Castle: A Novel (7 page)

Scattered about the floor of the pit were the remains of the false ground cover I had fallen through: a few broken twigs, some pine boughs and stones, and a lot of leaves. More startling, however, was what poked out of the ice and snow underfoot: thick branches, carefully whittled sharp, and positioned to do grievous harm to anyone or anything that should land on them. Most of these branches had slumped over and lay on their sides, but some stood straight, and it seemed a minor miracle that I hadn’t landed on one. I might have been killed.

The sharpened sticks had provided me with another piece of luck, I could see now: they could be driven into the dirt walls of the pit, and used to help me climb out. Having noticed this, I wasted no time. I tugged several out of the snow, along with a palm-sized flat stone that had fallen down with me, and began to pound them into the earth. Ten minutes later, I heaved myself up and out of the pit and lay panting on the damp forest floor.

The relative warmth of the surface was a great comfort, and I tipped my head back onto a mossy log and took a moment to think. Two things were clear to me. One was that this was a trap intended for men, not animals. There were easier ways to kill a deer, for instance; and even if a prospective hunter wished to use a pit, he would not have to dig it nearly so deep. This begged the question of who, then, had dug the pit, and why—but I had more important things to do at this point than to indulge in idle speculation.

The second obvious thing was that this trap was not carefully maintained, and might even have been entirely forgotten. The circle of false floor I had crashed through had developed its own layer of natural humus; it had been very well built, and had lasted a long time, perhaps a decade or more.

Surely, no one had come this way in years. Nevertheless, I suddenly felt paranoid. I jumped to my feet, body crying out in protest, and looked around me. I saw nothing and no one, save for the trees. The sun was lower in the sky, and a faint fog appeared to be rising up from the ground, but that was all. No one appeared to be watching.

I realized that the going would be rougher now, that the bruises and scrapes I had just endured would grow more painful as the hours passed. I briefly considered returning to the house. It seemed so inviting to me: the roaring furnace, a hot bath, a comfortable bed. But I have never been one to indulge in creature comforts; the only real comfort was success. I straightened my pack on my shoulders, consulted my compass (mercifully unbroken), and continued on my way, stepping more carefully now, with my eyes locked on the treacherous ground.

I made it another hour or so before I stopped. The sun had sunk further, and its slanting rays no longer found their way through the canopy above. In addition, the fog had thickened, and it had become difficult to see clearly more than a few feet in front of me. And finally, my fall was beginning to take its toll, with exhaustion and pain overwhelming my conscious thoughts. It was time to make camp for the night.

I found a lightly wooded area and began to clear it of debris. This proved more difficult than I had anticipated, as my rib cage ached, and the years of deadfall had become intertwined and grown through with vines. I made heavy use of my small hatchet, hacking away at everything that could not be pulled apart, and half an hour later I had managed to create a large circle of bare ground. The earth was very wet, of course, but I had packed a thin tarpaulin, and I laid this out carefully where I wanted my tent to go. The tent, a water-resistant one-person pod with inflatable headrest, came together without difficulty. By now it was nearly dark. I made a quick circuit of the area around my camp, gathered up as many dry or semi-dry branches as I could find, and built a small fire. When at last I had it blazing, I unpacked my food and sat down to a meal of trail mix, dried meat, and water.

Where, I wondered, did the time go? It seemed to me that it had only been a few hours since I’d left my house, yet somehow the entire day had managed to pass me by. Furthermore, I was puzzled once again by the apparent disconnect between the amount of time I’d spent walking and the amount of ground I ought to have covered. It took only an hour to circumambulate the entire wood on paved roads. Even allowing for the thick underbrush and mud, I ought to have been able to traverse the area twice over by now. Perhaps I had been walking in a circle—but the compass suggested the contrary, and I couldn’t remember encountering the same piece of terrain more than once.

These thoughts led nowhere, and my mind entered into the same state of confusion it had suffered earlier in the day. I looked up and found that the fog was impenetrable now: it reflected the light of my fire back at me, as if I were sitting in an igloo. The silence of the forest, already unnerving, had deepened, and a shudder ran through my weary body. The only thing to do was sleep, and hope that the fog lifted in the morning.

I removed my boots, crawled into my tent, unpacked my sleep sack, and slid deep into it, shivering and aching. A tightness in my throat suggested that, as if my misfortune were not already great enough, I might have contracted a cold. With a deep sigh, I closed my eyes and tried to plot out the morning’s progress. But the fog that blanketed the woods crept quickly into my conscious mind as well, and I was soon fast asleep.

I woke with a start in the night, as if from a frightening dream—though I remembered nothing of it—and cried out, in part from fright, in part from pain: my bruises and lacerations ached in earnest now, and my tent was eerily illuminated by the campfire’s remains. I paused a moment, caught my breath, calmed my racing heart. The pain was sharpest just below my left kidney: I probed the area, certain now that I had cracked at least one rib. I was just about to lie back down, to ease myself back into sleep, when I heard a noise outside my tent.

I froze. There was another sound, a rustle of brush. And then the light changed: it flickered and dimmed, and slowly a shadow appeared, elongated, on the tent wall. An animal.

For a moment, I was terrified. And then the animal moved, and I could see that the distorted shadow was that of a deer. I let out breath, and the shadow raised its head, and it bounded away. I heard its footsteps on the wet ground, and the cracking of twigs, and then silence returned. Reassured, I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again—mere moments later, it seemed—the tent was flooded with daylight. Effortfully, I unzipped the tent door, crawled outside, and stood.

The fog had lifted. The air was clear. Directly in front of me, about fifty feet ahead, visible between the trunks of trees, stood a solid wall of stone, reaching up beyond the canopy and out of sight.

SEVEN

I resisted my instinct, which was to run to the rock without hesitation. Instead, I broke down my tent, rolled it into my pack, and removed my climbing shoes, gloves, and helmet. Faintly trembling, I scattered the remains of the previous night’s fire and covered them over with dirt; then I sat down and scraped the mud off the soles of my mostly dry boots with a twig. At last I shouldered my pack and strode calmly to the rock, taking care not to trip and fall.

The work of breaking camp had loosened my stiff muscles, but the scrapes and bruises from my accident had ripened, and I winced with every step I took. My blood, however, was flooded with adrenalin, and my fingers and toes were warm. Above the forest canopy, the sun shone brightly. I imagined myself basking in its light when I attained the summit, and a shudder ran through me, a quiver of excitement that I did not fully understand, nor wish to. My mouth went dry, my palms were moist, and my skin prickled with anticipation.

In a few moments, I had reached the monumental stone. Its face was nearly sheer; it was smooth, and cold to the touch. Its composition was utterly unlike the brittle shale that comprised most of the local landscape; rather, it appeared to be nothing less than an enormous granite boulder, a massive foreign ship that had sailed here, fifteen thousand years ago, on a sea of glacial ice. I pressed my body to it and tipped my head back, enduring a wave of nausea and pain. The swollen knot on my forehead throbbed.

Between the trees and the rock I could make out a blinding blue strip of sky, which a small white cloud slowly traversed. The wall was very high, and footholds were few. There was little chance I could scale it, given my age, lack of experience, and aching ribs. As important as confidence in matters of personal safety is an understanding of one’s own limits, and there was no question that this climb was beyond mine.

I began to walk counterclockwise around the rock, hoping that the southern face would offer a clearer path to the top. For the first time since I entered the forest, the going was easy: the rock’s huge shadow disinclined vegetative growth, and the ground at its foot was flat, dry, and clear. Within a few minutes, then, I could see that my hopes would be fulfilled. The sheer face gave way to a pronounced slant, its angle decreasing gradually as I moved along. When at last I reached the southernmost point of the rock, it became clear that its overall shape was similar to that of a boot, with a low “toe” end sloping upward to a steep “ankle” at the north. I would likely have little difficulty until I reached the ankle—indeed, I was able merely to lift my foot and hoist myself directly onto the “toe” without even using my hands.

Nevertheless, I took my time, alert to the possibility of further injury. Here on the lower end of the rock, there were deep fissures where lichens and hopeless maple and pine saplings grew. Smaller boulders were seemingly held to the face by will alone, and I was eager not to upset them; depressions in the stone held pools of slimy green water in which I made certain not to slip.

As I rose up out of the woods, the air seemed to clear, and I breathed more easily. I was still underneath the long morning shadow of the trees, but the sky was full and blue above me, and my aches and pains receded in a wave of enthusiasm and hope. And a further detail caught my attention: a conifer, as tall as thirty feet, which appeared to be growing directly out of the solid rock. It was the last major feature before the rock arched skyward at the “ankle,” and I made my way toward it, eager to discover how this natural wonder had come to be.

A few moments later, I stood before the tree. I am no arborist, but it appeared to me to be a member of the family Pinaceae, a common pine, with broad flat boughs of short, sharp needles, and large, woody cones. It stood in a wide depression in the rock, which in defiance of the odds had developed its own miniature ecosystem—a bowl of humus-covered soil rich with mosses and smelling strongly of vegetative fecundity. There was even a small subdepression, perhaps three feet in diameter, partly attached to the main one, that was filled with rainwater. The water looked extraordinarily clean, rippling gently in the breeze and reflecting sky, and I had to resist the strong (and probably dangerous) impulse to kneel down and drink deeply from it. Instead, I removed my canteen from my belt and took a few sips.

I walked slowly around the tree, marveling at its singularity, until I noticed something incongruous lying half-buried in the compost, something small and yellow and unnaturally straight. I crouched at the edge of the depression and pulled it from the soil. It was a pencil.

Specifically, it was an inch-long stub, the sharpened end blunted by use, the eraser end missing entirely. It was the kind of pencil you might find at a library, in a cup on top of the card catalog, or at a miniature golf course. It was aged by the elements, but not much: the process of its subsumation into the earth had only just begun, with the paint still largely intact and the wood only beginning to grow soft. As I had upon escaping from the pit, I stood up straight and looked around suddenly, as if someone might be watching me, assessing my reaction.

Of course, this was silly. The pencil might have been dropped here at any time in the past few years. It could even have been left by a crow. And while these woods were fairly remote from any large town, they lay bounded by paved roads, in the middle of an inhabited region of the state. In fact, I should have been more shocked, on this little expedition,
not
to have encountered some human artifact. But given my solitude over the previous twenty-four hours, and for that matter over the preceding several weeks, coupled with the alarm and injury I’d suffered in the pit, it was only natural that a hint of paranoia should once again steal over my consciousness. I chuckled at my all-too-human reaction and slipped the pencil into my pocket. Then I turned to the “ankle.”

It was a monolithic chimney of solid rock, rising about seventy feet from where I stood; and while its face was hardly as imposing as the north face of the rock proper, it still presented a considerable challenge to the amateur climber. I breathed in and out, assessing its surface, plotting a path of ascent. Its angle was approximately seventy-five degrees, a not inconsiderable grade, but surmountable. The stone here had suffered more from the elements than its northern counterpart, giving me a distinct advantage, in the form of cracks, outcroppings, and ledges. I paced back and forth, examining the surface from every possible vantage point, and after ten minutes or so of consideration, a clear route presented itself to me.

I pulled on my gloves, changed into my climbing shoes, and fastened my helmet. After a moment’s thought, I laid my pack down on the rock, next to the pine tree. Though I had filled it judiciously, to avoid excess weight, the pack was large, and its absence from my back gave me new confidence. I flexed my fingers, stretched my arms over my head, and took hold of a crack in the rock.

Within a few minutes, and despite my injuries, I had climbed twenty feet into the air. The hand- and footholds I had spied from the base of the wall had proved even more effective than I had dared hope; up close, the rock face was everything a climber could desire. I paused to catch my breath on an outcropping, and, with one hand wedged into a crack, I hazarded a glance over my shoulder. I had nearly reached the forest ceiling. Below me the pine tree betrayed a slight lean to the south; I saw my pack lying forlornly on the ground beside it. The sun was on me now, and I was sweating; the air would doubtless reach sixty degrees today.

But every moment I held on still required an expenditure of energy. And so I continued, finding a hold for my left hand and pulling myself up another few inches.

At this point the going became rough. The rock provided few handholds, and my fingers scrabbled over the surface, desperate for purchase. Several times I had to move back down, pull myself laterally across the face, and seek another route. I had one frightening moment when I was certain I would fall: what I thought was an outcropping on a ledge proved to be no more than a loose shard of stone, and I was thrown off balance when it broke away. But my other handhold was secure, and I suffered little more than a racing heart.

It took the better part of an hour, but soon I realized that I was near the top. The grade dropped off precipitously, and I was able to scurry up the last ten feet on all fours. The sun beat down, warming the weathered stone, and I collapsed upon it, grateful and exhausted. I had reached the summit.

When my heart had calmed and I was breathing easily, I took a sip of water and got to my feet. The view around me was indeed spectacular—but, as I had imagined, no more spectacular than the view from my window. I could see over the trees at last, all the way down the valley to the distant steeples, rooftops, and power towers of Gerrysburg. It was the loveliest day since I’d arrived, and it gave me special pleasure to be able to enjoy it here, on the rock I had eyed with curiosity for all these weeks.

I turned then to look back, to the west, toward my house. Even from this distance, its roof appeared dark and tidy, the edges straight, and I felt a sudden and surprising upwelling of pleasure at the work I had done. Perhaps it was my exhaustion and pain; perhaps it was the weather, or my emergence from the woods into the light—but the sight of that roof, peaked tightly against the cloud-studded blue, moved me quite nearly to tears. I took in a deep, grateful breath at my good fortune.

My mood thus buoyed, I began to walk around the summit, looking down into the woods below; and this is what led me to make a discovery that could only be regarded as astonishing. The summit was a slightly convex cap of smoothly weathered stone approximately fifty feet in diameter, and as I have said, I knew that the western face was a sheer cliff, and the southern a gentler slope, the “ankle” that led to the rock’s “toe.” I had not, however, yet explored the northern and eastern faces. I was pacing in a clockwise direction, beginning from the west, and so as I rounded the northern edge (more cliff, it would appear) I was able to peer over the eastern lip to the forest ceiling. Except that what I saw there was not that gently undulating sea of trees. Rather, I saw what first appeared to be a peculiar, peaked cap of stone. I stepped closer to the edge, eager to have a new stimulus for my troubled mind, and looked more closely. There was not one such outcropping, I observed; there were three, plus a fourth that was shaped like a box. They were all connected by a high stone wall, and were not natural formations at all.

I was, in fact, gazing down at the ruins of a castle.