Chapter 16 Campfire Stories
Green paced the gravel lane while Valentina made final preparations, then together, they set out for the Hole in Nothing.
Valentina’s steps were halting and every second breath came with an audible sound of effort.
On past hikes, he marveled at the silence of her footfalls.
Now, she shuffled and stumbled through the fallen leaves.
“Can I at least carry your pack?”
She grunted a negative.
All of Green’s instincts told him to stop walking deeper into the dark woods.
They needed light and warmth. He wanted to give her his coat.
He wanted to stop and make a fire. He wanted to find a road and hitchhike back to a heated room.
Again and again these urges slapped him across the face and he had to answer each one, It wouldn’t do any good.
He hated that answer.
He no longer feared the horned wolf. He no longer needed to wonder if the fawn was nearby. Catskill knew, so he knew. Yet, as his mentor fought for her life, he felt more naked and vulnerable than ever.
Valentina was the one who knew what she was doing. Now, she could barely stay upright.
He clutched his senseless acorn and, while he resented the impulse, he didn’t pull his hand away. Any comfort was a treasure in the dark woods. Maybe it was his original acorn. Maybe it was a practical joke from a mythic crow. Maybe it didn’t matter.
Valentina spoke like the creak of an old screen door.
“Can you communicate with Catskill? Any sign of the glass fawn?”
“Yeah. Not nearby.”
He didn’t have to think questions at the wolf and wait for an answer. The answers were just there, sitting on a shelf in plain view. A front porch had been added onto his consciousness and it was always a glance away.
“The fawn is near Hickory. There’s a covered bridge with a flag mural and…I see a grain elevator? I think? Tall cylinder thing with a conveyor belt.”
She nodded and brushed more ice from her eyelashes.
“I know the place. North of town.”
“Catskill is circling. Trying to keep the fawn from moving toward town. Trying to contain it without provoking it to blur away. I was thinking of asking him to come guard us, but…”
“But he is doing more good where he is. I agree.”
She coughed and stumbled, clutching at a splintered poplar stump before spilling into the leaves. Green gave her a hand back to her feet. Her skin was colder than a corpse.
As they walked, he noticed her pulling a hand from her pocket and stealing glances at her fingertips. It looked like she was afraid of what she might see, the dark crescents of oncoming frostbite.
He checked his phone. The sleek black rectangle was already beginning to feel unfamiliar in his hand. It was metamorphosizing into a totem of a bygone religion.
No service.
No texts.
Still no way to warn off Alf and Jerome.
I’m as much help to them as I am to Valentina.
If the cold was good for anything, perhaps it would keep Alf and his friends from visiting the Hole in Nothing tonight.
Yeah, right.
He hadn’t known Alf long, but he couldn’t picture him saying, “It’s a bit cold, bro, let’s just not go.” They were already planning to get drunk in a pitch-dark wilderness next to a tear in reality. What was a little chill in the air compared to that?
“When we get there…you’re going to use that poultice Clara suggested, right? Use willpower to shut it?”
Valentina coughed and shook her head.
“Yes, but I need you to prepare yourself for the other eventuality. Ultimately, Mr. Green, closing the hole from inside is our surest method. I have come to terms with that likelihood and you should too.”
Valentina pulled a wad of linked keys the size of an apple from her pocket and handed them to Green. They were cold as ice and heavy. Then she produced a folded paper and handed it over as well.
“Here. These were part of today’s preparations. All the keys to the camp, above and below ground. The paper has instructions and a written statement for you to broadcast should I not return, as well as several contacts who may be interested in taking you on as an apprentice.”
Her teeth chattered on the last word.
“You have the keys, but do not explore. Your visit to the roof could have gone much worse. Do not go up there again. You cannot rely on the crow’s continued civility.
Stick to the structures you know. Again, do not visit the crawler tunnels.
I do not expect I need to say such things, but I’m saying them for my own peace of mind. Understood?”
“Understood.”
Green looked at his teacher.
Her lips were like day-old bruises and an unhealthy shadow was beginning to bloom on the tip of her nose. He thought of the girl under the sheet at Kinkaid Cabins, the dark stains he had mistaken for Catskill’s touch.
“You don’t think you’ll be coming back from this, do you?”
“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, Mr. Green.”
“That’s it? You really are just going to…what did you say to Clara? Plug the rathole with your life?”
She looked angry, then tired.
She turned and kept shuffling down the trail, speaking to the dark woods ahead.
“We are out of time. If I did not believe it was worth doing, I would not be doing it. Principles, Mr. Green. Our principles must be more than self-preservation.”
He thought of the lives that had been lost. He thought of the lives that still may be lost. He did not argue. He followed.
It was too cold for insect song. The mountain was the whine and knock of trees fretting in the wind and the chatter of desiccated leaves.
She shrugged her coat up and tucked her chin into the collar. It made her look like a toddler in an oversized hand-me-down.
“Still, it’s true that I have never risked getting closer than a meter to the hole.
Getting closer may well be the key. The poultice recipe Clara provided also has a promising track record.
We shall see. One way or another, it will be intriguing to find out.
Whatever happens, do not fail to record your observations to share with our colleagues. ”
She pulled up her chin and smiled at Green. Even with blue lips, it was a genuine smile.
“You are easily the toughest person I’ve ever met,” he said.
She gave a shaky half bow.
“I am old. I am a field scientist. I am a teacher. I am a woman. And, I think it’s fair at this point to say, I am Appalachian as well. It is a rather tough combination.”
Her voice was thin. Her shoulders shivered. Her breathing was labored. But there was still that wicked fairy fire in her eyes.
Valentina Blackwood.
He didn’t know how much of that name was original to her. He didn’t know how she was still alive. He didn’t know even a fraction of her story, but something told him he knew the parts that counted and he was in absolute awe of her.
She returned her attention to the dark path and he followed suit.
Between the dark and Valentina’s gait, their progress was slow.
He visited Catskill in his thoughts.
The wolf was always moving, always questing with the same certainty of purpose.
Cornfields.
Pinewoods.
A weedy lot full of huge spools of wire and telephone poles stacked like cordwood.
Racing across the brush-choked foothills with hummingbird speed and agility.
No distraction.
No fatigue.
Green couldn’t keep his mind on Catskill long without losing his footing and veering off the path. Being in the wolf’s thoughts for even a second left him feeling disconnected from his own limbs, and when he returned to himself he felt small and slow, painfully slow.
He checked his phone again and again. Nothing and nothing.
They reached the hole near 10 p.m.
“That’s not good,” Green said as firelight came into view, an orange glow fifty yards down the trail.
As they approached, they heard laughter and voices. A guitar strummed. The empty jangle of a tossed beer can tinkled through the trees.
“Mr. Green, you speak with the children. I will begin the work.”
Maybe it was the cold. Maybe the fawn’s influence grew after nightfall, but she looked like she’d aged twenty years on the walk. Her shuffle had become a limp. The firelight filtering through the trees revealed the dark stains of frostbite clearly visible on her nose, chin, and cheekbones.
He failed to hide the shock on his face.
“I can imagine how I look. I am losing feeling. We need to hurry.”
Green walked forward into the firelight. He cleared his throat as he went, hoping to avoid scaring the people sitting around the campfire. It was no good. The guitar had drowned out their footfalls and the ring of light made the night beyond into a blank black wall.
Jerome fell off his log with a full body flinch that brought a discordant yelp from his guitar. Alf stood and stumbled backward. A young woman swimming in an oversized purple hoodie let out a cry and flicked out a folding knife.
Jerome groaned on the ground, the first real sound Green had ever heard him utter.
“Man, Green, you gotta warn somebody before you lurk outta the woods like that,” Alf said.
Jerome set his guitar aside in the leaves and began gathering up the playing cards that had spilled from his coat pocket when he fell.
“Sorry. I tried,” Green said.
“I didn’t think you’d got my text. Where’s my six-pack?”
“I did, I just couldn’t answer. Zero service. No beer today, Alf. We’re here to work on that…business I mentioned earlier.”
“We?”
Valentina walked directly toward the Hole in Nothing.
Alf flinched back again when he saw her.
“Shit, bro. Anybody else with you?”
Green shook his head and waved to Jerome and the stranger.
“Hi, I’m Green,” he said.
The girl in the hoodie stowed her knife, wrapped an arm around her knees, and half hid behind a curtain of hair dyed gunmetal gray.
“Casper,” she said, raising a finger in greeting. Tattoos of wildflowers peeked out from the cuff of her sleeve.
“Oh, thanks for your work on my car.”
She dipped her head.
Jerome held up his deck of cards, tilting his arm back and forth like a metronome. Green nodded to him.
Really? Now? Fine.
“Yeah, I got one.”