The Tent: A Novella Read Online Free PDF Page B

the inside. Then again, the rods themselves don’t look like the traditional kind either. Dark brown, ropy and knuckled, and curving down from an arched and similarly knuckled spine-like ridge along the top of the tent, they appear to be made from flexible sticks or branches, so Mike wonders if perhaps, rather than looking at the work of an amateur, he’s observing the work of a true frontiersman, someone who perhaps, in losing their own tent in the inclement weather, had the resourcefulness to fashion a crude one from the materials at hand. The roof and sides of the tent appear to have been fashioned using vellum, or similar material, thin enough to allow the small orb of light within to be seen from without. There are no pegs or guy lines, and odder still, no entrance that he can see, though it’s possible they’re looking at the back of it.
    Emma turns to look at him. “Do you think he might be in there?”
    He doesn’t, because the soft amber light inside the tent is unobstructed and casts no shadows against its walls, but he takes a moment to weigh up the wisdom of sharing this opinion. He settles for a noncommittal “Not sure,” and takes a few steps further into the clearing and looks around even though there is little to be seen. “But if nothing else, it could be a place to stop and regroup.” As soon as he uses the word, he regrets it, because the terrible truth is that their group is one short, and he knows that they were counting on finding Cody behind that light, beckoning them toward him with his flashlight. More than once, Mike even imagined he saw the boy’s fuzzy silhouette waiting for them in the darkness behind that glow. But now they’re here, and Cody isn’t, and the implications of that fact are enough to suck the life from him, to hammer ingots of despair and hopelessness into his brain.
    Please God, let him be all right. Whatever the price I need to pay, I’ll gladly pay it. Just please, please, let my boy be okay.
    But he refuses to give up, at least not yet. He has to hold it together for Emma’s sake, for Cody’s sake. Whatever happens, they need to stay alert and vigilant, need to focus on reclaiming their son from the cold, dark woods. Because if anything has happened to their boy, it will alter for them both the definition of lost. There will, quite simply, be no more reason for them to go on. They may have their differences, may even have to go their separate ways and concede defeat when all of this is over, but the boy is an innocent and should not be made to pay for his unflagging faith in his guardians, in the people sworn to protect him. If such faith ends up costing the boy his life, then Mike and Emma will be guilty of the ultimate failure, and it will kill them, and the punishment will fit the crime.
    He turns his head and looks at the tent. “It didn’t just pop up out of the ground,” he mumbles.
    Emma draws closer to him, her fingers finding the crook of his arm in a tenderness borne of anxiety, not love, from the accurate assumption that he has become just as fragile as she has. “What?”
    “The tent. It’d be one thing if we just stumbled upon somebody’s old abandoned camping ground, but the tent’s in pretty good shape from what I can see, and there’s a light on, which means somebody used it, and recently. And people don’t just walk off and leave their stuff behind, right?” Unless they’re people like us , he thinks miserably, picturing the backpack he left by the boulder somewhere down there at the foot of the hill, and the tent they abandoned, though technically the tent abandoned them . “So there’s a good chance whoever owns this thing will come back, and they can help us.”
    Encouraged, Emma nods. “Okay, that makes sense.”
    In the distance, thunder rumbles. A light rain starts to fall, pattering like insis tent fingers on their slickers.
    “Shit,” Mike says, feeling his spirits fall in time with the silvery threads. “Loo ks like the