More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Suddenly, I got the feeling that I was being coaxed into the woods. I turned on my heels and dashed back to the cabin.
Finally, someone with some fucking sense
“Doctor in Arvada’s gonna fax your blood work over to this one,” I said, squeezing her shoulder as I passed by. “Maybe something’s changed.
Wow close to home
“You go up in the trees…or down in the hole,” he replied, nearly perfecting my voice. “That’s where you go. Oh they’ll find you. Either way…either way...either way...”
Faye here on Pale Peak, and thus it made sense to me that the solution too lay on the mountain.
Typo?
“What makes five? Tell…me…” And that’s when I knew. I remembered where I was, what day it was, and exactly what had happened up until this moment. My dark visitor had finally come to call, and he no longer needed to be invited in.
Hours before, I had seen the gruesome remnants of my friend, stretched over the creature like an ill-fitted Halloween mask. Now he donned human features I’d known far longer. I prayed that Faye was still alive, and that the Impostor had not taken this hair from her head.
Did Tiwé die?!
blood. The satellite phone was gone. The gun was gone. My shoes were gone. Everything was probably outside in the snow, or up in a tree. Or down in the hole. But at least I still had the ring. The Impostor could have taken it while I slept, but for some reason, he did not.
I imagined the shattered dreamcatcher, and my crumpled corpse beside it. It may well have been warding off the Impostor all this time, and now there was nothing left of it to protect me.
But beneath them, dangling in the trees, were scores of human bodies. They swung from their necks or wrists or feet, fastened with dark red rope – rope that looked much like the dreamcatcher’s sinew. As they passed overhead on our downward crawl, I could barely make out their frozen faces, lifeless for years, maybe decades. Some of them were flayed or had missing body parts, and their black blood stained the trunks of the trees.
“Tíwé’s dead.”
Ah ok then..
As I sat there with my head against the window, a constellation of possibilities presented itself in my mind. The Impostor gave Faye’s ring back to me. He wanted me to destroy the dreamcatcher – the totem – whatever it was. The ring was an object of great sentimental value, both to Faye and to my family. The creature used it to invade her mind and control her thoughts. To weaken our relationship. To make us suffer.
By destroying the dreamcatcher, I gave him the keys to the cabin. I let him in. And when he came, his goal was to extract the meaning of the number five from me. I’m not sure I’ll ever unravel the truth behind that number, but I believe that my ignorance might have saved Faye’s life. My ignorance, truly, is her bliss.
including Faye’s all-time favorite: Grandma’s Boy.
I fucking HATEA that movie
I found her downstairs. She sat there in the dark, spine straight and neck craned to the side, facing the stairwell. Her eyes were closed. She ran her fingers across the stain on the carpet before her, whispering to it and giggling. I raced over and threw the light on. As I flipped the switch, Faye mumbled with a big grin on her face, “How could I forget?”
Without even realizing what I was doing, I moved to a window, reached out my hand, and drew a backward ‘5.’
“I’m almost a Ph.D.,” I said, pointing at the mountain of books on the table. “I can’t do anything that could even be remotely considered an employable skill.”
“Don’t tell Felix,” she whispered. “I didn’t tell him. Didn’t…wanna scare him.” “Didn’t tell him what?” I asked, doing my best impression of Becca. Faye’s hand raised up off the bed and pointed at the door. It wagged a bit, then flopped back down. “He’s in the stains,” she said, lowering her voice further, as if to tell her deepest secret. “He gets up and walks around at night.”
“I never got to see him,” she replied. “That number was how I always thought of him. Christopher was going to be the fifth member of our family.”
THAT'S what makes five?!
He beckoned her in every voice she knew, calling out her name in all his stolen tongues.
Nathan never answered any of the thousand calls I made to his phone that weekend. Neither did Ranger Pike. My heart was certain of Nathan’s ghastly fate, but my brain still had to know for sure. The wait was agonizing.
Angela and I have spoken a few times since that night, mostly about the dreamcatchers, but the conversations go nowhere. We may never know for sure who built them. Perhaps they were crafted by the people who live on Pale Peak. Perhaps they wanted to protect fools like me who venture to that mountain without understanding its history. Maybe they were creations of the Impostor himself. Or maybe they had nothing to do with us.
