Mattie tilted her head at him, confused. What did his teeth have to do with anything?
“I have to take a piss,” C.P. said.
“Oh,” Mattie said, and flushed. “Of course. The outhouse is behind the cabin.”
“Yeah, we saw it the other day,” he said. “Me and Griffin. I can’t believe you lived here for twelve years without a flush toilet.”
Mattie thought of telling him that the outhouse was hardly the worst indignity she’d suffered, but decided it wasn’t worth it. He only looked half-awake anyway. She wasn’t sure he’d understand anything she said.
“Look, I’ll get my jacket and the rifle,” he said. “And then we can go out and get some food from the storehouse and I can, erm . . .”
“Yes,” she said quickly, and turned away to get her own coat and boots.
A moment later C.P. emerged from the bedroom dressed for the cold and carrying the rifle. He stopped to check the ammunition before they went out.
“I’d feel like an ass if it wasn’t loaded,” he said. “Now, you get behind the door and open it slowly. If there’s anything outside I want to take care of it right away and I don’t want to shoot you by accident.”
Mattie positioned herself against the door while C.P. stood facing it, the rifle at his shoulder. She pulled the door open, using it as a shield, all the while thinking, He’s taking all the risk on himself. I shouldn’t let him do that. I should be ready to defend us, too.
But she didn’t know what she would defend herself with, or even how.
She felt an unbearable pitch of suspense in her throat, expected William to charge through the open doorway, expected C.P. to fire the rifle. Instead C.P. huffed out a long, relieved breath.
“Nothing there,” he said. “Let’s go out. You stay behind me.”
He didn’t lower the rifle, but stayed ready to fire. He stepped out onto the porch, Mattie close behind him.
The clearing was empty. There were tracks everywhere in the snow. She picked out the prints of her own small feet, and the close three-legged prints of Jen and C.P., Jen’s bad leg dragging.
She saw William’s tracks, too—the large print of his right boot, and the sweep of his left leg. It hadn’t been her imagination, that thunk-drag. William’s leg was hurt, and he was limping.
There were also gigantic paw prints that led right up to the front window, and here and there streaks of blood. The paw prints returned to the trees in the same direction as the stream.
What if the creature is waiting there for us? What if it knows the only way we can get down the mountain is by following the water?
C.P. said, “Do you think it’s still here?”
Mattie shook her head. “I can’t feel it watching us.”
This, she realized, was true. Whenever the creature was near before she’d always felt its presence, even if she wasn’t entirely aware that she felt it.
“But,” she said, looking around, “the heart is gone.”
C.P. looked sick. “Do you think it came back for the heart? Or it was waiting for us to, I don’t know, respond?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not like a regular animal.”
It took the heart back for its collection, she thought, but she wasn’t going to remind C.P. of the cave.
“But you don’t think it’s here now?”
“No,” she said, although she didn’t feel as relieved about this as she ought to.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, lowering the rifle and heading around the side of the cabin.
Mattie stepped carefully off the porch, examining the snow. William’s prints definitely went away from the cabin, toward the woods, and they didn’t return.
Maybe he’s dead, she thought, but she knew she wouldn’t believe it unless she saw his body.
It might be right there, just inside the trees. If you follow the trail into the woods then you’ll find him, his heart torn out by the creature and his ice-chip eyes colder than they’ve ever been.
She was halfway across the clearing before she realized what she was doing, the idea of a dead William calling her like the piper of Hamelin. She couldn’t stop herself, and she couldn’t stop because she wanted it so much to be true. She wanted him to be gone forever, this monster who’d taken her life from her.
“Hey, where are you going?”
She heard the alarm in C.P.’s voice, heard the rush of his boots crossing the clearing, but she couldn’t stop, couldn’t answer.
“Hey!” he said, and grabbed her shoulder, forcing her to look at him. “Are you nuts? Where are you going by yourself?”
“William,” she said.
He frowned at her. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about that guy.”
Mattie shook her head. “I want to know if he’s still alive. He might not be. He was firing the rifle and then he stopped. I can’t believe he would stop trying to kill the creature if he could.”
Understanding crossed C.P.’s face, and a flicker of pity, too. Mattie didn’t care about his pity. She needed to know if the monster was dead.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll look around, just a little. But I don’t want to go far. I don’t want to leave Jen alone in the cabin.”
Mattie had forgotten about Jen. “Is she better?”
C.P. shook his head. “She’s still asleep, and she’s not as cold as she was, but she didn’t make a noise all night. It’s like she’s in a coma or something, but I can’t figure out why.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t . . .” Mattie began.
“No, you’re right. We should try to find out what happened last night, if we can. But we shouldn’t stay out here too long.”
They followed the tracks into the cover of the trees. C.P. spotted a couple of discarded rifle shells. There were splashes of blood and disturbed snow everywhere, and then suddenly there was nothing. All they saw before them was a smooth field of white, unbroken except for the tiny tracks of a rabbit.
“Where did they go?” C.P. asked. “Did they disappear into a portal or something? A door in a tree?”
It was exactly like when Mattie had encountered the dead fox. The prints in the snow had just disappeared, like the bear—or what they’d thought was a bear then—had taken flight. She looked up, expecting to see claw marks on the tree bark as she had then.
And screamed.
I should have known I should have known I should have known this would happen because it happened before I saw it
C.P. looked up too, and she heard him say, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, goddamn,” and then he stumbled away from her, gagging.
Griffin was there, hanging from the tree by his own intestines. Mattie could see the gaping hole in his torso, the place where the creature had torn out all of his organs. The shredded remains of his shirt and jacket hung around him like a pathetic shroud.
The creature hung him just like it did the animals by the cave, the ones that I saw, the ones that I tried to show William but William didn’t want to see because he was so angry that I looked at Griffin and Griffin looked at me.
Griffin’s eyes were closed. Mattie was grateful for that. She didn’t think she could bear to see him wide-eyed, accusing her of not doing more to save him.
I couldn’t have done more.
(you could have let C.P. go out when we heard the screaming) That was Samantha, Samantha who lectured and harangued, Samantha who would never let Mattie off the hook.
No, then C.P. would be dead, too. I was right about that. There wasn’t any way for us to help.
(you just wanted to stay in the cabin because you were afraid of William you’re nothing but a little coward)
I’m not. I’m not a coward. I just didn’t want anyone else to die.
(Coward)
C.P. stood up again, rubbing his mouth. “We have to get him down from there.”
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Mattie gave him a helpless look. “How? It’s too high for us to climb.”
“I don’t know! But we can’t leave him up there like that. We can’t.” The last word came out as a choked sob. Tears streamed over his cheeks. “He was my best friend and I can’t leave him there. What am I going to tell his mother? How can I explain this to anyone? No one will even believe us if we say that there’s a great big monster on the mountain killing people. Our families already think we’re nuts for searching for cryptids in the first place. If I go home and say Griffin was eviscerated by a . . . well, I don’t even know what it is, and that’s 90 percent of the problem right there. This is crazy. This never should have happened. Never.”
Mattie knew she ought to comfort him, ought to put her arm around him or say how sorry she was, but she didn’t know how. She didn’t know how to behave around people, didn’t know how to act without William telling her what to do.
Just be human, a voice whispered in her head. Samantha again.
Mattie reached out a tentative hand, rubbed his arm. “I’m sorry. I know he was your friend.”
This seemed like very little to give, but her hesitant comfort was enough to make him scrub his face with his hands and visibly pull himself together.
“Let’s go away from here,” he said. “Back to the cabin. I can’t be here with him like that. If we can’t do anything about it then I don’t want to be here, looking at him.”
It wasn’t very far back to the clearing. Griffin had been murdered and mutilated just inside the trees.
Close enough to touch.
(Close enough to save)
Shut up, Samantha.
“This was supposed to be a fun trip for the three of us. We all like winter hiking and camping, and this mountain isn’t very far from our college—just a couple hours’ drive. It seemed perfect. Plus, we wouldn’t have to do any really technical climbing, although there are a few places where you have to scramble over boulders, but that’s not a big deal. You can even avoid them if you want, take different paths or whatever. Griffin came up early because he finished his exams first and he was so excited about the reports he read online. And when he found those prints up by the cave—man, he was over the moon. I mean when I met up with him he was just bubbling, you know? About to overflow. That was all he could talk about. That, and you.”
Mattie stared at the ground. She couldn’t look C.P. in the eye. “I’m sorry.”
He tugged at her sleeve so she would look up. “No, listen. I’m really sorry I said that last night. I really am. It was a jerk thing to say. If Jen had been awake she probably would have slapped me for saying it. It’s ridiculous to blame you, and you were right. If I’d gone outside when Griffin started screaming, I would have ended up hanging from a tree, too. So thank you. For keeping me from doing something stupid. For saving my life.”
This was giving her far too much credit. Mattie looked at the ground again, at the scuffed toes of her heavy leather boots. “I didn’t save your life. I just didn’t want you to die.”
“That’s saving my life, dope,” he said, and gently tapped her shoulder.
Dope. It was a funny word, and it meant she was being stupid. But he’d said it in such a gentle, affectionate way—almost like the way Jen called him dummy. It made her feel strange, like she belonged to them somehow. Like she was part of them. A friend.
“Let’s get some food,” Mattie said, because she didn’t know how to respond and she didn’t know how to think about the idea that she might not have been a coward at all, but a savior.
They crossed the clearing to the storehouse. Mattie turned the knob, half-expecting it to be locked because she could hardly believe that William had made such a mistake in the first place. The knob turned easily and the door swung open.
“Whoa,” C.P. said. “Look at all this stuff.”
There were haunches of meat, hunted and dressed by William. There were cartons of eggs and milk and butter purchased from the town, and some loaves of bread and packages of cheese. Those things Mattie expected, because those were foods that William brought into the cabin for Mattie to eat.
But there was also an entire wall of shelves filled with packaged food—canned soups, pasta, sauce, bags of chips, cans of soda, candy bars, crackers, cookies, wrapped pastries. There were gaps in the items that made it clear William had been eating some of these things.
“He had all of this in here? And he never told me?” Mattie could hear the astonishment in her voice.
And he never shared it with you, never brought you anything that might remind you of home or of the real world, but he kept it all for himself and had it in secret because he wasn’t going to do without his comforts. That was your lot, not his.
“Just looking at all of this is making me hungry,” C.P. said. “Let’s just grab armfuls and bring it inside, okay?”
“Wait,” Mattie said, before C.P. started grabbing everything in sight. She didn’t think there was any point in removing a lot of food when they were leaving as soon as possible. “Let’s just take what we need for now, for breakfast.”
“But Twinkies,” C.P. said, pointing to a box of the cakes. “What about coffee cakes? Coffee cakes are basically a breakfast food.”
Mattie couldn’t remember what a coffee cake tasted like. She stared at the blue-and-white box, at the picture of the cake with crumb topping. She suddenly longed to know what it was, how the texture of the cake would feel on her tongue.
“Okay,” she said. “The coffee cakes.”
She collected a full carton of eggs—I’m going to eat as many eggs as I want, William’s not here to stop me, she thought with a savage satisfaction—and a package of bacon and a loaf of bread. She noticed a small bin in the corner and found that it was filled with food wrappers. She realized then how careful William was to never let her see the packaging from the eggs or bacon or bread. He always carried everything inside in a basket or wrapped in a towel, so that she would never think about the modern world he’d dragged her from.
She turned away from the bin to find C.P. balancing a huge load of packages.
“I thought we were only taking coffee cakes,” she said.
“Just in case we get stuck in the cabin. For whatever reason,” he said. “I do want to get out of here as soon as possible. But there might be a siege, or whatever.”
“A siege?”
“Yeah, you know. The monster might come back. Or that guy. We didn’t see his body.”
That was true. Mattie had forgotten she was looking for evidence of William. The sight of Griffin hanging from the tree pushed it out of her mind.
Is William still alive? If he is, why hasn’t he come back here for me? Maybe the creature took him away to the cave.
She wished very much that this was so, that the monster was tearing William’s organs out one by one and that he was screaming the whole time, screaming the way he used to make her scream in pain and misery.
Mattie led the way out of the storehouse and C.P. followed. “Make sure the door is pulled tight, otherwise bears can get in there.”
“You don’t think a bear is hanging around with that giant thing on the loose, do you?”
Mattie thought about it. It was true that she and William had noticed fewer animals about in the last month or so. She’d assumed, once she knew about the creature, that it was eating all the available meat. But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps some animals had just moved on, ceding their territory to the new monster in their midst.
“Maybe,” Mattie said. “You never know with bears. But it’s true that I haven’t seen much evidence of bear activity around, and neither has William. He does all the hunting, so he should know.”
Mattie checked the fire and started preparing breakfast as she always did. It was so much a part of her that she did everything automatically.
“What can I do to
help?” C.P. asked.
She was slicing the bread when he said this, and the question shocked her so much that she nearly sliced one of her fingers.
“Help?”
“Yeah, you know, I could set the table or toast the bread or whatever.”
He wanted to help. William never helped. Kitchen work was for women. It was the responsibility of women to prepare the food that men had hunted.
But he didn’t hunt all of it, did he? He went to the supermarket and bought it and carried it home and forced you to feel grateful.
“I can toast the bread on a fork,” he said. “I’m really good at that. I do it around the campfire all the time.”
Mattie never made toast. William didn’t like it.
“Yes, that sounds like a good idea,” she said. “Just leave me enough room to cook the bacon, please.”
Soon they were sitting down to breakfast and again the cabin felt cozy and safe, filled with the smells of food and the wood burning in the fire. Mattie reflected that she’d never felt this way with William, even with the same fire burning and the same food on the table.
C.P. shoveled food into his mouth with abandon. “God, I’m so hungry. I shouldn’t be this hungry, not with Griffin gone and Jen in the state she’s in and who knows what waiting for us outside. But I am. I’m starving.”
Mattie watched him dip his toast into his egg yolk. She’d never done that before. She copied him and took a bite and discovered she liked it.
I feel like a baby animal, learning the world anew, she thought. William took so much from me.
“So what are we going to do?” C.P. said. “We left the packs somewhere. I don’t know what I was thinking, doing that. I don’t even know how we’ll find them again but we need that stuff, because we’re going to have to spend at least one night outside. Jen can’t walk, obviously, and we’re going to have to fix up some way to drag her. Make a travois or whatever.”
“Travois?”
“Like a sled, but with long poles to pull instead of a rope.”
“The sled!” Mattie said. “I forgot about it. William bought a sled so he could carry the bear trap. I wonder where he put it. I saw it yesterday morning.”
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