It must have taken me ten minutes to reach the lip and peer around the surrounding woods. Already my feet were tender, and everything looked exactly the same in every direction. I had no compass, of course, and above the forest canopy the clouds now blocked the sun, leaving its position unclear. I tried to remember what side of the trees the moss was supposed to grow on—I thought it might be the north—but when I examined my immediate surroundings, the moss seemed to be growing arbitrarily wherever there was room for it. I had the distinct, if foolish, impression that the landscape stretched identically in all directions, forever. My eyes stung and I choked back a sob.
With nothing else to do, I chose a direction and walked in it. The going was slow and painful. As I had predicted, my feet were poked and scratched, thorny branches kept swinging into my path and scraping my legs, and I was growing thirstier—and now hungrier—with every passing moment. Because I felt compelled to keep my hands over my genitals, my balance was poor, and I nearly fell several times. And though I stumbled through the trees for what seemed like hours, the position of the sun never appeared to change.
I did, however, have one conviction that kept me from complete despair, and that was the inevitability of my return to the house at sunset. At some point, Doctor Stiles would have to find me, return my clothes to me, and lead me back to the hilltop, where my father would be waiting in his truck. All I had to do was endure the day—and though I was certain that this tactic would not meet with the Doctor’s approval, I was already beyond caring. Whatever punishment he chose to administer, I would accept it. But I would not play his game.
My memory is unclear on the precise manner in which I passed the afternoon. I would imagine that I did a lot of wandering, and perhaps took a few naps. I remember very clearly one particular nap, because it was upon waking from it that I realized the hour had grown late, well past the time when Doctor Stiles and I generally began our trek out of the woods and back to the house. Indeed, judging from the filtered light of the forest, it was possible that my father was already waiting for me there.
I spoke for the first time in hours, breaking the cardinal rule of speaking only when asked to. I called out his name, first quietly, then more loudly, until I was fairly screaming it. I had not realized just how completely a dense wood could swallow up a person’s voice; I had the distinct impression that, even had Doctor Stiles been standing a mere twenty-five feet away, he still might not hear me.
I stood up and began to pace, straining my eyes to look more deeply into the forest, hoping to make out a figure there, or some evidence that I was, in fact, close to the hilltop after all. But the woods appeared just as inscrutable and frightening as ever. I called out until my voice grew hoarse, then called out some more, and as the sunlight leached away, my voice became weaker, and I could no longer deny the obvious fact that night was falling, and I had been abandoned to my fate in the dark woods.
For some minutes, I simply leaned against a tree and sobbed. I felt as though I had no other option, that I would starve or freeze—for the temperature had begun to drop—or be devoured by animals, and could only stand and wait for my fate. My thirst, however, which I had temporarily managed to forget, returned with almost unbearable force, and it motivated me to start moving again.
There must have been a full moon, or close to it, because the darkness never enveloped me completely. In a sense, I could actually see better this way—my field of vision, limited by the dim, was more focused, and I was not
confused by the enormity of the forest. I moved steadily, feeling from tree to tree, careful not to walk in a circle by mistake. I was thinking of the drive here and back with my father—many of the roads we traveled upon ran along creeks or ditches, and there had been rain the day before. If I walked in a straight line for as long as possible, I would eventually come to a road, and beside that road there might be water. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the first real plan I had come up with, and it gave me the impetus to move.
I walked for hours, or what seemed like hours. And eventually, I was rewarded with a sound: the very faint gurgle of water.
I wanted to increase my pace. But the woods here were unusually thick, and I was forced to grope toward the noise. It was real, though, the distinct sound of a creek, straight ahead. It seemed like an hour or more before I reached it, and when I did, I nearly fell in—the trees ran right up to its edge, and the bank dropped off sharply, straight down into the water. The stream was perhaps four feet wide, and flowed quickly, considering it was late summer. Bracing myself against an exposed root, I stepped gingerly into the current.
My relief was profound. So good did the cool water feel on my aching, wounded feet, that I let out a mad-sounding laugh. I bent down and scooped up a double handful of water, intending to examine it in the dim moonlight, to see if it was too silty or muddy to drink. But once I had brought it to my face, I couldn’t resist. I gulped it down, then fell to my knees and thrust my face into the current. I gulped in long, choking draughts until I was sated, then I sat up, grew dizzy, and collapsed on my back into the creekbed. It was only a few inches deep, and I lay there with the water running over and around me, and thanked the God that I don’t think I had ever before believed in. I may even have slept there, with the water lapping against my cheeks, and the forest canopy moving above me, shifting and throbbing, a darker black against the faintly glowing black of the sky.
Indeed, I must have slept, because I remember waking to even deeper night, and cold. I was cold there, in the water, freezing in fact, and I began to shiver, so violently that I thought I might break apart. I sat up and let out a cry, and saw a smear of movement out of the corner of my eye.
It was a ghost.
Or so I thought at first. It stared at me out of round black eyes; its chest was broad, its hair white and strangely peaked above the ears. It stood on a pair of spindly legs and appeared to have no arms at all.
I stared at it, and it stared back, insensible and silent. Then I blinked, and the ghost moved, exposing its flank.
Of course it was a deer, a white deer. I had seen them before, elsewhere in the Town of Henford, while driving with my parents. It was my mother who habitually pointed them out, usually just before sunset, when we were on the way home from one of our infrequent nights out for dinner. But I had never come near one. Indeed, I had never before seen a living thing in this forest.
I stood up slowly from the water, eager not to frighten the animal. My heart thumped. I noticed that my shivering had stopped, and I stepped out of the creek.
The deer bounded off, twenty paces away, and looked at me over its shoulder. Without forethought, and feeling a new warmth race through my body, I took a step, and then another. When I was almost near enough to reach out and touch it, the deer leaped again, this time veering off to the left.
Again I followed, and again it bounded away and looked back. It would have been sensible to think that it was merely trying, though not very skillfully, to evade me—surely, at any moment, it would give up the game and dart away for good, beyond my field of vision. But I had become convinced that the deer wanted me to follow it, that it knew I could see no more than ten yards into the woods, and took care not to move beyond that distance.
The going ought to have been rough, as it had been ever since the Doctor knocked me out and left me to my own devices. But my feet fell only upon patches of moss, flat stones, and soft humus, and I was moving fast enough to break a sweat. I should have been exhausted, terrified, consumed by anger. I was not. I felt as though the woods were mine—that I knew every twig, every bramble and pebble, every handful of earth, by heart. It was as though I were dreaming.
But if it was a dream, it was the most intense, the most detailed, I had ever experienced. I believed that I possessed spectacular agility, strength, and stamina; that I could have described every footstep in aching detail, could have shown how I turned my ankle, and flexed my toes, the way I fell to earth and landed gently and firmly, and
sprang up again to find the next patch of welcoming ground. I did not panic, nor did I fall, or doubt for even a moment the rightness of my direction. As I followed the deer, I became the deer. As I negotiated the woods, I became the woods. As I raced through the night, I was the night.
And then, suddenly, the deer was gone. It stepped behind a tree and never emerged on the other side. I stopped, and my foot came to ground on a sharp twig, which snapped with a deafening crack. Where had it gone? I leaned to one side, then the other, and saw no sign of it. I made my way to the tree—slowly and carefully, as the ground here was suddenly uneven and littered with obstacles—and walked all the way around it, once, then twice.
There was nothing. And for a moment, I felt despair creeping back into my heart, because I thought that I was lost once again.
Then I looked up, and saw the wall.
It was, undoubtedly, the wall of the castle. The deer had led me here, then melted away into the forest. I stepped out of the trees and across the clearing, and slipped into the now-familiar opening between the wall and the rock. In almost total blackness, I felt my way to the wooden block, and pulled it free, and wriggled through the tunnel and into the courtyard.
The clouds had parted and moonlight flooded the castle. The silence was total. I stood on the cool flagstones, panting faintly, waiting to grow calm. The cage, the balance table, all the devices I had trained upon were motionless, yet they seemed filled with grim potential in this eerie light. I was filled with a sense of well-being, a strange confidence and maturity, as if I were safe at home, in my bed, instead of naked and alone under the yawning sky. I blinked, waited another moment, and then moved.
From time to time I had seen Doctor Stiles disappear into the low compound in the corner of the yard, and it was to this doorless opening that I now crept, with as much stealth as I could muster. I stepped over the threshold, alert for signs of life; my eyes grew accustomed to this deeper gloom, and I saw that the room around me was empty. Stone steps extended into the ground before me, and faint light emanated from the stairwell, and the smell of smoke. My fingers brushed the walls as I descended, steadying my tired body. I reached the bottom and walked through the open door.
He lay, wrapped in an army blanket, on the floor beside the dying embers of a small fire. He faced the ceiling and his eyes were closed. Beside him, about three feet away, my clothes were neatly folded in a pile. The room was spacious and low-ceilinged, and contained nothing else but Doctor Avery Stiles, the fire, and my things.
I moved around the room, staying close to the wall until I could reach the clothes. I picked them up, stepped back, and lay them down again, out of the Doctor’s reach. Then I approached him, knelt, and studied his sleeping face.
The Doctor was not a good-looking man. Of course I would not have understood this at the time—I was a child, and had rarely had the opportunity to look closely at anyone, let alone a grown man who wasn’t my father. But his face was distinctive, severe, the cheeks and eyes sunken, the bones sturdy and ghoulishly pronounced. The muscles of his jaw were twitching in the ember-light, as if he were dreaming of something frightening. His neck was long, and rough with beard stubble, and his Adam’s apple, the largest I have ever seen, moved up and down with haunted slowness, like a will-o’-the-wisp.
I became fixated on that Adam’s apple, and the neck that contained it, the tendons taut and long, the throat a dark depression between them, the blood pulsing in the vein. And when my hands moved toward it, it was as though they were someone else’s, and I a passive observer. They were curled like claws, these hands, and crusted over with earth, the fingernails long and filthy, the creases and pores standing out in sharp relief. They were like the hands of an old man, wizened but still strong, and I understood that they meant to murder Doctor Avery Stiles, to choke him in his sleep.
They had that power, I knew. He would struggle, but I would not let go. I would press the life from him, crush his throat, cut off the blood to his brain. (I knew about these things from comic books and films—or thought I knew, as, in retrospect, I am certain I could not possibly have killed Doctor Stiles.) My hands drew closer and closer, and then, when they were about to make contact with his rough flesh, they stopped.
His eyes were open. They were darting back and forth as though following some mad insect as it flew around the room. It took several seconds before I realized that he was still asleep.
Before I could relax, however, his head turned, and those eyes appeared to stare at me, and his face softened, and the eyes went limpid and sad, and tears ran down his cheeks.
“Rachel,” he whispered.
I did not, could not, speak.
“Rachel…” His hands came up, out of the blanket, and found my cheeks; he stroked them, gently, as he cried.
I could stand it no longer; I backed away, disgusted with myself and with his touch. Confusion crumpled his face, and he looked as if he might sob; but instead his eyes fluttered and closed, and his breaths quieted, and lengthened.
I gathered my things and retreated up the stairs. Outside the compound, a rain barrel stood underneath a crude gutter made from a hollowed-out log; I dipped my cupped hands into it and splashed my face with water. Then I put my clothes on, found a suitable flagstone, and curled up there to sleep.
As it happened, Doctor Stiles had made prior arrangements with my parents, or at least my father, for me to stay overnight. From his questions the next day, I gathered that my father had been told I would be learning to make camp, build a fire, and cook my dinner and breakfast. In fact, I had barely slept, had made no camp, and had eaten nothing since he dropped me off the day before. He seemed to sense that there was something wrong, or at least something peculiar—he stole glances at me as he drove, and at one point seemed almost on the verge of speaking. But he didn’t, and we arrived home without any understanding having been reached.
My mother, on the other hand, was more direct, and took me into her arms with desperate relief, studying me as though I had been gone a year: my face, my hands, my arms and hair.
“What happened to you?” she demanded. “What did he do to you?”
I wasn’t certain how to answer. Something about her eyes, their penetrating anger and love, seemed crazy to me. Or more likely, as I was only eleven, I was merely disoriented and frightened. In any event, I had never seen her in this state. She wore her bathrobe, though it was past noon, and her hair, usually tied back into a casual, efficient ponytail or bun at this hour, was sticking out in all directions, as if from an electric charge. She smelled unclean, and her chest heaved with shallow, quick breaths.
“Nothing, Mother,” I said.
“What, then!” she said. “What did you do, all night?”
“We went camping.”
“Are you hurt? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Mother.”
She embraced me tighter then, and took me by the shoulders and held me at arms’ length, observing, analyzing. Slowly her desperation receded, only to be supplanted by skepticism and, soon, disappointment.
“You’re not telling me the truth, are you, Eric?” she asked me.
“Yes, I am.”
She frowned, releasing me from her grasp.
“All right, Eric. All right.” She stood up from the chair she had fallen into to study me. “I’m glad you’re home.”
“I’m glad to be home, Mother.”
She had begun to walk away, but now she stopped and, looking over her shoulder, leveled a pained, unhappy gaze at me. She opened her mouth to speak, but, like my father on the ride home, she never did. Instead, she tightened her robe around her waist and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. I watched until she was out of sight.
When I turned, my father was standing by the fireplace gazing at me, an expression of stern approval on his face. And for a moment, I felt great pride at my ability to lie to my mother, and a mixture of pity and condescension for her, for having accepted my lies. I felt respected, and strong. I felt li
ke a man.
EIGHTEEN
I fell in and out of consciousness, only intermittently aware of where I was, or what was happening. My eyes were fixated on a black spot somewhere in the distance, around which something, some lesser darkness, flowed. I strained in the dim silver light to see the spot more clearly, and as I came to, it resolved itself into a knot in a broad plank, the lines of current around it no more than the grain of the wood. I blinked. My senses returned, slowly. Deep aches uncurled in my shoulders and knees, and I was cold. I remembered now where I was: suspended in a wooden cage, my limbs bound by rusted iron shackles and chains. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet. The rank scent of my unwashed body was sharp in my nose, and my mouth was dry and sticky and tasted of mud.
As I endured this moment of vulnerability, the courtyard began to fill up with memories: the tests of balance and concentration I faced on the tipping board; the feats of agility and strength I was asked to perform; the marathon sessions of stillness and stealth, such as the time I was made to perch in a tree for six hours without moving, or hide in a dark room all day, or hang from a branch, or crouch in the brush. I remembered now the Doctor’s strange demand that I give up my possessions, the things I valued the most: my G.I. Joe, and mushroom book, and canteen. The treasure map. The toy train he himself had given me, the day we met. A warrior, the Doctor once said, must be able to survive without the comfort of material possessions. He must require nothing but his muscles and his wits to defeat his enemy. Everything else—home, family, love, sex—was burden.
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