Bimji had no choice. He had to keep moving. Any moment, the charge would blow and when it did it would sweep Bimji into the gorge in a torrent of tumbling stone. He hauled himself up onto the plateau and ran across the spongy heath, heading for the only patch of trees between the gorge and the road.
As he ran hunched over, Bimji startled a band of Polus sitting in a hollow amidst the fragrant heather, enjoying a cold meal of hard wafer and dried fish. Bimji veered away, but kept running. They exploded off their rumps in pursuit. The weighted end of a long whip flew at Bimji, wrapped around his ankle and tripped him. A swarthy Polu pounced on him and held him down, while another secured his ankles with a leather thong. They dragged him face down to the edge of the gorge, shoving him forward until his head dangled out over the void, directly over the spot he had placed the charge.
Hands patted him down and removed a small knife from his belt.
“This is all he’s got.” The voice was gruff, guttural.
“Another spy? Watching for the caravan, eh?” This person had the accent of a plains man. He might have been from Maora.
“Take me away from the edge!” said Bimji. He could smell the acrid smoke of the burning fuse wafting up from the ledges below.
“Why? Afraid of heights?” said the plains man.
“Stick him over the edge,” said the gruff one.
“You will die if you keep standing here!” said Bimji. “You along with me.”
“What is this?” said the plains man. “Is this little worm threatening me?”
The charge should have blown by now. Bimji wondered if the fuse had fallen yet again. He could only hope that it had.
Chapter 5: Miles Displaced
A week before the rains …
Behind the rock shop, cornered in his red Prius, Miles cowered from his attackers. A feral trio circled his car—two women, one man—all wearing over-sized clothes, hair matted and twisted and jutting in spikes. Like Maori warriors they glared and growled, stuck their tongues out and bared their teeth. One woman popped up and scrunched her chapped and filthy face against the side window. The other drummed her calloused fingers against the glass.
Under ordinary circumstances, Miles might have blown off these punkish antics as merely absurd and annoying, but the hissing, sputtering stone in his grandmother’s cookie tin changed everything.
Mist poured from the trunk around the corners and through the 60/40 split of the back seat. Lost somewhere behind it, the infernal stone rattled and squealed in the tin like a shackled demon, destroying Miles’ typical cool under duress.
With quaking hands, Miles fished for his cell phone in the nest of ear buds and charger cords tangled in the bottom of his pack.
“911 … 911,” Miles repeated, over and over like a mantra.
His fingers closed against a familiar curve. As he pulled out the phone, a loud thud against the door made him jump and fumble it between his seats. As he jammed his hand down into a detritus of old chips and bits, a wild-eyed man rushed towards the car, hefting a hunk of mortared brick. Miles threw up his hands. The bricks crashed not against the windshield, like he expected but against the pavement. The wild man used the fragments to chink Miles’ wheels.
What did they want? The car? His money? The Stone? They could have it all if they would only back off and give him a chance to flee, if only they would say.
Mist filled the interior. The windows fogged over. Miles wiped a swath clear with his sleeve. A man ran up with a fire extinguisher and whacked it against a side window, trying to break through. When it merely bounced off, the man let loose and covered his windshield with white dust.
The squeal in the trunk deepened into a groan. A painful pressure built in Miles’ ears. The car began to vibrate. A patch of slender cattail-like reeds sprouted in Miles’ back seat. Miles extended a finger to touch them to see if they were real. They flexed against his touch.
A deep, slow thunder rippled through his bones. Miles levitated, as if a sinkhole had opened up in the lot and the Prius had been wrenched backwards into it. He knocked his head against the roof. The dashboard smacked his chin. The suspension creaked and the car came to rest at a tilt.
All became calm. The stone was gone.
Miles huddled on the storage hump between the front seats, breathing heavily. He swiped again at the misted windshield. His Prius leaned into a tiny tarn, boggy around the edges. He faced down a slope of increasing declivity that dove into a valley of dense and continuous forest. But the few trees growing at these heights stood bent and twisted like cripples, defeated by the wind.
Miles slid into the driver’s seat and started the car. He tried backing out of the bog, but the wheels spun free, kicking up water and weeds. He flicked on the radio. His FM pre-sets returned only hiss. He tried AM. A station quickly locked in.
“Newsradio 880. WCBS news time is 3:07. Terror trials in Manhattan? CBS News has learned that—”
He flicked off the radio.
***
Many minutes later he was still sitting there, waiting for reality as he knew it to reassert itself, for the order of his universe to be restored. He gradually came to the realization that it wasn’t going to happen on its own.
He pieced together in his mind the unlikely shards of circumstance that had stranded him on the side of this mountain.
It began with a stone. An interesting stone. Too interesting, as it turned out. “Just a chalcopyrite,” said Mr. Brown, the rock shop proprietor. “Nothing terribly uncommon or valuable. Just copper ore. Fool’s gold in peacock feathers.”
He brought it back to his apartment and added it to his collection on the mantle. That night, the hallucinations and delusions started– noises and visions in his kitchen. He spent a sleep-deprived day at the office accomplishing nothing, doubting his mental health. His biggest mistake was going home and expecting the insanity to stop.
Miles listened to the chill wind suck at a sliver of open window. This was no insanity. The vast and howling wilderness beyond his windshield would not be denied.
Panic descended like a smothering pillow. He modulated his breathing, meditating, willing, forcing himself to be calm. Fog re-accumulated on his windshield, this time from his own breath. He started up the car again, spun his tires some more, sprayed water out of the bog until he recognized the futility of it and shut off the engine.
If he was going to get anywhere and figure out where he was, he was going to have to step outside.
He reached into the backseat for his backpack, unzipped and pulled out his wind-resistant L.L. Bean fleece and put it on. He yanked out the used books he hauled around everywhere but never read, tossed his netbook onto the seat. He kept the radio and the extra batteries and a half-empty and dented Poland Springs bottle. Popping open the glove compartment, he cleared out every speck of chewing gum, melted and re-congealed Starbursts, Hershey bars turned chalky.
When he had everything ready, he could not bring himself to leave the car. He sat for long minutes and stared at the clouds, at the furrows the wind carved into the treetops below, advancing in Vs across the landscape.
He spotted his cell phone lying by his foot. He picked it up, surprised to find two bars lit up on the coverage display.
Who should he call? His best friend, Tony, had recently moved to Syracuse to work for IBM. Tony wasn’t going to be much help from there. But did it really matter where Tony was? Miles was not in Connecticut anymore.
His ex-girlfriends, all two of them, still resided in Connecticut; Leah in New Haven, Joan somewhere in Fairfield County along the MetroNorth line. Miles would brag darkly to friends over IPA about the starkly opposite reasons for each breakup. Leah, the wiser of the pair, dumped him the moment his neo-grunge band started to get some serious gigs. Joan, the sort-of-groupie, left, he was convinced, when and because the band met its demise.
Neither relationship could be objectively regarded as serious, long-term commitments, but to Miles each encapsulated an etern
ity; each a tragedy. All parties had moved well beyond the point of caring an iota about each other’s personal predicaments, but they talked from time to time at parties and such.
Each had new phone numbers entered into his phone, numbers that he had never called. Miles still had the same number he had had since college. What if they had caller ID? What if they wouldn’t pick up? And if they did, what would he tell them?
Miles went with something more dependable, something guaranteed. He checked to make sure the signal had maintained its strength, and pressed speed-dial #1.
“Hullo?” came a creaky, Long Island-inflected voice. The connection was strong and clear, though there was a strange whirring in the background, and a squeal that altered pitch as it faded in and out.
“Uh … hi Mom. It’s me, Miles.”
“Of course it’s you,” she said. “Is … everything alright? You don’t usually call me on weekdays. In fact … you don’t usually call. I call you.”
“Well, I just wanted to let you know … in case you tried to call … that I’m taking a few days off of work and … I’m going … hiking.”
“Hiking? You?”
“Well, yeah … it’s … healthy. Exercise. Fresh air.”
“You’re not by yourself, I hope.”
“Oh no. No. I’m meeting some … friends.”
“Is Joan going with you?”
Miles felt a twinge of discomfort. Of all his girlfriends, Joan had been the one his mom had liked the most, the one she had pinned her hopes on, and the hardest one for him to lose.
“Um, Mom … Joan and I … we ….” A doorbell rang across the voids, its tone sounding hollowed out, emptied of pith. “Miles. I have to go, the nurse is here. Have fun … hiking. Give me a call when you get back. And say hi to Joan for me. It’s been so long since I’ve seen her. You should bring her to visit sometime.”
The connection clicked off. Miles watched the connection indicator flicker between two and three bars. His battery held nearly a full charge, but he held the off button down to save some juice. Having phone service was a good sign. Now he wished he had an AT&T coverage map, just to see the range of possibilities.
The place felt like Canada. It was green and cool enough for the Maritimes, but there was not a speck of ocean anywhere. It was too mountainous, as well. Interior British Columbia, maybe?
He dialed the Greymore police station, the number still in his phone from the time his Fender Precision was stolen out of a practice studio downtown. It sounded like chaos at the other end of the phone. He spent precious minutes on hold before the receptionist came back on the line.
“Sorry sir, things are pretty crazy right now … how can I help you?”
“I’d like to report a missing person,” said Miles.
“Okay. And this person is … related to you, how?”
“The person is me,” said Miles. “I’m in my car … and I’m lost. I mean … really lost. I was wondering if you could just trace this call. Tell me … where I am?”
A pause ensued. The commotion in the police station filtered across the line: the chatter of multiple radios, panicky citizens, over-stressed supervisors.
“Were you … inebriated … at the time of this event?” said the receptionist.
“Nuh-uh,” said Miles.
“Name? Address?”
“Miles Pawluk. 289a Oxford Road.”
“Make, model and license plate?”
“Red Toyota Prius. BSL 279.”
“Oh my God! You’re the one,” she said. “You’re the one they saw disappear. Hang on!”
She put him on hold. After a few seconds, the connection disengaged. Miles frantically tried to dial back, but the coverage indicators had vanished.
***
Miles passed the hours in a daze, listening to the wind whistle, watching it ruffle and ripple the moors surrounding him. He started the car up once in a while to check the radio. Sometimes he had reception, sometimes not.
Someone will find him, he told himself. The police knew now that something had happened to him. He had not imagined it.
“Hug a tree,” was what his dad had always told him to do if he ever got lost. Staying by his car would make him much easier to find by helicopter. Problem was, the scenery outside his window looked nothing like Connecticut. He wasn’t sure helicopters existed in this place, or that anyone would be searching for him.
He ran the engine long enough with the heat cranked up to get the interior good and toasty. He reclined the front seat as far as it would go and closed his eyes.
Hours later, he awoke dry-mouthed and shivering in the dark. The sky was mottled with cloud and stars. A sliver of moon glowed feebly behind a swift-moving sheath of mist.
He started up the car again and turned on the radio. This time he found nothing on AM or FM, though he wandered up and down the frequencies like a lost child in the aisles of a supermarket.
He sank into the car seat and stared out the windshield, until his rapid breaths had completely fogged up the glass. He retrieved his iPod and wheeled past all the dark and moody collections that dominated his playlists, seeking the most neutral and soothing techno he could find. It did the trick, settling his heart so he could drift off again.
Miles opened his eyes to rivulets of dew spilling down the interior of his windshield. The sun was rising to his right. His ear phones remained in place, but the iPod had long ceased playing, its battery dead. He plugged it into his pocket charger and listened to his heart pound.
An image crossed his mind of the authorities finding his starved and withered corpse, much like that McCandless kid who had walked deep into the Alaska frontier and never walked out. He wasn’t about to let such a thing that happen to him. There was a time for staying put and a time for moving on. Forget hugging trees, he would hoof himself back to civilization.
The door creaked open. Rarefied air hit his lungs like a shot of dry-iced vodka. The boggy tarn was surrounded by a nearly treeless bowl. Tufts of heather and stunted trees filled the gaps between boulders.
He wondered how high the mountains rose beyond the lip of the bowl and thought about climbing as high as he could, to get the lay of the land, but the scale and emptiness of these moors terrified him. It would be like an ant ascending a brick wall.
Going down made more sense. That’s where the people would be, if people even lived in such a place. All he could see was unbroken wilderness.
He stepped away from the car, Nikes squishing in soggy moss, weaving through half-dead trees with sun-silvered limbs and the sparsest tufting of needles. He glanced back at the car, already so far away, so tiny, like a lone little berry in a Christmas wreath.
He paused above a gully, and swung the pack off his shoulders. Another few steps and the car would be out of sight. The thought of being separated made him panic. Could he find his way back?
He found his phone and turned it on. The coverage indicator wavered in concert with waves of nausea originating deep in his stomach. He fumbled through the junk in the bottom of the pack until he found the little pocket radio he used to listen to baseball games at work. Autoscan picked up a decent signal from WCBS—some doofus chattering about whether the Jets quarterback should play through a knee injury. Hearing that made him feel a bit better, and gave him the confidence to continue.
Taking a deep breath, he plunged into the gully, pushing through thickets of glossy-leaved trees with waxy, salmon-colored bark, leaving the little red car behind.
***
The road Miles found spurred mixed feelings when he stumbled onto it. He almost walked right past without noticing the twin tracks which seemed barely wide enough for a donkey cart. Roads meant people, except this one was so overgrown, it was likely weeks or even months since anyone had passed. It was better than nothing, but not exactly the sign of civilization he had had hoped for.
His nerves gnawed at him. He stopped and checked his phone again. Still no coverage. The radio blasted static that caused h
is heart to lurch, but he held it up and turned in place, until WCBS came back in loud and clear. Interesting, how the signal strengthened when the radio faced the place he left his car.
He yanked weeds, snapped branches and kicked up dirt to mark the spot and continued downward along the meager road, traceable only through the stunting of the weeds in the shallow ruts. His heart continued to pound in his throat.
This could have been avoided a hundred ways. Here it comes, the self-flagellation. But it was true. This incident, whatever it was, didn’t have to happen. The simplest solution, when the stone first started acting funny, would have been to call the fire department. But no, he had to avoid making a scene. He had to handle everything himself. Not that the authorities would have dealt with the weirdness any better, but at least it would have been their weirdness to deal with.
But truly, he had sensed something creepy about the stone from the moment he touched it. Why he felt so driven to possess it, he didn’t know. It seemed singular, one of a kind, and cheap for something so unique and beautiful. The collector in him had a knack for recognizing special things that others passed up as ordinary. Sometimes it worked out well, like the intact geode he had purchased that he had cut open to reveal pinkie thick crystals of amethyst. And sometimes his instincts got him flawed and worthless gem stones, or chunks of fool’s gold that excommunicated him from the land of his birth.
***
After work, at the dive around the corner from his office, Miles swigged the dregs of his draft, girding himself for home. By now he had convinced himself that those specters in his kitchen had been hallucinations—the spawn of stress, or one too many Ambien.
He was no stranger to drug-induced visions. In his gigging days he had experimented with all manner of street drugs, some of it, no doubt tainted with angel dust. He remembered one night coming home all wired, taking a few pills to calm down, clicking on ESPN, and settling into an easy chair. Maybe he forgot and popped a couple more. In any case, the pillows on his sofa began to move. They crawled and hovered around his flanks like lions stalking a wounded zebra, keeping just out of his peripheral vision. He remembered dashing for the bedroom and slamming the door.