Holland Suggestions

by John Dunning

  I had timed it perfectly. The sun was up and the dew was melting off the grass, leaving a pink-blue haze over the place. I walked along the twisting road to the top, past the jeep trail, past the cabin, and for future reference I tried to get a fix on where the jeep road came out below. It disappeared into a tall stand of timber and I lost it there. The road did not look too difficult, but I doubted that a car could make it. I moved into the upper part of town and felt a surge of anger. A jeep was parked just off the street. Someone was here.

  I had never seen the jeep and had no idea who the owner might be. Slowly and quietly I went through the streets, looking in each building as I went. I wasn’t anxious to meet my shadow, whoever he might be, suddenly and by accident in this lonely place. But I had no intention of turning back or hiding in the bush until he left. My eyes scanned each crack and corner for some movement, and with every turn I felt more edgy. By the time I reached the center of town I was so nervous that even a woman’s voice made me jump.

  “All right, Jim, what are you doing here?”

  I jerked around defensively. Jill was climbing down a rough trail about thirty yards behind me. She was smiling, but there was annoyance in her smile, as though I had caught her in some very private act. For a moment I didn’t know what to say. What I did say was, “I could ask you the same question. Where’d you get the jeep?”

  “I rented it two days ago. It’s been parked in town. And I’ve already told you what I’m doing.”

  “Oh, you mean shooting pictures.”

  “That’s right. You just spoiled my best one, you know. I told you I want to show the desolation of this place; that means no people.”

  “I didn’t know you’d be here. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, I can still get it if I hurry. My camera is set up there”—she pointed up the mountain trail—“so if you’ll just stay out of the way for a couple of hours I’d appreciate it.”

  She turned away from me and climbed up toward her perch. Now I could see her tripod nestled among some mountain underbrush. I followed her up and paused while she reloaded the camera. Clearly she was in no mood for conversation, and I reasoned that the sooner I got away from her, the better for both of us. “I’ll probably do less harm if I’m behind you,” I said. She nodded.

  “Maybe I’ll just climb along the trails above town for a while,” I said. “Do you know where they go?”

  “Some of them just drift around. I think the main trail is maintained by the forest service. Mr. Gould told me it was built for hikers. It goes fifteen or twenty miles into the forest.”

  I brushed past her without another word and did not look back until I was about fifty yards away. She was working intensely over her camera, changing positions and settings and shooting all the while, and she never once looked at me while I watched her. It was a great display of authenticity, and it would have impressed me no end had I not just learned that her publisher, MacDougald and Barnes, was another part of the fairy tale. I found the forest path easily enough. It rose above the town and was marked with neat signs, white lettering against brown. The letters said MISSION, 4 mi.; HOWARD FALLS, 12 mi.; RANGER TRAIL, 17 mi. The trail dipped and turned sharply, running parallel with the town along the face of the mountain. From there Jill was visible for a long time. Only once did she look up. I waved to her, but either she did not see me or she was ignoring me. She huddled over her camera and went on with her work. I climbed above the stone building and the saloon, but now, strangely, I had no inclination to explore the town any more. Again I felt that magnetic pull, stronger than anything before it, but it led me along the forest trail and away from the town. I looked one more time at Jill and saw that she was still working. Then I climbed quickly along the trail, and both the girl and the town slipped from my sight.

  Ahead was a panorama of untouched wilderness. The trail, lined with stones, climbed higher; the mountain sloped gradually away from it into a lush valley. Another range of mountains rose from the valley floor, running north and south until it was engulfed at both ends by swirling white mist. As I climbed higher and my breath came in heavy gasps, I became impatient to get wherever I was going, and I knew where that was even if I didn’t quite know the way. The stones lining the trail petered out. Two paths branched away, one going higher up the mountain, the other dropping down toward the valley. I ignored them both. The main trail peaked and started down. I was on the other side of the mountain now, but I had lost all track of time. I had no idea how long I had been climbing or how far back I had left Taylor’s Gulch.

  I came to the place called Mission some time later. It was a natural rock formation, with all the appearances of a real mission from the top. As I came closer, the illusion dissolved and the rocks became just rocks. The path forked there, and for the first time I had doubts about going on. But I did go on, staying with the main trail, dipping below the mission rocks and below timberline. The trees closed in on all sides; small pines grew up alongside the path and partly blocked it in places. I was deep in the forest, where the trail was used only by hardcore hikers; signs of people, fairly common before, became scarce. There were no bottles or beer cans and only occasional remains of old campfires just off the trail. The path hit bottom and started up another mountain. It was hardly a path any more; just a thin line across the wild grass. Again I rose above timberline, and the bald dome of the mountain spread out before me.

  I saw a flock of buzzards and wondered what had died. My eyes shifted to the sun, high in the sky; to the north I saw an ominous formation of black clouds. I remembered what Gould had said about storms, but I knew I was getting close now and I pushed ahead faster. My breath preceded me in white puffs. I stayed with the trail across a snow-spotted clearing, then a tumbling stream caught my eye and lured me along it up the mountain’s backside. The stream poured out of a crack in the mountain wall and plunged underground in a pile of stones and undergrowth. I clattered over the rubble and found myself on a stone trail that ran deep into the crack, concurrently with the stream. Soon the flowing water covered the trail, and rock overhead partly blotted out the sun. I was ankle-deep in the water before I saw the end. There the rock above broke away and the sun revealed a sandy bottom and a waterfall. The stone trail skirted the sand and wound among the rocks behind the falls, ending at the mouth of a small cave.

  I did not know why I was so excited; I only knew that I was. I fumbled at my backpack for my flashlight and almost dropped it in my eagerness. I played the light into the cave and moved slowly ahead. The opening was tight; twice I had to crawl on my hands and knees. About fifty yards in, the hole opened into a large room and I could stand again. I was in a circular chamber, perhaps half the size of a normal house. There were signs of some habitation; an old fireplace, several yellowed newspapers, and two sets of initials spray-painted on the rock. Already the dampness was working the paint off, and I knew the initials would not last another year. I studied them, but they meant nothing to me. I followed the walls around to the passageway, then went around again, looking for any crack or hole that might be a continuation of the cave. There was nothing.

  That was where it ended.

  But it couldn’t be!

  I went around the walls a third time, feeling the rock with the fingers of my free hand. Nothing. I played the light higher, to the ceiling. That was the end of it. Suddenly a great weariness came over me and the strain of the long climb took its toll. I sank to my knees, a lump forming in my throat. The flashlight dropped to the floor with a clatter, rolled against the rock wall, and lay there shining at nothing. My hands trembled, and the shakes spread along my back and down my legs. I lay back against the wall, breathing hard, completely exhausted. I realized then how I had made the climb without stopping; it was a form of light self-hypnosis, and it had left me physically and emotionally drained. It was so easy to rest now, to forget it. But I didn’t forget immediately. I lay with my eyes half closed, staring at the hazy beam from the flash, thinking, so this is it, this is the
end of it, and wondering how my subconscious would react to that decision. I would leave this goddamned place in the morning. Tonight, as soon as I reached the inn, I would burn the photographs. The gold coin would go into the stream, no matter how valuable it might be. When I got home I would burn the Holland tapes and I would never again open any unmarked envelopes. If it persisted, I would see a doctor; plain and simple, that was how I would fight it. And if I never did any of those things, thinking of them now brought a small spark of relief. I thought it through again and tried to draw more comfort from it, but it was gone the second time. As I closed my eyes, the last thing I saw in my mind was Vivian, sitting in our old apartment telling Judy her vile code of life, while Robert Holland and I played poker with faceless men in a distant, darkened room.

  I have no idea how long I slept. My eyes fluttered open, and I saw at once that my flashlight had dimmed to almost nothing. My head rested on my arms, and my legs were curled under me. I sat up with a jerk, grabbed the flash, and played it around me; there was hardly enough power left to show the walls, I got up. My legs were cramped and my muscles ached, but the weakness and trembles were gone. I felt my way along the wall to the passageway and crawled out to the opening. What I saw as I emerged under the falls was terrifying: snow blowing, swirling between the canyon walls, piling up against the rocks at the mouth of the cave. I struggled down the water-covered pathway and came out on the grassy mountainside. The pink morning light was gone; in its place was a gray nastiness that had settled over the mountaintops and was coming in like a giant rolling pin.

  Already the mountains across the valley were almost obliterated by the mist. Snow swirled around my head, melted at once, and left my face slippery-wet. I stood there for a full minute, undecided about trying to reach Taylor’s Gulch before it really broke. I would be safe in the cave if I just took Gould’s advice; hole up and wait it out. In the morning it would be over and I could pick my way leisurely down the trail. That was the sensible thing to do, and I probably would have done it had I not remembered Jill. When I didn’t come back she might well come looking for me; yes, she would come and risk being lost herself while I was safe in a cave. So that option was out and there was no use thinking any more about it. I was wasting time. I shifted my backpack and started quickly down the trail. Snow was just beginning to stick as I reached the bottom and started up along the face of the mountain. A wind had come up too; it was stinging my nose and ears. The thought of frostbite was sudden and alarming; I had no protection for my ears; my skullcap partly covered them, but I had no muffs or flaps, not even a rag that I could tie around my head. Like a man in a Jack London story, I had overlooked one tiny detail; I had misjudged the country despite the warnings. Now I tried to make up for it by running. I only slipped, losing more time than I gained. All the while that deadly looking white mist closed in around me.

  I think I expected it to hit me with a frigid blast that would knock me to the ground. It wasn’t like that at all. The mist passed over and around me like a great cloud, but there was no immediate increase in the snow or the wind. That came later, just past Mission, when the snow pounded me so hard that I could not open my eyes. I just stood and waited for it to let up, but for a time I was afraid there would be no letup. The wind drove the snow in a tiny cyclone around my head; the snowflakes melted as they hit my face, and the water seeped under my eyelids, blurred my vision, and ran down my cheeks. Then it passed and there was a time of almost total calm. That lasted less than a minute, just long enough for me to shift my backpack and start the wrong way down the trail. I stopped. How could I be going the wrong way? How could I have gotten turned around? But the canyon dropped away to my left, as it had all the way up; so waiting for the snow flurry to pass, I had somehow turned myself around during those minutes when I thought I had been standing still. I turned around and again everything made sense. That was another bad sign, another grim reminder that I was losing this deadly game with the mountain.

  I did not have much time or energy left, so I pushed on at a steady pace. Twice I slipped off the path. The first time I went down only to my knees, but it happened again in a more serious place. The path had narrowed and the slope was steeper here. I fell fifteen or twenty feet down the mountain, pushing snow with me until a treetrunk stopped my fall. I braced myself against the tree and looked down; another mistake, because I couldn’t see anything down there, and the vision that formed in my mind was of a sheer drop and only this tree between me and it. I moved my foot, and the tree gave slightly under my weight. That tightened every muscle in my body; my knees burrowed into the snow and my fingers clawed under it, feeling for a hold in the brown mountain earth. I gripped a clump of grass and cried out; the cry was lost in the wind. I moved again, and the ripping sound I heard might have been imaginary or it might have been roots tearing out of the earth. It didn’t matter; I heard it clearly, and that was enough to bring another useless scream up from my gut. But the wind whipped my voice around my head, and even I could hardly hear it.

  I lay there panting, hallucinating, dreaming that I had fallen into a silky bed somewhere and could sleep all day. I came back to reality with a jerk, the way a truck driver will jerk when he catches his head bobbing on a busy freeway. When I opened my eyes again I thought darkness had fallen. The mist had cleared away above me, but the mountains were black outlines beyond it. The thought of night falling while I was propped on that slope was too much to bear. I pushed down hard against the tree and there were more ripping sounds, but it did not give. I did not look down again; I kept my eyes on the path all the time I was clawing and pulling my way up to it.

  Jill came along just as I had cleared the edge and flopped over on my back onto the path. I saw her from a strange perspective, my face pressed into the snow, and at first I thought she must be another hallucination. I blinked but she did not disappear; she came closer, then knelt beside me and asked if I was okay. I gasped out something, I don’t remember what, and I felt her hands on my belt, pulling my legs over that final hump where they had been dangling. For a long time I just lay in the snow while she rubbed my cheeks and ears.

  “You going to make it?” she asked.

  “How much farther?”

  “Thirty minutes. Maybe less.”

  I struggled to my feet. Now the walk was very tough; my left foot felt numb and I didn’t make good time. She led the way, pausing occasionally to warn me of a slippery place. By the time we reached the bluff overlooking Taylor’s Gulch a premature dusk had fallen and I could hardly see the outlines of the buildings. We crossed the flat above the town and started down. The trail from the bluff into the town was much steeper than I remembered and we slid most of the way, landing together in a pile of snow at the foot of the alley. Quite without warning I began to laugh. Jill lay on her back, breathing very hard and apparently unable to see the humor of it. Then she laughed too. She rolled a small ball of snow in one hand and threw it at me, hitting me squarely between the eyes. That set us both off; we laughed insanely for a full minute. Then, with a great effort, I got to my feet and pulled her up.

  I stood in the desolate street of the ghost town and wondered what to do. Both of us must have been thinking about the long journey down to Gold Creek, but nothing was said. I assumed that it was out of the question and let it go at that. We pushed ahead into the town; I mentioned something about a place to spend the night and she didn’t argue. By the time we reached the stone building the storm had settled in for the night. We crawled inside and I collapsed just below the window where “Jake Walters” was cut into the stone.

  “We can’t stay here,” Jill said.

  “I know it,” I said, and I did. The snow filtered down through the cracks in the timbers. The boards creaked, and all around us was wet and drippy.

  “We could sit in my jeep,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything, and for a time she was absolutely still beside me. A large lump of snow dripped from the boards and splattered against the back of
my neck. I was too tired to reach up and scoop it off. I turned my head to look at Jill, and the water dripped down my back. She was not even a silhouette in the darkness.

  “What about that cabin?” Her tone was impatient now.

  “We’d probably have to break in.”

  “So what?”

  “My flashlight batteries are about shot.”

  She opened her backpack and pressed her flash into my hand. The beam was strong, and that was the end of the excuses. We charged into the storm again, half sliding down the alley to the main street. From there it was a long walk through the upper part of town to the rim where her jeep was parked. In places the snow was knee-deep, and it was a wet snow that gripped our legs and could not be kicked aside. The walk took at least ten minutes, and even when we had reached the jeep I could not see the cabin for the blowing snow. “It’s there!” Jill shouted above the wind. She took the light from me and led the way to the slope. The path was completely snowed under, but she found it as though she had committed its location to memory. She plowed through the unbroken snow, slipping twice, and both times I tried to push her from behind and slipped all the way down from the effort. At the edge of the cabin was a narrow level spot, and Jill had a long wait for me there while I struggled up the hill for the third time. The cabin looked strong and impenetrable. Of course the door was locked. There was a window on each side and Jill easily found the latch. She broke a pane nearest the latch, reached her hand in, and flipped it open.

  “Hold the light and boost me through,” she said.

  “I’ve just got two hands.”

  “Then put down the light.”

  She held up her leg for my hand, but she wouldn’t fit until she took off her backpack. The second time she went through head first and hit the floor with a thud. I passed the light to her through the broken window. In another moment she had the door open and we were both inside.