Shackles

The First Day

It came off with almost no effort. All the long days of waiting, all the struggle and frustration of trying to work it free, and on this last day, this first day, it came off with the same ridiculous ease as removing a shoe.

I dragged the chain into the bathroom, I sat on the floor and took off my left shoe and sock, I greased my ankle with a mixture of soap and a little fat from the last can of Spam, I eased the leg iron over the heel and pushed it down the instep. And there was a moment of binding and resistance, just a moment, and then it slid right off, all the way off, and I was sitting there looking at it-an empty pair of locked iron jaws held in both my hands, shining a little from the grease, like a skinny obscene gray doughnut with a huge hole in the middle. I must have stared at it stupidly for a few seconds before I reacted. Then I yelled out loud and hurled the thing away from me, couldn’t bear to be touching it any longer, and half-crawled, half-stumbled out of the bathroom.

The next several minutes were an emotional blur. I laughed a little, cried a little, grabbed up a pen and wrote the word FREE! in big block letters on the journal pad. Found myself at the cabin’s front entrance, pawing at the door knob, and it was unlocked and I threw the door open and lurched outside and stood there in a patch of old snow with my face upturned, dragging in the cold mountain air, free air. The wind, chill and blustery out of a dirty gray sky, and the snow cold-burning my bare foot, eventually started me shivering and drove me back inside. And when I shut the door and leaned against it I was all right again, back in control again.

My naked foot was numb in places, tingling in others; I returned to the bathroom, sat on the floor to pull on my sock and shoe. There was a shrieking urge in me, then, to gather up some things and get out of here for good. I refused to give in to it; summoned logic to keep it at bay. Things to do first, several things. And it was already past noon. I’d be a fool to leave now, with only a few hours of daylight left and snowdrifts on the ground and no clear idea of where I was or how far I would have to walk. I could stand the rest of today and one more night in this place, now that I was free of the chain and the leg iron. Couldn’t I? Not much choice in the matter: I had to, so I would.

I took a couple of breaths and made myself walk slowly across the room. I was conscious now of my unshackled leg and it felt odd to be walking normally, without the restricting weight of the chain. When I got to the chair he’d hauled out and sat in on his night prowl I had another impulse, gave in to this one, and kicked at the chair, sent it clattering against the front wall. One of its legs broke; I laughed when I saw that. It felt good to laugh again. It had been so long that the sound came out cracked and rusty.

I stopped in front of the door that was standing ajar, pushed it wide open with the tips of my fingers. Bedroom, empty except for a roll-away bed topped with a pillow and two blankets and a comforter-the bed he must have slept in the night he brought me here. I went in, opened a closet door, found the interior empty except for an accumulation of dust: Nobody had lived here in a long time, possibly as long as a year or eighteen months. I left that room, went through the second door in the same wall. Another bedroom, this one without furniture of any kind and an equally barren and dusty closet.

The door in the inner wall next to the fireplace led into a smallish kitchen. Gas stove, unplugged refrigerator, corner table with two chairs, nothing much else. I opened the cupboards, drawers, the storage area under the sink. All empty. A screen door gave on a rear porch; I moved out there. Clutter of discarded things in one corner-a ginger jar lamp with a water-stained shade, some folding chairs, an old mattress, bundles of old magazines, an easy chair with its backrest bleeding white stuffing. Grouped in another corner, a narrow stall shower and a laundry sink and a twenty-gallon water heater. And against the inside wall, a small stack of cordwood and kindling festooned with spiderwebs.

Another cupboard hung crookedly above the laundry sink; I opened that and found more emptiness. There didn’t seem to be anything in the cabin to tell me who owned it, where I might find him-at least not on this first look-through. Later I’d go through it again, much more carefully. I had plenty of time. Time had almost run out on me but now I had a fresh supply: Freedom buys time, freedom equals time, freedom is time.

I gathered an armload of wood and kindling, took it back into the main room, and laid it out in the fireplace. No matches on the premises but that wasn’t a problem. I tore up some of the magazines the whisperer had provided, stuffed them under the logs with the kindling, then switched on the hot plate and twisted pages from another magazine together to form a paper torch and lit that off the burner. In minutes I had a fine hot blaze going. I sat on the floor in front of it, close, letting the heat radiate over me and penetrate deep, bone-deep, to melt away three months of chill.

The flames had a hypnotic effect; the more I stared into them, the more everything around me seemed to recede, to take on the quality of images in smoke or thick mist. I saw Kerry’s face in the flames, and the hurt started again, but it was tempered now by a thin yearning, an even thinner joy. I tried to hang on to the yearning and the joy, to make them grow into something strong and sustaining, but they were caught under a layer of hate like a fibrous membrane you could see through but couldn’t tear loose. And pretty soon it wasn’t her face I was seeing, it was his masked one. I imagined him cooking there in the fire, screaming while his skin blistered and crackled and burned away from his skull, and for a time the illusion gave me much more pleasure than the prospect of seeing Kerry again.

Somewhere inside me, a small voice seemed to be murmuring, “You’re not all right, you’re a long way from being all right.” I heard it, but I paid no attention to it. It was just a voice in a crowded place.

The heat itself broke the spell, became so intense that it forced me back away from the flames. I got up-and found myself staring at the corner that had been my home for the past three months. It seemed strange from this aspect, unreal, unfamiliar, as if it were part of a hallucination or delusion under which I had been laboring for a long time. I put my back to it, walked into the first bedroom and rolled the bed with its pile of bedding out in front of the fireplace. That was where I would sleep tonight. For one thing, it didn’t stink of my own sweat. For another, it would be softer, warmer than the cot.

Something drew me to the side window-the shed, I realized after a few moments. Was there anything in it I could use? I was warm enough now in my clothing and the blanket I had tied around my body under the overcoat; I went outside, slogged through snowdrifts and the icy wind, and managed to dislodge the seal of frozen snow on the lower third of the shed door, then to drag the door open. All that the shed contained were some rusty tools and a crippled wheelbarrow and a pair of old snowshoes hanging on one wall.

I started back out, stopped, and went ahead to the showshoes. One of them had a cracked frame, and some of the gut stringing on the second was frayed and loose, but they both looked serviceable enough. There might be deep drifts somewhere along the road or roads I would have to follow tomorrow, if I could even make out where the roads were: There had been a steady and sometimes heavy snowfall over the past few days. The road that led up here was invisible as far as I could see downslope to misty stands of spruce and a hillock even higher than the one on which the cabin had been built. At least, I judged that that was where the road must be; there were trees everywhere else.

So I might need showshoes at some point. I had never been on a pair in my life, but how difficult could it be to learn to walk on them? Nothing seemed very difficult anymore, after what I had been through.

Back in the cabin, I propped the snowshoes against the wall inside the door. The fire was still burning hot and the room had warmed considerably. Mountain cabin on a winter afternoon: very cozy, very rustic. I laughed again and went out to the rear porch for more wood. I made four trips and built a stack of logs alongside the hearth, where they would be within easy reach whenever the fire began to die down. I wanted it warm in here tonight, all night. That would make it a little easier to face the cold tomorrow morning.

Now I was ready for another search of the place, a slow and methodical one this time. I started with the first bedroom, as I had before, looking for something, anything, that would give me a lead to the identity and whereabouts of the whisperer. And I found something, out on the rear porch-the last area I searched. It wasn’t anything definite, but it was more than I had expected to find. And I had started past investigations with much less.

Studded on the front of the water heater, just above the control panel, was a little metal plate with words stamped into it: RITE-WAY PLUMBING AND HEATING, 187 SLUICEBOX LANE, SONORA, CA. The heater didn’t look to be more than seven or eight years old; plumbing contractors usually keep records dating back that far. If Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating was still in business-big if, these days-the people there could probably tell me who owned the cabin, or at least who had owned it when the water heater was installed.

The plate gave me something else, too: confirmation of my guess about the general location of this place. Sonora was a town in the central Mother Lode, east of Stockton. Too low in the Sierra foothills to be getting this much snow, which meant that the cabin was situated at a higher elevation; but it still had to be close enough to Sonora to warrant a contractor from there being called in to do its plumbing. Somewhere off Highway 108, maybe… no, too populated up that way, too many ski resorts, until you got up as far as Pinecrest. There was another state road, I couldn’t remember the number, to the north of Sonora, out of Angels Camp; its upper reaches were closed in the winter, but the lower sections around Murphys and Arnold ought to be passable except when the snowfall was unusually heavy. And that area was sparsely populated at this time of year.

It was near dusk by this time and I realized I was hungry. An hour ago, the thought of food would have made me gag; now I craved something to eat. I made myself go back into the cell, open cans, put water on to heat, mix the last of the Spam with a can of spaghetti and put that on to heat. When the food was ready I took it and a cup of tea over to the bed, put another log on the fire, and sat in the heat to sip and chew and swallow. Before I was finished, darkness closed around the cabin, blackout-thick. The fireglow created weird, restive shadows in the room that made me think of demons and hungry things creeping, made me edgy enough to get up and turn on the lamp. Afraid of the dark, afraid of firelight. Just two of the things he’d done to me… two of the more minor things.

After a while I took off coat, blanket, filthy sport jacket, and cardboard insulation, and lay down on the bed with the comforter over me. I wasn’t sleepy; the edginess was still inside me. I lay watching the fire, with thoughts running around and around in my head, running into each other and caroming off until a pressure built up and started a pounding in my temples. I got up and paced for a while. Remembered I hadn’t done my nightly exercises-no sense abandoning the program now-and went through an hour’s worth of calisthenics, working up a good sweat in the heat from the fire. I felt better then, calmer, calm enough to turn off the lamp before I got back into the bed.

My thoughts were sharper now, less chaotic. Some of them: What if he decides to come back again tonight? Not much chance of it, with the weather being what it is and all the snow on the ground… but suppose he managed it? He’d see the fireglow, he’d know I was free-would he come in after me or would he run? And if he ran, suppose it was far enough so that I might never find him? No, he couldn’t run that far. I’ll find him no matter where he is, where he goes. Let him come tonight. Let him come tomorrow night or any other night between now and the day I find him, let him discover I’ve escaped. Better that way, much better. Let him know I’m free, let him know I’m after him, let him live with fear for a while…

Eventually I tried to direct my mind away from him, to focus on Kerry and Eberhardt and going home again, but he kept getting in the way. He was like a parasite growing inside me, some kind of poisonous fungus that had to be destroyed before I could even begin to think about resuming my old way of life.

First things first. Tomorrow first, escape first. I wasn’t out of the woods yet… ha! I wasn’t, for a fact. It was probably better than a mile to the nearest neighbor, more miles to the nearest town, and at that I couldn’t just walk up to somebody’s door, looking and smelling as I did. I’d be turned away, or somebody would insist on calling a doctor or the authorities. Contact with a law-enforcement agency was the last thing I wanted right now-word to get out that I was alive and of my ordeal. Avoid people, except in case of an emergency, until I got myself cleaned up and presentable again-that was a priority item. There would be a way to manage it. There are ways to do just about anything if you’re determined enough.

And after the outside of me was spruced up so that I didn’t frighten women and little children? Visit the neighbors then, find out if any of them knew anything? No. It would take too much time, and chances were it wouldn’t get me anywhere. Most mountain cabins are deserted in winter; and people who do choose to live in one year-round like their privacy and aren’t always acquainted with their neighbors, especially if the neighbors are summer residents and haven’t occupied a place in more than a year. Even if somebody could supply a name it was doubtful he’d have a current address to go with it, or any idea of where the owner could be found.

Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating was my best bet, at least for starters. If it turned out to be a dead end, then I could come back up here, wherever here actually was, and begin canvassing other homes in the area.

One way or another, I would find out who the whisperer was and then I would find him.

And then I would kill him.

Bad night.

Dreams, ugly and distorted and mercifully unclear. I woke up once sweating and believing I was still shackled to the wall, and something like a wail came out of me before I groped at my left ankle, felt nothing there, separated illusion from reality. Another time I came awake thinking I had heard something, thinking he’d come back, he was there in the cabin with me. I jumped out of bed and caught up a piece of cordwood and prowled the rooms for ten minutes, listening to night sounds and the cry of the wind. Nobody here but me. I ached when I finally accepted that: I couldn’t put an end to it here and now, in the very same execution chamber he had built for me.

Bad night, yes, but I had had so many bad nights. And it didn’t really matter anyway.

All that mattered was that I was free.

The Second Day

Eight-thirty A.M.

Cold and gray again today. More snow had fallen during the night-there was a layer of fresh, ice-filmed powder over everything-and there would probably be more flurries before the day was finished. Dry out there now, though, and not much wind.

I turned away from the window, restless and impatient to be on my way, to put distance between myself and this place. But there were preparations to be made first. And I wanted the temperature to rise a little higher, to take the knife edge off the chill of night and early morning.

I put water on to boil for tea, opened the last two cans of chili and emptied them into the saucepan, and set that on the other burner to heat. I had no appetite but it would be foolish to go out into that snowy wilderness without fueling up beforehand.

The snowshoes caught my eye. I went and got them, sat on the bed to see how they fitted on my feet-something I should have done yesterday. The foot straps on both were all right, but on one the things that evidently fastened around the ankles were badly frayed; one good tug and they would break. Was there something among the clutter on the rear porch that I could use to replace or reinforce them?

Yes: some twine that had been used to tie up a bundle of old issues of Life and Look. It was thin twine but when I worked it off the magazines and tested it, it seemed sturdy enough. I carried it back in, broke it into smaller pieces, doubled the pieces and tied knots in them at intervals to strengthen them even more, then tied each together with a thong to bridge the frayed spots.

The chili and the water were boiling by then. I made a cup of strong tea, gagged it down with the food. The need to get out of there was urgent in me now, almost a physical hurt. I held it down by force of will. If I left without taking precautions I might well regret it later.

One corner of the pillow casing had a tear in it, revealing the foam-rubber entrails. I widened the tear, ripped the casing in half and then into strips; took off my shoes, tore up some pieces of cardboard, and bound those around my socks with the strips for added protection against the cold. Then I wrapped both blankets around my body, over my regular clothing, and buttoned and tightly belted my overcoat to hold them in place. I had lost so much weight that even with the two blankets I did not quite fill out the coat. In the bathroom I tied the larger of the hand towels over my head and under my chin, like a babushka. Not much protection against wind and snow, but I had no other kind of headgear and I needed to wear something.

Almost ready.

There was a package of Fig Newtons left, the only remaining item of food that wasn’t canned; I stuffed it into one overcoat pocket. Into the other one I put the journal pages, all of them, torn off their cardboard backings and folded in half. I didn’t want the whisperer to find them if he came prowling before I caught up with him. They were for my eyes only. No one, I had decided, would ever read them except me.

That was the last thing; now I was ready. I caught up the snowshoes, went to the door, and walked out into the chill morning.

Whiteness carpeted everything within range of my vision. Downhill to my left, an avenuelike break in the spruce forest marked the probable course of the access road. After I had gone forty yards or so I stopped and turned to look back at the cabin, to fix in my memory its exterior design and its exact location. I hoped to Christ I would never have to come back here; but if I did I wanted to be able to recognize it easily from a distance.

The snowpack was slippery but the drifts didn’t become a problem until I was in among the trees, where there was a series of little ridges and hollows. In the low places the drifts were calf-high and it was like trying to wade through a dense mixture of water and sand. When I came onto a section of higher ground where the snow was only a couple of inches deep I strapped on the showshoes and tied the thongs around my ankles. It took me a couple of minutes, and a near fall, to get the hang of walking on them. You had to keep your legs wide apart to prevent stepping on one showshoe with the other, and you had to swing your legs in a kind of waddling gait to maintain balance. Otherwise, snowshoeing wasn’t much different from normal walking.

Once I got used to them I made good time, following the winding break through the spruce forest. The wind had picked up and I was conscious of its steady whine and rattle in the stiff tree branches; but it was behind me and it didn’t penetrate the warm layers of fabric around my body. Because I had no gloves, I kept my hands bunched down deep in the overcoat pockets. The cold got to them anyway, and seeped under and through the tied towel to numb my ears, but there was no pain or discomfort yet. On the contrary the cold gave me a muted sense of exhilaration. It was different from the cold I had felt inside the cabin all those weeks, refreshing, invigorating-a reaffirmation of the freedom that was mine again.

The long downslope ended in another hollow, this one much wider and flat-bottomed and deep-drifted. The second hillock, steeper than the one I’d just descended, rose on the far side. The trees thinned out ahead and most of the upslope was bare, so that I couldn’t be sure of where the road continued up and over. I made a guess and started up.

Snowshoeing was more difficult on an incline; I began to get tired before I had reached the halfway point. I tried moving in a zigzag pattern and that made the going a little easier. Near the top and directly ahead of the course I had set, dwarf fir and the tips of jagged ice-rimmed rocks poked up out of the snowpack. This couldn’t be where the road was, then. I veered away from the rocks, diagonally to my right.

I was forty or fifty yards from the top when a hidden outcrop snagged my right snowshoe and pitched me off balance. Reflexively I thrust the other shoe forward to catch my weight but it slipped on the icy surface of another rock, angled down through the drift and into what must have been a cavity between the rocks. There was a sharp snapping sound and I went down sideways into deep snow that billowed up and half buried me.

In frantic movements I jerked my right leg free and struggled around onto my buttocks, spitting snow and wiping it out of my eyes. When I tried to get up there seemed to be nothing beneath me to put my weight on. I rolled over, shivering; particles of snow had gotten under the collar of my coat, gone slithering down my back and chest. I still couldn’t get up and I had to fight off a thrust of panic as I floundered around again until I was facing downhill, my legs spraddled out below me. I could feel the ground, then, with my hands and hips. I managed to get both palms down flat, then pushed and twisted upward. It took two tries before I was able to heave myself erect.

But the frame on my right showshoe had snapped in two places; when I tried to put my weight on it it folded up around my ankle and threw me back down into the drift. The panic jabbed at me again, the same kind of panic a poor swimmer must feel in deep water. I rolled again, coughing snow out of my mouth and throat, blowing it out of my nose. I couldn’t see; everything had become a misty white blur. Once more I flailed over onto my buttocks, twisted upward. Finally managed to stand her-onlike on one leg, sawing the air with both arms until I had my balance.

I stood there wobbling, feeling crippled and anxious because I was out of my element, in a survival situation that I didn’t understand or quite know how to cope with. Maybe the right shoe would take a little weight, if I was careful… but when I tested it my right foot sank and I couldn’t free the left shoe to slide it forward, and I almost fell again.

Calm, stay calm. Think it through. Don’t do anything else without thinking it through.

I cleared my eyes, took deep breaths until the apprehensive feeling eased and some of the tenseness went out of me. All right. The first thing I had better do was to get rid of the snowshoes; the right one was too badly damaged and that made the other one just as useless. I untied the thongs, pulled off the right shoe and let that leg down as far into the churned up snow as it would go-thigh-deep. Then I took the other shoe off and got that leg down so that I was standing on both feet.

Walking was something else again. The first step I took, with my right foot, I sank to my hip on the left side. I tried it again and again, slowly and deliberately, and found a way to move forward and upward without losing my equilibrium, but each step netted me no more than eighteen inches of progress. The effort of moving, burrowing forward at this snail’s pace, was so great that I had to stop before I had gone more than ten yards.

I rested for a time, looking up at the crest of the hill. Maybe the drifts weren’t as deep along its flattish top, over on the other side; at least the going would be easier downhill. And if there was another steep hillock on the far side? One obstacle at a time. Get up to the top of this one first.

I struggled upward again, one short slogging step after another. It was slow, exhausting work and I had to stop twice more to rest my aching legs before I was able to cover the last few yards to the crown.

The snowpack was shallower up there. There were only a few spruce trees, nothing much else, and the wind had thinned the drifts down to a depth of less than a foot, exposed patches of bare ground along the far lip. Ahead and below, where the downslope flattened out into a long, wide, treeless snowfield, the drifts were unbroken and looked deep. But it wasn’t the drifts that caught and held my attention.

There was a road down there.

It ran along the far edge of the snowfield, where the terrain rose sharply into steep red-earth cutbanks and tree-clad hillsides. Its surface was mostly covered with a thin crust of snow, except for streaky areas where the wind had scoured it away and the asphalt showed through. But it was the high windrows flanking it on both sides that clearly identified it as a road, and gave me a small measure of relief. A snowplow had made those windrows; and no county sends out snowplow crews to clear mountain roads unless there is enough traffic to warrant it.

The road was maybe 300 yards from where I stood atop the hill-300 yards of wind-smoothed virgin snow. No telling from here just how deep the drifts were; I would find that out when I started wading through them. If I’d still had the use of the snowshoes, I could cover the distance in a few minutes. As it was…

I started downslope, keeping to the cleared patches wherever I could, and the first seventy-five yards or so weren’t bad. Then the drifts began to deepen, and before I was three-quarters of the way downhill the snow was hip-high and getting deeper. Flakes of frozen powder got into my clothing, burned where they touched bare flesh. My hands were stiff and numb inside the coat pockets. The wind was still up and it hammered at me, chilled my neck, sent tremors through my body.

The depth of the drifts leveled out to just above my waist. But the snow was packed solidly down close to the ground, and I couldn’t make more than six to eight inches with each lifting, thrusting forward step. It wasn’t long before the muscles in my hips and thighs began to cramp from the strain.

Near the bottom of the slope, I put a foot forward and down and there was no ground under it. I plunged into a depression of some kind, and for an instant my head was submerged and I was struggling wildly in freezing whiteness. Snow particles stung my eyes, poured inside the collar of my coat, caked in my nostrils. I fought upward, thrashing with my legs-and one foot found purchase, then the other, and I came heaving up through the surface blowing and gasping. Slapped clumps of icy wetness off my face and out of my eyes and stood for a time, racked with cold spasms, to get my breath and my composure back before I pushed onward.

It took me something better than an hour to cross the last 150 yards of the snowfield. Twice the drifts deepened to armpit level; both times I veered away, half floundering, until I found a shallower course. I was so fatigued by the time I churned out onto the roadbed, where the snow was only a few inches deep, my legs wouldn’t support me and I fell to my knees. Knelt there shaking, swaying like a sapling in the wind, until I was able to summon enough reserve strength to boost myself upright and keep my wobbly legs under me.

Which way, left or right? I seemed to recall, dimly, that the last turn the whisperer had made that night three long months ago had been to the left: left turn and then we’d climbed up and down the hillocks and eventually stopped near the cabin. I wasn’t sure I could trust my memory after all this time, but I had to go one way or another; and to the right the road ran in a gradual downhill curve. To the right, then. And hope to God I reached some kind of uninhabited shelter before anyone came along or I collapsed from the cold and the dragging tiredness.

Before I started walking I remembered the package of Fig Newtons I’d put into my overcoat. Mostly sugar, those things: fast energy. I fumbled in the pocket, and the package was still there; I pulled it out, managed to tear the cellophane wrapping with my teeth. I choked down three bars, and three more as I set off, and three more at intervals until I had eaten all of them.

I had to move in a slow, shuffling gait because of the weakness in my legs and because the asphalt was ice-slick beneath its patchy skin of snow. The three or four inches on the road had to be yesterday’s and last night’s snowfall, I thought, which meant that the snowplow crew had been here sometime within the past twenty-four hours. Would they come again today? Probably not. Not enough new snowfall, and this wasn’t a major road; its patched and eroded condition told me that. Had to be other cabins around here somewhere, though. And people living in them. I listened for engine sounds as I walked. If any vehicle came along I would have to get off the road, take cover behind a tree or rock or bush close by. My tracks might give me away, though the wind seemed to be obscuring most of the ones I was leaving on the road. Still, I would have to try.

Only it didn’t come to that. There was nothing to hear but the steady throbbing plaint of the wind, the steady throbbing plaint of my breath as I shuffled and shivered my way downhill. Nothing to see but the swaying branches of the trees. The sky had taken on a restless look and seemed to have lowered, so that its grayness partially obscured the tops of the hills that rose on my left. The chill in the air seemed to have more bite in it, too. It was going to snow again before long.

I had gone maybe a quarter of a mile before I saw the first sign of habitation. The road straightened out after a long leftward bend, and off to my right, above the tops of a thick stand of blue spruce, a thin spiral of smoke-chimney smoke-lifted into the low-hanging grayness above. The cabin itself was invisible behind the trees, and that was good because it was no place for me. I kept going, even more cautiously now, and pretty soon I came to the access drive. From there, through the trees, I could see part of the cabin-a big A-frame with a Ford Bronco parked under a lean-to to one side. The Ford had been there all night because the surface snow on the drive was smooth, unbroken. There was nobody out and about, nobody to observe me as I moved past and out of sight.

The first flakes of snow began to flutter down, then increased to a thin flurry almost at once. Just what I needed-Christ! I kept my head pulled down into the collar of my coat as I walked, eyelids half-lowered; but even so the wind-flung crystals stung my cheeks and made my eyes tear.

After a time I saw the shape of another cabin materialize among the trees ahead. No smoke coming out of this one, or at least none that I could make out, but it was just as inhabited as the previous one. The snow skin on its lane had been rutted by thick tires, probably sometime earlier today.

I got past there, too, without anybody coming out to ask who I was and why I was traveling on foot in a mountain snowstorm. The fall got even thicker, coming down now in shifting patterns that obscured most of what lay outside a hundred-yard radius. Some of the flakes adhered to the skin of my face, forming a crust and turning my eyebrows into little ridges of ice. The shiver spasms grew more violent, and my legs grew weaker, and the understanding crawled into my head that if I didn’t find shelter soon I would crumple into an inert mass and never get up again.

Shuffle-step, shuffle-step, shuffle-step. Another fifty yards, and another leftward jog in the road, and another twenty-five yards-

– and another access drive opening up to my left. Unmarked snow on this one; I might have missed it entirely if it weren’t for a break in the trees and a closed and icebound bargate across its entrance. I stopped, squinting through the swirl of flakes, but I couldn’t make out anything except the wind-tossed shapes of spruce and fir.

Chance it: I had no other choice, now. Even if the home was occupied I would have to bang on the door, take the risk of being admitted. I turned in toward the gate, sank immediately into drifts up to my knees. Plowed ahead a few painful inches at a time, angling around the gate and then over into the trees where the drifts were a little shallower. I was moving then in half-light and shadow, both externally and internally: My mind seemed to have gone as fuzzy and indistinct as my surroundings.

Minutes lived and died-I had no perception of how many-and suddenly I found myself peering at a small A-frame cabin half hidden by trees and snowfall. There was a quality of illusion about it, as if it might be two-dimensional. But I wasn’t imagining it because it stayed where it was, didn’t shimmer or fade like a mirage, and after several seconds I pushed ahead. Went from tree to tree, leaning against one frozen trunk after another; if I hadn’t had their support I would have fallen. The A-frame got closer, seemed to take on more substance. I scraped at my eyes to bring it into clearer focus. Shutters on the windows, snow piled up over the porch. Closed up for the winter? Yes. It had that empty, waiting aspect deserted dwellings take on.

There were thirty or forty yards of deep-drifted open ground along the front; it might as well have been a thousand yards. But the trees ran in close to the right-hand wall toward the rear, with no more than a few yards of drift to cross back there. I kept moving from tree to tree, jelly-kneed now, almost grateful for the drifts because they held me upright. More lost minutes, and then I was back near the cabin’s rear corner. Somehow I tunneled legs and body through ten feet of thigh-deep snow, then leaned hard against the corner to rest and take stock of the back wall. Midway along, steps rose to a platform porch, some of them hidden, the three that I could see thickly crusted. I groped my way along the wall, fell against the steps; couldn’t get my legs under me, and crawled up the three steps and onto the porch.

Screen door. I leaned up on my knees and managed to take a grip on the handle with fingers that were stiff and had almost no feeling left. Damn thing was locked on the inside. I yanked, yanked again, yanked a third time in a kind of dull frenzy. The hook-and-eye fastening ripped loose and the door came shimmying open in my hand. I batted it aside, got my body between it and the inside door. That was locked, too, but it had a pane of glass in its center. I clawed up the screen door until I was standing, but my left leg buckled when I tried to put weight on it and I nearly went down again. Balanced on one foot, hanging on to the screen door with my left hand, I used my right elbow to break the glass and punch out shards. Reached in, found the locking bolt, threw it. And twisted the knob and tried to walk in and sprawled through on hands and knees instead.

The wind made a whimpering noise, or maybe it was me. I crawled around in a half-circle, managed to shove the door shut again. Flakes of wind-hurled snow whipped in through the broken window, swirling past me into a shadowed areaway that opened into what appeared to be a kitchen. I lifted onto my knees, got my back against one of the areaway walls, and used my shoulders and my right leg to stand erect. The left leg still wouldn’t work; I had to drag it, hobbling on the right one and clutching the wall, to get into the kitchen.

Not much light in there, because the windows over the sink were shuttered. But I could make out a small refrigerator, a table and chairs, a propane stove, some cupboards and a standing cabinet, a dark alcove that was probably used as a larder. An open doorway on the far side led to the other rooms: a big living area with dust covers over the furniture, so that they had a lumpish ghostly look in the gloom, and a single bedroom and bath. That was all. The place smelled of winter cold and damp but not of must or decay. Closed up for a while, but not much longer than late last fall. Somebody’s warm-weather retreat.

I sank onto a couch-shaped piece of furniture in the main room by necessity, not by choice. I just could not stand up any longer. Little shivers and slivers of chill worked through me, and my hands burned and quivered, and my throat was so sore I could barely swallow. Sick. Exhausted. Badly used. But still alive. Can’t kill me, by God, not this way either.

I didn’t sit there long-just long enough for a little feeling and strength to seep back into my limbs. The icy wetness of my clothing, the chill in the room, and the overhanging threat of pneumonia prodded me up again. Get out of these wet things, get into something dry and warm, and do it quickly.

My left leg gave out again halfway across the room. I cursed it and hammered at it with my fists, dragged it under me, dragged myself up. And this time it supported enough of my weight so that I could hobble through into the bedroom.

The double bed had been stripped bare, but when I opened a big oak wardrobe I found blankets, sheets, pillows on an upper shelf. Some items of clothing also hung in there, both a man’s and a woman’s. I gave a heavy plaid lumberman’s shirt a quick inspection; it seemed large enough to fit me. On the floor in there were half a dozen pairs of shoes and boots, and a pair of men’s slipper-socks. I took out the slipper-socks and the heaviest of the blankets, carried them into the bathroom.

Dark in there… and it stayed that way, because when I flipped the light switch nothing happened. Electricity must have been turned off for the winter. I fumbled out of my damp, smelly wrappings, dried myself with a towel hanging from one of the racks. Kept rubbing my body until the skin began to prickle. Then I encased myself in the dry blanket. But still tremors racked me, set my teeth to clacking like old bones being shaken in a box.

It wasn’t until I started to put on the slipper-socks that I realized two toes on my left foot had no feeling. Neither did the tip of the little finger on my left hand. Frostbite? I hurried into the bedroom, over to the window, and opened one of the shutters partway to let in some light. Tiny dead-white patches on the finger and both toes, each surrounded by painful reddened areas. Fine, great. I seemed to remember that the best thing for frostbite was to soak the affected parts in hot water. That sent me back into the bathroom. But when I twisted the hot water tap, not a drop came out of it. The cold water tap was just as dry. The owners must have shut the water off for the winter too.

Was the propane stove in the kitchen hooked up? If so I could melt a pan full of snow, get hot water that way. But it would mean getting dressed, going out in the storm again to collect the snow, and I just wasn’t up to that. I was afraid to reexpose myself to that freezing cold.

I opened the medicine cabinet above the sink, pawed through its contents looking for burn ointment. There wasn’t any, and it was just as well, because now I remembered that you weren’t supposed to put that kind of stuff on frostbite. Keep the bitten areas warm, that was the next best thing to soaking in hot water. The cabinet did yield two other items I needed, though: a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of Dristan cold capsules.

I pulled on the slipper-socks. In the bedroom I rummaged through bureau drawers looking for a pair of gloves that would fit me. Didn’t find any there, but there were some old fur-lined ones in a drawer inside the wardrobe. The glove fit snugly on my left hand but not so snugly that I couldn’t bend the fingers.

I glanced over at the nightstand, where I’d set the bottles of aspirin and cold capsules. I couldn’t swallow any of the medicine dry; even chewed up it would lodge against the fiery constriction in my throat. Maybe there was something to drink in the main room or in the kitchen… preferably something alcoholic. I hated the taste of whiskey, thanks to my old man, but two or three stiff jolts would help warm me. And whiskey was also good for frostbite, because it dilated the blood vessels.

Out to the main room-walking better now, the left leg responding stiffly. No wet bar or liquor cabinet or wheeled bar cart; I even lifted up some of the dust covers to make sure. A tall, shallow redwood cabinet on one wall caught my eye, and not because I thought there might be liquor in it. I moved over to tug at its doors. Locked. Check it later, tomorrow. No time for that kind of work now.

The kitchen again. The cold back there, the wind and random flakes skirling in through the broken window and along the areaway, raised goosebumps on my skin, set up a fresh series of tremors. I drew on the right glove, then made a rapid search of cupboards, the standing cabinet, the refrigerator. Nothing to drink in any of them. I shuffled into the larder, probed among a thin supply of cans and cartons and jars. On a shelf near the bottom, my hand closed around a bottle with a familiar shape.. wine? I took it out to where I could see it more clearly. Wine, all right-a heavy Sonoma County red. Not as good as whiskey but it would have to do.

I got the foil wrapping off the neck. Screw top. Good. I took a tumbler from one of the cupboards, transported it and the wine to the bedroom. Poured the glass full, choked down a third of it with four aspirin and four Dristan capsules, drank the rest in quick little gulps. The heat of it spread immediately, took away some of the chill and eased the trembling. The alcohol went straight to my head: Within seconds I was woozy and I had to sit on the bed.

Lie down, I thought. You’re dead on your feet, it won’t be long before you pass out.

I got up long enough to toss sheets, pillows, other blankets from the wardrobe to the bed, then crawled under the pile, still wearing the slipper-socks and the gloves. Poured wine, drank it, then tugged sheets and blankets around and under me until I was completely covered, wrapped up like a bug in a cocoon. Pretty soon I didn’t feel the cold anymore. The last of the chill gradually went away and then the shaking quit altogether. And at last the warmth and the wine and the medicine combined with exhaustion to drag me down toward unconsciousness.

I didn’t fight it; I was safe enough here. The snowfall would have obliterated most of my tracks by now, and without them to make somebody curious, no one but the owners would have any reason to come here; and why would they show up in the middle of a near blizzard? Sleep was what I needed most right now-the rest of today and tonight, a dozen hours at least. With that much rest, with the self-doctoring I had done and would keep doing, I should be well enough to travel again tomorrow morning…

The Third Day

I didn’t go anywhere in the morning. Or at any time during that day. I was not even able to get out of bed for more than a couple of minutes until late afternoon, almost twenty-four hours after I first lay down.

The first time I woke up, it was pitch dark outside and I was sweaty, feverish, so weak and achy that I could barely lift up to pour more wine, shake out more aspirin and cold capsules; and swallowing was a torment. The second time I woke up, morning light had seeped in through the window shutters and I felt marginally better: still sweaty and feverish, with a headache from the wine, but my throat was less sore and I wasn’t quite as weak or stiff. I got up to use the toilet, and thought about staying up, getting dressed, but I didn’t try to do it. The storm had blown itself out during the night, and the sun had put in an appearance; but it was still cold and windy. Going out into that wind and wading through the snowdrifts in my condition would have been suicidal. So I took more medicine, with just enough wine to wash it down, and rewrapped myself in the blankets and slept again, fitfully and with jumbled dreams. And when I woke up the third time I was drenched in sweat, the headache was gone, there was that broken-fever feel in my body when I moved, and I was wolf-hungry.

Yesterday’s battle with the elements hadn’t damaged my watch; the time was 3:35. I lay there for a minute or so, listening to the wind beat at the cabin walls, watching my breath come out in round white puffs. Then I sat up, took the glove off my left hand to examine the little finger. The tiny patch of frostbite was still there but it hadn’t spread and the skin around it looked less inflamed; and when I touched the tip I had feeling in it again. I put the glove back on, drew the slipper-sock off my left foot. The two frostbitten toes looked better, too, though the top edge of one was still numb.

I swallowed two more aspirin and two more Dristan with the last of the wine. Swung out of bed, stood up on legs that creaked and ached dully but seemed to work well enough. The wardrobe provided a thin turtleneck sweater, the lumberman’s shirt, and a pair of faded and patched Levi’s. Tight fit on all of them, but not so tight that my movements were restricted.

My own clothes, the ones I had worn for more than three months, were bunched up on the floor where I’d dropped them. I remembered the journal pages and bent to the overcoat, reached a hand into the pocket. They were still there, damp and crumpled. I pulled them out, saw that the writing was still legible, if a little smeary, and spread them out individually on the floor to dry. The only other thing I wanted from those clothes was my wallet and keys. He’d let me keep those, and why not? He’d expected to bury them along with my corpse. I had no idea how much money the wallet contained, so I counted it. Sixty-nine dollars. Not much, but enough to get me by if I was careful. I ought to be able to use my credit cards for most things I would need, without anyone recognizing my name. My disappearance had likely been publicized statewide, because of its bizarre nature, but there wouldn’t have been any media mention for at least a couple of months, and people have short memories.

I set the wallet on the bureau, threw a blanket around my shoulders for added warmth, and went out into the kitchen. The wind wasn’t as sharp today, blowing in along the areaway, and it wasn’t bringing in any snow. But it had brought in plenty during the past twenty-four hours: There was a long white carpet on most of the areaway floor and halfway across the kitchen.

The propane stove wasn’t hooked up, and there was no way to hook it up; it didn’t contain a tank, nor was there a tank in the larder or anywhere else that I looked. Cold food, then. The larder yielded two cans of sardines, a can of mixed vegetables, another of peaches, and a second bottle of red wine. I found a can opener in one of the drawers, took it and the other stuff into the bedroom, and sat on the bed to fill the hole in my belly.

When I was done I opened the shutters over the bathroom window to let some light in there. The cabin had been virtually invisible from the road, so there didn’t seem to be any risk in that. It took me a while-two minutes or so-to work up enough courage to face myself in the mirror, but it had to be done and so I did it.

Christ! Wild tangle of beard and hair, both gone grayer than I remembered, almost white in spots; unhealthy grayish pallor, sunken eyes with things shining in them that I didn’t want to see, refused to focus on. The whole of the face had a partially collapsed aspect from all the weight I’d lost, as if some of the skull structure itself had eroded away. It struck me that I could reach up and take a handful of my features, bunch them up in my fingers the way you can grasp and bunch up an animal’s fur.

I clutched at the sink, staring at the face in the glass, and the hate welled up in me until I was bloated with it. I had to turn away before long. I felt that if I didn’t turn away I would continue to swell until the hate burst out of me like pus out of an overripe boil.

I stood with my back to the glass until I had myself under control again, my emotions screwed down under a tight lid. Then I opened the medicine cabinet and took out the cuticle scissors and safety razor I had seen in there yesterday. I made myself look in the mirror again-at the beard and hair this time, only those. I couldn’t leave here with either one as wild as it was. And because it would be painful to try to do a complete shave without water, my only choice with the beard was to trim it to a respectable size and shape. Keeping the facial hair was probably a good idea anyway. Combined with how leaned down I was, it made an effective disguise. For all I knew a disguise would be beneficial when I went a-hunting.

The beard trim took me ten minutes. I spent another couple scraping off edge-stubble with the razor to even it out. There was a comb in the wardrobe, and I used that to work the snarls out of my hair. Then I trimmed it as best I could. There was nothing I could do about its filthiness, except to cover my head with a cap or hat when I left here. There had to be some kind of headgear in the cabin.

When I was finished I looked… what? Less frightening, less like a man who had suffered through ninety days of hell. Reasonably normal as long as you didn’t look closely at the eyes. But there was nothing I could do about them, either, not externally.

The afternoon light was beginning to thin and fade. I closed the shutters against a battalion of shadows creeping among the white-clad trees outside. My legs had begun to ache again, and the scratchiness was back in my throat, and I was starting to feel the cold through all the things I wore. Almost time to get back into bed, drink a little more wine, sleep for another few hours. But not quite yet. There was still something I wanted to do first.

Among the utensils in one of the kitchen drawers was a big, thick-bladed butcher knife; I got that and took it into the main room, to the redwood cabinet I had noticed yesterday. The lock on the cabinet doors was the kind you could loid with a credit card. Using the knife I had it sprung and the doors open in fifteen seconds. Gun cabinet, just as I had thought. Enough rack space for four rifles or shotguns, but the only weapon of that type it contained was a Kodiak bolt-action center-fire rifle. On the shelf at the bottom were three boxes of ammunition, two for the rifle and one for a.22 handgun. The piece that the.22 cartridges fitted was on the shelf too, wrapped in chamois cloth: a High-Standard Sentinel revolver, short-barreled, lightweight, with a nine-round cylinder capacity. Not much of a weapon, really, except at close range-and even then it wouldn’t have much stopping power. I broke it open, spun the empty cylinder, checked the sights and the hammer and trigger action, peered inside the barrel. At least it was clean and seemed to be in smooth working order.

I hesitated for a moment, with the gun balanced in the palm of my hand. But only for a moment. I had to have a weapon and this one was available-and deadly enough. What difference did it make if I added the theft of a handgun to the theft of food and clothing, to breaking and entering and unlawful occupation of a premises? There had been a time, not so very long ago, when any sort of illegal activity had gone against my grain. But it didn’t seem to matter much now. Principles, ethics, were for men whose lives had not been turned upside down, who had not spent three months chained to the wall of a mountain cabin.

I took the revolver and the box of cartridges into the bedroom, and loaded each chamber before I undressed and got back into bed. The thought of the.22 there on the nightstand, loaded, ready, waiting, was another kind of medicine to help me sleep and make me well again.

The Fourth Day