Chapter 4 Riley
She knows they’ve gone wrong when they cross the snowline on the third day.
The trail is just taking them higher and higher.
Riley tries to believe that their timing is messed up because of Oliver’s injury.
But she knows that they’re lost. Somewhere the deer trail branched in two and she didn’t see it.
Oliver is always shivering. He is cold and hurt and thin.
Peaks soar all around them, but not one of them has spurs pointed like lynx ears.
Riley wishes it had been a real mountain lion stalking them instead of the boy.
That seems much less scary now. She wonders how long it will be before someone finds him.
Maybe they’ve found him already. Maybe they’ll never find him.
Maybe his bones will get up and walk the mountain, like in that kid’s song.
Have you seen the ghost of John?
Long white bones with the skin all gone
Wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on?
Riley threw Cousin’s cooking stuff down the hill, far away from the body into the brush, but her fingerprints will be on it all.
Should she have buried the body? She just left it there, hoping animals would take care of it.
Coyotes, maybe a real mountain lion. She had been beyond thought, at that point.
Maybe she still is. Killed a man, she thinks, wild, killed two— Riley stops the thought right there. It was self-defence.
But he was holding a compass, not a knife.
‘Too late for all that,’ Riley says aloud.
‘Riley?’
‘Sorry, Oliver Olive.’ He looks up at her and stumbles. She feeds him another Powerbar in fragments as they walk. But she keeps seeing the lion man’s eyes – red holes in a pale face. There’s a kind of sawing sound – it’s her gasping, Riley realises.
Oliver stumbles and falls. He screams in pain as his wounded leg hits the hard rocky trail. Riley feels above herself, removed. The mountain-lion man is ahead of them on the path, walking. He turns and beckons. Riley sees that his hand is bone-white, skeletal. His face has no skin on.
‘Long white bones with the skin all gone …’
‘I don’t like that one,’ Oliver says. ‘It’s scary.’
Riley realises that she has been singing aloud.
They are no longer walking. Riley and Oliver are sitting on the ground and she is stroking Oliver’s back and singing.
Light snow patterns the air. Her pack starts to roll away gently down the slope.
She grabs it, heart racing. She hunts through it.
There are no more Powerbars. Maybe she dropped them all, maybe she left them with the dead boy, the point is that they’re gone.
How could she have thought they could do this?
Follow these weird instructions to a place she’s not even really sure exists?
Nowhere, Riley thinks. It’s everywhere, up here.
Everywhere is nowhere. It is big and cold and doesn’t care about them.
All around, the mountains peer down at her and Oliver.
Just two tiny lives about to stop. Riley sees now that they have faces, the mountains – caves for eyes, crooked jagged mouths of sharp rock.
Their expressions are ancient. Riley thinks she might be screaming but can’t seem to hear it.
There is only the mountains. The two of them will die and the mountains will go on just the same.
Beside her Oliver is crying again. There is the scent of blood on the air. The wound in his leg gives out thin threads of crimson from under the dressing.
‘I tried to make us safe,’ Riley reaches for Oliver.
‘It’s all I ever wanted.’ He is crying too hard to hear her, wet tears on his face.
She tries to wipe them away but the tears keep coming so she just takes him in her arms. The temperature is dropping steadily.
‘Get up,’ she says, trying to lift him. ‘We have to get over the pass by nightfall.’
‘No,’ Oliver says, head buried in her middle. ‘I don’t want to walk anymore.’
‘Get up,’ Riley says through gritted teeth.
Something shifts inside and the voice that comes out is not hers, it’s harsh and rasping.
‘Get up or I’ll leave you behind here, all on your own.
’ It’s a gloating voice from the deep places of the earth.
Riley claps a hand over her mouth. She looks at Oliver in horror.
His eyes are wide with the same fear. He really believes she might leave him.
Too much normal has been stripped away from Oliver.
He doesn’t trust things anymore. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers. ‘I didn’t mean it. I wouldn’t.’
‘Demon,’ Oliver whispers. Flurries of snow land on his shoulders and dark head. ‘That’s your demon, Riley. It made you bring us here.’
‘Oliver, we have to move.’
‘You always do this, Riley, you always fight with people and make us leave, and you lie all the time …’ Oliver starts to cry.
‘Oliver Olive …’
He looks at her with big red-rimmed eyes.
‘Everything was fine,’ he says. ‘I was beating my demon and Cousin was helping me to know god.’ Riley sees for a moment the adult Oliver, looking out of his child’s face.
Serious. Dark eyes measuring. His voice rises to a scream.
‘You had to mess it up, Riley, like you always do, like you did with Mom! I hate you! I hate hate hate you!’ His voice cracks and his head hangs low again, exhausted.
Riley grabs Oliver under his arms. He struggles and yells in pain but she keeps dragging him up the slope.
‘Come on.’ She’s talking to herself and him.
‘Come on.’ They will die out here if they don’t walk.
Riley feels it, the reality of dying. Oliver’s body will fail him, his heart will slow and stop, his eyes will become red holes and he will walk around with no skin on.
It will be Riley’s fault because she brought them here – she thought they could cross the mountains with Powerbars and pencil directions scrawled on a dirty scrap of paper.
Riley knows she’s hallucinating now, because she can hear a sound nearby. It’s familiar. At first she thinks it’s the wind, but it’s not.
‘Riley,’ Oliver says. ‘There’s someone!’
‘Shh,’ Riley hisses. She knows it’s the lion man come back for them without his skin. Snow clouds her vision, inside and out.
‘Help!’ Oliver yells and she clamps her hand over his mouth.
Oliver’s hands beat at her, ineffectual.
He bites her fingers and she yelps in pain despite herself.
She holds his mouth harder, but it’s too late.
The whistling stops, then starts again. Is it coming closer?
Riley’s heart is pounding now, the snow turns into a sheet of rippling white in her mind.
She listens in horror to the footsteps of the dead man as he approaches, whistling the tune she was just singing.
Wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on …
Riley screams. She turns and stumbles, and she hears it, the actual sound as her skull hits the frozen ground. Everything is black and white and black then gone.
Riley sways gently, tightly enclosed. Everything hurts, she can’t move.
Caterpillars turn into liquid inside the cocoon, she remembers that from school.
She feels like that, she has no solid edges.
Memory seeps in slowly. They are in the mountains, Oliver got hurt, the lion was a man and then a boy, he was coming for them and whistling.
Riley tries to sit up but she is swaddled. She struggles, gasping.
She is being carried in an old blanket, twisted up in it like a hammock. Ahead she sees a dark back, hands holding the corners, and presumably there is someone behind her too, holding the other ends. Snow hurtles out of the grey sky overhead. It settles on her face in cold fingers.
Oliver, Riley thinks and starts to struggle. ‘Oliver,’ she yells.
‘Don’t move around so much,’ someone says from behind and pushes Riley back down with a firm hand. ‘He’s ok, they’ve got him.’ It isn’t the lion man, at least. The voice is young, she guesses he’s about her age.
‘Where are we?’ Riley asks the sky. They are near tundra, she can smell it, the cold frozen loam of the earth.
‘Never-Summer Wilderness,’ the cheerful voice answers her. ‘On our way to Nowhere. That’s where you were headed, right? Noon told us to look out for you.’
‘Let me go,’ Riley says, struggling again. ‘Put me down!’
She feels them come to a halt. ‘Ok,’ the voice says. ‘But you have to take it slow. Don’t fight like that or we’ll all go over.’
They lower Riley to the ground. ‘Watch your step.’
Riley’s breath seizes in her lungs. To her left is a sheer drop down the rock face.
Hundreds of feet below, a thread of silver stream worms its way through a canyon.
They are descending on a narrow single-file trail, winding along the cliff.
This must be the other side of the pass.
To the right pine forest rears up, clinging impossibly to the nearly vertical mountainside.
It feels like the trees are going to roll down over them like the sea.
The boy slings the blanket he has been carrying her in over his shoulder.
He smiles at Riley, shoving his shock of straw hair from his eyes – a white, dazzling smile.
Then she sees that the sides of his mouth are black and empty, missing teeth.
He wears an old black velvet jacket, faded in places to green.
A smoking jacket, Riley thinks they’re called.
It’s too big for him. ‘I’m Cal,’ he says. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Riley.’
‘That’s Everett.’ When Riley turns to look at the person behind, who was carrying her feet, she sees a head encased in black wool. Flinty eyes stare out from a balaclava. There’s some feeling in his look that’s so strong that she can’t breathe for a second.
Riley catches the scream in her throat and smiles instead. If people want you to be afraid, smile so that they don’t think you’re prey. Lies go deeper than words. Riley can lie with her whole body.
The black-encased head gives Riley a tiny nod.