The Upright Man (29 page)

“Murder isn’t a belief system.”

“Yes it is, Ward. That’s
exactly
what it is. We all did it. These days we only ever kill out of hate, or through greed, or as a punishment, but for a hundred thousand years our species believed in a kind of killing that had to do with life and hope.”

“Which was what?”

“Sacrifice. We sacrificed animals, and we sacrificed each other. Sacrifice is killing for magic purpose, and serial murder is a misplaced version of this instinct. They’re turning teenage girls and lost boys into symbols of the ‘gods’—perfect, unattainable, cruel—and their whole M.O. is a curdled version of an ancient ritual.”

“I don’t get it.”

“
Every step is the same
. They make preparations, choose a victim; they take the victim off to a secret place, then wash/feed/attempt to communicate with them—honoring before sacrifice. They may have sex with them, too, and partly this is an attempt to mate with these gods but it’s also because sexual dysfunction is the only thing strong enough to pull modern man down from civilization back to these elemental, innate impulses. Then they sacrifice them or ‘kill’ them, to use another word. Sometimes
they’ll eat parts, to take on their power. They’ll often keep a piece of the victim or their clothing, much like a bear’s pelt or a wolf’s tooth, putting it in a special place, keeping it with them to keep the dead alive. Does this not sound
familiar
to you?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “It does.”

“Then they’ll bury the remainder, returning it to the earth, or they distribute it—and dismemberment was a common feature of sacrifice too, breaking the body down to parts. They will be dormant for a while then, until the cycle starts again—until the music of the spheres tells them it’s time for another sacrifice.”

“But serial killers are not priests.”

“No. They’re
lunatics,
and so there will come a point at which the cycle starts to speed up. Most killers know they are wrong, deep down. They understand they’re at the beck and call of a neurotic dysfunction they try to rationalize but can’t understand. They speed up in the end because they give up giving up. But the Straw Men
do
believe that this is acceptable. That’s the difference. They believe what they’re doing is more than okay, that it’s essential, that it’s what put our species where it is. They believe that if you kill the right thing at the right time, everything will be well. It’s the original magic act. They’ve stuck with an ancient belief system that says
killing is right
.”

He stopped talking. His jaw was thrust forward belligerently, and his whole body vibrated with an unwillingness to see the world any other way. I looked back at him, not knowing what to say. I didn’t know how to tell him that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, or that not everything he had read on the internet was true, or that the willingness to fit any piece of information into a predetermined plan was a sign of mania. I didn’t know how to tell him that if he believed everything he’d told me, he’d lost his mind. You don’t want to use any of those words, when you’ve been tied to a chair by a man with a gun.

“Did you get all that from Dravecky?”

“Some of the history. He also confirmed that the view among some of the ‘tribe’—he used that actual word—was
that the Upright Man had become a liability, and he told me what he’s doing here. A sacrifice that hasn’t been made in a long, long time.”

“Does Paul think the Straw Men will take him back if he pulls it off?”

“I doubt he cares. This is a man who thinks even the Straw Men are going soft.”

“Where’s Dravecky now?”

“In the Columbia River.”

“Great. You’re the man. Tell me, John: did you kill the women or not?”

“No.”

The word was said immediately and simply. I still didn’t know what to think. “So what is Paul doing up here?”

John shook his head. “You don’t believe what I’ve told you,” he said; “and I don’t care.” He stood and took something from his pocket. It was a thick piece of cloth, about two feet long.

“Don’t put that—”

But with one quick movement the gag was on. He yanked it tight. Then he came round and squatted in front of me, looked deep in my eyes. I hadn’t even noticed that, while he’d been talking, the drapes had started to lighten. Dawn was on the way. In the murky light I could make out the sharp blue of his irises, the dark circles in the centers. Beyond that, I couldn’t go.

“Stay out of my way, Ward,” he said. “Him being dead is a lot more important to me than you being alive.”

He checked the knots, straightened, and then laughed. “You want to know the kicker? Forty years ago they believed the country was going to liberal ruin. That called for the ultimate. The sacrifice of the king. November twenty-second, 1963.”

I just looked at him. He winked. “They killed JFK.”

Then he went to the door, stepped out into dark blue-black, and was gone.

DURING
THE NIGHT THE MAN WITH THE GUNS SAT
bolt upright in a chair in front of the door. The other man, Kozelek, tried to talk to him on two occasions, and got nowhere, after which he seemed to give up. He sat slumped in another chair, staring into space for a while. Then he poked around in the kitchen until he found a bottle of wine. He drank it in twenty minutes flat, and fell asleep. His dreams did not look good. He said a woman’s name twice.

Patrice meanwhile lay on her side on the couch. With her hands tied behind her back, there wasn’t much else she could do. For a while she had kept her eyes open. When she realized this would do little to prevent any harm befalling her, she let them close. She didn’t sleep, however. Sleep didn’t come anywhere near.

They set off at first light. The man with the guns, Henrickson, made her walk in the front. Kozelek staggered along behind her, staggering every now and then. Partly it looked like hangover, partly a problem with one ankle. Mainly it seemed like he had given up in general.

Henrickson walked in the back. Every now and then she glanced that way to check where he was. Though the night had finally brought new snow underfoot, after the rain and sleet, he seemed to be able to move with very little sound.

She led them up around the north shore of the lake. There seemed little point in not doing so, little point in not taking him where he thought he wanted to go. It was much farther than he realized, it wouldn’t get him what he wanted—that would lie farther and deeper into the forest, a distance he would have to go by himself—and it might have other advantages.

As they passed the second cabin she glanced up and saw her reflection in the dusty window. She smiled, just in case something of Bill still lingered there, and in case she didn’t come back.

“I
HOPE YOU
’
RE NOT SCREWING ME AROUND
,” H
ENRICKSON
said.

Tom stopped, glad for an excuse to rest. Two straight hours’ walking, all of it uphill, had taken him to the brink. The sky, at first a pale and searing blue up between the trees, had gradually turned dark and mottled, clouds arriving like clumps of dropped clay. His head felt bad, and—wretched though he felt—he couldn’t help appreciating the parallel with the first time he’d returned to the place they were headed for, brain cracked wide. Of course he hadn’t planned it this way. He’d just wanted to be asleep, and getting drunk had done that. He wanted to be asleep now, too. Asleep, or far away. His absurd belief that somehow he was going to be able to get away with everything, that his find was going to heal his life, had disappeared.

Henrickson stood right in front of the old woman. “You told the cops this place was an hour’s walk from the edge of your land. Unless you own a state park, that’s beginning to look far-fetched.”

“I lied,” she said, simply.

“How much farther is it?”

“Quite a ways.”

“You can try to get us lost,” Henrickson said. “I could see that might look like a good plan. But I can outwalk the two of you put together, and will be going long after you both collapse. Sure, you’ll have stopped me finding the
place today. But I know it’s here to be found now, and so I’ll stay. I’ll find it sooner or later, and I’ll find them, and all that will have happened is that the two of you will have died and I’ll have lost a little time.”

“What difference?” Tom said. “If you’re just going to shoot it, kill this amazing thing, who cares whether it’s today or next week?”

“What exactly do you think is out there?” Patrice asked, looking at him curiously.

“You know,” Tom said.

She shrugged. “All I know about is bears. Just some animals been living out here a long, long time, and deserve to be left alone.”

Tom looked at Henrickson.

He didn’t say anything, just nodded up the way.

So they walked some more. After a time Tom began walking level with the old woman. He started talking, and she seemed to listen. He told her about his walk in the woods, and what had brought him there, and in the end he found his mouth telling her the thing no one else knew. It came out slowly, but it wouldn’t stop. He told her how he had turned to see the girl in the passenger seat of his car, how broken she was, and how hard she still fought to stay alive. He told her about the problems with the accounts of the company he had worked for, discrepancies that would almost certainly come to light sooner or later. Restaurants are expensive, as are gifts, and Rachel’s tastes had not been cheap. It is hard to run an affair without financial implications, especially if it’s your wife who checks the card and bank statements. Sarah would have spotted the spending even if all had come from withdrawals of cash. The company’s accounts were more complex, and there was a chance it might go unnoticed. But there was a chance it would not, and Tom knew that because of what had happened his name would be on the top of any list. The really screwed-up thing, he admitted, was that the guilt he felt over this was actually more acute than at Rachel’s death. Of course he should not have been having an affair with her—but she was very pretty, and once he’d started, it was hard to stop. He should not have tried to get across the
intersection that night—the arrival of the Porsche and its drunk driver, however, had been completely out of his hands. The theft of the money had not. He had stood there, made the decision, and worked out the method. He had done the thing of his own volition, knowing it was wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, and he could categorize just about everything else that way. Very human errors. Not the stealing. He had started, deliberately, and then he couldn’t stop. The chance to tell Sarah about it had come and gone in the week following the accident. Not telling her had either been a second crime or doubled the magnitude of the first, he wasn’t sure which. He crossed that road. He was now trapped on the other side.

The old woman listened, and didn’t say a great deal. Telling her made him feel a little better, but not much, and he realized the only thing that would make a real difference was telling Sarah. The crime against the company was the stealing; the crime against her was lying. The latter was far worse. He decided that tonight, regardless of what they did or did not find this afternoon, he was going to phone home. She had loved him once, and maybe she did still. At the very least she would tell him what to do, and that might be as much absolution as he could expect.

Eventually, at a time Tom’s beleaguered guts told him was past midday, they got where they were going.

THEY
HAD BEEN CRESTING A RISE FOR A LONG
time. Tom had absolutely no idea where they were by now. For a time he had believed that Henrickson might be right, that the woman was simply trying to get them lost. But he watched her carefully and saw she never seemed to hesitate, even for a moment, the beat required to decide which wrong way to go. Progress had been slow but constant. She had turned this way and that, taken them around some features and over others. For a woman of her age, she was surprisingly fit. She winced occasionally, however, and twice slipped and fell quickly on her side, unable to use her hands to halt her fall; and gradually she began to get slower, and to tire.

Then she stopped. She was panting. She indicated with her head.

“It’s down there.”

Henrickson walked past her and up to the edge of the gully. He looked down for a few moments, and then beckoned to Tom.

“That the place?”

Tom walked up and stood with him, looking down into the streambed. At first it looked just like any of the others they’d passed through. Then he picked out the little area where he’d sat in the dark, then returned to the next morning. Still less than a week ago, but it felt like an eternity. As if this was some place he was bound to come back to, over and over.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s where it happened.” That defining moment, before which everything seemed gray and indistinct.

“Good,” Henrickson said. He turned away from the edge and walked back to Patrice. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“What was the big deal, anyway?” Tom said. “Why did you want to come back here? Or was that just part of pretending to be something you’re not?”

“Not at all,” the man said. “Follow me.”

He turned and started walking up the edge of the gully. They followed. After five minutes Henrickson started cutting left again, through the trees clustered around the lip of the drop. In another few minutes he stopped.

Tom stared. The man had led them to the trunk that had fallen across the gully.

“Mrs. Anders—would you tell Tom what we’ve got here?”

“A fallen tree,” she said.

Henrickson shook his head, walked the last few yards to the edge, and then stepped up onto the tree. He examined the end, and then walked straight across to the other side, walking across the trunk like it was ten feet wide.

“Both ends have been worked,” the man said, squatting down to examine the wood. “And branches along the trunk trimmed off. It’s also been pulled about twenty degrees round from the angle it fell. I’m astonished you didn’t notice, Tom.”

“I wasn’t well,” Tom said. This was true, but in all honesty he couldn’t believe he’d missed it either. Once you’d seen it, it was so obvious.

“You can cross the river down the way for the time being,” Henrickson said, “but come the spring it’s a long, long walk in either direction. This is a bridge, and it was manufactured. Some of our forest friends put it together. Consciousness solidified. They are here, but they want to be over there. So they build a simple machine. Tom, there’s your proof. Told you it would be worth the walk.”

“How do you know it wasn’t just some guy? Or something left from logging?”

“Because I know this area has never been felled, and that it’s unlikely a human would do the job with stone tools.” He looked at Patrice. “Just a fallen tree, right?”

“That’s all I see. Think maybe you’re seeing something in your head, not what’s actually there in front of your eyes. Lots of people are like that.”

He walked back over the bridge and, one last time, he grinned. He looked up the gully.

“Have it your own way. But let’s walk up this way a little more. See what we find.”

They walked another ten minutes, keeping close to the edge of the gully. The sides grew steeper and deeper, and the stream grew in width and sound, swollen by waterfalls, winter-thin but relentless.

Finally they got to the top of the ridge, and Tom gasped.

Beneath their feet the ground fell away. To the left the river suddenly dropped out into space, to tumble helplessly into a large rocky bowl two hundred feet below. The forest stretched out in front, a craggy carpet of white-crusted green, limitless, toward Canada and beyond. Way up above was the thin, fading trail of a jet, across the remaining narrow band of clear sky. That was the only work of man you could see. Otherwise it was as if humans had never been there. Tom watched as cloud slowly filled the gap, until the sky was allover gray, then tilted his head back to look back over the forest.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“Imagine when this was all there was,” Henrickson said, quietly, standing beside him. “When nobody else was here.” Tom could only shake his head again, faced with the world as it was before words. He kept on shaking it, slowly, feeling his eyes fill up with water. He didn’t know why.

“I want to thank you, Tom,” Henrickson added, and suddenly his accent was backwoods again, and he was the person Tom had thought he’d come to know. “You tried real hard, my friend, and it’s not been an easy time for you, I know. You know the weirdest thing? I’ve actually enjoyed having someone to talk to.”

Tom’s head, shaking still, and then nodding. He looked up, saw the blurry shape of the old woman, hands still behind her back. She smiled at him, sadly, then looked away.

And then Henrickson put his hand on Tom’s shoulder and pushed him over the edge.

There was a feeling of tilt, the hollow wrongness of knowing nothing was beneath, as if he were back on the bridge he had found all by himself, and the voice in his head had not been there to help him. Then the weightlessness of pure free fall, fast and brief, before he started hitting things. The collisions were not rustles or slides this time, but brief, bone-cracking impacts that span and twisted him into a rag doll. Another momentary unbroken plummet, and then he landed like a dropped glass.

He lay wedged between two big rocks, hidden beneath a mossy overhang thirty feet above the ground. He tried to make a sound, but heard only a liquid bubbling. His body was bent around and smashed, clothes torn and bloodstained, and something appalling had happened to his left leg. Cold water ran over his feet and his outstretched left hand, but he couldn’t feel it. Though his skull was broken, and his cheekbone, his eyes still saw, and his right arm still worked, a little.

Over the next twenty minutes he managed only one thing. He worked his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. He navigated laboriously to the text messaging facility, and, with a thumb that alternatively tremored and stalled, he got as far as:

i saw bigfoot. i lov