Hold the Dark: A Novel (3 page)

“Stay here long enough and you might. Can I refill your tea?”

He indicated no. His tea was finished now and he felt the first shadows of sleep drop across his shoulders. Somewhere in the village a brace of sled dogs barked up at constellations stretched across a bowl of black. Both he and Medora Slone turned to look at the sheeted window. Where were the sled dogs when the wolves came? He remembered a Russian proverb:
Do not call the dogs to help you against the wolves
.

He remembered a story he’d been told and could never say if it was parable or fact but he told it to her anyway: “In Russia, during a winter of the Second World War, a food shortage was on. No meat, no grain. The fighting decimated the land. The wolves rampaged into villages and mauled at random. Like they were their own invading army. They killed hundreds of people that winter, and not just women and children. Drunk old men or crippled men too weak to defend themselves. Even dogs. There was nobody left to hunt the wolves. All the able men were at the war or dead. Somehow aware of that imbalance, the wolves came and left scenes of carnage almost as bad as the bombs. Doctors said they were rabid, but the villagers said they were possessed by demons hell-bent on revenge. Their howls, they said, sounded like hurt demons. It was revenge, the old people thought. Revenge for something, for their past, maybe, I don’t know.”

She stared at him—she didn’t understand. She looked insulted.

“I mean you’re not alone,” he said.

“Yes, I am. What’s done can’t be undone, can it? Just look what we’re capable of, Mr. Core,” and she held up her palm for him to see. But he did not know why and was too frightened to ask.

She lowered her hand and said, “Come, I’ll show you outside where the children were taken. Are those your boots?”

He looked at his feet. “These are my boots.”

“You’ll need better boots.”

* * *

This stolid village remained gripped in snow and stillness, and over the hills lay a breadth without end, an echoing cold with a mind that won’t be known. Yellow-orange squares burned in the sides of log and frame homes, stone spires exhaling wood smoke. From the hook on a cabin hung a fish chain with two silver salmon. Core saw overturned dogsleds and toboggans, canoes and aluminum boats, ricks of exposed wood, pickup trucks with tire chains. Adjacent to some cabins were plywood kennels for sled dogs. Unlabeled fifty-five-gallon drums, rust-colored, most with tops torched off. Shovels and chain saws and snow machines, Coleman lanterns dented and broken. Gas-powered auger to drill lake ice. Blue tarp bungeed around a truck’s engine on sawhorses. Vehicles mugged by snow and stranded. The church an unpainted A-frame beside the schoolhouse. And all around, those hills with howls hidden within.

He’d been deep into the reaches of Montana, Minnesota, Wyoming, Saskatchewan, but no place he could remember matched the oddness, the otherness he felt in this place. A settlement at the edge of the wild that both welcomed and resisted the wild.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said, his words in a cloud. It was a lie, and he knew she heard it as a lie.

She looked to him. “You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand, Mrs. Slone?”

She neither tensed against the cold nor appeared to feel the freeze on her naked face and hands.

“This wildness here is inside us,” she said. “Inside everything.”

She pointed out beyond the hills at an expanse vaster than either of them knew.

“You’re happy here?” he asked.

“Happy? That’s not a question I ask myself. I see pictures in magazines, vacation pictures of islands, such green water and sand, girls in bathing suits, and I wonder about it. Seems so strange to me, being there. There’s a hot spring not so far from here, a three-hour walk, a special place for me, hidden at the far end of the valley. That’s as close as I get to warmth and water.”

“A hot spring sounds good right now,” he said.

“Good to get clean,” she said, and he did not ask what she meant by that.

“I’ve come to help you if I can, Mrs. Slone. Nothing’s a novelty to me here.”

She wouldn’t look at him now. “Mr. Core, my husband left me alone here with a sick child.”

“You met in this village?”

“We never met anywhere. I knew him my whole life. Since before my life. I don’t have a memory he isn’t in. And he left me here.”

“But the war.”

“I heard on the radio it’s not a real war. Someone said that.”

“It’s real enough, Mrs. Slone. People are dying real deaths. On both sides.”

“He said he’d never leave me. That’s what men say. Words can’t be worthless, just thrown away like some trash. There’s punishment for the wrong words.”

“But I’ve found that sometimes life interferes with words. Or changes what you meant by them.”

She turned from him and walked on. He followed. From a copse of birch a Yup’ik man and his boy, both with rifles, dragged a lank moose calf, barely meat enough for a family’s meal. Medora Slone and Core watched them pull it through the snow to their cabin beyond the copse.

They walked again in silence.

“That’s the pond where the first was taken.” She pointed.

He wiped his wet nostrils with a glove.

“Didn’t you bring some warmer clothes?”

“I didn’t expect this kind of cold,” he said.

“It’s not even cold yet, Mr. Core. I have some warmer clothes for you. And Vernon’s good boots.”

“You said before your son was sick.”

“He wasn’t the right one.”

“I’m sorry?”

“He stopped going to school after his father left.”

“That’s normal enough, I think. Children usually don’t like school at first. My daughter went through that.”

His daughter was of course grown, very much alive, a lifetime of school in her past. He wanted to blame his exhaustion, this ungodly cold for his carelessness, his stumbling words.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I only meant—”

“Stop apologizing to me.” She pointed again. “The wolf came from that dip in the hill, at the far side of the pond there. I found its tracks. I followed them. And there was nothing normal about our son.”

He saw at the pond the snow-covered rectangle he guessed was a dock. Children leapt from that dock in summer, but imagining the sounds of their splashes was not possible now. This village tableau repelled every thought of summer and light. He wanted to understand what warmth, what newness and growth was possible here, but he could not.

“The second was taken over here. The girl,” she said, and they moved around the pond, behind a row of cabins to where the low front hills split to form an icy alcove. “The children sled in here, down that hill there.”

He remembered:
Take warning hence, ye children fair; of wolves’ insidious arts beware.

“Bailey too?”

“Bailey didn’t sled.” She paused here, hand on her womb as if the womb held memory the hand could feel. “He just wasn’t the right one.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that, ma’am.”

“He didn’t sled.”

They stood staring into the alcove; he tried to imagine the animal charging down the slope. A startled child’s visage of terror. A gust lifted from their left, carried blurs of snow and yanked at their clothes. Medora Slone moved through wind and snow as others move through sun.

“How did it feel to shoot that female wolf?” she asked.

“I was there to study them.”

“And you really believe what you wrote? That a wolf taking a child is part of the order of things out there?” She gestured to the hills, past the hills.

“Yes, I do, Mrs. Slone.”

“How did it feel to shoot it?”

“I didn’t have much of a choice that day. It felt bad.”

“But not so rare?”

“Very rare,” he said. “They aren’t what you think, Mrs. Slone. What happened here does not happen.”

She stared—her eyeballs looked frozen. “What happened here happened to
me
.”

He closed his eyes and kept them closed in the cold, loathing the words that might come from him. He said nothing.

“I suppose you’re hungry now,” she said. “I have some soup for you.”

When they arrived back at the Slones’ front door, he asked, “Where was your son taken?”

“Around back,” she said, and gestured feebly with her chin at the corner of the cabin.

“May I see?”

“I’d rather you didn’t now,” she said, and took his gloved hand to lead him inside, a lover’s gesture he could not make sense of.

She heated caribou soup in a small dented pot on the burner. In the armchair he ate from the pot and let the broth transform him, quash his ability to fend off this insistent sleep. She traded him a mug of black coffee for the pot. He saw on a shelf a half-gone bottle of whiskey and asked if she might add some to his coffee. She poured into his mug and when he drank the heat of it filled the hollowness in him.

He asked then if she might have a cigarette and chocolate. From a cupboard she retrieved them, an unopened bag of chocolate he knew must have belonged to the boy, and a brand of filterless cigarettes he did not recognize. They sat and smoked together but they did not speak. His chest and lungs felt aflame at first, but after several pulls they remembered. He smoked smoothly with the chocolate smeared to the roof of his mouth and was thankful for this pleasure among so much sting.

She rose to answer a knock on the rear door. It was the boy of the Yup’ik hunter they’d seen earlier; he handed her an unwrapped slab of the moose calf, no larger than her palm, and she thanked him.

When she returned to the sofa Core said, “The others here love you.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not love. It’s just what we do. Everyone shares with everyone.”

“It’s not common where I’m from.”

“I left a quilt and pillow here for you, Mr. Core. I see you’re tired.” She rose from the sofa and placed her mug on the countertop. “Thank you for coming here. I can’t pay you anything.”

“It’s all right,” he assured her.

“Is your daughter expecting you?”

“I’m not sure what she expects, actually. I might call when I’m done here. Or just go. Thank you for the soup and coffee.”

She fed the fire wedges of axed wood. “You’ll get cold in the night when this fire dies. That heater there works, when the electric works. You’re free to use it, just roll it to you. Or I can start up the stove for you.”

“I’m all set,” he said.

“Good night, Mr. Core.”

She clicked off the lamp before turning into the back room. “To bed, to bed,” he heard her say, and the door clicked shut.

* * *

In the dark beneath the quilt he felt the fissure filling in him, sleep his sole respite against the strafing day. He was still disoriented in this place; he wanted badly to remember where he came from, and why he had come.

He heard the howl of a wolf seconds before sleep would drag him down into darkness. It was mournful through the iced black of night—an uncommon howl, an appeal he could not identify: part fury, part fear, part puzzlement. The female gray he had tracked and killed so long ago howled at him—he knew the howl was at him—from across three miles of flat expanse, from the center of that stripped abundance.

Many nights he expected to be jarred awake by dreams of the wolf he’d killed, by the sharp crack of the rifle round. And when he slept soundly through till dawn, he woke feeling remorseful that his rest had not been disrupted.

With sleep wafting in now he thought he heard the mutters of Medora Slone from the back room, the incantations of a witch, songs whispered through sobs. He knew what haunted meant. The dead don’t haunt the living. The living haunt themselves.

An hour into sleep, somewhere at the heart of an errant dream, he woke to light knifing out from around the bathroom door, to the sound of water running into the tub. He sat up on the sofa and listened. She had not closed the door completely, and in his wool socks, slick on the wood floor, he crept to look, terrified by what he was doing, by the chance of being seen by her, but helpless to ignore this. He could hear her muttering, and when he crouched by the door and looked into the crack of light, he saw her sitting in the steam of the tub, scrubbing herself raw with a bath brush, her expression one of pained resolve. Ashamed, he returned to the sofa and raised the quilt to his chin.

But soon he woke again, and he saw the naked figure of Medora Slone silhouetted before the window. She’d pulled away the plastic sheeting and stood now motionless with her hand on the glass opaque with rime, moon-haunted, it seemed to Core, but there was no moon anymore. The firelight had died and the blue-white night was unnaturally intense around her. He saw the folds of her waist, the weighted breasts falling to either side of her rib cage, the tiny cup of flesh at her elbow. He lay unmoving in a kind of fear looking at her over his cosseted body, his breath stifled lest she hear him watching, lest he disrupt this midnight vigil.

“Is he up there? Or down there?” Her voice, no more than a murmur, came to him as if from across an empty chamber.

“Mrs. Slone? It’s late, Mrs. Slone. Are you all right?”

She turned to see him lying on the sofa. He could make out only half her face. If he sat up he could reach over the cushioned arm and stroke her hip, her breast, no more than a yard away.

He rose to stack more wood in the hearth, then wheeled the electric heater near the sofa. When she moved toward him, he instinctively peeled back the quilt and shifted to make room. She fit into him imperfectly, the sofa sank more, then he covered them in the quilt and clutched her quaking body.

With her back to him, she took his hand and brought it to her throat, folding it hard around her windpipe, trying to will his grip to squeeze. He tried to retrieve his hand but she held tighter, then slid it down and placed it between her thighs, on a woolly patch of yellow hair. Arms around her again, he held her till she passed into the twitch of a nightmared sleep.

O
n patrol through the western sector of the city Vernon Slone saw pyramids of tires flaming on street corners in their own weather of black smoke. A market bombed and abandoned, fruit on the stones like vivisected bellies, the buildings behind the market reduced to irregular mounds of rubble, some of them unrecognizable as former houses or places of ware. Another afternoon’s creep, the cool of dusk an impossibility only dreamed of.