Dark Hollow was a deep depression formed at the base of one medium-size mountain and two huge sidehills and their steep sides kept most of the hollow in shadows except at noon. Farther southwest the land flattened out and even opened up in spots so that a rare beam of sunlight could reach down to the floor of the hollow, but there were also spots that never saw the light and it was toward one of these spots that Crow and Newton descended yard by yard. There was a clear division line where the mountain crest blocked the sun from reaching any farther down into the valley. It took the climbers twenty careful minutes to reach that point, and as they crossed that division line from sunshine into shadow, Newton felt a chill pass through him. Certainly the air was colder without the touch of the sun, but to him it felt as if he had stepped into a freezer unit. He blew out his breath and was surprised to find that it did not steam the air; it felt cold enough by far. He glanced at Crow, to see if he felt it, too, but Crow was reacting in a starkly different way to the shadows of Dark Hollow. Despite his jaunty baseball cap and grunge-crowd sunglasses, despite the affected spring in his muscular step, he was sweating bullets. Perspiration beaded his face and trickled in icy threads down his face. Unnerved by the sight, Newton said nothing and they kept moving, heading deeper into the valley.
They climbed down without conversation, silent and alert to the deceptive irregularities of the slanting landscape. Newton became more and more aware of the ambience of Dark Hollow.
Crow removed his sunglasses and stowed them away in a pocket. “Black as pitch down here,” he said vaguely. “Come on.”
Ten minutes later they reached the floor of Dark Hollow.
At the bottom they stopped and stepped away from the slope, their legs wobbly, and when they pulled off their gloves, their hands were pink and puffy. Crow took both pairs of gloves, then wrapped several turns of both climbing ropes around them and tied it all off so that nothing would be lost, weighting the ends with rocks to mark the spot. As he did this, Newton unslung his walking stick and shrugged out of his backpack so he could get to his canteen. He took a long pull and handed it to Crow. Then Crow fished a PowerBar out of his pocket and split it between them. They stood in the gloom, chewing, looking around them. The place was a bleak nothing, cold and damp and utterly still.
Crow consulted his compass and pointed northeast. “Griswold’s farm is that way,” he said. “I think,”
“You…
Crow shrugged as he put the last piece of the PowerBar into his mouth. “It’s not like I’ve been there before, dude. I found it on the county surveyor’s map. Its location is mentioned in some old borough zoning records.”
The way ahead looked choked with brush and stumpy scrub pines and Newton gave it a dubious stare. “Is there a path?”
Crow shook his head. “I doubt it. Come on.”
If there had ever been a path it was thirty years overgrown and as they went northeast they simply picked their way through the path of least resistance, and for an hour they crept forward with no feeling of having made any real progress. They clambered over rocks, crawled through coarse shrubs, slithered under fallen trees, and leapt gullies, feeling like they were running an obstacle course with no breaks in it at all. Newton’s legs felt leaden as he lumbered along behind Crow, and he struggled to draw chestfuls of air. He wanted to blame his breathlessness and tiredness on the sedentary life of a writer, or the arduous terrain, or the weight of his pack, but he was unable to manufacture any real belief in those fictions and tried to work it out logically, tried to pick apart his own nervous reactions and explain them away, using weather, lack of sleep, bad coffee, and cold air as culprits for each individual emotion. He tried, in short, to be a reporter and slant the story in a way that would favor a totally rational explanation for everything. For most of the trek he was happy with that, but as the shadows got deeper and the air got colder the farther into the Hollow they went he kept having to remind himself of his own logic. He really didn’t want to openly acknowledge the grim and oppressive atmosphere of Dark Hollow, because to allow it to be a fact, or even a possibility, would be to accept that the place itself possessed some kind of negative energy, and to him that was preposterous. Crow was the one who believed in this freaky shit, not him.
Eventually even Crow’s pace faltered and he stopped and leaned his back against a hemlock tree; he dragged his forearm across his face and examined the dark stains of perspiration on the sleeve. His chest was heaving, though he looked less like someone who was exhausted from exertion than someone from whom breath had been robbed by illness. His skin color was bad and his dark eyes looked faintly feverish as he sucked at the air like a gaffed fish.
