When Winter Comes | Book 4 | Masks of Bone

by Willcocks, Daniel

  Naomi placed her drink on the coffee table and kneeled before her sister. She embraced her, holding her until the wracking sobs faded. The storm raged on outside, showing no signs of slowing down.

  Naomi eased Tori back and held her shoulders, staring deeply into her eyes. Behind Tori, Donavon shifted his weight to the other foot, eyes sparkling. “You wouldn’t even begin to believe me if I told you.”

  Tori laughed, sawed a hand across her nose, then winced. A string of pink snot trailed the back of her hand. “Try me. I’ve seen some crazy shit tonight. Didn’t you just hear my story?”

  “Mine’s crazier.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Just you wait,” Naomi said.

  Tori cleared her throat, eyes darting to Naomi’s drink.

  Naomi offered a weak smile. “Let me fix you something to wet the windpipe, first. You look like you’ve been dragged through the Drumtrie backwards.”

  She poured Tori a glass of water which she drained in mere seconds. Laughing, she went to grab her another, offering her something to nibble on, too. Tori refused, stating that, as hungry as she was, her stomach wouldn’t be able to take it, yet.

  Finally, Naomi returned to her seat. “I hardly know where to begin.”

  “Try at the start.”

  Tori smiled, but this time Naomi didn’t return it. She chewed her lip, then started at the only place she could think of. The week that her world had flipped upside down.

  7

  Tori Asplin

  Tori knew better than most of the rocky relationship her sister and her brother-in-law had shared.

  Donavon Oslow was always the independent sort and thrived on being able to provide for his family. When he and Naomi had first gotten together, Tori was thrilled to bits. Donavon was cool, he was resourceful, he was funny. At the time, she had only been in her early teens, but she could still remember the fun they all shared together. When Donavon and Naomi would come over to her parent’s house for dinner, Donavon would have the family howling with laughter, offering to help with the dishes and giving her father advice on the best ways to hunt and cure game. When plates were emptied, Donavon would be the first to offer to clean up and tidy.

  As most relationships do, the dynamic changed slowly. After the pair got married, they found their little house on the borders of the Drumtrie forest. An abandoned building that was in dire need of a spruce. Donavon worked tirelessly to turn it into the dream home they’d always wanted, slaving away into the late hours with their father, and when Naomi finally fell pregnant with their first (and last) child, they were all thrilled to bits.

  Pregnancy was tough. Naomi and Donavon grew more reclusive. They had less time to donate to seeing family and focused on their own relationship. At the time, that seemed normal, although it didn’t help Tori and Naomi’s relationship. At that point, Tori was going through her high school hormone phase, and needed an older sister to lean on. Naomi only had time for the baby, and so their bond began to sour.

  There was a brief respite on the day that Oscar was born. A chunky baby boy. 8lbs and 13oz, and full of life. The boy came out screaming, and it seemed that his lungs carried no lack of oxygen. The cries had been the soundtrack to every visit, and on Tori’s third time seeing the baby, when Oscar was just eight days old, she offered to watch him while her Tori and Donavon slept.

  For three hours she tried to settle the baby, catching only short glimpses of silence when Oscar wore himself out and finally shut his eyes. Tori would chance making a drink or attending to her needs in the toilet, but the slightest of sounds would trigger him, and the screams would fire up all oveer again.

  Naomi and Donavon gleaned no sleep, despite their family’s help. After a couple of weeks, they stopped requesting assistance and broke contact with the family altogether. Tori wondered what it must have been like, constantly on alert and at the beck and whim of a demanding infant. Did they have any time to themselves at all? Was it just a phase that Oscar was going through?

  Naomi called, on occasion. Always, the backing track to their conversation was a despairing Donavon and a screaming child. Even when Naomi went to the opposite end of the house, it wasn’t far enough. They could both be heard shouting and screaming. Naomi put on a brave face and sounded positive enough, but it was always clear to Tori that something was wrong, even if her sister never stated it at the time.

  Alcoholism. There was no other name for the demon that baby invited into their house. Donavon had been a drinker on and off for years, yet it was only in the wake of his death that Naomi told Tori her version of the truth. While Naomi coped with her son’s endless demand for attention by staring into his shining blue eyes and drawing gratitude and inspiration to protect and watch over her squishy, pink miracle, no matter how tough parenthood proved to be, Donavon made his peace by drinking until he was numb and passing out wherever he lay.

  Donavon changed. He drew insular. Naomi shared with Tori the moments in which she detected the hatred in her husband’s eyes. A deep resentment that a child could claw at every corner of his life and claim it for his own. She tried to pacify Donavon, explain that this was parenthood, and that they would work through it together. But over time the bottles emptied, and the lion’s share of the work fell on Naomi.

  Tori didn’t see Naomi for months. She heard from her on occasion, Naomi’s voice more strained and cracked with every call. Then, one day, as Tori was running downstairs to pack her bag and get ready for school, she could hear Naomi’s tinny, distorted screams through the telephone receiver. Her mum held the phone at arm’s length, her father lowered his paper with interest.

  They never found Donavon’s body. According to Naomi, she had tracked him down only so far into the woods. His footprints led in, but they never led out. The town performed a rudimentary search of the borders of the Drumtrie forest, but even the local authorities hardly dared to tread further inside than necessary. Superstition was rife in Denridge, and it was believed that dark magic lay in the beating heart of the dense woods. Those who entered never returned. It was just a way of life.

  Tori and her parents helped Naomi through her grief as best they could. How could you console a broken mother and a weeping infant after such a loss? Naomi told the family of Donavon’s drinking, explained the dark turn his life had taken, spoke something about a tale of a white stag and Donavon’s obsession, but that all fell on deaf ears. Tori was young, swallowed by her own grief. She had grown close to Donavon and had never experienced a loss so near to her.

  A few years of time and the loss of her parents would change that.

  That had been the story as Tori knew it. It had never explained the strange appearance of the mutant man-stag skull that appeared over Naomi’s hearth, but since the arrival of the skull, her sister seemed to find some kind of peace. It was a strange ornament. Something that looked as though it belonged in a museum of medical marvels more than as a decorative piece to go on the mantel, but Tori didn’t press her sister on it. The grief-stricken go through their process, and it’s no one else to understand. The best you can do as an outsider is support and provide a shoulder to lean on when asked. Grief is a solo journey, made harder for a widow and her new-born child.

  Now, Tori listened with morbid eagerness as Naomi regaled her tale, taking the existing narrative and twisting and bending it into shapes that Tori couldn’t describe. She remained tight-lipped as Naomi spoke of those final months again, turning over the story of Donavon and his drinking, matching the mantra line for line until she came to the day that she discovered that he was truly missing.

  “He was obsessed with that stag. I was never even sure that it existed, it just seemed like a figment of his imagination. Something that he hooked onto and couldn’t let go. No matter how much I tried to keep our life moving forward, he couldn’t let go.”

  She told Tori of her and Donavon’s trip into the Drumtrie forest to gather wood, the string, invisible hook drawing him deeper into its heart. She shared the
truth of the night Donavon disappeared.

  “I woke up and he was gone. He didn’t make a peep, which was unusual, he wasn’t the quietest riser. But he wasn’t there. He just wasn’t. When I went downstairs, the back door was open, a chill running through the house. I remember thinking that the chill should have woken Oscar—hell, everything woke Oscar back then—but he was sound asleep, as if the world was conspiring to help him vanish.”

  Footsteps trailed into the forest. Naomi sprinted towards the borders, the weight of the monolithic trees towering over her an oppressive force. Somewhere in the darkness, she fancied she heard laughter, deep, menacing laughter, but it was soon replaced by Oscar’s cries.

  Tori knew all of this—well, near enough. It was the next part that had Tori sitting up straight, the remaining water in her glass shaking in her hands.

  “You know what came next. The search party. No body. No sign of Donavon. The police chief—Sanders, I think his name was, back then—he wrote it off as an unsolved mystery. Closed the books and called it a day. But that wasn’t the end for me.”

  A smile played on Naomi’s lips, no trace of mirth in them, just a shrug of nostalgia. “I remember finding the whole thing impossible to believe. I couldn’t cry, because I couldn’t accept that it had happened. One day Donavon would return from the woods, maybe a little dishevelled, maybe a little worse-for-wear, but he’d come back to me. Through it all, he’d always come back to me.”

  Naomi looked past Tori and to the stairs, and not for the first time.

  “And then it happened.”

  Tori reached forward and touched Naomi’s hand. “It’s okay.”

  Naomi nodded. “Four days later… It was… Something that I haven’t shared with anyone since that day.” She took a steadying breath. “It was the middle of the night when I woke up and… felt something strange. Oscar needed a feed and so I obliged, taking him into my arms until he was full. When I lay him back in his cot, milk-drunk and satisfied, I heard a knock downstairs, as though someone was at the door. My heart skipped. Already, I imagined that it was Donavon standing there, ready to greet me and apologise and I’d forgive him—of course, I would—and we could put all of this stupidity behind us. My love, returning from a booze-addled binge, but I could fix him. We’d make it right.”

  Naomi’s eyes grew glossy. “I went downstairs and stood in front of the door, scared to open it. What if it wasn’t him? What if it was whoever took him from me, come to claim what Donavon had left behind?”

  Tori swallowed dryly.

  “I was right on both accounts, I suppose. I opened the door and found that there was no one standing there. The world was empty and cold, and whoever had knocked was long gone.” Naomi’s brows knitted together as she looked into Tori’s eyes. “Donavon was there, though. He was home.”

  It was Tori’s turn to crease her brow. “You just said no one was standing there? How could you have seen Donavon that night, after he had been declared dead?”

  Naomi bit her lip to try and stop it wobbling. “He wasn’t standing. He was… He was…” She closed her eyes, unable to say the rest of it, but Tori wouldn’t let it go. Not now. She needed to understand.

  “Was what, Naomi? Was what?”

  Naomi glanced over Tori’s shoulder. Tori turned and found nothing there, just an empty room. When she turned back, Naomi was staring up at the skull on the mantel. She made a strange choking sound.

  It took Tori a moment before she connected the dots and, when she did, her breath caught. She strode towards the skull, as if in a dream. She shook her head, taking her first proper look at the mask of bone, imagining what it might look like with a layer of flesh covering its surface, threaded with nerves and muscle and tissue and gelatinous fat, two eyeballs rolling around in the hollow sockets and a head of dark hair.

  “It… It can’t be.”

  Naomi joined her side. “It is.”

  Tori’s mouth gaped. The skull stared back at her with an intelligence it shouldn’t hold. The shadows in those hollows looked out at her with the same dead stare of the wendigos. It was unnerving, almost as though they had buried themselves in her sister’s life and watched her with every passing day.

  Tori stepped back and felt for the sofa. Her legs were already weak, and this took what little energy remained from them. “I don’t understand any of this. What is happening to this town?”

  Naomi continued to stare at the skull. “That’s a big question. I’m not sure anyone has the answer.”

  “But you found me out there. You rescued me. How did you know to come for me? Why did the wendigos leave you alone?”

  Naomi let out a soft sigh. “If there’s one thing you’ve learned tonight it’s that there are things in life which just can’t be explained. Am I right?”

  Tori narrowed her eyes. “Yeah…”

  “There’s a higher power to the world, a plane of existence that we will never truly know or understand,” Naomi continued. “The Iñupiat have known it for years, it’s what they base their entire culture around, right? Their beliefs, their rituals, it’s all bound in the unknown forces of this world. They worship the gods and ask for forgiveness. They cherish the beating hearts of Nature’s creatures, even though they fill their stomachs with their meat. The aurora…” Naomi scoffed. “Magnetism and lights? Give me a break. It’s a phenomenon that is otherworldly. The one true constant that remained in my bubble of the world… it broke tonight. The green and blue lights… They changed. They were tarnished. Did you see it?”

  “I did.” Tori thought back to the strange crimson glow that entered through her window as Karl pulled on his clothes and left the house, what seemed like a lifetime ago. She hadn’t given it too much thought then, but could it all be connected? Was there something in the air that these creatures were drawing their power from? Alex had spoken of the Iñupiat, had discussed the strange goings on in their tribes and their belief in the wendigo. Could it all somehow be connected?

  “This is crazy,” Tori said. Her shoulders slumped. “Will this night never end?”

  “There’s more.” Naomi poured herself another drink, this time draining it in one gulp. “You asked how I knew where to find you. How the wendigos stayed away from me as I came to you?”

  Tori nodded.

  “I can give you the answer to the first question, though you won’t believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  Naomi let out a steady breath. “Donavon showed me.”

  Tori’s brow creased. “I’m sorry?” She pointed at the wall. “The skull showed you?”

  Naomi shook her head, eyes darting back to the staircase. “No. He did. Donavon. I don’t know how to explain it, but he’s back. He’s here.”

  Tori turned over her shoulder, finding nothing of note behind her. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Donavon died over a decade ago. What do you mean he was here?”

  “No, Tori. Is here. Right there.”

  Again, she pointed to the stairwell. Again, Tori saw nothing at all.

  Tori fixed Naomi with a concerned stare. “You’re crazy.”

  “Am I?” Naomi asked. “I struggled to come to terms with it, too. But he’s here. It’s real. He came to me tonight. I woke up, that same discomfort in the pit of my stomach that came on the night that I woke to find him missing. There’s something in the air, Tori. Something that we just can’t explain. I fought to discredit what I was seeing, came up with a thousand reasons as to why he couldn’t be here. But there he stands, and if it hadn’t had been for Donavon, I would never have found you. Would never have known you were in trouble. He guided me through the storm. Showed me the way back. You don’t owe your life to me. You owe your life to him.”

  Tori scoffed. “To a dead man?”

  “He’s not dead!”

  Tori threw her hands in the air. “Don’t you hear yourself? This is insanity. Donavon is dead. Ghosts don’t exist. This is all—”

  “Then you explain it,” Naomi bark
ed. Tears sparkled in her eyes. “Explain why I can see him standing there. Explain why I can hear his voice. Explain how my innate GPS system guided me straight to you. You can’t, can you? You said it yourself. You saw those fucking things out there. When I found you, there were half a dozen of them and some brute who had been possessed by their power. There’s magic at play, Tori. I don’t have all the fucking answers, but I know what I know.” She pointed to the stairs. “Turn around and thank him. Thank my fucking husband for saving your ass. You don’t owe me shit, but you owe him everything.”

  Tori slowly faced the stairs. Her eyes lingered in the place where her sister claimed her late-husband stood. There was nothing out of place there, nothing out of the ordinary. No sign to credit that her sister was seeing what she claimed to see.

  She glanced back at Naomi.

  “Go on.”

  Tori closed her eyes and tried to imagine him there. Her brother-in-law, in his prime, beaming back at her. He always had a smile that could light up a room, and as she imagined him there, an image coalesced in her mind. When she spoke, the words were soft, as though wrapped in cotton wool, a deep appreciation set into the inside like a sticky nougat centre. “Thank you.”

  A shadow appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Tori’s eyes narrowed, her heart beating faster. In the place where she had imagined Donavon, the shadows took his shape, swelling and growing until they accommodated his size and figure. Tori gasped, unable to process what she was—

  “Mum?” Oscar’s voice trailed down the stairs. His bare feet appeared as he padded down the wooden steps, and it was then that Tori realised the shadow had been his, cast by what little light leaked from somewhere upstairs as Oscar eavesdropped on their conversation.