The Big Reap

8.

“Nicky! Nicky, are you effing seeing this?”

As a point of fact, Nicky wasn’t effing seeing this, because Nicky wasn’t home right now. He hadn’t been for a while. When he and his cohorts stopped to film their live webcast Q&A in Boulder two days back, I took the opportunity to hitch a ride in ol’ Nicky, stuffing that poor, befuddled neo-hippie burnout into a metaphorical steamer trunk in the back of his mind next to some half-remembered Rusted Root lyrics, the abandoned mental blueprints for his pot-themed amusement park, and that awkward memory of seeing his not-yet-stepmom naked that one time by accident only really on purpose.

Not that Topher (pronounced Tow-fer, like we didn’t know his name was really Chris) or Zadie’d noticed. Firstly, because Nicky — the cameraman, equipment tech, weed supplier, and webmaster behind their all-the-sudden way-more popular web series Monster Mavens — who oh, by the way, really hated being called Nicky it’s Nicholas or at least just Nick you guys c’mon — was the quiet type, usually too baked and too absorbed in tinkering with his many gadgets to offer up more than a crooked half-smile or a grunt to register his happiness or displeasure (excepting those rare instances in which he felt he’d been Nicky-ed to excess). And secondly, they were too busy basking in the their newfound fame.

Until two weeks back, Monster Mavens was a modest internet success, with their blog generating a couple hundred unique hits per post, and their YouTube channel clocking in at somewhere around twenty-five hundred subscribers, half of whom were smartass college kids at least as baked as Nicholas-not-Nicky, who only tuned in to mock Topher and Zadie’s stubborn, moronic credulity in the face of no evidence whatsoever.

See, Topher and Zadie hunted monsters.

Badly.

Of course, they called them cryptids, and played them off as animals as-yet undiscovered. You know, Bigfoot and Nessie and the like, only they talked about them like they were a hair’s breadth away from coelacanths, those fish everybody thought were extinct until some fisherman netted a live one off the coast of South Africa. But if you ask me, finding a seven-foot ape in the Pacific Northwest or a dinosaur in a goddamn loch is a frick-ton less likely than a new fish in the sea. As anyone’ll tell you, there are plenty of them. Plus, these two patchouli-stinking, constantly bickering Deadheads (their shirts all said “Phish” or “Moe” or “Dave Matthews Band” on them, but I’ve been around a while, and I know the type) didn’t strike me as the scientific-method type — all the jargon-laced talk of fossil records and investigative methods in the world couldn’t convince me this gig of theirs was anything other than the two of them successfully forestalling their entrance into the real world, in favor of nights spent swigging jug wine around the campfire and boinking in tents while — and unfortunately, I know this part for absolute, if unscientific, fact — don’t-call-me-Nicky here surreptitiously recorded audio for his own, uh, personal use.

Then came Ada Swanson.

And then came fame and fortune.

And then came me.

You’ve heard of Ada Swanson. Hell, anyone who walked past a TV set in the summer of ’09 couldn’t have missed her. Those blond locks all twisted up in perfect ringlets, the tweezed eyebrows and bleached baby teeth that somehow so grotesquely aged her. Cheeks rouged rounder than round. Lips sculpted by cosmetics until their childlike fullness more resembled a grown woman’s. Every picture perfectly staged, her twirling a baton in the front yard of her family’s modest raised ranch in their quiet Colorado Springs suburb; playing piano at the local senior center; volunteering at a Denver soup kitchen. Always in sequins and a smile. And all of America wondering what kind of sick fucks did that to a six-year-old. Dolled her up. Pranced her about in front of crowds and cameras. Toured the pageant circuit like she was some kind of prize poodle: sit up, roll over, beg.

It was only a matter of time, the eager sad-faced viewing public told themselves, before someone went and took her. After all, that’s what happens in these twisted cycles of exploitation. They escalate, become self-feeding. Pageant-kids become targets for predators. And twenty-four-hour news networks make stars of murderers in their endless quest for new sets of bones to gnaw on.

The lack of irony with which we exploit the exploited to feed our endless need for misery-based entertainment is astonishing.

She was three days shy of her seventh birthday when she was taken. Straight out her bedroom window sometime between midnight and 6am, if her parents were to be believed. Not that anybody thought they were. They were creepshows, said America, and on that, at least, America probably wasn’t wrong. Mom was a pill-popping, big-haired, crispy-banged former cheerleader who ran the front desk at a local Chevy dealership and occasionally, after hours, lay atop it with the owner/manager. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship: his bad back kept her in Oxy, and the jungle-gym sex she treated him to in return kept him in a bad back. Dad was a general contractor with big hands and a big mouth who’d been between jobs for going on six years, which didn’t stop him from racking up a four-figure tab at the local watering hole, and low fives at the track. Then there was his best buddy, a local ski bum by the name of Dick Hartwell — five feet six of pure douchey smarm, always photographed in the same fleece vest and wraparound Oakleys, like he’d just stepped off the slopes. His picture was splashed across every news outlet the nation over for weeks when kiddie-porn was found on his computer. Never mind that it turned out to be a bunch of images downloaded from the sort of “barely legal” site where the chicks are all twenty-something behind their lip gloss, knee socks, and pigtails, by the time they cut him loose, his rep was ruined. Which was fine, I guess, since it turns out ol’ Dick Hartwell of Colorado Springs was once Richard Hartwell of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who just so happened to be thirty-two months in arrears on his child support payments for the three children by two women he’d left behind.

No one believed their story. Not even me. I mean, who pries open a second-story window in a quiet, closely packed development with no trees or hedges to speak of and absconds with a freakin’ six-year-old girl and her trusty stuffed rabbit without raising enough ruckus to wake the whole damn block? The way I saw it, the parents had to know more than they were letting on. They seemed all lovey-dovey on the surface, sure. But once the media spotlight blistered off the thin veneer of normalcy they’d overlaid onto their life, the rot beneath only served to make them look even guiltier than the hard-to-swallow lack of evidence.

No wonder Ada’s pop decided to eat a gun six months into the investigation.

Anyways, given the lack of evidence, the leads dried up pretty quick, and once every speck of dirt in the Swanson family’s life had been well and truly inspected by the tutting masses, folks lost interest. Then some nutjob psychiatrist in Fort Hood went on a rampage that left thirteen soldiers and civilians dead, and America moved on. The grand pageant of misery had found another head on which to rest the crown. Funny to think the well-coiffed anchors said the shooter-shrink’s name a thousand times, but the victims in that case were nothing but a hashmark on his tally. At least when a kid went missing, they were given the dignity of being exploited by name.

So what’s any of that got to do with Topher and Zadie and Nicholas-you-guys-not-Nicky? That’s easy. See, two weeks ago, the three of them were trudging through the chill Colorado wilderness, hot on the trail of some nothing-at-all they were convinced had to be Sasquatch (a local hiker snapped a blurry photo of something brown and maybe moving, which didn’t seem that remarkable to me, since damn near everything in Colorado that isn’t snow is brown, and half of it is moving) when they, uh, found her. Or she found them. Or not, depending who you ask.

You wouldn’t think the event would be so contentious, so up for debate. I mean, Nicholas-not-Nicky caught the big moment on camera, and once word spread, the footage was picked up by the mainstream media, first local, then national. The handheld camera jittering in time with the sound of trundling footfalls, crunching over dead leaves and crusted, desiccated snow as dry and noisy as breakfast cereal. Topher’s breath pluming as he whispered his narration — all mixed metaphors, malapropisms, and “majesty of nature” monologuing. Zadie with her emphatic “Nicky! Nicky, are you hearing this?” as their bull-in-a-china-shop parade through the stunned silence of the old growth forest was joined by a fourth set of footsteps — crazed, ragged, and coming ever closer. Topher, Nicholas-not-Nicky, and Zadie crouched for a moment, silent, behind a thicket of brambles, beyond which that fourth set of footfalls shuffled out a confused solo while it tried to figure out where its accompaniment went. Topher prattled on in a reverent whisper about how they were going to change the course of modern science when they revealed the gentle giant behind these bushes — this missing link between man and beast — to the world.

The big moment: Nicholas-not-Nicky’s hand reaching out past the lens to push aside the branches. Zadie gasping. Topher shouting, “What the fuck?”

And then the three of them gang-tackled by a gaunt, hunched, and apparently stark-raving-mad woman — ninety years old if she was a day — with wild eyes, tattered pajamas, and matted hair that looked like strands of iron and steel against her blue-tinged hypothermic skin, which was speckled white with frostbite. She smashed head-first into the camera, mashing a cheap pink plastic barrette into the lens. The four of them went ass-over-teakettle — the five of them if you count the old lady’s stuffed bunny — and slid down a small embankment to a creek. The whole while the three monster hunters are screaming, and the woman’s prattling on the same nonsense five-syllable phrase over and over again. “Ahwahmahmommee!” stacked end-on-end, without so much as a pause for breath. She mouthed the words with every inhalation as well, sounding like a cross between a bullfrog and a set of soot-choked bellows. When they finally came to a rest at the bottom of the embankment, snow-dusted and sprinkled with pine needles, Topher and Zadie tag-teamed trying to calm her down, one soothing while the other asked Nicholas-not-Nicky if he was getting this. It didn’t take, so Topher — fed up, I guess, or else he spent too much time in college watching soaps — slapped her. America didn’t like that much, as it turns out, and he later admitted on the Today show he shoulda maybe had Zadie do it. But still, it did the trick; the old lady stopped talking.

“Now,” he said to her, eyes glancing all can-you-believe-this at the camera the whole time, “nice and slow, how bout you tell us your name, and what it is you’re trying to say, okay?”

The old woman swallowed hard and licked her cracked, bleeding lips, calming by degrees. Then she looked directly into the camera lens, and said, with all the attitude of a pissed-off tween diva, “My name is Ada Swanson, and I want my mommy.”

Once the video hit the web, the response was full-on nuts — as, most assumed, was the old lady herself. But the obvious falsehood (in most folks’ eyes, at least) of her claim aside, the fact remained that she was found in pajamas consistent with those Ada’d been wearing the night of her abduction, and she’d been carrying Ada’s stuffed rabbit, Admiral Fuzzybutt, when she’d been found by these yahoos. Not a similar one, mind you, but the real effing deal, as identified some hours later by her mother. Seems the Admiral had himself a craft-project mishap one day when Ada was three — by which I mean his left ear was lopped off with a pair of scissors — and Ada’s mother was forced to reattach the ear with the only thread she had on-hand, a royal blue. She did so inexpertly, though not without a certain flair. Anyways, her choice of thread and lack of skill were distinctive enough to convince Mom and cops both. They took the woman into custody and interrogated her for hours in an attempt to find out who she was and where she got the bunny.

But if the news was to be believed, her answers made no damned sense. She stuck with her story of being Ada Swanson, taken from her bed by dark of night. By whom? She didn’t know, exactly. Seems she could only see them when the moon was full, whatever that means. Taken where? A cabin nestled in the woods as hard to look at as her captors or maybe not, she claimed, seeming confused and unsure because she also spoke of spending her nights beneath the stars, of bare dry earth beneath her feet (even on those rare instances in which it rained), and of the watchful eyes of animals in the darkness. When pressed on the question of where this maybe-cabin was, she couldn’t say.

And how had she happened upon the Monster Mavens? Why, she’d escaped, of course, or maybe been let go, only to wander for days through the frigid Colorado wilderness, parched and starved and hypothermic, before finally running into the first people besides her elusive captors she’d seen since she’d been taken. Which was how long, exactly? Days, she thought sometimes, or maybe months, or maybe decades. Her story was vague and unhinged, full of nightmares of bloodletting and half-glimpsed half-human creatures who brushed her hair and cooed over her and plumped her up inside their imaginary cabin with stolen sweets and wild root vegetables and the spit-roasted meats of countless tiny woodland creatures even as they slowly drained her dry — but word for word, unnamed sources told the papers, it matched the big bucket of crazy she’d unloaded with scarcely a pause for breath straight into Nicholas-not-Nicky’s camera as they’d trudged back to the Monster Mavens van with her in tow.

Word was, her fingerprints came back inconclusive. Which is what I woulda told the press, too, if I’d run ’em and they came back matching a missing six-year-old girl’s. DNA results were pending, said the news — but the state was backlogged, their lab drowning under the rising tide of pending cases, so it could be weeks before they had anything to report. In the meantime, no one came forward to identify the woman, which made sense, because Lilith was pretty damn sure she was Ada. She told me as much a few days back, after popping in on me from out of nowhere and damn near scaring me right out of my borrowed skin.

“Like the duds,” she said. “Very… ironic. I hear the kids are into that these days.”

The duds in question were a paunchy, lugubrious sixty-something Italian man with deep-set eyes, a gentle voice, and delicate, uncalloused hands, upon the third finger of the left of which he wore a clunky gold ring, absent jewels but stamped with the image of the crucifixion. A cardinal’s ring, which made sense, on account of he was a cardinal. A cardinal Lilith damn near killed by sheer force of startlement, if his race-horse heartbeat and resulting dizziness were any indication.

I tugged free my meat-suit’s Roman collar, setting it on the scarred wooden desk of the study carrel at which I sat, and gulped air in an attempt to calm him. He was a pious man, well-intentioned yet ill-equipped for the recent turn his life had taken, meaning me. The carrel was piled high with books, half of them older than the European conquest of the Americas, plucked from the shelves of the Vatican’s Secret Archives in which I sat. The place was deserted; all the Vatican was abuzz with Easter preparations, leaving few with time for study or quiet reflection. It was five months or so since I’d vanquished Magnusson, four since the nameless creature in the desert, and I’d spent the ensuing days doing my damndest to locate any mention of the remaining feral Brethren, to no avail. Lilith figured it was best to take them out first, before tackling the ones who’d been tipped to hell’s hate-on for them and would therefore see me coming. Problem was, they were the very definition of off-the-grid. Even the Pope’s own private library didn’t have shit-all on them, though I did find some peculiar references to Christ’s own purported bloodline (which, apart from the fact that it shouldn’t exist since scripture never mentions him fathering a child, seems to include two heads of state, four saints, and all three Bee Gees) and a centuries-old reference to a near-apocalypse ushered forth in a great city by the sea as a consequence of the damnation of an innocent girl — only to be foiled by one of the devil’s own.

But I didn’t put much stock in prophecies.

“Nothing ironic about it,” I told her. “I needed access. This guy had it. End of story. Besides, you’re behind the times. I hear irony is dead.”

“Yes, well, so are you,” she said. “Although I can’t help but notice this meat-suit of yours is not. That makes what — eleven live ones in the past five months alone? Dare I hope you’ve lost your taste for piloting the dead?”

“Dare all you like, but it won’t make it any truer,” I told her. “Like I said, I needed access, and this guy had it. Dead cardinals are hard to come by, and anyways, even if I could find one, it wouldn’t do me any good. He’d raise a few eyebrows if he was seen walking around.”

“And here I thought his sort was big on resurrections.”

“Resurrection,” I corrected, “as in singular. Now, what’re you doing here, Lily?” I confess, that last was testier than I intended, but truth be told, her teasing hit a little close to home. I had been taking a lot of living vessels lately. I kept telling myself it was on account of access or some other necessity, but the fact is, the Sam of old would have found another way. When it comes right down to it, taking living vessels was… easier than it used to be. Less hand-wringy. Maybe my heart was growing harder. Maybe something inside me had given up. Or maybe being so close to the dark energy released by Ana’s failed ritual in LA — the one that resulted in Danny’s death — had tarnished me in ways I’d yet to understand. Whatever the reason, it troubled me, but not enough to stop. That alone was enough to make me wonder if I’d lost something fundamental to what made me me.

“I have a lead,” she told me. “A little girl who disappeared four years ago from her Colorado home just reappeared. Only she’s not so little anymore.”

“Look, Lily, I don’t mean to criticize, but that sounds kind of flimsy. I know you haven’t been among the living for a while now, but kids grow up. It’s hardly news, let alone evidence of Brethren involvement.”

Lilith gave me a look that could have shattered glass. “I don’t mean to say that she got taller, you fucking dolt, I’m telling you she wandered out of the woods an old woman.”

I sat up a little straighter in my chair. “She what?”

“You heard me.”

“You sure she’s not a nut?”

“That’s what the authorities believe, of course,” she said, “but they’re wrong.”

“And you think there’s Brethren mojo behind her aging act?”

“Do you recall what Jain said to you?”

I narrowed my eyes at her in puzzlement. “Jain?”

Lilith shook her head subtly — more to herself than to me — and clarified. “The one you killed in Mexico.”

I thought back. “If I could be killed,” I quoted as best as I could remember, “my mountain cousins would have found a way. They begrudge me my appetites, as if their method of procuring sustenance is any more humane.” Realization dawned. “You think the mountains are the Rockies, and the humane methods are sucking her life-force dry bit by bit but leaving her alive?”

“I do indeed.”

I looked around. Slammed closed the book that I’d been poring over. A plume of dust that smelled like dried vanilla poofed out of it and pricked at my sinuses, daring me to sneeze. “Then fuck this place,” I said. “Let’s find me a new meat-suit and head to Colorado!”

“Excellent,” said Lilith. “As it happens, I have just the candidate.”

The police combed the woods, of course, aided by countless volunteers from as far afield as Fort Collins and Durango, sweeping through the brush in dotted lines of men and women with only ten feet in between. But despite the fact the area surrounding Colorado Springs was too dry for any significant snowfall to accumulate the terrain was steep, uneven, and tough to navigate, and there was just too much of it to cover with any degree of confidence. After a week spent trudging back and forth along a grid two square miles centered on the spot the woman had been found, the police called off the search.

Lucky for me, the Monster Mavens hadn’t, and who could blame them? Their fifteen minutes of fame had brought them endorsements, late-night talk appearances, even the promise of a book deal. They were gonna milk it for all that it was worth, and with a YouTube audience now numbering in the hundred-thousands, that meant trying to find the mysterious cabin of which the old woman spoke. And, of course, the strange, subhuman creatures within.

Did they believe the woman to be Ada? Hard to say. Nicholas, based on what little I could glean from the not pot-dulled bits of memory I’d been able to access, didn’t, but Topher and Zadie seemed earnest enough. Lord knows they played it up whether they believed it or not. And the internet gobbled it up like so many McNuggets. The old woman had her own Wikipedia entry, and the comments section of the Monster Mavens’ blog was chock-a-block with speculation. SCULLY58008 was betting, against all odds, on some sort of hillbilly brainwashing cult, while LilMsGlinda was leaning toward a coven of witches looking to fatten up the old lady Hansel-and-Gretel style so they could eat her. VanH3llsing, predictably, guessed vampires. And Area69 said dollars to donuts it was aliens, or a government cover-up of same.

If they only knew how much weirder the truth really was.

It was six days in to the Monster Mavens’ search — our search, I should say — that we’d found the cabin.

We’d been hiking in a haphazard zigzag — something Topher (never Christopher, a rule even Nicholas-not-Nicky obeyed, though neither Topher nor Zadie extended him such courtesy) cooked up between sips of Early Times straight from the bottle as he hunched over our maps beside the fire at camp one night. “The cops don’t know what the eff they’re doing, man,” he’d told me conspiratorially, the sheer paint-blistering offensiveness of his whiskey breath making me wonder whether it might be prudent to be sitting farther away from open flame. “The sorts of things we’re looking for, they don’t follow lines or grids, you get me?”

I didn’t. Luckily, Topher was too drunk, and too comfortable in his role as alpha-male to require — or even expect — a response.

“We gotta, like, listen to our souls, bro. They’ll lead us true, you wait and see.”

And as stupid as that sounded, it kinda sorta worked.

We’d been on the trail for hours. Lungs hoarse in the thin mountain air, Topher and Zadie snapping at each other all day in the benign way all couples do when their company runs brittle. They’d been pushing hard to find some scrap of fame-stretching evidence ever since the calls started drying up a few days after the discovery of the old woman, and they were both haggard, tired, and grumpy as all get-out. Not that I had a ton of sympathy for them. They had each other, after all, while I had no one, and on a pettier note, they got to walk all day with those ski-pole-looking thingys that helped with balance or whatever, while I was stuck pretending to be their cameraman. That meant hauling thirty pounds of camera around on one shoulder and maneuvering by viewfinder, which in turn meant I’d experienced several days of stumbles, backaches, and motion sickness. But I’d gotten my revenge, I guess. I was supposed to be editing and uplinking the footage of our mystical snipe-hunt every night from camp, but in fact, I’d been doing no such thing. Wouldn’t even know how, to own the truth. Hell, there was a pretty good chance this camera I was carrying wasn’t even on. Not like I could tell the difference either way. Best I could hope for was to remember to take the lens cap off.

But that goddamned camera was good for one thing, at least: it could see the fucking cabin. Which is more than I could say for the three of us. Though whether we couldn’t, or just wouldn’t, I’m not entirely sure; Lord knows how Brethren mojo works. The sensation was not unlike the one I’d experienced when I’d first arrived at the shuttered public bath house Magnusson had been using as his laboratory. But while that building simply resisted looking at, causing my eyes to slide right off it with nothing more than the scantest of impressions, the cabin flat-out would not show itself to my — or Topher’s, or Zadie’s — naked eye.

I’m getting ahead of myself. First I should tell you about the almost-murder.

We’d been trudging along for what seemed like forever, on jagged nerves and terrain to match. The afternoon was getting on, and the long shadows cast by the mountain ridge to our west bathed us in chill gray half-light like crushing depression, dulling colors, numbing limbs to sluggishness, and settling creaky into our every weary joint. My feet were blistered. My camera-shoulder ached. And my head was throbbing, on account of Topher and Zadie’s bickering, which had begun as the occasional potshot a few miles back, only to escalate to a vicious barrage as the afternoon wore on.

Topher, early on, all brittle false-cheer: “C’mon — pick up the pace back there, woman! We got monsters to catch!”

“Quit hogging the water!” Zadie, later, whining.

“What’re you, stupid? We’re not going that way, it’s too steep.” Topher, evening the score a few paces later. And then they were off to the races.

“You’re the one who marked the route, dumbass. Can’t you fucking read a map?”

“Better than you can read a fucking sonar readout.”

“Jesus, does it always have to come back to that bullshit in Loch Ness?”

“Bullshit?” Topher got up in Zadie’s face, all pointy and indignant. “How can you stand there and call it bullshit? That sonar image was definitive.”

“Definitively a piece of driftwood.” As Topher got closer, Zadie made a face, squinching up her nose and eyes. “Holy hell,” she said, “when’s the last time you washed that shirt? It smells like gym socks soaked in Patchouli and bong water. I’m gonna lose my fucking lunch here.”

“More like both our lunches, the way you’ve been packing it in.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying, I thought I made it pretty clear I packed the ostrich jerky for me.”

“Well then maybe you shouldn’t have put it in my pack. Oh, wait! You needed room in your pack for that goddamned travel guitar, because God forbid I go one night without having to hear your horrible playing. You’d think in seven years, you would have learned one chord.”

“You never complained before.”

“You sure about that? Or is it that you couldn’t hear me over the fucking racket you were making? Long as you insist on torturing me with that thing night in and night out, I’ll finish the goddamn jerky if I goddamn well feel like it. And you’re one to talk about putting on the pounds; your gut looks like fucking cookie dough pouring out over that stupid-ass belt buckle of yours.”

“You sound just like your mother. And you told me you liked this belt buckle!”

“I swear to Christ, Christopher, if you tell me I sound just like my mother one more time, you’ll be bunking with Nicky, you hear me? And believe you me, there’s plenty of stuff I’ve said I liked that I’m mostly just enduring.”

“You know I hate it when you call me Christopher! Christopher is my dad’s name. And anyways, it’s fucking rich, you teasing me about my name — your given name is Susan. You stole Zadie off the cover of a book, one you never even finished, for shit’s sake.”

At that last, Zadie looked directly into my camera, worried that she’d been outed to the world. (No chance: it wasn’t recording, and anyway, I’d been zooming in on a cool-looking bird some twenty feet behind her.) Then, after one stricken moment of paralysis, she wheeled on Topher, and smacked him square across the jaw.

I was surprised. In my time with Topher and Zadie (Chris and Susan?), I’d seen ’em bicker plenty, but nothing ever came of it. They were peas in a pod, or whatever the hippie drum-circle equivalent would be. Macho and hembra bongos, I guess. (What? That’s what they call the big bongo and the little one, respectively. Or maybe it’s the little and the big. Okay, I may’ve been spending way too much time with these two.) Point is, I’d never gotten a whiff of violence repressed in their prior interactions. Which made the slap surprising, and what came next goddamn terrifying.

Topher looked at her a moment, shocked silent. Then he shrugged out of his pack in one quick motion and tackled her, his hands around her neck.

Zadie let out a squeal that became a gurgle as his thumbs pressed against her trachea. I belted out an involuntary “Hey!” and moved toward them to stop Topher from killing her. In my astonishment, I clung stupidly to the camera on my shoulder. It had become so much an extension of this meat-suit in my mind — so accustomed was Nicholas to carrying it — I simply never thought to drop it. It was a stupid move, because the weight of the equipment slowed me down, and could have cost Zadie her life, but in retrospect, my idiocy proved helpful. But not before we three tumbled down the embankment.

It happened like this. I leapt onto Topher’s back, and tried to ride him to the ground. He would not relinquish his grip on Zadie, who was already off-balance from his attack. My weight plus the camera made him top-heavy. He tumbled forward onto her, me still on his back and then rolled into an awkward somersault, taking me along. His hands released her neck, too late to prevent her from tumbling after us. So the three of us rolled down the steep decline, maybe twenty feet all told, but the pitch was such it was more falling than rolling.

We hit bottom and scattered like jacks. I landed flat on my back with a hollow whumph and a plume of breath like a pair of bellows being squeezed. For an agonizing second, new breath just wouldn’t come, and then finally my diaphragm listened to what my lungs were telling it and got back to work.

I found my feet and looked around, disoriented. Heard a shuffle of nylon ripstop, caught a glimpse of matching winter jackets through the trees, one following the other in hot pursuit. I had no idea what the hell had come over these two today, but I figured I ought to join in the parade. And so I did, the camera dangling behind me from its strap, its choking weight slowing me down enough I thought I might never catch up. But they weren’t running for long.

Up ahead, I heard a scuffle, and then a sickening crack. Like a gunshot. Like broken bones. I worried it was Zadie’s neck and put on whatever little speed I could with the camera pulling back on me like a yoke. In seconds, I spotted them, and breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Zadie’s neck that snapped. It was her walking pole, which had apparently just broken in half. Unfortunately for Topher, said walking pole broke in half because she brought it down atop his head.

Topher, who’d been grappling — buck knife drawn — with Zadie when she cold-cocked him, wobbled a moment on his feet. His eyes rolled back, his face went slack, and his buck knife tipped slowly in his loosened grip, eventually falling to the forest floor point-down. Its handle wobbled back and forth as it stuck, in imitation of its owner, perhaps. Then Topher’s knees buckled, and he went down.

I looked at Zadie, who was still holding the handled end of the walking pole like a baseball bat, its lacquered surface now terminating in a jagged metal O, and then at Topher’s crumpled form. Zadie looked back at me, wild-eyed and panting. Then she threw the pole away from her in disgust, as if it had transformed into a writhing snake, and whatever malevolent urge had come over the two of them evaporated. She dropped to her knees beside her unconscious lover, and called to me, voice pleading: “Nicky! Nicky, get over here, and bring the camera. I can’t tell if Topher’s breathing!”

I did as she asked, struggling out of the camera strap as I approached. She snatched the camera from me like a desert wanderer might a canteen. Then she held the lens up to Topher’s nose and mouth, her face splitting into a manic grin of relief as it plumed with rhythmic condensation.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “I thought I’d killed him. Hell, for a minute there, I thought he was gonna kill me.” She chucked Nicholas-not-Nicky’s camera aside without a thought. It bounced off a jutting shoulder of exposed mountain rock, and its oversized viewfinder swung open on its hinge. Somewhere deep inside his own psychic prison, Nicholas-not-Nicky let out a wail of sheer gearhead angst. But I wasn’t paying him any mind. Nor, if I’m being honest, did I care much that Topher had regained a sort of swirly-eyeballed consciousness, thanks possibly to Zadie’s gentle if insistent slapping of his cheeks.

But I did care about what he was pointing at with one unsteady hand as he blinked his eyes into focus, his face a mask of punch-drunk confusion. “Nicky!” he stage-whispered with awed incredulity. “Nicky, are you effing seeing this?”

And as I said some time ago, Nicky wasn’t. But I was, and once Zadie followed the trail of Nicky’s arm down past his pointing finger toward the camera, she was seeing it too.

The camera, propped crooked on the rock a few feet from us, aimed at a gentle, treeless patch of upslope, gray and barren as the moon, and as empty, too. The camera’s viewfinder was open. And in it was that same patch of barren, empty upslope, though in the viewfinder it was neither barren nor empty.

On it sat a small log cabin, rough-hewn and lichen-scabbed. It sat a quarter-turn away from facing us, its front windows staring blankly into the middle distance from beneath their brow of covered porch as if indifferent to our presence. A thin wisp of oily smoke twisted skyward from its chimney. A patch of tilled earth arranged in furrows — a garden not yet growing — rested on its southeastern edge, now deep in sunset’s shadow. The cabin was still and quiet beneath the waning light. No light shone from within. And though for our entire hike the forest had teemed with life, it had apparently abandoned us now, for all was silent and still as a crypt.

“The fuck is that?” Zadie muttered.

“That,” I told them, “is proof.”

“Of what?”

“That the world’s a weirder place than even you two yahoos realize.”

And then, before they knew what hit them, I attacked.