Lost Cipher (10 page)

CHAPTER 20

“I fell,” Lucas said groggily. He pulled himself up onto his elbows, keeping one eye on the gun and the other on the old man behind it.

“Fell? From up there?” The man waved the shotgun at the top of the falls. A small, brown spider crawled across his matted, white beard, but the old man didn't seem to notice. “You oughta be dead.”

“Not from the top. I was climbin' down and I slipped. I hit the water. Hard.” He fingered the side of his face again and wiggled his jaw, wincing.

If the old man felt any sympathy for him, he didn't show it. He kept the shotgun pointed at Lucas while he talked. “Who you with, boy? Better yet, why you trespassin' on my property?”

Trespassing. Lucas recalled what the clerk in the store and Aaron had told them about what the snake man did to trespassers. How some people had wandered into these woods and disappeared.

“My friends and I got lost. We were at the camp. Camp Kawani. We got lost on a hikin' trip.” He wasn't going to say anything about looking for treasure. But the old man didn't buy his story anyway.

“Kids from that camp don't just get lost. You a runaway?”

“No. We just…took a little side trip. We lost the trail. We were stupid. We shoulda stayed with the group.”

The old man finally pointed the shotgun away from Lucas, cradling it in his other arm. It was big, an old twelve-gauge pump, but it seemed weightless the way he handled it. Even with the barrel pointing the other way, Lucas didn't feel any safer.

“Stupid sounds about right. That camp's been over there near twenty years, and they ain't lost a kid yet. Not till now at least. So where're these friends of yours?”

“They're upstream. Maybe a mile. No more'n two. One of 'em can't walk. He broke his ankle or something. And a snake bit him. A copperhead.”

Lucas watched the old man's eyes when he said the last part. He wondered if the lunatic holding a gun on him had put Alex's snake in the hollow too.

The old man's expression didn't change. “I guess you and your friends managed to get yourselves in a heap of trouble.”

The way he said it made Lucas shiver, not knowing if the old man meant the trouble they'd already had or what they had coming. Still, the old man was his only chance of getting help for Alex and George.

“We have to go back up there and get them.”

The man laughed. “
We
? What do you think, boy, I'm gonna
carry
your busted-up friend out of here? It's already a hard couple miles back down to my place, and that's just from
here
. Best just to get you out of here while we got some daylight. Then maybe we'll worry about your friends.”

Lucas's anger started to grow. Was this old man really planning to leave Alex injured and stranded for the night?

“What do you mean,
maybe
? They can't spend the night up there. If you can't do it, then I'll get them down as far as this waterfall. They're not too far. You could go back and get someone to meet us here.”

Lucas knew he could never get Alex down to the waterfall by himself, even with George's help. He wasn't even sure he could climb back up the creek, as hungry and exhausted as he was. He hoped the old man would take it as a challenge, like Lucas was telling him again that he was feeble, that he needed a kid to help him out. He remembered the angry reaction he'd gotten in the store.

The man stared back upstream, perhaps weighing whether or not to leave the other boys. Lucas had to stand his ground. His friends were counting on him to bring help. He couldn't leave them alone at night in the wilderness, wondering if he had abandoned them.

“Look,” he said defiantly, “I'm not going anywhere unless I get my friends out of here.
Today
.”

The old man turned slowly and stared at him. He threw the shotgun back over one shoulder and twisted a tuft of white beard between his fingers, his cold eyes locked on Lucas's. Finally, he spoke.

“Sassed me just like that in Herschel's store not four days ago, didn't you.”

Lucas wasn't going to back down now. “Yes, sir. You were rude to my grandma.”

The old man smiled wryly. He took the shotgun off his shoulder, cradling it, and Lucas thought he'd crossed a line.
I'm dead
,
he thought,
just like the missing treasure hunters.

Instead the old man racked the shotgun until all the shells were on the ground. He pocketed them and leaned the gun against a fallen tree.

“Stay here and keep your hands off my gun.”

Then the old man climbed up the rocks of the waterfall like he'd done it a hundred times, cursing under his breath the whole way up.

The woods were darkening with long shadows when Lucas heard the old man returning with Alex and George. He couldn't see them coming from the foot of the steep waterfall, but there was no mistaking Alex's arrival. His painful moans grew loud enough to hear over the falls, and Lucas was suddenly fearful of seeing what terrible shape Alex might already be in.

Lucas heard the old man grumble something at his two friends before he peered over the top of the falls.

“Best climb up here, boy,” he yelled over the splashing water. “We ain't goin' back to my place that way. Not with this one at least.”

Lucas pointed at the shotgun leaning next to him. “What about your gun?” he called back.

“Leave it. I saw what you done to yourself tryin' to climb this rock. I'd surely hate to see the same happen to my gun.”

Lucas quickly started climbing back up the waterfall, taking the route the old man had followed. Going up wasn't nearly as tricky, and he made steady progress, but not without catching grief for moving too slow.

“Let's go, boy,” the hermit hollered at him from above. “I already hauled your friend halfway down this mountain! I ain't haulin' you up that rock!”

When Lucas finally made it up the falls, the sight of Alex made him wince. His friend's hand was swollen past the wrist, and his thumb had turned almost purple. The old man had used a pair of stout sticks and some kind of vine to splint Alex's foot, but now that his boot was off, Lucas could see that the foot was badly swollen too. Streaks of dried tears marked Alex's dirty face. Still, he managed a weak smile when he saw Lucas.

“Thanks for finding…help, Lucas,” he said.

George was still picking his way down the rocks along the stream, making much slower progress than even the old man with a boy on his back. He was carrying Alex's boot in one hand. When he spotted Lucas, his wide-eyed glance toward the old man revealed his fear.

“I didn't find him. He found me.” Lucas kept his voice low, watching the old man resting against the trunk of a tree. “All I managed to do was fall off this waterfall and hit my head.”

The man pushed himself off the tree, ready to move again. “I know you trespassers would like to talk all day, but it ain't gettin' any lighter. And your friend needs to get some pain medicine in him. Lucky for him I keep some around. Comes in handy when you ain't got a phone.”

No phone. Lucas had been so happy to find someone, he'd forgotten what the man in the store had said about the old hermit.

No phone.

No car.

They were going back to the snake man's house, and there'd be no way to get help. No one would even know where they were. Lucas wanted to tell the old man he'd changed his mind, that he'd just stay put with Alex and George and let the rescuers find them.

But the rescuers were probably just getting started. Even if they found the message on the rock, they would never get down this far by tonight. He didn't have a choice. He had to trust the old man.

CHAPTER 21

After giving George less than a minute to rest, the old man walked over to Alex, grabbed him by the shirt, and lifted him from the ground with one hand. He bent over, wrapped an arm around the boy's legs, and tossed him over one shoulder like a sack of concrete. Alex grunted in pain from all the jostling, but he didn't protest.

Lucas couldn't believe the old man's strength. “Are you going to carry him like that the whole way?” he asked.

“I sure ain't dancin' with him.” The man started off through the woods, going away from the falls Lucas had tried to descend.

“Where are you going?” Lucas asked. “I thought your house was down there somewhere.” He pointed downstream, but the old man kept walking.

“I ain't gettin' past them falls with your friend here on my back,” he yelled over his shoulder. “And I'm guessin' he don't want to get down the way you did. If you're comin', stay close and stop flappin' your yap. This hollow's been my backyard for seventy years. I believe I can find my way home.”

Lucas and George fell in behind the old man, dropping back just enough to whisper.

“Where'd you find this guy?” asked George. “Talk about creepy.”

Lucas wasn't sure George remembered the old man from Aaron's story, and he didn't see any reason to let the younger boy know who was leading them through the woods.

“Like I said, he found me. He says we're on his land. All I know is, he's the only chance we've got for getting Alex some help and getting out of here.”

“Yeah, but you heard him. He doesn't even have a phone. No one's gonna know where we are.”

Lucas was still worried about the same thing, but the alternative was even worse. “You want to stay out here another night?”

Before George could answer, the old man hollered back at them. “You all can either keep up, or you can keep lollygaggin' back there and end up just as lost as when I found you. But I sure ain't comin' back to get you.”

With every one of the man's bouncing steps, Alex let out a feeble moan. Lucas and George gave each other one more nervous look, but they hurried after the strange old man carrying their friend.

At first the man made his own path through the thick forest. To Lucas it seemed impossible for him to know where he was going. But after some time, he saw that they were following a faint trail, no wider than a boot. To Lucas it looked like no more than a game trail. It didn't seem to lead to anything but more empty wilderness.

The old man never slowed. He had more than a hundred pounds slung over his shoulder, but Lucas still had a hard time keeping up. It didn't help that his stomach was empty, or that he'd gone more than a day now without water. Or that he was constantly stopping to wait for George. When the old man finally paused for a break and lowered Alex to the ground, Lucas plopped down, exhausted, in the middle of the path. A few seconds later, George emerged from a bend in the trail and did the same.

“Don't get too comfortable,” the old man said. He wasn't breathing nearly as hard as Lucas, and he didn't even sit down to rest. “We got another half mile.”

“Jeez, I need food,” gasped George.

“Yeah, and that's about the hundredth time you said so since I found you,” the hermit told him.

“We at least need some water,” Lucas said defiantly. “Especially Alex.”

“Well, unless you can figure a way to suck it out of these trees, I'd say the nearest water's at my place. You ain't gonna die before then, are you? Let's go,” the old man said, hauling Alex up onto his shoulder again and trudging off through the trees, seemingly unconcerned whether Lucas and George followed.

Soon they came to a rusted and fallen barbed-wire fence with a broad clearing on the other side. The sun had sunk below the mountains, but the light at the edge of the woods was enough to make Lucas squint after being in the dim forest all day. The clearing had probably been a farm field long ago, but now it only sprouted spiky cedars from a tangle of tall grass and wild roses. Lucas still didn't know where the old man was taking them, but they finally seemed to be leaving the wilderness.

They skirted the edge of the field, walking along the old, rotted posts of the fence for a few hundred yards. Lucas was looking at the ground, watching for half-buried strands of rusty barbed wire, when the old man finally spoke.

“Down there,” he said more to the boy slung over his shoulder than the others trailing behind. The old man didn't break stride, but Lucas stopped and looked up.

A house lay below them in another field. If it was the old man's, it wasn't what he'd expected.

This house was easily more than a hundred years old, but it was clean and painted a fresh white, with bright blue shutters. Its redbrick chimney was straight and sturdy looking, and its shiny tin roof had only a few streaks of rust. Even from far away, Lucas could see neat curtains in all the windows. The house seemed totally out of place, especially considering the rough character that lived there.

Behind the house was an enormous tree, much taller than the building, its deep, green canopy spreading out more than twice its height. Away from its shade, a neatly tended vegetable garden sat surrounded by a high deer fence, and several straight rows of orchard trees lined the slope of a hill. Farther away from the house, one tiny outbuilding stood near the foot of a rock outcrop that jutted out from a green hillside like the bow of a long-buried ship. Lucas recalled that the man didn't have a bathroom, so he guessed the little building was his outhouse. It was the only part of the picture that didn't surprise him. Otherwise, nobody who saw this house could have guessed much about the character living in it.

They came up to the house from the back, below the little orchard and past the vegetable garden. From up close, the yard was even tidier. Beneath the wide, shady tree, a thick bed of acorns crunched under Lucas's feet. An oak. He saw from its massive and knotted trunk that the tree was much older than the old farmhouse, like maybe the big oak was the reason the house was there in the first place. For a second, he paused under the old tree and surveyed the little farm and its valley, thinking how nice it would be to grow up in such a place.

The four of them went up onto the back porch. Without saying a word, the man disappeared through a screen door, Alex still dangling from his shoulder. Lucas didn't want to leave his friend, but he didn't feel right just following them in. The old man sure hadn't invited them. So he and George stood on the porch, staring back out at the garden in the twilight.

That's when Lucas saw the gravestones.

“Look,” he said to George.

They were no more than fifty feet from the house. From up on the hill, they'd been hidden in the shadow of the big tree. It was a family plot, maybe a dozen headstones surrounded by a low iron fence. Some of the markers looked ancient, tilted and covered in clumps of crusted moss. Most were too small or too eroded by time to make out the names and dates carved into their faces.

One, however, stood out from the rest. It was larger than the others, and it rested nearly in the center of the crowded plot. In large letters weathered smooth by the years, it was marked with the name
Morris
.

Just then a voice boomed from inside the house, making both boys jump.

“You come all the way down that mountain to spend the night outside?”