Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  “Jesus,” she muttered.

  It was a packrat’s hole, a collection of dirt-streaked items packed against the earthen walls so that the center of the tiny underground room was the only bare space. As she passed the flashlight’s beam across the items, she saw an old barn coat streaked with mildew, a pair of leather work boots, some backpacks that were crawling with large black beetles, and various other items.

  “Some sort of storage cellar?” McHale suggested, his voice muffled behind his own hand. He was pressing against Ryerson’s back, the room was so cramped.

  “In a sense,” she said, holding the beam of the flashlight on one item in particular—a large, dusty shoulder bag with a dull metal buckle and what looked like a leather strap. “That’s a woman’s purse,” she said.

  “Oh. Oh hell, Jill.”

  “Yeah.”

  She shifted the flashlight beam off the purse and along the wall of items—more clothing, shoes, a soggy-looking North Face backpack—and stopped when the beam illuminated an old steamer trunk. It was shoved up against a wall of cinder blocks with bloody crosses smeared across it, stamped almost in a straight line, the color black in the Maglite’s beam. The trunk looked ancient and padded with dust, the large brass clasps along the front oxidized and green. It looked larger than a traditional steamer trunk, which for some reason troubled her. Large white stones wreathed its base. One of those strange symbols from the walls upstairs—the eye with the vertical pupil, in fact—had been painted on the lid, though she didn’t notice this until she approached it and blew a layer of dust from it.

  “Do we open it or call in the bomb squad?” McHale asked. Again, she couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not.

  Jill Ryerson opened it.

  “Oh,” she groaned, and turned away from the thing inside. She dropped her flashlight and pressed both hands against her nose and mouth.

  Mike McHale wasn’t as eloquent: He bent forward and retched onto the ground.

  6

  Over the course of four days, eight bodies were unearthed from unmarked graves in the woods less than two miles outside the town of Dread’s Hand, Alaska. The extensive decomposition of the bodies suggested that at least five of them had been buried up there in the woods for a considerable amount of time—several years, according to the medical examiner out of Anchorage. The more recent victims weren’t exactly portraits of beauty, but their levels of decomposition weren’t as severe . . . although investigators still found it impossible to lift prints from their fingertips. Captain Dean Ericsson of the Fairbanks Major Crimes Unit said his officers were currently going through missing persons files to see if they could narrow down the pool of potential victims, but given that approximately 3,600 people went missing in Alaska every year, narrowing that pool promised to be a laborious and long-winded process.

  Paul Gallo read about all of this online. He also learned a bit more about the suspect, Joseph Mallory. Most of the online articles were accompanied by the same black-and-white photo of Mallory that they’d shown that first night on the news—a snapshot of a simple-looking man with a bad comb-over and the narrow, elongated face of someone not prone to smiling. He wore a flannel hunting jacket and was clean shaven. The photo did not look recent.

  There was a brief bio of Mallory in each article, some only a sentence long. He was fifty-eight years old and a lifelong bachelor who’d moved up to Dread’s Hand sometime in the mid-eighties. Prior to that, he’d lived in a town called Buffalo Soapstone, where he worked as a fur trapper and fisherman. He continued this career in Dread’s Hand, and was known to take the occasional party into the foothills of the White Mountains to hunt sheep.

  There were some cursory statements made by people who knew him from his days in Buffalo Soapstone, but, strangely, there were no statements from any of the Dread’s Hand residents in any of the articles Paul read. Joseph Mallory had entered a local eatery, where he allegedly ordered hot cocoa and then confessed to killing an untold number of people to all the patrons within earshot . . . yet none of those people had been interviewed by anyone. Then, after his confession, Mallory supposedly wandered down the road and sat on a bench outside the local church to wait for the police. The local village officer arrived—no name was given in any of the articles—and this individual sat with Mallory until Major Crimes could dispatch investigators up from Fairbanks. Paul executed a quick Map-Quest search and estimated that it would have taken the MCU investigators at least an hour and a half to make the drive. Yet the village officer, who had sat with Mallory for that entire time, had apparently provided no statement.

  Something didn’t feel right, so Paul did a little more digging. Or tried to, anyway. But there was very little information about the town of Dread’s Hand online at all. It was an old mining town tucked away in the foothills of the White Mountains, ninety or so miles northwest of Fairbanks, and on the outer perimeter of the Arctic Circle. In 1916, the town’s mine had collapsed, killing twenty-six men. The old prospectors’ cabins still stood on the outskirts of the town, half-sunk into the fault that had been created by the collapse of the mine all those years ago. Paul learned about these from a scant few websites where people had posted about them on message boards. Other than that, it was almost as if Dread’s Hand—a remote and sleepy Alaskan village, whose population had remained at around seventy-five souls since the turn of the century—didn’t exist.

  Over the course of that week, he dialed Investigator Jill Ryerson’s desk number three more times. Each time, he was sent straight to voice mail. Each time, he hung up without leaving a message.

  What is wrong with me? he wondered.

  But he thought he knew.

  * * *

  “It’s like I’ve lost him all over again,” he said during a lunch date with Erin Sharma that Saturday. “And if I call up there and get confirmation, well . . . well, then, that’s it, isn’t it?”

  Erin smiled at him from across the table. She worked in the English department with him at St. John’s, a studious-looking woman in her early thirties with an attractive smile. They’d dated a while ago, and she’d even met Danny on a number of occasions. When Danny got jammed up with the police and he’d asked Paul to lend him money for an attorney, Erin had taken Danny’s side, unable to comprehend how Paul, who claimed to care about his brother very much, could be so unsupportive. Paul had explained that she didn’t know Danny, not the way he did. He might have even recited that pompous old chestnut about teaching a man to fish. The situation with Danny wasn’t the reason he and Erin didn’t work out as a couple, but he felt it had forever painted him in a negative light in Erin’s eyes. He could never fully explain the situation to her, and so he gave up trying.

  “Whether you call up there or not, it won’t change what happened to him,” she said. “Instead, you’re just fooling yourself, Paul.”

  And he was, wasn’t he? For the first time, he realized how all-encompassing Danny had become in his life ever since his disappearance—even more so than he had been when he’d been in Paul’s life. There was something sad about that.

  “But do you know what I find interesting?” she said. They were seated outside the Book & Bean in downtown Annapolis, enjoying the cool autumn weather and watching the sailboats glide back and forth across the bay.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “That he’s always ‘lost.’ Do you realize that? Every time you talk about him, he’s always just ‘lost,’ and even now, despite what you think you believe to be true because of what some lunatic did to those poor people five thousand miles away, he’s still just ‘lost.’ Can’t you hear yourself when you talk?” She smiled. She wore thick, black-framed glasses, her eyes lucid behind the lenses. “Love, I don’t think you’re afraid of calling up there and finding out your brother is dead. I think you’re afraid of calling up there and finding yourself back at square one, not knowing what happened to him. The same place you’ve been since he’s gone. You’ve got no closure and it’s changed you.”
>
  “It’s changed me? How?”

  She stabbed at a cucumber on her salad plate. “Little things, mostly. But there’s a part of you that’s different now, ever since Danny went away.”

  “Of course there is,” he said.

  “You misunderstand,” she said. “Not different since he disappeared, but since he went away. Ever since he went to Alaska, I mean. Even before he disappeared. It’s like some small part of you went away, too. Went away with Danny.”

  “So, where’s this part of me now?”

  “Wherever Danny is,” Erin responded.

  For some strange reason, this made him think of those weeks last summer, and the insufferable insomnia that had kept him up till all hours of the night, often seated with his back against the headboard of his bed, watching the sky change color as the sun rose far beyond his bedroom windows. Several times he’d nearly gotten into a car accident on his way either to or from work, his exhaustion was so great. And somewhere around day four or five—a time span during which he’d only gotten perhaps ten solid hours of restfulness—he’d hallucinated that his bedroom was a dark crypt in the middle of the earth, and that the windowpanes were covered with dirt, and that his bedroom carpet was alive and wriggling with worms. When he couldn’t take it anymore, he’d gone to his doctor, who’d prescribed him sleeping pills. But the pills had only made him drowsy during the day, while he stood before a classroom of college students attempting to lecture. At night, those pills could have been jelly beans, for all their effect on him.

  “He’s always been a terrible brother, you know,” he said, smiling but not really smiling. “He didn’t mean to be. He was just always getting in trouble. Getting me in trouble, too.” He rolled up the sleeve on his left arm and showed her the semicircular pattern of tiny divots in the flesh. “See that?”

  “I remember,” said Erin. “You said it was a dog bite. Now you’re saying it was Danny?”

  Paul laughed. “No, no—it wasn’t Danny. But it was Danny’s fault. He broke into an old abandoned house in our neighborhood when we were eleven years old. Somehow he convinced me to follow him. We went down into the basement and there was a dog down there. Some stray. Scared the shit out of us.” Paul shrugged his shoulders as he rolled his sleeve back down. “Danny ran and I got bit. Had to get rabies shots just to be sure.”

  “I’ll call the waiter if you start foaming at the mouth,” Erin said.

  “We’d always had this really weird bond when we were kids,” he said. “You know I don’t believe in stuff like that, but Danny and I, we were close when we were young. Sometimes it even seemed like we knew things about each other. Of course, now that I’m older, I can kind of put that sort of thing in perspective—I realize it had less to do with any supernatural bond between us and more to do with plain old intuition and, frankly, just playing the odds—but back then, when we were young . . . I don’t know. It’s like we both lived in the same head at times.”

  “Well, you know I’m not a believer in crystals and dream catchers and that sort of thing, either,” Erin said, “but I do believe we carry pieces of other people around inside us. Particularly when those people are closely related to us. It’s in our blood, or maybe it all comes down to genetics or whatever— some leftover instinct from when we all used to live in caves and club each other over the head with big sticks—but I believe it exists. And you guys are twins, for Christ’s sake! You hear stories all the time about twins who . . . I don’t know . . . who can feel each other’s pain, or tell when the other person is hungry or scared or sick or whatever. Like, ‘When the phone rang, I knew it was about my sister, two thousand miles away in Poughkeepsie, and that she’d fallen down the stairs.’ That sort of thing.”

  “It was never like that,” he said.

  “Then what was it like?”

  It was like a great pulsing umbilicus, he thought, the notion of it flashing across his mind for just a millisecond, like glimpsing a neon sign through the window of a speeding train. It was like some tether uniting us, combining us to make us whole. Two halves brought together. Instead, he said, “A gut feeling, really. The mother of all gut feelings.” He pushed his thumb against his abdomen, midway between his solar plexus and his navel. “Right here.”

  “That’s the Manipura,” said Erin. “The third primary chakra.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in crystals and dream catchers.”

  “Hinduism is not crystals and dream catchers. It’s not hocus-pocus.”

  He raised both hands in mock surrender.

  “The Manipura is associated with fire,” Erin said, “and also with the transformation of the body and spirit. If you learn to meditate on Manipura, you may attain the power to save or destroy the world.”

  “In that case, I feel like I haven’t lived up to my full potential.”

  “You joke, but the chakras exist.”

  “How does it help me find Danny?”

  “Ah,” Erin said, smiling her rarely seen sly smile. “Find him. Because he’s lost.”

  “You’re an enigma,” Paul said.

  “Let’s have drinks,” Erin said.

  * * *

  Later, he would tell himself that it was the discussion with Erin Sharma that convinced him to make the call, but that wasn’t the truth. It was just easier to swallow, and so he swallowed it. In truth, Paul made the call because of what happened two days later, on the following Monday, during a classroom discussion of Henry James’s short story “The Jolly Corner.”

  “When Spencer Brydon returns to the Jolly Corner and runs into his alternate self, what is James trying to say?”

  A girl in the front of the classroom whose name suddenly eluded him spoke up: “James is alluding to the ‘unlived life.’ Brydon’s alter ego haunts the Jolly Corner, his childhood home, to show Brydon what might have become of him had he stayed in America and actually done something with his life.”

  “So, what do you guys think?” Paul asked. There was a distant, insect-like buzzing in the back of his head now, but he was trying to ignore it. “At the end of the story, has Spencer Brydon learned anything from the ghost of his alter ego? Will he change his life because of the experience, or will he go on being a lavish, self-centered . . . uh . . .” His thoughts became jumbled.

  “They’re doppelgangers,” someone said. Paul could hear the voice but could not identify the speaker. “It’s good versus evil. Only the reader is confused as to who is the good Brydon and who is the evil one. Brydon’s alter ego ultimately overpowers him with what, in the text, is described as a ‘rage of personality, ’ but what that really means is that Brydon is weak-willed while his alter ego—his doppelganger—has matured and succeeded, despite having not existed in the real world at all.”

  But Paul had stopped listening. He glanced back down at the book in his hands, a slim paperback edition of Henry James’s The Jolly Corner and Other Tales. He blinked and brought it closer to his face. The text was visible, but the words were a jumble of nonsense. He couldn’t read them. He couldn’t comprehend what they meant. He felt his hand close on a piece of chalk, which felt suddenly very heavy in his palm, and as cold as a chunk of ice.

  One of the female students in the first row said, “Mr. Gallo?” But her voice sounded like a record album played on slow speed, her tone deep, drawn out, discordantly masculine.

  Paul dropped the book and stared at the class. He continued to squeeze the piece of chalk. At the back of the room, Rena Tremaine, his teaching assistant, glanced up from her desk, her glasses perched at the tip of her nose, a book open in front of her. Her mouth moved and she said something, but her voice was obscured by the sonic boom of his own heartbeat, steady as a bass drum in his ears—thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. A fuzzy gray border framing the periphery of his vision grew thicker and thicker, until it seemed like he was gazing at the class through a pair of cartoon binoculars. The border continued to expand until all that was left of his vision were two pinpricks of dull white light. And th
en nothing at all.

  * * *

  He blinked, and found himself staring up at a gunmetal sky mottled with scudding, ash-colored clouds. A cold wind chilled his body. He was splayed out on the ground, lying immobile on his back, respiration whistling up the narrow stovepipe of his throat. When he tried to sit up, he found that he couldn’t. When he tried to move at all, he found himself powerless to do so.

  He sensed rather than saw a figure moving somewhere beyond the periphery of his vision—a vague and indistinct presence that nonetheless chilled him to the core. He tried to open his mouth and speak, but he was unable to do that, either.

  A hand slid in front of his field of vision, blotting out the gunmetal sky and those dark clouds. He realized it was his own hand, although he had not moved it, had not brought it up in front of his face.

  His palm and fingers were covered in blood.

  * * *

  He awoke splayed out on the floor of his classroom, a blurry and unfamiliar face staring down at him. The face’s mouth moved, but no words came out. There was a warm hand against the side of his face. His entire body felt encased in a film of cold sweat.

  The face above his took on the features of Rena Tremaine, and her voice filtered down to him, rising up through the octaves until it approached its normal pitch.

  “Mr. Gallo? Mr. Gallo?” Her voice softened then, although the concern never left Rena’s face. “There you are.”

  He struggled to sit up. His head throbbed.

  “Maybe you should just stay put for a minute,” Rena said.

  “What happened?”

  “You passed out.”

  “Where—” He managed to turn his head and found his students staring back at him, their eyes wide, a few mouths unhinged.

  “Should I call an ambulance?” one of the students asked.

  “Yes,” said Rena.

  “No,” Paul said. “No, I’m okay.” This time, he managed to prop himself up to a sitting position. He leaned his back against the wall, his arms buttressed on his knees. For some reason, he felt the urge to look at his right hand. He turned the hand over, and everything looked fine, except that it was powdered in chalk. Beside him on the dark green linoleum floor was a circle traced over and over again in chalk—seemingly fitfully, as if done by an angry child—with a harsh slash running through its center.