Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

The clouds didn’t clear. Instead, the cold wind penetrated her light shirt, bringing with it big icy drops that slapped the leaves and exploded into mist. After that, the body of the storm arrived overhead. The rain came down in an avalanche of water, plastering her wet clothes to her skin and making the trail muddy and the stones slippery.

She walked into the wind because it usually came from the west or the northwest, and because she knew that this was one thing that would be as hard for him as it was for her. She went on for hours. She was shivering, and her hands began to feel numb. At last, when she climbed onto a flat place in the middle of a grove of tall, thick trees, her foot slipped out from under her and she fell.

The ground was wet and spongy, but it didn’t feel cold anymore. She rolled over onto her back and lay there. It felt good. She hadn’t known how good it was going to feel. She knew she was going to have to get up, but not now.

This time when she dreamed, she felt her mother’s lap again. She wanted to stay there on the soft, smooth fabric, feeling the hands petting her to sleep. But then she heard something. It was a voice, harsh and hoarse. She looked up and saw, far above her in the sky, the tiny shape of a man falling. He was hundreds of feet above her, turning over and over as he fell, and he was screaming. She said, "No. No, not this." She closed her eyes tightly, but it didn’t make any difference. Her eyelids were clear.

Her father was plummeting downward at incredible speed, but the distance was so great that he just kept falling, minute after minute. She watched him, trying to will him to stop, to make the air under him thicken and hold him, but it didn’t work. It never worked. She was as terrified as he was, looking down at the ground and feeling his sensation of falling. She held her breath as he came faster and faster.

Now she could see him clearly. He was the way he always had been, dressed in a soft, worn red cotton shirt and a pair of washed-out blue jeans. He was coming head-first, his arms outstretched and his mouth wide open. He seemed to be looking into her eyes as he fell. Jane went rigid, pressed her fingers over her eyes, and braced herself for the impact.

She could hear the wind now, hissing past him and making his clothes flutter and flap. Something strong forced her hands apart as it always did, to make her see him die. Just as he was about to knife into the weedy plateau where she lay, the sound of fluttering seemed to increase, and he swung upward again, so close to her that she could feel the wind in her face.

He soared up into the sky, and she could see that he was changing. His arms were outward from his shoulders, and they were black and had long feathers. He flapped them, and it made the same wind sound, and he shot upward as quickly as he had fallen. He rose higher and higher until she couldn’t see the red shirt and the jeans anymore. He was just a black shape against the bright sky. He gave a loud cry, not a word but a shout, as though he were calling to her.

She heard another voice answer him. It was harsh and hoarse like his, and it seemed to be coming from overhead. She opened her eyes, and it was daytime, and her father was gone. She looked up at the crow. He was big, perched on a limb near the top of the tree maybe sixty feet above her head, riding on the leafy end of a branch as it bobbed up and down in the morning sunlight. He called, "Gaw," and another crow flew in, his wingspan at least two and a half feet. The sun shone on their feathers so they looked as though they had been combed with a viscous oil that put blue-purple-yellow highlights over the coal-black. She must have heard them in her sleep and invented a dream to incorporate the noise.

The crows looked friendly to her, benign. She watched them without moving until she could tell them apart. She sat up slowly and glanced around her at the other trees, and saw more crows above and streaks of white crow shit on some of the tree trunks. There were bits of wet, downy feather here and there in the weeds. She had managed to stumble into the middle of a rookery in the night. They had found her there and decided she was not a threat.

Crows posted sentries higher up than she could climb, with eyes so sharp they could see a leaf move from a thousand yards off. That was what her two friends were doing up there. If the killer came anywhere nearer than that, the cry would go up. She stood up slowly and quietly, so the sentries would not be alarmed by the prone figure popping up.

She said quietly, "Thanks, Daddy," to the crows, not because they would magically know what she meant, but because it would help them get used to the fact that she would be making sounds and moving around.

Jane now saw things with a mad clarity. So much came into her mind that she could only acknowledge that it was there, and not go over it step by step. She had been trying to fight against the enemy and the woods at the same time. She had accepted his terms of battle: that they would go deep into the wilderness and bring with them the equipment of civilization—guns, tents, boats, and compasses. Whoever brought the most and the best had the advantage. He was bigger, stronger, faster. He had all the food and the warm clothes. He had let the journey use up everything she could carry, and let the chase wear her down to nothing.

The crows had reminded her. She didn’t have to think like a frightened, half-starved white girl lost in the woods. She didn’t have to invent a way to escape, or invent anything at all.

She spent a few minutes under the tall trees collecting a handful of coal-black wing feathers, ten inches long, that had fallen to the ground from the limbs above. Then she went for a walk, looking around her for the right kind of tree. She found one at the edge of the next clearing. It had that special smooth, grayish bark that had always reminded her of an elephant’s legs. When she touched the trunk it was hard and cold like granite. It was definitely genus Carpinus: ironwood. She stepped back and stared up at the limbs. She found the right one in a few minutes. It was ten or twelve feet up, and the wind had broken it off at the joint and the knot had come with it. The limb was at least four inches thick and fifteen feet long. She looked around for a way up, but there was none.

Jane remembered a night in Los Angeles years ago. She had been driving along a freeway at two o’clock in the morning, and she had seen a boy climbing up a metal signpost beside the pavement so he could spray graffiti on the exit sign. He had put his belt around the pole, held both ends in his hands, and walked up. Jane took off her belt, slung it around the smooth trunk, and tried it. She was up in a few seconds, touching the limb. She got her hands around it and walked herself along it, hand over hand, until she had bent it to the ground. Then she patiently pushed and pulled and walked with it until it tore off and fell at her feet.

It took her half an hour just to carve through the limb with her knife. The wood was incredibly heavy, close-grained and hard. But as she worked she got better at it, and learned to split off long strips at a time from the handle of her ga-je-wa. The knot at the end she carved into a lump about four inches in diameter, and she had curved the handle in toward it a little, tapering the handle slightly and flattening it like a blade.

After two hours of carving, it was a little over two feet long and looked like a slightly cruder version of a war club she had seen in the New York State Museum in Albany. She tested it by thumping the ground a few times, then practiced swinging it. The shape gave it a kind of hammer force, and it was rock-hard and heavy. She stuck it in the back of her belt as the Nundawa warriors used to carry theirs. The ga-je-wa would not make her Martin’s equal, but it would make close combat a different kind of experience for him.