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The way became more trail than road and before long they reached the place where the tire tracks dove down into the brush and one set of bootprints became two and they raised their Maglites and probed the gully with the beams, but the light struck the thick latticework of brush and went no farther. They switched off the torches and stood in silence, in moonlight.
“Want me to go on down there, Sheriff?”
“I guess not, Donny. We’ve got two men afoot now and we’d best see where they’ve gone to. Though by the looks of these tracks I’d say they’ve already got there.”
The deputy sniffled and looked back down the way they’d come, and up to where they were going. “What do you suppose made him do a thing like this anyway, Sheriff?”
“I quit even asking that question a long time ago, Donny.”
They went on.
The two sets of tracks progressed in tandem up the narrowing trail, one set landing wide of the other as if out of some compulsion, or superstition. As if one man were loathe to place his foot where the other’s had been.
“There ain’t no mistaking which is which, is there, Sheriff.”
“Let’s go quiet, Deputy.”
They came around a bend and, seeing only more trail, more tracks, stopped to get their wind. Kinney wanted a cigarette but put that out of his mind.
They’d turned to go on when a sound reached them, traveling in echo from up the mountain. A dull flat chock, as of an ax blow to solid wood. They stilled themselves and listened. Less than a minute later the sound came again and after that there was no more sound like it nor any sound at all. The deputy looked at the sheriff and the sheriff nodded, and they went on.
The trail grew more difficult and Kinney yielded the lead to his deputy so that he himself might concentrate on the surrounding woods, listening for any single thing which was not of the woods. They’d not climbed another fifty yards before he reached and put a hand on the deputy’s shoulder and they halted.
The deputy looked where the sheriff pointed and he saw the small flare of color deep in the monochrome woods, simmering and orange and
geometrical—a doorway. And seeing it he immediately smelled woodsmoke, as if one could not exist without the other.
“Damn, Sheriff,” he whispered. “Damn.”
Kinney lowered to a squat and removed his hat, and the deputy did the same, the shotgun bridged across his knees. They watched to see if anyone would pass before the door or window or come to shut it against the cold, but no one did.
The deputy whispered, “Sheriff, look up ahead here,” and he pointed to where the two sets of tracks abruptly diverged. The men rose and went stooped-backed up the trail and dropped once more to their haunches to study the tracks.
The deputy drew a gloved forefinger under his nose. “What should we do, Sheriff?”
Overhead, the white points of the pines sawed through the stars and sent a fine brilliant dust sifting down.
“I don’t like it,” said Kinney, “but I guess we’ll have to split up.” He leaned and spat dryly. “You go on ahead with those tracks and I’ll take these here. Set that radio to beep mode. If you see anything, beep me twice and wait for me to come, and I’ll do the same.”
They restored their hats to their heads, squared them, and stood. “Don’t use your torch if you can help it, and stay sharp, Donny.”
“Okay, Sheriff.”
He watched his deputy out of sight, then turned and stepped into the woods as his brother had done when he spotted the same remote light two, perhaps three hours earlier.
THE MOON FOLLOWED HIM, sidling through the treetops and attaching to him a disturbed version of his own shape, a liquid shadow that moved with perfect stealth while he himself blundered along behind. He kept an eye on Billy’s tracks and an eye on the light ahead, and he made himself stop every twenty paces and count to ten, just listening. He heard a twig fracture thinly in the distance, in the direction his deputy had gone, and nothing more. He considered whether he’d made the right decision splitting up. Made the right decision not calling Summit County to meet them
up here.
Meet us for what, for Jesus’ sake?
He had stopped to listen at a place where Billy had tripped over a tree that lay hidden under the snow. “Up here in goddam cowboy boots,” he said, and continued on.
He followed the tracks where they dodged through the pines, and when he glanced ahead once more to the lighted rectangle, now unmistakably a doorway, something passed darkly and soundlessly before it, like a tree felled in the middle ground but with no sound of its landing. He stood still and the tree came swinging back to darken the doorway again, and he saw then that it was no tree but some figure careening through the woods.
He stepped behind the branches of a young pine and watched the figure come on, antic and wayward, wildly lame in one leg. Bereft of all ballast or compass yet moving doggedly on some course, and it was the same course, he saw, that he himself was on and that was stamped in the snow by his brother’s boots.
He peeled off his gloves and stashed them in his pocket and unholstered his sidearm and found his stance behind the small pine, digging his boots into the snow. He raised the Maglite and rested it on a branch at eye level where the sight line was clean, training both gun and unlit flashlight on the place twenty feet ahead where he knew the figure would come into view.
Through the intervening boughs he made out the hobbling shape and he saw the blue-black gleam of leather in the moonlight, and although he believed he recognized the jacket he saw nothing else in those palsied movements or in the blanched face under the watch cap resembling his brother. He thumbed off the safety of the gun and released the air slowly from
his lungs.
The sound of erratic footfalls arrived in advance of the figure, and Kinney watched the white breaths erupting before the white face, and in time he heard the breaths too, hearing not only the exertions behind them but also the ragged bursts of speech within them—a breathy convulsive incantation as fierce as it was unintelligible.
At last the figure came lurching into his line of fire and he threw his light on it and a gloved left hand swung up reflexively and there was no weapon in it, nor in the right, which remained down and fisted and close to the right thigh.
“Not another step,” said Kinney, and the figure stopped. The splayed, outstretched hand wavered in the torch beam, its shadow covering the face like a huge smothering glove. He saw that it was not his brother but some impostor in his brother’s clothes and a poor one at that: swamped in the leather jacket, blue jeans lapsed into accordion folds from the ankles up. Or rather from one ankle up, for on the opposite leg the pant leg was bunched above a cowboy boot, where a strap had been fed through the pullstraps of the boot, the impostor holding the resulting loop in his gloved fist like the bridlereins to his own right foot.
“I want to see both your hands in the air right now,” Kinney said, and after a moment the unsteady figure let go the strap and fell at once to both knees and then to all fours with a high, awful whimper. Black hair spilled from the shoulders and hung trembling in the sheriff’s torchlight.
“Look up,” said Kinney. Such shoulders as there were under the jacket shook visibly. Droplets fell amid the lank hair, dazzled in the light, and were consumed in the snow.
“Come on now,” said the sheriff more gently. “Look at me.” He lowered his beam and when the light was off of it, the fallen head lifted and showed him the face under the cap and for a moment he believed he was seeing the face of his own daughter—haunted and drained and ravaged by illness.
“My Lord God,” he said. He came from behind the tree holstering the gun and knelt beside her and looked into her wild wet eyes. “Sweetheart,” he said, “what’s your name?”