Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

But now, bumping along the minimal little mountain roads, with me trying to read Caleb’s map by the dash light and Laura tight-lipped with concentration and Glynn silent as a stone in the backseat, hilarity had long since fled.

Finally, after we had inched along Highway 9 through the blackness for so long that I could not remember when we had last made a turn or seen a light, I said, “Maybe we should go back and ask somebody. If we’ve missed Caleb’s road and we run out of gas or something, we could never walk back to civilization.”

Laura turned her head to answer me and from the back-seat Glynn said, “There it is.”

And there it was, the upended log with the battered mail-box atop it that said “Pringle.” If Glynn had not seen it I doubt if we would have; the road was merely a narrow dirt track snaking off into the thick undergrowth. It might have been an old logging road, or no road at all.

“Good girl,” I said, relief flooding me. “You get the first shower.”

“We can all take showers at the same time,” Laura laughed, too. “There are four baths and a hot tub. This ain’t Green Acres, I don’t think.”

For a long time the track bumped along through under-growth and fog, climbing and dropping, climbing and dropping. There was no break at all in the wall of green and gray on either side of us. Then we passed a clearing on the right, and I could just make out the base of some sort of rough tower, rearing itself up into the fog, with a clutter of small lean-tos and a rough veranda at its base. The shape of some sort of big vehicle emerged from the swirling whiteness and then was lost again, and it seemed to me that there was a lot of equipment of some sort littered about the tower’s base. Far up in the fog a lone light burned yellow, as if it might have been cast by a lantern.

“The lair of the hermit,” Laura said. “The lodge ought to be on down the trail here.”

“The hall of the Mountain King,” Glynn said dreamily from the backseat.

“It could be, couldn’t it?” I said. “I think I like the lair of the hermit even better than I’m going to like the lodge. Can you just imagine what you’d see from the top there?”

“Can you just imagine climbing up those steps with a load of groceries or every time you had to go to the bathroom?” Laura said.

“Why would you do that?” Glynn said curiously. “I’d just pee in the woods. Who’d know?”

“I’ve been in the city way too long,” Laura laughed. “I need to pee in the woods. We all do. We’ll pee in the woods every chance we get. Give the hermit a thrill or two.”

The road dropped rapidly from the crest where the tower stood, and made a sharp turn, and we saw the lodge ahead, clinging to the side of a hill so steep that it looked like a cliff. Lights blazed through the fog, and I could see that it was large and rambling and fell down the cliff as if it had spilled there, or grown. In front of it was only a sea of drifting gray-white, but I sensed, rather than saw, immense space.

“Oh, Lord,” I said. “I take it back about the tower.”

No one spoke when we opened the door and walked into Caleb Pringle’s lodge. But I felt my breath stop in my throat and my heart rise up in the kind of joy I remember feeling on Christmas mornings, in those good years before my mother died. All around us light leaped and poured and ran as if melted down log walls and off great beams high in the cathedral ceiling and spread over the stones of a hearth as large as many motel rooms I had seen. It seemed to have many sources: the fire that roared in the hearth with a whispering bellow like a great wind; the immense copper hanging lamps; the old, smoky gold of the wood and log walls themselves; outsized leather sofas and chairs the color of maple syrup; the glowing Indian rugs that hung from the railing of a gallery that ringed the top floor, leaving the entire bottom floor one vast, open space. More jeweled rugs lay on the wide burnished boards of the floor, and the walls were hung midway up with a forest of antlers and the massive bleached skeletons of who-knew-what. One side of the big room was lined with furniture and paintings and bookcases and doors obviously leading to other rooms. The other was one sweep of small-paned glass in which all the light swarmed and pooled and danced. Curtains were drawn back so that you would see the entire panorama of whatever lay outside, but tonight, beyond the light, only fog lay there.

Then Glynn said, in a small voice, “Cool,” and Laura gave a whoop of sheer delight, and I laughed aloud with the radiance and energy and sheer, joyous excess of it.

“Welcome to hard times,” I said, and we flopped down into the lustrous swamp of the leather sofas and laughed and laughed and laughed.

We were still laughing when a man came out of one of the doors on the opposite wall of the room. We all stopped laughing as one and drew in a great collective breath. I pulled Glynn against me reflexively and prepared to thrust her behind me if he made so much as a move toward us. Laura made a small sound deep in her throat.

He was an apparition, a grotesque, something out of a pagan legend older than the earth of this young mountain range. He seemed, in the flickering firelight and reflected radiance of the window wall, taller than any normal being could possibly be, and darker, and as impassively inhuman as if he had been carved out of basalt. His skin was the color of old rawhide and he had thick black hair hanging over heavy brows and an enormous bush of black beard, and features so attenuated they might have been done by a medieval limner: long chin, long nose, high-ridged cheekbones, sharp brows. He looked like an El Greco painting of an American Indian, and he was literally covered in flowers.

Then he smiled, and white teeth split the black beard, and everything changed. I saw that he wore crooked wire-rimmed glasses on his nose, mended with what looked to be friction tape, and had small black coal-chips of eyes that danced with light when he smiled, and the beard was not a wild bush, after all, but a neatly trimmed felting that covered his jutting jaw like sleek fur. I smiled back, involuntarily. The white grin in all that darkness was utterly disarming.

“Hey,” he said.

“You must be Caleb’s hermit,” I said.

“You got it,” he said, and his voice had so much of the thick Mississippi River delta in it that my grin turned into a giggle. How could you not be safe in the presence of that voice? It was the very music of home.

“God, you scared us to death,” Laura snapped. “Couldn’t you have called out? Do you always just let yourself into Pring’s house whenever you want to? For all we knew you might be a murderer or a rapist or something—”

“I’m both flattered and sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know when you all would be getting in, and these posies came for you by way of the pissedest FedEx driver I have ever seen, and I thought I’d bring ’em on down here and put ’em in water for you, and then I heard your car and thought, well, I’ll light the fire and turn on the lights for them, welcome them, you know. I really am sorry. Caleb told me to take especially good care of you, too.”

“Well…okay. Thanks. That was nice of you,” Laura said, and walked toward him, holding out her arms for the flowers. Before she reached them she gave a short, sharp scream and backed up hastily.

“Jesus Christ, is that a rat on your shoulder?” she squeaked.

I looked, harder. It was. From a perch on his shoulder, leering foolishly from among the masses of larkspur and stock and baby’s breath, was…

“ Rattus rattus !” I yelled. “I’d know that face anywhere! Excuse me, Mr.…whoever you are, but did you know you had a European black rat on your shoulder?”