It wasn’t Lindsey. Instinctively he darted behind a tree and held his breath. He heard footsteps but saw no one. Thoughts of Billy returned. The boy had been convinced the ghosts were calling him. When Terah had got him on the trail back to their tent he boy stood panicked, flashing his light into the treetops. “The voices,” he cried, “they’re coming after me!” Although it’d been summer, Terah shivered.
“Billy, you’ve got to believe me! There are no voices!” He’d had some psychology at college, but nothing had prepared him for this. Indeed, his religious classes hadn’t exactly convinced him that his faith was wrong, but he’d come to doubt the supernatural. Science courses found a mechanistic universe much easier to comprehend. Could Billy really be seeing ghosts? The way he darted his flashlight beam around was creepy, unsettling.
Now Terah found himself in the woods on a sunny January day. He was alone but he heard someone he couldn’t see. Had his slowly effaced faith been eroded erroneously? He held still for a long time, listening. The steps grew closer. Deliberate. Bipedal. Not a deer foraging or a squirrel looking for hoarded nuts. The tread was feet away. Beside him. He wanted to close his eyes, but he dared not. The steps continued beyond him. He saw nothing.
Tales of Gettysburg came to mind. The battleground was miles from here, but so many people had reported ghosts over the years that even skeptics had to give some pause. Had Stroudsburg been founded by then? He was far enough away that this would’ve been well outside the city in the 1860s. Swallowing, he decided to follow the sound of steps. He had no better ideas.
The phantom didn’t leave cheap Hollywood tracks in the snow. It was only the sound. Terah limped along after it, not really believing what he was doing. Somewhere in the echo-chamber of his mind, it resurrected a recollection. Somewhere in the Bible a king heard God’s army marching through the treetops. Terah had always glossed over that, but now it felt eerie. Uncanny. A week ago he didn’t believe in the supernatural. Now he was following a ghost through the woods. It turned out unwise.
The sound was drowned out in the percolating of water over stones. The stream was wide enough to be still flowing in the middle, but the edges were iced over. He did need to break his scent trail, but as he stood here, right leg radiating a warning about slippery surfaces, he thought about Lindsey. In his ill-fated Boy Scout days, the troop master said if you got lost you should stay in one place—you’d be easier to find that way. Terah didn’t want to be found, but by one person and he had no idea if the feeling were mutual. Existing on one’s own had, over the weeks, made him very lonely.
In their hurried packing in the garage, Lindsey had pointed out that empty plastic bags, the bane of the environment, could make great shoe insulation. Recalling how difficult it’d been to dry out his socks, was it just last night?—no, the night before—he sat heavily and worked on getting off his boots, bagging his feet, and relacing. His shoes would be wet but his feet dry, and he had to throw any dogs off. This gully was relatively wide and the incline not too steep upstream. Terah stepped into the water and the cold began its work right away. At least it was a dry cold.
He remembered his childhood fear of public restrooms and how when camping with said Scouts he’d gone for a winter walk with a couple of guys he knew. They’d been on a weekend camping trip and the cabin was chaotic and noisy. He couldn’t even remember the names of the guys, but he already had to pee when they started out. All weekend he’d been having trouble. Standing at the urinal when some less inhibited guy burst in and stood there waiting, watching. So here in the woods he told his chums he had to use a tree. The cold, however, left him barely a stub with which to work and instead of watering the tree, his own leg fell victim. Now, no way would other teenage guys not notice this. Worse, make fun of this. Saying he had to wash his hands, he pretended to slip and fall into the stream. Plausible denial. Stomping back to the cabin with stream-soaked jeans was better than being known as a pants peer.
Why that memory haunted him he could easily guess. Even with Danielle he hadn’t been able to use the bathroom with the door open. He’d avoided public restrooms all of his life, and, he reflected, the only person to see him urinate was Lindsey. There was a weird intimacy to it. She knew things about him no one else did.
Such thoughts helped counter the coldness seeping into his feet. The water was barely liquid and the stream bed slick in places. He persisted, however, driven on by a fear of being found. The stream rounded the base of a hill to his left and he was now well out of sight of the road. The hill, rocky and weathered, offered a niche where he could build a fire to dry his boots. As he sat by the flames, over which he heated a can of beans, he wondered where Lindsey could be. What had he triggered with the word “savages”? He didn’t know her well at all, but her image played and replayed in his mind. She must surely think him an unfeeling rake, leaving his lover to be found by strangers. Danielle was becoming a sun-bleached memory.
It was still too early to camp, but Terah didn’t know where to go. Scotrun may as well have been Scotland; both were inaccessible without help. Feet now thawed, the plastic bags seemed a good idea as an extra layer. His boots, still a bit damp, protested but finally complied. The hill was a rocky cliff right here, so he continued beside the stream, looking for access. That’s when he saw something had gave him his first ray of hope since the asylum.
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