Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  “If you’re still with me, let’s jump ahead to 1977,” Keith said.

  “I’m still with you.”

  “A man described as possessing an ‘aloof demeanor’ and the ‘ambulatory gait of a sleepwalker’ crosses the frozen Bering Strait and arrives at a small, isolated village on the island of Little Diomede. Reports say he was nothing but skin and bones, and was dressed only in a tattered pair of pants that, by all eyewitnesses’ accounts, was streaked with some dark fluid that looked very much like blood. The guy wasn’t even wearing shoes, for Christ’s sake, and his feet were split and bleeding and frostbitten. This was at a time of year when temperatures out on the island were recorded to be around fifty below. The man said he had come all the way from Dread’s Hand, where he’d ‘seen terrible things,’ and that much of his memory as to how he got clear across the rest of the continent and out to the island was a mystery to him. We’re talking hundreds of miles here, through some of the most inhospitable terrain in subarctic temperatures. And this guy just showed up there like he’d stepped off a bus. He told one person that he had a memory—or maybe it was a dream, or maybe it was even a hallucination—of being lifted off the ground by a great wind and carried through the air for miles and miles. He said he remembered his feet scraping the treetops, which was how he lost his shoes. The wind had claws, the man told this person. This same witness later told police that the man had what appeared to be very large and obvious claw marks about the shoulders, which sort of corroborated the guy’s story. The witness assumed they might have been made by a polar bear—there are polar bear attacks out on the island on occasion—though he couldn’t fathom how a man could have been attacked in such a way and not be outright killed.

  “Another eyewitness said the man’s face was frozen into a skeletal grin, and that he couldn’t stop grinning, even though his skin was chapped from the wind and cracking and bleeding from the cold. Some of the man’s teeth had shattered from the cold, too.”

  Paul grimaced at the thought.

  “The man was given shelter until an officer could fly in from Nome,” Keith continued, “but when the officer arrived, the man had vanished from the shelter—and he’d left no footprints behind in the snow.”

  “Was the man ever identified?”

  “No,” Keith said. “And no one ever saw him again. The officer who flew in from Nome interviewed a few witnesses on the island, and although everyone’s story regarding the man’s appearance and demeanor was the same, no one had ever gotten the man’s name or knew anything about him. With the exception, of course, of an elderly Iñupiat woman, who claimed to know the name of the man. She spoke to the officer in her native dialect, which was then translated by the woman’s granddaughter. The rough translation of what the old woman said was ‘bone white.’ The officer took it literally, believing it to be the description of the man’s pallor. But the contextual translation actually means ‘demon’ or ‘devil.’”

  “This is a folktale you’re telling me, right? I mean, this isn’t something that actually happened, is it? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “There was a report filed by the officer who flew to the island. I’ve read it.”

  “Yeah, okay, but that officer was only reporting on what the villagers told him. How can you be sure that what they said was the truth? I mean, it’s impossible. Walking for hundreds of miles in subarctic temperatures in nothing but a pair of pants? ”

  Keith shrugged his shoulders, but the expression on his face was anything but casual. He looked pleased by Paul’s skepticism. “Just think about all the seemingly impossible stuff that has happened over the course of mankind’s existence,” he said. “Jesus, Paul, we’ve sent men to the goddamn moon.”

  “That’s different. That’s science.”

  “But before that stuff was science, it was magic. Am I right? Tell someone in 1940 that, in just twenty years, men would be walking on the moon, and they’d call you a lunatic. Probably accused you of witchcraft in some parts of the country, I’d bet.”

  “There’s probably a rational explanation for what happened, and over time the story just snowballed until it became this urban legend. Or arctic legend. Or whatever. That’s probably how all these creepy little tales get started. Some band of settlers gets stranded in a snowy mountain pass and have to resort to cannibalism to stay alive. Next thing you know, we’ve got people saying it’s the wendigo.”

  “Shit, man, it’s not like I believe in these ghost stories,” Keith said. “But even if you discount the possibility of any supernatural occurrences, you still can’t deny that the sheer number of bizarre and inexplicable things that have happened in and around that area over the past century must cause the conclusion that there is something going on, that there is something that needs to be explored and better understood. Maybe it’s ley lines or maybe it’s space dust or . . . I don’t know . . . radio interference making people’s fillings vibrate and driving them to madness. I really have no clue. But I do know that anyone can take one story and rationalize it until it fits with their perception of the world. But five stories like that? Ten? A baker’s dozen? They can’t all be rationalized, and they can’t all just be coincidences.”

  “So, how many more stories are there?” Paul asked.

  “Countless,” Keith said. “But we haven’t even gotten to 1984 yet.”

  Paul grinned, sipped his beer, and said, “Okay, I’ll bite. What happened in 1984?”

  “A drifter named Michael Silka killed nine people in a town called Manley Hot Springs.”

  “Silka!” Paul said, drawing the attention of the young bartender and a few nearby patrons. He lowered his voice and said, “I’ve heard of him. In fact, I spoke to someone recently who ran into him back then, a few days before Silka was shot and killed by police. But none of that happened in Dread’s Hand.”

  “No,” Keith agreed, “but prior to Silka popping up in Manley Hot Springs, he spent the early part of April 1984 picking up small construction jobs along the highway and in surrounding towns, to include spending a week or so in—you guessed it—our very own Dread’s Hand.” Keith smiled like a Cheshire cat as he finished this anecdote.

  “All right, sure, if that’s what really happened, then I’ll grant you that it’s unusual. But what does it mean? That he contracted some mental illness or bad juju from spending a week in Dread’s Hand? Or your space dust theory? Vibrating fillings?”

  “Bad juju, vibrating fillings,” Keith said, “or maybe something worse. Just like that old native woman told the cop from Nome back in ’77—the guy had gone bone white, man. He had the devil in him.”

  Paul shook his head, smiling. He held up two fingers toward the bartender—two more beers.

  “Like I said,” Keith continued. “You can explain away any one of these incidents by itself, but it’s not until you put all the pieces of the puzzle together that you start seeing the big picture. That’s when it becomes more difficult to rationalize. Because there isn’t anything rational about it. I don’t believe in that spooky bullshit, but no place with such a small population in the middle of nowhere should have a long history of such tragic and bizarre events. Am I right?”

  “I’ll give you that,” Paul said.

  “And now we’ve got Joseph Mallory’s story to add to the mix. Maybe fifty years from now, people just like you and me will say the whole thing is hyperbole, but you and I, we’re living it right now. We know the facts. That lunatic murdered eight people and buried them in the woods on the outskirts of that town. There’s nothing to rationalize there. Maybe a hundred years from now, people will question whether that ever really happened. But you and I know it’s true. Just one more creepy, inexplicable link on the chain.”

  “So, this is what you’re writing your book about? All the crazy shit that’s happened in and around that place for the past hundred years?”

  “It probably goes back even further than that,” Keith said, “though it’s pretty much impossible to find any accou
nts of events from that far back. Hell, Alaska wasn’t even a state until 1959. And I’m sure there was some crazy shit that happened up there in the twenties and thirties—the decades after the mine collapsed and those villagers disappeared—but, like I said, there’s no official record of anything, and the people who would have been alive back then are all dead now.”

  “So, what does this all mean?” Paul asked. “What does it all come down to? That Dread’s Hand is . . . what? Haunted? Cursed?”

  “Well, I guess that’s the big question, isn’t it?” Keith said. “I’ve got a book’s worth of creepy, inexplicable anecdotes—true anecdotes—but I’ve got no solid hypothesis on which to hinge them all. Like I said, you can rationalize one or two events. But all of them?”

  “Space dust,” Paul said.

  “Space dust,” Keith Moore agreed. “Either that, or something ungodly walks the woods surrounding Dread’s Hand.”

  “Joseph Mallory,” Paul said.

  “Mallory is just another anecdote,” said Keith, finishing the last of his beer. He sucked foam from his upper lip, then said, “Have you been up there yet?”

  “To Dread’s Hand? No, I haven’t.”

  “It’s a different place, man,” he said. “I’ve been up to the Hand twice—once while researching stuff for my book, and then just recently, covering the Mallory story for the paper—and it’s like stepping into an alternate universe. And I’m only sort of exaggerating.” Keith winked at him, and Paul raised his beer in a salute. “But really, it’s like stepping across some invisible border that runs around the whole town, cutting it off from the rest of civilization. There’re these huge crosses along the road just before you get into town. Some of them look so old, I’ll bet they were erected by the town’s original settlers.”

  “I’ve seen crosses on the side of highways before,” Paul said.

  “No, man, you haven’t. Not like these. Not the way they’re arranged, as if to form some . . . I don’t know . . . some pattern that might only be understood from the sky, maybe. Who knows? But, see, it’s not just the crosses. It’s not any one thing in particular. I can’t even describe it. It’s just like this overwhelming sense of apprehension. You ever lay your ear to the ground when there are a bunch of high-tension wires around? You feel all that power shuttling through the earth? It’s like a sound you can feel in your back teeth, man. It’s like that. Irrational, sure, but I was there and I can’t deny it. And each time, it stuck with me for the entire day, until I got back in my car and drove the hell out of there.”

  Paul grinned. “You don’t talk much like a reporter,” he said. “I thought you guys dealt with nothing but facts.”

  “Those are the facts, brother,” Keith said. “But you want more? How about this? Fact—Joseph Mallory, local resident of Dread’s Hand, went crazy and killed eight people over what police believe to be a five-year period. We can rationalize that any number of confluences came together to make Mallory go crazy and kill those people. But how about this? Fact—for some reason, eight people felt compelled to go to that remote town in the first place, only to wind up dead. Dread’s Hand isn’t Manhattan, man. It’s not even Paris, Texas. What were those eight people doing out there? What set of circumstances caused your brother to go out there, Paul? If we can write off Mallory as crazy by sheer stupid chance, or maybe bad genes, or whatever, then how do you explain how fate brought before that lunatic eight people to murder? What was your brother doing out there?”

  Paul didn’t answer right away. The conversation had veered into territory that hit too close to home. After a moment of silence, he said, “I’ve been asking myself that same question since he disappeared.”

  Fresh beers arrived, and Paul took a healthy gulp of his.

  “So, what do you think?” he asked Keith. “What’s your personal opinion of Dread’s Hand?”

  Keith Moore sipped his beer, then sucked the beer foam off his mustache. “When I first started this project, it was purely out of curiosity. You said it, man—I’m a guy who deals in facts.”

  “But now?”

  “But now,” Keith said . . . and then his voice trailed off, as though he was no longer sure what he believed. Or maybe he was just afraid to speak it aloud. “I guess I’ve become a bit more open-minded, you might say.”

  It was at that moment that Paul realized why he was so comfortable around this stranger: Keith Moore reminded him of Danny.

  “Look,” Keith said, a hint of apology in his tone now, “maybe we shouldn’t be talking about this stuff, given your situation with your brother, man. I mean, I hope I wasn’t being insensitive. I shouldn’t have brought any of this stuff up. This isn’t something you want to hear. I apologize, Paul. Shit.”

  Paul waved him off. He wasn’t offended . . . but he was thinking now, and picturing Danny staggering around some remote patch of wilderness in the middle of nowhere, just below the curvature of the Arctic Circle, his face gaunt, his chin stippled with what their father had referred to as “beardlings.” What the hell had he been doing out there?

  When Paul’s cheeseburger arrived, he found that he wasn’t hungry.

  10

  Come morning, all eight of Joseph Mallory’s victims had been identified. Paul learned about this while seated at a small table by himself in the dining room of the Best Western, sipping black coffee and watching a morning news program on the TV that was bracketed to the wall above the omelet station. Police had confirmed the identities of all eight victims, the reporter said, although they wouldn’t be releasing any names until the families were contacted.

  Paul took out his cell phone, dialed Ryerson’s desk number, and listened to the investigator’s phone ring at the other end of the line. The connection was garbled, rife with static. Bad connection. No matter—her voice mail picked up, which prompted him to end the call.

  When the taxicab dropped him off at the police station thirty minutes later, the same dour receptionist greeted him without interest as he approached the panel of bulletproof glass. This time, when he asked to speak with Investigator Ryerson, the receptionist said, “I’ll have to call her. She’s getting coffee. Take a seat, please.”

  It was snowing, and Paul watched the gentle snowfall from behind a narrow window reinforced with wire mesh. The sky looked gray and terminal, and in one instant, he caught a flash of lightning far out on the horizon. He couldn’t remember having ever seen lightning during a snowstorm in his life.

  He waited for almost twenty-five minutes. Just when he was about to get up and approach the receptionist again, the door to the outside swung open and a woman in a bright orange knit ski cap and a puffy coat came in, stomping brown sludge off her boots. She noticed Paul sitting there and smiled. She had lucid gray eyes and the round, clear face of a college coed. Her ski cap covered all but a single raven-colored braid of hair that rested on her left shoulder like an epaulette. She wore a University of Alaska Anchorage sweatshirt beneath her coat and held a Starbucks cup in one hand.

  “Mr. Gallo,” she said, coming over to him while extending her free hand. “I’m Jill Ryerson. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  Paul stood and shook her hand, which was cold and hard, the grip firm. “Thanks for meeting me.”

  “Sorry about my clothes. This was supposed to be my day off.”

  “I hope you didn’t get called in on my account,” he said.

  She laughed—a laugh that wasn’t at all derisive, but one that suggested he was just a blip on her daily radar screen. “This place has been a madhouse, as you can imagine,” she said, motioning him to follow her down a brief corridor. “Half our staff are out sick with the flu, so we’re all working double and triple shifts. Looks like we’ve got an early snowstorm coming down from the mountains, too, so this whole thing couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

  She opened up a door and led him down a hallway carpeted in garish blue Berber.

  “Let’s talk in here,” she said, opening yet another door and stepping asi
de to allow him to enter.

  It was a small office with a single desk, a few framed pictures on the walls, and an octagonal window that looked out upon a pewter sky. Covering the wall behind the desk was a huge, detailed map of Alaska. Investigator Ryerson gathered a stack of papers off of a folding chair and set them down on her desk.

  “Sorry the place is such a mess. I never get around to shredding anything. I hardly spend any time in here, to be honest.”

  She waved a hand at the folding chair and Paul dropped down in it, an obedient dog.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked, moving behind her desk while shrugging off her coat. “Coffee or something?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “So,” she said, exhaling audibly. She pulled her ski cap off, and Paul heard the popping sounds of static electricity. What few hairs she hadn’t managed to finagle into her braid lifted off her head and seemed to float around her face like an aura. When she sat down, her wooden chair squealed, catlike. “I assume you’re here about the DNA test results.”

  “I saw on the news this morning that all the victims have been identified,” he said. “I figured I’d come out here instead of sitting there, waiting for a phone call. Cell reception’s lousy, anyway.”

  She smiled at him again, only this time there didn’t appear to be anything cheerful behind it.

  “Your brother is not one of the victims,” she said.

  It took a second for this to resonate with him. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a rasp of air came out.

  “Days ago, we executed a search warrant on Joseph Mallory’s residence, where we uncovered several items that appear to have belonged to his victims. Those items were sent to a lab for tests, but we got lucky. The driver’s licenses for all eight victims were still intact and with their personal belongings. We then ran their IDs against our database and were able to narrow the scope of our search to dental records. Eight positive matches. We’ll be contacting the families for any additional verification, but we’re certain we’ve identified all eight victims. Your brother, Danny, is not among them.”