“We seem to be missing someone,” Kurt said after a moment. “Doug, I can see you’re in pain, and deserving of my attentions, but tell me first. Where is your wife?”
Natalie shrank back behind the barrier of rock, pushing herself a few inches farther into the hollow column. Now the confines were so tight, they squeezed, pressing in on her from all sides. She felt the coarse, burlap texture of stone against her skin, smelled moss and oxidation. Then she could penetrate the ageless mass no more, its walls and floor and partial lid impervious to budging.
Claustrophobia delivered a python hug. Wrapped tightly on all sides, Natalie was unsure whether, when the time came, she’d be able to reverse her maneuvers and get herself back out. Her breath sped up, and dizziness overtook her. The narrow space began to waver. She was going to pass out.
Natalie forced her eyes to close, then open. The return of light—a laser beam of sun shining down from overhead, out where space was abundant—calmed her.
It was harder to hear from this deep point of remove, but Doug must’ve been trying to say something for Kurt spoke loudly. “What’s that? I can’t quite make out what you’re telling me.”
There came a slow, halting rasp. Doug’s voice, shorn of everything. “She left…”
Kurt let out a shriek of sheer fury, then scurried out of the cave on all fours. Natalie could hear him moving about like an animal; she knew when he got to his feet and started to stride around the structure. He must have arrived at a point right above where she curled, for all light was suddenly blocked. She could no longer see a thing, not the humps of her shoulders, nor her fingers clasped against her sides.
“Natalie!” Kurt cried out ringingly. “Where are you? Don’t lie to me! I know you would never leave your husband!”
How much did she want that to be so—to scurry out to Doug right now and stay by his side forever, or for however much time the two of them had left. Instead, she crouched and cringed inside her hiding space. Way back here, the stone itself seemed to be weeping, a slow, steady seepage that chilled her face and arms.
“Natalie!” Kurt screamed again. “I’m going to kill your husband, you know! If you don’t come out right now, then I promise you. That spike will seem a mere splinter compared to the injury I inflict.”
Natalie smacked a hand to her mouth—abrading it against the rock—feeling the flesh on her knuckles scraped raw. It was the only way she could keep from crying out in protest, telling both Kurt and Doug not to worry, she was coming out now.
Kurt would detect the smell of blood, sniff it in the air like a wolf, and so Natalie bent her head in the cramped space, cricking her neck painfully in order to lick every sticky, coppery drop from her skin.
Leaves began to flutter and fall outside the rock structure, making a noise like rain, creating shadows. Kurt, rattling trees, snapping their limbs in a rage.
“Are you here?” he shouted. “Did you climb a tree, thinking I wouldn’t look up?”
Beating footsteps as he raced between the tree trunks, giving each one a forceful enough thrashing that the ground around it shook.
“Can you hear me, Natalie? You’ve been able to stay hidden longer than I would have guessed. You must not be thinking of all that I intend to do to your husband.”
Kurt’s footsteps retreated, the sound of his voice also fading away. He stayed gone for long minutes, enough of them that Natalie nearly crawled out to Doug.
Then Kurt arrived back at the maze of rocks, his tall shadow falling over its entrance, cooling the interior. He scuttled inside, low to the ground again, his panicked voice booming off the walls. “Doug? Wake up! Are you still with me, Doug? Doug!”
There was no response from her husband.
Still, Natalie hunkered down, her breathing finally slowing.
Because she had realized something.
Kurt wasn’t going to kill her husband. He would never voluntarily sacrifice a companion, a specimen to study out here in the woods.
He was going to save him.
Only once Kurt was clearly occupied, intent on whatever maneuvers he might be performing, his breathing no longer labored and no more shouts forthcoming, did Natalie allow herself a peek.
Kurt knelt on the floor of the cavern, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. His chest was covered with the same hair that formed his bushy beard. Veins on his neck stood out with exertion, and lengths of muscle bunched in his arms as he worked the clothes he had stripped off himself onto Doug’s trembling form.
“Wha…” Doug began, and Natalie’s heart fluttered with hope. “Are you—”
“Have to get you warm,” Kurt muttered.
“Why?” Doug sounded like his mouth had been shot full of novocaine.
Kurt pulled one of his wool socks onto Doug’s uninjured foot.
“Why?” Doug asked again, lips mealy and numb. “Do you hate us so much?”
“Hate you?” Kurt responded, his voice robotic and hollow. He continued to tug the sock into place with a series of automated jerks. Despite the passion of Kurt’s next assertion, not even a film of emotion lay over it. “My God, I don’t hate you, Doug. No, not at all. I love you. I love both you and your wife so very much.”
Natalie shrank back inside her pocket of stone until she could no longer see and her breath was constricted, knowing that in some monstrous way, this was true.
“And now,” Kurt said, “I have to bring you to safety before I go find her.”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
As soon as the sounds of Kurt getting Doug out of the rock formation diminished, Natalie began to wriggle free of the tight column behind which she’d wedged herself. Then something stopped her, as sure as a barricading arm, a cautionary command. The concave section of rock she’d been about to maneuver around served as a cup against which she could lean as she thought.
Kurt was smart. He’d guessed their intentions and seen through their ruses at every turn. What if he wasn’t truly convinced that Natalie had left, but was just giving her a chance to reveal herself?
She couldn’t imagine how she would delay, pass time that could allow for a head start while Kurt tended to Doug back at camp, without going insane. But what if Kurt simply put Doug down on the forest floor, while he himself lurked at the entrance, waiting for Natalie to squirm out, vulnerable as an inchworm, from the rock?
She became aware of something slicing into her waist, and reached down.
Here was a way she could ensure that Kurt was really gone while accomplishing what would be a necessary act if she intended to escape these woods.
Natalie pulled the map in its plastic sheath from her shorts, and there in the dimness of the chasm, began to unfold it.
The space was so tight that she had to look at one small square at a time, fighting to orient herself amidst what appeared to be a hopeless morass. The streaks, dashes, and squiggles were as incomprehensible as always—encryption she had no chance of breaking. She could’ve been looking at the thing upside down, or sideways, and indeed bunched up a clump in frustration, giving it a spin before trying to smooth the same section out again and examine it from a different angle.
If she squandered this chance, Kurt would win as surely as if she and Doug had just accepted his will, never even tried to escape. Except that it wouldn’t be Kurt keeping them prisoner in that case. It’d be Natalie herself.
The night she and Kurt had spent by the fire before Doug woke up.
Kurt had pried insight and revelation from Natalie as if he had a tool, a physician’s sharp implement designed to open up her deepest, darkest reaches, or an insect’s proboscis that ate out the core of its prey.
But Kurt had revealed something as well, hadn’t he?
Maps are just like dollhouses. A scaled-down version of the real thing.
The sun shifted its position in the sky, and a pinprick shaft of ligh
t shone down through the opening in the rock above Natalie.
There was the lake.
A pale-blue shaded area leapt out from the rest of the confusing symbols and muddied lines, as clearly as if the word for self-contained body of water had spelled itself out. That lake, surrounded by mountains—those faint triangles must indicate elevation—had been where Kurt had roasted the fish. Which meant that Natalie should be able to find Kurt’s camp if she could only interpret the spaces between. And that would lead to the system of caves and rock shelters in which she found herself now.
Her fingertip slid across the sheet of paper, a Ouija board coming to life. At first she was able to identify only the most recognizable landmarks, but slowly, she began making sense of orientations and configurations too, the way one unknown area fed into the next. A map wasn’t linear, like a book or an article, and trying to read it as one had always confounded Natalie, stopped her cold.
Instead maps represented multiple dimensions.
Natalie found the creek, and pulled that part of the paper close so as to see what lay adjacent. She rued the narrow closet of rock in which she sat when what she really needed to do was spread this whole thing out and study it in full. Natalie made the map into a fan, drawing each fold in once she understood what it represented, until a brief scrawl of words clanged a bell in her brain.
Turtle Ridge Wilderness Area.
With a dashed line that indicated a trail.
About some things at least, Kurt hadn’t been lying.
But he had indeed meant to fool her, in terms of his leaving. For Natalie could hear him now, coming back to the cave.
Kurt was clearly taking pains to keep quiet, but inevitable sounds jumped out, the same ones she and Doug had been unable to mask when they’d made this trip. Plants pressed into the earth by the weight of a heel. Air currents stirred so that dry leaves trembled on twigs, brushing their diaphanous bodies against each other. A songbird’s light departure.
The light shining in from the front of the tunnel changed. Didn’t disappear, but grew shadowed somehow, parts blotted out. Kurt was inside the rock structure.
Natalie glanced around the tight space to make sure she was concealed.
A tiny corner of map protruded, sticking out over her lap. A white slice glowing in the dim confines of the roofless cave.
Just a sliver, but enough for someone like Kurt to notice.
Natalie started to lower her hand—if she slid the map over by a fraction of an inch, that piece would disappear—but suddenly halted. The paper would crinkle, make a noise that might be perceptible to a man with senses as acute as Kurt’s.
Instead, Natalie eased her body sideways, tilting it so her shadow fell across the paper. She was tucked in so tightly, the motion couldn’t be seen.
The rock edifice stayed as silent as a monastery. Kurt’s was an anti-presence, a great, sucking vacuum of space that indicated he was still there.
Unless he hadn’t ever really been here at all, and simply lived inside Natalie now, a being impossible to erase.
Then she heard a noise that told her not only had she been correct, but also that she’d hidden herself successfully. Kurt believed himself to be alone, had no idea that Natalie remained nearby. For he’d begun weeping, unashamedly, unselfconsciously, an echoing of pure loss and despair throughout the stone space.
Only after Kurt’s sobs started to abate, and he made his retreat, did Natalie allow herself to count, a slow, hypnotic beat in her head. She enforced a wait of ten full minutes, six hundred seconds, before beginning the slow, effortful wriggle out from her hiding space. Clenching the precious map between her teeth, she fought to shimmy free, scraping her arms and shoulders against the rough rock walls until they widened enough to allow her to get down on all fours and crawl out.
She emerged into a changed day, the sky oppressively low, holding the promise of rain. With the sun hidden from view, Natalie couldn’t be sure how early it was, but she sensed that no more than a couple of hours had passed and it was still morning.
According to the map, she had to cover fifteen miles; Kurt had been truthful about the name of the nearest trail, but not about its location. Given her current level of fitness and acclimatization to the terrain, this was a walk of hours, not days.
The creek would still be of use. That deeper section Natalie had come to earlier would propel her along, both concealing her passage and enabling a shortcut.
Beneath a gritty overhang of rain clouds, Natalie lowered herself into the cool, gray pool, and as the current of the water took her, it also rinsed her clean.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Natalie emerged from her dunking when the creek started to shallow out, then used the map to orient herself. She gobbled one of the energy bars as she set off into the woods, breaking through a fierce cage of branches. These trees had fangs, and they sunk themselves into her. She had to wrench herself free. Each tree stood so close to the next that their branches intertwined. Lower down, brush was snarled like long hair and snagged at Natalie’s shins, requiring pauses to untangle it before she could proceed. At last the forest loosened up minutely, and Natalie began to half jog, half walk, desperate to be out of here and find help for her husband, yet aware of the need to pace herself.
Despite the pulse of impending rain, the day was warm, and Natalie was soon coated with sweat. It stung the new scrapes and scratches she’d accrued. She kept snatching glances at the map, reminding herself of the clarity she’d come to in the rock formation, until the crosshatch of lines became something she felt she could actually rely on.
The humidity felt spongy and thick. Natalie kicked aside a clump of brush while thunder muttered overhead. Her heart throbbed along with the sound; she was all but running now. The air wrapped itself like a woolen cloak around her. She wished the sky would just open up already, but the rain stubbornly held off.
Another quick perusal of the map, a second energy bar. She only had two left, but that was okay, she was almost out of the untrammeled part of the woods.
A section of third-growth forest appeared, the flora spindly and young. It made for easier bushwhacking, except that now Natalie had to trudge through a muck of leaves and forest debris, this land open to the sky. The ground sucked at her shoes, and Natalie forced herself on, aware of how each minute, each mile meted out danger for Doug. Her stomach churned—all those nuts and seeds from the bars—in time with the rumbling sky.
She came to a steep pitch and checked the map before starting to ascend. Her calf muscles complained as she forced them on, harder, faster, higher, but with every twang, her heart rejoiced. Because according to the map, this incline was the last before the Turtle Ridge trail should begin to unspool, perpendicular to where she was walking.
Natalie pushed aside a nothing branch—it split under the brunt of her assault—then stopped, her heartbeat ragged. Not because of the exertion, the way she’d run up that final hill, but because she could hear noises now. A body crashing through the woods. Kurt, in a fury, taking no care to be silent.
The roaring sound became discernible as Natalie started to back away. Was that Kurt, hollering out his rage? Or water somewhere, rushing past?
She began to whirl around, seeking a hiding place, but the branches on these trees were sparsely leafed, and all the boulders scattered. Natalie could think of nothing to do except crouch down, lower herself as close as possible to the earth, and pray that Kurt didn’t stumble upon this spot.
She bent over, aware that she had begun to cry, frightened, hopeless tears of defeat. Were there no limits to Kurt’s reach? Drops from her eyes struck the ground like the rain that refused to fall.
The crashing grew louder. Branches thrust aside, leaves dashed to the ground.
Also a voice. Calling out her name. And Doug’s.
“Nat-a-lie Lar-son! Doug-las Lar-son! Can you hear me? Nat-a-lie! Doug!
”
That wasn’t Kurt.
• • •
Natalie rose so abruptly, she nearly fell over. Was the voice coming closer, or growing more distant? The sodden air distorted sound, turning shouts into watery echoes.
“Yes!” she cried out frantically. She ran in the direction she thought the noises were coming from, stopped, then spun in a circle, her gaze scouring the woods. The voice called out again, and Natalie started to scream. “Yes, it’s me, it’s Natalie, I’m here!”
The man who’d been shouting was middle-aged, his hair close-cropped and gray, but clearly in excellent shape. A United States Marine Corps cap sat atop his head, and he was swathed in waterproof rain gear, wearing boots whose grooved soles made short work of the slippery ridge he had to scale to reach Natalie.
As soon as he appeared, she grabbed him, yanking out the map and flapping it in his face. “There’s a man”—she gasped—“in the woods… I mean, my husband—”
“Hold on just a second,” the man said. He held Natalie in place, looking her up and down. “We know your husband is missing. We have searchers looking for him close to where your canoe was found. Did you get separated? How did you wind up here?”
Natalie didn’t answer the question, immediately parsing what the information meant for Doug. However many searchers there were, it couldn’t be an infinite number, and some of them were nearly at the Canadian border. This man who had found Natalie might be all that she had. What had made him look here?
He was peering into her eyes, shining a pinprick light while pressing one finger to her wrist at the same time. He kept count, lips visibly moving.
Natalie snatched at his hand. “We didn’t get separated,” she told the man fiercely. “My husband is here too.”
“You stayed in one place?” The searcher regarded her. “That’s great. That was exactly the right thing to—”
Natalie shook her head rapidly. “I’m sorry, I misspoke—” She felt suddenly confused and wished for a cold splash of rain to jolt her. “Doug isn’t here, he’s about fifteen miles away, I can show you on this map. But there’s a man—who will try to stop you—and the woods there are booby-trapped—”
Wicked River Page 34
