The Ravens (23 page)

JUST
AFTER
DAWN
the next morning Lance drove down Baraga Cross Road and pulled into the empty parking lot. With a heavy sigh he got out, took his snowshoes out of the back, and put them on. Then he climbed over the high snowbank. Somewhere close by a few titmice cheeped, but he couldn’t see them in the birch forest. Otherwise the only sound was the distant, snow-muffled rushing of the traffic up on Highway 61. The path he’d taken on that summer morning was gone, and even wearing snowshoes his feet still sank a ways into the snow. Soon he could hear the muted, cave-like sound of water running deep underneath the snow and ice. He emerged from the thickets and saw the cross and the place where the Cross River emptied into Lake Superior.

Suddenly it all seemed so simple.

He put on his sunglasses and started walking across the snow-covered expanse. Every step forward was an effort for his heavy body until he reached the area where the wind had swept the ice more or less clean. There he took off his snowshoes and left them lying on the ground. Then it was only a matter of going on, without looking back. That was the most important thing. Not to turn around and see the distance widening. Just keep moving forward until he disappeared.

Was she part of what now surrounded him? It seemed pointless to think that his mother should be part of the ice and the blue
sky and the low February sun. That sort of thing belonged to . . . He wasn’t sure what. Maybe in a poem. Here on the real ice, under the real winter sky, with the real sun on his face, it was impossible to imagine that his mother was part of what he saw before him. She no longer existed. Ever since he’d come back home, he’d given priority to other things instead of going to see her. And worst of all, he knew she had been waiting for him. Waiting and hoping.

Gradually the cold from the ice penetrated the thick rubber soles of his boots and began to lay claim to his body from below. He had a feeling that he was in the process of vanishing. It was a little frightening, but mostly it felt good. Soon he would enter something else and disappear. Disappear from himself too. Since he didn’t have a watch, except on his cell phone, which he’d stuffed into his jacket pocket, the sun’s position in the sky was his only indication of the time. He tried to avoid looking at it.

The farther out he walked, the greater the silence. When he paused to listen, it was like he was wrapped in thick layers of cotton. Even the ringing in his ears, which usually occurred when everything else was quiet, had gone. He had passed the border for the ringing in his ears and crossed into a place where he’d never been before. This is the beginning, he thought. If I don’t look back and just keep on going, it won’t be long before I disappear.

His cell phone rang.

He pulled off one glove and dug the phone out of his pocket. It rang again. The sound filled the whole enormous space, resounding between the ice and the sky. Followed by a silence that seemed to drop over him. Before the next ring tone could rip through the silence again, he raised his arm and threw the phone as far as he could. The moment it landed, the phone rang again, but now the ring tone was fainter, as if coming from a great distance.

Lance headed out, wanting to get far away from the sound as quickly as possible. But strangely enough, it didn’t seem to get any weaker, no matter how fast he walked, and that made him feel like he hadn’t moved at all. For a moment the temptation to turn around and look for the phone was almost overwhelming,
but then he would also see how far from land he’d gone. And that would ruin everything.

Finally the phone stopped ringing.

HE
HAD
CLOSED
HIS
EYES,
swaying as he stood there, as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet. When he opened his eyes, a wolf with bared teeth and raised hackles was standing right in front of him. Fear shot through him, all the way out to his fingertips. For several seconds he was completely paralyzed. Then he spun around and began running toward land, but there was no land to run to, only the same gray endlessness in all directions. Lance turned abruptly, determined to fight, but now there was no wolf in sight. Had it been some sort of vision? The wolf he’d seen in Canada had posed in the exact same way, like an image of everything that refused to budge.

He would just have to go on. As he walked, he thought several times that he could hear the sound of breathing behind him, but when he turned around, nothing was there. He realized no wolf would go this far out on the ice, yet he couldn’t help turning to look. Each time he did, he saw once again that there was no land visible in any direction.

After a while he heard the breathing again, but this time he was determined not to look back. He kept on walking, but the sound didn’t go away; instead it got louder, and it seemed to have changed. It merged with the rhythm of his pulse, settling like an extra layer of sound on the sound of his own breathing. When he held his breath, the sound behind him stopped too; but the instant he began breathing again, it was there, like a shadow breath. As he continued across ice-covered Lake Superior, he thought the wolf breath slowed, definitely becoming more like the breathing of a human, until there was no longer any doubt. A man was walking behind him. Lance knew who the breathing belonged to. He would have recognized the sound anytime and anywhere. When he stopped short and held his breath, Andy did the same. Utter silence. Then he released the air from his lungs and clearly heard his brother do the same.

LANCE
TURNED
AROUND,
but Andy wasn’t there. Nothing else was there either. Making little shuffling movements with his feet, he turned 360 degrees on his own axis, without noticing anything change. The only thing he saw was his own body and the ice on which his boots were moving. Yet Andy kept on breathing, but the sound was no longer coming from a specific direction. It was more like it came from all directions at once, filling the whole space. The huge vault above the lake reverberated with Andy’s breathing, as if Lance had walked so far out that he’d at last ended up inside his brother’s terrified mind.

Just like the wolf, Andy stood there with his ears flattened and his hackles raised, refusing to budge, and yet he was radiating fear. And right behind each of them lay a blood-spattered body: the dead deer and the dead tourist. The deer is just a carcass the wolf found, thought Lance. The wolf was cleaning up after others. A thought slowly rose to the surface: What if Andy was also cleaning up after somebody else?

ALL
AROUND
HIM
the world was filled with a grayish light that told him nothing about what time of day it was. When he looked up, he didn’t see blue sky or clouds, just gray light. It wasn’t necessary to walk any farther. All he needed to do was to sit here and wait. He had sat down on the ice, and he could feel how his body was starting to doze off. Whoever had killed Georg Lofthus, it was no longer his concern.

Then he saw Jimmy walking toward him. Lance wanted to go to his son, but when he managed to get to his knees, he saw that he was looking at Jimmy’s back; the boy was moving away from him. Jimmy had on a thin summer jacket and no mittens, and no one was holding his hand. Lance realized something terrible: it was not him but his
son
who was about to disappear. Desperately he tried to call out Jimmy’s name, but he had almost no voice left. It was like in one of those nightmares when everything depended on being able to shout loudly enough, but it proved impossible. Except that this was no dream. He was really on his knees, way out here on the frozen lake, trying to yell his son’s name, but without success.

His legs twinged painfully when he stood up, but he had no choice. He couldn’t let Jimmy disappear. By now he could just barely make out the figure of the little boy. He needed to catch up with him and put his hat on, warm up his hands, take off his own jacket and wrap it around his son, carry him back to land. But how could he do that when he couldn’t tell one direction from another? He began following the hazy figure as fast as he could, with needles piercing his legs, but soon he lost sight of the boy. For a moment he paused, tempted to sit down and rest his painful legs. Jimmy was gone anyway, and soon he himself would disappear, but something inside him refused to let him sit down. Instead, he started walking again, trying to stick to the same course that Jimmy had taken when he vanished. It was the only chance he had to see his son again.

Not a drop of energy remained in him, other than a tiny scrap of tinder-dry will. Each time he blinked, black spots fell across the ice. Somewhere deep inside he understood what that meant, but he was not afraid. His only thought was to find Jimmy, to give him his hat and mittens, to wrap his own jacket around him. More of the black spots appeared when he blinked. So far they had dissolved whenever he kept his eyes open for a moment, but he could tell that soon they would stay where they were, like black snow.

He stopped and blinked. Black snow swirled into view. He forced himself to keep his eyes open as long as he possibly could. At first the black seemed to have come to stay; he saw nothing but darkness. Then he noticed that it was starting to disperse, the black spots disappeared, but much more slowly than before. He could manage only a couple more blinks. Finally there was only a single spot left on the ice. Lance went over and knelt down. It was his cell phone. He had a hard time getting his hand to obey, but at last he yanked the phone loose from the frosty grip of the ice. He opened the cover and saw the display light up. It was a missed message from Debbie.

Of course I remember. I can still feel the touch of your hand.

He blinked again and again, but not a single black spot fell. A thought was slowly forming in his cold head. He’d thrown away the phone a long time ago, when he was still trying not to turn
around because he didn’t want to see land. After that he must have walked over the ice in a big circle, and now he’d come back to the same place. That meant he couldn’t be very far from land even though he couldn’t see much more than his own hand and the cell phone. But a voice might be able to reach him from land. And a voice was all he needed to find the right direction.

SOMETHING
WAS
MOVING
under the ice. A shadow appeared right under his feet, as quick as a darting fish but bigger than a man. It lasted no more than a few seconds, then he lost sight of it, but the fear stayed with him. There was more than just water beneath him. He hesitated, took a couple of steps out. Or was it in? The ice rocked with each step. Then he saw it coming back. The shadow. It came racing toward him under the ice. At that instant the ice broke under his feet, and he fell through. Desperately he tried to lift his arms out of the water to defend himself against the creature speeding toward him.

Lance woke up, soaked with sweat, his chest heaving for air under several layers of woolen blankets. Still panicked from the dream, he cast the blankets aside. In the faint snowy light coming through the gap in the curtains he could see that someone was lying next to him. He leaped out of bed with a shriek and fumbled about in the dark room until he found the light switch over by the door. In his mind, he’d pictured his mother’s dead body lying on the bed, but then he realized that it was Debbie Ahonen. She was looking at him with a sleepy, confused expression. Lance’s heart was pounding, as if it wanted to leap out of his chest.

“What’s wrong?” asked Debbie in a husky voice.

Lance noticed that she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but her feet were bare.

“Come back and lie down.”

“But what . . . what are you doing here?” stammered Lance.

Suddenly he saw himself sitting in the kitchen, bundled up in blankets, while Debbie tried to get him to drink a mug of hot tea. Was that something that actually happened, or was it something he’d dreamed? But she really was here in his bed right now. And wearing no socks. Or was this also a dream?

“Come on,” she said, firmly patting the mattress. “And give me some of those blankets before I turn into a block of ice.”

Lance went over to the bed and picked up the woolen blankets he’d thrown off. One by one he placed them over Debbie, covering her up from her toes to the tip of her chin. She seemed to like that. Then he crawled under the blankets, being careful not to touch her.

Neither of them spoke. Lance was trying to collect his thoughts and figure out what was going on, but he couldn’t make any sense of it.

“Is it night?” he finally said.

“Almost ten.”

“At night?”

“Of course.”

As he took another breath, about to ask her what was happening, he suddenly remembered everything. The ice, the gray emptiness out on Lake Superior. He’d thought he was well on his way toward death when he finally heard her voice. Debbie was shouting to him from land. It had taken time to get his bearings, but after a while he’d found the right direction and heard her shouts getting closer, until at last she was standing there, wearing an army-green down jacket, with Baraga’s Cross behind her.

“You were mad at me, weren’t you?” he said, without looking at her as she lay next to him under the woolen blankets.

“Mad at you?”

“In the car.”

“I was yelling your name into the dark, but nobody answered,” said Debbie. “All sorts of thoughts were swirling through my mind. I’d almost given up, when you came staggering into view. I think I was more scared than mad.”

“So it was starting to get dark?” said Lance.

“Yeah.”

“You saved my life.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Debbie. “If you hadn’t got hold of me, I’m sure you would have called somebody else.”

“I’d dropped my phone. When I found it again and saw your text . . .”

“Oh, that,” said Debbie, embarrassed.

“Is it true that you can still feel the touch of my hand?”

Debbie sighed.

“Is it?” he asked.

“I just meant that . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Just meant what?” said Lance.

“You know, don’t you?”

“I just want to be sure.”

He could hear from her breathing that she was wondering how to put into words what she meant. And he had a feeling that at this moment everything would be decided.

“I’m lying in your bed, aren’t I?” said Debbie. “Isn’t that proof enough?”

“So it’s not just because I got lost and was freezing?”

“No.”

“No?” Lance repeated, happily.

“No.”

“At first I was scared to see that somebody was lying next to me.”

“I guess it’s been a long time,” said Debbie.

“But then I saw that it was you.”

She turned to face Lance, and they kissed. A quiet kiss that went on and on, as if they were trying to build a bridge over the past twenty-five years.