CHAPTER 22
CLIFF
Falling, Elizabeth knew that she would die in moments. It is strange how much can go through a person's mind in a very short time under such circumstances. She especially thought of her wonderful Johnny during most of her last seconds, and the crazy mysteries surrounding him and Goth Mountain. The Goths and the Tribe would be very hurt by her death, as would her poor Aunt.
At the same time she rejected the whole crazy notion of dying, and instinctively reached out for life with desperately flailing legs and grasping hands. She didn’t want to die, and certainly not at the hands of that traitorous bastard Small Bear. But there was nothing to grasp, only fresh cool dark spring air rushing by as she tumbled down, faster and faster.
Suddenly something whacked her across the back, and then all over her body as she tumbled about, crashing through whatever it was. She was whipped and poked. Her grasping hands caught hold of some of it but it ripped through her fingers and was gone in an instant.
Then something snagged the chain linking her handcuffs and she was yanked up savagely by both arms. There was a loud cracking sound and she was swung sideways for a moment, where she slammed into something impossibly massive and hard. It had to be the cliff. At the same time she felt the handcuffs slide on whatever they had caught on, but she grabbed at the thing with both hands before it could totally slip away.
Moments after striking the cliff-face incredible pain shot through her, and she fought to remain conscious and to hold on, as she tried to figure out what was happening. Why the pain? Why was she still breathing; wasn’t she dead? No, not yet, apparently.
It was a stout bush or tree branch that she now hung from, strong enough to catch her without totally breaking off, but springy enough to do the job without yanking her arms out. She was holding on to it with her right hand; she couldn’t trust that the handcuffs wouldn’t slip off the branch even more. Her left hand and arm didn't seem to function anymore. Instead, it was the primary source of the incredible pain. The branch had swung her left side into the cliff.
She could hear laughter from somewhere far above her. Skunk and Small Bear! Then the voices were talking, mostly too faint to understand, though she clearly heard Skunk joyfully shout "the little bitch is crow bait!" several times.
How far had she fallen? A hundred feet? More? The moon peeked out from behind the clouds for a few seconds, and she was suddenly able to see that the fractured branch that she was clinging to was hanging nearly straight down now, perhaps only two feet away from the cliff-face. The cuffs had probably originally snagged on a sub-branch somewhere further up, but then slipped off, such that only her right hand now held her, along with legs wrapped around the main branch lower down.
Looking down, she could dimly see open space and the valley floor, still far below. She couldn't tell exactly how high above the ground she was, but she was much too high to survive a resumed fall. She had to hang on.
Lights reached down from above. “I don’t see her,” she heard Barns say. She was thankful that she had worn her green jacket instead of the red one. “Too far down and too much brush down there. I’ll have to radio this in to the state rescue rangers and get myself down there pronto. I want to be first to find the body." The lights withdrew, and then the voices. She was alone.
Her left arm and shoulder were numb and throbbing, and her right hand was tiring fast; she had to move on soon or fall. She tried to reach for the branch with her left hand, but was rewarded only by shooting pain that threatened her consciousness. She kicked her legs and tried to swing towards the cliff to get a foothold, but instead, her legs glanced off another portion of the branch, and the jolt almost caused her to lose her right hand grip.
She wrapped her legs around the main part of the branch tighter to hold some of her weight. The branch swung like a pendulum slowly, though it was scraping against the cliff, and for all she knew, it was perhaps close to breaking off completely.
Moonlight filtered again between the clouds, and she surveyed her desperate situation more critically. Above her, other dark silhouettes jutted out. Tree branches higher up must have cushioned her fall, slowing her to the point that she could be shagged by a big, springy, lower branch. Small soft aromatic needles identified the branch as hemlock. She knew that hemlock was a relatively soft, weak wood, and right now she might be hanging by just a few strands of it. The cliff-side was close, but swinging the branch towards it could break it off the rest of the way. Besides, she could see nothing but smooth rock next to her; no potential for handholds or footholds were evident. Below her black empty space yawned for at least a hundred feet.
She had only one chance, she realized: she had to climb up the branch, which stretched above her a dozen feet before disappearing around an overhang.
She pulled up mightily with her right hand with no results; one armed pull-ups were clearly out of the question. Her left foot seemed to be on a small limb that branched out from the main one, so she carefully moved the right one up and felt for similar foot-hold.
She found one, and carefully transferred more weight to it and pulled herself up perhaps half of a foot. Holding all her weight for a few seconds with her legs, she reached up higher with her good hand and pulled herself up further. Pain shot through her left arm, but she had again moved up several inches.
She repeated this process endlessly, inches at a time, slowly working her way up the branch. Her left arm seemed to be broken, and despite her efforts to protect it, agonizing pain shot through it again and again, especially on the occasions when her footing slipped, which was too often. Her sneakers seemed to be covered in grease.
There were fewer and fewer side-branches to use by the time she reached the lip of the overhang, and the main branch was becoming too thick to grasp as it pressed against the rock; good handholds on it were knuckle bruising and all but impossible. At that point though, she started to find handholds in the cliff face, despite slippery moss and loose and crumbling rock.
Suddenly her searching hand met a solid tree-trunk about a foot in diameter. Her life-saving tree clung to a narrow ledge covered with thick roots that provided excellent hand-holds.
In another minute she was wedged comfortably between the Hemlock tree-trunk and the cliff, which stretched up and out of sight. With her back resting against the cliff and her legs wrapped around the tree, she was for the moment safe and secure. She felt like shouting or laughing, but she was too exhausted and beat up.
She took inventory as she rested and caught her breath. Her thin green jacket, the flannel shirt beneath that, and the T-shirt beneath that were shredded, and her blue-jeans weren't much better, but they had saved her from most scrapes and bruises. Her hands were scraped raw, and she bled a bit from dozens of minor wounds, enough blood to make her sneakers slippery, but hopefully nothing serious.
Her left arm was more of a problem. No bones were poking through yet, but based on gentle probing she knew that it must be broke below the elbow. Something was also wrong with her left shoulder, and both the upper arm and the shoulder hurt like hell. She broke off a small tree limb and slid it up her left jacket sleeve, to serve as a crude splint.
She knew that Barns was driving down into the valley to look for her body. They would have search lights. She couldn’t remain on the cliff exposed to their view; she had to get herself somewhere else fast. The cliff ledge that she and the tree were perched on disappeared down-valley, but stretched East towards the Reservation and the Goth place, a couple feet wide and covered with bushes and small trees, most of them much smaller than the one that had saved her. She moved along the ledge slowly.
Looking and feeling every inch of the way, she couldn't find any path up or down. Finally, where the ledge widened a bit and a trickle of water welled out from a crevice in the rock, another surprisingly large hemlock with a trunk two-feet in diameter grew. Beyond it, the ledge ended completely. But she noticed that the tree's branches reached far up the rock-face, and that most of its roots
followed the tiny stream down over the cliff as far as she could see.
Up or down? Gravity and her physical condition made the choice for her. She couldn't possibly climb up. Even if this big tree reached clear to the top of the cliff, she didn't have the strength for such a climb. After a refreshing drink of spring water she picked the largest tree root and slid slowly down it, relying mostly on her legs to hold her weight.
The big root followed the tiny stream half way down the cliff. Bushes provided handholds the rest of the way down. She finally made reached the valley floor safely, despite now being wet and increasingly cold, exhausted, dizzy headed from loss of blood, and wracked with pain.
She wanted desperately to rest, but knew that Barns would appear at any moment. Soon she was stumbling past huge rotting tree stumps among small trees and bushes so thick that she had problems getting through.
Fortunately, it was still all downhill; when all else failed she leaned into the foliage and fell forward through it, a few feet forward and down at a time. She tried to protect her left arm and shoulder but pain still lanced through it, though all pain was by now gradually fading into a more comfortable dull numbness. Shock was setting in, she managed to reason. Everything was fading, consciousness as well as pain.
Suddenly she tumbled through bushes into a surprisingly open area. Somehow she was no longer standing; she was laying down. It immediately felt wonderful to lie there with her face in the dust. In a few moments she recognized where she was; she was laying in the road that led through Goth Valley. Rutted and bumpy, it was still blissfully flat, compared to where she had been walking, and the packed dirt and gravel was still wonderfully warm from the strong Spring Sun. Forest night sounds sang gentle lullabies. She wanted to sleep. She needed desperately to sleep.
Dimly through the haze of her throbbing mind she heard sirens, coming closer. Moments before the headlights hit her she somehow pulled myself up and stumbled into the bushes at the far side of the road, twisting an ankle painfully as she again fell. She hit the ground hard, but by now she almost welcomed new pain when it overcame the numbness. It showed her that she was alive and helped to keep her awake.
She heard vehicle doors and voices very close-by. It was Barns. "She has got to be right in there somewhere, along the base of the cliff."
"That's heavy bush. Even if we find her quick it might take an hour or two to get her out," said another voice.
"I saw her go over. Fall like that must have broken every bone she had. Damn shame; she was a young woman. But I want her found and out of there quick, before animals get at the body. I’ll get more of my own men down here."
"She was a school teacher you say?"
"Right. She took up with a trouble-maker named Johnny Goth recently, it looks like. Went so nuts at the Goth place when we served some legal papers tonight that we charged her with assault. I figured a night in jail would cool her off. We drove up the old logging road to avid all those crazy tree-huggers gathering down here in the valley. We had her sedated and I was driving her towards town when she came to and bolted from the front seat of the squad car, handcuffs and all. I hit the brakes when I heard her open the door. That saved her from breaking her neck when she jumped from the car, but she was able to get up and run away.
“My fault; I shouldn’t have trusted in the sedatives. I should have followed standard protocol and had her in the back seat, locked away as if she was a serious prisoner. She headed straight for the cliffs. There was nothing I could do but chase after her, with the Indian Reservation cop Small Bear helping. It was pitch dark; she couldn’t have seen the danger. She went over the cliff just as we caught up with her. Damn crying shame."
Barns was only a few feet from her, Elizabeth realized dimly. Giddy from pain and exhaustion and absurdity, he had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing. They turned and walked away and she couldn't make out their words anymore. She thought of calling out then and taking her chances with whomever Barns was talking to, but that would have only made it too easy for Barns or someone else on the Fenster payroll to take custody of her again and finish her off.
On bloodied right hand and knees she crawled further from the road as quietly as she could, then stood and limped slowly up-valley in parallel with it. She fell down, then got up and stumbled a few more feet, then fell down again. Fully unconscious, she did not rise again.
A shadow separated from an enormous nearby rotting tree trunk and moved to stand over Elizabeth. Dark shook his werewolf head in disappointment. The event that had drawn his avid attention had ended without revealing anything of real interest. But perhaps it gave him an opportunity to move things along himself.
Today he had been to the Mountain and had seen the thing that the humans called the Source. He recognized at once that he had at last found what he had sought for many centuries. He hadn’t seen it for over ten thousand years. It obviously invigorated normal plant and animal life, though he could sense nothing at all from it. His so-call kin, the ancients known as the People, were also very interested in it, as evidenced by the One Tree that he had seen nearby. He had found them in the distant past, but had met defeat. This time would be different. This time they would all die.
He was excited to have at long lost found both the Source and the People, but the experience had frustrated him, for he had been totally unable to do anything with the Cube object or to it. So far. As he gained more power he would be able to control it, he was certain.
He was tempted to kill the woman now, but he wanted Johnny. Johnny would track her down of course, and he could take him then, but that alone wouldn’t get Dark what he wanted either. He wanted the shaman also. Together they had what he needed. After that he would be stronger, strong enough to kill the unicorns and to control the Source.
He gently picked up the woman and quickly carried her away, trotting quietly on clawed back feet.