For a long time, he simply had the sound of his own crunching footsteps and the scattered chirpings of birds to keep him company. As a native of Washington, DC and the son of a history professor at Georgetown, Ludwig had spent most of his childhood in the streets of a large city rather than in the wide-open spaces of the suburbs and small towns. His family had taken an occasional family trip to a state park, but even there, they clung tightly to the designated paths and, when finished, they hustled back to the car like frightened refugees, eager for an escape route back to the city and the familiar terrain of concrete and sidewalk. These days and weeks trudging through the woods, accumulating scrapes and burrs, never growing even somewhat accustomed to the chorus of animal and bird sounds, had been akin to being an explorer on an alien planet. Every moment he expected something large and enraged—a bear? a cougar?—to emerge from behind a tree and zero in on the vital veins and arteries that passed through his neck. That he had seen nothing more threatening than a small fox scrambling away at his approach brought him no comfort. As far as Ludwig was concerned, the longer one went without encountering trouble, the more likely it became that trouble waited around the next bend.
His hunger pangs returned after twenty minutes of walking. The landscape hadn't changed in the least, just trees and more trees. When the hunger came back, he stopped and sat on a large, fallen log. He stretched his legs out before him, felt his knees—which hurt more and more the older he got—quietly creak, bone rubbing against bone as his cartilage wore away. He looked back in the direction he had come and saw the same landscape that stretched before him, no sign of the farmer's field or the road or his car. It made sense for The Pioneer Club to meet in these woods. If it was this deserted in the twenty-first century, he could easily imagine how much more isolated it had been in the nineteenth. And the longer he sat, the more aware he became of his own isolation. If he dropped dead at that moment, if he just stopped breathing and fell off his perch, would anyone ever bother to find him? When they found his car abandoned on the side of the road, would they just write him off as another disappearance or suicide? Would he be dismissed as a lonely man who simply walked away from his life?
Maybe, he thought, that's what this is really about. Rather than a desire to help someone else, maybe he simply wanted a way for his own life to be remembered, a way to say that he did more than cloister himself away in an ivory tower.
Fair enough. He didn't need noble aspirations to keep himself moving.
He stood up, took a deep breath, and continued on, deeper into the woods.
He really didn't know what he was looking for. A clearing in the woods where nothing grew. A place that looked like it might once have been conducive to clandestine meetings. A needle in a county-sized haystack. It would be like pornography—he'd know it when he saw it.
But he did have to see it in order to know it.
He knew eventually he'd come to the Donahue house, and that would be the point at which he would turn around and go back to the road. He glanced at his watch and told himself to go forward for ten more minutes, just ten, then turn around wherever he was and get out of there, cross this area off the list and turn his attention to the next one.
He had been walking for about nine minutes when he came across the path.
It was narrow and nearly indistinguishable, so much so that Ludwig almost thought he was forcing his mind to see a path where there wasn't one. But the more and the longer he looked, the more obvious it became. The narrow ribbon of the earth was tamped down unnaturally as though by hundreds and hundreds of human feet. It sliced through the trees at an angle, coming in from the north and bending slightly to the west, the direction Ludwig was traveling. A shiver passed through his midsection, shaking his body with a slight convulsion. It was not an unpleasant feeling. It reminded him of the times when, as a young scholar, an idea would crystallize and take hold of him, and the process of writing it down and following it to its natural conclusion brought a level of satisfaction he wasn't sure he had experienced since.
He started down the path.
Any thought of a time limit to his searching went out of his mind. Paths led somewhere, and even if it just led to the Donahue's back door, he'd at least know he'd tried and exhausted the best lead he had. While he walked, his excitement grew. And also his fear. What would he do if he found exactly what he was looking for? He tried to imagine himself presenting the information to his colleagues at a conference. The thunderous applause. The slaps on the back. A landmark discovery in the field of folklore. Would they reward him with a distinguished professorship?
As he moved down the path, the canopy of trees grew thicker overhead, the limbs knotting together and blocking the sun. He paused and looked back again. It was even cooler under the trees, despite all his walking, and he began to doubt whether he'd even be able to find his way back to the road now. If that were the case, then he really had no choice but to keep going forward. If he stepped off the edge of the world, at least he could consider it a form of progress.