Out of The Woods (23 page)

“The man in the basement…the man that looked like Nick…” Halley’s voice was thick and heavy.

“Yes?” Hope said.

“He wasn’t Nick.”

Hope looked startled.

“I think he was you. And me. Us…”

“That makes no sense at all.”

“He was a part of us that knew, that was warning us. The same part that made you draw the sketch of the fortress, that made you leave the notebook out for me to see. That man in the basement was your intuition, telling you to beware. He had to keep coming back, until you faced the truth. Until you decided to leave Nick.”

Hope was silent for some time, rocking forward and backward. She turned to stare uneasily at the house. Suddenly, she stood up.

“Come with me,” she said.

Together, they walked across the porch, and through the front door. The living room was light now. They walked into the kitchen, letting the door swing freely behind them. Hope went straight to the glossy black basement door. She opened the door wide. Nothing happened. Hope’s body relaxed and she sighed. It was a full, lifting sigh. Halley had a sense that this was to be the last sigh. Hope’s careworn face lightened and she said, “You’re right. I know the truth. I’m leaving Nick.”

“What about Andy?”

“It never had anything to do with Andy.”

* * *

Halley walked out of the back door. It was still cool on this side of the house. Athena watched her with big grey wet eyes.

“What happened?” Eden said, running up to Halley at once. “Where’s Hope? Did you fix her, or is she still crazy?”

Halley smiled. “She was never crazy, and yes, I think I fixed her.”

The back door opened a second time, and Hope stepped out. She must have showered; her hair was still damp, and she had pushed it back behind her ears, which gave her an elfish appearance. “Do you two have anything to eat?” she asked. “I’m starving!” She jumped down the back steps and landed on two feet. “Don’t look so surprised, Eden – I bet you’re hungry too.”

Halley reached into her bamboo backpack, and pulled out three ripe bananas. “Eat these. They’ll give you strength.”

Halley and Eden watched as Hope devoured all three bananas without pause.

“It’s funny. I forgot how good it was to eat.” She looked thoughtful. “Hey… I’ve got something better than bananas. Give me a minute…”

Eden and Halley watched Hope enter a small shed at the back of the garden. “The freezer!” they said in unison.

“Peters Monkey Bars!” Halley added. “I’d forgotten all about Dad’s secret recipe. Didn’t he say they’d last for years in the freezer?”

Eden nodded.

Hope came back with an armful. They were individually wrapped in aluminum foil, and sealed inside zip-lock bags. Condensation had already begun to form on the plastic. Hope dropped them to the ground. “God, they’re cold!”

Eden giggled, and picked one up from the pile. “We used to eat these on those long hiking trips. They taste awful! But if I had one, I’d be full all morning.” She turned it over in her hands and studied the handmade wrapper. Halley and Hope grimaced as she tore one open, and sniffed it. “Smells just like it used to – terrible!” She took a big bite, and spoke through a full mouth. “Yuk! It tastes just like it used to, too!”

Hope and Halley opened their own bars and tasted.

Hope made a face.

“But the second bite’s better, right?” Halley said.

“No!” Hope and Eden shouted in unison.

They began to laugh.

They ate the bars quickly. Halley felt a surge of energy flow through her. Hope helped them fill the two bamboo backpacks with enough Peters Monkey Bars to keep them going for a week.

They were silent for a moment, each lost in their own thoughts.

Hope was the first to speak. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for everything.”

Her voice reminded Halley of freely flowing water. Halley opened her arms wide and Hope stepped in for a hug.

Hope soaked up the embrace and then stepped free, gazing out at the mountains. “It’s a beautiful morning.” She stretched her arms wide, as if to take it up with her body. “I think I’ll take a walk.”

With a smile that held within it both thankfulness and farewell, she turned and walked around the house and towards the front garden. Halley and Eden followed her to the front of the house, where she stopped for a moment and then bent down. When she stood up, she was holding a ripe dandelion. She blew hard, and white dandelion seeds suddenly filled the air.

“Angel parachutes,” Eden said.

“Yes.” Halley smiled.

Hope turned to wave goodbye. In time, she became small in the distance, and finally disappeared from view entirely.

Tired from the sleepless night, Halley slept for hours.

Upon waking, she spoke decisively.

“I have to see the basement.”

Eden looked at her in disbelief. “But he’s down there!”

“No, I think he’s gone. But I need to be sure.” She stood and dusted grass from her clothing. “I know you’re frightened. It’s ok. You can wait here. I won’t be long.”

Slowly, she made her way inside. A familiar coldness washed over her as she crossed the kitchen and approached the basement door. The dark stairwell gaped.

“It’s just a basement. I’m not a child anymore.” With a shaking hand, she reached for the doorframe.

Eden’s voice startled her. “I’m coming too,” she said.

Halley turned. “You sure?”

She nodded.

“Ok.” Halley hesitated. “But listen, stay close. I’m pretty sure I’m right about that man but…”

Eden swallowed and didn’t answer.

Quickly, Halley reached into the stairwell, and flicked on the light. The small click was unnaturally loud. Tentatively, she stepped forward, resting one foot on the top stair, the other leg lifted as if it hesitated to follow. “It’s been years since I’ve gone down this staircase. When I was a child, that thing used to climb the stairs in the middle of the night…”

Eden shivered.

“It came into my room. I believed that if I closed my eyes, I would be invisible. If I was absolutely still, it couldn’t get me.”

“I remember,” Eden said.

The light from the bare bulb was cold and lifeless, not bright enough to illuminate the darker shadows. Halley took a few steps down the stairs, and then forced herself to take a few more. The descent felt endless. The back of her knees were sweating, her pulse racing. By the time she’d reached the bottom, she was half-blind with panic.

Taking a deep breath, she stepped off the stairs, and turned the corner. There, she stopped in her tracks. It was completely dark. She felt around on the closest wall, but there was no central light switch. This had not changed. Despair filled her. The lights were the very worst thing. To turn them on meant venturing into the dark. Four bare bulbs, turned on and off by pulling long hanging cords. Turning them on was bad. Turning them off was worse. Pulling one cord, leaving a dark space where anything could lurk, and then another, the darkness growing like a shadow, and then the third, so the whole basement was nearly dark but for a small, safe circle of light. To turn off the last light was terror. She would flee the darkness, racing up the stairwell, pursued, desperate to lock the door behind her. Sometimes, the lock wouldn’t catch.

When she was little, the basement had terrified her. It wasn’t just the darkness or the junk. It was the dark spaces behind it. Anything could hide behind those discarded sofas; inside her grandfather’s old war chests; between warped bookshelves. The empty armchairs, stuffing overflowing, were often peopled by figures she would see from the corner of her eye.

Biting her lip, she took two paces forward, reached up, and pulled a cord hanging from the ceiling. The single bulb lit. She pulled on the remaining three bulbs. Then she stood still, stunned. The basement was empty. It was all gone. The cement floor radiated cold through her shoes. The scary things were gone.

But the good things were gone too. The bookshelves with all their childhood toys; the photo albums that went back to her grandparents’ time; the barnyard of plastic horses; Dad’s collection of old bits of strangely shaped wood from the forest; the broken old typewriters. Even her father’s old oil paintings were gone. Halley felt hollow; she understood now why her parents had saved things. The objects had held their memories.

One object remained. Hung on a rusty nail, on a metal hanger, was an old raincoat. She reached out to touch it. A memory came to her. She was young, perhaps three or four, waiting for Daddy to come home. Every night was the same; he was home by exactly six-thirty. She would watch the clock in anticipation, knowing the angle the hands made when it was time for him. In her memory, it was a cold winter’s night. Daddy would get home, and she’d run across the living room, jump up and be hugged tightly in his arms. She could still smell the cold of his raincoat, that outdoor smell; the sense that he had been somewhere else, but now he was come home to her. This was his raincoat.

Halley looked over at Eden.

“Dad wasn’t always so nice,” Eden said.

“Yes, he was.”

Out of long habit, she went through the pockets of the raincoat. It was empty, but for a small object wrapped in a handkerchief in the inner pocket. She opened it. It was a small brown ceramic horse. Its fourth leg had been reattached with Elmer’s Glue, and bore a lump from the childish paste that had been used in her time to mend the precious objects of children.

Halley ran her finger along the lump of dried glue
. It’s held all these years
. With her smallest finger, she stroked along the back of the figure. It was a bay horse. Like Sampson. It was just an inch tall, fine-boned and delicate. She closed her eyes, and felt a flush of warmth before tucking it safely in her pocket.

It was time to go. Halley was no longer frightened, and there was nothing more to find. The basement was empty; there was no man with terrible eyes haunting the place. She’d been right.

“Let’s go,” she said.

They climbed the stairs, hand in hand. At the top, Halley was surprised to see that the basement door was closed.
I’ve never noticed the back of this door. I’ve always been in too much of a hurry to get out of the basement and lock it behind me.
The stairwell light shimmered in the glossy black door. She was now the one in the basement, opening the door into the kitchen, into the light. She had become one with the thing that had climbed these stairs in her nightmares. But she was no longer angry, no longer a monster at all. Maybe she never had been.

They left the basement, left the house, closing the back door behind them. The basement door they left wide open.

He arrived at the abandoned house shortly after they’d left.

“Monsters and nightmares. So you think it is that simple, do you? You think you can forget all of this, wish it all away? I don’t think so, my dear, I really don’t think so.”

He left the house. It didn’t matter that they were far ahead. They were easy to track.

They were no longer afraid. So they were making far more mistakes.

He smiled, and strode on.

Athena was waiting patiently, nibbling grass. Halley patted her on the shoulder, and Athena swung her big white head up and looked at Halley with wet eyes.
Yes, yes,
those eyes said.

Using the back steps of the house as a mounting block, she grabbed hold of Athena’s mane just above the withers, and swung herself lightly onto the horse’s back. “Give me your hand,” Halley said, looking down at Eden, helping her up behind herself with a big tug. When they were both settled, Athena began to walk slowly. Feeling the horse move under her, Halley felt the long-familiar sense of height and poise that came with riding.

As Athena clomp-clomped down the stony path, Halley felt Eden’s arms around her mid-section. After a while, her hold loosened a bit, and Halley guessed she’d dozed off to the gentle swaying of the horse’s stride. This swaying allowed Halley’s thoughts to quiet in a way the action-embedded last few days had not. As the events of those days played through her mind, she focused upon her breath moving in and out, letting her thoughts of the experiences slide by as if they were simply words on a screen: escaping Trance up the steep hillside trail; sliding downhill and traversing the tundra; losing Eden, and finding her again; falling into and escaping from Gail’s pit; helping heal Gail by taking down the hill of ‘bones’; finding and healing Hope.

And myself, healing myself too.

Her mind came back into the now. A sense of change was upon her. Through her encounters with these others, she herself was evolving.
I’m recovering parts of me. Parts I’d forgotten even existed.
At this thought, the distance from the top of her head to the base of her spine lengthened. Her chest lifted.

The path forward was clear today, straight and obvious and long. Wide-open. Up in the sky – high above, riding the air currents – an eagle soared in a wide circle. Its enormous wingspan made it look powerful and unearthly.

Eden stirred, and lifted her head.

“What do you see?” she asked.

Halley pointed upwards in answer, watching the eagle. The speed and power of the bird’s movement woke something in her; she wanted to move fast too. “Let’s do some running,” she said.

Eden tightened her grip around Halley’s mid-section. “Hooray! I thought we were going to walk this slow forever!”

Halley nudged the horse with her heels, and Athena broke obligingly into a slow jog, and with a little more encouragement, a fast trot. Each bounce at the trot was jarring, so she urged the horse on until they had moved into a smooth cantor and from there to the sweetness of a full gallop. Halley grasped Athena’s wiry mane, and Eden held tight to Halley.

They flowed over the landscape, melded to the horse’s back like they were born to be there. Hooves
kerchunked
against hardened earth. Athena stretched long through her forelegs, and there were moments when, for an instant, all four of her hooves were free of the earth. They were airborne, creatures of the sky. The wind was in Halley’s hair, her blood pulsing wildly through her body. It was the essence of liberation, distilled from the air, movement, and breath.

They galloped for miles, letting Athena decide when she was tired. Finally, she slowed to a walk, blowing hard. Her neck was flecked with white foamy sweat.

Eden burst into laughter. “That was so much fun!”

Halley was lost for words. She swung to the ground. The air was sweet with freedom. The blood was still pounding through her body. “I can’t remember the last time I felt so alive.”

After Eden slid from Athena’s back, the horse lay down in the grass on the side of the trail, rolling back and forth, her legs stretched high. She had enjoyed the run as much as they. When the horse had recovered, she rolled back to her feet and shook herself heartily, dirt and foamy sweat flying from her white coat. Satisfied, she took a few paces around a clump of trees. Halley listened to the sucking sound of her drinking: Athena had found water.

Following, Halley and Eden found themselves facing a wide river. The swiftly flowing water was grayish-white and looked cold. Athena finished drinking, and shook the drops from her muzzle; they hit Halley’s arm and made her shiver.

“It’s too wide to cross here,” she said, frowning as she looked up and then downstream, searching for a narrower crossing.

Athena pawed at the ground. She tossed her head, and snorted appraisingly while staring at the water, as if issuing a challenge. Her grey eyes shone.

“I’ll just bet you could, Athena. You could swim it, even if we can’t.” Halley stroked the flat of the horse’s face, who answered by bumping Halley gently in the chest with her large white head. “I guess we’ve got to try.”

“Before we do, let’s have some food,” Eden said.

“Good idea – I’m starved!”

They choked down several of the ‘Peters Monkey Bars’.

“Feel better?” Halley asked.

“Well…less hungry.”

They had four bars left. Halley zipped them inside the zip-lock bag from her earlier food supplies to keep them dry during the river crossing.

“Ready?”

“Ready! But can I sit in front this time? Please?” Eden said. Her eyes asked as well.

“Of course. I’ll give you a leg up…”

Eden bent her left leg and Halley took her knee in her hands.

“Ready – on three…one, two, three!”

Eden jumped with her right leg, pressing into Halley’s hand with her left knee and she was up.

“You want a hand up?”

“Yes, thanks.”

The river mud made a sucking sound as Athena entered the water. As the river deepened, Athena began to swim, her muscular white legs pulling against the water, carrying them across. She swam effortlessly, with her neck stretched long.

Halley, however, was no longer smiling. The river was colder than she’d imagined, and far swifter. Without warning, a heavy branch, swept along by the strong current, smashed into her leg. Her leg blazed with pain. I
didn’t even see that coming!
Holding onto the horse’s mane with one hand, her other pressing against the hurting leg, she felt her thighs begin to slip. She was losing her balance. She tried to grip tighter but her injured leg wouldn’t work properly. Sharp-edged fear was upon her, worse because she was responsible now for both Athena and Eden.

It was then that she looked upriver, and saw the boat.

It was bearing down on them from upstream. It came fast. Faster than the current. It was steering directly for them. There was only one oarsman. He was cloaked in a familiar grey-green jacket.