The plane had descended toward Logan Airport through layers of overcast, lumbering as carefully as an overweight old lady walking down a sidewalk where there are patches of ice. Trisha had watched, fascinated, with her forehead pressed to the window. They would be in a perfect world of white... there would be a flash of the ground or the slate-gray water of Boston Harbor below them... more white... then another flash of the ground or the water.
The four days which followed her decision to turn north were like that descent: mostly a cloudbank. Some of the memories she did have she did not trust; by Tuesday night 171. the boundary between reality and make-believe had begun to disappear. By Saturday morning, after a full week in the woods, it was all but gone. By Saturday morning (not that Trisha recognized it as Saturday when it came; by then she had lost track of the days) Tom Gordon had become her fulltime companion, not pretend but accepted as real. Pepsi Robichaud walked with her for awhile; the two of them sang all their favorite Boyz and Spice Girls duets and then Pepsi walked behind a tree and didn't come out on the other side. Trisha looked behind the tree, saw that Pepsi wasn't there, and understood after several moments of frowning thought that she had never been there at all. Trisha then sat down and cried.
While she was crossing a wide, boulder-strewn clearing, a large black helicopter - the sort of helicopter the sinister government conspiracy guys used in The X-Files - came and hovered over Trisha's head. It was soundless except for the faintest pulse of its rotors. She waved to it and screamed for help, and although the guys inside must have seen her, the black helicopter flew away and never returned. She came to an old forest of pines through which the light slanted in ancient dusty beams like sunrays falling through the high windows of a cathedral. This might have been on Thursday.
From these trees hung the mutilated corpses of a thousand deer, a slain army of deer crawling with flies and bulging with maggots. Trisha closed her eyes and when she opened them again the rotting deer were gone. She found a stream and followed it for awhile and then it either quit on her or she wandered away from it. Before this happened, however, she looked into it and saw an enormous face on the bottom, drowned but somehow still living, looking up at her and talking soundlessly. She passed a great gray tree like a hol-172 low crooked hand; from within it, a dead voice spoke her name. One night she awoke with something pressing down on her chest and thought the thing in the woods had finally come for her, but when she reached for it there was nothing there and she could breathe again. On several occasions she heard people calling for her, but when she called back there was never any answer.
Amid these clouds of illusion came vivid flashes of reality like glimpses of the ground. She remembered discovering another berry patch, a huge one splashed down the side of a hill, and refilling her pack while she sang, "Who do you call when your windshield's busted?" She remembered filling her water-bottle and Surge bottle from a spring. She remembered stumbling over a root and falling to the bottom of a wet lit-tle declivity where the most beautiful flowers she had ever seen grew - waxy-white and aromatic, graceful as bells. She had a clear memory of coming upon the headless body of a fox; unlike the army of slain deer hanging from the trees, this corpse didn't go away when she closed her eyes and counted to twenty. She was quite sure she saw a crow hanging upside down from a branch by its feet and cawing at her, and while that was probably impossible, the memory had a quality that many others (the one of the black helicopter, for instance) did not: a texture and a lucidity. She remembered fishing with her hood in the stream where she later saw the long drowned face.
There were no trout but she did manage to catch a few tad-dies.
She ate these whole, being careful to make sure they were dead before she did. She was haunted by the idea that they might live in her stomach, and turn into frogs there.