CATHEDRAL, Patrick Sean Lee [most popular ebook readers .txt] 📗

A young lady in suite three, and…well, two gentlemen we put in suite one.”

She utters the last part rather dourly, but I do not follow up with inquiries that don’t concern me. Half of her answer intrigues me, though.

I thank her again, and then hurry out the door to begin my run.

A few seconds later I’m bounding off the porch and easing myself through the opening of the trail into a bower of pines and a different world than I’m used to. The beginning of the path is narrow, and follows the initial gentle slope of the mountain. Within a couple hundred feet it begins to ascend remarkably, like the first hill of a roller coaster. I take long, deep breaths of fragrant, crisp air, as I get warmed up, and I enjoy the sound of my feet on the loamy soil beneath them. I’m in my groove. I’m happy, and soon enough moving at a steady, quick pace—maybe seven miles per hour, which, given the terrain, I realize, is extraordinary. I am a perfectly tuned machine. The sign at the bottom said the lake was one mile away. In about ten minutes I’ll be there.

The trail splits a hundred yards up. There is no sign, and I wonder which way I should go? I stop, but continue running in place. Eenie-meenie…I take the one leading off to the right. Soon enough I notice that the narrow path has gotten steeper, much steeper than the one before the fork. I’m down to five miles an hour, I gauge, and I’m starting to huff a little. A lot. I think that maybe I should turn around. Go back and take the softer, easier route.

Oh bullshit, Matthew, suck it up.

Thank God I didn’t eat another pancake.

This bloody trail is a snake, if I might use that zoomorphic comparison, and it’s biting me. But I continue on, listening to my heavy breaths mixed with the occasional chirping of birds in the dense forest around me.

Two more turns—Jesus, who cut this trail, anyway? Two more turns and it starts to plummet down. Fifty or sixty feet farther I see the trees end abruptly off to my left. Thank God. I leave the path and slip and slide downward in sideways movements.

Oh, this is great. I’m on a rocky ledge. Jesus, how high above the water am I? It looks like a couple hundred feet! But the view is remarkable. The lake below lies in a long, oval hollow. Pristine, calm, and dark blue. Ah yes, way over there I see the ending of the easier trail I should have taken. I also see her. She’s sitting on a rock at the shoreline, twenty or thirty feet below those two huge boulders where the trail ends abruptly. I peer down at her. She seems busy, her backpack lying beside her on that rock. She’s reading it looks like. No, not the book, something else, like a page ripped out of it. Maybe Saving Isabelle? No, not Saving Isabelle. No one would ever, ever remove one of its pages.

Wait, she’s tearing the page up. Huh? How could she, I’m thinking! I need to call out to her, but something holds me back. I need to get down to her. Standing here, I look around. There’s nothing but a sharp drop to my left, but on the right, the cliff ends, and although the hill is steep, I think I can negotiate my way down. When I reach the shoreline I’ll—Shit. I lean out just a little and gaze in terror. I can’t even see a shoreline, save for a tiny stretch off to the right.

I’ll make it. I’m an athlete after all. The perfect machine. I lean out one more time and stare at the placid, dark blue water. I’ll bet right below where I stand like an idiot, it’s probably a hundred feet deep. If I fell—I won’t, I won’t—the temperature alone would no doubt make my heart stop in an instant.

I step back, turn, and head for the little clearing. Two or three minutes and I’ll be standing triumphantly on the shore. I’ll wave across at her first.

It’s funny. As I slip and slide downward, my stomach begins to growl. Maybe after I’m finished conquering the heart of the girl across the way, Mrs. Davenport will let me have some carrots or half a dozen apples before dinner. A big, greasy hamburger sounds even more delectable. Volume. Soon.

My latest misadventure in writing hits me. I think about Sylvia as my stomach growls and I try not to fall to my death. I see her growling, clawing across the quarter mile-wide room toward Danny-boy’s bed. Should I have him sleeping in the buff? Unaware that Delilah is prowling? Why the hell is she…I’m beginning to bounce around in my head. My eyesight twitters down, then clicks on once again. Delilah…John, the dwarf…no, Daniel. Daniel the dwarf. The russet-haired woman. I see them dancing on top of the bed, an appaloosa whinnying, another quarter of a mile away at the bed’s end.

Concentrate on the hillside, Matthew!

Everything goes well for a dozen hip-hop paces—the woman fails to see me slithering, sliding, catching woody stems with my hands to halt my forward motion. I look across the lake at her once more as I ease myself down, behind the clatter of pebbles and rocks I’ve broken loose with my feet. I’m closer. She has fine features, and I concentrate, not on the earth below me, but on her too closely. The hillside disappears for a moment, and before I can find it or dig my fingers into the ground, I’m falling. Tumbling like a rock blasted free of the mountainside with dynamite. Two, three, five seconds and a thousand cartwheels pass, then I feel a brief instant of freedom from the bruising earth before the blast of ice water greets me. I go down thirty or forty feet, I think. But no. Probably no more than two or three. I am certain I see huge Brown trout flash in front of my face. Huge brown shadows, more likely.

The water is a razor. I right myself and push upward toward the surface, then break free of the freezing sharp steel water with a gasp. I take a quick, deep breath, then try to touch bottom with my shoes. Or shoe—one of them seems to be missing. No bottom, though. Maybe I’ll sink, and within minutes turn into a human ice cube, locked inside a frozen block, watching the fish and my shoe floating by.

I’m cold. Really cold. I relax, and practice survival, letting my feet and legs level out just a bit, then I kick and paddle. I’m moving, but I’m under the sheer face of the cliff. To my left the shore meets the rocky edge of the cliff, and I force my body in that direction. After what seems an eternity I let my legs fall. My feet touch bottom. I’m safe.

I begin to slog out when it hits me. The woman with the black hair must have seen it all. I’m suffering hypothermia and terminal embarrassment. I can’t look back. I know she has to be rolling over in laughter, but I hear her call out, “Are you alright?”

I raise a shaking hand—two fingers and thumb bent slightly, as though I were casting a wordless message to her. No, I’m not alright; I think I tore my right kneecap off. Yes, it hurts now. The breeze exacerbates the sub-zero feeling of my skin right through my suit, exacerbates the throbbing of my knee. I hobble up the hill a few paces, plant myself onto my rear, and grab my knee. Hopefully she’ll just leave. I’m mortified by my clumsiness. I thought I was the perfectly-tuned machine. This woman surely has seen that I am not.

That's Gratitude!

 Isabella

Something on the far side of the lake catches my eye and I raise my eyes to see it. It’s a bear, falling, tumbling…Oh no, no! Bears are furry brown and don’t wear jogging pants and running shoes. It’s a person. A man! Good God, he’s falling into the water! Now he thrashes to the surface. The water is quite deep at that spot, I know. I remember. But he’ll be fine if he doesn’t panic, if he just dogpaddles back. There! He’s made it. He’s fine.

“Are you okay?” I yell.

He raises an arm in perfunctory acknowledgment as he wades ashore with great difficulty, back turned to me, dripping wet. He doesn’t speak, which I find odd. He must be terribly embarrassed. The man is limping, holding his knee. He’s hurt, though I have no idea how badly, and so I call out again as I step off the rock and begin to hurriedly walk around the point of the shoreline in his direction. “I’m coming, sit down. I’ll help you.”

He collapses onto the steep slope of the mountainside in the wild grass and weeds a few yards from the water, bends one knee out straight very quickly, leaning forward, then winces and draws it back up toward his chest. He grimaces at the obvious pain of this last movement as he cradles the knee in the palms of his hands. I arrive as he falls backward, holding it, his eyes locked tightly shut, jaw clenched.

He appears to be in his late forties judging by the graying of the hair at his temples, perhaps a little older. It’s hard to say, seeing that he’s just taken a dive into the freezing water and his face has turned pale milky-blue. His hair, though it is wet and hanging in several different directions, is otherwise neat; trimmed and washed-out auburn. Tight lines of wrinkles shoot from the corners of his eyes, and he almost appears to be smiling, the way the ends of his mouth contort upward. The jogging outfit has smudges of mud and sand spotting it, and only one running shoe has survived the plunge. If he weren’t in such agony I’d laugh. Behold the drowned business executive who’s lost a shoe. But, he is hurt and needs my help. I bend down to inspect the damage done to his knee.

“Hold still. Lay back, I need to roll your pant leg up,” I say in a soothing but firm voice.

“Ow, ow, ow…”

“Yes, I know it must hurt. Just lay still.”

He does so, at least as much as he is able. I gently roll the pant leg up inch by inch. His calf is muscled, well-toned, but flexing with each turn of the wet material. He’s shivering. Tiny rivulets of water from the gray fabric follow the rhythm of his shaking along the tanned surface of the skin, then fall to the sandy ground. When I manage to push the roll of pant leg up over his knee I can see that the cap has been bruised badly by the wide red circle forming toward its outside edge. But it’s sitting where it should be, and there is no sign of a laceration anywhere. I think he’ll survive.

“How on earth did you manage to tumble down this hillside? Did you fall all the way from top? There isn’t even a path there!” I know the path he