Sometime in the night he met a horseman. He’d been walking on half asleep, stumbling with a wooden gait, and the horseman was almost upon him before he recognized the sound of steel shoes on the packed earth roadbed. There was a bend in the road ahead and the rider just beyond and without even thinking he veered off down an embankmentand crouched in a thicket of winter huckleberry bushes till the rider should pass. When he passed he passed above him with the sound of steel on stone and the creak of the saddle and Tyler could see the smoking breath of the black horse and the rider pale and indistinct like some underimagined protagonist in a fever dream. Horse and rider diminished into the foggy rain and the mist muffled the slow clop of hoofbeats. There was a sharp pain in his chest and he realized he’d been holding his breath. He exhaled in a pale plume of steam and hunkered there in the winter huckleberries. He was shivering from more than the cold. He fought an almost overpowering urge to flee crazed and directionless into the fog that drifted between the dark boles of the trees. He didn’t know if it was Sutter or not and he didn’t know if it was real or he had dreamed it but he knew that something dread had passed over him in the night and gone on.
He could hear a rush of water toward the hollow that kept increasing in intensity, and he went downhill tree to tree over the slick, soggy leaves. Runoff was massing where the hollow was deepest and he could hear more than see the churning below him, a vague, dark, turbulent motion and thick, creamlike gouts of foam clocking rapidly downstream.
Loath to return to the road just yet lest the horseman double back he clambered on around the hillside, going steadily downhill. The carpet of wet leaves thinned to ultimate stony shale and he could hear his boots on the rocks. His feet felt wooden and strange and he wondered idly if they were frozen. He didn’t know how cold it was but it didn’t seem to matter. It was just cold. The earth flattened and widened here and he was moving through halfgrown cedars that loomed suddenly out of the mist like shrouded ghosts, and the waterwas boiling into a larger body of water and he stopped to get his bearings. He looked up as if to chart from the stars, but the heavens were leaden yet and out of them the ceaseless rain still fell. Some nameless creek on his right but he didn’t know what creek or even which direction it should be flowing. He went on. On his right hand rose an embankment that came out of the fog and continued on too symmetrical to have just happened, and he clambered up its rickrack sides to the summit, where railroad tracks laid on crossties gleamed palely with a wet phosphorescence through the dead weeds grown through them. One way led to town but in the dark he wasn’t sure which. Down the bank on the other side another shadow loomed anomalous out of the more familiar shadows of trees and stone.
He approached cautiously. If it was a house it might be inhabited and folks hereabouts sometimes answered a nighttime summons with a shotgun in hand. It was a house, or at least a building of some kind. A wall with darker rectangles for stonedout windows and a doorless cavity behind a canted stoop. He went in slowly, feeling for missing floorboards with his feet and for the snuffbox of matches with stiff fingers, and whatever tenanted the house this night crossed the floor in nighsoundless scuttling and over the windowsill and into the night. Somewhere in all this dark a startled nightbird rose with a clamor of wings and subsided against a wall with a soft thud. Rose fluttering again.
He dried his hands as best he could on the lining of the coat and lit a match. A low ceiling over his head, loose paper hanging in shreds. On the wall across the ruin of a fireplace. A litter of old newspapers, broken boards. The match went out, and he could hear the rain drumming on the tin roof. Within a half hour he had a cheery fire going in the fireplace and he was crouched before it feeding it broken pieces of boxing he had ripped off a partition wall. The room was lit with a hellish orange light and he had the firebox fairly stuffed to the damper with splintered chestnut before he ceased and he just sat on the hearth for a time basking in the heat. He’d never felt anything better and he hadn’t known such cold as he’d been existed. He’d kept the bag sheltered from the rain as best he could, and now he ate the lunch she’d packed. Thick slabs of yeast bread smeared with butter and jelly. Loose ground coffee in a folded paper tied with floursack ravels. He could smell the coffee through the paper and he had a taste for a cup but he could find no sort of pan about.
When he had eaten he stripped off his clothes and put the steaming coat back on and buttoned it around him. He leant boards against the brick mantle and hung his trousers and shirt to dry. He went on gathering wood for a while until he had a great pile mounded before the hearth. The chestnut burned fiercely hot but it was dry as tinder and there wasn’t much last to it.
He gathered a stack of old newspapers to read and sat as close to the hearth as the heat would permit. An eye to the boards cocked against the mantle, he had to be forever turning his clothes lest they scorch. He chewed a handful of the coffee raw, swallowing the bitter essence, and tried to read, but he was utterly weary, and the stories the papers told were strange and surreal and whole sentences tilted and slid off the page into the fire.
When the clothes were dry he put them on and restoked the fire one last time, and with a stack of newspapers for a pillow and the coat for a blanket he went to sleep. His dream was strange and fevered.
He was on a blasted heath where the trees were sparse and dead. Birds he couldn’t put a name to clustered their bare branches and called mournfully ahead of him and fell silent at his approach, then resumed when he’d passed as if they’d announce his entry into this sepia world of shades. He moved on a thin skift of snow that a sourceless wind kept setting in motion and settling back and all there was was the white snow and the black skeletal trees.
The weary road he traveled wound gently downhill toward a vague depression in the earth and he kept trudging on and after a time he could see another traveler approaching, a black figure seeping across the snowy landscape like a line of ink dripping down the snowy page, and he came to think that across a vast distance he was approaching a mirror image of himself.
When they met they ceased walking without speaking for a time and hunkered in the frozen roadbed to rest. The man took out a sack of Country Gentleman and rolled himself a cigarette with deft economy of motion and offered the tobacco then when it was refused pocketed it.
Then Tyler knew him.
Why, you’re Clifford Suggs, he said. Wait till Claudelle and Drew hear about me running up on you. Drew thinks you were lost down a mineshaft, and they’ve been hunting you for years.
The man exhaled acrid blue smoke from his nostrils. Beneath the felt hatbrim his shadowed face studying Tyler with a kind of distant amusement.
I don’t know who you are or how the story come to you, but you got it turned around backwards. I’m the one been huntin them. They’re the ones that’s gone.
Tyler was studying his shoes where the snow was compressed into a thin sole of transparent ice and between his feet were little curling strands of grass all seized in tubes of ice and when he looked back up the man’s face with the curious illogic of dreams was gone. In its place was a yellowed skull with a few strands of lank dead hair. Within the skull there was furtive movement. He leant to see. A rat’s sharp gray face peered through an eyesocket and all about the eyeholes the bone was chamfered with teethmarks, but the rat would not fit. It withdrew, turning, trying the other eyehole then growing claustrophobic and agitated and turning endless upon itself within the bony confines of the skull but there was no way out.