Again, I felt uneasy looking at it. It seemed to evoke some nameless anxiety or desperation, which I could not put my finger on. I began to feel as if I were being watched. I quickly shot glances up to the four towers, the walls, the roof of the rock. But there was nothing, and no one. I was still alone.
At last it was time to move on. The nearest wall was that of the watchtower, so it was there that I dashed, my footing surer this time, the journey swifter. Again I arrived unharmed. I slid along this wall, peered again into the once-hidden area of the courtyard, and slipped around to just beside the watchtower door. After a brief pause to listen, I ducked in.
It was clear that no one else was here. My eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness, and a flight of stone stairs made themselves visible before me, spiraling up into dim light. There was a strong scent of rodents, and fungus. I climbed the staircase slowly, quietly, stopping after every three steps to listen for my enemy. In this manner, I reached the top and emerged onto the broken roof.
In the minutes I spent climbing, it had begun to rain, a stinging, spitting rain accompanied by a warm wind. Gunmetal clouds were racing in from the west, promising a powerful storm. Looking down, I could make out the overgrown path to Minerva Road, and the approximate place where I had avoided the bear trap; above me loomed the barren rock. No people or animals could be seen, not to the east nor in any other direction. The wind picked up, and I felt very desolate and helpless, in spite of my commanding view of the surroundings.
A few moments later I was back in the courtyard. Again there was no one. I moved along the castle’s north wall, giving the wooden cage a wide berth, and quickly arrived at the doorway that led into the compound. As in the tower, I smelled a rats’ warren, and the chemical tang of mildew; but in addition I again detected woodsmoke — and a human scent, the stink of living. Fear enveloped my body like a sack, and I suppressed a shiver. My eyes adjusted to the light, and I could see now that I was in a large open room, with the blackened remains of a fire off to the center, underneath a small hole in the peaked roof. A flat stone sat beside the fire, and a small pile of sharpened twigs. It appeared that food had once been cooked here, though there was no indication that the fire was recent. In front of me and to the left, a rectangular hole was dug in the dirt floor and a flight of crude stairs led down into darkness.
No — not darkness, not quite. There was light, and not the gray light of the stormy sky outside; rather, it was a yellow light, flickering faintly. A fire, somewhere below. That was where the smoke had come from — not the dead fire here in front of me, but the one burning at the bottom of those stairs.
Slowly, I crept across the room and began to descend. Once again I nocked my arrow and held it before me. One step, then another, and another — I paused between each, listening, knowing that this must be the place where he waited. Fourteen steps, fifteen, and I was standing one step from the doorway on the other side of which burned the fire. Smoke stung my eyes. I leaned against the stairwell wall and inched my head closer and closer, until I could see the outlines of a room. A rough corner, walls of stone. A bundle lying on the ground — blankets, perhaps, brown in the dim. And a pair of shoes. Moccasins, by the look of them, sewn together out of deerhide.
He was here — I knew it. The moment had come. I closed my eyes, breathed in and out to clear my head, and then stepped forward, into the light.
The room was about twenty feet square and undivided, like the room above, and I realized that it had been hollowed out underneath the rock. The walls, as I have said, were of stone, not milled and fitted together as in the castle walls, but irregular and jagged, as if they had been found on the ground outside, or dug up during the room’s excavation. The wadded-up bundle I had noticed was indeed a pile of blankets — a bed, in fact, laid right in the dirt — and the wall I faced, across the fire, was lined with bookshelves — crude, crooked planks, heavily weighted with books, their spines obscured by years of smoke. The planks were supported by the books themselves, so that the bottom few rows were hopelessly squashed and bent, their bindings ruined, and only the top two shelves’ contents were even removable.
Something, however, stood in front of that walclass="underline" a small wooden table. It was old, a bit lopsided, the kind of table one might find in a child’s playhouse or a kindergarten classroom. On it lay an apparently random collection of objects. Something about them — some familiar pattern in their arrangement — made me take a step closer.
As if in keeping with the table, the objects seemed to belong to a child. There was a homemade slingshot, made from a stout branch and a thick rubber band; there was a military action figure — a G.I. Joe. These lay beside a mushroom hunting guide, a small canteen, a penknife, a cigar box full of bones.
I should clarify here that the cigar box was closed. Yet I knew that it contained bones — the tiny bones of birds and squirrels, and perhaps the husks of cicadas. The box was cardboard, with a fabric-hinged lid, and it bore the name CABAÑAS above a kind of heraldic crest. The lip of the box was ragged with torn paper, which once had sealed in the cigars.
I reached out and ran my thumb along the lip, feeling the paper’s uneven edge. After a moment, I lifted the lid.
It was just as I had imagined. Several skulls, some of them beaked, and a scattering of tiny thin bones. The cicadas’ husks were in a separate compartment, an unlidded jewelry box, to keep them intact. From underneath the bones poked the corner of a thick, folded piece of paper; even as I reached for it I knew that it was a map, a hand-drawn treasure map, marking the places in and around my childhood home where I had concealed things that were valuable to me. The weightless bones clattered faintly as I drew out the map; it unfolded with a dry rustle, revealing the drawings and symbols I knew would be there, rendered in pencil, then traced over with calligraphic ink. There was the house, the shed; there stood the catalpa tree and the sugar maples. The trash pit, the gravel drive — it was all there, the diagram of my childhood, as I had drawn it thirty-five years before.
The smoke in the room was thick and choking; the flickering of the fire cast disorienting shadows across the walls, and I gazed down at my lost possessions: my slingshot, and my book, and my canteen. All of it was mine.
From behind me, over the crackle of the fire, I heard the small noise of a bare foot shifting against the dirt floor.
I stood and turned. It was him. He held a hollowed-out twig to his mouth and, with a terrible grin, blew. I felt something sting my face, and moved my hand to brush it away. But my hand merely hung at my side, immobile.
My knees buckled and I lost my balance; my arm landed in the fire. The old man acted quickly to move it, tucking it in close to my body, and as I lost consciousness I felt gratitude for his alertness and concern, and tried, but failed, to form my lips into a gesture of thanks.
FOURTEEN
I don’t know where or how my father met Avery Stiles, but it is not difficult to imagine a scenario by which the two, working after hours on campus — my father at his maintenance chores and Professor Stiles on his research — struck up a conversation and, eventually, a friendship. My father, though cold and distant with his family, was quite amiable around others. In retrospect, this may seem strange, but as a child I never thought to question the drastic change in personality that overtook him at the hardware store, the bank, the municipal dump, when he encountered perfect strangers. I accompanied him on these errands for many years, and distinctly recall the tense silence that enveloped the truck as we drove. My father’s back never seemed to touch the seat — he leaned forward, his chin out over the steering wheel his bony fingers gripped, his jaw tight, his eyes darting across his field of vision. Any attempt on my part to speak was met with a terse “Quiet,” and so I sat in nervous boredom, my body rigid, waiting for the journey to end.