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And thirty yards further, another: smaller, with a false front.
"Cool," Henry said, and briefly I admired him.
We sidled now, a lot more slowly and heading along the rise instead of down it. Ruined houses look real interesting during the day. At night they feel different, especially when lost high up in the forest. Trees grow too close to them, pressing in. The lack of a road, long overgrown, can make the houses look like they were never built but instead made their own way to this forgotten place, in which you have now disturbed them; they sit at angles which do not seem quite right.
I was begi
Then we saw the light.
After Pete asked his question in the bar, there was silence for a moment. Of course we remembered that night. It wasn't something you'd forget. It was a dumb question unless you were really asking something else, and we both knew Pete wasn't dumb.
Behind us, on the other side of the room, came the quiet, reproachful sound of pool balls hitting each other, and then one of them going down a pocket.
We could hear each other thinking. Thinking it was a cold evening, and there was thick snow on the ground, as there had been on that other night. That the rest of the town had pretty much gone to bed. That we could get in Henry's truck and be at the head of a hiking trail in twenty minutes, even driving drunkard slow.
I didn't hear anyone thinking a reason, though. I didn't hear anyone think
why we might do such a thing, or what might happen.
By the time Pete had finished his cigarette our glasses were empty. We put on our coats and left and crunched across the lot to the truck.
Back then, on that long-ago night, suddenly my heart hadn't seemed to be beating at all. When we saw the light in the second house, a faint and curdled glow in one of the downstairs windows, my whole body suddenly felt light and insubstantial.
One of us tried to speak. It came out like a dry click. I realised there was a light in the other house too, faint and golden. Had I missed it before, or had it just come on?
I took a step backwards. The forest was silent but for the sound of my friends breathing. "Oh, no," Pete said. He started moving backwards, stumbling. Then I saw it too.
A figure, standing in front of the first house.
It was tall and slim, like a rake's shadow. It was a hundred yards away but still it seemed as though you could make out an oval shape on its shoulders, the colour of milk diluted with water. It was looking in our direction.
Then another was standing near the other house.
No, two.
Henry moaned softly, we three boys turned as one, and I have never run like that before or since.
The first ten yards were fast but then the slope cut in and our feet slipped, and we were down on hands half the time, scrabbling and pulling-every muscle working together in a headlong attempt to be somewhere else.
I heard a crash behind and flicked my head to see Pete had gone down hard, banging his knee, falling on his side.
Henry kept on going but I made myself turn around and grab Pete's hand, not really helping but just pulling, trying to yank him back to his feet or at least away.
Over his shoulder I glimpsed the valley below and I saw the figures were down at the bottom of the rise, speeding our way in jerky blurred-black movements, like half-seen spiders darting across an icy window pane.
Pete's face jerked up and I saw there what I felt in myself, and it was not a cold fear but a hot one, a red-hot meltdown as if you were going to rattle and break apart.
Then he was on his feet again, moving past me, and I followed on after him towards the disappearing shape of Henry's back. It seemed so much further than we'd walked. It was uphill and the trees no longer formed a path and even the wind seemed to be pushing us back. We caught up with Henry and passed him, streaking up the last hundred yards towards the fence. None of us turned around. You didn't have to. You could feel them coming, like rocks thrown at your head, rocks glimpsed at the last minute when there is time to flinch but not to turn.
I was sprinting straight at the fence when Henry called out. I was going too fast and didn't want to know what his problem was. I leapt up at the wire.
It was like a truck hit me from the side.
I crashed the ground fizzing, arms sparking and with no idea which way was up. Then two pairs of hands were on me, pulling at my coat, cold hands and strong.
I thought the fingers would be long and pale and milky but then I realised it was my friends and they were pulling me along from the wrong section of the fence, dragging me to the side, when they could have just left me where I fell and made their own escape.
The three of us jumped up at the wire at once, scrabbling like monkeys, stretching out for the top. I rolled over wildly, grunting as I scored deep scratches across my back that would earn me a long, hard look from my mother when she happened to glimpse them a week later. We landed heavily on the other side, still moving forward, having realised that we'd just given away the location of a portion of dead fence. But now we had to look back, and what I saw-though my head was still vibrating from the shock I'd received, so I ca
Black hair was whipped up around their faces, and they looked like absences ill-lit by moonlight.
Then they were gone.
We moved fast. We didn't know why they'd stopped, but we didn't hang around. We didn't stick too close to the fence either, in case they changed their minds.
We half-walked, half-ran, and at first we were quiet but as we got further away, and nothing came, we began to laugh and then to shout, punching the air, boys who had come triumphantly out the other side.
The forest felt like some huge football field, applauding its heroes with whispering leaves. We got back to town a little after two in the morning. We walked down the middle of the deserted main street, slowly, untouchable, knowing the world had changed: that we were not the boys who had started the evening, but men, and that the stars were there to be touched. That was then.
As older men we stood together at the fence for a long time, recalling that night.
Parts of it are fuzzy now, of course, and it comes down to snapshots: Pete's terrified face when he slipped, the first glimpse of light at the houses, Henry's shout as he tried to warn me, narrow faces the colour of moonlight. They most likely remembered other things, defined that night in different ways and were the centre of their recollections. As I looked now through the fence at the other forest I was thinking how long a decade had seemed back then, and how you could learn that it was no time at all.
Henry stepped away first. I wasn't far behind. Pete stayed a moment longer, then took a couple of steps back. Nobody said anything. We just looked at the fence a little longer, and then we turned and walked away.
Took us forty minutes to get back to the truck.
The next Thursday Henry couldn't make it, so it was just me and Pete at the pool table. Late in the evening, with many beers drunk, I mentioned the fence.
Not looking at me, chalking his cue, Pete said that if Henry hadn't stepped back when he did, he'd have climbed it.
"And gone over?"
"Yeah," he said.
This was bullshit, and I knew it. "Really?"
There was a pause. "No," he said, eventually, and I wished I hadn't asked the second time. I could have left him with something, left us with it. Calling an ass cute isn't much, but it's better than just coming right out and admitting you'll never cup it in your hand.