XX
Jacob is prepared for the interior of the house to be dark. He isn’t prepared for it to be full of trees, evergreens, from the feel of their branches. It’s as if he and the others have walked into a thicket. The sharp odor of pine threads the air. Needles tickle his cheeks and neck. Branches rustle as he follows the others through them. Who plants a forest inside his front door? he thinks, and the question strikes him as so ridiculous, he laughs out loud, a high-pitched whinny that rings on the tree trunks. It isn’t happy laughter. It’s the sound of someone who’s watched a woman who should’ve been dead days ago collapse into a pool of foul water, of someone who’s stared at a white creature whose gold eyes hold too much of knowledge, of someone who’s passed slowly between rippling walls of water. Rainer’s, “Steady,” quiets Jacob’s laughter, but it’s still there at the base of his throat, ready to geyser out.
A dim light whose source Jacob cannot locate renders the trees visible. The evergreens extend far back into the house. Although he couldn’t see how deep the house was, Jacob is fairly certain he and the others must be a good part of the way into it. Overhead, the trees are so high and so dense he can’t see the roof. Nor is the floor visible, though it feels more like dirt, rather than wood or stone, underfoot. Jacob supposes it makes sense. If you wanted to fill your house with a forest, you would need soil to plant it in. My God, he thinks, I’m reasoning like a crazy person.
The dirt floor angles down, gradually, at first, then more sharply. The trees appear to be thinning, drawing apart enough for Jacob to see Andrea in front of him, Angelo in front of him. To his left, Jacob hears a dull roar, like a storm blowing through a wood. The trees around him are still. If anything, the ground seems to be responding to the noise, shuddering slightly. As the trees yield to a small clearing, Jacob identifies the source of the roar. It’s a small stream foaming through a narrow ravine running roughly parallel to the course the five of them have been descending. White, the water gallops down the ravine as if it’s in flood. Rainer waits on the far side of the clearing, observing his companions.
Almost immediately, Jacob’s first thought—This man has a stream inside his house, too? — is replaced by another—We are not in the house, anymore—and a third—We never were. A look the way they came shows only evergreens ascending the slope. Above, the sky glows with the same dim light that’s disclosed their way. Beyond where Rainer stands observing them, the ground drops more dramatically — still passable, Jacob estimates, but with need of the trees that continue down it to help keep their descent manageable. Past that, his vision will not reach.
He is nervous, but not as much as he was walking the last few yards between those walls of water. To be frank, he would rather Rainer had not brought him wherever he is, but he assumes that, if Rainer has led them here, then Rainer will be able to lead them out of here. (He understands that this is not necessarily the case, but does not dwell on it.) Neither Italo nor Angelo appears particularly delighted, either, but they appear to be managing their emotions. Andrea is not doing as well. He passes his axe from his right hand to his left hand and back again. Whatever hand is not occupied with the tool steals to his face, where it rubs his jaw as if there’s a weighty problem he’s deliberating. Jacob supposes there is. The cast of the man’s features suggests his deliberations have stuck, if they ever got moving in the first place.
Rainer’s noticed Andrea, too, and is walking towards him. His lips are moving, but he’s speaking too softly for Jacob to pick out his words over the stream’s roaring. No doubt, he’s offering Andrea some form of reassurance. Andrea’s features relax. His hand leaves his jaw. Whatever Rainer’s saying to him, Jacob hopes he’ll repeat it for the rest of them. Rainer’s standing next to Andrea. He puts his left hand on the younger man’s shoulder, and that’s when Andrea bolts. Knocking Rainer over, he sprints straight downhill.
For a moment, Jacob, Italo, and Angelo stare at one another, open-mouthed. Then they’re at Rainer’s side, helping him to his feet. “What did you say to him?” Italo says.
“Never mind that,” Rainer says. “We must—” He waves after Andrea.
Angelo plunges after him, and before he can think better of it, so does Jacob. Past the clearing, the ground slants so sharply he finds himself in more of a controlled fall than a downhill run. He tries to dig his heels in, slow himself, but that almost tumbles him face-forward, so he’s forced to let gravity pull him along, his arms out for balance, his legs kicking up behind him, almost snagging on an exposed root and tripping him. To his left, the stream is practically a waterfall. To his right and in front of him, the trees have spread even further. He’s too busy keeping himself upright to devote much attention to it, but he’s reasonably sure the trees aren’t evergreens, anymore. No expert, Jacob doesn’t recognize the type at all. These trees are tall, slender, their branches and leaves clustered at their crowns. It’s another detail to put to the side, like the ground, which has lost its carpet of pine needles and is a dark, brownish-red. Already, the muscles up and down Jacob’s legs are protesting, and there’s at least half the slope left to go. Ahead and to the right, Angelo twists, trying to avoid the trunk directly in his path. He almost succeeds, but at the last second, his left shoulder connects with it, spinning him around and off his feet, into a roll. Jacob would stop to help him, if he could figure a way to do so that wouldn’t send him flying ass-over-teakettle. Besides, he’s sighted Andrea, almost at the foot of this steep hill. So he pushes past Angelo, who’s managed to throw himself onto his back and is sliding down feet-first, the leading edge of a plume of red dust. Beyond Andrea, Jacob can see something — he isn’t certain what, because he’d have to hold his head up to look for longer than he’s willing to risk running at this speed. Trees whip past him. To his left, the stream leaps and foams. To his right, in the middle distance, the reddish ground climbs to a ridge stationed with trees. His legs are on the verge of moving too fast for him. Andrea has reached the bottom of the slope, where, Jacob is relieved to see, he has come to a halt. Through the tops of the trees in front of and below him, Jacob glimpses something vast, something in motion. Andrea sees it, too; the sight of it seems to have fixed him to the spot. Jacob’s lungs are burning in his chest, his pulse drumming in his ears. His feet kick up sprays of dirt as they carry him down the hill. The axe threatens to fly from his grasp. Andrea has not moved from his place. Jacob is almost upon him.
And then the ground levels, and he’s running towards Andrea. He tries to bring himself to a stop, but it’s as if there’s a weight hung from his neck, pulling him on. On legs at their very limit, legs like taffy, he stumbles past Andrea, one, two, three steps, when the weight around his neck pulls him to his knees. Hand still on his axe, Jacob leans forward. Andrea — he has to see to Andrea. If only his heart wouldn’t beat so fast. It seems to be taking all his strength into itself. Muscles trembling, he tries to stand, cannot. There is a noise in front of him, a sound his brain is telling him he should know. He raises his head and what he beholds chases all thought of his discomfort — all thought — from his mind.
XXI
Maybe fifty yards away, an ocean crashes its waves against a rocky shore. Jacob has seen the ocean, before — he had to cross one to travel to America — but that in no way prepared him for this one. This is an ocean whose water is dark, as if Jacob is seeing it at night, as if it’s made of night. It’s an ocean in storm. Even though the sky above is clear, the dark water lifts itself in frothing waves large as houses. Some of these burst on the jagged boulders that constitute the beach, shooting spray high into the air. Others smash into one another, larger waves sweeping over smaller ones, consuming them, rows of smaller waves angling into larger ones, collapsing them. It’s as if this is a spot where a host of opposing currents converge. A few hundred yards from the stony beach — it’s hard to estimate distances with any accuracy in this tumult, but much too close for comfort, let alone sanity — something enormous raises itself amidst the waves. For a moment, Jacob’s mind insists that what arcs out of the water is an island, because there is no living creature that big in all of creation. Then it moves, first rising even higher, into a more severe arch, then subsiding, lifting itself from the waves at both ends while relaxing its middle into a gradual curve, the whole of its dull surface traversed by the ripples of what Jacob understands are great muscles flexing and releasing, and there’s no doubt this is alive. Before now, if you had asked Jacob to name the largest thing he’s ever seen, he might have answered with St. Stephen’s cathedral, in Vienna. But the beast against whose scaly side the black water batters itself dwarfs that structure. There is so much of it that its very presence presses on Jacob, as if mere proximity to it might be sufficient to snuff him out, like a candle in a hurricane.