The Tent: A Novella Read Online Free PDF

to rise again, which is not good. It tells Mike they are moving even further off track (wherever the hell the track is ), ascending the moon-shadow hill instead of descending to the valley where the chance of finding the campground is greater. But that’s all right for now, because there is a light, the first one they’ve seen since losing their way. Best case scenario, it is Cody, demonstrating better sense than his parents did and waiting instead of roaming aimlessly through the enormous woods in search of them. If it’s not, then Mike knows his heart is going to shatter and Emma will be inconsolable, but it might be a cabin, and from there they might be able to summon help and end this nightmare. And though he does not want to think about rescue choppers and search teams, and the horrifying possibility of never finding their son (especially considering what he and Emma will forever remember doing when they should have been looking for him), he wants even less to wander these woods indefinitely waiting to freeze or starve to death. His wife’s words come back to him: I still can’t believe it’s even possible to get lost in this day and age. And while of course such a thing is possible—it happens all the time—he didn’t think it possible here , not in a stretch of woods less than an hour from their home. Abroad, maybe, where everything would seem alien, but not here, not somewhere he could probably see the Columbus skyline if he climbed high enough.
    But all he has seen for the past three hours, and all he fears he will ever see again, are more and more trees.
    “You all right?” he asks his wife, and she looks at him, her face barely lit by the glow from her flashlight.
    “No,” she replies.
    They’re cold and miserable and out of their depth, the tension between them far from eradicated, only on hold for the time being. The argument both incensed and demoralized him, like ice water thrown on a burning man, leaving him numb, and now he finds himself investing everything he has left in that little light. It might be a lantern, his son’s or a hunter’s flashlight, a candle in the window of a welcoming home or a manned outpost…it is not yet possible to tell. But what it represents is a promise of sanctuary, however temporary, and so they skid and strain their way against the rocky, slippery slope, heartened by its unwavering glow.
    It takes them the better part of forty minutes before the slope levels out and they find themselves in a clearing. There they stop, exhausted. Mike doubles over, hands on his knees, his heart hammering so hard it must surely be digging its way out of his chest, while Emma surveys the area.
    “Cory?” she says, her voice low, as i f afraid of disturbing someone.
    Ringed by gnarled and ancient oak trees, the clearing is roughly forty, no more than fifty feet in diameter, the floor carpeted with the same woodland detritus they’ve been battling their way through all night: twisted scrub, broken branches, twigs, and dead leaves, though here and there are bare patches of earth and what appear to be a scattering of small dark boulders. It is an unremarkable place, otherwise disappointing to Mike but for the tent that squats upon one of those patches. Once he has caught his breath, he straightens, knees, back, and feet aching, but does not move. Emma stands a few feet away from him, staring at the tent and similarly immobile, and though she doesn’t say a word, he knows what has given her pause, can see it just as clearly as she can.
    The tent is unlike any he has ever seen before, and yet somehow it reminds him of his own. Perhaps it is the dark yellow hue, or the dome-like shape, but there the similarities to his ill-advised purchase end. The longer he looks at it, the better it makes him feel about his own dubious skill as an outdoorsman, because clearly whoever erected this tent didn’t even know that the tent poles or rods or whatever the heck they’re called, usually go on