Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

Then she found her canoe, dragged it to the edge of the water, and knelt beside it to check her equipment. She spent some time getting used to the rifle. The first one she had found that was suitable was a Winchester 70 XTR Standard 30-06 bolt action. It held five shots, and the receiver was tapped for scope mounts. It was heavy, seven and a half pounds without the Weaver K4 scope. The man at the store had told her that her husband would be very pleased.

She loaded the magazine and set the rifle on top of the nylon tarp in the hull in front of her seat and wrapped it once to keep it from catching drops from her paddle blade when she changed sides. Then she distributed the weight of the rest of her possessions as evenly as possible. She spent a few minutes staring out across big Tupper Lake to memorize the shape and took compass readings to help her find the outlet at the other end.

When the lake was obsidian-black and glassy, Jane pushed her little canoe into the shallows among the reeds, settled her weight into it, and began to paddle. She moved the canoe steadily along the quiet, calm water. She set the compass down on the hull in front of her and moved out from the shore to where she could see any flicker of light in the woods above it. The darkness was comforting now because she knew that somewhere deep in the forest, a man who had embraced the left-handed twin, the Evil-minded, was waiting for her.

25

Jane paddled steadily but quietly. She judged the distance from her starting point at Martin’s hidden vehicle to the southern tip of big Tupper Lake to be ten or twelve miles. She planned to take three hours to get there, so she would reach the head of the lake about the time the moon rose. As the afterglow of the sunset disappeared, the swallows that had been skimming the surface of the lake for mosquitoes returned to their nests and she was alone.

She glanced down at her compass now and then as she got used to the little canoe. Six strokes on one side, then six on the other seemed to hold the canoe’s course straight and to keep her arms from feeling the strain. The simplicity of the act of paddling and the quiet swish of the light craft gliding on the still water soothed her. She let her senses explore the world around her. Route 30 ran along the far side of the lake, so once in a while she would see a tiny glow of light from a cabin or a fishing camp across the water. The west side, where she paddled, was dark.

The chill of the evening had begun to settle on the mountains, a still, frosty mist that made the air that entered her lungs burn a little. After she made the bend in the lake and passed the distant lights of the little town of Moody, she saw nothing to mark the far shore. At this time of year there probably weren’t many tourists, and the locals were locked in their houses recovering from the skiers, so the highway was already deserted.

She knew that he had come down this side of the lake, and she could visualize his passing if she allowed herself to reconstruct it. He had the kind of concentrated premeditation that seemed possible only to those who had given themselves over entirely to scheming. If he had parked the Bronco in the afternoon, he too probably had made this stretch of the journey at night. He was entering the last part of his trail that went near the places where even a sprinkling of people lived, where any roads had ever been.

She could hear the night whisper of the trees now that she had moved away from the roads. He had been born here. The North Woods could never represent safety to anyone who had been born here. He wasn’t running to safety. He was running because he knew he could go farther and deeper into a dangerous place than the ones who were chasing him. It was like a taunt, not meant to discourage pursuers but to lead them farther and farther out until they were in a place where he was stronger than they were. It was a place where shots could be fired without falling on a human ear, where any number of people could die without their bodies ever being found.

Her grandfather had told her old Nundawaono stories. Sometimes the people they happened to had names, but usually they were just the Hunter or the Woman, and they always seemed to end up alone in the forest, as she was now, and the forest was alive with frightening beings. There were flying heads with long streaming hair that sailed through the air, always searching the ground for something to feed their voracious craving for flesh. She couldn’t help feeling the hair on the back of her neck start to stand as she thought about the way she must look from above right now, alone in the middle of the empty lake, but she refused to turn her head and look over her shoulder.

Then there were the stone giants. When she looked to either side, she could almost see them stepping forward to free themselves from the camouflage of the bare rocky peaks of the dark mountains that surrounded her now, coming down to hunt her, their skin made of rock so she could not shoot them, and with such enormous strides that she could not outrun them. They were all supposed to have been killed off at Onondaga, a hundred miles south of here, except one, who still roamed the woods. That was the way the stories went: There was always one left, and it was the one her imagination could construct out of the shapes in the rocks above her right now.

The creature that had always struck her as especially horrible was the Naked Bear, because it had come too close to revealing overtly the secret of the stories. The secret was that the stories weren’t true, but they weren’t exactly imaginary, either. This was a bear, a creature whose nature was to kill people, but it wasn’t just a bear. It was hairless, made to look like a human being, and it talked: "Ongwe ias"—I am the one who eats you.

The surface of the big lake was almost invisible. She paddled on, going faster now because the slight sweat she had raised by paddling helped to keep her cool and her arms felt limber and strong after an hour of the rhythmic sameness. Her strokes had lengthened and become sure. It had been a couple of years since she had been in a canoe, but now everything had come back, because even when the mind forgot, the synapses in the brain that controlled physical movement had been altered to hold the pattern forever.

The moon came up an hour later, but she still could not see the end of the lake. The paddling had already become unconscious, and she spent the time making herself firmer and stronger. Her grandfather’s stories were cautionary tales: The lone hunter the woods devoured had made some mistake out here. A turned ankle or a case of dysentery or even a failure to see signs on a trail thirty miles from a road might as well be a bullet through the head. The thought made her afraid, but it was the right kind of fear, so she nurtured and studied it. The fear made her alert and cautious, aware of every sound. She felt the irises of her eyes opening wider, letting in more of the light from the moon that the black water reflected up at her. The people in the stories never survived by strength, only by cleverness. A human being was a small, fragile animal with skin that could be punctured and bones that broke. The only way to stay alive was to think clearly.

She stayed a couple of hundred feet from shore, where the tiny, almost imperceptible swish of the paddle would be difficult to hear and the shape of the canoe would be hard to separate from the shimmer of the surface of the lake. She studied every foot of the shoreline as she went, watching ahead for a faint glow, sniffing the air for the smell of smoke.

It was after midnight when she reached the southern tip of big Tupper Lake. The end was just a sense that the darkness had thickened in front of her. She paddled toward the shore through the standing reeds in the shallows that scraped quietly against the hull of her canoe, and passed along the shore until she found the inlet. It had been marked on the maps, but in the dark it was only a sensation that sounds were coming from farther back, not muffled, but open and alive. She had planned to camp here and wait for first light, but now that she had made it, she did not want to stop.