Near the Bone

by Christina Henry

  “I want to know more about this cave,” C.P. said. “Do you remember exactly which one it was?”

  Panic replaced the warm feeling. “You can’t go there. Don’t you understand? You can’t go up there at all. It’s not a Sasquatch, or some harmless made-up thing for you and your friends to play at hunting. It’s a monster. A real monster.”

  Both Griffin and C.P. looked insulted.

  “We’re not playing,” C.P. said. “We’re serious. We’re trying to find solid evidence of a cryptid.”

  “You don’t need to find evidence. You need to go home before something terrible happens to you.”

  Her teeth chattered. The cold air coming in through the open window was even colder. Mattie smelled snow on the air.

  It will cover the proof of them, and I’ll be safe from William. It might even send them off the mountain. They can’t want to sleep outdoors in a snowstorm.

  “You don’t look so good,” C.P. said.

  “I’m just c-cold,” Mattie said. “I have to shut the window.”

  This was clearly meant to send Griffin and C.P. on their way, but they both hesitated.

  “I really think we should take you to a doctor . . .” Griffin began.

  Something exploded out of Mattie then, something she didn’t even recognize.

  “I told you I don’t need a doctor. I don’t want a doctor. Why won’t you listen to me? Why are all men the same? You’re just like William, who never listens to a thing I say, never thinks I have anything important to say. I talk and I talk and I tell you that you need to leave, to get off this mountain before you’re ripped apart like those animals, but you just ignore me and only think about what you want, what you think should happen. Stop talking about a doctor and start talking about collecting your friend before something terrible occurs.”

  She stalked toward the window and yanked it down in front of their stunned faces.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mattie pulled the curtains together so she could no longer see the men outside. There was something burning in her, an over-bright feeling that half made her think she could shoot flames from her eyes.

  One of the strangers (that’s right, they are strangers, they aren’t your responsibility) immediately banged on the window, shouting something, but Mattie backed away and out of the bedroom. She didn’t think they would break through the window or try to hurt her, but she didn’t want to take a chance. And she didn’t want to listen to them shouting, either.

  She shut the bedroom door to trap any lingering cold air in there and went out to huddle by the fire, which was low. William had left some firewood for her and she carefully placed two logs with trembling hands.

  What had made her scream like that, made her behave in such a way? That wasn’t like her at all.

  If you acted that way around William, that would be the end of you.

  They weren’t the sort of men who would hit her just for losing her temper. At least, she didn’t think they were—how could she really know? She was pretty certain, though. And because she felt safe, felt that they wouldn’t beat her senseless for speaking her mind, she’d vented her feelings on them—and more than just her current feelings, too. She’d vented the feelings that she’d been tamping down for years.

  I shouldn’t have done that. They were only trying to be kind.

  Mattie felt a little guilty then, felt that she ought to apologize, but then decided against it. She didn’t want to be drawn into another conversation with them. Despite their kindness, there was nothing else to say. She’d tried to convince them that it would be dangerous to stay on the mountain. She didn’t think she’d succeeded, but she could hope. Perhaps they would consider her words later and escape before they were harmed.

  A pounding at the front door startled a little scream out of her before she could swallow it.

  “Miss? Miss? I mean, ma’am. Listen, I’m sorry about what happened. I didn’t mean to . . . Well, could you come out and talk to us again? Maybe at the door this time? We could really use your help.”

  They knew she was inside the house, so she couldn’t pretend not to be at home.

  But you aren’t required to answer them. You aren’t.

  (You’re being a fool. They could help you. They could help you run away.)

  Except that they aren’t leaving the mountain. They’re going to stay and tramp around and try to find the creature, and what good will it do you to trail after them while they do that? William will come after you and if the creature doesn’t get you then he’ll shoot all of them and it will be on your head.

  No, Mattie realized that she couldn’t trust anyone to help her. If they helped and were hurt because of it, she’d never forgive herself.

  “Miss? Miss?”

  Mattie wondered why Griffin was calling her “miss.” Then she remembered that she’d never told them her name.

  (What is your name, anyway?)

  “Go away, Samantha,” Mattie whispered. “I don’t have time for you right now.”

  Griffin pounded a few more times.

  Mattie heard C.P.’s voice. “She’s not coming to the door, man. And we gotta meet Jen. And there’s no cell signal here so I can’t text her and tell her why we’re late. She’s going to leave us if we don’t get going.”

  “I know. I just . . .” Griffin’s voice trailed away.

  “I know, I know. You’ve seen her somewhere before.”

  “I wish I could remember.”

  Mattie heard Griffin’s tread on the porch, then the crunch of his boots in the snow. C.P. said something she couldn’t make out, and a few minutes later all was silent.

  She crept up to the front window and peered out, making certain they were gone. The clearing was empty except for their footprints.

  The tracks were everywhere, and Mattie felt a flare of panic. What if there wasn’t enough snow, or it didn’t start falling soon enough? A few lazy flakes were drifting down but those flakes were hardly enough to fill the footprints that crisscrossed the clearing and wrapped around behind the cabin.

  Mattie went to the back window and checked that the two strangers weren’t behind the cabin, either. There was no sign of them. She wondered if they’d gone back the way they came, or if they’d taken a different route. She wouldn’t know unless she followed their tracks, and she didn’t want to follow their tracks. She didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

  I don’t, she thought, but it was like she was trying to convince herself. Part of her wondered why she hadn’t gone with them. It would have been the easiest way to free herself of the hell of this cabin.

  You know why. Because you can take any risk to yourself, but it’s not fair to place it on other people.

  No, her original plan was still the best one—to get better, to heal so that she could sneak out under cover of night and disappear before William ever realized what had happened. She should forget about C.P. and Griffin. She’d tried to warn them, tried to save them. Maybe they would survive the creature’s fury. There wasn’t much she could do about it.

  Why does Griffin keep saying he knows me?

  Mattie wondered if she’d known him Before. But even if she had . . . she’d been a small child when she came to live with William on the mountain. Griffin never would have recognized her after all these years, and it wasn’t realistic for her to try to dredge up some potential memory of a boy from her very spotty memory.

  Did I know you?

  There were no boys in her thoughts, no memory of any other child except Heather.

  She realized she was standing at the back window, woolgathering. The snow had begun to fall in earnest. It was like that on the mountain. There was no snow and then suddenly there was more snow than you could imagine.

  Mattie remembered standing at the front window with Heather, their hands and noses pressed against the glass,
wondering if there was enough snow for school to be called off.

  “Snow day,” Mattie murmured.

  Sometimes it was just a few flakes, not enough to hold up the bus. Sometimes the weatherman would predict snow for the morning that wouldn’t arrive in time to disrupt the school day. The girls would rush to their bedroom windows in hopes of seeing a proper blizzard outside, and instead there would be bare sidewalk and bright sun, no hint of snow anywhere. Then they would drag themselves downstairs, heels slamming against the wooden stairs, their bodies seemingly made of dripping rubber and their voices to match.

  “Whhhhyyyy do we have to go to school today?”

  And their mother would tell them that it was hard luck but that was the way it was. Mattie knew their mother would tell them this but she couldn’t hear it, not the same way she heard her own voice or Heather’s.

  Why can’t I remember my own mother?

  A thick fall of snow was coming down. Mattie saw it filling in the marks made by the creature and the telltale footprints of the strangers who’d violated William’s mountaintop sanctuary. She realized just how lucky the two strangers had been that William hadn’t been home when they arrived. William would have chased them off with the rifle instead of pretending not to be at home.

  You’re still more of a mouse than a falcon, you know.

  She ignored that voice, the one that sounded like Samantha. Samantha had never been scared, not really, so it was easy for her to be fearless. Samantha had never lost a part of herself in a deep well.

  “But I’m trying,” Mattie whispered, turning away from the window. “I am trying.”

  She made tea and cut off a slice of bread. She was half-tempted to sneak a little butter, just a scraping, but William was sure to have noted the precise shape and amount of butter left in the dish.

  One day she would be away from him and she would eat all the food she wanted, eat until her stomach was stretched tight and she felt like she could hardly walk.

  And I’ll have . . .

  Her thoughts ground to a halt there, because she didn’t know what she would have. The only food she could think of was the food that she and William ate—stews made from animals hunted in the woods, or fish fried in the cast iron pan, or vegetables she took out of her garden. The only things that they ate that weren’t made by their own hands were butter and eggs and milk, which William collected from town. He said that chickens were too much trouble to raise and would attract too much attention.

  Mattie had never questioned this, the same way she’d never questioned anything that William said, but she realized now that it was true. Chickens made noise—roosters especially—and might attract the attention of anyone wandering nearby who’d ignored the private property signs that C.P. and Griffin had mentioned.

  If I manage to get away from here alive (and this was not a certain concept, not at all, when she stopped to think about how many things could go wrong it was enough to paralyze her), I’m never eating venison or rabbit or fried fish again. I’ll eat all the foods that people eat in the other places.

  She still couldn’t imagine what those foods might be, though. The only food she remembered was ice cream.

  Mattie stared down at her plate, now empty of its meager bread slice, and tried to imagine it filling with some food that she’d eaten with Mom and Heather. But the tin plate remained the same, a blank space scattered with a few crumbs.

  She glanced at her work basket. There were many things to mend in it—there always seemed to be more clothing to mend—but she couldn’t dredge up the energy at the moment. All the shocks of the last twenty-four hours—the cave, the stranger, the beating, dragging herself through the snow, the creature stalking her, William locking her out, the two men showing up at her door—seemed to suddenly press on her, and all she wanted was to go to sleep. She hadn’t slept in ages.

  Mattie lay down on the couch with a blanket rolled up for a pillow—the cushions were hard, and not very good for sleeping, but she wanted to be near the fire. It didn’t matter that the couch wasn’t comfortable, though—she was asleep almost before her head touched the blanket.

  William at the window.

  He was knocking, knocking very softly, like it was a secret he only wanted her to hear.

  She sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes, and saw him there, waving at her.

  “Open the window,” he said, his voice faint through the glass.

  If it had been anyone else she never would have, but it was William, so she hopped out of bed and dragged her wooden desk chair over the carpet and up to the window. She climbed onto the chair—she was very small for an eight-year-old, and Heather always teased her about it, but Mom would hug her and say good things came in small packages so Samantha didn’t mind.

  It was hard for her to push the window all the way open, but once she got it partway, William helped her lift it the rest of the way.

  “Good girl, Sam,” he said.

  “Where’s the screen?” she asked.

  “It’s right there,” he said in a whisper, and she peered out and saw it leaning against the house. “Let me through, Sammy girl.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked as he climbed into her bedroom. “Why don’t you knock on the door like a regular person?”

  He wasn’t dressed the way he was usually dressed. His clothes were all black.

  “You look like a ninja,” she said, and a giggle escaped her.

  “Be very quiet,” he said, holding a finger to his lips. “Be very, very quiet.”

  “Like Elmer Fudd,” Sam said. “Hunting rabbits.”

  “Exactly,” William said, and swiped at her nose with his thumb. “Like Elmer Fudd. I need you to stay so quiet and so still in here, just like you’re still asleep. I’m going to surprise your mother.”

  “Oh!” Sam said. “Can I help?”

  “You already did,” he said, and rubbed the top of her head. “Just wait here for me until I get back and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  There were arms underneath her, someone carrying her with surprising tenderness. She surfaced from sleep just long enough to open one bleary eye.

  “William?”

  “Don’t you worry now, Mattie girl. I’ve got you,” he said.

  He placed her on the bed. She felt him pulling her stockings down but she was too tired to do anything about it.

  “A man’s got to have sons, Mattie,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for them.”

  * * *

  • • •

  There was an astonishing array of gear laid out in the main room of the cabin. Half of the table was taken up with boxes of ammunition, giant knives, brown bottles with warnings and skulls on them, strange round objects that were . . .

  Grenades? Are those grenades? Is he hunting the creature or starting a war?

  Mattie had never seen a grenade in real life, only on television.

  Thinking about television made her stop for a second, because she had only remembered it properly just then. A box with moving pictures inside it, and she and Heather used to watch cartoons and laugh.

  Every Saturday morning, and Mom would let us eat cereal with marshmallows in front of the TV.

  As soon as she thought “cereal with marshmallows,” she could remember the taste of it. The cereal was like sweet oats, soft and crumbly from being in the milk, and the marshmallows were not like the marshmallows that she ate around a campfire but small and hard and gritty, crunchy underneath her teeth. She liked the strange texture of the marshmallows best and saved them for last, let them float in the milk while she picked around them, scooping up the cereal with the spoon.

  Cereal. You remembered a food that you had before. Cereal.

  A gun leaned against the wall next to the door, the largest rifle Mattie had ever seen—the barrel seemed enormous. A chipmunk could disappear inside that barr
el and never be seen again.

  Next to the gun was a giant trap, gleaming silver in the faint morning light. It had huge shiny teeth, the kind that snapped together over an animal’s leg. Mattie shied away from it, not wanting to come too near even though the trap wasn’t set yet.

  Her eye felt even worse today than it had the day before, the pouch of fluid larger and harder. She hated not being able to see out of one eye. It gave her the feeling that something was always lurking in the blank space where she used to be able to see.

  William’s boots stomped across the porch. She heard him kicking his feet against the side of the cabin to get rid of the snow, then the door opened.

  He dropped the load of firewood by the door. “Better get the fire going, Mattie. It’s a cold one out there. Going to have to keep the fire on all day.”

  He shut the door again. Mattie knew he was going out to the storehouse to get the eggs for breakfast. She heard him whistling as he did, and she froze in shock.

  Whistling? William whistling?

  He must have had a very good day in town. Mattie couldn’t recall the last time she heard him whistle, even though he was good at it. He could whistle a tune and it actually sounded like a song, not just a random series of notes.

  He stopped whistling a long time ago, when he decided that music tempted the devil close.

  She decided not to say anything about it. If she drew attention to it then it would be her fault that he made music and attracted evil to them.

  There were still large hot embers in the fireplace. William must have put wood in when he returned home the night before. Mattie stoked up the fire again so it would be ready for cooking. In the meantime, William returned with the eggs, removing his boots at the door.

  “Going to catch that demon today, Mattie my girl,” he said as she made the coffee. “It doesn’t stand a chance.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, going about her usual breakfast chores.