Chapter 7: Lost Forever?
The next morning Eugene got up early, leaving his two companions asleep in the tent, and lit the fire again. Once it was burning steadily he sat beside the rocks which ringed it to inspect the lighter which he had just used.
It was unlike any he had seen before. Carved of a single stone, it reflected and glittered as if made of silver. But if he looked closely the stone was not entirely opaque; through its gray, milky sheen he could see the fluid sloshing inside. Eugene had thought that it was glass or plastic at first, but when he knocked it against a rock or scraped it with the tip of his lock pick it sounded like a gem.
Finely inset on one side of it with copper wires was the sketch of a pine tree standing on top of a hump, or hill. But that wasn’t all that was strange about the piece. Its lighting mechanism was worked with a small key which hung from a chain on one side. One simply wound it up and depressed a metal piece on top, upon which flame jetted steadily up for as long as the key was wound. Once it stopped turning, the flame would disappear.
Hearing the tent flap begin to be unzipped, Eugene stuffed the lighter into his pocket. It would be no good to let Leaflow notice so soon that he had taken it. Later it would make a good revenge for getting water dumped on him the previous day.
Leaflow and Maniac crawled from the tent, ruffled from sleep, and moved over to join him.
“I wish someone had thought of packing coffee,” Maniac complained, Eugene nodding agreement with the mental reservation that it would need to have cream in it to be acceptable.
Leaflow wandered down to the stream, coming back with a handful of greenery, “anyone want mint tea? I noticed it growing there last night.”
Eugene accepted his offer, but their other companion seemed to think that it was too 'soft’ a beverage for a man to be drinking first thing in the morning.
After breakfasting on leftover ham, which they put on toast, the three adventurers packed up to move on.
Maniac had crammed as much of the fresh meat as possible into the cooler, but most of the pig they had to leave behind fr the wild animals. Neither of the others complained about the weight of the meat he brought, since they were not the ones carrying it. They simply had to carry the same tent, sleeping bags and cooking supplies which they had been toting the day before. Eugene carefully took a reading on the sun, as none of them had thought to bring a compass, before they began the second day’s journey.
“Now this is the life,” Maniac declaimed, balancing the ice chest on one shoulder while he marched off through the woods, “it almost makes me sad to think that we’ll be reaching civilization today. All this fresh air and exercise simply going to waste!”
“The quicker we get to where we can get rich, the better,” Eugene inserted his oar, rowing in a different direction, “whether Yad has the riches or we just go to a city with things to do.”
Leaflow neither agreed nor disagreed with either of them.
“I hope my car is alright.”
They marched on through the early morning, with the gray sky slowly turning blue overhead and beams of sunlight rising to stream through the branches. Sometimes walking single file, other times side-by-side as the land allowed, they plowed their way through branches, low brush and tangles of blackberries. Eugene looked down at his arms to see that the healed scars of the razor wire were being over-layed with fresh, shallow stripes. He made a face at them before turning back to concentrate on where his feet were landing. On sticks or pine needles most of the time, unless they had to scramble over a pile of boulders which were directly in their path.
Around mid-morning Eugene took the map out briefly while they stopped at a spring to get a drink. Checking it, he saw that they would soon have to ford a larger creek, but it wouldn’t be long after that before they reached Ambrose. After all having a drink of the fresh water, kneeling down in thick moss and cupping their hands to the cold flow, they went on again. Trees, ridges and rocks went passed, one after the other. Once they crossed a disused logging road, with the grass starting to grow back up between the wheel ruts in the reddish dust. All the time Eugene had his eyes open for the large creek, but he did not see it. He said nothing to his companions, simply hoping to come upon it over each hill or beyond every stand of trees. But no creek larger than a yard across made itself apparent.
By the time morning was turning into noontide all of them were becoming weary, hot and impatient.
“Where is this town we’re supposed to be coming to?” Maniac growled, stopping in a small clearing to set his burden down with a thump.
“Maybe it’s further than I thought,” Eugene took out the map again, crouching to unfold it on the ground, “but no matter; as long as we keep going in this direction we can’t miss the town. And even if we veer a little, we’ll hit the highway at some point.”
He began using a stick to count out miles on their route, having broken it to fit the scale on the legend. He was just thinking that they must have been going much slower than he had calculated, when Leaflow bent down next to him, “let me see that map. What are you doing on it way down there?”
“Finding out how far it is between where we left the car and Ambrose.” Eugene tapped the town with his stick, frustrated at having lost his count because of the interruption.
“And where do you think we left the car?”
“Right here, over the summit from the valley with Red Bluff in it,” Eugene snapped, pointing out the city with that name.
Leaflow gazed at the map for a long moment of deep silence before telling him, “that is not the right town of Red Bluff.”
A wave of horror crashed down on Eugene. He stared down at the map making inarticulate sounds as the cloaked one explained his error relentlessly.
“See, if you go to the west this Red Bluff is almost even with San Cortuze, which we traveled north from quite a distance, up to the correct Red Bluff. Here is where we left the car, beyond Morgan’s summit at a distance. The next town with gasoline isn’t Ambrose, it’s Chester.”
He walked the whole thing out on the map with his gloved fingers, like twin pointers of dark doom, “which would put us, not between the bends of the highway, but far to the south of it, around here.”
He made a large circle somewhere in the empty expanse of trees shown on the map. It was not the sort of map which indicated where the hills and ridges were, unless they were tall enough to be marked as peaks. Because of this it was difficult to pinpoint their exact location with any accuracy. But Eugene could get a fairly good idea from how long they had been walking, so he knew they were at a goodly distance from the highway by now. It bent away from them at an equal angle as the one which they had been taking from it.
“So we’re lost?” Maniac inquired, not even bothering to look at the map.
“Well, the road is up there somewhere--” Eugene indicated a northerly direction with a weak flip of his hand.
“So we are lost,” Maniac nodded, breaking in to his explanation, “probably forever. Not such bad thing, as long as we don’t starve. But if food starts running low we’ll probably turn to cannibalism. It usually comes to that in the end. In which case I’ll eat you first, Eugene. Nothing personal to it, but Leaflow doesn’t look as edible, does he? Lost forever in the northern woods, how interesting!”
“From my experience it’s difficult to get lost ‘forever’,” Leaflow put in, “no matter how hard you try. You can be marooned for twenty years, attacked by an alien dragon or shot into a parallel universe and you still find your way back to home at some point. It’s inevitable.”
Eugene glared at both of them, “can’t you guys be serious for even a moment? No, don’t tell me, you were both being entirely earnest. Look, all we have to do is go north and we’ll hit the road at some point. It would be impossible not to.”
He drew a line upwards on the map with the tip of his hook, illustrating his point, “it has lost us some time, but nothing worse than that. We’ll get to Chester eventually.”
His confidence was coming back now. Though at first he had been horrified at his mistake, he had begun to realize that it was only an annoying delay, not a life-threatening disaster. They had plenty of supplies to last them to the town, especially with the pork Maniac had added to it. Now if only the other two would stop going on in such an exasperating way...
“We can build a shelter out of branches hacked off with my knife,” Maniac was explaining, drawing sketches in the air, “then a palisade out of saplings about, oh, twenty by thirty feet on each side. They’ll all be sharpened of course, with the skulls of intruding foresters stuck on them as a warning.”
“Perhaps we should just retrace our path back to my car,” Leaflow suggested, off on his own tangent as usual.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Maniac wasn’t paying any attention to him, either.
“Spike traps all around the moat, punji pits in the forest and snares on the path at predetermined locations. Hmm, anything else?”
“A touch of common sense wouldn’t go amiss,” Eugene put in bitingly, “would you two please stop it? We aren’t going to be lost in these woods forever and we aren’t going back to the car! Just follow me!”
He started marching off into the trees in a northerly direction, while behind him he heard Leaflow say, “that’s what got us lost in the first place.”
Not paying any attention to them, he set his course by the sun and began the trek through the woods. Once again they scaled boulder heaps, ridges and the tangles of brush that were in their way. But this time, everyone was a little less sure of their navigator and did not put their hearts into it, so that by the end of the day they had not made as much progress as Eugene would have liked. Tension ran high as they set up camp, the thief snapping early on, “I’m going to climb a tree to see if I can spot the road. You two make dinner.”
He chose the tallest Sugarpine in sight and scaled the lower part with some difficulty, before reaching the lowest branches and bounding easily up into the heights. Hugging the trunk with one arm, he leaned out to look all around. Behind them were only trees and hills, rolling one into the other. Off to each side was the same, the western trees tinted with the sunset. But to the north something glinted in a larger clearing. Concentrating his gaze, the young man made out an angled rectangle of shining metal, resting on top of some large object.
After un-sticking his arm from the tree (hugging it might not have been the best idea. It was covered in sap,) Eugene dropped back down through the branches and leaped lightly to the ground.
“Hey, you two. Good news. There’s some sort of building to our north; I saw its roof glinting in the last light.”
The other two showed a bit of interest in this announcement. After suggesting that it probably was a mad scientist’s hideout, Leaflow said, “but if they have a car we might be able to beg a lift into town.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Eugene nodded, “and once we reach the town, anywhere is easy.”
“Should we try for it tonight?” Maniac asked, tilting his head back to look at where the last light was touching the tips of the trees.
Eugene shook his head, “Tomorrow will do. It will take about an hour to hike there, if not a little more. But not all day, don’t worry!”
He added the last words quickly, throwing up his hands to forestall their acidic comments on his estimation skills. They camped that night in a more cheerful mood than they had been in all day, going to bed early so as to be ready for the morning.
Packing up in the gray light before the sun had fully risen, the three spoke eagerly of getting to the end of their quest. Eugene kept most of his plans to himself, but mentioned living finely on the money for a few years.
Maniac wanted to live well too, and have a bit of fun. Maybe go skydiving or deep-sea diving off the Florida keys.
Leaflow said that he was going to use his money to go home for a little bit, then go traveling again. They all felt that getting a lift into the next town would make the rest of the trip easy.
“Just an hour’s hike and we’ll be nearer to the end than ever before!” Eugene exclaimed, setting off in the lead once again. They slogged through a marshy bit of creek, down a long slope, over a bramble with razor-sharp thorns and through a surprisingly level bit of woods. It was through this that they came to the edge of the clearing. It spread out in an irregular oval with a graveled road curving off of the far side. The building in the center was a large house, sporting at least two stories, a turret and a gabled roof. Its windows winked in the early morning light, reflected in silver and gold. Where they weren’t broken, that is, or overgrown with ivy.
The driveway had weeds and wildflowers growing up through it, the lawn had not been trimmed in years and there was a sad lack of vehicles in the drive. Moss and mold hung down from the eaves of the house while prickly vines trailed around it’s base. No one had come to cut them back in years.
“Abandoned!” Maniac summed up what all of them had been thinking, moving over to crumble a window sill where dry rot had turned it to foam, “well, so much for quick trips to town and a friendly welcome!”
Eugene went to peer in one of the unbroken windows, seeing the sad and mysterious lighting of an empty house within. A rat nest sprawled in the corner of the room, dust covered the table and birds had stuffed straw in cracks of the roof. Obviously, no one had been there for a long time.
“At least it’s not mad scientists,” he joked weakly, disappointed at yet another setback, “though they would have had a car we could steal, I suppose.”
Leaflow gave him a look which said that he wasn’t convincing anyone to be more cheerful.
“We could live here, perhaps. No one would mind,” Maniac suggested, poking his head in a broken window for a moment, before pulling it out and shaking dust off of his hair.
“It’s probably haunted,” Leaflow stated, gesturing at an upstairs window, “or else how do you explain that?”
Up under the gable sat a large, triangular window divided into multiple panes. In each of these a staring face had been painted with some thin, whitish fluid. Eugene had not noticed them before, but now they gave him a queer chill. All of the faces were narrow and tall, slightly twisted and had expressions of languishing sorrow.
“It must be just a prank someone played once...” He tried to make his voice sound firm, but it trailed off on a wimpy note at the end. There was something otherworldly about those faces, as if they were watching you from another dimension. And a dimension that was not so full of pleasant illusions as this one is.
“Oh, those are nothing,” Maniac shrugged, picking up a fist-sized rock and cocking it back in his hand.
“Wait!” Eugene jumped forward, trying to stop him. But it was too late; he flung his arm forward and the stone went sailing through the air, smashing in the window with a loud explosion of shards. The faces crumbled away. Among the tinkles of broken glass they heard a moaning sigh.
It might have just been the wind flowing through the new gap. It could have been a breeze in the treetops. But all of them had an idea that it was the faces moaning in mixed anguish and relief at their untimely release.
Without another word all three adventurers picked up their dropped camping gear and fled into the forest.
---
All the time they were hiking to the highway, waiting for a car to pass in the right direction and pick them up, and riding in to town they argued. Or simmered in angry silence. Or threatened to beat each other’s heads in if another cross word was said. When they got out near a gas station on the edge of town it was no different. The driver was just pleased to see them go.
“It wasn’t my fault that we ran out of gas and found ourselves marooned in the first place!” Eugene exclaimed, spreading his arms wide, “If Leaflow had made sure that we had fuel none of it would have happened.”
“And if you had any brains we would have been here days ago, instead of taking that ‘long-cut’ through the woods,” the cloaked man told him dismissively.
“You’re both idiots,” Maniac muttered, fed up with the conversation.
“Look, we can still make up for lost time,” the thief told them, suddenly spotting a bus idling at the corner of the gas station, “we take this bus, which is going east, and we’ll get there without any more nonsense.”
“What about my car?” Leaflow stared hard at him, crossing his arms over his chest, “I’m not leaving it behind. Especially not with those ghosts that Maniac stirred up running loose around there.”
“You can pick it up later. With the bus, we won’t have any more accidents.”
“I’m not leaving it behind.”
Maniac put the heels of his palms to his eyes, “would you two please stop? I have a headache.”
“The bus is more sure.” Eugene repeated stubbornly.
Leaflow was just as unmoved, “the bus cost money to ride on. Money we don’t have.”
“If you two don’t stop I’m going to leave,” Maniac threatened, taking a step away.
“Fuel takes money too!” suddenly sick of trying to argue the others into doing things his way, Eugene began to run for the bus, “besides, you can just--”
He ran up a board leaning on a dumpster, scrambled to the low roof of the gas station and leaped lightly from there across the gap to the roof of the bus.
“--Hitch a ride on it!”
At that moment the bus began to move. He crouched down and put his hook through a grill on top, balancing himself with it against the headwind.
“That’s it, I’m out of here!” Maniac threw up his hands to stomp away. Leaflow stood watching for a moment, before muttering to himself, “I’m going to get fuel for my car. Then I’m out of here too.”
On top of the bus, Eugene splayed himself out on the roof, belly-down. The wind whipped at his hair and clothes as they picked up speed, forcing him to hold on with his one hand as well. It would have made him shiver, except for that the sun had warmed the roof already and it was almost too hot to stand beneath him.
Now that he was on his own his head seemed to clear a little and he realized that the top of the bus might not be the best place to ride. If it rained he would get soaked, at night in the mountains he would freeze and if there was any taller buildings along the way someone might see him. Inching his way over to the edge, he peered down the side of the bus. The road was spooling past in a black and yellow blur, as fluid as water and as hard as stone. He closed his eyes for a minute, dizzy, before opening them again and spotting what he was looking for. A baggage compartment, along the lower edge of the bus.
He pushed himself a little further over the edge, but the compartment was much too far away for him to get into from the roof. He would just have to stick it out on top until their next stop.
Curious, he turned his eyes to look through the top of the windows. For a moment he scanned the passengers idly, until his eyes locked on one point and his heart gave a leap that almost precipitated him off of the roof. Sitting on a far bench with her head turned away was a tall, slim woman wearing red, with a curtain of black hair hiding her face. Slowly she turned her head towards him, revealing that his instinct was correct. It was Irene Rillcoe.
For just a moment their eyes met. He winked mischievously, suddenly oblivious to the fact that he was clinging on to the edge of a moving bus with just his toes and fingertips. An elderly lady a few seats back had spotted him as well and was staring at him with mouth open, frozen in disbelieving silence.
Swiftly recalling himself, Eugene heaved back up on top of the bus, out of sight. The roof was too thick for him to hear what was going on inside the compartment, but he could guess. Irene would not betray him; she was far too cool-headed and independent for that. But the old woman would gather herself eventually and start squawking to the driver, who would in turn promise to search the roof at the next stop, even if he thought that it was impossible for a man to be up there. All making a bit of challenge to keep things interesting. And then there was the deep gaze of Irene still lingering in his mind...
Warmed by more than the roof, Eugene hummed cheerfully to himself all the way to the next stop on the bus route.