Someone who saved you. Someone who did what you should have done to William years ago—hit him in the head with a rock until he stopped moving.
Mattie would never forget how fierce Jen had looked, how she hadn’t hesitated.
You used to be like that. You were fearless until William beat it out of you. You need to stop thinking the way he taught you to think.
They all shuffled along in the snow like weird three-legged animals, Griffin supported by C.P. and Mattie supported by Jen. Jen’s long hair was loose under her cap and it kept tickling Mattie’s face. Mattie was suddenly conscious of her homemade dress, her heavy coat and boots.
Jen wore trousers like the men—jeans, they’re called—and a brightly colored jacket made of some soft material under a puffy vest. She seemed warm and comfortable and able to move easily, and Mattie was wearing clothes that trapped her, held her in place.
She was unable to stop herself from checking over her shoulder frequently for William. He’d never let Mattie go now, not when she knew his secret.
I killed your mother.
That was what he’d said. He’d killed her mother.
I can’t remember her face, and now I’ll never see it again.
“I gotta take a break,” C.P. said.
They’d reached a place where there were several large boulders clumped up together. One of them had a low flat top, perfect for sitting. C.P. carefully lowered Griffin to the boulder and sat down beside his friend. Griffin slumped backward immediately, his body propped at a strange angle by his large pack.
“Get his pack off him,” Jen said.
C.P. helped Griffin out of his pack and propped it under Griffin’s head. Griffin closed his eyes.
“Don’t go to sleep,” Jen warned. “That guy could pop out of the woods at any minute.”
She turned to Mattie. “You should probably sit down, too, and let me take a look at your head.”
Mattie perched on the edge of the rock near Griffin. Jen took Mattie’s hat off and Mattie saw the other woman flinch when she looked at the wound.
“It doesn’t look too good,” Jen said, wrinkling her nose. “It’s clotting, but it’s pretty long. You’re lucky it’s shallow, though.”
“Lucky,” Mattie said. Her voice was still small and strained.
“I bet it doesn’t feel too lucky, though,” Jen said with a little laugh.
Mattie gave her a half-smile back and shook her head. “Where . . . are . . . we . . . going?”
“Dunno,” C.P. said. “I just wanted to get away from that nutjob.”
Mattie said, “Down . . . the . . . mountain. Away.”
“It takes about a day or so to get back to the base when we’re all in good shape and moving along, and there’s no snow to slow us down. With you and Griffin like this, it will take a lot longer, and I don’t think either of you are in any condition to do a lot of walking. We need to find someplace to hole up for a day or so and rest before we try.”
“A . . . day?” Mattie shook her head. “William . . . goes . . . to . . . town . . . and back. Same day.”
“Well, I don’t know how he does that unless he’s got a vehicle, like an ATV or something. You just can’t do the hike that quickly no matter what kind of shape you’re in,” Jen said.
“ATV?” Mattie asked.
“All-terrain vehicle. Like a little car, but with big wheels so it can go over rough ground. Does he have something like that?” C.P. asked.
“No,” she said. “I’ve . . . never . . . seen.”
Though now that she considered it, of course it made sense that William might have some kind of vehicle stashed away somewhere. How else could he have brought up all the heavy gear he’d bought the other day? Did she really believe that William had dragged it all up the mountain on a sled?
If he did have a vehicle he’d made certain that she didn’t know of its existence, and the key would certainly be on his key ring. Which was on his person, and they’d never get it off him as long as he lived.
Not that it would do her any good if she found a vehicle, in any case. She didn’t have the least idea of how to operate one.
Mattie shivered. She’d been sweaty from the exertion of the fight and the fast pace, but now that they were sitting still her body was cooling. Jen noticed and sat down next to her, so that all four of them were crammed on the flat lip of the boulder. Jen put her arm around Mattie’s shoulder and pulled her close.
“You’re not dressed for this weather,” she said, rubbing her hand up and down Mattie’s arm. “And it will be dark in a few hours. We need to find a safe place to pitch the tents and start a fire.”
“We should go up to those caves,” C.P. said. “You know, the ones where we saw the tracks.”
Mattie stiffened. “You . . . went . . . to . . . the . . . caves?”
“Yeah,” C.P. said, his eyes alight with enthusiasm. “We saw that weird cave with all the bones and stuff that you told us about, too. I’ve got some amazing pictures on my phone, and Griffin has even better ones on the camera.”
“No,” Mattie said. Her throat hurt so much. Every time she spoke she saw William’s mad face above her, felt his hands on her throat again. But she needed to tell them, to warn them again. “No . . . no. Creature . . . warned . . . us. Can’t . . . go . . . there.”
The idiots. The absolute idiots. She’d told them not to follow the creature, not to play in things they didn’t understand. They hadn’t listened.
There came an unearthly roar, almost as if the creature had heard what they were saying, or had caught their scent. It wasn’t too close, but it wasn’t far enough away for Mattie to feel safe, either.
“What was that?” Jen asked. She didn’t look scared, though. She looked curious, and a little excited—just like C.P.
“Creature,” Mattie said. She stood up so quickly that her head spun. “Hide.”
“Creature? You mean the thing that made the tracks on the mountain? I want to see it,” C.P. said.
“No . . . no,” Mattie said. She wanted to shake him. What kind of person saw a room of bones and organs and thought, I really want to meet the animal that mutilated all these other animals? “You . . . don’t. Will . . . kill . . . you.”
“It didn’t kill you, right? You said you saw it. It came right up to your house.”
The creature roared again, and this time it sounded different. It sounded louder—and angrier. The roar echoed all around them, all through the forest—bouncing off the trees, filling up the air, echoing inside Mattie’s ears so that she had to cover them with her mittened hands or else that sound would seep inside her head and stay there.
She hunched over, closing her eyes, vaguely aware of the cries of the other three people—their surprise, their fascination. After several moments the sound faded away, though something seemed to still linger in the air—an undefined malice that made Mattie want to hide away forever so that she might never cross the creature’s path.
“That was awesome!” C.P. said.
Jen was smiling, and even Griffin had sat up and was staring around with an excited light in his eyes.
C.P. held some kind of device up in the air. It was flat and black and completely foreign to her. Mattie saw him draw it close to his face and tap on it. A moment later the creature’s sound emitted from the device again.
“Stop,” she said. She wanted to shout it but the small amount of talking she’d already done had strained her voice close to the breaking point. She flapped her arms so he would get the picture.
“Why? It’s amazing! I didn’t think we’d be able to capture a cry like that. We might even be able to get some video,” C.P. said.
How could she explain? How could she make them understand? She could hardly talk and they didn’t want to listen anyway. William was after them, and now the creature would be, too. There
wasn’t anywhere on the mountain where they would be safe.
CHAPTER TEN
Jen noticed Mattie’s distress and grabbed Mattie’s wrists to stop the flapping.
“I know you’re trying to tell us something, but I don’t think you should try to talk right now. It’s hurting me just listening to you. Do you think you could write it out?”
Mattie shook her head. “Can’t . . . write.”
Though that wasn’t exactly true, she realized. She used to be able to write—or rather, Samantha could write. She had a vague memory of Samantha practicing her letters at the kitchen table—but she hadn’t done it in so long that she didn’t think she’d be able to write out anything legible.
“Creature . . . is . . . angry,” she said. Her throat was at a breaking point, but they needed to hear her. “Don’t . . . approach. Will . . . hunt . . . us . . . because . . . caves.”
She hated the way she sounded, like a child who didn’t know how to talk. But she needed to make them understand the important thing—stay away from the creature.
“I don’t understand what you mean, ‘because caves,’” Jen said. “Are you saying that the cryptid is going to come after us because we went into its bone cave?”
Mattie nodded.
“But that’s ridiculous. It’s not human. It doesn’t think like a human.”
Mattie wanted to scream. Even Jen, who Mattie was certain would be sensible, didn’t believe. They were all willing to believe in the existence of an animal they’d never seen before but they weren’t willing to believe it could think and reason.
“Not . . . like . . . human. But . . . not . . . like . . . animal . . . either. Warned . . . us.”
Griffin, who seemed to be barely following the thread of the conversation up to that point, spoke up. “You said that the marks near your cabin were a warning because you went into the caves.”
Mattie nodded again, though she was worried about Griffin. His words were slurred together, and he seemed to have trouble focusing his eyes anywhere.
“So you’re saying that because we—me and Jen and C.P.—went into the caves after the cryptid warned you to stay away, that it will come after us, all of us?”
Mattie nodded once more. She thought her head would fall off if she kept shaking it around like that. Anyway, at least one of them understood, or seemed to. She hated the way they kept using that word, “cryptid,” though. It implied something benign, and the creature was not benign.
“So the wackaloon with the shovel is after us, and the cryptid is after us, too?” C.P. said. “Just what are we supposed to do here? There’s no cell service, you and Griffin are on the injured list, and all we have to keep us safe are our tiny nylon tents.”
Mattie had been thinking about this ever since she heard the creature’s roar. The important thing was that at least one of them got off the mountain to get help—or better yet, all three of them.
“You . . . take . . . Griffin. Go . . . down . . . the . . . mountain. William . . . will . . . follow . . . me.”
If Mattie stayed behind then the three of them would be safe from William. He’d only be interested in getting his wife back. The creature would probably follow her and William, as well, because it knew the scent of them and even where they lived. The three strangers would be able to escape, and Mattie would only have to worry about keeping out of William’s grasp until they returned with the police.
“No way,” Jen said. “Forget it. We’re not leaving you up here with your kidnapper.”
Kidnapper. That was the word for what William was. Of course William had kidnapped her, though she couldn’t seem to remember that part. She only remembered William coming in the window—her bedroom window. It was the first time anyone had said “kidnapper” out loud, though, the first time it was explicitly acknowledged.
“You . . . get . . . police,” Mattie said. “They . . . arrest . . . William.”
“By the time we get down the mountain and then back to you he’ll have chopped you up with an axe,” Jen said. “We already know he’s a murderer.”
She covered her mouth with her hand then, her eyes appalled.
“I’m sorry,” Jen said. “I’m sorry I’m so stupid. It was like I didn’t remember who I was talking to for a second. I guess I’m more stressed out than I thought.”
“Gee, I wonder what’s stressing you out?” C.P. said. “Could it be that we’re all going to die?”
“We’re not going to die,” Griffin said. He sounded worse every time he spoke. “But I do need to take a nap before we run anywhere.”
“You can’t take a nap here. It’s too exposed,” Jen said. She turned to Mattie. “You said we shouldn’t go back to those caves up by that meadow. Are there other caves, maybe nearby, that we could use?”
They all looked at her expectantly. Mattie acutely felt the limitations of her life in the cabin then, her lack of knowledge about the environment in which she’d lived for more than a decade.
“Don’t . . . know. William . . . not . . . allow . . . me . . .”
She trailed off. It would take too many words to explain that there were very few places she was allowed to go without William.
Jen watched Mattie closely, and Mattie felt a sudden flush of shame. How could Mattie explain to this woman, this woman so free and easy and independent, how one man had kept Mattie locked in a cabin for so many years? How could she explain that after a time she’d allowed him to do that? Mattie should have fought. She should have run. She should have tried harder, instead of just accepting her fate.
Jen’s hand was taking Mattie’s then, gripping it tight. “Whatever happened wasn’t your fault. You were only a child when he took you.”
“Eight years old, right?” C.P. said. “That’s what it said on the news.”
Mattie wanted to ask what else they knew, what else had been said on the news, if they knew anything about Heather, but Jen gave C.P. a quelling look and he went back to tapping his flat black box.
A third roar sounded through the woods, this one longer and fiercer than the last two. Mattie covered her ears again, and this time the other three did as well. As she hunched over, trying to block out the sound that leaked through, she had a strange thought. The creature sounded slightly different. It wasn’t the triumphant cry it had made when it found its prey in the woods, not the cry of anger and warning it had given when it had stalked Mattie through the woods to the cabin. This call was still angry, but there was something else underneath it. What was it?
Hurt. It’s hurt, and it’s . . . scared?
“Trap,” she said, and she didn’t realize she’d said it out loud until the other three looked at her. “William’s . . . trap. Bear . . . trap. For . . . creature.”
Mattie had thought that the creature would be too smart to be caught, or that the trap wouldn’t be large enough for the enormous thing, but maybe it had stepped inside the trap just so.
“That guy put out a bear trap for the cryptid?” C.P. sounded outraged. “Sure, the scientific find of the century and he’s going to catch it in a trap and put its head on his wall.”
“You think it got caught in the trap?” Jen asked. “Or fell into a pit?”
“If it did then that’s good for us,” Griffin said. His words came out of his mouth at half-speed, and he was clearly working hard to hold on to consciousness. “We can find a place to pitch our tents for the night and we won’t have to worry about it finding us.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know for sure,” Jen said. “Where did he—William—put the bear trap?”
“Path . . . to . . . stream. From . . . our . . . cabin,” Mattie said. She pointed in the direction from which they had come.
“So the opposite direction from here,” Jen said, and sighed. “I’d like to verify that the animal was caught, but I don’t think it’s smart to go back in the direction of the
angry man with the shovel.”
“And . . . gun,” Mattie said.
And knives, and grenades, and all sorts of other weapons you haven’t even thought of yet.
When Mattie considered it, she realized that William didn’t even have to stalk them through the woods. He could follow them from a distance and shoot them with his rifle, or find a high ridge to perch on and then drop grenades on their heads.
“Must . . . go,” she said, standing up. “Off . . . mountain.”
C.P. had put away the strange black device and pulled something else out of his pocket—a compass. He peered at it closely. “Trouble is, we’re going in the wrong direction to get back to the base of the mountain. The top of the mountain is west, and the base is east. We’ve been moving west.”
“And east is where William is,” Griffin said.
“We’ll just have to find a way to circle around him,” Jen said.
“How? You can see every step we take in the snow,” C.P. said, gesturing at the path they’d taken. The ground-up evidence of their passage was clear for anyone to see.
Mattie looked up at the sky hopefully. If another squall moved in then it would cover their tracks, but there wasn’t a sign of clouds.
“Have . . . to . . . try,” she said. “Can’t . . . stay.”
“Samantha is right,” Jen said, and Mattie felt that same startled shock as before, hearing the name she’d only just rediscovered. “We have to try. And anyway, we might get lucky. William might be too incapacitated to do anything.”
“You don’t think we killed him, do you?” Griffin asked. His voice was so low that Mattie barely made out his words.
“If we did, I don’t think it’s any loss to the world,” Jen said. Her tone was light, but Mattie noticed the flicker of unease in her eyes. “And if he isn’t dead, I don’t think he’s going to report us to the authorities.”
“No, he’ll just kill us,” C.P. said.
He was clearly joking, or trying to, but Mattie nodded.
Near the Bone Page 14