Chapter 2: The Hand That Feeds
I did not move. I could not have told you which way was out. The voice was familiar in a way that had no shape to it, the way a word you've known your whole life goes strange if you stare at it too long. I knew it. I had never heard it before.
"Who's there?" I said.
The answer came slow, and it seemed to come from everywhere in the dark at once, from the walls and the floor and the cold air on my neck.
"Do you remember me?"
And here is the thing I have not been able to explain to anybody since.
Standing in the mouth of that hole in the ground, sweat going cold across my back, my heart hammering like a trapped bird, I was not only afraid. Something in me lifted. Something in me leaned in toward that voice the way a man leans into a fire on a bitter night.
I should have backed out onto the grass and gone down the hill at a run. I had the legs for it. I had done harder things for no reason at all.
Instead I put one hand out to the wall to steady myself. The stone was warm under my palm, warm and faintly humming, like the flank of some enormous animal that had been sleeping there a very long time and had just now begun to stir. The pitch of that hum changed. It dropped, and kept dropping, until my teeth ached with it.
Behind me, at the mouth of the cave, the daylight flickered. Once. Twice. Like a lamp with a bad connection.The voice said my name again, and the second time it came up through the floor of the cave and into my heels. Then, without speaking, without resistance, without another thought in my head, I turned and walked toward the Voice.
Three steps in I felt the sleeves of my tee shirt lengthen, fall over my shoulders, as if i was shrinking. The hem of the shirt suddenly swung at my thighs, low, loose. My hiking trousers had gone slack around the waist, and I had to grab the belt to keep them from falling.
I kept walking, holding my pants up, stumbling in now-too-big hiking boots.
I told myself it was the cold. Cold does that. Cold makes a man feel small.
I looked at my wrist, checking the time. The watch strap that always sat on the fourth hole, now rattled, and there was a good half inch of daylight between the leather and my skin. The back of my hand, below the strap, was smooth. No liver spots. No cords of vein standing up over the tendons. The knuckles were clean and young, and the small scar I got from a chainsaw at twenty-six was gone.
I stopped, walked back to the mouth of the cave. Sunlight lay across the deer path, real and warm and ordinary, and I stood in it and held both hands up in front of my face like a man checking for rain.
I swore.
They were not my hands.
They were mine from a long time ago.
"NO!" I said out loud. "What the hell?"
I don't remember deciding to run. I was just running, out of the shadow and into the open, and my body ran the way it hadn't run in thirty years, easy and deep and without complaint, and that was the worst part, that it felt good. The boots slid off my feet at the third stride. I left them and kept going, barefoot on the pine needles, and I got maybe forty yards down the path before something grabbed at my ankle. Fumbled. Grabbed again. Got a good purchase on it and I went down.