THOMAS’S DREAM
I
slept fitfully that night. I dreamed of Anna and Silence, of horses and gunshots, of a madman’s laugh … .
I saw him, standing atop the snowpack left by the avalanche—standing and staring toward the mountain pass and loading his rifle.
No man could have survived that avalanche; no man could have clawed his way up out of the sarcophagus of ice. But he did.
He was Noman.
Then I saw
into
him, past his flesh and into the alien spirit that dwelt within him. It was vengeful, like an angel sent from heaven or a demon escaped from hell. It was greedy, like a creature from another world taking human form … .
But whatever it was, it was decidedly not human … .
DAWNING REALIZATION
Thomas and Silence tossed fitfully in their sleep, murmuring questions into the air. Anna lay and listened as long as she could, but when dawn began to slide its bloody fingers into the cave mouth, she rose to see the morning.
Walking on tiptoe, Anna sneaked past the sleepers. The smooth floor of the cave gave way to hoarfrost and then to trammeled snow. Easing her way past it, she emerged into the gloaming light.
The mountain pass spread out before her, black peaks standing sentinel over a wide saddle. The spot was pristine except for the ragged footprints she and Thomas and Silence had left the night before. Anna retraced her steps, wishing she could retrace every last one, back to Reichenbach, back to Meiringen—could undo all the terrors that had been done … .
At the edge of the pass, she looked down the avalanche field, the skinned belly of the mountain, the fallen trees lying far below like ruffled plumage.
Someone moved down there.
Someone climbed the slope, his eyes intent on her.
For a moment, Anna could only stare in shock and dread. Then, turning, she ran back to the cave. “Thomas! Silence! Wake up! He’s coming!”
TRAPPED
“W
hat?” I started awake and sat up. The dream of demon spirits and possessed men faded away, and the reality of cave walls and sheep shit solidified. “What?”
Anna was a black silhouette in the cave mouth. “The gunman is coming.”
Dreams and reality collided: The demon was coming to the cave. I rolled from the straw mattress and stuffed my flask and clothes and matchbox back into my rucksack and pulled it over my shoulder and stood. “Let’s go.”
“No,” Silence said. He sat on his straw mat and stared bleakly at the two of us. “I’ve had enough of running.”
Anna and I were speechless. Then we both spoke at once: “He still has his gun—” “Are you out of your mind—?” “We have no weapons—” “He’s bent on killing you—”
“All of which is reason not to run,” Silence said calmly.
“You’re going to fight him?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’m going to trap him.”
“How?”
Silence blinked thoughtfully. “Let’s list our assets.”
“Legs—” I pointed out, “for running!”
“Yes,” Silence allowed. “What else?”
“A slingshot and a dagger,” Anna offered.
“What else?”
I lifted my hands in exasperation. “The clothes on our backs.
My
clothes on
your back
.”
“Precisely,” Silence said, rising from his mattress and crossing to me. He grabbed my shoulder, spun me around, and dug into my rucksack, pulling out my last shirt, my last pair of pants, and a beret that a French farmer’s daughter had given me. “Clothes make the man,” he said, taking the items to the back of the cave and stuffing them with straw.
“He won’t fall for that.”
“He will—snow-blind,” Silence replied. “It’s just a lure—bait to get him inside—”
“Inside so he can shoot us!”
“We could hide,” Anna blurted. “There’s a niche just inside the cave mouth. We all three could fit in, out of sight.”
I glared at her.
“Good girl,” Silence said.
“Then what?” I asked in exasperation. “A slingshot against a gun? We’ll be slaughtered.”
Anna peered beyond the cave into the pass. “It’s that or a flat-out run with him fifty feet behind. How good are you with that slingshot?”
“Good enough,” I groaned, pulling the thing out while Anna scooped up scree from the ground to use as shot. At the back of the cave, Silence propped my clothes in a niche. The straw man had the awkward attitude of a man relieving himself.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said.
Silence looked near exasperation. “It’ll work—as long as you can shoot straight.”
“Time’s up!” Anna hissed from the front of the cave.
Silence and I rushed to her, and all three of us slipped sideways into the niche inside the cave mouth.
And only just in time. The gunman’s breath ghosted in the
air above the horizon line, and next moment his head crested the rise, too.
We held our breath as he approached, fearing any sound would be our last. Anna offered hands full of rocks. I selected a round, walnut-sized stone—big enough to make a pigeon explode—placed it in the much-used sling, and drew back. Then I peered out around the edge of the niche.
The man approached warily. His strange rifle jutted before him as he stalked up to the cave mouth. He was so close I could have grabbed him. In the silence, his teeth skirled on each other. I caught a whiff of him: sweat and anger and something else—something like excitement. My fingers twitched on the sling, but I didn’t release. His eyes raked blindly past us, and he stalked into the cave.
“There you are!” he growled at the dummy, and Silence gave me a little smile of triumph. “Don’t move, or I’ll shoot. Where are the others?”
“Now,” Anna whispered, nudging my elbow.
I let fly the stone, though I shouldn’t have—should have realigned after that nudge from Anna. The shot whistled into the cave, clipped the man’s ear, and flew past to strike Silence’s dummy. It fell as if lunging, and the gunman fired into it. The boom was deafening in the cave, and the bullet ricocheted among the stone walls.
“Run!” Anna said, shoving Silence and me from the niche. “I’ll cover.”
“What?” I said.
“He won’t shoot me,” she growled. “Run!”
Silence grabbed my shoulder and hauled me after him, and both of us darted from the roaring cave mouth and out over pristine snow. My heart pounded faster than my feet, and the rubber tubing of the slingshot thrashed my legs.
“What are we doing?” I yelled.
“Escaping.”
“No. I mean Anna.” I skidded to a halt and pivoted back toward the cave. “We can’t leave her with that madman.”
Silence grabbed my arm and swung me around. “Don’t you understand? She
knows
that madman.” His eyes fixed on mine. “Come on!”
I lumbered after him, my head and back and legs stiff with disbelief. “She knows him?”
“Of course!” Silence snapped. “Couldn’t you tell? The way she wept when she thought he was dead? The way her words caught whenever she spoke of him—her eyes averted, her voice falling to murmurs and whispers? The way he never shot at her?”
“He wouldn’t have shot a lady.”
“He’s a madman! He would’ve shot a baby if given the chance! But not Anna. She means too much to him … . Get a move on, man!”
I was running in earnest now. The dread of it, the certainty of it, was catching up to me. Anna was on the gunman’s side. She’d had my knife in her hand, had been probing my wound with it. She could have slit my throat. I’d been such a fool. Of course, from the very start, I’d known she was playing me—that was simply part of any seduction. But none of the other women had been playing at murder.
I looked back. There was no sign of Anna or the gunman. Silence and I were two hundred yards from the cave now and running still. We topped the spine of the pass and began to descend the opposite slope.
Before us lay a wide valley with a great glacier sliding slowly down the belly of it. The snow beneath our feet crunched more loudly, no longer a thin skin over rock but now a thin skin over ice. The footing grew treacherous.
“Look out!” Silence shouted even as his feet shot out
from under him. He sprawled to his backside and slid away down the sloping glacier.
“Damn!” I shouted as my own feet were stolen from beneath me. I thumped down on my buttocks and back. I tried to dig in my heels, but they just skated atop the ice. My skid turned into a slide and then into a luge. Thrashing, I flipped to my belly and tried to grab this knob of ice or that rill, tried to kick my toes into the cracks in the ice sheet.
“Help!” I called out stupidly.
Silence would be no help. He was a hundred yards ahead of me, shooting down the mountainside like a human toboggan. Worse yet, a hundred yards ahead of
him
, the glacier split open into a wide, deep crevasse.
“Silence! Look out!” I cried.
“What do you think?” he responded in exasperation. He flailed with his one good arm, fingertips dragging scratch marks down the ice sheet. Still, his strategy was working. He was slowing, or I was speeding up. The distance between us closed, but he’d be over the edge of the crevasse in two more seconds.
Silence slid onto the final shelf of ice and gave a great roar of desperation as he rammed his hands into a crack. He jerked to a halt, and ice popped and crackled with the strain. Even so, he was stopped. Hanging with hands wedged in a crack, belly lying on ice, and feet dangling above a thousand-foot plunge, Silence was safe—for the moment.
I hurtled down directly at him. I fought for purchase, nails clawing the ice. Incrementally, I slowed, but it wouldn’t be enough.
“Sorry!” I called out just before smashing into him.
My feet rammed his shoulders; my backside struck his head. I flipped over him but snagged his shirt—my shirt!—and went over the edge. Fingers clenched to fists. The white
linen in my grip yanked tight across his back as I jerked to a halt. My legs pitched back and forth over the abyss while threads popped at the seam along his shoulders.
“Don’t let go!” I shouted.
“Let go!” he cried.
“No,
don’t
let go!”
“No! You! Let! Go!”
REUNION
The bullet still cracked and pinged off the cave walls as Anna shoved her friends out of the niche and out of her life. It was a horrible moment. She never expected to see Thomas or Silence again and felt she didn’t deserve to. They had been her heroic dream. Now, she was confronting her villainous reality.
“Don’t shoot, Father,” Anna said.
He whirled around to face her. A moment before, her father had been crouching while the bullet ricocheted about him, while the roar of the rifle reverberated. Now steel and sound had spent themselves, and he rose to stare at her. He seemed all darkness, the grimy color of the cave itself.
“Anna,” he sighed heavily. Four simple letters, two syllables, one word, and yet in the last five years, her name always carried a freight of meaning when her father spoke it. The name meant simply
I am so disappointed.
Her father used it as an all-purpose curse: “Anna.”
“What?” she snapped.
He lowered his rifle—the gun that he himself had built, disguised as a walking stick so that he could take it with him wherever he went. He was a clever man, clever enough not to shoot his own daughter—though his words could be as lethal as bullets. “Always, this is the way with you.”
“What?”
“Let’s review,” he said. It was his way of signaling a litany
of complaint stored up against her. “My empire in London is destroyed by a man—no, let’s not give him that credit—by a termite, a sleepless worm that wriggles through the foundations of my house and gnaws and gnaws away in darkness and silence until my empire crashes into dust. The work of my life—
my life
—becomes food for this worm. I have nothing left—nothing except vengeance.”
“Nothing, Father?” Anna interrupted in their age-old pattern: He would rage a while about his injured self, and then Anna would interrupt to remind him of his injured girl. “You have more than vengeance left. You have me.”
“Yes, you! You! Napoleon flees his Waterloo, not a man beside him, not a moment to snatch up a treasure chest, a masterpiece—some remnant of his empire—because he must needs snatch up a little girl. You escaped alive
because of me
. You are my only spoil of war, and how spoiled indeed!
“I did everything you asked!”
“Oh, yes. Everything I asked.”
“I did! I was your spy at the Englischer Hof, this innocent girl in white lace, planning a picnic at the falls. I watched your foe, reported every movement to you, goaded the men to hike to the falls that afternoon, made a fuss at the front desk to get a messenger boy to take your message to the good doctor, made sure you could have your ‘final confrontation.’ I was the spring in your trap—just as you asked—but you said it wouldn’t be murder.”
“Stupid girl!” he growled. “It wasn’t murder!”
“Throwing a man from the top of the falls isn’t murder? Shooting at him? Shooting at him and at the man who saved him from the river—that’s not murder?”
“You cannot begin to understand.”
“You didn’t used to be this way, Father,” Anna said. “I thought if I helped you resolve this, perhaps—perhaps you’d
be done with this mania, be once again my father. I did everything you asked. And even though you didn’t ask, I went out to witness your moment of triumph. I wanted to be there when this whole nightmare would end, and I would have you back, so I went … and I saw …”
All through Anna’s tirade, her father had been edging nearer to her. Now, they stood toe to toe, eyes locked, breathing the same air. There was grime in the anger lines of his face. “You did everything I asked, yes. But then you did this last thing that I did not ask. You read me wrong, Anna.” He spoke each word that followed in a dead, calm voice. “I … did … not … want … you … there.” He stoked his voice with heat and hate. “I did not ask you to bring a young man with you. I did not ask you to pull my enemy from the river. I did not ask you to splint his arm, to lead me on a wild chase across the mountains. I did not ask you to bury me alive in an avalanche and spend your night sporting with your new young lover!”
Anna smacked his face. She had never done that before. She had received slaps but never given one, and this first one showed how much she had changed.
Her father took a step back, his eyes blazing, as if they would light his brows on fire. It was a terrifying look from a man who specialized in them. Anna was ready to feel the slug in her belly, to crumple to the floor of the cave and bleed out for having raised a hand against her father. At least then it would have been over.
In his inimitable way, though, her father exceeded her fears: “Well done, Anna.”
She stiffened.
“All your life, you have simply been the failure. There is nothing admirable or even interesting about a failure. Now, your failures have become so deep and systemic that they
have evolved into outright betrayal. A traitor, at least, is interesting.”
“Father, shut up,” Anna said, but it was too late. She dragged her hand across her eyes, but he had seen them pregnant with tears. “Oh, shut up!”
“Interesting …” he continued as if she had not said a word, “but not trustworthy.” With that, the cane-rifle flew up in his fist, and the handle hit her head, and everything went black.