The footlocker is just like he left it. Oliver takes the journal from under his belt and, with his phone illuminating the yellowed pages, looks for where he left off. There’s not much time.
He turns the brittle page.
Date? I don’t know the date. I don’t know how many days have passed, don’t know if I’m still dreaming or awake.
Sleep feels like eternity.
I awake, or so I believe, with lotion on my hands and feet. My flesh still has an odd color, something closer to ash, and I’ve lost some sensation. But my toes wiggle and my fingers write, and someone seems to be making sure they do so.
Some mornings (I’m calling them mornings, but there is no way to know) there are fresh clothes stacked on the floor, clothes that I’ve never seen. They are newly tailored and warm, fitting perfectly over my pudgy frame. I can no longer see my ribs. And if I stand up straight, I can hardly see my toes.
I call out, but no one answers.
I feel buried, but awake with a full belly and salt on my lips. Someone is fattening me up. Perhaps I have fallen prey to a sea monster. I will wake, one morning, to find myself not walking the confines of a square cubicle but swimming in boiling soup!
Time has become my enemy. I am thankful for life, but what life is this? It is survival, I tell myself.
Survival until I see you, my love.
I pace the room and count my steps. And I do push-ups and sit-ups, fifty at a time. And then I start over.
Judging by the curly whiskers hiding my chin, I can guess that I have been here a month or so. Still, the unending silence, broken only by my own breath, pushes me toward madness.
Why am I alive? Why me?
And what of the crew? When I think of my mates, the room becomes smaller and the silence heavier. I can’t think of them. Their fate has surely been cast. They either made it home or died on the ice.
Either of those fates tortures me with envy.
There are pages torn from the journal and mad scribbles on the ones that follow—sketches of ships and desolation, of wistful clouds and sunrises in full array. Some of the entries are difficult to read, as if written on the brink of sleep or despair.
WHY?
I shout after waking. I shout it to no avail.
My captors tease me with compassion, but leave me only with the company of my thoughts. Dreams of you are all that I cling to. You reach for me in a field of green, and we walk the water’s edge. We lie down in the summer and watch the clouds pass. I hold this locket to my heart, open it to see your loving face. I am tempted to touch your photo but too afraid it will blot the image.
It is all I have.
And just when I think I cannot wake another day without you, my savior appeared. With grizzled bush upon my face, I pushed curly locks from my eyes to see him enter the room
And he is nothing what I expected.
An alarm goes off.
Oliver drops the journal, accidentally prying the cover until the spine cracks. He touches the phone’s screen, turning off the alarm. The time passed too fast.
It’s the last entry in that journal.
There’s no time to find the next one. He makes sure he’s not leaving anything behind, squeezing the orb in his pocket and feeling the surge of confidence before closing the door behind him.
He makes it to the clearing, the sun hanging above the mountains.
A sharp whistle echoes off the trees.
Henry and Helen exit the far side from about the same spot they entered. One of them is waving. Oliver waits at the edge of the forest, rubbing his ears, watching them trek through the snow. Henry, with the black stocking cap pulled down to his eyes, starts running. He scoops up a ball of snow and throws it. It falls short of Oliver.
Oliver’s head is already cold.
He starts to ask for his cap back, but Henry puts him in a headlock, thumping his scalp with his knuckle.
“Good doggie.”
His coat smells like smoke.
Oliver pulls his frozen ears out of the arm-vise. He falls on his hands and knees. Just like a dog.
“Hey, come on.” Henry yanks him up. “You did good, waited for us just like I said. Maybe you can come next time.”
“Can I have my cap?”
“Not until we get back.”
Oliver’s ears are burning.
He can’t stop frowning, but it doesn’t bother Henry. It only makes the smile widen. Oliver can’t wait until they’re gone. He starts for the house, forcing himself not to run.
Helen is still behind them. Oliver isn’t waiting for them. He’s stomping a path back to the house, where he can get a shower and rinse the cold from his bones.
Maybe they’ll be gone by the time he’s out.
Henry shouts at his sister to hurry. Oliver buries his hands, now colder than his ears, deep into his pockets and hunches his shoulders when something moves in the trees near him.
The snow falls from branches just inside the tree line.
Something is lurking.
FOOP.
It shoots between the branches.
It arches high and hard.
A snowball, something the size of a basketball, rotates as it peaks. Oliver watches it fly over his head and descend.
All the way to Henry’s face.
The stocking cap flies off, landing twenty feet behind him. He falls backwards, arms and legs out, landing flat in the snow. Oliver, with his hands in his pockets, watches his cousin rise up, his face as red as a flame. He shakes the dizziness away and looks around.
And finds Oliver.
His face turns a shade darker as he crawls to his feet and begins running. Oliver looks back at the trees, wondering if Henry saw it, too. Although Oliver didn’t see what threw it, maybe Henry did. Why didn’t he dodge it?
Henry buries his shoulder into Oliver’s chest.
Oliver goes down, eating snow all the way to the soil.
Henry lands on his back with all his weight, driving him into the frozen ground. Oliver can’t draw a breath, struggles to find air as Henry rolls him like a log and drops his knees into Oliver’s stomach.
Oliver gasps like a speared fish.
The side of Henry’s face is starting to swell. Spittle bubbles in the corners of his mouth. He grabs handfuls of Oliver’s coat.
“Stop!” Helen closes in on them. “Get off him!”
Henry slams Oliver’s head off the ground.
The world is washed in light, but pain is overridden by the desperation to breathe. Snow falls over them as Helen slides into Henry, wrapping her arms around him. Oliver rolls onto his hands and knees and, finally, finds his first breath.
Drool dangles from his lower lip.
“He didn’t throw it,” Helen pleads. “Ollie didn’t do it.”
“What?”
“It came from the trees. I saw it, Henry. I swear, Ollie didn’t throw it.”
“Who did?”
“I think…I don’t know.”
Henry is huffing through clamped teeth, looking at the trees and back to Oliver. His gelled hair has been sculpted into a rogue wave. He starts toward Oliver, but Helen gets between them.
“Don’t.” She pushes him. “You drag him inside with a bloody nose and Grandmother will tie you to a stump.”
He wipes his nose and checks the back of his hand. It’s swiped with blood. He spits red, staining the snow.
“Who’s over there?” he shouts.
He takes a step and stops, looking back at Helen. If someone is in there, he’s not too eager.
“It came from the trees,” she says.
“What’s that mean, it came from the trees? Did you see him or not?”
See him?
“I don’t know! I just saw it, that’s all.”
He spits again.
There’s a long pause between them, unspoken words not meant for Oliver. They know what’s out there but don’t want to admit it, not in front of Oliver. Or to themselves. Hands on his hips, he wanders
over to the trees, but doesn’t enter the forest. He points at the spot, and Helen nods. A few more steps. And that’s it.
He doesn’t say another thing, doesn’t come to shake Oliver like a broken toy or kick snow in his face. He heads back to the house.
Helen helps Oliver stand, wiping the snow off his coat. He sees his reflection in her glasses, his cheeks pink and scuffed.
“Wipe your nose.”
He rakes his hand across his upper lip. A faint red blur remains on his hand. She pinches his nose, then straightens his coat. Without saying a word, she follows her brother’s footsteps leading to the house.
A headache begins to blossom while Oliver catches his breath. He feels shaky, too. It’d be good to get inside and check his sugar. First, he waits until both twins are in the house. Oliver trundles out to the clearing, his legs cold and nervous. He finds the buried stocking cap and knocks the snow off before pulling it over his ears.
Something looms in the tree’s shadows, right where Henry’s tracks stopped short. Snow falls from the branches.
And then it’s gone.
F L U R Y
eight
Oliver finishes shoveling the circle drive.
The night of the mystery snowball brought a light dusting. He leans on the handle, looking down the spotless entry drive, contemplating where the snowball had come from. Someone had to throw it.
Once Aunt Rhonnie and the twins left, he realized the obvious hadn’t freaked him out. Someone had to throw it. A snowball doesn’t just spontaneously launch from the trees with the precision of a rifle. The thing that didn’t occur to him until he was lying in bed was the obvious:
Henry and Helen weren’t freaking out.
They were scared, but not freaked. Strangers don’t come out to the property; they don’t hang out in the woods and toss random snowballs. Henry and Helen weren’t shocked at all. They were scared. They knew who was out there.
Or what.
Whatever threw the snowball meant to hit Henry, to knock the stocking cap off his head.
Holding the straps of his backpack around his shoulders, Oliver jogs to the side of the house and leans against the wall, just below the family room window. He’d like to hide in the garage and read another journal.
Who threw the snowball?
The thought causes his heart to work harder. He swallows the fear and clenches his fists, mumbling, “You can do it, Oliver. You can do it, you can do it, you can do it—”
He leaps before his thoughts change to go to your room and hide.
Eyes fixed on the trees, arms stiff at his sides, he marches across the backyard. His heart swells into his throat as he nears the darkness between the tree trunks. He ducks beneath the heavy branches, can hardly feel his legs as he forces his way into the shade.
Turning left, he forges toward the clearing like a nutcracker soldier, stepping quickly and stiffly. Nothing moves deep in the forest; snow doesn’t fall from the branches. Nothing jumps out to greet him.
He reaches the forest’s edge.
Nothing at all.
Oliver leans against a tree, staring into the shadows. There are no hulking figures, no snapping branches or mystery footsteps—just his raspy breath. He could go deeper, but he doubts his heart could take it. Besides, there’s one more thing to find.
He looks across the wide field.
Their tracks have vanished as all tracks do on the property. It doesn’t matter. Oliver starts across the open field, keeping his eyes on the sparse trees near the twins’ exit point.
When he reaches the other side, he checks the compass app on his phone. He’d been camping enough to know that trees can all look alike. He gets his bearings, thinking north seemed a little more to the left the last time he checked the compass.
Maybe he didn’t calibrate it.
The trees are long and stringy between hulking trunks of mammoth conifers. He makes a mental note of the bark chewed off a large poplar, maybe a woodchuck or a beaver. Still no tracks to follow. He moves side to side, searching for a trail or broken branches. The snow isn’t as deep, but he grows weary and bored. This feels too far. The twins aren’t nature lovers.
There’s another poplar missing bark.
It looks just like the other one.
He gets closer and notices footprints. It is the same one!
He didn’t turn around, he’s sure of it. The compass is reading north slightly to the right this time. The app is broke. That’s great. Get lost in the woods looking for the twins’ secret. If the weather doesn’t kill me, Henry will.
He takes a moment to consider which way leads back home when he hears something splash. In between the blood pumping in his ears, he hears it again.
He follows the sound instead of the compass, where the land begins to slope downward. He climbs over a fallen tree. Then another. Ahead, branches litter the ground, some the size of telephone poles. The tops of trees are broken in various locations, some dead, bent and hanging.
This is where the forest rumbles.
He’d been sleeping through the nightly ruckus lately, even wondering if he’d been imagining its odd nature. Maybe that’s just how it was supposed to sound near the mountains.
The rushing water is beyond an uprooted cedar.
Oliver hikes around a tangle of vines and nearly steps in an oversized hole.
Heart leaping, he looks down the gullet of a ten-foot-wide sinkhole—the smooth sides funneling deep into the ground.
Pebbles splash into a dark pool at the bottom.
No coming out of that.
He walks around, watching the ground for another potential death pit. The rushing water grows louder. Ahead, a deep trench is carved from the ground, snaking along the base of a steep slope like a scar. Oliver approaches warily, grabbing a sapling sprouted near the edge. An innocent stream runs across the bottom; debris caught in the rocky sides suggests stronger currents when snowmelt comes off the mountains. He leans forward, feeling the cool, humid updraft from the frigid waters.
Ice breaks under his boot.
Oliver’s balance spills forward. He grabs the sapling with both hands and spins around as the backpack sways. His foot finds the sharp edge of a stone.
The young tree bends and cracks, but holds his weight. He hugs the tree and pulls himself onto solid footing, falling into the soft bed of needles.
His heart is full throttle.
That’s a sign. As soon as the feeling returns to his legs, he’s heading back to the house. Whatever the twins were doing can remain a secret.
He follows the stream, keeping a safe distance from the edge while watching for sinkholes until he’s ready to turn south for the house. Tree debris increases. Up ahead, the gorge turns north where a fallen cottonwood spans the shores, its roots upturned on the opposite bank.
Oliver pauses.
He should go back to the house and warm up, that’s the smart thing to do. It wouldn’t hurt to look, though. He’d come all this way, braved two brushes with one-way trips into hypothermic water.
Just a look.
He makes his way to the broken tree.
The bark is smooth, and the leaves long fallen away. Rot has hollowed out several openings where branches once grew. He climbs through the debris and finds a clearing on the opposite side, a narrow trail that weaves to the foot of the shore, where flat stones lead up to the massive trunk.
He tests his footing.
The trunk is plenty wide and, strangely enough, somewhat flat. He wouldn’t even have to step like a tight-rope walker, rather walk as if this were a sidewalk. The surface looks dry and tacky.
Oliver looks back. He knows he should turn around, play it safe. Let the twins do whatever it is they do. That would be the smart move.
Not this time.
He keeps his eyes on the radial roots fanning the opposite bank.
Oliver always follows directions. He’s never had detention, never received a demerit or failed to apologize for a conflict regardless o
f who’s at fault. If a sign says “Keep Off Lawn,” he walks in the opposite direction.
Today, Oliver takes his first step on the forbidden lawn.
His legs become colder when he’s over the water.
Refusing to look down, he feels the icy updraft. The water echoes from below, warning all warm-blooded animals to stay out.
Halfway across, with his arms out to the sides, he notices a stack of boulders on the rising slope. Across the river, the ground looks like jagged outcroppings over granite, but this pile is out of place—a pyramid of rounded stones.
There’s another set of stone steps at the end of the natural footbridge. Oliver climbs down while holding onto stray roots until he’s firmly on the ground.
Footprints.
The tracks lead around the array of root flares.
Oliver follows the skinny trail with convenient roots to grab. It goes up the hill, and then, without warning, the tracks vanish. He finds a snowless hollow beneath a rocky ledge where the base of the great tree was uprooted.
The pyramid of rocks is to the right of the opening.
His phone does little to illuminate the depths. He pauses after each step, looking behind him before taking another. The hollow is deeper and darker than expected, more than what the roots would’ve excavated.
Two more steps, he promises. I’m not going to wake up a grizzly.
The earthen cave continues beyond the light’s reach. He’s about to turn around when he sees the L-shaped root.
Maybe he wouldn’t have noticed if there were other sticks or roots this far inside, but it’s the only thing attached to the wall.
A light dizziness fills his head.
He lays his hand on the dry, gnarly root.
Click.
An earthen door swings on soundless hinges. Inside is a dark stone hearth with hand-carved chairs. The smell of soot lingers.
Oliver slams the door and runs to the foot of the upturned tree.
There’s a room inside this hill.
A room!
He should leave. That’s the smart thing.
He should go back to the house and hide in his room, check his blood sugar, take it easy, and no one gets hurt. That’s what he always does.
Claus Trilogy (Boxed Set) Page 56
