Near the Bone

by Christina Henry

  “The Box,” she whispered. “I’m not lying. I wouldn’t.”

  He seemed to see what he wanted to see in her face because he abruptly climbed off. Mattie lay there for a moment. She felt blood trickling down her skull and hoped the wound wasn’t deep. Infection was always a risk with any open wound, and William became irritated when he had to look after her.

  “Get up,” William said.

  Mattie did, slowly, because the world tilted crazily and she still didn’t have her breath back. William watched her dispassionately, making no attempt to assist her.

  He doesn’t cherish you. He doesn’t love you, she thought, but the same despairing thought followed that always did—Where can I go? What can I do?

  She was completely dependent on him in every way.

  As soon as Mattie was on her feet, William jerked her toward the cave mouth. Almost immediately they were bathed in the waft of fetid air. Mattie turned her head away, covering her mouth and nose with her scarf. Even William, normally so self-mastered, made a gagging noise.

  Mattie couldn’t help a tiny little smile of satisfaction at that, and since her mouth was covered she allowed herself to have it. William would never know.

  He pulled up his own scarf and took a few steps inside the cave. The cave’s deep shadow swallowed him up immediately.

  “Smells like a cache,” he said. “But bears don’t usually keep a cache where they sleep, or in places where they can’t cover up the food.”

  “If it is a cache shouldn’t we stay out?” Mattie asked.

  She did not want to go inside where it was dark and stank of dead things. Her legs felt wobbly and off balance and her vision still hadn’t righted itself. Everything would blur, then clear, then seem like it jumped up and down, then go blurry again and the cycle would start all over.

  “If it was in the cave we would know. It would have rushed out the second you started making all that noise. I didn’t come all this way just to turn around because you’re so weak you can’t climb a hill.”

  He pulled two candles from his pocket and handed both to Mattie. He lit each one with a long wooden match.

  “You stay right next to me so I can see. I can’t hold a candle and the rifle at the same time.”

  Mattie nodded. William wanted to go inside, so there wasn’t any point in arguing any more even if this was the most foolish idea he’d ever had. Her throat felt clogged up with her fear, a tangible thing that she couldn’t swallow down.

  They shouldn’t go into the cave. Even if the bear (or creature) wasn’t there at the moment it could return at any time. When it did they would be fish in a barrel, trapped with no way to escape.

  Mattie kept pace with William as they entered. Hot candle wax dropped onto her mittens, but she’d knitted them thick and tight to keep out the cold. The wax settled and cooled quickly without burning her.

  The smell was much worse just a few paces into the cave. The walls took a sharp turn and grew narrower, the ceiling much lower. Mattie and William were able to walk side by side, but only just.

  “There,” William said, pointing to the ground in front of them. He tucked the rifle under his arm and took one of the candles, crouching down to peer at the dirt. “Do you see?”

  Mattie stepped closer, squinting down. The flickering candle allowed her to just make out two of the prints they’d seen yesterday, side by side and about a foot apart.

  “It must have to bend over to get through here,” Mattie said.

  “I knew it was up here. I knew it,” William said, triumph ringing in his voice. “Now I can kill it before anyone comes looking.”

  “Comes looking?” Mattie said. “Why would anyone?”

  “An animal that big will attract trophy hunters and other types,” William said darkly. He didn’t elaborate on what those “other types” might be. “All that has to happen is for one fool to catch a glimpse of it somewhere down the mountain. They’ll all swarm up here like a bunch of ants, stomping through our woods and killing our game. They’ll come knocking at our door, asking idiotic questions and wanting water and food. But if I can stop it all before it starts—”

  He seemed to realize then what he was saying and whom he was saying it to. He stood, thrust the candle back into her hand and said, “Come on.”

  “But why are we going farther in?” Mattie asked before she could stop herself. She cringed away as he leaned toward her.

  “Because I said so. You listen to me now or you know what will happen.” His tone was all cold fury. He marched ahead and she followed, because she did know what would happen if she didn’t follow.

  He’s angry because he explained too much. He’s angry because now I know that what he’s really afraid of is people. He doesn’t care about the creature in the woods or what it might do. He just doesn’t want anyone else to come looking for it and find us.

  (No. Not us. Me. He doesn’t want anyone to find me.)

  Before Mattie could explore that idea further, the stink, which she’d grown somewhat accustomed to, became abruptly unbearable. Then her boot found something round and slippery and she flew forward, crashing onto her elbows. The candles slipped from her hands and rolled away, their meager light winking out.

  “Clumsy idiot,” William said. She heard him fumbling in his pockets for another candle and matches.

  The darkness was too close, pressing all around her, making it impossible to breathe. There was something under her, several somethings, things that poked at her at odd angles and clacked together like beads.

  Bones. The word streaked across her brain like a panicky firefly. She scrambled back and away, swiping desperately at the front of her coat to make sure nothing had stuck.

  William struck the match and for a moment all she saw was his face illuminated by the lit match head. Then the candlewick caught. William lifted the candle high, and Mattie shrank away from what the light showed.

  They were in a large chamber, the ceiling several feet higher than the passage, and stacked all around the walls were piles of bones. The bones were enough to send Mattie fleeing but she didn’t dare, as William went closer with the candle, muttering, “What in God’s name?”

  She saw then that the parts were sorted—skulls in one place, ribs in another, leg bones next to that and so on. They were from all kinds of animals, large and small—Mattie recognized deer and elk and mountain lion, and also chipmunk and squirrel and fox and coyote.

  “It’s not natural,” William said. Mattie heard a quaver in his voice that had never been there before. She wondered if he was even aware of it. He seemed completely fixated on the bones. “No animal acts like this. No bear acts like this. But if it’s not a bear, what can it be?”

  Mattie inched away from the chamber as far as she dared. She wanted to flee into the passage, to run back down the mountain until she was back in her own cabin, where there were still things to fear but these were things she knew and could understand. She didn’t understand this. She didn’t understand an animal that kept the bones of its victims.

  “Let’s leave, William. Let’s go before it comes back.”

  He ignored her, pacing around the chamber, inspecting each bone stack. When he reached the far side of the room, his head jerked back, as if in shock.

  “Found out why it smells so bad in here. Come look.”

  Mattie did not want to look. She wanted to leave the cave, not head in deeper, but she knew an order when she heard one.

  She shuffled slowly forward, her heart in her teeth. We need to leave, we need to get out of this terrible place, it’s not natural, it’s not normal, the creature is going to return at any moment and kill us and our skulls and ribs will be sorted with all the rest.

  “Look,” William insisted.

  Mattie covered the scarf over her mouth and nose with her mittened hand. The reek was unbearable as she peered around
William. A moment later she gasped and stumbled back.

  It was a pile of organs, hearts and intestines, again in different sizes and from different creatures, all in various states of decay.

  “Don’t you dare faint,” William snapped as Mattie swayed on the spot, her hand clutching his shoulder so she wouldn’t fall.

  “I can’t breathe in here,” she said. “Please, William, please.”

  He turned away, clearly uninterested in her distress and intent on his investigation.

  “Please,” she whispered, or maybe she only thought it because William didn’t even twitch.

  What would he do if I ran? If I just went to the cave mouth he would be angry, but maybe not too angry, especially if he saw I wasn’t trying to run from him, just the cave. He couldn’t be too angry, could he?

  No, he could be very angry about it. Mattie knew that.

  Still, she wanted to be as far from the rotting organs and eerie piles of bones as possible, even if it meant leaving the circle of light provided by William’s candle. Mattie backed away carefully until she was at the chamber entrance again. The darkness swallowed her up, squeezed tight around her ribs.

  “Please, please,” she whispered. “Please let’s leave this terrible place, let’s just go.”

  Then she heard it. The strange cry they had heard in the woods the day before—a furious roar that was nothing at all like a bear.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was far off still—not on the slope yet, not about to enter the cave, but it would very soon. Mattie knew that for certain.

  It would come home with its kill and find them in its cave, like Goldilocks sleeping in the little bear’s bed, except they wouldn’t be able to escape like the small girl in the story. They’d be trapped.

  Which was exactly what Mattie had feared would happen.

  William peered around the chamber, moving the candle here and there, completely absorbed in his task. It was apparent he had not heard the monster’s call.

  I could bash the back of his head in with one of these bones. I could leave him here and the creature would find him and rend him to bits and make all of those bits part of its collection.

  Then the roar came again, and Mattie couldn’t be sure but she thought it was closer, and there was no time for anything she might want to do but hadn’t the courage to actually do.

  “William,” she said. “It’s coming.”

  “What?” He turned around, blinking in the candlelight, his mind returning from somewhere very far away. Mattie recognized the symptoms.

  “I heard it roar,” she said. “Outside. It can only be on its way here.”

  “This is my chance,” he said, crossing the chamber in just a few huge steps. He thrust the candle at her and said, “Stay behind me. If you get in my way, you’ll wind up getting shot.”

  Then he pushed by her, hurrying toward the exit without waiting for Mattie. She hurried after him, afraid to see what the creature looked like, afraid to see it running at them with an open maw ready to devour.

  And it would devour them. William’s flimsy rifle was no match for the thing that made that horrible roar.

  They were just at the cave mouth when the cry came once more, long and furious. It echoed strangely around the meadow, reverberated off the rocky cliff so that Mattie couldn’t tell if it was nearby or not. It might break through the trees below them at any moment.

  William quickly scouted the immediate area and found a boulder that provided both cover and a view of the tree line below.

  “Blow that candle out, idiot girl,” he snarled. “Do you think it won’t smell the fire?”

  Do you think it won’t smell us? Mattie thought, but she blew out the candle and crouched low beside him.

  They heard branches cracking, the sound of something huge blundering through the trees.

  Or traveling through the branches, Mattie thought. Yesterday the creature had seemed to disappear high above them, even if William didn’t believe it.

  The noise was tremendous, and the echo made it impossible to tell exactly where it was coming from.

  “Just how big is it?” William muttered, training his rifle below.

  I don’t care, Mattie thought. I want to go home.

  But the place she saw in her mind’s eye wasn’t the spare two-room cabin where she’d lived for the last twelve years. It was the place she always dreamed about, the place William said didn’t exist.

  Heather, she thought. The two of them holding hands and spinning across the carpet and laughing to the music, a woman wailing, “Just like a white-winged dove sings a song . . .”

  Mattie heard William suck in his breath, felt the growing tension that emanated from him. She realized then that everything had gone quiet, just like the previous day, and right after that they’d found the huge strange pool of blood.

  The birds had fled.

  All the little creatures are still and huddled and so are we. I wish I could fly away like a bird instead of crouching behind a boulder like a scared little mouse waiting for the swipe of a cat’s paw.

  William curled his finger around the rifle’s trigger. Mattie listened hard. She thought there might be something approaching, but it wasn’t anywhere near as large as the creature. It sounded like it was picking its way carefully along the trail, trying to be as silent as possible.

  She heard the twitter of sparrows then, and whispered, “It’s gone. The crea— the bear, I mean. Whatever’s down there, it’s something else.”

  “Quiet,” William said.

  A moment later, a man emerged from the trees.

  Mattie stared at the stranger as William cursed under his breath. He paused for a moment, seemed to come to a decision. Then he said in a low tone, “Don’t talk to him. Don’t you say one blessed word or you’ll pay for it later.”

  He put the rifle on his shoulder and stood up. William strode down the slope toward the man, who hadn’t appeared to notice them yet. The stranger had paused in the meadow, crouching down with a small black box near his face.

  The box was familiar to Mattie, but she couldn’t remember quite why. The word was on the tip of her tongue.

  A camera, she thought. He’s taking a photograph.

  She remembered having a camera herself, an old-fashioned one that belonged to her mother. When you pressed a button, the photo would come right out and you wouldn’t have to take it to the photo lab for processing.

  She remembered standing next to Heather, both of them shouting, “Cheese!” and making silly faces while Mom took photo after photo.

  She remembered taping those photos to the wall of her bedroom, deliberately tilting them this way and that so that the overall effect was a huge jumbled collage.

  As they approached the man, Mattie felt her stomach roil, watery nausea clogging her throat. It had been many years since she’d seen any person other than William, and part of her recoiled from the contact. She wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. That had been her mother’s rule, and it was William’s, too.

  The stranger’s clothes also made her feel uneasy, for while they were completely different from her own, they were also somehow familiar—part of the echoing memory that had been pounding in the back of her mind since the day before.

  He wore a bright coat with blocks of color on it—blue and orange, and it was made of a very shiny material. A windbreaker, she thought. I used to have one, but it was red. Heather’s was bright pink, like a glowing raspberry.

  Aside from the windbreaker he wore gray pants with many pockets and brown leather boots with pine-colored laces. The stranger carried a very full pack on his back, the same bright orange as his jacket, with a bedroll (no, a sleeping bag) tied to it. As they got closer, Mattie saw he wore fingerless gloves with a mitten top buttoned back.

  Every part of his appearance sparked something in her—curiosi
ty, a memory, an unfixed kind of longing. She glanced up at William and hoped he wouldn’t see any of these things on her face. They would only make him angry.

  The man appeared to hear them approach, for he dropped the camera back to his chest (where it was attached by a strap), glanced around, then stood, smiling. His teeth seemed very white and even. Mattie self-consciously pressed her lips closed in reply. She was missing a tooth from her lower jaw—it had gotten infected and William had to pull it out.

  She shuddered, remembered the way William had strapped her head to a board with his leather belt so she wouldn’t move, remembered the horrible wrenching as the tooth pulled free of the gum, the blood gushing everywhere. The rest of her bottom teeth had moved around as a result of the empty space, some of them tilting crookedly like broken tombstones.

  “Hello there!” the stranger called, waving.

  Mattie felt she ought to wave back, but William had told her not to speak and she was certain waving counted as speaking.

  William didn’t wave back, either, nor did he call out a response. He marched toward the strange man, so brightly colored against the faded meadow. The stranger’s smile wobbled, then receded as it became apparent that William was not approaching for a friendly chat.

  Mattie struggled along just behind William, still feeling sick and dizzy, but she could tell the expression on his face just by the set of his shoulders and the stiffness in his walk. His eyes would be fixed in a cold glare, his lips compressed, a muscle in his jaw ticking like a bomb.

  The stranger took a quarter step backward as William stopped a few feet away from him. Mattie came to a halt near William’s left elbow, half of her body hidden behind her husband. She saw the stranger throw an uneasy glance at the rifle held loosely in William’s arm.

  “What are you doing here?” William barked.

  The stranger had brown eyes, and now they flared in annoyance. Mattie expected him to yell at William, to respond to William’s aggression with some of his own, but the stranger only said, “It’s public land,” in a tone that was mildness itself.