Second Inning
THE WEST SIDE of the ravine in which Trisha had taken her rest-stop was considerably steeper than the side she had come down. She climbed it with the aid of several trees, got to the top, and headed over more even ground in the direc-tion the voices had come from. There was a lot of under-brush, though, and she swerved around several thorny, close-packed patches of it. At each swerve she kept her eyes pointed in the direction of the main trail. She walked in this fashion for ten minutes or so, then stopped. In that tender place between her chest and her stomach, the place where all the body's wires seemed to come together in a clump, she felt the first minnowy flutter of disquiet. Shouldn't she have come to the North Conway branch of the Appalachian Trail by now? It certainly seemed so; she hadn't gone far down the Kezar Notch branch, probably not more than fifty paces (surely no more than sixty, seventy at the very most), and so the gap between the two diverging arms of the Y couldn't be very big, could it?
She listened for voices on the main trail, but now the woods were silent. Well, that wasn't true. She could hear 27. the sough of the wind through the big old west-country pines, she could hear the squawk of a jay and the far-off hammering of a woodpecker digging his midmorning snack out of a hollow tree, she could hear a couple of freshly arrived mosquitoes (they were buzzing around both ears now), but no human voices. It was as if she were the only person in all these big woods, and although that was ridicu-lous, the minnow fluttered in that hollow place once more.
A little more strongly this time.
CHAPTER 2
Trisha started walking forward again, faster now, wanting to get to the trail, wanting the relief of the trail. She came to a great fallen tree, too high to climb over, and decided to wriggle under it instead. She knew the smart thing would be to go around, but what if she lost her bearings?
You've already lost them, a voice in her head whispered - a terrible cold voice.
"Shut up, I have not, you shut up," she whispered back, and dropped to her knees. There was a hollow running beneath one section of the moss-caked old trunk, and Trisha squirmed into it. The leaves lining it were wet, but by the time she realized this the front of her shirt was already soaked through and she decided it didn't matter. She wrig-gled further and her pack hit the trunk of the tree - thump.
"Damn and blast!" she whispered (damn and blast was her and Pepsi's current favorite swear - it sounded so English country-house, somehow) and backed up. She got to her knees, brushed clinging damp leaves from her shirt, and noticed as she did that her fingers were trembling.
"I'm not scared," she said, speaking out loud on purpose because the sound of her voice whispering was freaking her out a little. "Not scared a bit. The trail's right there. I'll be on it in five minutes, and running to catch up." She took off her pack and, pushing it ahead of her, began to crawl under the tree again.
Halfway out, something moved under her. She looked down and saw a fat black snake slithering through the leaves. For a moment every thought in her mind disap-peared into a silent white explosion of revulsion and horror.
Her skin turned to ice and her throat closed. She could not even think the single word snake but only feel it, coldly puls-ing under her warm hand. Trisha shrieked and tried to bolt to her feet, forgetting that she wasn't yet in the clear. A stump of branch thick as an amputated forearm poked ago-nizingly into the small of her back. She went flat on her stomach again and wriggled out from under the tree as fast as she could, probably looking a bit like a snake herself.
The nasty thing was gone, but her terror lingered. It had been right under her hand, hidden in the dead leaves and right under her hand. Evidently not a biter, thank God. But what if there were more? What if they were poisonous?
What if the woods were full of them? And of course they were, the woods were full of everything you didn't like, everything you were afraid of and instinctively loathed, everything that tried to overwhelm you with nasty, no-brain panic. Why had she ever agreed to come? Not only agreed but agreed cheerfully?