Page 44 of Backwoods
“Come on, don’t be ridiculous—” he started to say, and then he lost his words.
Wincing, Raven had placed one foot on the bridge, and the “W” on her face was glowing. It reminded Nick of the heat conducting tubes of a toaster oven when the power had been switched on: the mark, a ruddy orange, steadily grew brighter, and brighter.
Can’t be seeing this. It’s not really happening . . .
“See?” Raven stared at Nick, tears running down her cheeks. She put one hand on the railing, and the glowing suddenly increased in intensity, and Nick saw smoke tendrils rising from her face. She screamed at him. “See!”
“Stop it!” Nick broke his paralysis and pushed her away from the bridge. Raven staggered, dropped to her knees. She covered her face, trembling.
“Let me . . . let me take a look, please,” he said gently. He knelt next to her. “Please.”
Sniffling, she took away her hands. The mark had lost its unearthly glow, but it looked raw and sore, as if recently applied by the branding iron, and he caught a faint, sickening smell of seared flesh.
She gave him a baleful look. “You believe me now?”
“Raven, I’m a scientist,” he said. “But what I just saw . . . I don’t have a scientific explanation for it. Spontaneous human combustion triggered by touching something—nothing like this has ever been recorded.”
“Help me get away from here,” she said. She wiped tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. “Help all of us.”
He drew in deep breaths. If what she had told him about the power of the mark was real, as he had witnessed with his own eyes . . . he could not contemplate the implications of such a thing at the moment. He knew only that he needed to help her, and Amiya, and everyone else being held there against their will.
He looked skyward. He estimated that it was edging toward late afternoon. Perhaps a couple of hours left until sunset.
“You wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back for you—for all of you.”
28
Nick crossed over the bridge, leaving Raven behind, the girl watching him with glassy eyes full of hope. She had given him the details on a rendezvous point if she was forced to slip out of the vicinity, but she warned him, again, about the looming threat of nightfall.
“Get back before dark,” she said, and hugged him, surprising him. “No matter what.”
“Promise,” he said.
A keen sense of urgency pushed him into a run as he traveled the narrow dirt lane. He pumped his arms and legs.
He kept seeing that glowing mark on Raven’s face, his brain trying to process how such a thing was possible, and finding no answers.
It is what it is, his mother liked to say. Sometimes you didn’t have to understand the how or even the why of a thing in order to take the appropriate action. You had only to accept it and conduct yourself accordingly.It is what it is.
The lane diverged into a couple of different paths, but Nick had a simple landmark to guide him in that area. Peering downone lane, he saw, at the periphery, the boxy shape and triangular roof of his grandfather’s smokehouse.
“Thank God,” he said. The sight of the beloved structure was as welcome a vision as dry land might have been to a sailor lost at sea. He ached to be anchored back in the world he knew and understood.
He raced down the path, ghosts of dirt pluming from his rapid footsteps. Arriving at the perimeter of the home place, he looked around.
His Range Rover was parked exactly where he had left it: underneath the wooden carport. He felt in his pocket, found he still had the key fob, too. The helpers had confiscated the rifle, but had left him with his wallet and keys.
He scrambled to the vehicle. As he rounded the back end, he mashed the fob, and the doors unlocked.
“Hold it right there, son,” a familiar voice said.
Nick turned around to the house.
Grandpa Lee stood on the veranda.
He aimed a shotgun at Nick.
29
