M.A. Kleen

Twenty-five years ago, I self-published The River of Rain, a philosophical exploration of freedom, human nature, and the modern world. To mark its anniversary, I’m releasing a fully revised edition, one chapter every Wednesday. This is the novel as it was meant to be. Continued from Chapter 13.

---

Victor decided not to tell Ariana about the bear. If she knew, she would panic and insist on moving back toward the entrance of the cave. All he had to do was build some kind of container for the food, find more meat somehow, and let the fire keep the animal away.

Then another thought came to him. He had already killed one bear. Why not another?

The one he killed before had been a male. If this one was its mate, then it was probably female, and female bears were smaller… weren’t they? He was not entirely sure. His knowledge of bears came mostly from distance and fear. In all the time he had lived in these woods, he had only seen one up close, and they were eating it now.

His eyes drifted toward the spear resting against the wall.

At that moment Ariana stirred awake, interrupting his thoughts. Her eyes remained half closed, still adjusting to the dim cave light. “I’m hungry,” she complained, as she so often did.

Victor lowered his head. “Alright,” he conceded. There was hardly any point rationing the meat anymore. Whatever had taken it would probably come back for the rest, so they might as well eat what they could while it remained.

Ariana hurried over to the pile, forgetting in her excitement how much larger it had been the day before.

“This is so good,” she said through a mouthful of meat. “I don’t know why I never ate meat before.”

Victor watched her quietly. Despite all his strict rationing, she had started putting weight back on. It made him wonder what she had actually eaten before all this. He took a few pieces for himself, though he ate slowly.

Most of the day passed with Victor thinking about the bear and how he might kill it. Eventually he decided to make another spear. He found a straight, sturdy branch and spent hours shaping it with his knife before hardening the sharpened tip in the fire. When he finished, it looked like a decent weapon, though he was not entirely convinced it would stop a charging animal the size of a bear.

Nearby, Ariana busied herself carrying water from the underground lake to a shallow depression in the cave floor that she insisted on turning into a bath. It was exhausting work, but she attacked it with stubborn determination, as though staying clean was the last fragile piece of her old life she still hung on to.

“What are you going to do with that?” she asked, glancing toward the spear.

“Oh.” Victor hesitated before finally deciding to tell her at least part of the truth. “This morning I found something got into our food and ate half of it. I don’t know what it was, but I’m getting ready in case it comes back.” He deliberately avoided mentioning the tracks.

Ariana slowly stood from where she had been kneeling beside the water. “Do you think it’s still here?” she whispered.

Victor straightened himself, trying to look braver than he felt. “If it is,” he said, sounding almost theatrical, “it probably won’t bother us. It already had the chance and didn’t.”

It was another lie. He knew perfectly well that once the food was gone, the bear would likely start testing whether they were edible too.

Ariana gave him a nervous smile and returned to her painfully tedious task.

“Hey,” Victor said a moment later, drawing her attention again. “I’m going to check what the weather’s like outside. I’ll be back as quick as I can.” He picked up the torch and started toward the tunnel leading to the mouth of the cave.

Ariana watched him with frightened eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said calmly. “Just keep the fire going and you’ll be fine.”

The chamber grew very quiet after he left. Slowly, his footsteps faded into the darkness.

Victor questioned the wisdom of leaving Ariana alone in the depths of the cave with a wild bear somewhere nearby, but he needed time to think, and he needed to do it alone.

He kept replaying her words in his mind. First she had said she wanted to stay. Before that she hated him. Now she wanted to leave again. His thoughts churned in circles until they almost hurt.

Why couldn’t she just decide? If she hated him, fine, he could live with that. At least it was simple. At least his mind would stop twisting itself apart trying to understand her. Better still would be if she wanted to stay with him. Really stay.

He wanted somebody to love him. Somebody who chose to be there. Those were things he could barely admit even to himself, though sometimes he slipped up. There was something broken in him that made him say too much at exactly the wrong moments.

Back inside the cave, the silence frightened Ariana more than anything else. It was not the darkness. It was the aloneness of it. When you were alone and everything was quiet, every small sound became something waiting to attack. It reminded her of being a child lying awake in a crib while her parents slept somewhere far away in another room. Every shifting shadow took on a life of its own.

The limestone formations seemed to leer at her from the edges of the firelight. They teased her imagination into inventing terrible stories about how they had formed and what might still be living deeper in the earth.

She tried to focus on her work, but every splash of water into the slowly filling bath only made the chamber feel emptier.

God, she wished Victor would hurry up.

Outside, Victor shook his head again, frustrated with himself as the winter wind bit against his exposed skin. Without much sunlight lately, his flesh had faded back to its usual pale color. What kind of life had he made for himself?

Enemies seemed to be everywhere now. Back when it had only been him and Ingram, survival had felt simple. And where was that bird? The black raven had disappeared without explanation.

Victor leaned heavily against the spear he had made, lost in thought, until a scream tore from the cave entrance behind him.

Deep inside, where the firelight flickered across the ancient painted walls, Ariana huddled against the limestone, whimpering beneath her breath. Across the chamber stood a massive black bear.

It growled low in its throat as it stared at her through the dim orange light.

At first, she had heard only a strange shuffling sound from somewhere beyond the fire. Then the darkness itself had seemed to move. A shape unfolded from it, huge and black and covered in coarse fur.

She screamed and scrambled backward through the dust until her shoulders slammed against the cave wall.

For the moment the animal kept its distance. It sniffed the air, snorted heavily, and clawed at the ground with enormous paws.

Where the hell is Victor? she screamed silently inside her own head. Why did he leave me?

Continued in Chapter 15…