The Only Shelter
by Robert S. Dawson
part 1
A black and billowy wall of storm cloud rolled over the hazy blue valleys deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains toward the lost young men continuing on their trek. Paul and Jeremy made their slow and steady way, stopping occasionally to check the massive and fierce looking cloud in the distance. Lost without a doubt, though neither of them admitted it aloud.
By this time, they’d grown more quiet, only bursting into unsteady conversation every once in a while that petered out under the hacking and slashing machetes. Each took turns in the lead. Neither suggested that they backtrack.
They weren’t exactly running from anything; what they were trying to do was run toward something: an adventure, like the ones told about by Tolkien or Jack London or Hemingway. And they wouldn’t quit until they found it.
One day passed into another. They ate beans cold from the can, jerky, and nuts until they ran out, and they scavenged wild apples and berries and meat from a dead carcass they’d found along their journey. They ate only a little at a time though their hunger never seemed to dissipate. So hungry it hurt sometimes.
Slept in the open under leaves and branches and stars; tent lost to a hungry black bear a week or two before. Lack of shelter hadn’t been a problem until they saw the gray highlighted black cloud creeping monstrously over those peaks and hemlocks in the distance bringing cold rain, the chills, maybe even hypothermia.
“What do you want to do, Paul?” The first words spoken in they didn’t know how long weighed heavy on them both. Jeremy stopped. Machete dangling at his side, dripping plant blood and pasted with poison ivy leaves and mountain laurel blossoms, his head turned to look out at the storm coming.
The sharp profile softened by a thick growth of red beard. The pack on his back seemed a hundred times heavier though they’d eaten several pounds of food from it. Sweat had drowned their watches, and battery power on their phones was too precious to waste.
Paul shrugged even though he knew Jeremy wasn’t looking at him. “May as well keep moving.”
Up the slope, same as before, same as always, hoping to see some sign of civilization at a higher altitude. Quiet again but for the slashing and hacking. After several miles, and the storm cloud grown larger and closer and darker and Jeremy questioning silently their sanity, they came to a strange gap in the foliage.
To someone who hadn’t spent much time in the woods it might have seemed like nothing, just a place where the plants didn’t grow so thick, but to Jeremy and Paul who’d grown up in the forest and had now spent God knew how long in the mountains, there seemed something supernatural about the space. Not clearly, but very possibly man-made.
As boys playing in the woods, they’d learned always to pick a direction and stick with it; eventually they’d run into something. But here in the forest of the Blue Ridge Mountains they’d walked for days maybe weeks and found nothing. Without speaking, with just the look on their faces, they came to the agreement to step into the gap in the woods.
On the other side, in the shadows of the trees, they found a path made of two parallel ruts. It wound up and around a hill. And it could have just been their imaginations or wishful thinking or a game trail, but it looked to be an old wagon road. Up above them about a hundred feet or so was a distinct plateau, the top obscured by the angle but clearly treeless.
“I’ll bet there’s a cabin or something up there,” Paul said.
Thunder rolled into the trees from a distance, and the very air seemed to dim and to cool and take on that dewy smell that precedes rain. It was only a matter of minutes before the storm would hit.
Between the leaves and branches and budding poplar tulips, they could see that half the sky was still bright blue and full of sunshine, but the sky didn’t seem to care as it dropped monster droplets against their heads and the leaves, slow and sporadic at first but growing steadily heavier.
They picked up their pace as they followed the parallel ruts on their spiral around the mountain. Neither of them asked, though the question occurred to them both: What will we do if this path leads nowhere?
Faster and faster, the raindrops fell, pattering against the leaves and their heads. The world was much darker now, and still they trekked the spiral under thinning protective limbs and trees. Hope was waning thin as they made their way into patches and tufts of grass that sprung up out of treeless space and, just as they came around to face the abysmal cloud again, they were also overlooking a clearing that dipped down and curved off to the left around a peninsula of trees that seemed to jut out of the woods.
Tall, yellow grass — at least it had looked yellow in the gloom before the storm — sloped down the dip, and the two ruts like wheel tracks cut straight through the middle until they were cut off from sight around the trees. Hurrying now, they followed the tracks, the grass swishing against their blue-jeans.
As they rounded the trees, a structure slowly came into view. Despite the rain falling heavier now in the open grass lawn, they stopped and looked at the old two-story house, unbelieving. It was very old and dilapidated, but the first sign of humanity they’d seen in weeks. The front porch, which overlooked the ridge they’d seen from below, was nearly caving in. The four-pane windows were black inside, and the one on the second floor appeared to be half open.
Not knowing if the house was vacant, but suspecting it was, they made their way slowly toward the back where they would find a more stable entrance. Coming up to the corner, there was a scraping sound, like a chair sliding from someone standing up, and four loud thuds that seemed to come right up to the open window above. Jeremy stopped in his tracks and looked up at the window expecting to see a man peering out, but it was just blackness.
“You hear that?”
“Just thunder,” Paul said as he continued on around.
“I ain’t so sure.” Jeremy stepped back to get a better look at the window, still empty. “Hello?” he called up, but there was no answer. “We just need shelter,” he announced shakily.
Paul stopped and looked at him. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Just making sure if anyone’s there, they don’t shoot us.”
“There’s nobody here. Do you see this place? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“Whatever.”
There was a back door, turned gray and rough with age, and the rusty knob was unlocked. Paul went right in while Jeremy hesitated before the doorframe, inspecting the darkness and the old wood in the ever-increasing night and rain, the water beginning to matte his hair and bead on his forehead.
After a few moments, the rain picked up again as though turned up by a switch, with a clap of thunder so loud it rumbled in his chest. Jeremy nearly jumped across the threshold. Inside, Paul was holding out his Zippo, shining the flame around the bottom floor, which was just one big room without furniture; the wood floor bare but for dust, and refuse strewn about and a few stacks of what appeared to be newspapers and magazines against the wall to the right. Rusty metal items hung from square nails on the walls; tools, maybe some tractor or plow parts, and an old lantern which Paul rushed to grab. The Zippo went out.
In the moments of darkness, Jeremy clearly heard squeaking floorboards overhead, moving to his left, where he’d been vaguely aware of a set of stairs that went up just beside the door they’d entered. Jeremy was sure those squeaks went right to the top of the stairs. He turned to look, expecting to see a face peering down at him, the hairs across his entire body standing on end, but there was only blackness around.
After a moment to adjust, there was enough light that he thought he could make out the outline of the portal at the top of the stairs. His heart thumped loud in his ears, and the moments stretched on forever. Was there something there? A face peering in the darkness? The glint of an eye?
Yes, he thought. I see it. It’s there, a white male, long hair, and a wild white beard. The look in its eyes was not fear but realization at someone being in its house — if anything, a look of anger. And growing angrier. Hatred.
Orange light suddenly filled the downstairs, and the portal became nothing but a black rectangle. An empty hole leading to the mysterious second floor.
“You all right, man?” Paul asked as he slid the glass chimney down over the flame.
Jeremy shook his head. “You hear something upstairs?”
Laughing, Paul turned to shine the lantern around the downstairs. “Here,” he said and pulled a hatchet from a nail on the wall.
Taking the rough-handled hatchet, Jeremy suddenly felt embarrassed at his wild imagination. Still, he didn’t put the hatchet down as he followed Paul to the stacks of newspapers and magazines against the wall. Occasionally, more than occasionally, he looked back at the stairs expecting to see that angry old man sneaking down or creeping up to kill them from behind. But there was never anything there.
Paul thumbed through a stack of dried and yellowed pages, all appeared to be The Chronicle newspapers from the mid-forties and before. After taking in the general overview, Paul picked up the paper from on top and tilted it to the light for a better view. The article was about the Civilian Conservation Corps being defunded by Congress. He tossed the paper back onto the pile and dust plumed up, bugs scattered.
“Kinda creepy, ain’t it?” Paul said with a grin when he looked back at Jeremy. “Nobody’s been here in almost a hundred years.”
Rain was pelting the roof and windows, and intermittent lightning eerily lit the room with blue light followed shortly by clapping thunder. Jeremy looked over his shoulder again, expecting the mysterious man to be there creeping, but there was no one there. He began to wonder if he had just gotten spooked and imagined everything.
“Hungry?” Paul asked.
They removed their packs and sat on the floor around the lamp, Jeremy ensuring that he faced the stairs, and ate jerky in silence. Jerky was all that was left. But it was fresh. They’d cut the meat from an animal they’d found on the trail, the blood still red. They’d cut the meat with their machetes as thin as they could so it would dry faster, then they’d hung it from tree branches in the sun. It had taken all day, but at least they had food.
Rain pattered softly against the window, sounding considerably softer than it had been, but it didn’t sound like it was going to stop anytime soon, either. There was no more thunder and lightning.
Paul didn’t eat, he just sat looking off at God knew what. In the profile it seemed Paul’s face was filling out again. It hadn’t been obvious at first, but both of them had lost a considerable amount weight. His hair, which was typically curly, had been stiffened back by running his hands through it to keep the water out of his eyes, but now that it was drying the ends were curling up again.
After a while, once Jeremy stopped tearing into the allotment of jerky he’d pulled out, Paul sat back against his elbows with his feet stuck out. “Wonder what’s upstairs,” Paul said, acknowledging the stairs for the first time since they’d entered.
It made the hair on Jeremy’s neck stand up. He shrugged.
At that very moment there was a rustling upstairs as though someone were moving around. Their eyes met over the glowing lantern, and it was clear from Paul’s raised eyebrow that he’d heard it this time.
Copyright © 2022 by Robert S. Dawson
