Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  “Please,” said the woman, her face seeming to fill with some distant light. “Please do.”

  He turned through a few of the photographs while the woman, smiling, drew closer to him. She pointed out a few photos and explained the context, or identified other people in the pictures with her daughter.

  “She’s very pretty,” he said, closing the album.

  “A free spirit,” the woman said, her voice growing distant and her eyes losing their focus on him. “Bobbi couldn’t hold down a job. Got into drugs, too, but we tried to help. Do you know how hard that is? Trying to help someone who doesn’t want help?” She balled her hands into fists, but her face remained soft, her eyes lost in some far-off reverie. “Do you know what that’s like?”

  Paul could see the pain on the woman’s face. He wished he hadn’t come here—not to this police station and not to Alaska. Damn you, Danny, you son of a bitch. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. You just had to pack up and take off, didn’t you? Some things never change, do they? You selfish bastard.

  “We’re from Bethel,” the woman went on. “Spent our whole lives there. Bobbi was such a happy child. We gave her a good life, Roger and me. We were good parents. But I guess you can’t stop those bad elements from sinking their claws in, can you?” She was frowning at him and wanted a serious answer. “Can you?” she repeated, more sternly.

  “No,” he said. “I guess you can’t.”

  “She left home two and a half years ago. It was with some local bums. I don’t mean bums as in homeless people, of course, but some older men who did nothing but drink and get drunk and shoot things. With guns, I mean. Maybe homeless people would have been better.” The woman lowered her voice and added, “They all smoke marijuana.”

  Paul nodded.

  The woman sob-laughed again; this time, the fellow in the turban turned and shot a disapproving eye in her direction.

  “Right? Am I right?” she said. “I mean, you see the kind of people I’m talking about, right? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” She genuflected.

  “What makes you think she’s tied up in all of this?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What makes you think she didn’t just go off someplace? Why do you think something . . . well, something bad happened to her?”

  The woman’s face went hard and cold. Her eyes narrowed, and she seemed to be seeing him now for the first time. When she spoke again, her voice was laced with palpable distrust. “It’s all bad, mister. All of it. Don’t you see that? Don’t you know what they say about that place?”

  “What place?”

  “Dread’s Hand.”

  “What do they say?”

  “That it’s cursed,” said the woman. “That terrible things happen to people who go out there. They lose themselves. Spiritually, I mean. Their souls get corrupted.”

  Paul just nodded.

  “The locals know, but they keep it a secret. A dark secret. I’ve heard all the stories. You look into that woods and something looks back at you.”

  “What kind of something?”

  The woman didn’t answer. She stared at him, her gaze growing more and more intense with the passing of each heartbeat.

  “What kind of something?” Paul repeated.

  A man in an oxford shirt with the sleeves cuffed to the elbows came out of a door at the far end of the room, breaking the woman’s stare on Paul. She blinked and shook her head. The man in the oxford shirt examined a clipboard, then called out, “Hollister.”

  An elderly man and woman got up from one of the tables and, in the slow, aggrieved waltz of the arthritically challenged, followed the man through the door.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said to him. She reached out and patted the top of his hand. Her palm was cold, her fingers as hard and rigid as twigs. “I’ve got no manners. No manners at all. Did you say you’re here because of your child?”

  “My brother,” he said.

  “Do you have a picture of him?”

  “Not with me, no.”

  “Not a single one? He’s out here missing and you don’t carry a picture of him?”

  I’m his twin, he thought, but did not say. I walk around with his face on.

  “Well, I have a few in my phone,” he conceded.

  The woman seemed to brighten. “Let’s see them. Maybe I’ll recognize him.”

  As he dug his cell phone out of his coat, he realized that, yes, he was now an official member of the Club for the Hopelessly Damned. I’m going to show this stranger a picture of Danny on my phone, and that will be like my gateway drug. From there, I’ll start showing Danny’s picture to every asshole I meet—at restaurants, in parks, at the movies, at the grocery store—and then I’ll start carrying whole photo albums around with me, imparting my grief on others and gibbering like a lunatic, until I either go mad or impose upon the wrong person and get my goddamn nose broken.

  Astoundingly, he found he was very close to braying laughter. It was all he could do to keep it bottled up inside. He realized that if he did laugh, the spectacle might send this poor, fragile woman shrieking like a madwoman down the hallway and out into the street. And of course, the thought of that made it all the more difficult to stifle the hilarity of it.

  “Is something wrong?” the woman asked. She was staring at him, one corner of her mouth turned up in her own confused half grimace.

  “I guess I was just thinking about Danny,” he said, and showed her the most recent photo of Danny on his phone.

  It was the last picture Danny had texted to him just before all communication had ceased—a selfie of Danny standing in front of a decrepit log cabin with what looked like wooden crosses hammered against the cabin’s façade. Paul had received a number of Danny’s selfies during Danny’s trek across Alaska, and they had reminded Paul of the Evolution of Man chart that he’d seen in a textbook as a boy, only this chart went in reverse: Danny, who had started out clean shaven and well groomed, had degenerated over time into a bearded, gaunt-faced mountain man. Paul could tell by Danny’s smile in the last picture—a smile that looked too big for his brother’s face, comprised of too many teeth and sharp angles—that he had lost a considerable amount of weight.

  He doesn’t even look like me anymore . . .

  “Oh,” the woman uttered, her voice toneless, flat. “Oh, God. Jesus.” Then she pushed herself away from the table, the chair legs scraping along the tiled floor.

  “What’s wrong?” Paul asked.

  “You’ve been playing with me,” the woman said. Her voice was barely a whisper now. “You’ve been having fun at my expense.”

  “Of course not . . .”

  The woman stared at the photo on Paul’s phone. Her lips tightened. “You think it’s funny, teasing a grieving woman?”

  Paul glanced down at the photo on the phone, perhaps to divine something from it that had upset the woman, but there was nothing there except the emaciated, hollow-eyed image of his brother.

  “We’re twins,” Paul said.

  “You’re a monster, is what you are,” said the woman. She gathered up her photo album and stood. “Excuse me.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I might be sick,” she said, and hurried out into the hallway.

  * * *

  Paul’s cheek was swabbed by a burly technician with hairy arms and breath that reeked of onions. The whole thing took maybe five minutes, which included scribbling his signature on a series of forms. He asked how long it would take before the results came in, and the technician assured him they would have the results at some point tomorrow. “Someone will call you, either way,” the technician said.

  * * *

  He stepped out of the police station feeling like a stone that had been dropped into a deep pool. The temperature had plummeted maybe ten degrees while he was inside, and he shivered as he stood there waiting for his taxi to arrive and take him back to his hotel. He could have waited in the lobby where it was warmer, but he didn�
�t want to go back in there. The whole ordeal had left him feeling cold and exposed. He wished he was back home.

  Across the parking lot, the woman who had seemed offended by the photo of Danny on his phone hustled toward a rusted Ford Escort with religious stickers crowding the rear bumper. She glanced at him over her shoulder. Even from this distance, Paul watched her expression harden. Then she genuflected, got into her car, and drove away.

  9

  Paul spent that evening at the hotel bar, feeling anxious and hot despite the chill in the air. The barroom was only mildly populated, the sounds of quiet conversation and the clinking of silverware the only soundtrack. Paul sat at the bar and ordered a cheeseburger and a pilsner from a young male bartender with hoop earrings and a fuzzy upper lip. There was a brief mention of the Mallory case on the muted TV. Paul read the closed-captioning as it scrolled across the screen until some ignoramus with bulging biceps in an Under Armour shirt asked the bartender to change the channel to a UFC fight.

  When Paul’s beer arrived, the bartender said, “This one’s on your friend’s tab.” He jerked his head toward the opposite end of the bar, where a man sat holding up a salutatory hand in Paul’s direction. The man looked familiar, though Paul didn’t place him until he came over and sat on the empty stool next to him.

  “You were at the police station this morning,” Paul said. “You’re a reporter.”

  “Keith Moore,” the reporter said.

  “Paul Gallo.”

  Keith extended a hand and Paul shook it.

  “I’m with the Dispatch down in Anchorage,” Keith said.

  “You’re covering this Joseph Mallory story? Was that why you were at the police station?”

  “In part, yeah.”

  “Well, thanks for the beer, although I’m not sure why you felt the need to be so generous.”

  Keith Moore shrugged. He had a thin face haunted by the ghosts of childhood acne, and a gingery goatee that was neatly trimmed. “Looked like you could use it,” Keith said.

  “You’re right. Many thanks.”

  They lifted their glasses and tapped them together. The beer was cold and infused with hops, and it seemed to carve a path down Paul’s throat like an ice floe cutting through a fjord.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” Keith said.

  “Does it show?”

  “Well, you’re staying in a hotel, so I know you don’t live in Fairbanks. But you don’t look like you’ve spent much time in Alaska.”

  “This is my first trip,” Paul acknowledged.

  “So, who are you looking for? Back at the police station.”

  “My brother.”

  “How long’s he been missing?”

  “About a year.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Maryland.”

  Keith whistled. “You’ve come a long way. What makes you think your brother might be a part of this whole thing?”

  “The last place I can trace my brother to before he disappeared is that town Dread’s Hand, where that guy Mallory lived, and where he killed those people. I thought I should come out here and see this thing through.”

  “Dread’s Hand,” Keith murmured, grinning with one corner of his mouth. He looked at his beer as he rubbed a thumb along the rim of the glass.

  “How well do you know it?” Paul asked.

  “Oh, boy.” Keith laughed. “So, see, I’m covering the murders, yeah, and the Dispatch is picking up my tab, but I’m also using this as an opportunity. I’m out here writing a book.”

  “About the murders?”

  “About the town.”

  “The town? Dread’s Hand? Other than the murders, what’s so interesting about the town?”

  “Nothing, really . . . on the surface,” Keith said. “It’s what’s under the surface that I’m interested in. I’ve been working out here for years, and I’ve heard things from time to time—stories that maybe don’t seem so outlandish in and of themselves . . . but then you put them all together and this bizarre sort of tapestry begins to take shape.”

  “What sort of stories?”

  A playful smugness came over the reporter’s features. Paul thought Keith Moore was going to tell him that he couldn’t divulge his secrets, for fear Paul might abscond with his intellectual property and write a book of his own. Instead, Keith held up one finger and said, “In 1906, the Dread’s Hand gold mine opened, and for a time, it was a flourishing little hamlet. Upwards of three hundred people were accounted for at one point. Those are big numbers for such a remote place, particularly back then. But then, in 1912, the entire population of Dread’s Hand simply vanished off the face of the earth. No trace of the people, no signs of a struggle, no indication that the population picked up and went elsewhere. They were just there one day, gone the next.”

  “Sounds like the stories about the old Roanoke Colony,” Paul said. “Raleigh and White and something like one hundred settlers vanishing into thin air.”

  Keith nodded his approval. “Yes! Exactly like that. Of course, Roanoke happened in the sixteenth century, in the middle of Indian country. The Roanoke settlers were most likely killed by the Croatoan Indians. Not much out by the Hand back then except wilderness.”

  “The Hand?”

  “That’s what the locals call it.”

  “Is that the end of your stories?”

  “Not by a long shot,” Keith said. “Two years after those villagers disappeared, new settlers came into town and revitalized the mine. There were far fewer people then, but they were determined to make a go of it. There was still plenty of gold up there in the hills, and things were good again—for a time. But then in 1916, the mine collapsed. Twenty-six men died down there.”

  “I’ve read about that accident online,” Paul said.

  “Sure,” Keith said. “But ask some of the old-timers out there—the generations whose great-great-grandfathers died in that mine collapse—and they’ll tell you it wasn’t an accident at all.”

  “Then what was it?” Paul asked. “Sabotage?”

  “A curse on the land,” Keith said. “An evil.”

  Paul laughed, but when he saw that Keith wasn’t laughing with him, his laughter died. “You’re serious.”

  “Well, the old-timers are serious. I’m just interested in the facts,” Keith said. “You can’t deny all the facts.”

  “What other facts?”

  Keith said, “The twenties and thirties are murky. There’s not a lot of official documentation from that era, and no one was reporting any news from way out here. Maybe things happened, maybe they didn’t. But my point is, no one knows for sure.

  “So, let’s jump ahead to 1943. A group of U.S. soldiers out of Fort Washington gets waylaid and winds up far off course—like, way far—and they make camp in the woods near Dread’s Hand. They report strange lights in the sky, just before they get snowed in by a harsh winter. All of them died, though journals that were later discovered disclosed horrific stories—of cannibalism and of some . . . some thing . . . there in the forest with them, watching them from behind the trees and hiding in the shadows. A number of them went mad that winter, and one journal entry attributes this madness to that thing in the woods having touched these men while they slept. One man wrote, ‘We have seen the devil and he is us.’ How’s that for literary gold?”

  “Sounds like the legend of the wendigo.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  “All of these stories sound like variations of other stories,” Paul said.

  Keith shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe that’s how legends are spread around the globe, or maybe there’s some greater meaning behind it all,” he said. “Part of the beauty of legends is trying to determine what is actual fact and what has been influenced by the human element of storytelling.”

  “What else?” Paul asked. “What other stories are there?”

  “Well, throughout the sixties, missing persons reports become prevalent in and around the area. The Alaska Bur
eau of Investigation has a whole file on them, and I’ve gotten most of them under the Freedom of Information Act, but you can Google this stuff and do your own research. Most people were never found, and there were rarely any bodies recovered. However, one party—a group of trappers who went up there in the spring and summer months—stumbled upon what was described in police reports as a mass grave of corpses half-buried in the muskeg. Witnesses reported that the bodies looked ‘chewed upon,’ and although I guess it’s possible that animals got to them after they’d perished, the medical examiner’s reports suggested that parts of their bodies had been devoured while they were still alive.”

  Keith had been ticking off each incident on the fingers of his left hand. He popped his thumb up now and said, “Then there’s the story of Lans Lunghardt.”

  “Some name,” Paul said.

  “In 1967,” Keith went on, “Lunghardt, a trapper who spent weeks on end up in the White Mountains, murdered his entire family with an ax—just chopped them up like kindling while they were still inside their home. His middle son made it out of the house, but old Lans brought the kid down with a swift drop of his ax between the boy’s shoulder blades, killing him right there in the backyard. When he was done, he walked down the street, covered in their blood, sat down outside the church, and waited for the VPSO to show up.”

  “What’s a VPSO?”

  “Village public safety officer. They’re not necessarily law enforcement, although they serve as a sort of de facto liaison to the state police in a lot of these remote villages where there is no actual police department. When the VPSO showed up at the church, Lunghardt admitted to slaying his entire family, and although he said he knew there was a good reason for it at the time, he suddenly couldn’t remember why. And then he broke into hysterics and said he’d made a horrible, horrible mistake.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Paul said. “That really happened?”

  “Oh, absolutely. There’s a record of it. Lunghardt was arrested, convicted of the murders, and sent to a state hospital down in Anchorage, where he died of pneumonia a few years later. He was never able to explain why he did what he did, and he seemed destroyed by his own actions. Those last few years of his life, he was practically a vegetable.