Possession (27 page)

When she was finished with her games, she came back to 197

him and lay down beside him. He was far too ill and weak to make love to her, but he felt her against him. The tension! that had been there was gone. She lay beside him as easily as a lover, no longer a captive. He had sent her out of his sighfl deliberately, and she had come back. He was too sick taj hobble her, but it didn't matter. She would not leave.

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The fork in the trail was clearly marked, and Sam could see the arrow to the left reading Rainbow Lake and the one to the right indicating McAlester Pass. Five and a half miles to go now until he found them. The trail seemed easier for the moment, deceiving him into believing he had conquered the worst of it, falling downward beneath his feet to Rainbow Creek. He crossed a jerry-built bridge and filled his canteen, feeling more confident. The old man wasn't doing so bad after all.

But beyond the creek the trail became a maze of switchbacks, steeper than those he'd already climbed, and his lungs sucked up dusted air. At the top of each ramp of dry ground there was another and another—a labyrinth—as he trudged 1,200 feet higher on the sere breast of the moun-a tain. He could not imagine anyone's deliberately seeking out such agony for recreation.

Five miles. He drank the last of his water grimly and started up one more switchback. His throat was dry as baked gravel as soon as he turned the corner.

And then there was water again, and the trail grudgingly flattened to negotiable planes. He mistrusted the mountain now and the mirage of meadowland sheltered by peaks on every side, but the hike was easy for more than a mile, the land lush and bespeckled with flowers again. His breathing eased and his body ached less. With the slackening of physical pain his sense of isolation grew strong and made him eager for the moment he would walk into their camp-

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Danny was going to whoop and clap him on the back for surviving this ordeal.

And he was starving. He hallucinated food odors on the wind. Steak and fish frying, whatever else Joanne might be cooking up only a mile ahead. Danny was going to devil him about being out of shape. Joanne would smile and tell her husband to shut up, and the three of them would sit around the campfire and fill each other in on their days spent apart. Where they waited was as fixed in his mind as if he really could see beyond the top of the trail; he held the picture as the path started upward again—not fooling him this time, but made bearable by the waterfall close by. What the hell. So he'd missed them; that was no crime.

He looked at his watch. Almost six-thirty. The ranger had said five and a half hours to the lake. It had taken him a little more than six, not too bad for an old man fueled on beans and water and no sleep. He saw the lake, green water surrounded by a horseshoe of crags and spires, looking like a goddamned picture postcard. They would be down there hidden in the trees. He shouted a "Halloooo!" that startled him as it burst from his throat. He waited.

There was no answer.

He was probably beyond shouting distance; he would continue calling as he drew closer until he reached a spot where the woods wouldn't swallow his voice. He would not sneak up on them. He knew better than to surprise a cop. He kept shouting at regular intervals, stopping each time to listen. If they were in there screwing, he was going to feel like an ass.

"Come out, come out wherever you are... Uncle Sammy's come for supper . . ."

He listened. There was some answer. And then he realized it was his own echo mimicking him. Tree limbs sighed and groaned around him too, and a flight of tiny birds rose from the ground and circled over his head before they disappeared deep in the forest.

The smell at first was only a trickle of an odor. The rancid sweetness resembled the skunk cabbage stench that lay over

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sodden lowlands around Seattle in March. Cloying perfumed air, urging the uninitiated to pick an armful of the greenish-yellow hooded lilies. Once in drunken romanticism, he'd picked Nina a mass of them, and then been sorry; at the first bruise, they'd bled their pungent stink over everything.

But he knew what the smell really was; he had encountered it more than most men. He would not acknowledge it.

It grew stronger with every step toward the lake, and he held his breath. When he opened his lips to shout again, it rushed in and filled his lungs. Rotten air. He lit a cigarette and gulped the smoke, but the miasma choked out burning tobacco.

. It was decaying flesh, something long dead that surely rested off the right side of the trail, close by now, fouling the air. He did not want to walk toward the slope of land that sheltered the dead thing.

But his feet took him to the edge and he bent his head slowly to look down through the underbrush and narrow-trunked saplings. There was a roaring in his head and then no sound at all as if he had slammed full-tilt into a wall and died. And yet, there was no surprise. He had known it for a long time, days—all those days of pretending and manufacturing explanations while the man below him had never moved at all.

The corpse lay on its face next to a deadfall, one dead hand lightly curled around a rock, its knees drawn under the swollen belly. There was no life in it; even its hair looked spiked and false, the scalp beneath it dull white.

Sam stared down for a long time before he could unlock his knees and side-step through the underbrush, down and down and down. He began to slide and saw the previously hidden ravine twenty feet beyond the corpse. He did not will himself to stop or make any effort at all to stop. He thought for a moment that it would be easy to go with the momentum and drop heavily on the rocks below—easier than greeting the dead man.

He did not go over; the ground cropped out just at the end of his descent and held him fast. A great lassitude filled him,

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and he lay alongside the precipice for a time and looked up and back now at the body, trying to make it unfamiliar.

Something or someone had dragged the corpse downhill by its boots; the arms reached back toward the trail, the plaid shirt was bunched up beneath the armpits, exposing a wide band of visible flesh, striated with purpling lividity along the belly portion and leached of blood on the back. He could see no blood stains on the jeans or the flannel shirt, nothing on the back of the head. He could not see the face at all.

He did not want to see the face. He longed to run away, back down the eleven miles of mountain to Stehekin. If he had not come, he would have had what? Maybe three or four more days of not knowing. It seemed an important block of time to hang onto, but it was too late; he had rushed to this place to find what he could not endure.

He gulped air and found that the smell was not as awful as it had been up above. The dog men always said that and he'd never believed them—that death odor rises in the woods, leaving the corpse oddly pure of scent. He'd seen dogs circling and howling at treetops and still hadn't believed it, but it was true.

His legs could not support him. He crawled on his hands and knees until he was four feet from the faceless, ruined man. The boots were nondescript, the jeans were Levi's, the shirt looked like all plaid shirts.

It could be any man.

His damn teeth were chattering. He crawled closer and allowed himself to look more carefully. He reached out and touched the left hand, finding it cold, its skin slippage already begun. The first layer would slip off like a glove if the skin was severed at the wrist. He unbuttoned the taut band of flannel with his own dead fingers and tugged the material back.

The tattoo—Danny's dumb home-made heart—crept into view, expanded now, stretched along with the bloated arm until it spread out grotesquely like something in a funhouse mirror. The D and J were there in the center of it, distorted too.

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"Oh pard, oh pard, oh pard, oh pard," he was not aware that he spoke out loud. "What happened to you, Danny?"

He could not keep a partner; it was as simple as that. He sat back on his heels and let out a sound, a howl. Rage and grief, a primitive lament common to all tongues. It sent a hundred wild creatures scuttling for shelter, terrorized.

And then he worked rapidly with some icy deftness, racing the sun that had begun to sink toward the western ridges. He felt a curiosity, an obsession to know, coupled with a dull conviction that knowing would change nothing.

Danny was heavier than anything he'd ever tried to lift, and he struggled to turn the corpse over. Rigor had come and gone; what had happened had occurred days before. All that time, Danny had lain moldering through sunrise and sunset and sunrise again, unattended. An unattended death had to be the loneliest death of all.

He fought to think objectively. This was just another dead body, like the dozens of others he'd worked over. He could manage it in time-sets. For fifteen minutes he would not remember that this was Danny. He checked his watch and saw that it was only seven o'clock, not hours since he'd slid toward the rocky edge.

The eyes rolled into view, open and staring, their pupils clouded over with opaque circles. He did not recognize them. He did not recognize the face either. Purple as wine. He noted what he was supposed to note; the body had lain prone since death—it had not been moved or the lividity pattern would not be so classic.

Sam jotted findings on an imaginary pad. Cause of death?

The right cheek was scratched deeply with four parallel lacerations—bloodless. Why bloodless? An animal's claws maybe, but why bloodless? Post mortem. Mutilated after death. But why?

The blood was along the shirt front, pints of it spilled there, staining the blue and white plaid so completely that only black lines remained, framing neat squares of red now. The gore had sluiced down over the blue jeans and left them stiff. He lifted the shirt and saw puncture wounds, sucking wounds, over the heart and lungs, the skin around them

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already putrescent, green going black. Stab wounds? Bite wounds?

Eleven minutes to go.

Danny's—no, the corpse's—right arm flopped loosely, its humerus wrenched from the shoulder socket. Oh God, the power. What power? What creature?

The gun was there, lying in the crushed foliage where Danny's body had been. Danny's battered .38 that had belonged to the old man, to Doss. Sam picked it up by the checkered grips where fingerprints never clung, released the cylinder cautiously, and saw that every chamber was full. Danny had not fired it. He had carried it with him to this dying place, but why had he waited too long to use it? Neither of them had ever had to shoot bullets into a human being; they both knew what all cops knew—that any cop forced to shoot a man is himself maimed by the experience. Seattle P.D. or Natchitat County Sheriffs Office—the officers forced to shoot had all retired early on "mentals" that were called other things. It was one of the silent axioms of law enforcement: don't shoot or the bullet will eventually hurt you worse. But killing an animal was different. Danny hunted; most cops fished and hunted, perhaps to find some acceptable channel for the hours of required marksmanship. Danny should have fired, emptied the damn cylinder. Sam shuddered and lay the weapon down, terribly puzzled. He was not thinking well. There was something else he should be remembering, something of vital importance. He was not afraid; that wasn't it, although he visualized some animal, a bear probably. They were six feet, eight feet, when erect. Razor teeth. Five hundred pounds, a thousand— maybe more. He would relish the sight of the creature and the chance to destroy it. His pistol would be a peashooter—unless he could put out its eyes, but it scarcely mattered. There was nobody left to grieve over him. He could die up here and be absolved of guilt for having killed yet another partner.

Then he remembered. Joanne. Where was Joanne?

He scrambled through the saplings to the trail, shouting 203

her name. He called until he was hoarse, listening each time for her answer, and then unable to stand the mocking quiet, shouted again.

He thought he heard something near the lake, a woman crying, some muted sobbing. When he reached the water, i dark jade now in the gloaming, the sound stopped. He could hear it again, this time behind him on the left of the trail— wailing and pleading—but when he pushed deep into the trees there, the sound had moved back into the meadow from where he'd just come.

"Joanne! It's Sam," he shouted. "Wait for me. Stay where you are—I'm coming!"

Now the crying woman seemed to answer from high in the trees. He wondered if he really heard her at all.

He grew frantic in his search; she would be so frightened, perhaps even afraid to come out where he could see her. She had waited far too long for help, all alone. Danny had lain dead beside this lonely trail for at least three days, and she had been alone all that time. Frightened?

God no, she would be terrified.

If it occurred to him that she too might be dead, he never let the thought bubble up. The worst had happened. There could be nothing more. He talked to himself unaware, "I'll find her, pard—don't worry. I'll find her and take care of her. She's in here someplace, pard, and she'll be O.K. Don't you worry about that."

He saw her then, her back to him, leaning against a log in the small clearing near the lake, motionless.

He ran now, unconscious of the pain in his back and thighs. Closer, he could see their little camp, the burned-out fire with the coffeepot resting on gray ashes, but even as he reached out to touch her, he saw that the figure he had been so sure was a woman with lowered head was only a sleeping bag, left propped against a log. Danny's old surplus khaki sleeping bag.

They had camped here, but there was no one here now, nothing but shadows. He looked up and saw something suspended from the trees and felt sick, afraid to go nearer and find that she had hanged herself in despair. When he

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drew near the swinging thing, he saw that it was only a duffel bag of spoiled food twisting in the wind and bumping against the pine.

The tree's bark was scuffed and he could see the broken branches where someone had crawled frantically upward. He saw even the crusted mounds of dried vomit on the ground. Someone had hidden here, someone in the grip of nauseous horror. He expected to find blood on the ground. She was no longer in the tree, so she had either come down of her own volition or she had been dragged down.