Hell Is Empty (Walt Longmire, #7)

by Craig Johnson

He smiled but only as a professional courtesy.

At one point midway on our path in life, I came around and found myself now searching through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost.

‘The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.’ ” “Pascal.”

“We must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.”

There was the noise of the wind, like something colossal moving past me, something important—so imperative in fact that it could not pause for me. It was the cleaning sound that the wind made in the high mountain country, scrubbing the landscape in an attempt to make it fresh.

Maybe our greatest fears were made clear this high, so close to the cold emptiness of the unprotected skies. Perhaps the voices were of the mountains themselves, whispering in our ears just how inconsequential and transient we really are.

“Where you’re goin’ and what you’re tryin’ to do—don’t trust nobody. I mean even the people you think you know? Don’t trust ’em. I’m just sayin’. Adios.”

“Cigarettes are killers that travel in packs.”

“You have great sorrows burning in your heart, and you’ll have more sorrows with someone very close to you in the not so distant future. The Old Ones have told me this, and that’s probably the most important thing I have to say to you.”

“You collect things as you go—the things you think are important—and soon they weigh you down until you realize that these things you cared so much about mean nothing at all. Our natures are our natures.” He grunted. “And they are all we are left with.”

“All the horrors in this book are the horrors of the mind, and they are the only ones that can truly harm us.”

The forest is never silent, no matter the season; there are always sounds, and the trick is simply slowing yourself to the point where you can hear them. My situation was different, though. I can’t explain it, but it was almost as if I was laboring under a selective deafness; I couldn’t hear the wind or the sound of my own footfalls, but I could hear voices—at least I had been able to hear Joe’s, Henry’s, and now Virgil’s.

It all came down to judging—if you were a good judge of the man in front of you, you might survive; if not, then you were the honored dead. It’s never about who’s the fastest, strongest, toughest—it’s always about who, when everyone else would pause, will commit.

thought I’d said it to myself but evidently I hadn’t. I guess I was more tired than I thought. Talking with people was more confusing than being confused by yourself.

That’s how I was thinking about myself as of late, like some Marine mule that didn’t have enough sense to lie down and die. It wasn’t the most comforting of thoughts, but it got me up the hill.

I listened to myself breathing and thought about whether or not I was dead—it felt like it.

I’d never given up on anything in my life when I was alive. I hadn’t always won, I hadn’t always been right, but I’d never given up. Not till now. Now that I was dead.

Maybe this was what it was like to be dead, going through the motions until you came to a grinding halt thinking about all the things that you still had to do. It certainly didn’t seem so different from being alive. Who would they send for me—the same individuals who had saved me before on this mountain and who had haunted Shade throughout his lifetime? Maybe it was like Virgil’s statements about the Inferno, that all horrors are horrors of the mind. We summon up the devils we need to punish us for the things that we’ve done. If that was the case, then why had they sent me for Virgil?

I could only see maybe three feet ahead of me. I stretched out an arm and watched as my hand disintegrated and disappeared. I drew it back, afraid that it might not still be there.