J. Lennon - Castle

The cheeseburger sat uneasily in my gut, and I scolded myself for my indiscretion. What on earth was the matter with me?

By the time I reached the house, the sun was going down and cold had returned. I parked, climbed the front steps, and walked through the door into the darkness of the front room. I had set my bags of supplies down on the floor and was reaching for the thermostat when I experienced the same creeping unease of the night before, prompted by some faint noise from upstairs. I was convinced that someone was inside my house.

I didn’t hesitate and allow fear to take root. Instead I sprang into action, climbing the steps two at a time, flipping the light switches as I went. The hallway exploded into light, and I ran from room to room, illuminating everything and throwing open the closet doors. But, as before, there was nothing. The closets were empty of all but my possessions. Beneath my bed was only dust. I did discover that I had left my bedroom window open an inch or so — perhaps a draft had been causing the door to bang against its frame while I was out.

Frustrated and exhausted, my body throbbing from my injuries, my mind racing with the day’s uncharacteristic social interaction, I stumbled into the bath and, soon after, fell into bed. I dreamt with unusual intensity. A girl appeared in the bedroom doorway, long black hair framing a pale thin face. She was illuminated by a cold light without any clear source, and wore a thin nightgown of plain cotton. She could not be more than twelve years old, and I understood her to be Rachel, Avery Stiles’s daughter, who had been mentioned in his wife’s obituary. When she turned to leave, I followed her down the stairs and into the yard: she crossed the threshold of the woods and disappeared. Realizing that she was in danger, I gave chase. The nightgown flashed between the trees. I was quite naked; branches scratched and gouged my bare skin. I heard the girl scream, and came at last to a hole, a pit like the one I had fallen into — but it was far deeper, too deep to see into. I began to climb down, calling the girl’s name, as I groped with my toes for footholds in the crumbling dirt.

At last I fell, tumbling some great distance before striking the ground flat on my back. I looked down and saw the sharpened branches jutting up through my ruined body, slick with blood, and when my head fell back I found Rachel standing above, on the edge of the pit, gazing at me with empty eyes. I woke on the bedroom floor, my head throbbing, a scream curled in my throat.

It was still night. I lay, naked on the cold wood, until my heart and breath had slowed. I felt as though I hadn’t slept at all. With effort I hauled myself to my feet. Through the window came the glow of the moon behind the house; the landscape was edged with silver, the trees and rock etched against the starry sky. I am not deeply moved by beauty, and in fact may even be incapable of appreciating or even recognizing it. But there was a profound rightness to the scene outside, a natural order that the unseen moon seemed to emphasize with its clinical light. I could admire this, the ability of nature to create order out of chaos, and I stood in the window, coexisting with it, feeling some small part of it, for long minutes. Not a thought was in my head, and my dream was already half-forgotten.

But it came back to me with terrifying force when I looked down into the yard and noticed a white shape lying curled in the grass.

It was hard to make out, there at the edge of the woods, in the shadow of the house; but it had the appearance of a twisted white sheet. Could it be her? I wondered. Could the girl, the dream, have been real? I ran down the stairs, out the door, across the parking lot. The gravel scoured my bare feet and the cold air shocked my bare skin, and I made my way across the yard, the white blur looming closer.

Even when I was upon it, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. I crouched down and reached forward, expecting to feel the soft cotton of the girl’s gown, her lifeless body beneath it. Instead, what I felt was bristly, coarse, like a woolen rug, and still warm, though no life was evident. In a moment, I understood. I jerked my hand away, stood, stepped back.

It was lying on its side, its legs splayed out against the grass, its head thrown back. The dead eye gleamed. It was the white deer, pierced through the heart with an arrow.

At first I assumed the arrow to be a sportsman’s. But when I touched it, and felt its irregular, planed smoothness, I realized that it had been handmade, from a whittled twig and what appeared, in the moonlight, to be crow’s feathers. The shot was excellent — it had struck directly between the creature’s ribs. There was little blood, just the barest stain around the wound, far less than one might expect from an animal with its heart pierced, and I wondered if perhaps the hunter had treated the arrow with poison.

And how had the deer come to rest here, at the edge of my yard — and why? It couldn’t be chance that led it here; its presence could only have been deliberate, a signal to me. I knew now with certainty that my pack had been stolen by a human being, not some hungry animal. I stood and scanned the impenetrable treeline. Was this hunter, this thief, watching me now? My flesh rippled with fear and disgust, and I felt, for the first time, utterly exposed.

I mastered myself, however, and went back inside with slow, deliberate steps. I dressed. It was a quarter to four — sleep, it appeared, was finished with me for the night. I went out the back door, grabbing a shovel from the vestibule, and returned to the white deer’s corpse. In the few minutes I’d been away, it seemed to have deflated somehow, its one visible eye sunken, its fur lusterless. The body had cooled. With another glance at the treeline, I took a few steps back and sank the shovel into the sod.

The soil here was clayey and resisted the blade, but I had faced far greater challenges, and persisted in my work. In an hour I had made considerable progress, and when dawn arrived, the hole was dug. I went inside and drank a glass of water, then returned to the grave. I wiggled the arrow: it was stuck fast. After a moment’s thought, I went back to the kitchen, found a pair of rubber gloves, and put them on. I then removed my new knife — it had replaced the one stolen over the weekend — from my new pack, and carried it outside. I made several cuts in the deer’s flesh, radiating away from the arrow’s shaft, and in time I was able to wiggle the weapon free. I held it up before my eyes. The tip appeared to have been fashioned from scrap metal — stainless steel, it seemed, perhaps from an old kitchen knife. It was roughly cut, and uneven, but the blade itself had been carefully whetted and was clearly very sharp. I brought it inside, rinsed it off under the faucet, then left it to soak in a mixture of hot water, dish soap, and bleach. I would scrub it more carefully later, using a brush — I didn’t want to risk the same fate as my deer.

Back outside, I took two of the animal’s hooves in my hands and dragged it into the grave. I’d dug the hole three feet deep, and hoped this would be enough to discourage scavenging creatures. I shoveled the dirt back on top, tamped it down again with my feet, and replaced the sod. The mound was considerable and would likely remain so for a long time.

I completed my cleaning of the arrow, then sat down at the kitchen table to examine it. It was, to be sure, a peculiar artifact. The maker had found a remarkably straight twig, cut it to a length of thirty-six inches, stripped it of bark, and sanded down the knots, perhaps with a rough stone. He had carefully split several crow’s feathers, slotted the shaft, and inserted them with impressive straightness, apparently without glue. The same was true of the tip, which, as I had surmised, was made of a kitchen knife — the beginning of the word JAPAN was actually visible, engraved on one side — cut to the shape of an elongated chevron and ground to a stunning sharpness. A very small, crude hole had been bored in the shaft and through the blade, and a precise little peg had been fitted to hold the metal in place. I tugged at the tip, but it would not budge. The arrow was solid.