The Deep Dark Descending

by Eskens,Allen

  I move my left hand from the glove in his mouth and hold the knife upright.

  “You also killed my child.”

  I raise my right hand above the handle of the knife, the heel of my palm exposed like a hammer head.

  “You’re missing a drop.”

  I start to bring my palm down on the knife handle with all the force I can muster. I envision of the blade punching though his stomach and spine, embedding itself into the ice beneath him. His eyes go wide as he screams through my glove. But at the last second, I hold up. Then I smile, and with two fingers I tap the knife just enough to break the skin with the tip. A single drop of blood seeps out of the wound.

  I look in his eyes and whisper, “I don’t want you going to your grave with an incorrect body count.”

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 41

  “P

  lease, God, I’m sorry!” Mikhail yells. “I didn’t know she was your wife. I swear. Don’t kill me—not like this.”

  I should have left my glove in his mouth, but my fingers were turning brittle from exposure. I climb off Mikhail’s chest and kneel beside the bundle of stones.

  “You can’t do this. Stop! Please!”

  I’m too weak to pick the bundle up so I shove it toward the hole with my feet, pausing the stones at the edge of the precipice. I clear my head of all his pleading, and I listen, waiting for some argument against what I am about to do. I expect to hear Nancy in my head, or maybe even Jenni’s voice, but all I hear is the wind. I push the stones into the water.

  The bundle of stones isn’t heavy enough to drag Mikhail across the ice. I didn’t expect that it would be. I know that I will have to feed the man into the lake. He’s on his back, twisting from side to side, trying to work the ax handle out of his pant leg. He’s yanking at the cord that binds his wrist. He is helpless and has no choice but to fight like hell.

  I sit down in the snow above his head, put my boots on his shoulders and shove. He slides a foot closer to the hole.

  “For God’s sake stop!” he screams.

  I think about Jenni on the table in the medical examiner’s lab—the day I had to identify her body. I think about the bracelet in my pocket and the baby who never got the chance to take a breath. I shove again. His feet are now over the hole.

  “I killed her,” he says in a flurry of panic. “Okay? I admit it. I ordered Whitton and Kroll to kill her. I’m sorry. I swear I’m sorry.” He sounds like he’s crying. Giving the performance of his life.

  I won’t be able to get him into the hole while he’s on his back. I move to his side and try to turn him over, but he’s bucking and twisting too much and I can’t get a good grip. I take off my gloves to get ahold of the man’s snowmobile suit. My fingers don’t want to obey. They’re too frozen. I zip my coat down and shove my hands under my arm pits, keeping the wind at my back.

  “Please don’t kill me,” he bawls. “I’ll give you anything you want. I swear. Anything. I’m sorry.”

  My fingers aren’t warm, but I’ve worked enough blood through them to make them somewhat useful. I grab an arm and roll him onto his stomach, and when I do, the cord that binds his wrists together breaks. He is still bound by the belt that tethers his elbows and he immediately starts to shake his arms to try and slip them free of the belt.

  I stand up and take a second to catch my breath. The belt is tangled in the folds of his snowmobile suit, but he whips his arms frantically to get free. The toes of his boots are dangling over the mouth of the hole. He tries to bend his knees to get his feet away from the hole, but the ax handle that I shoved down his leg gives him very little wiggle room.

  “Please, you’ve got to believe me. I’m sorry. I swear to God I’m sorry. If I could take it back—”

  “Tell me about Zoya,” I say. My next move will take all of my remaining strength, and I need a moment to summon what I have left.

  “What?”

  “You killed Zoya. Why?”

  “I don’t know anything about—”

  I put my foot on the back of Mikhail’s heels and lean down to grab the waist of his snow pants. In one last depleting effort, I heave his hips up while at the same time, stomping his feet through the opening in the ice. Frozen water splashes and overflows as he drops, up to his hips, in the water. He is bent at the waist, his chest flat against the ice, his gloved hands clawing to find purchase against the weight of the stones pulling him down.

  “FUCK!” He yells at the top of his lungs. “OH MY GOD! STOP!”

  “Tell me about Zoya,” I say again.

  “You can’t do this! God! No!”

  “Why’d you kill Zoya?” I grab his shoulders and begin to lift.

  “Okay! Yes. I killed her. Pull me up! Please!”

  “Why?”

  “I’m slipping!”

  “Tell me!”

  “She wouldn’t listen. She wanted to find Ana. I told her no, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “How’d you kill her?”

  “I can’t feel my legs.”

  “I said, ‘how’d you kill Zoya’?”

  “I . . . fuck! I drowned her, okay? Now get me out of here. I’m burning. It hurts!”

  “Keep going. How’d you drown her?”

  “I shoved her face into a toilet. I didn’t mean to kill her, I swear. I just wanted her to listen to me. It was an accident. Please!”

  I stand over him panting, my exhausted breaths shooting into the night sky. This man killed Jenni. He killed Zoya—drowned her in a toilet because she wanted to see her sister again. Only Zoya’s true killer would have known that she had been drowned.

  “God—dammit! P—p—pull me up!” His words punctuated by short gasps of air.

  I grab the shoulders of Mikhail’s snowmobile suit and lift him off the ice—enough so that he can see my face.

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank—God.”

  My chest burns as I pull against the weight of the rocks. That little bit of effort is almost more than I can do. I don’t have the strength to pull him out, not with a hundred pounds tied to his ankles. I give another tug, but stop.

  And it’s in that moment of pause that my universe shrinks to the size of a pinhead—my every thought orbits around one simple truth. It’s not the pain that stops me from saving this man, nor the weight of the rocks tugging Mikhail downward. I could save him if I wanted to. I could end this ordeal with both of us walking off the ice, him going north and me heading south. I have what I came for. I have his confession.

  But Jenni’s words come back to me as I hold Mikhail’s life in my hands. Vengeance is not justice. She was right about that, but those ideas are not strangers to one another either. They’re born of the same mother, one sired by virtue, the other, the bastard son of vice. I used to think of them as standing back to back facing opposite horizons, but I understand now that sometimes they can face the same path, the same end.

  He looks at me, and in his eyes I see both hope and doubt. But deeper, behind it all, I see guile. I see the monster.

  Vengeance is not justice. But on this frozen lake, under a sky ablaze with the Northern Lights, vice and virtue collude to deliver Mikhail Vetrov to the only grave he will ever know.

  I’m holding him up by the lapel of his snowsuit, and he’s watching my eyes as I hesitate.

  He knows.

  I tip his chest up enough so that he slides deeper into the hole. He lets loose a scream and claws at the ice, catching himself, his hands locked on the wall in front of him, pressing his back into the edge behind.

  “NO!” His words sputter through muscles turned thick by the cold. “I told you . . . what you wanted . . . I confessed . . . you can’t . . . do this . . . you’re . . . a cop.”

  I sit on the ice in front of Mikhail. “No,” I say. “I’m not a cop. I’m a man—a man whose wife you killed.”

  Mikhail is breathing in hard spurts. I can hear a gurgle of spit churning in his exhales. He slips down a few more inches and jerks his head
back to keep his chin above the water. His fingertips are barely holding on.

  I look him in the eye and say, “In the end, it comes down to this: You’re an evil sonofabitch, and the world is a better place with you not in it.”

  I climb onto my knees and move in so that I am only a foot away from his face. His eyelids are heavy and I can tell that he is struggling to keep them open. He begins to grunt as the weight overtakes him.

  “You may want to get right with . . . well with whatever God you may believe in.”

  He speaks and I can barely make out the words. “Go . . . to . . . hell.”

  I shrug. “Maybe.”

  His hands slip and I hear the final gasp as he sucks in a breath before he is swallowed by the water. I watch the pale glow of his face disappear into the darkness. I wait until I see the bubbles of his last breath break the surface.

  He is gone.

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 42

  I fall onto my back, lying in the same hole where Mikhail had spent most of the day. Above me the Northern Lights are in full flare, green and white, pulsing like a wildfire above my head. I’m mesmerized by the dance.

  If I don’t move, my toes don’t hurt as badly, the crushing throb is replaced with numbness. I shiver in waves that break at the base of my neck. I breathe in shallow puffs because I am certain that a deep inhale would rip my lungs open. The cold from the ice at my back radiates up through me, and I feel as though I am becoming fossilized in ice. I look at the Aurora and all my concerns take on a lilt of insignificance. It fills me with peace. The lights above my head are so beautiful I can barely keep from crying.

  I am tired. I close my eyes and think of Jenni. I can feel her hand on my cheek and the tickle of her breath on my throat as she curls up with me. I am floating on a warm tide, and I can smell the sweet scent of sugar cookies. We are on the floor, in front of that fireplace. I touch the tender curve of her cheek. The nearness of her soft body causes my skin to tighten, and I remember the pleasure of that ache.

  She kisses my neck and her lips move up until they brush the lobe of my ear. She is whispering to me, but I can’t make out what she is saying. I strain to listen. It sounds like a song, but not any song I’ve ever heard before. I listen more closely and hear it again. The sound is soft, quiet, not from a whisper but from distance. It rises and holds, hitting a sharp crescendo before trailing off.

  I can’t smell the cookies any more. I reach for Jenni and she is not there. My hands hurt again, my chest hurts. The throb in my toes has returned. I hear the sound again and realize that it’s the howl of a wolf. I open my eyes. The Aurora continues to light the surface of the snow, casting a green haze across the lake.

  I try to roll to my side, but my defiant muscles won’t listen to me. Everything hurts. I want to go back to my dream. I want to feel Jenni at my side again. I curse the wolf whose lonely, selfish wail brought me back to that lake. I could try again. I could close my eyes and bring her back to me—this time forever. I know what I’m doing. It’s my choice. I try to conjure up those memories, but the wolf howls again. She won’t let me go.

  I grit my teeth, hold my arms to my chest and roll onto my left side. The effort cause me to cough, sending a jolt of pain through my ribcage and down my spine. I feel like I’m breathing glass shards. I work my hips up until I am on my knees. I shouldn’t have rested. That was a mistake. I should never have let my energy settle away like that. I needed to get up, get moving.

  I get one foot under me, then the other, wincing as the blades of pain reawaken my feet. With one last effort, I stand. The cracking of my back and shoulder muscles is almost audible. I look around the nest.

  Nothing remains of my deed except the knife in my boot and the auger, lying beside the hole. I drop both through and watch them disappear into the black water. In a couple hours, the ice will reclaim the hole, the lake skimming a new layer of skin over its wound. In a day or two, the blowing snow will hide the nest. There will be no evidence of my being here—beyond the dead body anchored to the bottom of the lake.

  I start back to the cabin, the path lit by the full moon and the waning surge of the Northern Lights at my back. My snow pants are stiff with ice, having been glazed with lake water as I fought to shove Mikhail Vetrov through the hole. I feel like the Tin Man working the rivets loose. The wind catches the bare skin of my neck with the sharp edge of a guillotine and I lift my hood over my head. When I get to the trees I pull myself up the bank, pausing on my hands and knees to catch my breath. Just standing back up is like lifting an ox cart filled with bricks.

  I climb the first hill, using the aspen scrub to pull myself along the portage. The snow grips my legs. I stub my frozen feet on rocks as I try to get a foothold, and the pain is so jarring that it spikes throughout my entire body and seems to settle beneath the roots of my teeth. One step more. I tell myself. Just one step more.

  I crest the hill and see the valley beyond. I know that the snowmobile is at the top of that next hill. If I can make it to the snowmobile, I can make it back to the Durango and safety, but I am convinced that I cannot make it to that next hill. In the moonlight I can see the skeletons of the aspen and birch, black against the moonlit snow in the distance. It is too far.

  That’s when I see the shadow moving on the path ahead of me. I stop, my heart thumping hard against its frozen shell. The shadow has halted about thirty feet away, low and dark. She turns and I can see the eyes of the wolf. I expect them to glow as they do in my dreams, but they look tired, resigned, forgiving. We look at each other.

  I open my arms and tip my head back, exposing my throat. I expect to hear a snarl as she launches at me. I hurt so badly, I just didn’t care anymore. Maybe this is how it all should end anyway. I am afraid, but somehow, this seems fitting.

  I wait and nothing happens. When I open my eyes, she is gone. I listen and can hear nothing except the wind. I start walking again, certain that one of only three things can happen: I will succumb to the cold, I will be eaten by wolves, or I will make it to the sled. One more step. One more step.

  The valley seems longer and deeper, and the path far more narrow than when I had crossed it that morning. Tree branches tug at my arms and cast shadows that play tricks on me. I step cross-eyed onto fallen logs or jutting rocks that knock me to my knees. I don’t stay down, though. With my nubby hands, I push myself back up and press on.

  I try to fill my head with thoughts to distract myself from the pain, but they evaporate before becoming fully formed. I try to think of a song, something easy to remember, something with a marching cadence. The only one that comes to mind is My Girl, by the Temptations. I can’t sing that well on a good day, but as I start my climb out of the valley, I shove that song into my head, whispering the words as I pull and clutch my way up the hill.

  “I got sunshine . . .” I trip on a root and face-plant into the snow. The song plays on. I lift myself up. “When it’s cold outside . . .” I make it back to my feet as the song tells me about the month of May. I push on. “I guess . . .” I pause to breathe, but keep the song playing in my head. I take another step and whisper, “My girl, My girl, My girl, talking ‘bout . . .” At times I get too winded to whisper, so I let the rhythm of the bass guitar carry on longer than it should.

  I’m on my third rendition of the song when the snowmobile comes into sight. I’d forgotten that I turned it around when I parked it on the hill, and I gave a silent prayer of thanks to the fallen saint or random flair of synapse that had put that idea in my head. I’m fairly certain that I would have died trying to lift it now.

  I straddle the sled, start it up, and take off.

  The wind in my face fills my eyes with tears. I have to blink hard to see the path. A couple times, my eyelashes freeze shut and I force them open by raising the muscles in my forehead and under my eyebrows. In no time at all I am back at the cabin, and I park where the snowmobile had been idling when I first came there. I leave the motor running and the headlight on
so that I can search for my gun.

  I see the divots where I’d been standing when Mikhail caught me in the wrist with that first log. I drop to my knees, feeling under the snow in the shadow of a pine tree. I can’t leave my gun here. It’s the only proof of my connection to the man who ordered my wife’s death.

  My fingers are numb and I begin to question whether I’d be able to feel the gun if I brushed across it. I’m so close to being finished, so close to the safety and the warmth of the Durango, yet, I can’t feel a thing beneath the snow.

  Then suddenly the light above the cabin’s deck bursts to life.

  I am in the shadow of the pine tree, on my hands and knees, and I stop all movement. I hold my breath to listen. It might be a motion sensor. It has to be. Then I notice that the lights of the cabin are off. Total darkness on the other side of the glass. Those lights were on this morning. I remember.

  I hear the glass-sliding door open. Although the light blinds me from seeing who is on the deck, I know that I am not alone. A small figure steps into the light, a woman. Her arms are stretched out in front of her as though she might be holding a gun.

  I shake my head. “For fuck’s sake,” I mutter. “What next?”

  “Mikhail?” Ana calls out.

  “No, not Mikhail. Max.”

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 43

  I

  close my eyes and wait for the sound of the gun shot. I don’t move. I’m not sure if I am even able to move.

  With my head down, I don’t see Ana’s ghostly silhouette slip out of the light. I don’t hear the movement as she slides the deck door shut. The next thing I hear is the basement door opening. I raise my head to see her standing at the door.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked. “Come in.”

  I climb to my feet once more and stumble toward her. Ana is wearing the same clothes I’d left her in, except now she wore a pair of men’s galoshes and had a blanket draped around her shoulders.