Those That Wake

THE JOURNEY

IT WAS SLOW GOING DOWN the mountainside. Some of the irregularities in its face required them to make short drops, just a foot or two below dangling feet; others demanded some climbing before a person could drop to the next outcropping safely. At one point there was no outcropping beneath them, forcing them to make a fairly hair-raising fifteen-foot lateral traverse before they came to a position with a clear route down.

Mal, able to hold on a little longer and drop a little farther than the rest of them, always went first. On occasion they could see his face as he moved along the rock or landed hard below and his expression became briefly fierce, as if the rock were his enemy and he was not merely moving across it but engaged in combat with it.

Laura thought she would be the slowest among them, though, as it turned out, Mike proved to be the one with the hardest time negotiating the descent and the one who kept demanding they wait an extra few minutes before they move on. This clearly did not please him, and he remained sullen and quiet for most of the journey, except to grunt at a hard impact or shout in anger or fear once or twice as he felt that his hand or foot might be slipping. Laura, for her part, had gone to the climbing wall at the mall for what felt like every weekend of her twelfth and thirteenth years and was not completely out of her depth. On top of it, Mal seemed to be watching her more intently, keeping a steadying hand on her just a little bit longer.

Gradually, the wall became a slope. At first it was too steep to go down without using both hands and feet. Her hands were aching beyond reason, stiff and abraded and uncooperative. Mike winced when he flexed his fingers, and even Remak massaged his hands intermittently. Only Mal, whose hands had suffered the same rigors, worse in some cases for testing out the routes, seemed indifferent to the damage they’d sustained.

She could not, even in the midst of all this, stop herself from stealing glances at Mal, which she only hoped were not as obviously admiring as they felt. He was slim at the waist and broad across the shoulders and the chest, his torso a V of rising power. He was solid, too, as if right under his flesh he were made of metal. His face was almost a boy’s still. The features were young, almost innocent, but the face had been slugged pretty good, judging by the bruise around the left eye. Actually, it looked as if it had taken more than its fair share of slugging, and not just from fists, either. It looked weighed on, the eyes always bracing for the worst. Scars cut across the bridge of his nose, cheekbone, and chin. His dark eyes lit for an instant when he caught Laura looking at him once.

He was not, however, quite enough to make her forget what was happening. Luckily, just when the pain of grabbing and pressing and rubbing up against rock was no longer tolerable, when Laura felt as if she was going to let tears come out with an angry scream, the grade of the slope softened further. It was now possible to walk, taking careful measure of one’s balance, slowly down the mountain.

And so, the pain in her hands receded just as her calves began to burn. When they came to relatively even ground, it felt as if they’d been going for hours upon hours, yet the sky was still cloudless and too low, white and gray with no sign whatsoever of the sun’s position, but still dropping a tired, gloomy light on them all.

“Hey,” Laura said, her voice tired and rough, “what time is it?”

Mal instinctively looked at the watch on the wide leather band around his wrist.

“Broken.” Mal held up his wrist and shrugged.

“Ten fifty-five a.m.,” Remak said after consulting his own little digital wrist machinery.

“That means”—Laura looked back up the mountain—”if we’ve been descending for about two hours, it was only, like, eight-thirty when we woke up.”

“It’s light out. Sort of,” Mal said. “Anyway, the light hasn’t changed at all. Or the weather.”

“It should be cooler than this in the mountains,” Remak said, scanning the environment with disapproval. “In the morning, at this time of year, there ought to be a strong wind. If we’re anywhere near New York anymore.”

It was true. Laura was sweating and hot from the climb, as they all were, but there was no relief here from the elements, no more wind here than there was in a room with no doors or windows. She’d been in the mountains before, camping with her parents, and it was always too cold and too windy for her mother’s comfort.

Her mother.

“Why did they put us here, exactly?” Mike demanded. “In a goddamned wilderness?”

Remak shook his head with a bewildered expression that seemed to please Mike.

“There has to be something special about it that would make it desirable for them,” Remak conjectured. “It’s well removed from where we were. Our bodies would be harder to find intentionally, I suppose, though we could be stumbled upon by hikers. The distance hardly seems convenient. So why go through the trouble to put us here, specifically?” He looked around at the flat gray expanse for an answer.

They had tacitly agreed to take a rest here, finding seats on the bumps of the rocky ground.

“Did you say your watch was broken?” Laura asked Mal.

“Yeah.” Mal nodded, looking as if it was one more burden he could hardly bear. “Just taking after my mirror and my bag.”

Laura felt her face go agog at his answer.

“Me, too,” she said. “All sorts of things have been breaking on me, and for no reason. My cell, a cup I made when I was a kid. It’s been happening all week. What about you two?”

“No.” Mike shook his head as if to say how stupid this all was. “Wait. Yes. My key ring came apart, too, before I opened my door and he was there.” He turned a sour face on Remak.

“A doorknob broke off, though I was with Mike when it happened,” Remak said. “When did you notice the first thing break?” he asked Mal.

“My mirror, the night I got home from the gym. It was fine when I left, broken when I got back.”

“What happened in between?”

“Nothing that could have broken it.” He stopped, but went on again before Remak pressed him further. “But Tommy called me that night, asking for my help, while I was gone.”

“You?” Remak looked at Laura.

“Um, a few hours before I called my parents.” She thought on it briefly. “Actually, they were supposed to call me much earlier, so I guess it happened right after they…” She searched for another word, couldn’t find one, and finally surrendered to it. “Forgot me.”

“Anything since we woke up here?” Remak said, beginning to check himself.

Everyone gave him- or herself the once-over, then answered with shaking heads.

“What about it, Remak? What’s it supposed to mean?” Mike said, tired of the man’s fascinated manner.

Remak shook his head and shrugged.

“I don’t know. But it’s not normal.”

“Not normal.” Mike smiled despite himself. “That’s huge. Thanks.”

After a rest and politely turning their backs for one another to relieve themselves, they went on. The ground was not on a slope here, but it was cracked and uneven in places and it would be easy to twist an ankle or trip. Laura was in jeans with a light, loose shirt and had tied her loose sweater around her waist, her father’s Mets cap shading her eyes. She had sneakers on, and Mal, in loose cargo pants and a T-shirt that strained at his chest and shoulders, wore tough leather boots with heavy soles. Mike unfortunately had been in loafers when he had returned to the school with Remak, and he slowed the entire group down, cursing and stumbling along. He wore the khakis and casual button-down shirt that was the uniform of the modern urban teacher.

When they had first begun their climb, seeing Remak in the suit and tie had made Laura think of James Bond, a government agent invading enemy strongholds, fighting on catwalks, and leaping from moving vehicles, all in his perpetually immaculate tuxedo.

Remak was not James Bond. He had discarded his tie and jacket almost as soon as they’d started climbing, revealing the gun at the small of his back. His white shirt and blue pants were now anything but immaculate. They were dirtied, scuffed, torn in places, with rock powder ground into them. The shoes were no better, dull and scratched. He had also removed his glasses for the climb, the lenses through which he examined the world. All four of them were dirty and sweating and scuffed, but Remak, in what was left of that suit, seemed the most like a castaway, without dignity, the trappings of civilization slipping away.

They walked and stumbled for a little more than two hours, plus a half hour stop to rest in the middle. Eventually, the squat mountain with trees on top that was in front of them became larger and larger, and the squat mountain with trees on top that was behind them got smaller and smaller. When the ground started to slope upward again, Laura slowed to a stop and Mike happily took the signal.

“Mal, Jon,” Laura said. “Why don’t we break here?”

Mal, many steps ahead for the entire journey, stopped, turned around, and walked the few steps back to them. The four formed a vague circle and sat down heavily on the hard ground.

“I don’t know when it’s going to get dark in this place,” Remak said, “but why don’t we see if we can get a little sleep here?” There was eager agreement to that, and they awkwardly attempted to arrange themselves comfortably on a ground that made it all but impossible.

“Do you think we should keep a guard up or something?” Mal asked.

“I’ll go first.” Remak nodded tiredly, stiffly returning to his feet.

“I’m okay,” Mal said. “I’ll go first. You get some sleep.”

“Sure,” Mike said. “So you can ogle your new girlfriend all night.”

Mal looked away without responding, and Laura made a tart face at Mike, though, frankly, it was not the worst idea she’d ever heard.

Remak nodded and looked back down for a spot with no lumps.

“We were going to go see the school play this week,” Laura said after a few moments of windless silence, searching for some evidence that another world still existed somewhere. “My best friend, Rachel, is in it. They’re doing Bye Bye Birdie, and my dad had been in a production back in high school. He’d played Birdie. Some nights, after he had too much wine with dinner, he’d sing that song about being sincere and pretend to try to get my mom to faint.”

“We were going to close the gym early on Tuesday,” Mal said, “and have a party for this guy Norman. He’s turning ninety, but he still comes in every day and does a half hour with the jump rope and the five-pound weights. He does it slow, but he does it.”

“You work at a gym?” Laura asked.

“Yeah, after school. Not like a sports club or anything. It’s a small place, for ex-boxers and up-and-comers to train, programs for kids, that kind of thing.”

“Where is it?”

“Jericho’s Canvas, way downtown, on Greenwich and Edgar.”

“Jericho?” Remak asked. “Is that your name?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you related to Max Jericho?”

“He was my father.” Mal let it go as if he were confessing something.

“Really?” Mike said, sitting up a little. “Max Jericho was your father?”

“Yeah.”

“Who’s Max Jericho?” Laura asked, her bright eyes perking up with interest.

“Best amateur boxer that ever lived,” Mike said, lying back down, trying to show that he wasn’t that impressed. “Maybe.”

“Some sports writers used to say he could have gone toe to toe with Tyson if he’d had the chance,” Remak said.

“What happened?” Laura asked Mal.

“He wasn’t very”—Mal tilted his head from side to side—”cooperative.”

Laura looked at him a little longer, then settled herself back as Mal rose up and started treading a few steps off.

She was going to ask him about school, who might miss him there, but her mind was tugged away, thinking about Isabel, her eyes open, unsurprised, their defiance gone. Talking and angry one second, and then Brath, and then not talking or angry or even human anymore. It made her think of the dream she’d had on the train coming back from Manhattan, the weird suffocating dream. She was going to mention the dream then, but just in the act of thinking about it, sleep found her again.


When they started up again, Remak informed them that his watch read 7:24 a.m. The sky, the light, the temperature, were all the same.

It was much easier going up this mountain than down the last one, despite the fact that Mike’s legs were so stiff that the calves and thigh muscles seized up several times in the first hour and they had to stop a few times to let them loosen as he grumbled and sulked about it. This mountain seemed to be about the same height as the last one, but its slope was far more gradual, at least on this face.

Here it was just walking. Walking and walking and walking forever, with a rest here and there, until the last thirty minutes or so required them to make intermittent use of their raw, throbbing hands.

They made it to the top and looked back at the other mountain. Just like that one, the one they were on was mainly flat but sprouted a tight, impenetrable forest of trees. They might have gone off in one of the other directions along the journey, but there had been nothing there, just sprawling granite with the occasional rise of squat mountain as far as the eye could see. At one point, Remak announced that he saw, or thought he saw, moving figures impossibly far in the distance. But when they all stopped to look, the movement had vanished, or had never been there to begin with.

They also could have traced the base of this mountain to the other side, but the slope, as they could all see, was gentle and thus would be easier going than the last. The thinking was that atop the mountain, they might be able to see something of significance.

So they were up here, with no choice but to try to skirt the forest and get around to the other side of the mountain. They moved in single file along a ledge that was so narrow in places that Laura’s throat clenched up and her stomach muscles quivered. At one point along a particularly slim stretch, with limbs and branches and dry, pale brambles trying to force them off into space, she actually found her hands gently shaking.

They were all hungry and dreadfully thirsty, but none of them mentioned it. Remak had them all sucking on pebbles, to keep saliva in their mouths. Mike, whose cracked lips had started to bleed, didn’t find the pebble helping much and didn’t hesitate to announce it. Laura could hardly disagree. In fact, the pebble felt odd in her mouth, not quite soft, but not solid the way she would expect a rock to feel.

Mal, out in front as usual, had come to a small niche in the trees, affording them an amorphous clearing of some ten feet around to stop and take a rest in.

“There’s another opening, a bigger one, I think,” Mal said to them after leaning out from the edge and scanning what lay ahead of them. “Like where we woke up on the last mountain. That should bring us around to the other side, anyway. But it looks like rough going.”

Tired faces gazed back at him.

“I’ll see how it is,” he said, always stepping up first, not bragging, just accepting that he was the one who was going to do it. “If there’s anything there worth looking at, I’ll see if we can make the going a little easier.”

“Wait,” Laura said. “The forest is thick, but there are some openings low down here. I think I could crawl through.”

“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Mal said.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Remak told her.

“Fine,” Mike said.

“No.” Laura knelt down on aching thighs, squinting into the depths of the brambles. “I can get through here.”

Remak came over to study it, Mal following the operation with concern on his usually somber face.

“Laura,” Remak said. “You can’t see all the way through. The path may curve off in the wrong direction, or cut off in a dead end.”

“It’s got to be better than making Mal climb along the edge over a drop that could kill him.” She looked at Remak seriously. “Don’t you think?”

He stood up, glanced at Mal, and adjusted his glasses silently.

“Okay, then.” She tugged on her thick sweater, tucked her Mets cap onto her head, and got down on her hands and knees.

“Be careful. Seriously,” Mal said, causing Mike to roll his eyes.

She squirmed into the gap, and dry branches refused to snap as she forced her way through, instead flicking back and stinging her through the protection of her sweater. It was difficult going. The long, thin sticks pricked at her, pulling at her sweater and gouging holes into it. Even the leaves, dry and sharp like the edges of paper, caught in her ponytail and tugged stubbornly at her head. She put her hand up to protect her face as she shimmied along, but more than once a branch flicked back and slashed a red mark on her cheeks.

Then, finally, her hand came through to the clearing. She struggled until the top of her body was clear, and then dragged her legs out and came staggering to her feet just inches from the edge of the cliff. Blinking sweat out of her eyes, she finally surveyed the opening she had come into and was hit with such a force of shock that she almost stumbled back off the cliff and went tumbling to her death.

Isabel was there, her body lying exactly how they had left it on the other mountain. It was, in fact, the same clearing in every way: the size and shape of it, the pale grass Laura had woken up on, the outcropping Mal had begun the descent with. And across the way, over a long expanse of cracked granite, was another mountain, with trees jutting from its top. The mountain they had just come up. The mountain they were on now.

Laura stood, tight and still, afraid to move for fear of disturbing the space around her and shattering the universe apart. It was so shocking that she almost didn’t register the single difference between the clearing now and the clearing the last time she had seen it: Brath was gone.