PROLOGUE - PART TWO
The Arctic
Trails Have Their Secret Tales
By the dancing dim light of the campfire, the group of men
surrounding me looked demonic—light and shadow played off their features and
made their faces seem lopsided and horrifically deformed. In such light every
scene appears monochromatic, with every detail rendered in shades of only black
and orange. True colors are sucked away, and objects are repainted in a hellish
tint that makes every face look like a jack-o-lantern and the world look like
something out of Dante's Inferno.
"There you
go again," the little voice inside my head nagged. "Always making
comparisons to books that you've never read."
"Shut
up," I told myself. "This is hardly the time to be criticizing my
choice of literary references."
Besides, Dante
was writing about hell, wasn't he? And the situation that I found myself in was
surely the closest thing to hell that I could possibly imagine.
The tallest one
of the group walked over to get a better look at me. As he leaned in close,
some dark shadows flickered hideously across his face and eyes and caused me to
pull away in terror. I tried to push myself backward away from him, but it was
difficult, considering that I was sitting on the ground and my hands were bound
tightly behind my back. Every move that I made only pulled the binding tighter
and made my wrists scream in agony as the wire cut painfully into the skin.
"I never
should have come out here," I told myself as the tall one stood up again
and continued pacing back and forth, trying to figure out what to do with me.
How could I have been so stupid? What had I been thinking, hiking around a
deserted ghost town from the Yukon Gold Rush in the middle of the night?
What made me
even stupider was the fact that ever since I had first set off on my foolish
quest, I'd felt a heavy, dark blackness filling every pore of the landscape.
But instead of turning back and going home, I had stubbornly dismissed it as
merely the dark shadow of the suffering and death that had occurred here so
long ago, when thousands of souls had passed through on their way to the empty
dreams of the Klondike gold fields. How many of those greedy fools had died
chasing after those empty dreams?
"I am no
better than them," I thought. I was just as stubborn and foolish as they
had been, and now I was paying the price for it.
"I hate to
say that I told you so," the little voice in my head said.
"Yes, you
did," I agreed. "But right now, that isn't helping. Right now we have
to figure out how to get out of here, because these guys are a bunch of greedy
fools just like the rest of them, and who knows how far they'll go to protect
the secret of their gold."
"What are
we going to do with her?" the man with dark blonde hair asked the tall
one, who was apparently their leader.
The tall one
thought about this for a moment, and there was a long silence, broken only by
the crackle of the nearby campfire. My fear of his answer made my heart pound
faster and faster.
"There's
only one thing we can do with her," he said slowly and
deliberately, his voice ice cold and emotionless.
I was terrified
of what that meant, and as they continued to discuss my fate among themselves,
I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes and my breathing becoming
shallower and faster with every passing second.
"I promise
not to tell anyone," I thought, feeling completely helpless and
considering the option of begging them to let me go. "I will promise not
to go to the police if you just let me go free."
"Don't be
crazy," the little voice in my head scolded. "They aren't stupid. You
discovered their secret! You know about their stolen gold!"
I remembered a
line from a poem that I'd learned back in high school—a poem about the Klondike
Gold Rush and the lengths that men were driven to by their greed and lust for
gold.
"The
Arctic trails have their secret tales," the poem had said. "That
would make your blood run cold."
That was exactly
how I felt at that moment—as though my blood was running cold. I had discovered
the secret tale that these men had tried to keep hidden, and now they had no
other choice. They couldn't just let me go. They couldn't trust me to keep
their secret. And now they had to deal with it. And that was the part that
terrified me.
The men continued
their discussion, and a sudden outburst from the tall one broke my train of
thought. The discussion had grown quite heated, and he'd finally put an end to
it by holding up his palm and cutting off the blonde one in mid-sentence.
"There's no
other way," the tall one said simply.
