She shook with rage like a bit of newspaper shaken by the wind, a bit of blazing paper in a fire.
“I warn you!”
What she had said before was getting through to him.
“There are—people that live there?”
After a long pause she said, “Yes. There are.”
Her eyes flashed queerly in the restless light.
“They’re waiting for you,” she said in her stifled, jeering voice, and then came forward suddenly and passed him, not going back, as he had expected, down the path into the evening land, but passing him, abrupt, swift, solid, and going forward into the morning. Within a few feet the bulk of the thickets hid her, another moment and the slight sound of her steps was gone.
Hugh stood bewildered and bereft in the warm, slightly dusty air of the woods, which was continually shaken by the vibration of distant engines on the ground and in the air. A spot of sunlight filtering in through leaves danced on the dun cover of his bedroll, in constant motion.
Where do I go now? There isn’t anywhere to go.
He was tired, worn out by emotions—anger, fear, grief. He sat down there beside the path, one hand on his backpack, protectively, or for reassurance. The dreary ache of loss would not leave him or grow less.
Maybe she feels like this too, he thought. Like I took it away from her.
But I can’t help it. I have to go back. I don’t have anywhere else. She has no right…That was not the appropriate word, but he did not know how else to put it.
I will go back. I won’t leave my stuff there. Not at the gateway clearing, anyhow. I could go farther—up the creek a ways. She can’t go everywhere. There’s no reason we’d ever have to see each other.
Unless I can’t get out again.
That thought went through his mind quite lightly. The panic terror he had submitted to when the gateway led only farther into the twilight had already sunk down deep in him, too deep to stir up easily. If it’s like that again I can wait, he told himself, and go through with her when she comes.
She’s like me, she comes from here. But there are people who live there, she said.
But his mind slipped away from this idea too. I don’t have to meet them. There’s never been anybody at the creek place. And she’s gone now. I’m going back…
He shoved his gear under the dusty, spiny outskirts of the thicket, stood up, and went back down the path to the threshold and into the twilight, to the clear water where, at last, he knelt and drank. The water washed his face and his hands, washed away shame and fear. “This is my home,” he said to the earth and rocks and trees, and with his lips almost on the water, whispered, “I am you. I am you.”
He got to Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart at ten and by ten-five was opening up Line Seven. Donna looked over from the register in Six. “You O.K., Buck?”
For Hugh two days and three nights had passed since he left work an hour early yesterday afternoon; he did not remember why Donna might think he wasn’t O.K. “Sure!” he said.
She looked him up and down with a curious expression, cynical yet admiring. “You wasn’t sick at all,” she said. “You had something better to do.” She rang up a sixpack of cola and a packet of cocktail cheese snacks for a shaky, unshaven old man, remarking to him and to Hugh, “Ain’t it wonderful to be young? But I wouldn’t go through it again if you paid me.”
He did not explore far downstream. The gorge of the creek deepened; it always seemed darker in that direction. Upstream from the gateway clearing there was less underbrush, and in many places the creek had clear, broad, sandy verges. He came to a place where the creek, under a stand of big willows, was narrowed by an outcropping of red rock that slanted across the streambed in steps and shelves. Above the white water lay a deep, long pool. The shores were overhung by trees, but the pool itself lay open to the sky. The place had about it a sense of remoteness, self-containment; no one else would come here.
He made a cache for his gear, the fork of a low tree, so thickly overgrown with a small-leafed vine that it was hidden even from him till he put his hands on it. He gathered a little supply of firewood, mostly branches from a dead tree nearby, and scooped a fireplace in the sand of the sheltered bank just above the barrier of red rocks. He laid a fire ready. Then he took off his shirt and jeans and silently, holding his body straight, walked out into the still pool. Just above the rock barrier it was deeper than he was tall. There he swam in silent and intense delight until he could bear the cold no longer, and made for the shore cramped and shuddering, and lighted his fire.
The flames were beautiful in the clear twilight. He crouched naked to get the heat on his skin, in his bones. At last he dressed, and made himself a cup of the sweet coffee-chocolate mix he had bought on sale, and sat drinking it in peace of heart. When the fire had burned down he covered all trace of it with sand, put on his shoes, and set off to explore farther upstream.
He came daily now. Half his life was spent in the twilight land. When he was there even the rhythm of his breathing was different; was deeper. When he woke from the sleep he slept there, a sleep deeper than dream, dark and resistless as the currents of the stream, he would lie a while, lazy, listening to the water run and the leaves stir, thinking, I’ll stay here…I’ll stay another while…He never did. When he was at work in the supermarket, or at home, he did not think much about the evening land. It was there, that was all he had to know while he was checking out a sixty-dollar load of groceries or getting his mother quieted down after a rough day at the loan company where she worked. It was there, and he could come back to it, the silence that gave words meaning, the center that gave the world a shape.
He had never found the gate closed again, and had given the possibility very little thought. It had had something to do with the girl. It had happened because of her, because of her being there, and that was why she had been able to unhappen it, going with him through to the other side. From time to time he thought about her, apprehensive yet regretful. If she had not been so full of hate and spite maybe they could have talked. He had let her push him around, it was his fault. She might have told him something about this land. Apparently she had known it longer and knew it better than he did. If she didn’t live here, she knew those who did.
If there were any others. He thought about that a good deal, during his silent whiles at the willow place. All she had said was something like, “You don’t know the language,” and then when he had asked if there were people living here she had said yes, but after hesitating, and with something faked or forced in what she said. She had been trying to scare him. And the idea was threatening. It was being alone here that was the joy of it. Being alone, not having to try to handle other people, their needs, demands, commands.
But people who lived here, what could they be like? What language would they speak? Nothing here spoke. No bird ever sang. There must be animals in the woods but they were elusive, silent. There was no need for anybody here to bother anybody else.
He thought about these things when he sat in the silence by the bright small fire beside the water under the willows. A thought here could occupy his mind for a long time, having room to expand and think itself through. He had never felt himself to be particularly stupid, and had done well enough in school in the subjects he liked, but he knew people found him stupid because he had no quickness. His mind would not work in a hurry, would not rush. Here he could come and think things out, and that made a great part of the freedom he felt here. The alternation of two utterly different lives, the repeated crossing of the threshold between Kensington Heights and the evening land, might have confused and exhausted him, if it had not been for the strength he got from his whiles by the creek. He was quiet, occupied simply and fully with hiking, swimming, sleeping, thinking, using his senses; and that full quietness replaced all the sense of being pushed and hurried through life without time to ask what he was doing or where he ought to go, without time to see that there were choices, and to choose. Even there, if he held fast to the quietness he found here, even there he managed to get some thinking done.