American Quest (13 page)

In that one quick movement, Isolde had used her talon to slice open his nostrils so that they resembled the snout of a pig.

And ironically, in his outrage, Hedon now squealed like one.

Enervata smiled.

Bruce breathed in the autumn woodland, and it smelled like the sun.

He and Jamie strode along the same path as the night before, only this time the monochromatic silver landscape exploded with brilliant hues of fall leaves and pebbled mosaic trails. There was no sign of the fog from the previous evening.

They decided to follow a different track, abandoning the hiking trails and veering into the unsanctioned wilds. Jamie had had no more
luck this morning summoning spirits than she’d had before, but Bruce encouraged her to try again later. Realizing she was going solely on intuition, he understood now that he needed to pay more attention to his own. He felt certain things were about to change, that some sort of breakthrough was coming. He hoped that wasn’t only his desperation speaking. He focused intently on the wood, looking for any sign he could decipher.

Until he fell into a crevice.

He heard Jamie give a cry above. “Bruce! Are you all right? I can’t see you! Say something!”

“Agghh.”

“Say something else.”

“I think I’m okay. I can’t see you, either. Except . . . wait.”

Pain shot from his tailbone as he rolled and fumbled to his feet, spitting dirt, and angled to a patch of sunlight. He could see the silhouette of Jamie’s head above. It seemed very far away.

“Are you hurt?”

“Not really, it’s just . . .”

He rubbed at his backside, shaking his head with a bitter chuckle. “Just my butt.”

“Can you get out?” He heard a strangle in her voice, and could tell she was making a determined effort not to laugh.

“I don’t know.”

He looked around. The fissure formed a barrel with the wall and ceiling curving upward. In the darkness, he saw no viable exit.

“It’s kind of wet and slippery down here.”

He attempted to scale the dripping wall, but he found no place for a foothold. He wouldn’t have been able to reach the roots dangling above, anyway, assuming they even proved stable enough to grab.

“Nah, I’m stuck.”

“Oh my God,” he heard Jamie say. “What should we do? Oh my God. Wait there—I’ll get the park ranger!”

“No, hang on. That’ll take too long.”

Bruce eyed the snaking fissure, lit only by occasional patties of sunshine. He could see no real end.

He tilted his head up toward Jamie. “It makes a kind of a narrow
passage down here. I’m going to follow it along. See if there’s a way to get out farther down.”

“Sounds kind of dangerous.”

He took ginger steps along the slick granite. It felt like trying to walk along the edge of a very long, wet ruler. But he could manage.

He pushed his fingers off the muddy wall for support. “Can you follow along up above? Listen for my voice.”

“Okay. But if it gets dangerous, stop.”

He walked on a little.

“Bruce?”

“Yeah.”

“Keep talking. I don’t know where you are.”

“Okay. I’m walking along. Walking, walking. Looking for a way out . . .”

He fell silent again.

“Bruce? Bruce! Come on, keep talking.”

Her voice grew muffled above.

He was running out of things to say.

Up ahead, a plant had managed to root itself in a patch of sunshine, the seed having found just enough light and soil on a dark sheath of granite. Valiant little thing. He stepped over it. It was a maidenhair fern, thin black stems invisible, giving the illusion that the emerald leaves hung suspended in air.

If Gloria were here, she’d want to know about it. She always seemed to enjoy the stupid trivial facts he shared with her. He told her everything he knew, and when his knowledge ran out, he made things up.

“You’re fading away! Where are you?” Jamie sounded like she’d put a pillow to her face as she spoke.

Bruce tilted his head back and boomed. “I’m looking for a way out! Looking for a rock to climb out on. Looking for, I don’t know, the stairway to heaven.”

That gave him an idea. Instead of maintaining an aimless monologue, he’d sing.

“There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold and she’s buying a stairway to heaven.”

Every now and then, the earth would yawn open and Bruce could see up to the brilliant sky and the trees that peered down at him. He wondered at the roots dangling from the black soil above, guessing at what kind of shrubs they anchored.

If Gloria were here, he knew exactly what he’d have told her. He’d have said those were ape crabapple. Her face would have brightened but with a fold at her lip—that ruthlessly sweet thing she did when she tried to hide a smile—and she would have cocked an eye.

“Ape crabapple,” she would have said.

And he was certain that her hair would shine blue-black in that spill of sunshine.

“Yes,” he would have told her. “Though they’re known to the scientific community as
malus primaticus
.”

At this, her lips might twitch, but he wouldn’t quite have her yet.

He’d have held her elbow to keep her from slipping, because her feet would have been wet like his, and he’d have told her that the ape crabapple got its name because the roots were so very sturdy. And if one were to find oneself groping along in the dark, stuck in some rotten cavity of Mother Nature’s tooth, one could make use of said ape crabapple by grasping the roots and swinging from clump to clump in the same way that apes swing through the forest trees.

And if she were here, and he would’ve said that, he absolutely would’ve had her.

She would have laughed out loud. There would have been no more fold at her lip. She would have thrown back her black hair and laughed. And then she would have hooked his neck with her fingers.

“Bessy-me,” she would have said. And he would’ve kissed her.

A dragonfly dipped into the fissure. It lighted on a thick root just ahead. Like Bruce, it didn’t belong down there. But unlike Bruce, it could fly right back out again. Fly straight over to Gloria if it wanted.

“Dragonflies can travel up to eighty-five miles in a day,” he said to Gloria, who still wasn’t there.

This was a “true fact,” not a “fake fact.” The real fun happened when Gloria couldn’t tell the difference. He picked his way past the dragonfly.

“Carry that kiss to Gloria for me. Tell her I’ll be there soon.”

“Bruce!”

Jamie sounded so far away she might have called from beyond the surface of a body of water, not a fissure in the ground. The dragonfly swooped, dipped, and looped back above the fissure.

“Sorry!” Bruce called back.

He launched into the rock-out part of “Stairway,” hamming it up for Jamie; hamming it up to make his feet move faster.

“There walks a lady we all know-a-woah-woah!”

Hamming it up so that he wouldn’t think of a lock of that blue-black shine in someone else’s fingers.

He splashed and brayed. And then all at once his feet gave out and he buried the lyrics to “Stairway” under a scandal of curses.

He slid on his back, the granite having become a mudslide in an abrupt shift to the south. (Or was it the east?) And he was moving fast.

“Bruce!” Jamie called from very far away. He could only reply with one word, though he repeated it with machine-gun speed:

“Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit!!!!!”

Ahead of him, the very thing he’d been waiting for opened up. The end of this godforsaken fissure. The way out. If only he were not approaching it as though he were on a luge.

He grasped at the tangle of roots and managed to slow himself only a little as the Earth regurgitated him from its belly. He landed on his back, sprawled in a cold rush of creek, his mouth neither drawing nor expelling air.

And even through the mounting anxiety of not being able to breathe as he lay gaping at the sky, it seemed to him that the sky gaped back. Or rather, from above him the mouth of a small canyon gaped back.

In fact, he was laying in a big, round sinkhole, rimmed on the far side by a stand of beech and pine. And filled with a grove of maples.

The same damn place they’d landed last night.

His lungs awoke from their momentary narcolepsy and sucked in air. He filled them hungrily, too hungrily, and began to cough and gag. He rolled over in the creek, already wet so he might as well rinse off some of that sticky mud, and spat.

And as he raised his eyes, he could see in broad daylight with the absence of fog, a clearing in the red, red trees. And in its middle, there stood a lonely golden sapling rooted firmly in a stump.

He stood and squeegeed his sopping clothes with his palm.

“Oh my God!”

He looked up and saw Jamie picking her way down the canyon wall. He thought he detected a threat of nervous, hysterical laughter lurking in her voice. She had her hand clamped firmly over her mouth.

Bruce wore his darkest expression as she approached. After last night’s weird display among the trees, she’d damn well better not get the giggles.

She inspected him for injuries. But aside from the abused tailbone, he was fine. They decided to look again at the stump.

Jamie’s velvet bag was still laying forgotten from the night before, along with the discarded herbs and whatnots it had contained. He picked it up and looked inside. All that remained was a map she’d printed before they set out.

The old rotted stump stood just as gnarled and twisted as it had appeared in the moonlight, but under the drenching sun, he could not see the strange symbols.

He frowned. “Weren’t there some kind of markings?” He ran his hand along the gray bark, then slogged around the side of it, shoes creaking with brook water on each step.

“Hey, wait. Look.”

Jamie moved next to him.

He positioned her shoulders so that in her field of vision, the golden sapling stood centered among the red beeches along the cliff ledge above. The symbols now emerged clearly visible within the folds of bark.

“Odd,” she said, taking a step to the side.

He followed her movements, and as he did so, the markings vanished within the rolling wooden bumps and curves. Faded into a trick of shadow and perspective.

Bruce and Jamie repositioned themselves so they could see it again.

“Can you read it?” Bruce asked.

Jamie shook her head. “I have no idea what it means.”

At this, they looked over their shoulders, as if the forest might erupt again in cackles of derision. But this time, mercifully, no such thing occurred.

“If those damn trees were gonna have a laugh, they’d have done it
when I rode on my butt into the creek.”

Jamie gathered some berries from the woodland. She smoothed out the map and turned it over, then squeezed them over the back, clumsily using the juices to copy the markings on the tree stump.

“I have no idea what to do with this. But we might as well capture it.”

“Good idea,” Bruce agreed. “We’ll figure out what to do later. Right now, I’m cold, wet, and starving. Let’s get out of here.”

They trudged back up the trail toward the van. In essence, they were no wiser than they’d been the night before, but Bruce felt different this time as they got into the car. He felt as though he’d learned something. He wasn’t in the least bit sure what that something was, but he felt it nonetheless.

That strange woman entered again. The one with no mouth. She’d been coming around in the mornings and evenings, scraping and cleaning, so dreadfully silent. Gloria was uncomfortable even looking at her, certain that her appearance had something to do with the force that kept Gloria captive.

Still, Gloria preferred the mouthless one to Aaron Vance. In fact, she was starting to feel so isolated that it became a comfort to know this cleaning woman would be coming by from time to time.