Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

The river was slow and the banks thick with low trees and bushes. He had a three-day start on her. She tried to feel his presence ahead, but it seemed wrong. He wouldn’t paddle this far, down to the tip of the big lake, and then stop a mile up the river. He would go on, farther from policemen, electric lights, and roads.

If she guessed wrong and he had stopped along the little river, then it would be better to come on him in the dark, when he might be asleep, than to swing around a bend in bright sunlight and find him waiting. She paddled on up the little river into the dark forest. The river was swollen with water from the melted snows above, but she could make slow headway by paddling hard and not letting the canoe glide. She threw herself into the work, watching the trees along the banks for signs and the water ahead for obstacles.

At three in the morning, she was stopped by a big old tree that had fallen into the water across the channel. She let the current carry her a few yards backward and then headed her canoe into the opposite bank. She pulled the craft up on the mud into the weeds and found a flat place in the trees to lay out her nylon tarp. She wrapped herself in her down jacket, rested her head on her backpack, and went to sleep with her hand touching the stock of the rifle.

Dawn came three hours later, with the chirping of chickadees and the rap of a woodpecker back in the woods. It was still blue half-light in the forest, but she found that objects around her were beginning to have clear edges. She sat by the side of the water to eat her packaged breakfast of dried beef and eggs. She had brought nothing that she couldn’t eat uncooked, but she would have liked a fire now for the warmth. In the night she had kept up a sweat, but during the three hours of sleep she had stiffened and the cold and damp had settled on her.

When she had finished eating, she loaded her canoe and dragged it around the fallen tree, staring at the ground. There were no keel marks, no footprints. She launched her canoe and paddled to the opposite bank, then stepped ashore again. She walked to the place where the roots of the tree had lifted a piece of the bank and found no signs there, either. She widened her search until she found one. He had pulled his canoe up onto the bank at least a hundred feet downstream from the fallen tree trunk. He had caved in the bank a little to destroy his keel mark. Then he could only have walked into the forest. It took her a few more minutes before she found his footprint in the dirt: the ripple-soled hiking boots he had bought in Lake Placid. She moved ahead in the direction the toe was pointing, but she lost him again.

She walked back to the place where she had found the print. It was a single mark, a misstep maybe, but it was disturbing. There were no tracks going back: He had made only one trip. He had managed to pack all the gear and supplies he had bought onto his back, lift the canoe, and walk through the woods around the barrier. It made her feel small and weak and alone. He was so much bigger and stronger, and he wasn’t using his size to make mistakes but to be more careful. He had started to walk long before a tracker would look for footprints, and gone into the woods instead of staying on the bank. The only reason she had found any mark at all was because she had known there had to be one.

She walked back to her canoe and stepped in. This time she didn’t wrap the rifle in the tarp but kept it beside her as she pushed out into the stream and began to paddle. It was after 10:00 A.M. when she reached the mouth of the stream at Round Lake. As soon as she recognized what it was, she went back down the river a hundred yards, pulled her canoe up into the woods, and brought the rifle back with her. She hid in some bushes near the edge of the lake and scanned the shoreline through the rifle scope.

There was no smoke, no canoe, no sign of human life anywhere along the margin of the lake. She opened her map and studied it. There was a small circular road marked 421 that went west at the other end of Round Lake, leading to a little town called Sabattis and back. After that, there was nothing. The logic of it said he wasn’t waiting for her here. He had started out in the tourist spots, where strangers were a common sight, and he had laboriously made his way down here. He wasn’t going to stop until he had left even that road behind him.

Jane went back to her canoe and put it into the water again. She spent the afternoon going across the lake and down the stream to the bridge where the road crossed it. She searched the area around the bridge for a half hour but found no sign that he had been here, or that anyone else had, either. She made it to the edge of Little Tupper Lake in late afternoon and stopped to eat dinner and watch the water. The lake was oblong like big Tupper, formed by glaciers moving south and scraping the mountains. She used the rifle scope to look for the usual signs of life, and she began to feel a foreboding.

She had been paddling deeper and deeper into the western reaches of the forest, away from the dramatic, scenic peaks and the resort hotels built below them and, finally, away from even the smallest roads. Now she was at the edge of a five-mile lake, and it looked enormous, with thick forests beyond and jagged mountains as a backdrop. The quiet was overwhelming. In the night the quiet had seemed like a cloak to her, protecting her, but now in the clear, bright late afternoon it seemed like an emptiness waiting for something to fill it. She could hear birds in the forest and a buzzing blackfly that kept making spirals in the air behind her ear. Beyond those constant, unchanging noises there was no sound. When she moved, the crunch of a twig made her spine stiffen.

When she had come up here as a child with her parents, they had stayed on Cranberry Lake in a cabin and fished and gone east to hike up Mount Marcy because that was what tourists were supposed to do. But they had never left the marked trails. In those days the rangers used to tell people the Adirondacks were the oldest mountains on earth. Since then, the scientists had learned that they were young and still growing.

Today the part about growing made them seem alive, capable of at least that much intention and therefore almost sentient, but with a brutal kind of sentience: the blind, brainless reflex of monstrous stomach-turning sea creatures that lived in the dark and rose toward sounds so they could eat. She knew that what she was feeling was a form of agoraphobia. If she didn’t shake it off, she was going to end up cowering somewhere, trembling and unable to take care of herself.

She waited for the blackfly to settle, then slapped at it but missed, and this only seemed to wake others. She pushed her canoe into the water and headed for the middle of the lake. She told herself she was doing it to stay out where the blackflies weren’t swarming, but it was actually to stay in the open, away from the banks.

She camped for the night at the tip of Little Tupper. She forced herself to do what she knew she had to do. She picked out a package of dried food, read on the label that it was designed for a hearty meal, and ate all of it. She walked knee-deep into the icy water to bathe and wash her clothes, then hung them on a low limb to dry. At the end of it, she was exhausted. She made her tarp into a lean-to and fell into a deep sleep beneath it.

She was in dark emptiness for an hour, and then her mind began to work again. In her dream it was still night, but she became aware that there was a splash and then another and then a dripping sound. The splashes were footsteps. She sat up to reach for her rifle, but it wasn’t there. She turned and looked at the lake. A man was coming up out of it, walking toward her, the water dripping off his clothes as he sloshed to shore. He walked up onto the bank and stood across the campfire from her. For a moment she was angry at herself for having built a fire, but then she remembered that she hadn’t. It had just come. Then she recognized the man: He was Harry Kemple. He leaned down and warmed his hands at the fire, and she could see steam rising from the shoulders of his dripping suit.