before any of us was here. You would bar the door against the wolf, why not more against beasts with the souls of damned men, against men who would damn themselves to beasts? Answer that.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am?”

  “I read the books they bring me. What else to do here through nights like these? I read the books. The Christians came when I was a child. The missionaries. They taught me the books. They came with books and they came with the plague.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The influenza plague.”

  The flame widened in the barrel and Core could feel its broad heat from six feet away.

  “Do you know the name of this village?” she asked.

  “Keelut.”

  “Say its meaning.”

  “I don’t know its meaning.”

  “Its meaning is an evil spirit disguised as a dog. Or a wolf.”

  “Why would they name it that?” he asked.

  Her gums glowed part orange, part pink. “Why indeed. You are the wolf expert, I hear.”

  “My name is Core.”

  “That girl knows this place is cursed.”

  “The girl? Medora Slone?”

  “Her.”

  “She just lost her child. What she knows is grief.”

  “Will the wolves come again for us tonight?”

  “Wolves should not be coming here at all. Tonight or ever.”

  “I did not say should. I said will.” She stared. “They have the spirits of the damned.”

  “They’re hungry wolves, hungry animals. Nothing more.”

  “I don’t mean wolves.”

  “I’ll go now,” he said.

  “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

  “That’s the Gospel of Matthew.”

  “I told you, I can read the books. They taught me how.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  “Are you a Christian?”

  “Ma’am, I know some things about nature and wolves. I write about them. I don’t pretend to know about anything else.”

  “We all pretend. And they know about you too.”

  “I’ll go now,” he said. He made to move up the trailhead. “Have a good day, ma’am.”

  “You’re going the wrong way,” she said, not turning her face from the heat of the drum. “Go back the way you came,” and she pointed a bent finger to the snow-blown center of the village.

  Core ignored her and continued up the path, over chokes of rock and lightning-struck spruce.

  * * *

  He expected to find a wolf pack in the valley on the other side of these hills, a den tucked away, hidden on a bouldered ridge above the plain. He’d meet them just after daybreak at the den, if he could find it, meet them after their long night hunting afield. If there was a famine on this land, they’d have to seek their prey at the edges of the land they knew.

  He remembered telling his daughter this when she was a girl: the Apache hunted the wolf as a rite from boy to man. A wolf kill turned a teen into a leader and earned him favor with the spirits of his ancestors. He remembered being outraged when she brought home from grade school the children’s book Peter and the Wolf, how it painted the animal a hellish fiend. And now Core was hunting one for a reason and a woman he did not know.

  The boy’s bones would not be in the den; it had been twelve days since he was taken. His bones were spread throughout this wilderness by scavengers, blanketed by mantles of new snowfall. There would be no burial, no coming to terms for the woman and her husband. But he would kill an already half-dead wolf if he could. He would carry it back for Medora Slone, tell her it was the monster that had seized her son. The monster she wanted to believe in, to explain this away. A wolf’s corpse meant relief to her—but only the illusion of relief, he knew. Perhaps she’d be able to quit the midnight vigils knowing that one wolf had been removed from the world. Perhaps not. Her every day was a midnight now.

  He trundled through drifts to his shins despite these snowshoes. The sack of food and ammunition hung heavy on his shoulders. The snow ceased briefly beneath a clearing sky to the east. The coming dawn cast a half halo of light on the horizon, then clouds like great coats hurled in to cloak it. Year’s end at this latitude the sun rose and set in such a truncated arch it seemed it might not find the will to bring the day.

  He felt again the weight in his legs. Beyond the snowed-in trees, just over these hills, lay an unknowable compass of tundra, a tapestry of whites and grays. Everywhere the living cold. Like grief, cold is an absence that takes up space. Winter wants the soul and bores into the body to get it. What were the possibilities of this place? There were patterns hidden here beneath the snow, patterns knowable but he did not know them.

  He walked on from one bluff to the next, knoll to knoll, snowshoeing over nonexistent paths and seek
ing tracks. The horizon kept losing its line, mixing down with up. Hours into his trek over the hills he stopped under a rock face, alongside what seemed an ancient esker. A minor sun drained of color blinked on and off behind clouds. The uniform white on the land pained his eyes until he remembered the tinted goggles in his bag. While drinking from snow and eating an egg sandwich she’d made for him, he heard the first howls down in the valley, half a mile over the tallest crest in the hills. He had seen no caribou tracks, no coyotes, no lynx, not a moose or hare.

  What plague had invaded these vast silences? The virid earth, his memories of fruit breathing hotly in summer fields—all obliterated by this moonscape.

  He felt the food warm in him and walked onto the snow-steamed plain. The wind flogged him, rushed around his hood, pushed against the padded contours of his clothes, made chalk dust of air. He adjusted the goggles on his face and tugged his chin low into the ruff of Vernon Slone’s caribou suit. It seemed he’d have to walk a long while more. He looked to the sky but could not tell time from a sun this sick. The bluff ahead was at two hundred yards, or three hundred, or three-quarters of a mile—this land made measurement obsolete. Only a fool counted steps and yet he counted. The goggles kept clouding and he stopped to wipe them dry.

  Where the plain began to rise again into an escarpment he found the first lupine tracks, a male, nearly six inches around, a three-foot stride, a hundred and twenty pounds, he guessed. He climbed the bank, over half boulders on the talus, and mounted the ridge from a narrow pass, all bluff face below him now, clouds gone north again. To his right he saw steam escaping from a copper-colored mouth in the crag, perhaps the hot spring she had told him about the night before. The sun sat low and wide; snow gave the glimmer of rattled foil. He crouched at the ridgeline and watched the valley beyond, and there he spotted the pack against the facing hills, a frenzy of ten gray wolves.