Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

I readjusted my goggles and watched the world suddenly glow as if in a warm fire. “Are you telling futures now, Virgil?”

He smiled as he stood and approached me. “I am. How do you like yours?”

“Couldn’t you have just told me I was going to be rich someday?”

He considered it. “No. Now, do you have something you wish to tell me?”

I chewed on the inside of my lip. “Not just yet.” I readjusted my hat. “And now, if you’re through gazing into your crystal ball, how about we get going?”

He stared at me a few moments more with the smile still in place and then raised his arm, inviting me to take the lead. “I’ll assist you for as long as the Old Ones tell me to.” With the next statement, the smile faded a little but was still there. “Pax?”

I smiled back till I was sure my teeth were going to crack. “Pax.”

Rather than follow the trail and face the drifts, Virgil decided that we would make better time crossing the frozen, windscrubbed flat of Lake Marion or Dead Horse, depending on your Maker.

After climbing over a few boulders, I removed my snowshoes and attached them to the pack. We stood at the precipice of the expanse, and I studied the ridge at Mistymoon that appeared and disappeared with the changing cloud currents. “We’re also going to make some pretty majestic targets out there on the ice if somebody, and I mean Raynaud Shade, is aiming a laser sight at us from up on that ridge.”

Virgil had draped the remnants of a wool trade blanket across his face for protection against the wind, and pulled it down with a forefinger to address me as he scanned the deadstand, beetle-killed trees. “No one there.”

I stepped off onto the slick surface under the skim layer of snow that the wind had left as change. “Fine with me; you’re a bigger target than I am.”

He muffled a laugh as he re-covered his face with the red cloth and then wrapped one of the grizzly arms across it and over his shoulder with the panache of a high-fashion model. “Like a tin bear in a shooting gallery?”

Boy howdy.

After a couple of hundred yards I came to the conclusion that the surface was slicker than I’d thought, and the light layer of driven snow made ball bearings under my boots, causing me to slip and catch myself with each step. It was getting to be like a tightrope act, and I was about to turn and tell Virgil to forget about this route when I took a long split and rolled to my right, the weight of the pack and rifle forcing the side of my head to strike the ice with full force.

“Where are we going?”

“If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise.”

He watches as the almost-man drives the truck, newer than his grandfather’s. The truck is loud and he watches the strange territory pass by the window, growing higher and more rocky-mountains unfamiliar to him.

There was a time when his grandfather took him to a place like this, telling him stories of the mighty warrior that had helped the Thunderbirds in their battle against the Water Monsters. He said the man had gone so far that he had forgotten who he was and from where he came. This will never happen to you because you will find the hard edges of the earth rounded by those who love you, he had said.

After many miles the boy begins to cry, softly at first and then stronger.

“Shut up or I’ll really give you something to cry about,” the almost-man said.

I lay there for a few seconds and fought against the concussion, but my eyes refused to focus. I closed them for a moment and thought I could hear something in the ice as though the plates of frozen water were colliding underneath me, grinding like glaciers. I opened my eyes and watched the snow skim across the surface toward me and could feel the warmth of my face adhering its skin to the lake.

I peeled my face away and looked at the sky, half expecting Virgil to yank me back up to a standing position, but nothing happened.

I stared at the lower part of the clouds that raced overhead and could hear a thumping noise, loud and insistent. The noise was steady, but it wasn’t coming from above-rather, from below. I could feel it in my back, through the expedition pack, as it set up a rhythm. It was a song in counterpoint, one that I’d heard before but was unable to identify.

The noise settled into my heartbeat and the pounding in my head. My legs moved okay, but when I pulled my hand away from my temple, there was blood. The pain was tremendous and once again reminded me of the headaches I’d had only a few months ago, before my eye operation. I stretched my jaw and probed the wound under my hat-more blood. “Well, hell…”

My hat fell off as I rolled onto the pack on my back and sat there looking for Virgil.

There was no one.

As far as I could see, there was no one on the ice of Lake Marion but me.

I immediately felt panic, disconnected the breast strap, and shrugged the pack and rifle from my shoulders. I wrestled myself to my feet, assuming that with Virgil’s weight he had hit a soft spot in the ice and had broken through.

I kneeled, sweeping my arms across in an attempt to find the hole that must’ve been covered by the snow, but there wasn’t anything. I scrambled my way back along my tracks but could see only the dull, opaque sheen of the flat surface with not so much as a crack.

My head was still killing me, but I couldn’t stop jerking it from left to right in an attempt to find him. I took a deep breath and stood, turning three hundred and sixty degrees, but there was nothing except undisturbed lake. I walked in a spiraling circle emanating from where I’d fallen, fully expecting the giant Crow to be somewhere in my field of vision, either approaching or disappearing into the blowing snow, but he wasn’t there and there were no prints.

I stretched my jaw again and blinked my eyes. “Virgil!”

“Virgil. Virgil…”

My voice ricocheted off the cliffs, and I swallowed and stood there for a moment more before noticing that my hat was skimming away on the surface of the lake. Carefully, I trudged across the smooth, hard surface and had just begun to lean over to grab it when a ripping gust carried it out toward the center until it lodged in a small drift a good twenty yards away toward the ridge. I sighed and thought about how I’d lost my last hat and how I damn well wasn’t going to lose this one.

Figuring I’d not have to backtrack if I took the entire load with me, I gripped the strap of the pack and hoisted it, picked up the Sharps and examined it to see if I’d done any damage, but it appeared intact. I put the rifle on my shoulder and looked through the binoculars.

All I could see were the acres of beetle-kill pine that spilled over the ridge and down the valley toward me. I followed the trail to make sure Virgil hadn’t gone ahead and then followed it behind to see if he’d retreated.

I lowered the binoculars and looked around just one more time, forcing his name from my lungs like a bullhorn. “Virgil!?”

Nothing.

I approached my hat and watched as it started to flip up again. I scrambled over and got ahold of the crown and tried to pull it up, but it stuck to the ice, probably from the warmth of my head.

I yanked at it this time, scattering the snow and revealing a freeze-dried, mummified hand.

I blinked hard to clear my head, thinking that it must’ve been a frozen branch, but it was still there when I opened my eyes. I knelt down and used my hat as a fan to scatter the snow that had built up around the thing.

There was a lot of skin left, with a few tendons, and the nails were purpled and black. The wrist was bent, the thumb contracted toward the palm, the forefinger extended and the other three digits slightly curved, almost as if that one finger were pointing up the trail.