Consequences Read Free Page B

breathe. His defense system had worked. His security creed had paid off.
    You had to be flat on your belly to get near the edge and look down into that black well of the unknown. When he thought again about how he’d nearly fallen into it before, he got goose pimples. One day he and his sister had found the body of a roe deer stuck halfway down, on a narrow projection that had probably snapped its spine. The next summer there was nothing left, not even bone.
    The same thing was happening to Barbara’s corpse. Although it was in shadow down below, you could still make it out perfectly—stopped as it was in its fall by a narrow overhang of damp rock in the shape of a door handle.
    He lay there on his belly for a moment longer, his head suspended above the pit, wondering what to do next. Obviously, the chances of a hunter’s, hiker’s, or anyone else’s eyes falling on the student’s remains were scant. But not null. For a moment, crows flying circles in the blue sky captured his attention, and then he began reconsidering the problem posed by some stray tourist’s or obnoxious mushroom collector’s discovery of the body.
    There was a way to reach it. A way to go down into that crevice if you were careful where you placed your feet—as far as he remembered—and reach Barbara’s body. Just being cautious would do, checking his points of support, taking his time on the way down. The same for getting back up. But the effort would be worth it.
    You had to do it right. His instinct had led him to get rid of the body, and getting rid of the body meant making it disappear—concealing it from all eyes, even if they were improbable. And yet, just as he was starting to realize, just as he’d feared, his work was only half done. He folded his glasses and put them away, thinking, This is what happens when you do things too quickly. It’s true he’d been running very late that morning, had gotten rid of the girl fast, and left without turning around to look, to go give his course on John Gardner and moral literature. But that was no excuse. He hadn’t shown much competence, that’s all; in the end you often paid the price for your blunders.
    The inside surface was steep and slippery. Luckily, he was wearing a good pair of shoes and more or less understood how to go about it; he’d served in the mountain infantry. A few stones crumbled under his feet and went flying into the pit. To lower the risk factor, he flattened himself as much as he could against the side and descended cautiously. The willies came with age, he thought to himself as he inched toward her body, the willies came with the consciousness of death.
    When he got a foothold on the cornice, he realized he must look like he’d been rolling in mud. He was a real mess, he thought, grimacing, before twisting toward the student’s body, which had turned purplish gray. She seemed to be balanced on a kind of spur.
    If he stretched out one leg, he could just reach her with the end of his foot. He pushed. With the tip of his foot. It was a matter of toppling her back onto her path toward the shadows, but the job wasn’t as simple as that. Something was jammed. Stuck. Cold sweat flowed down the small of his back as he struggled to push the body to the bottom of the pit and sworeby all the devils, whimpered, gasped for breath. All of it shattered the silence of the forest, usually so serene except for the cry of a distant bird or the rustling of leaves—it was like a joke, set against the medley of grunts and moans that spewed from the bottom of the dark grotto, which had been transformed into an echo chamber.
    Then, about to be overwhelmed by his own helplessness, he threw the last of his strength into the battle, was reduced to clinging to a root with the tips of his fingers, and a loud tearing sound accompanied the toppling of the girl’s body into the void.
    â€œHello?” a voice above his