Chapter 3

The False King of Nowhere

This newsletter is a place where I post my works in progress and unpublished manuscripts to see how they land with the world. Thanks for reading! Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

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CHAPTER THREE

The “home” Jack had been talking about appeared before much longer, tucked away in a small clearing just off the trail. It was a small log cabin, with broken glass in the front window, and a door that banged open and closed with each gust of wind. It looked as though no one had been in it for a long time. My heart sank.

“This is it?” I asked.

Jack said nothing. He nudged the door open wider with his nose, and disappeared inside.

I followed him to the door, and stood for a moment, weighing my options. Would I be safe here? Did it matter? I would be safer inside, I reasoned, than I would have been out here in the snow.

I eased the door open with my frozen hand, and slipped into the complete darkness cabin. It felt as oppressive and terrifying as being dropped into a pool of cold black ink. I’d never experienced a darkness that complete, not even in sleep. Not even after Cricket’s murder, when I wanted nothing more than to be there with her, in that tiny white coffin under the ground.

Outside it was still the middle of the night, maybe another two hours to go before daybreak. Afraid, I found myself speaking to her, to my sister, in “What-What,” the language we had made up as toddlers – a language full on consonants and hilarious questions, that only we understood. I asked her to help me, to guide me. She was the spirit to whom I turned, always, in times of danger. I had no way to know whether she heard me.

I opened my eyes wider, as if this might help me to see better in the blackness. It didn’t, of course. All it did, probably, was give me the look of a very surprised person who didn’t know where he was going, though the only person around to see this bewildered expression was me, inside my own head. I held the numb hands out in front of me, groping for anything that might hinder my awkward stumbles forward. The temperature in the cabin was just as cold inside as it was outside, though there was a slight bit of relief that came with the lack of wind. I closed the door behind me.

“Jack?”

“Right here.”

He sounded close.

“This is your house?”

“No. This is a hunting cabin.”

“I thought you kept referring to this as your house.”

“I said home. I said we needed to get home. We aren’t there yet.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know. You will. Cam, I need you to go to the far wall. There are some drawers under the counter there, in the area that is sort of like a kitchen. In them you will find some candles and matches. I need you to light them. I don’t have opposable thumbs or I’d do it myself.”

Shuddering, I did as he asked. Sure enough, I found some candles, the kind that come scented, in class containers, at the grocery store. They smelled like cinnamon and apples. There were no matches, but there were several lighters. I used these to ignite two candles, and set them on the counter.

By the glow of the two lit wicks I could make out the interior of the cabin. It was just one room, with a loft area that seemed to hold a bed. The bed had blankets on it, and pillows. The main room contained a table and chairs which, like the counter, was not dusty, telling me someone had been there recently. There was an overstuffed chair and a leather sofa, and a dog bed on the floor. There were paintings on the walls, and a couple of rugs on the floor, all of it much cozier and homier than I had expected given the dilapidated state of the windows and the ajar door.

As I looked around further, however, I realized that my sense of coziness had been perhaps premature, because the walls were also punctuated at various intervals, with the mounted heads of animals presumably killed in the hunt. Their dull marbles of eyes seemed very dead, all except for one of them – an African lion whose eyes seemed shiny, wet and alive, and, worse than that, I felt these eyes to be following me as I moved around the room, though every time I looked at it directly, they seemed to snap away a second before. I avoided looking at it again.

I had grown up in rural New Mexico, in the high desert mountains, where hunting was normal and, for many families, a nutritional necessity. But I had never myself been one to enjoy or have any interest in hunting. Venison made my stomach turn. I was not much of a meat eater, in fact. I wasn’t a vegetarian, but I was what you might call a reluctant carnivore. Chicken was cool, maybe turkey. I’d enjoyed ham until I read that pigs were as smart as dogs, maybe smarter, and then I couldn’t touch the stuff again, unless I was starving. I’d eat meat, but I didn’t want to know where it came from, how it had looked, or how it had been killed. These sightless taxidermy eyes, all staring lifelessly into space in the flickering candlelight, spooked me even more than I was already spooked.

“Ugh,” I said. “A pet cemetery.”

“Yeah, well, everybody’s gotta go sometime.”

I went to the wood stove in one corner of the room, and saw, with happiness, that there was a stack of chopped wood in a large metal bucket next to it, as well as a stack of dry old newspapers for kindling. I didn’t like to hunt, but I could hunt, because every kid in our town learned to shoot at some point. Similarly, I knew how to start a fire. I used this knowledge now, as Jack sat by, watching with great interest. My hands were so frozen I couldn’t grab the paper, so I held them over the candles for a few minutes, until I felt able to move them again.

“You could melt some snow in a pot,” suggested Jack. “We need to drink some water and warm up before our journey.”

“Oh, could I?”

“You could.”

“What journey?”

“You’ll see.”

“I seriously do not want to go anywhere right now.”

“You aren’t going now.”

“And where might a pot be?”

“Kitchen, under the sink.”

I checked, and found several dented pots and pans. I grabbed the largest one, went outside with one of the candles for light, and dug it into the snow. I brought this inside and set the pot down on the flat top of the wood stove, and stood by, watching the snow slowly melt. My legs began to buckle once more with exhaustion, prompting Jack to suggest I sit down, which I did.

He curled up in the dog bed, and licked his paws. “Frostbite will be the end of me,” he muttered.

“Unless I am. Tell me how you know about Cricket.”

Jack paused in his licking, to look me in the eye for a long moment. “I think maybe you should rest a bit before I answer you. I want you to be strong when I tell you.”

“I’m fine. Tell me.”

The dog sighed, as dogs do. Then he shook his head back and forth, like a person. “I would feel better about doing this after you’ve had some rest.”

“Oh. Well,” I said with sarcasm. “As long as you feel good, you know. That’s all that matters.”

We sat this way, in relative silence, as the fire crackled. I felt the eyes of African lion upon me again, and instinctively I looked towards it. I could have sworn that the second I made eye contact with the mounted head, it looked away. This was worse, in effect, than if the thing had just continued to stare at me. I folded my arms across my chest, and tapped my feet.

The room warmed quickly, and even though I was exhausted and angry – to such extent as a person could be angry at something as unbelievable as a talking dog or a lion-head stalker gaze – I relaxed into the spreading glow of thawing.

Soon, to my surprise, Jack was snoring.

“Oh, great,” I mumbled.

I heard a sound then, something like a faint rustling, coming from the direction of the mounted lion’s head. I did not want to turn my eyes to look at it again, but it happened anyway. Again, the lion’s eyes seemed to snap away as soon as I looked at it. When I looked away again, the sense of being watched, however, was overwhelming.

To distract myself, once I was warm I went back to the wall that held the counter and sink, and I began to look through the cabinets there, for something to eat. Jackpot. There were several shelves stacked full with canned goods. Soup, beans, ravioli. All I needed was a can opener. A spoon would have been nice, too. I searched, and found both items. The contents of the cans were frozen, from having been in sub-freezing weather for so long, so I placed the cans upon the stovetop until they thawed enough to be dug through with a spoon and eaten. While Jack continued to snore, I gorged myself on concentrated bean with bacon soup, ravioli in red sauce, and a can of peaches in heavy syrup.

Full, I walked back to the sofa, trying to avoid the eyes of the lion head – without success. When I looked up, against my own better judgment and before I had a chance to even stop myself, I was astonished to see that the head had moved.

Moved.

It was no longer in the same spot, high on the wall. Now, it was at eye level.

My eye level.

And the lion was looking right at me.

Now, I was not a boy – or, as I liked to tell myself, young man – who was given to acting on my fears. I had plenty of things I was afraid of, as anyone who had lived the life I’d had until then would. But I had learned long ago that one of life’s greatest survival skills was the ability to pretend to be just fine, no matter what. I was the guy who blurted out sarcastic comments when he was most convinced he was about to die. That’s who I was. Or, rather, that was who I had been, until that moment. In that moment, I ran to the dog, to Jack, and I shook him awake. I was shaking, more now than I had been at the worst moment of freezing to death during our long walk here.

“Jack! Jack!”

The dog blinked his eyes open and looked at me. “What is it?”

“The lion. It moved.”

Jack knit his brows together the way dogs do when they are struggling to understand. “I don’t follow.”

“There.” I pointed to the mounted lion’s head, at eye level.

Jack rolled his eyes and closed them again. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. Then, he was snoring again.

I was so agitated I began to pace. Towards the lion, then away, always keeping my eye averted. I did not want to look at it, the same way most people don’t want to stare directly at the sun. And just like the sun’s light, the lion’s eyes were everywhere upon me.

I was on about my twentieth lap, having just paced away from the lion and just turned back, when, as I approached the portion of the wall where it was hung, the lion’s head dropped. It stayed attached to the wall, but dropped from being up near the ceiling to being exactly at eye level with me. I froze. I should have run, but I was far too astonished to move.

This was when the lion’s head zoomed away from the wall and grabbed me up in its jaws, lifting me into the air by the collar of my shirt. I barely had time to let out a weak gasp, and then I was gone, down the throat of the beast. There was no chewing, nothing like that. Just me, walking in the room, then the head zooming out like a speeding train engine, growing larger as it came towards me, then the teeth hooking the fabric of my shirt, and me rising off the floor in stunned silence, me squeaking a little, and then me, diving head-first into a sort of dark tunnel as the lion tossed me down its throat.

I did not have a moment even to understand what was happening to me, before I fell, with a terrible thud, onto the hard, dry, dusty ground in the middle of a desert, in the middle of a very hot day.