54
It was altogether nightfall under the pines, and while this helped him to track the orange light it also rigged his path with deadfall he didn’t see until he’d snagged his boot and pitched headlong into branches that raked at his face like the hands of ghouls. One twisted ankle pulsed in its boot and he struggled to hold his direction. It was necessary to detour around the boughs of the pines and each time he did so he lost the light, then stopped, then moved again laterally through the trees until he reached a place where the light and his eye aligned once more and he could move forward again. Then, abruptly, he smelled woodsmoke, and he said in the silence of the trees, Jesus, Jesus.
He made progress but the light seemed to grow no brighter or nearer, as though it were borne through the woods ahead as a lure is dragged through water. He pursued it, moving through the woods tree by tree, until he came around the broad skirt of a blue spruce and stopped.
Before him in the smallest of clearings sat an unlikely structure, so squat and spare, so colorless and rough-hewn and artless, that if not for the weak pulse of light in the seams of the door he never would have seen it. And but for the light never would have believed it to be anything but some crude and temporary shelter that rightly should have rotted back into the mountain a century before.
There were no windows that he could see, and even the pale vine of woodsmoke rising from the roof pipe, hardly distinguishable from the snowfall into which it climbed, seemed a sign of abandonment and disuse.
He stood almost within the spruce, pulling the air into his lungs as quietly as he could. He looked for signs of the man he’d been tracking and saw none. No footprints before the door of the shack and no visible trail or footpath in any direction. There was the hunkered little structure and there were the trees all around it and there was the vast, snowbound mountain. He watched the seam in the door to see if anyone would pass between it and the source of light within but no one did. He looked all around him through the trees, alert to any sound. He reached into his pocket and brought out the nine-millimeter and, muffling the sounds with his gloved hands, chambered a round and thumbed off the safety. He removed his right-hand glove and stowed it in the opposite pocket with the whiskey bottle, restowed the gun carefully, and stepped away from the spruce.
Crusted snow lay under the new powder and his boot steps announced him to the woods but there was no help for that and he moved ahead unhurriedly, favoring the bad ankle, until he reached the cabin. He raised his fist to knock on the door and it was then he saw the lock, a large outdoor Master, the fat boltshackle passed through an equally fat staple of a heavy-gauge hasp, which was itself fastened to door and jamb not with screws but lags, or perhaps through bolts. In the moment he took to consider such hardware he understood from its gleam and the smell of oil that it had been used recently and would be used again soon. Then he struck the door a few knocks with his bare knuckle and called out Hello as casually and quietly as he could.
He lowered his hand and found the gun grip inside his pocket. Held his breath, listening. The ticking of the snow on his shoulders, the faint pop of firewood on the other side of the door. He glanced around the clearing and it seemed even smaller now that he was at its center, the woods that shaped it more immense and dark. He let go of the gun and raised his hand again but then held it still. There was a sound from the other side of the door, as of a chain, as of chain links unspooling over a wooden floor, like a hound hauling itself to its feet, some old mountain breed chained up against doing damage or breaking free in its master’s absence. And then the hound spoke. It spoke in the voice of a girl and it said, thinly, “Hello? Is someone there?”
Billy swallowed.
“Who’s in there?” he said.
The chain dragged again and came to rest.
“Who’s out there?” said the girl. Nearer to the door but still some distance from it.
“What’s your name?” he said, and waited, his heart pumping. He asked again, and she said: “A man is keeping me here. Please help me.”
He took hold of the gun again. “Is the man in there?”
“No. He’s gone. Please help me.”
“I’m trying, darlin. Just tell me your name. Please.”
She was silent. The chain was still.
Then she said her name. So quietly that Billy wondered if it had been his mind that said it.