Her stomach churned. The thought of William or the creature catching up to them made her want to throw up. She didn’t know which of them frightened her more.
William. If William catches up to you, it’s a lifetime of hell for you. The creature can kill you in an instant.
Or creatures. If there actually are two and it wasn’t a figment of your imagination.
Mattie didn’t have any idea how far they’d gone from the site where William had attacked. She knew they’d walked in a circle, or something like it, as they’d hurried away from William in the direction of the caves and now they were going back toward the cabin. Maybe they’d already gone past it.
“That’s it,” C.P. said, stopping so suddenly that Jen only kept Griffin from tipping forward just in time. “I can’t walk anymore.”
“We can’t stop here,” Jen said before Mattie could protest. “We’re out in the open.”
They were directly in the center of a trail, but there was an-other clump of large boulders to their left, on the forest side, and the trees rose up over them. The cliffside hadn’t changed—it was still a steep drop-off to a ground that was far below. Mattie wondered when they would encounter the stream that was close to the cabin. It seemed they’d gone a long way from the place where she’d lived.
“It’s not that exposed,” C.P. said.
Mattie could see his point. The boulders seemed to provide a kind of cover, something sturdy to lean against. But the four of them were still easy to see, easy to find, especially since they had just stopped a few inches away from their snow trail.
“We can’t keep going like this. Even with two of us we can’t carry Griffin fast enough to get away from that guy if he’s got a gun.”
“So, what, we’re just going to lay down here and let him find us and shoot us in our sleep?” Jen said.
“We have to pitch the tents now. The light is going to be gone very soon.”
“We can’t pitch the tents. Are you crazy? We have to get Griffin out of here and into cell phone range as soon as possible. He’s been out cold for the last half hour. He’s going to need a helicopter.”
“Jen, we can’t just keep trudging forward until we all collapse.”
Why not? Mattie wanted to ask. That’s exactly what she had done the day William abandoned her in the woods. And if C.P. truly understood the danger they were in, he wouldn’t suggest stopping.
Mattie recognized that all of them were hungry and exhausted, including herself, but she couldn’t imagine feeling safe inside a tent.
Her memory of tents was limited to a play tent that she and Heather had pitched in the yard, a small pink-and-purple cabin for small children to run in and out of. Even if the tents that the others carried were sturdier than her play tent, they were still only cloth, and cloth was easily torn by claws or broken by bullets.
“Look, I’ve gotta eat something or I’m going to pass out, too,” C.P. said. “Let go of him.”
“We can’t just drop his unconscious body in the snow,” Jen said, clinging to Griffin’s shoulder even as C.P. released him. “He’s going to get hypothermia.”
“Wait,” C.P. said, slinging his large pack off his back and rummaging around in it. He removed a small object that Mattie couldn’t quite make out in the gloom and waved it at Jen. “Wrap him in this. I keep them for emergencies.”
“Good idea,” Jen said.
“She actually said I had a good idea,” C.P. said to Mattie. “I should mark this day on the calendar.”
“Unwrap it for me, dummy,” Jen said, handing the item back to C.P.
“Aaand everything’s back to normal,” he said, pulling off the wrapping and unfolding the object.
It was a large silver blanket, very shiny even in the deepening gloom.
“It’s a space blanket,” C.P. said in response to Mattie’s questioning look. “They don’t look like much but they really do keep you warm, and they don’t take up a lot of room in your pack.”
Jen and C.P. carefully wrapped Griffin in the blanket and lowered him down to the snow, propping him against one of the boulders. Griffin didn’t move or protest. His eyes were closed and he appeared completely unconscious.
Mattie shivered. Now that they’d stopped moving and the sun was gone, she realized how cold it was and how unprepared she was—for the second time in just a few days—to be out in it.
(Think how disappointed William would be if you died of the cold instead of at his hand)
I’m not going to die. I’m going to get off this mountain. I’m going to tell people what he did, what he did to me and my mother.
C.P. and Jen were both rooting around in their packs. C.P. threw several items out in the snow.
“Take something,” he said to Mattie. “You have to be starving.”
She stared at the variety of wrapped objects. It was packaged food, something she hadn’t seen in a very long time, and most of it was unrecognizable except for one item.
Even in the deepening gloom she could see the word on the package clearly, white letters against a dark background.
HERSHEY’S
“Can . . . I . . . have . . . that?” she asked, pointing at the chocolate bar.
“Have whatever you want,” C.P. said. He picked up a bag, tore it open noisily, and began stuffing something crunchy into his mouth.
“Do you have to eat like a cow chewing cud?” Jen said. “Close your mouth, for god’s sake.”
Mattie tentatively picked up the chocolate bar. She felt the ridges of the bar through the wrapper and suddenly remembered breaking up a large bar into the smaller squares, lining up all the tiny Hershey’s bars on a napkin at the table and eating them one by one. She could almost taste the chocolate on her tongue, feel the creaminess melting inside her cheek. She drew the bar near her face and sniffed at it. The faint sweet aroma permeated the wrapping.
She had to take off her mittens to open it, and almost immediately her hands started shaking. It was too cold to have bare fingers, but she wanted the chocolate. Mattie couldn’t remember the last time she’d wanted something so badly.
After a few minutes of struggling she managed to tear the packaging enough to expose the top of the bar. The scent of chocolate wafted out, and with it, a rush of memories that she’d forgotten, an avalanche of the past that threatened to bury her completely.
Standing in the hallway wearing a Sleeping Beauty costume, a pink ribbon in her hair. She held a plastic pail shaped like a pumpkin and so did Heather. Heather was Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Mom was holding up a camera that kept flashing in their faces as she said, “Just one more, one more, say ‘cheese.’”
Saving her allowance so she could buy her own candy from the grocery store. She always selected a Hershey’s bar, even though Heather said she was boring for picking plain chocolate when there were Reese’s cups and Milky Way bars in the world.
Carefully placing half a chocolate bar on a graham cracker and smashing down with a scorched marshmallow on top before adding another graham cracker and stuffing the whole thing in her mouth. It was sweet and dry and sticky at the same time and also tasted of the campfire.
Mattie carefully broke off a piece of the chocolate with her teeth and let it float onto her tongue, just resting there. She’d forgotten what sweet things really tasted like. The memory was nothing compared to the reality.
Jen put her hand on Mattie’s shoulder. “Are you all right? Are you in pain?”
Mattie stared at Jen in confusion. Then she noticed that she was weeping, hot tears warming her cold cheeks.
“It’s . . . been . . . so . . . long,” she said. “Chocolate. I . . . forgot.”
She wished she could explain properly but her throat still hurt. She hated that she couldn’t speak to them, hated that her first moments with people other than William were limited by this. And deep down she
was afraid they would think she was simple, or broken, because she couldn’t make complete sentences without choking.
“How long has it been since you had chocolate?” C.P. asked.
“Since . . . before,” Mattie said. “Before . . . William.”
“So, twelve years, right?” C.P. said. “That’s what they said on the news.”
Twelve years. Mattie knew a lot of time had passed, knew that she’d been with William on the top of that mountain since she was a child, but William didn’t celebrate birthdays or keep track of the days so she’d never been completely sure how long it had been.
I lost my childhood, she thought. I lost my mother and my sister and my childhood.
Now that the subject of the news program had come up again, there was something she wanted to know.
“Heather,” she said. “On . . . the . . . news?”
“Heather?” C.P. asked, and looked at Jen, who shook her head.
“Sister,” Mattie said, tapping her chest. “My . . . sister.”
“They didn’t say anything about a sister,” C.P. said. “Not that I remember.”
Did that mean that Heather was still alive? Or did it mean that she was dead and C.P. just hadn’t been paying attention during the broadcast?
“The only thing they talked about was your mom, how she was . . . well, you know. And about you and how nobody had any idea what had happened to you. The tone of it kind of made it sound like you were dead.”
“You have zero tact,” Jen said.
“I’m just repeating what I heard!”
“Zero.”
It happened then, so fast that Mattie wasn’t sure what she’d seen.
An enormous shadow loomed out of the trees. Shiny claws gleamed in the darkness. A paw swooped down from the top of the boulders, curled around Griffin’s shoulder and yanked him up, over the boulders, into the trees.
A second later Griffin was gone, nothing left of him except his scream that lingered in the air.
All three stood still for a moment. Then Mattie backed away a few steps from the boulder, her eyes searching for any sign of the creature. Would it return? Was it just stashing Griffin somewhere so it could come back for one of them? Would they all end up as part of its collection?
Mattie remembered the animals hanging from the trees, imagined Griffin’s body dangling from one of the branches.
The old familiar panic bubbled up—the longing to hide, to make herself small, to go away someplace where there was no pain and no fear.
Don’t let it come for me don’t let it take me don’t I can’t I just got away from William and now there’s this what did I do why does this keep happening to me why was I not allowed to be happy and free.
“Griffin!” Jen shouted, standing up and staring into the space where he’d disappeared. “Griff, answer me!”
Jen’s voice made Mattie start. What is she doing? Is she trying to bring the creature down on us again? We have to leave. We have to escape before it comes back for us.
Mattie grabbed Jen’s shoulder so the other woman would look at her. “He’s . . . gone. The . . . creature . . . took . . . him.”
“What do you mean, gone? What’s it going to do to him?”
Mattie didn’t know for certain but she had a pretty good idea. Jen and C.P. should have the same kind of idea. They’d seen the inside of the cave. They knew what the creature kept there.
“We . . . run,” Mattie said. “Before . . . it . . . returns.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We’re not going to run. We have to go after him,” C.P. said. “It’s going to take him to the cave, right? So it can mutilate him?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. “Look, let’s leave the packs here and just take some food and water. We can tuck the bags into these boulders and come back for them. That way we can move faster.”
“I don’t know if Samantha can move that fast,” Jen said.
“Then she can stay here with the packs. Or she can run away, if she wants,” C.P. said. He said this last so dismissively that Mattie felt her terror covered over with shame.
Is it so wrong to run? Is it wrong to want to avoid hurt?
“Come on, if we hurry we can catch up to it before it carves Griff up into little pieces,” C.P. said to Jen. It was clear that Mattie no longer mattered, in his opinion, if she didn’t want to come along on his quest to retrieve Griffin.
Mattie did not want to say that she didn’t want to be left alone in the woods, because she was certain C.P. would dismiss her as cowardly.
You’re not a coward. You lived with William all those years. You survived every day as William got crazier and crazier. C.P. doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what it was like.
This sounded like what Mattie thought of as her Samantha voice, that strong and practical self that didn’t seem quite merged with the Mattie she’d known for so long. Everything Samantha thought was true, though. Mattie wasn’t a coward. She wasn’t.
The truth that C.P. didn’t want to face was that there wasn’t much they could do about Griffin. How would they get him back from an animal that was so large, so fierce, so silent? All three of them had seen the size of the silhouette, the length of its claws. And nobody had heard it. They hadn’t even known it was stalking them.
You only hear the creature when it wants you to hear it.
There had been no breaking branches to warn them, no grunt of its breath, no roar echoing through the forest. It had watched them and waited and then it had taken the most vulnerable person, the one who clearly wouldn’t fight back. Griffin.
There’s always a chance Griffin might survive, or that the creature might not harm him. There’s a chance.
She thought this, but she didn’t really believe it. It was more like a hope, or a wish—a little-girl wish. Mattie wasn’t a little girl anymore, and she knew that stories didn’t have happy endings.
Mattie felt a little pang at the thought of the kind-eyed Griffin, the man who’d been so concerned for her to get to a doctor, the stranger who’d attacked William so she could escape.
“What . . . will . . . you . . . do?” Mattie asked C.P., who was busily stuffing things from his pack in his jacket pockets.
“I don’t know. Get Griffin back, I guess, and then figure it out from there.”
“How?” she persisted. “Do . . . you . . . have . . . a . . . weapon?”
“No, I don’t have a weapon,” he said. “I didn’t think I was going to have to battle a gigantic . . .”
He faltered, his voice trailing off. He looked at Jen.
“It wasn’t what we expected. Not at all,” Jen said. She hadn’t moved a muscle since she’d stopped yelling for Griffin.
“I thought it would be more like a Sasquatch, or just a really big bear,” C.P. said. He sounded thoughtful, though there was just a tremor of fear underneath. “But that wasn’t a bear, unless bears are the size of elephants now.”
“I don’t understand how it could sneak up on us like that,” Jen said. “And if it was so big, how can it have been in the trees?”
“Maybe we’ll get a good look at it when we get Griff back,” C.P. said.
“I don’t know if I want to get a good look at it,” Jen said. Her eyes were wide and shiny in the moonlight.
Moonlight. Full dark had come while Mattie had fallen away into a flood of memories set off by a chocolate bar. The nighttime was the creature’s time. And William’s.
“Jen, come on,” C.P. said, grabbing her arm and shaking her. “This isn’t like you. Yes, that was terrifying. Yes, I think I actually peed in my pants when I saw its claws. But if that happened to one of us, Griffin wouldn’t just leave us out there. He’d come after us. You know he would.”
William knew these woods, knew how to hunt. He could stalk Mattie through the forest just as silently as th
e monster who’d snatched Griffin away.
“I know,” Jen said. “I know. It’s just . . . what can we really do? We don’t have guns or knives or anything.”
Danger was all around her, in every twitching branch and every shifting shadow. She couldn’t stay here alone. But it was utter foolishness to chase after the creature, to go back in the direction of William’s cabin, to put herself in harm’s way.
“We don’t have to fight it,” C.P. said. “I’m not going to have a boss battle on the top of a mountain, and neither are you. We can, I don’t know, sneak up on it or something.”
She should continue down the mountain. She could find the stream, the way she’d originally planned. She could get police, people who could help, and they would come back and rescue Jen and C.P.
If they’re still alive.
“Don’t you think it will be able to smell us coming? Or hear us? Whatever it is, it’s some kind of animal and its senses are probably a hell of a lot sharper than ours,” Jen said. Her voice was rising in pitch with every word.
Yes, the best plan, the most practical plan, was for one of them (me, it should be me) to keep going, to get others to come to the mountain. The rescuers could swarm the mountain and they could catch William in their net and then Mattie wouldn’t have to look over her shoulder for the rest of her life, waiting for him to appear and snatch her away again.
“We’ll just figure something out,” C.P. said. “I mean, first we have to find out if Griff is even still . . .”
William didn’t snatch you away, though. You opened the window for him. You trusted him. Why did you trust him?
“What if the monster eats Griffin?” Jen said. Instead of getting louder this time, her tone had dropped practically to a whisper, like she was saying something she shouldn’t say, or didn’t want to believe in.
It’s your own fault he took you. It’s your own fault that your mother is dead.
“No.” Mattie shook her head from side to side. “No. No.”
“I know, I don’t want to think about it either,” Jen said. “It’s too horrible.”
Jen thought Mattie was distressed over the thought of Griffin being eaten. And of course it was a terrible idea, that kind man torn to pieces like the fox Mattie saw in the snow. But that wasn’t what made her shake her head and mutter “no.” It was the seed that had planted itself in her mind that she could not dig out.
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