He went to the table and sat in a chair, but nothing happened except he got hungry. He got so hungry he went to the cold box where some food was kept.
Some things he ate were cooked by his father, who could cook good, and some things didn’t need cooked. Jimmy didn’t know how to cook.
So first, he took a can that if you pressed the top just right it shot out this cold fluffy cream. He put the opening in his mouth and pressed just right, and his mouth filled with sweet cold fluffy cream. It was good. He did it a few times, but it wasn’t enough.
There was a tub of chocolate ice cream. It was only half-full, but there was still a lot in it. He worked at it with a spoon, and it was good. Then he ate some bread. It wasn’t as good as the ice cream, but now he was full.
He went to look at his father. Nothing was happening.
Sometimes people went away, and other people said they were gone to be with God. God was someone good, though Jimmy didn’t know who. It must be nice where God was because no one came back the way the girl came back a little while ago.
His father was still here, but somehow maybe he was gone to be with God. This made Jimmy sad. He went to the table again and sat in the chair, and tears came.
The tears didn’t last because sadness turned to fear. If Father wasn’t coming back, Jimmy was alone. He didn’t know how to be alone.
He needed someone to be with, someone who knew how to do all the things Jimmy didn’t know how to do. Someone who wouldn’t be mean to him.
Long ago the girl was never mean to him. She wasn’t mean to him a little while ago, either. She was angry with the Thing that was in him because the Thing was mean to her.
He went to the box that hung on the wall. Father used it to talk with faraway people. But Jimmy didn’t know how to use it. And he couldn’t talk.
No, wait. He talked when the Thing used him. If he thought hard how the Thing made him talk, maybe he could make himself talk.
He stood at the wall box and thought hard. He still couldn’t talk. But when he thought hard like this, it seemed that when the Thing was in him and then it left, he was changed a little. The tiniest little bit changed. He remembered this was true long ago, when the girl lived here, and the Thing was in Jimmy every day, and Jimmy slowly changed inside, slowly thought more and felt more. So though he had never been able to make himself talk, maybe the Thing had taught him how. If only he could think how. If only.
After a while, he went to look at his father again.
Then he went to the front door and opened it and stepped out into the wind. The dark was all around, but the dark didn’t scare him. Alone scared him. He walked out to the road.
Light flashed out of nowhere, and he looked up, and the sky rumbled. He was not scared of the sky. The sky never hurt him.
He didn’t know where he was going. And then he did.
64
The wind soughed through the trees, and the larger branches creaked as if carpentered with weak joints. Dead needles and other debris rained down on them, and the pleasant smell of decaying forest mast rose on all sides.
Colson used the Tac Light more sparingly than Ophelia would have preferred, but she understood his reason for trying to advance as much as possible in the dark. He was only slightly worried that the batteries wouldn’t last, and he was even less concerned that Optime would be drawn by the beam. His intention was to preserve their night vision until they came to the highest portion of the trail, where the footing was more treacherous and the consequence of a fall might be catastrophic, where the flashlight would more likely be essential.
In spite of the minimal ambient light, Ophelia was not blind. Dark-adapted eyes seemed somehow to heighten her other senses, so she maintained an adequate spatial perception, intuitive awareness of the shadowy ranks of trees like a ghost forest that grew in some land beyond death.
Colson clicked the light on to take a quick look at the trail map or to read the compass or to sweep the way ahead when he thought they should be nearing a landmark. When the trail split, there were rock formations to guide them, unique configurations of trees if you had the trained eye to read them, clearings of which each had its own features; there were small pyramids of stones left by previous hikers, as well as less frequent but more serious cairns of rocks that for a century and a half or longer had marked the graves of mountain men unknown, where sometimes a cross was etched into the top stone, but never a name.
Remote from all the popular hiking routes, this was not a trail followed by multitudes, but Colson seemed confident that they could make their way out of the forest to open land, where the going would be far less arduous. This was the trail that his dad had intended to follow back to the town of Buckleton, where they had parked their SUV. Before they had set out days earlier, Colson had studied the map until he had memorized it.