Dead Air at Dead Man's Lodge

The GPS gives up at the fork in the access road. I take the left anyway because I remember it. Pine trunks thick on both sides, the road gravel and dark, the kind of road where you drive slow and still feel like something is pacing your car.

My name is Rachael Engel. I'm twenty-nine. I spin records for a living, small club nights, one tour starting in three weeks, and a weekend residency here that I said yes to for reasons I haven't fully admitted to anyone, including me.

The lodge comes out of the trees all at once. Treeline Lodge. Mid-century roofline, new cedar shake, windows glowing yellow against the dusk. It looks better than I expected and worse than I hoped, if that makes sense. Better fixed up. Worse because it means Mortimer succeeded, and I spent three years quietly hoping he wouldn't.

I park next to the deck stairs. Sit with the engine off for a minute. The lake below is black and flat. Somewhere out there a loon does its thing, which is either comforting or a horror movie starter, depends on your mood. My mood is bad.

My phone buzzes. Laila. "You here yet? Come in the side door, lobby's full of rich people."

Laila Reimer, twenty-six, runs the bar here. She and Mortimer have been friends since they were poor at university together, years apart in the same dorm. She texted me the gig offer in the first place, which means she's either my friend or his agent. Possibly both.

I go in the side door like she said. And there he is.

Mortimer Hamilton. Thirty. Holding a stack of folded towels he clearly doesn't know what to do with. Hair shorter than I remember. Same flannel, different flannel. He sees me and does the thing he always did, that too-easy smile that arrives a half second before the rest of his face believes it.

"Hey, Rachael." He sets the towels on a chair. Careful, like they're breakable. "You found the road okay."

"GPS died at the fork. Used my memory."

"That memory's better than any GPS." He steps in like he might hug me, then doesn't. Good call. I offer a handshake instead, which is worse, and we both know it, and he takes it anyway.

"Wow," he says. "Okay. Cold. Fair."

"I'm professional. There's a difference."

"Kitchen's this way. I got you the corner suite. Lake view. Best room in the place that isn't mine, and I'd argue mine isn't better, just mine." He talks faster than he used to. Nerves. Good. He should have some.

The lobby is full, like Laila said. City money, ski racks on the rentals out front, a guy in a vest that costs more than my car asking about sauna hours. Mortimer walks me through it with his host voice on, and I watch him do it and feel that stupid pull in my chest I came here specifically not to feel.

We dated two years, ages twenty-four to twenty-six. Then the lodge came into his family and he couldn't leave the mountain, and I couldn't stay in a town with one stoplight and a radio station that signed off at ten. So I left for a city drive-time slot and he stayed and we did the long thing for four months and then we did the not-talking thing for three years.

"Deck's open," he says. "Sound check whenever you want. Laila's got the bar running."

"Sound check first. Then I need forty minutes alone before I'm nice to anyone."

"Twenty or forty?"

"Mortimer."

"Forty. Got it." That smile again. I walk out to the deck before I can be talked into anything.

* * *

The deck is wide, raw wood, half of it new. From the far rail you can see the old access road where it curls back down through the trees toward Kettlebrook. There's a break in the pines maybe half a mile out where the ruined warming hut sits. I can just see the dark shape of the stone chimney through the branches. As a kid I heard stories about it. Everyone around here did. Skiers lost up there, lights flickering where no lights should be.

I'm doing that thing where I stare at a thing too long. Cut it out, Engel.

"Beer or the fancy stuff?" Laila slides out the service door with two glasses already.

"Beer. Obviously."

Laila Reimer. Short, sharp, bartender arms. She sets the glass down and studies me with the exact expression she had at the wedding we both went to two summers ago, the I'm-glad-you're-here-and-this-is-a-mistake expression.

"You look good," she says.

"I look nervous."

"That too." She drinks. Then, quieter, "Listen. Before the set tonight. There's something you should know about, and Mortimer's going to wave it off, so I'm telling you first."

"What kind of something."

"Guests have been hearing things out past the hut. The old warming hut. Wednesday night, a couple from Seattle came back in white as sheets. Said someone was calling from the trees. A woman's voice. Saying a name."

"Whose name?"

"The husband's. They both heard it. Same voice, same name, three times." She says it flat, like reading off a keg order. "Guide I know, Wallace Driscoll, he's up that road all the time. Even he doesn't like it up there lately."

"It's an echo," I say. "Ridges do that. Sound bounces weird off rock and water. Whole thing's a giant parabola."

"Sure. And it's been doing it for fifty years and nobody cared."

"Or it's guests who had too much of your fancy stuff and got turned around in the dark."

"Rachael." She waits until I look at her. "I don't care what it is. I care that Mortimer's reopening weekend is going great and I'd like it to keep going great. If you hear your own name out there tonight, you come inside. You don't follow it. Deal?"

"Follow it. Why would anyone follow it."

"People follow it. That's the part I don't love." She tops off my beer without asking. "The Seattle guy was halfway down the deck steps before his wife grabbed him. He didn't remember getting up."

I laugh. It comes out wrong and I stop it. "Okay. Noted. Come inside, ignore the woods, don't become a folk story."

"That's all I ask." She bumps my shoulder with hers. "Now go do your forty minutes. He's going to come out here, by the way. He always comes out here."

"Laila."

"Twenty minutes then. Use them well."

She goes back in. I stand at the rail with the beer and the black lake and that dark chimney in the trees. The wind moves through the pines in a long low breath, and under it, faint, I swear there's a second sound. Like a voice that isn't quite a voice. Just past hearing.

Wind. Ridges do that.

I finish the beer and go set up my gear.

* * *

The forty minutes turn into thirty because Wallace Driscoll finds me in the event room while I'm leveling a table. Thirty-four, local ski guide, hands like rope. He knocks on the doorframe even though the door's open.

"You the DJ?"

"I'm the DJ."

"Wallace Driscoll." He doesn't offer a hand, which I appreciate, mine are full of cables. "Laila talk to you about the road yet?"

"She mentioned guests hearing things."

"Uh-huh. I've been guiding this ridge since I was twenty-two. Twelve years. I know every switchback." He leans against the doorframe. "Thing in the woods out there has gotten good at voices lately. Last week it did my own voice back at me. My voice, saying come on, this way. I stood there and listened to myself talk from thirty feet inside the trees."

"What did you do?"

"Went the other way." He shrugs. "It's not complicated. It says come on, this way, you go the other way. Anyway. Good luck tonight. Play something loud." And he's gone, boots heavy down the hall.

I stand there with my cables.

My own voice. Nobody mentioned my own voice.

I look out the window toward the tree line. Dusk has gone full dark. The hut chimney is just a black tooth in the blacker forest. And I get that feeling, the one from the drive up, of something pacing my car.

Stop it, Engel. Set the table. Spin the records.

* * *

The set goes well. Better than well. Lodge full, dance floor full by the second hour, the expensive-vest guy requesting disco and me ignoring him. Mortimer stays on the far side of the room the whole first hour, which is either respect or cowardice, and around eleven he finally crosses to the booth.

"Requests?" he says, leaning on the table.

"From you? No."

"One song. For old times."

"Mortimer, I'm working."

"You're working and I'm proud of you. There. Said it." He holds up both hands. "That's all. Enjoy your night. The lake view's better at midnight, if you want it."

He walks off before I can decide whether to be annoyed. I cue the next track and hate how good the compliment feels.

Midnight comes. I'm done, gear packed, and I should go to my room. Instead I'm on the deck with a drink Laila pushed into my hand, looking at the lake.

The deck's empty now. Cold enough that my breath shows. And out past the tree line, where the old road drops toward the hut, there's a light. Small, warm, flickering.

No campers tonight. I heard Mortimer tell the Seattle couple that himself, the hut's fenced off, no one's up there.

"Rachael."

I turn so fast the drink nearly goes. Mortimer's at the deck door. It's Mortimer. Of course it's Mortimer.

"You scared the hell out of me."

"Sorry. Couldn't sleep either?" He comes to the rail. "See it too, huh."

"The light."

"The light. And about ten minutes ago, before I came out, I heard you. From the trees." He says it level, watching the forest, not me. "Your voice. My name. Twice."

"That's not funny."

"It's not. It's also not you, because you were standing right here at the rail where I could see you." He turns. "Laila told you about Wednesday?"

"She told me. Wallace told me it does voices."

"Wallace is the only person I believe about this mountain." He looks out at the flickering light for a while. "So here's my question, Rachael. And answer it straight, because it matters more than either of us wants it to."

"Which is?"

"What's it got on you?"

"What's it got on you?" I say it before I decide to. "Regrets. Probably. That's the theory, right? It feeds on old regrets."

He's quiet a second. "Then it's eating well this weekend."

"Flatterer."

"You know what I mean." He turns to face me. "We left a lot of loose ends, Rachael."

"We left one loose end. It was shaped like us."

He laughs, and God, I forgot that laugh, low and surprised at itself. "Can I pour you a drink that isn't Laila's pour? I've got a bottle of the red she's been hiding from the menu."

"You're bribing me."

"I'm bribing you."

"Okay."

We end up at the little table by the deck door, inside, because it's freezing, and he pours two glasses of something dark. Thirty years old and he still pours wine like he's afraid of it.

"So," he says. "Three weeks."

"Three weeks till the tour. You've been talking to Laila."

"Laila talks. I listen. It's a system." He swirls his glass. "Proud of you, though. Genuinely. You always said you'd get out."

"And you always said you'd stay."

"And I stayed." He shrugs. "Somebody had to hold down the mountain."

The flirtation comes back the way a fire does when you leave the door shut. It just starts again on its own coals. He says something dumb about my set, I say something dumber about his vest, and then his hand is on the table near mine and neither of us moves it away.

"You're still doing the thing," he says.

"What thing."

"The thing where you look at me half a second longer than the joke needs."

"You're still doing the thing where you notice."

"Well." His voice drops. "That was always our problem. Paying too much attention."

"Was that the problem?"

"One of the top five," he says, and leans across the table and kisses me.

Here's where I should tell you I hesitated. I didn't. Fourteen months since anyone touched me like they already knew the map, and here's a man who does. His hand at my jaw, my fingers in his shirt. We knock a glass over coming up the stairs and neither of us stops for it.

My room, because it's mine and it has the lake view and I like the symbolism, sue me. He gets my top off and stops at the button of my jeans like he's asking.

"Yes," I say. "Mortimer. Yes."

"Okay." His mouth goes to my neck, my collarbone, down. I'm naked on the bed and he's still half dressed and that's not right, so I fix it, drag his shirt up over his head. He's broader than he was at twenty-six. Work, not gym. I run my hands down his back and he shivers.

"Still sensitive there," I say.

"Shut up." He laughs into my hip.

He works his way down with his mouth, slow, and by the time his tongue finds my clit I've got a fist in the sheets and my own name ready to come out of me, which under the circumstances feels like a bad idea. I keep it to his name. Two syllables. Safe. He slides two fingers in, curls them, and I come with my heel digging into his shoulder.

"Cock. Now." Very eloquent, Engel.

"Bossy." But he's already rolling on the condom, already pushing into me, and we both make that noise, the one people make when the fit is exactly right. He moves slow at first, then I dig my nails in and he stops being polite. The headboard taps the wall. My tits bounce and he watches them and I watch him watch them, and it's stupid and hot and familiar as breathing.

"Rachael." My name, from him, in person, in the right voice. "I'm close."

"Don't stop."

He doesn't. He finishes with a sound like the first breath after cold water, and I go over second, clamped around him, seeing nothing.

We lie there breathing. His hand finds mine on the sheet.

"That was," he starts.