But I did care about what he was pointing at with one unsteady hand as he blinked his eyes into focus, his face a mask of punch-drunk confusion. “Nicky!” he stage-whispered with awed incredulity. “Nicky, are you effing seeing this?”
And as I said some time ago, Nicky wasn’t. But I was, and once Zadie followed the trail of Nicky’s arm down past his pointing finger toward the camera, she was seeing it too.
The camera, propped crooked on the rock a few feet from us, aimed at a gentle, treeless patch of upslope, gray and barren as the moon, and as empty, too. The camera’s viewfinder was open. And in it was that same patch of barren, empty upslope, though in the viewfinder it was neither barren nor empty.
On it sat a small log cabin, rough-hewn and lichen-scabbed. It sat a quarter-turn away from facing us, its front windows staring blankly into the middle distance from beneath their brow of covered porch as if indifferent to our presence. A thin wisp of oily smoke twisted skyward from its chimney. A patch of tilled earth arranged in furrows — a garden not yet growing — rested on its southeastern edge, now deep in sunset’s shadow. The cabin was still and quiet beneath the waning light. No light shone from within. And though for our entire hike the forest had teemed with life, it had apparently abandoned us now, for all was silent and still as a crypt.
“The fuck is that?” Zadie muttered.
“That,” I told them, “is proof.”
“Of what?”
“That the world’s a weirder place than even you two yahoos realize.”
And then, before they knew what hit them, I attacked.
9.
“Ow! That pinches!”
“Does it?” I asked, giving the nylon line another tug. Topher wailed a little louder than was strictly necessary in response, if you ask me. But after the racket we made stumbling upon the cabin in the first place any attempt at a quiet approach was shot anyways, so I figured let him yell. “Good.”
We were huddled in a cave some three hundred yards from where the cabin stood. More a depression in the rock than anything. Not quite deep enough for a bear to settle down in, but not so exposed to the wind and elements that these two would freeze to death if I didn’t come back until morning. Probably. I mean, I’m not a nature guide or anything. But either way, I figured they stood a better chance of surviving hog-tied and tucked away somewhere than if I let them storm the cabin with me. I’d lost enough lives taking on the tunnel Brethren — three shit-bags and one innocent — to learn my lesson. The only hide I’d be risking today was Nicky’s — er, Nicholas’s — and even that was one more than I’d ideally prefer.
“What the fuck, Nicky!” This from Zadie, who, near as I could tell in the failing evening light, was giving me the scowling of a lifetime. “I thought you were our friend.”
“If we’re such good friends,” I said, figuring I’d throw the consciousness who, when I left, would once more be driving this meat-suit a bone, “then you’d know I hate being called Nicky. And besides, this is for your own good.”
“Yeah? How you figure?”
“Well, for one, believe me when I tell you, you want nothing to do with what’s in that cabin. And for two, let’s not forget whatever nasty juju they’ve enacted to keep folks from stumbling across it damn near made you two kill each other. But worry not, once I head in there and do my thing, you won’t have either to contend with.” I hope, I added mentally.
“Since when’d you go all Venkman on us?” asked Topher. “I thought you didn’t even believe in this shit.”
I rolled my eyes. “Venkman hunted ghosts,” I told him, “and was a huckster besides. If you’re gonna drop a reference, think I’d prefer Van Helsing.”
“You mean that shitty movie by The Mummy guy where Wolverine wears that dumbass hat?”
“You know what?” I said. “Never mind.”
“Nicky,” Zadie said, only to shake her head and close her eyes by way of self-chastisement. “Nicholas,” she corrected. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Tie us up. Abandon us. Leave us out here to die.”
“Zadie, believe me, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Because, in order, yes I do; no, I hope I don’t; and leaving you out here’s the best way I can think to keep you breathing.”
“If that were true,” she said, “you’d leave us our packs, at least.”
I eyed the backpacks lying at my feet — their zippers open, their contents strewn about. “You can keep your packs, and your food, and your clothes. All I need,” I said, patting my stuffed jacket-pockets, “I got.”
Topher glared at me. “Unless you’re leaving us my buck knife, the whiskey, and our sat phone, consider yourself hella motherfucking fired.”
At that, I smiled. Because I’d be lying if I said my plan didn’t include his buck knife and his whiskey, if not his sat phone. And oh yeah, not just a little bit of fire.
It was full dark now, and the moon was new. This far out from any human source of light, the stars and my conscience were my only guides. And I hadn’t heard much from the latter of late.
“Look,” I told these two forlorn lovebirds, lashed back-to-back before me, “I won’t be long. Unless they kill me, in which case I might be a little while. But either way, you have my word that I’ll come back for you. I won’t let you die tonight — not on my watch. Just stay inside this cave, you hear me? Nothing that means you any harm can breach it.”
“Whadda you mean, either way?” This from Zadie.
“Never you mind,” I said. “Now do me a favor and keep quiet. I’ve got a job to do.”
They didn’t listen. They just kept on screaming their fool heads off. But that was fine. I didn’t really expect them to heed my request. If I had, I wouldn’t have bothered scratching those protective runes into the rock at the entrance to the cave with Topher’s buck knife; God knows the damn thing was more useful to me sharp than dull. But whatever, if the Brethren heard them carrying on, maybe they’d serve as a distraction, because if those same Brethren caught wind of what I had in store for them, they were bound to get a little pissy.
I trudged away from Topher and Zadie’s hidey-hole and flicked open the camera’s view finder and switched the image to infrared night vision. One of the perks of bumming around with cryptozoologists is they’re accustomed to skulking around the forest at night. Meant Nicholas was pretty sure-footed in the dark. Meant his camera was built for it as well.
The night was cold and still and dark before me, but my viewfinder glowed with green-white light. It flared at the cabin’s windows — the light unseen by my naked eye, the ground on which the cabin sat appearing wild and undisturbed — and at the chimney’s outlet. I watched for the better part of two hours, hoping it would also give me some indication of how many creatures waited for me inside, but given that the source of the chimney’s heat was not visible through the walls it was clear the camera was incapable of delivering such a penetrating image. The closest I could come to any kind of estimate were the brief flickers of movement at window’s edge a time or two, as if whatever waited inside was pulling back the curtains to get a peek at me. But it, or they, were careful, and I never managed to catch a glimpse.
That was fine. I had no illusions of sneaking up on them even without my two idiot companions carrying on behind me, we’d made enough noise on our initial approach they couldn’t help but have heard us. And anyways, I wasn’t worried about going in to the cabin blind, because I wasn’t going in at all.