Near the Bone

by Christina Henry

  “Fingerprints,” she said. “Right.”

  She still didn’t really understand, but she went to the closet and took out a pair of mittens.

  “Don’t you have anything with fingers?” he asked as he watched her pull them on.

  “No, I only know how to knit mittens,” she said. “Do you have gloves?”

  “Not exactly,” he said, and took his out of his pocket and put them on. They looked like mittens at first, and then he unbuttoned a button at the top of the palm and they were half-gloves underneath, leaving the tops of his fingers bare. “Not very good for hiding your fingerprints, although they are useful when you need more mobility with your hands than you can get from a mitten.”

  Mattie knelt in front of the trunk again and swept some of the packets to the side. Underneath there were several stacks of wrapped bills and a pile of newspaper clippings.

  “There must be thousands of dollars,” C.P. said. “If you took this you could buy an island in the middle of the ocean.”

  “An island,” Mattie said. She’d never been to an island, although she had a sudden vision of sand and sun and a lone palm tree.

  She picked up the pile of newspaper clippings. There was a black-and-white picture of a little girl with light hair and dark eyes smiling awkwardly from the first one, her head tilted just a little too far back so that she appeared off-center.

  “That’s you,” he said. “Oh my god. I don’t think you should look at those clippings.”

  “Me?” she said, staring at the little girl. “This is me?”

  There were no mirrors in William’s cabin. Mattie hadn’t tracked the changes in her face and body as the years passed because it had been years since she’d seen herself. It had been such a long time that she’d forgotten the shape of her eyes and her nose and her mouth and her cheeks.

  The little girl in Mattie’s hand wavered, and she realized her hand was shaking.

  “Here, give me those. You don’t need to see those,” C.P. said.

  “No,” she said, and forced herself to take deep breaths, to make her hand stop shaking. “I know you want to help. But I need to see. I need to know.”

  There was a headline above the picture of the awkwardly smiling girl. “TRAGEDY—8-year-old girl missing after mother found brutally murdered.”

  She placed the clipping to one side. The next clipping had the same picture of herself, this time below larger text that said: “MISSING—police seek information.”

  The third clipping made her breath stop.

  The headline read: “MURDER AND KIDNAPPING IN A SMALL TOWN.” And there was the picture of herself again, smiling her awkward smile. But Mattie didn’t care about that picture. Next to it was a candid photo of a woman wearing a checked shirt, her smile a little too wide to be considered pretty, her right hand pushing her hair back from her face.

  Her mother.

  “Mom,” she said. She felt the tears—they were blocking her throat and pushing against the backs of her eyes. But she didn’t cry. She stroked the picture with her finger, because she had a face now for the person she’d once loved most in the world. “I forgot your face.”

  And even though Mattie stared down at her mother, she still couldn’t dredge up a memory of her mom’s face.

  “Look, we should, um, stay on track,” C.P. said. “I know this is important to you, and finding this stuff explains a lot, but we really need to get going. There are only so many hours of daylight.”

  “I know,” Mattie said, and sighed. She folded up all of the newspaper clippings and put them in her pocket.

  “I can’t believe that sicko kept cuttings of his own crime,” C.P. said. “You should take some of that money. I think you earned it.”

  Mattie hesitated. Now that she knew how William earned his keep, the money felt wrong, somehow dirty. She didn’t know exactly what heroin was but C.P. said it was a drug and all she remembered from childhood was that drugs were bad, that they ruined lives. Should she take money earned on the back of someone’s ruined life?

  He ruined your life, too. And principles won’t feed you.

  She took two stacks of bills, which seemed like more money than she would ever need, and then closed the trunk and locked it again. She stood up, holding the keys in one hand and the money in the other. The money felt like it was burning her.

  “You get all your cold weather gear on. Do you have a backpack or bag that we can use to carry some of that food in the storehouse?”

  “William has a rucksack. He usually keeps it in the storehouse, but I don’t know where. I’ve just seen him carrying it in and out.”

  “I’ll go look while you put the rest of your things on. I’m really hoping that we can find whatever vehicle that key goes with,” he said, pointing to the keys. “I think it would be smart to take provisions, though, just in case we don’t find it. Without a car we’ll be spending another night on the mountain for sure. Anyway, don’t lose those keys. It would suck if we did find a car and didn’t have any way to start it.”

  Mattie felt very nervous then, felt the sudden burden of not losing their way to escape. She went out in the main room, C.P. trailing her again, and rummaged in her work basket until she came up with a ball of wool. She cut off a long length of it, pulled the key ring over the string, made a second loop through the key ring just in case, then tied the double loop with the keys dangling from it around her neck. She tucked it all inside her sweater.

  “OK, that works,” he said. “You won’t drop them by accident, I guess.”

  Mattie put on her socks and boots and coat while C.P. went out to the storehouse. She wrapped a long scarf around her throat, pulled a hat over her shorn hair, and carefully tucked the stacks of bills and the money she’d hidden under the couch inside her coat pocket. C.P. returned just as she was putting her mittens in the opposite pocket. He was carrying William’s haversack. He held it out to her.

  “Do you think you can carry this? I tried not to overfill it. We’re going to need to get my pack, and maybe Jen’s if we can manage it. The tents are with the packs, and if we have to sleep outside we’re going to want tents. Though I have no idea how we’ll even find the packs again. It’s like we ran through a maze last night in the dark.”

  “It will be easy,” Mattie said. “We came along the deer path from the stream. All we have to do when we get back to the stream is follow our footprints in the snow. It didn’t snow overnight, so the trail will still be there.”

  C.P. frowned. “Yeah, OK. But then what? How do we get down the mountain from there?”

  “William always said the stream fed into a river, and the river goes down the mountain. So we just follow the stream.”

  “Is that the way he goes when he leaves for town?”

  Mattie nodded.

  “Good, that means his vehicle is probably that way, too. We’ll be back in civilization in a few hours.”

  Mattie noticed that they were both careful not to mention the creature, or the possibility that William was still out there somewhere. The sun was shining and they were rested and fed and all those things made the terrors of the night recede. It didn’t seem possible that bad things could happen to them in the day.

  Mattie put the pack on her back, and then the two of them half-dragged, half-carried Jen out to the sled. She was so still and so pale that it was like carrying a corpse, but C.P. checked Jen’s pulse and breathing once they had her loaded on.

  “She’s still alive,” he said, giving Mattie a thumbs-up.

  They’d had to put Jen on her side, pulling her legs into a fetal position. She wouldn’t fit otherwise—she was far too tall for the sled platform. Mattie tucked a blanket around Jen. There were straps on either side and C.P. used these to buckle Jen into place.

  “If she’s not waking up after all this . . .” he said. “Jesus, what the hell can be wrong with h
er?”

  He didn’t seem to expect an answer, because he picked up the rope and started pulling. “This way, right?”

  Mattie pulled the cabin door shut and trotted after him. She felt something huge swelling in her chest. She was leaving. She was really leaving. She was never going to live here again.

  She felt an inward tug, something telling her she should look back, commemorate the moment properly.

  Don’t look back. Don’t ever look back. There’s nothing for you there, nothing you want to remember. Don’t give him another second of your attention.

  And then they were into the trees, and the moment passed, and Mattie knew if she looked back the cabin wouldn’t be visible anymore.

  C.P. was too busy pulling Jen to chatter as he usually did. Mattie listened to the sound of the woods—the wind rustling in the trees, the busy chirping of winter birds. As long as she heard those birds then they were safe from the creature.

  And even if William is alive he can’t really be a threat any longer. He can’t be. He could barely walk last night. He couldn’t run after us.

  But Mattie listened hard for the thunk-drag of his walk all the same.

  After a very brief time they came upon the trap. It had been reset.

  “Did that guy actually stop to fix his trap last night?” C.P. said, sounding disgusted.

  Nearby there was a dead squirrel in the snow. Mattie noticed a graze on its flank, like it had brushed against the teeth of the trap. But a little cut like that wouldn’t kill a squirrel, unless . . .

  Mattie remembered that amongst the pile of seemingly random things William had purchased to defeat the “demon” was a liquid in a small brown bottle. She hadn’t looked closely at the bottle but she did recall that there was a skull and crossbones on the side of the label.

  “Poison,” Mattie said. “William put poison on the trap. He bought some. I saw it.”

  C.P. followed her eyes from the squirrel and back to the trap again. “That’s why Jen’s out cold? Because that son of a bitch put poison on the bear trap and now it’s killing her?”

  “I’m not certain,” Mattie said. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it? What else could have killed that squirrel?”

  “What kind of poison is it?”

  Mattie shook her head. “I didn’t look at it very closely.”

  “We have to get her to a hospital. I was worried about an infection before, or stress or shock or whatever. But poison—I mean, it could be damaging her brain or her organs permanently right now while we’re standing around talking.” He grabbed the ropes and pulled at the sled with more energy than before. “That guy is a garbage person, you know that? A complete and total garbage person.”

  “I don’t want to defend William,” she said. “But I think if he put poison on the trap it was because he wanted to make sure he caught the creature.”

  “It doesn’t matter what his reasons are,” C.P. said. “He’s still a garbage person. Leave aside what he did to Jen. Look what he did to you.”

  “I know what he did to me,” Mattie said quietly.

  “I know you know. And that’s why you should agree with me when I say he is a garbage person.”

  “Yes,” Mattie said. “He is. A garbage person.”

  She giggled, and it so surprised her that she covered her mouth with her mitten. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard a noise like that come out of her own mouth.

  C.P. noticed, and he laughed, too. “Total garbage. A wet bag filled with trash.”

  The laugh bubbled up again. “Yes. Nothing but trash.”

  Soon they were both laughing, laughing so hard that tears streamed out of their eyes.

  “Garbage person, garbage person,” Mattie said. She’d never heard such a phrase before and it was so funny, so funny because it was true and because she was scared and because she was running away from the man who’d kidnapped her for twelve years, that complete and total garbage person.

  After a few minutes their laughter seemed to peter out, though they still grinned idiotically at one another.

  And that was when Mattie noticed the woods had gone silent.

  “What is it?” C.P. asked, halting.

  “It’s here,” Mattie whispered.

  The back of her neck prickled. She tilted her head back, trying to see the monster hiding up above. She knew it was there. It was always there, impossibly so. How could something so large hide in the shelter of pine boughs?

  “How do you know?” he whispered back, his eyes scanning the trees as hers did.

  “It’s quiet,” she said. “Go, go, as fast as you can but don’t run.”

  “The rifle,” he moaned. “I forgot the rifle. I was thinking about food and about Jen and about maybe getting to the vehicle, and then we found that trunk and everything was so weird and I left the rifle in the cabin.”

  “It’s okay,” Mattie said. She didn’t think that rifle could do anything against the creature in any case.

  She heard the harshness of her breath, the sound of their boots in the snow, the swish of the sled’s runners, the rustle of their clothes. But she didn’t hear the creature, though she knew it was keeping pace with them above.

  It can be silent when it wants to, she thought, not for the first time.

  And thus far it had always been silent when it didn’t intend to attack. So maybe they were safe. Maybe it was just watching them, making certain that they didn’t go anywhere near its lair.

  Maybe it would let them go.

  Maybe.

  A branch cracked above them.

  Mattie felt a rush of air, smelled rank and rotten meat, saw an impossibly huge paw tipped by shining claws. Then C.P. was screaming, and Jen was gone, and so was the creature.

  “Jen!” he shouted. “Jen!”

  There was nothing. All that was left was an empty sled, the straps sliced in two, and the remains of the blanket that had fallen off Jen as the creature lifted her into the trees.

  “Why?” C.P. shouted. “Why her? Why? Jen! Jen!”

  Mattie grabbed his arm and pulled. “She can’t hear you. Come on, come on, run now.”

  But he seemed in a daze, half-furious and half-baffled, and his legs moved in slow motion.

  “Why did it take her? Why? She was unconscious. She wasn’t any threat. Why didn’t it take me instead? What am I going to do? How could they leave me here alone?”

  “Run,” Mattie said, tugging him along. “You’re not alone. I’m here, too. Come on, run.”

  The creature watched them. Mattie felt its eyes on her. But it didn’t follow. It had its prize and it didn’t need to. She wasn’t sure how she knew that but she was certain.

  C.P. stumbled along beside her, mumbling about Jen, about Griffin, about their families and what he would say to them. Mattie didn’t listen to the exact words. She just wanted to get to the stream, where they would be out in the open and the creature wouldn’t be able to swoop down upon them. It would have to show itself.

  They broke into the clearing, and Mattie kept pulling C.P. until they crossed the water and were safely on the other bank.

  There, she thought. It can’t sneak up on us now. It’s on the other side of the stream.

  C.P. bent over, holding his stomach with both arms. “I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t understand. Why would it take Jen? Why did it take Griffin in the first place? Why wouldn’t it just kill all of us?”

  Now that they weren’t running for their lives Mattie wondered that, too. The creature was so much bigger than them. All of their strength combined couldn’t have prevented the monster from killing them. So why had it taken Griffin away? Griffin had been unconscious at the time, and no threat at all. And it had been the same for Jen.

  “Wait,” Mattie said, trying to grab at the threads of an idea. “Wait. I think it too
k them because they were no threat.”

  “What? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does, if you think about animal behavior. Even animals that you think of as big and powerful will try to take down the sick and the weak in a herd. It’s because predators don’t want to risk being injured. They just want to get their meal without getting hurt.”

  “So, the giant monster that lives in the woods, the one that’s five times the size of us—it took Griffin and Jen because it knew they wouldn’t hurt it?”

  “I know it sounds strange. But there were four of us. Five, if you count William. It had to have thought that its odds were better if it removed us one at a time.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why did we come here in the first place? Stupid, stupid, stupid. We didn’t think we would really find anything, you know. We never do. Sometimes we find prints or fur or something like that, or we listen to people tell stories of their sightings, but we never actually expect to find a cryptid. At least, I don’t. I like the idea that there’s something unexplained out there but I don’t think it actually exists, you know? But Griffin and Jen love this stuff and I just want to hang out with my friends. And now my friends are gone, taken by a monster that I still barely believe in, even though I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

  “What did you see?” Mattie asked. “I only saw its arm, and the paw.”

  “That’s all I saw, too. But it wasn’t any bear paw, that’s for sure. And it moved so fast—almost faster than I could see. Like an alien or something in a movie.”

  Mattie had very little memory of aliens, but the picture that immediately came to mind was of a little man-shaped being with a round head and large eyes.

  “It’s not an alien,” she said.

  “I didn’t say it was. I just said it was superfast like an alien in a movie, like a computer-generated effect.”

  Mattie didn’t know what a computer-generated effect was, but she didn’t think they should stand around arguing about it any longer. C.P. seemed less dazed than he had a few moments before.