Black Mountain: An Alex Hunter Novel 4 Page 2

  ‘This far, that’s all.’

  She nodded slowly, still not convinced he was telling her everything. Still, one more hour can’t hurt, she thought, and tossed him her empty cup.

  *

  Brad watched Amanda smack a low branch out of the way as she set off. Even in the bulky cold-weather gear, her tight little figure was visible beneath all the layers. He smiled as he watched for a moment longer, then rolled up his sleeve to check his altimeter and compass again. The dials were illuminated due to the poor light. He looked up and frowned: the sun hadn’t reappeared and the low cloud was darker than he would have liked. If it snowed, or got any colder, Amanda would kill him. The trek was turning out to be miles longer than he’d expected, and now he was thinking that they’d be trekking back in the dark for sure. He chewed his lip. If the advice he’d been given was right, it should be less than an hour now to the landslip that had created a short cut to the top of the Black Dome. Maybe he should lift the pace a bit.

  He hoisted the pack a little higher on his back and adjusted his belt. As he did, the gun he was carrying dug into his gut. The red crosses on the map indicated bear sightings. Seemed the large animals were on the move early this season. On the move away from where we’re going, he thought, which is good. He’d heard that even the wolves had been coming down off the mountain. Even better.

  Still, it was better to have a gun and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

  *

  They looked at the landslip – tons of rock and soil that had been shaken free from the side of the mountain and had settled to create an uneven path up the once inaccessible rock face. Normally this was the spot where hikers gave up and professional climbers took over, but now, even to Amanda, it looked . . . well . . . possible.

  Brad had picked up a stick about four feet long and was pointing it at a few places along the slip. ‘We just need to ease across that small gap at the start, then drop down onto the path and stay close to the cliff face – it’ll be a piece of cake.’

  He leaned in against the stone and hopped across the gap, then turned back to her and held out the stick for her to grab onto and follow. As Amanda leaped across, she noticed that the newly exposed rock was clean – the stark browns and grey of the gneiss and schist probably only laid open to the elements within the last few weeks. A fanciful thought crossed her mind: it looked painful, like a wound cut through to the bone.

  Amanda kept hold of the stick and used it as a walking staff. As she moved along the dry wall of stone, she observed crevices and holes in the rock face exposed by the loss of surface soil and debris. Some of them looked deep, and she bent down to peer into one. Even though she put her hands on either side of her face and squinted, it didn’t do any good; there was nothing to see but inky blackness.

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Phew, smells like something died or pooped in there.’

  Brad looked back at her. ‘Maybe a falcon, they like to nest in rock faces. Come on, keep up.’

  Amanda turned to look out from the mountainside. At over 6000 feet and without the trees to block the view, it was spectacular. True to the name, the mountain looked almost black in the fading light. Low cloud vapour was snaking through the hollows and around the treetops, giving the whole place a primordial atmosphere. She lifted the camera from around her neck and opened the zoom – it buzzed and clicked as it took the snap, then tidied itself away.

  It was almost magical to be able to look down on the other mountains from this height. She leaned out towards the edge of the slip – it was a long way down, at least a 1000-foot drop before the slope became a little gentler and tree-covered again.

  ‘Halloooooo,’ she called.

  The word stretched out and she waited, but no echo came back to her. She sucked in a huge breath, preparing for an even bigger shout, when Brad swung around pulling a pained face. As he put his finger to his lips, a rock the size of a mailbox thumped into the dirt between them. They looked at each other with wide eyes . . . and waited. Amanda drew her shoulders up and gritted her teeth – she’d forgotten they were in a slip zone.

  Brad came back to her. ‘It’s pretty stable,’ he whispered, ‘but there could be loose debris that may fall. Best not to bust out with any more karaoke right now, okay?’

  She nodded and went to step over the stone that had fallen. She frowned, tapped it with her stick, then squatted. Odd, it doesn’t look like a raw boulder. The stone seemed to have been shaped, squared, like a large cinderblock, she thought. She brushed it with her hand – and noticed the symbols carved into it.

  ‘Hey, look at this,’ she called.

  Brad kneeled beside her and pulled the stone out of its slush and dirt crater. He turned it over – the symbols were on all four sides. ‘Old. Looks Native American – a figure behind two arrows, one pointing left, the other right. Makes sense – the Black Dome was actually called Attakulla, after a Cherokee Indian chief, long before we palefaces renamed it.’

  Amanda brushed more soil out of the carving. ‘Is that a man?’

  ‘Nah, don’t think so; arms are too long. Looks sorta deformed though. See all those other little marks carved into it? Might be symbols, or just where the stone was cut.’

  Amanda sat back on her haunches. ‘Well, it’s very cool – we should take it back with us.’

  Brad looked at her with half-lidded eyes. ‘My little angel, I know who you mean when you say “we”. This piece of stone probably weighs about forty pounds. I’ll end up a hunchback if I try lugging it down over 6000 feet of mountain.’

  ‘But it’s all downhill on the way back, remember? Like you said, it’ll be eeeeeasy. Besides, I have the perfect place for it beside the fireplace.’

  Brad groaned. ‘Let’s leave it for now and have another look on the way back, okay?’

  ‘Good idea, I’m sure it’ll be lighter then.’ She patted his shoulder, then used it to get to her feet. She looked up at the sheer rock wall above them. ‘Wonder where it came from? It looks like a giant house brick.’

  Brad scanned the rock wall where it had been scoured by the slippage. ‘There.’ He pointed to an area half-hidden by a small ledge and a tangle of fallen bushes. He squinted. ‘Looks like more of them up there.’

  Amanda followed his directions about thirty feet straight up, and saw the other stones – dozens of them, stacked one on top of the other, bricking in a natural cavity in the rock wall that had been exposed by the earth sliding away. It was roughly triangular shaped and about nine feet in height. She could see a small dark hole near the top where the fallen stone had come from. She stepped back, closer to the edge of the path, to get a better look.

  ‘The cave’s been sealed off – did the Native Americans build walls like that? I thought they only made stone burial mounds.’

  ‘Sure they did. Different tribes built walls for everything from agriculture to defence. In fact, I read archaeologists just found an ancient Indian wall submerged beneath the Hudson River – running 900 feet end to end.’ Brad stepped back as well. ‘Maybe this was a grain store they needed to hide. Around here, the Catawba and Cherokee were always at war with someone.’

  ‘Pretty secure grain store if you ask me. Maybe it was a prison – you know how the legends go: mess with the chief’s daughter, get entombed, problem solved.’ She had another thought. ‘Hey, could be hidden treasure maybe. You think?’

  Brad rolled his eyes. ‘They were Indians, not pirates, Amanda. The ancient tribes never valued gold, or jewels. Land, good hunting and honour – these were the things they treasured. Can’t seal them up, can you?’

  ‘Guess not.’ Amanda stepped back again, craning her neck to see the stones better. The ground shifted under her feet as the lip of the ledge started to move. She felt herself sliding towards the abyss and pinwheeled her arms, trying to regain her balance.

  Brad grabbed her by the front of her parka and pulled her roughly forward. ‘Stop playing around, will you. Anyway, we’ve seen all we can from here. Let’s g
o on up to the Dome, and we can report the wall to the ranger when we get back.’

  Amanda looked back at the edge of the path and shook her head, trying to clear the image of that long fall to the forest below. She started walking, her legs feeling wobbly, then turned back briefly. ‘Okay, we report it, but only after we’ve got that stone safely in the trunk of my car. Just one second.’

  Buzz-click, buzz-click – two more photos for her album.

  *

  By the time Brad had hauled Amanda up onto an outcrop of rock and declared they were as high as they could go, the occasional speck of sleet had turned to real snow. There was a wind chill that cut through their clothing and made their lips so numb it was hard to talk.

  ‘We might be the first people to have stood here for nearly one hundred and fifty years,’ Brad said through gritted teeth.

  Amanda tried to give him her best appreciative smile. She was standing as close as possible to his huge frame so he acted as a windbreak. As far as she was concerned, and kept telling him, the view had been just as good from the side of the mountain where the slip had been. She noticed his lips were turning blue and he’d developed the hunched look of someone whose body temperature is rapidly falling.

  The snow either drifted down or whipped past them, depending on the gusts of wind, and she had to speak loudly to be heard. ‘Let’s go, baby. We’ve seen enough now.’

  Brad stared into the wind for a few more seconds, then nodded and took her hand to help her down from the rocks. ‘You’re right, time to go. I don’t like the way the weather’s closing in on us.’

  There was no sightseeing on the way down. Away from the exposed Black Dome, there was more shelter so the needle-sharp cold wind with its haunted moaning was left behind. The falling snow suppressed any sounds around them, except for the squeal of crushed flakes under Brad’s large feet as he moved them quickly along. Amanda had her hands firmly tucked up under her arms and only pulled them out to maintain her balance when they had to hop across logs, boulders or particularly slippery-looking drifts.

  ‘You hear that?’ Brad said, stopping and half-turning to her with a frown on his face.

  She almost bumped into him. On seeing his expression, she stopped to listen to the snow-dampened silence. She didn’t hear anything . . . no, wait, there . . . It was a thumping sound, like a fist striking a giant pillow. There was no rhythm or pattern to it. She slowly turned her head, trying to determine where the sound was coming from.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Shit, better not be another rockfall. Come on, let’s hurry – we’re nearly at the slip. I’ll feel better once we’re back across it.’

  ‘Goddamnit, Brad, I am not staying on this mountain tonight. I warn you – you’ll be in big trouble if you’ve gone and gotten us stuck.’

  Brad just frowned before setting off again. He looks worried, she thought. She didn’t know why she was blaming him, after all she liked to hike and it wasn’t as if he’d made it snow or caused the slip to drop more debris. She just felt like venting – and probably would again before they got back down.

  It didn’t take them long to get to the slip, now white with fresh snow. Its surface looked like a powdery moonscape complete with meteor-strike craters. Brad hung onto a tree, not yet ready to step out. He leaned out and craned his neck to look upwards.

  Amanda grabbed a handful of his parka and tried to lean out too. ‘What is it?’ she whispered. ‘Has there been another landslide?’

  Brad kept his eyes on the track. ‘I think . . . yes and no. That old Indian wall up on the rock face – it looks like it’s finally crumbled. I think that’s what’s causing the pits in the snow.’

  ‘Is it safe to cross?’

  Brad hesitated. ‘I guess so . . . doesn’t look as though there are many stones left to fall. Besides, there’s no choice if you want to sleep in a bed tonight.’ He still hadn’t moved, just kept looking from the path to the cliff face and back again. Finally, he turned to her. ‘Just a little over a hundred feet – stay close to the wall, and to me.’ But he still didn’t move.

  ‘What’s wrong? You’re scaring me, Brad.’

  ‘Nothing, just a funny smell – reminds me of when we were kids and Scotty found a dead bird and rolled in it. Sort of a rotten, wet-animal-hair, shitty smell – took us two baths before we got the smell out of his fur.’

  ‘Hey, that’s what I smelled in that little hole before. Maybe it’s that dead falcon again – remember you said that?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I do. Stay close.’

  Brad stepped out, his foot sinking into the snow to his ankles. He kept one arm up towards the rock face, not touching it, just monitoring where he was in relation to the wall and the sheer drop to the slopes below. Amanda could understand his tentativeness. The late afternoon, combined with the heavy cloud, was creating an early twilight on the mountain. Snow was starting to fall again, making the edge of the cliff path hard to see. The whitening air around them, white sky and a white pathway – all definition was disappearing, making it too easy to step off into limbo.

  She hung on to the back of Brad’s jacket and tried to test the path with her small staff, but nearly tripped several times as she was pulled along at a speed that better suited his long legs than her shorter ones. Out on the slip path, the lack of trees meant the wind chill was severe again, and the earlier silence was broken by the wind’s shriek and moans.

  She flinched when Brad stopped dead. He spun around and stood like a statue, his eyes wide and his face frozen as he stared along the bleak pathway. She put her hand on his arm and felt his large bicep shivering under his parka. She hoped it was just from the cold, but deep in the pit of her stomach she knew it was something more. As he gently pushed her behind him, she realised her legs were shaking so hard she could actually felt her knees knocking together. It hurt.

  ‘Please, Brad, let’s go.’

  Her stomach was fluttering in a tingly, upsetting way. She craned her neck and looked up at his face, hoping to see that big dumb grin splitting his handsome square jaw in an I gotcha kind of way. She’d be real angry for a while, sure, but then real relieved. But he wasn’t smiling; instead, he looked pale . . . and scared.

  Amanda saw his hand go to his waist and lift his parka. There was a gun tucked in behind his belt. Anger flared inside her then, at his secrecy, at bringing a dangerous weapon . . . And then, just as quickly, the emotion disappeared. Thank god he did.

  He pulled the revolver free – shiny black metal against the white surroundings. As she stared at it she saw snowflakes melting on the short barrel; the heat from his body was still radiating from within the steel. She was about to speak when he raised the gun slowly to aim down the path. She followed its grim pointer and made out a shape in the swirling snow – roughly man-shaped, but impossibly huge.

  ‘Is it . . . a bear?’ Her voice sounded ridiculously small.

  ‘Back up,’ Brad said.

  She was pressed up behind him, looking at the shape from under his arm. She lifted her camera on the cord around her neck. Buzz-click.

  Brad stepped back just as she took the photo and tripped over her crouched body, falling backwards on top of her. The gun went off and she screamed. In a flash Brad was on his feet, the gun pointed back at the shape. But the slip path was empty.

  ‘Shit. Did I hit it?’

  ‘Was it a bear?’ she asked. ‘It looked like a big deformed bear.’

  ‘I dunno. Must have been. I’ve heard black bears can get pretty big – 800 pounds and seven feet tall on their hind legs. It was a lot bigger than that, but it had to be a bear . . . had to be.’

  ‘It seemed to be waiting for us, but I can’t see it anymore. Do you think it’s gone?’ Amanda had both hands on her stick, holding it out in front of herself like Gandalf at Helm’s Deep.

  ‘I think the gunfire scared it off. I might have even winged it. We’re just lucky we didn’t set off any more landslides. Come on, we better get off the path.’
Brad looked over his shoulder briefly, then down at Amanda. ‘Take my hand and hang on tight. We need to move quickly.’

  *

  Brad leaped off the path, back into the forest, literally dragging Amanda through the air with him. Being out of the landslide zone should have made him feel more secure, but the thick tree cover did the exact opposite. The wind was muffled, and light snow swirled gently around the tree trunks. The thick cloud, combined with fast-approaching twilight, made the dense stands of spruce and fir trees even darker.

  Brad rushed them headlong down the mountain. Several times he stumbled on logs or loose rocks hidden beneath the snow and knew that come tomorrow his ankles would be painful and swollen. A cheap price to pay, he thought, if it gets us off the mountain safely.

  Amanda fell and reached out to a slim tree trunk to save herself. She pulled her gloved hand away quickly when it stuck to something sticky and red.

  Brad saw it. ‘Hey, I did hit it.’

  Good, he thought, and cast his mind back to the shape on the slip path. He’d seen black bears around the Appalachians before, but what had stood in the centre of that trail was no bear – he knew that even with the low visibility. It wasn’t like anything he recognised.

  He could hear Amanda gasping and slowed his pace. He didn’t want to stop, but he knew what she was experiencing. Even in an environment of frozen water, dehydration was a danger to both experienced and amateur hikers alike. He slid the pack off his shoulder so he could pull a water bottle free.

  ‘C’mon, sip slowly. You’re doing great.’

  Twigs snapped behind him. Both of them froze, paralysed by the sound of movement behind the tree line. Their breath created small plumes around their faces before dissipating into the white landscape.

  A creaking beside them made Brad whirl with the gun. He found himself aiming it shakily at a tree that had become overburdened with snow. A huge mound slipped from a branch to fall harmlessly to the ground.

  He laughed nervously. ‘I knew that was probably all it was.’

  He looked down at Amanda, but her face was half-hidden by the hand she held over her nose and lips. Brad had been breathing through his mouth to avoid taking the stinging air into his nostrils, but now he tested the air and it wasn’t the cold that assaulted his senses. It was back – that shitty, rank, animal stench.