Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  “Okay, see, you’re here,” she said, pointing to downtown, “and you want to go all the way out . . . here.” The smudgy dot that represented Dread’s Hand sat at the end of a circuitous roadway that stopped at the foothills of the White Mountains.

  “This long road here, leading into the town,” Paul said. “It doesn’t have a name?”

  “No, I guess not,” said the attendant. “And it’s in red. That means it’s not part of the official highway system. Some of the roads in and out of those old mining towns are like that. They shut down all winter, too. No plows get out that way.”

  “What do people do out there in the winter?”

  “Pray,” said the attendant.

  Paul wasn’t so sure it was a joke.

  “So how will I know when to turn onto this road from the highway?” he asked.

  “Keep aware of your surroundings and count your mile markers,” suggested the attendant. “I’m not kidding. Here, look. You know if you hit this intersection out here, you’ve gone too far. And if you’re still back this way, well, then you haven’t gone far enough. You’ll just have to keep your eyes peeled when you get around this spot, which is really only a twenty-or-so minute drive from here. It shouldn’t be too bad. At least it’s not snowing.”

  “Thank God for small miracles,” he said.

  “I can get you a vehicle with a GPS system, if you think that would help.”

  “Couldn’t hurt. Thank you.”

  “Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.”

  Paul didn’t think she sounded too hopeful.

  The light rain had turned into a soupy sleet by the time he stepped outside and hustled across the macadam to pick up his vehicle, his suitcase feeling like it weighed two hundred pounds. He was exhausted, and he hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since he’d been out here. He attributed this to the time change and the shrinking daylight as this part of the world moved closer toward the winter solstice. But there was no denying that Danny had been on his mind more in the past few days—it was the reason he was here. The whole thing had left him unsettled and disassociated. Last night, he’d woken around three in the morning with a scream lodged in his throat, the tendrils of some nightmare slipping off him so quickly he had no time to register anything about the dream. Except that it had to do with Danny.

  It always had to do with Danny.

  “Do you know where you are going?” said the young guy behind a sheet of Plexiglas as he fed the keys to a Chevy Tahoe through an opening.

  “Dread’s Hand,” Paul said. “It’s about ninety miles northwest of here, right?”

  “You’ve seen the news, yeah?” said the guy.

  “You’re talking about the bodies they found?”

  “That’s an empty place,” the man said. “A blind spot.”

  Paul shook his head. “What do you mean?”

  “People don’t go up there,” said the man.

  “What people? They don’t go where?”

  “You’d be better to go sightseeing, yeah?” The man smiled at him, exposing a mouthful of blackened, rotting teeth.

  “Have a good day,” Paul said, and hurried away from the window.

  The Tahoe stood in a spot that looked too small for it. It was a massive vehicle, and he felt like a kid getting on a school bus as he climbed up into the thing.

  Blessedly, the heater worked. He cranked it to full force, then pulled out of the lot. The strange attendant stared at him as he drove off, leaning in his chair and pressing his face against the Plexiglas in order to watch Paul go.

  Up is down, down is up, he imagined Danny whispering inside his head.

  Once he pulled out onto the highway, he fired up the GPS and typed in the name of the town—Dread’s Hand. A little hourglass icon appeared on the GPS screen, and the sexless robotic voice informed him that the device was calculating, calculating, calculating . . . but then it informed him that the location he’d entered didn’t exist.

  “Great,” he grumbled.

  He tried it a second time. This time, a message popped up on the screen, suggesting he update his software.

  Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, indeed, he thought.

  * * *

  The nameless road wasn’t nameless, after all.

  He followed the printed map, leaving the highway for a secondary road ten minutes into his trip, and from there, he kept an eye out for a nameless cutoff road that looked like it was heading in the direction of the foothills. Although the rain had stopped, a hazy mist had gathered about the shoulders of the roadway and coiled around the bases of the surrounding trees like something alive.

  He almost drove past the sharp cutoff, but stood on the Tahoe’s brake at the last second. Thankfully, there were no other cars on the road, otherwise he might have been rear-ended. Spinning the wheel, he took the turn, hoping it was the right road. Judging by the position of the waning sunlight, the road headed due north, though the fog was too thick for him to make out any suggestion of the White Mountains in the distance. The sun itself was just a dim coin of light burning through the haze.

  After just a few minutes of driving, he motored past a rickety wooden road sign that looked like it had been made in someone’s garage. The letters had been scorched into the wood—DAMASCUS ROAD.

  “You’re not supposed to have a name, my friend,” Paul muttered. “I just hope you’re the right road.”

  Everything looked hard and flat and inhospitable, like the atmosphere of some foreign planet. On both sides of the unpaved road, massive lodgepole pines rose up into the atmosphere, their tops obscured by the fog, their pine boughs looking like steel brushes.

  The notion of something coming in from the outside and framing his destiny latched on to him as he drove. After Danny had disappeared, Paul had taken to driving. He’d spent most of his evenings driving, usually after work, as darkness fell. He preferred the wooded secondary roads beyond the suburban neighborhoods, the ones that were so far removed from the highways and the interstate that you couldn’t see the distant headlights of cars through the trees. He had cut through wooded hillsides, guided by nothing more than the iridescence of the moon. Sometimes he’d drive to the Eastern Shore, cutting across the Bay Bridge, a pair of headlights in a parade of them, the Chesapeake so expansive that he could discern the slight curvature of the earth from such a height. Cornfields, forested trails, wet and glistening blacktop—it didn’t matter where. He’d kept his windows rolled up tight, the radio tuned low to some AM talk station, his eyes cutting back and forth to the shoulders while his headlamps moved through the darkness ahead. A few times, and despite the utter desolation of those secret byways and twisting, serpentine passages, he’d be convinced that he was not alone. There had been a joining presence, like warm breath on his neck, as if someone was leaning toward him from the backseat. There had even been a few occasions when he had slowed down and peered over his shoulder while driving, terrified that he might find the silhouette of another person propped up back there. But, of course, he never had.

  That feeling was upon him now, again, and with full authority. There was even a moment when he thought he might turn his head, glance out the window, and see Danny standing on the shoulder of the road.

  Or perhaps hanging from a tree, an electrical cord around his neck, he thought.

  When his vision began to blur, Paul realized he was crying. It was the first time since that night he’d gotten drunk on Knob Creek and blared Danny’s favorite Van Halen albums on the stereo.

  He pulled over on the shoulder of the road and geared the Tahoe into Park. His warm breath fogged up the windows. He closed his eyes and eased his head back against the headrest. He thought of the almost-preternatural closeness they’d both shared throughout their childhood and adolescence, those brotherly transmissions that seemed to travel like radio waves between them. Those transmissions had faded over the years, though was it possible that Danny could have arrived at such a dark, dire place and had attemp
ted to take his own life without Paul having some inkling of his brother’s grief? Or worse—had the transmissions come through, only to be ignored by him?

  No, there was no magical bond. We were brothers, were twins, and felt strongly for each other. That’s all.

  When he faced forward again, he was startled to find a large black wolf standing in the middle of the otherwise empty road. The thing was close enough so that Paul could make out the patterns in its damp, rain-slickened fur and the shimmery greenness of its eyes. Despite the shroudlike fog that blocked out the sun, the thing’s shadow stretched like black taffy along the pavement behind it. Its breath steamed in the cold air.

  It was staring straight at him.

  Paul waited for it to move, but it seemed rooted to its spot, just a few yards in front of the Tahoe. It was motionless except for the patches of its sleek black fur that undulated like fields of wheat in the wind. The Tahoe’s headlights caught the creature’s eyes in just the right way so that they appeared to glow a bright swamp-gas green.

  Paul shifted the Tahoe back into Drive and lifted his foot off the brake. The SUV rolled toward the creature, its shadow elongating even further along the pavement. But the wolf did not move.

  Now only a few yards from the creature, Paul eased back down on the brake and watched it as it watched him. It lowered its head and looked like it might either spirit away into the woods or actually charge at the vehicle. As Paul stared at it, the beast’s ears flattened to its skull, much the way a dog’s would when it was preparing to attack. But the wolf did not even bare its teeth. Only stared.

  Paul laid on the Tahoe’s horn, the sonorous blast echoing out over the rutted dirt road and into the foothills beyond.

  The wolf just stared at him.

  Then it turned and, without giving Paul a second glance, trotted off into the woods. Gone.

  An instant later, the robotic voice of the GPS said, “Recalculating.”

  Startled, Paul uttered a sharp cry, then laughed a nervous laugh.

  12

  The first few crosses seemed to materialize right out of the fog.

  They were large structures, constructed of two sun-bleached javelins of wood tied together with string, a heavy bolt nailed through the cross section. They were staked along the right-hand shoulder of the dirt road and seemed to ghost out of the fog as he drove by.

  A moment later, he could see countless others, some planted along the gravelly shoulder while others were stationed farther back from the road and partially obscured beneath the shade of the trees. They looked old and time-worn, streaked with what he deduced was bird shit and road muck and other debris, while others had fallen apart, and remained as single stakes jutting from the loam. They looked like certain doom.

  Beyond the crosses, he drove past a crumbling shotgun shack off to his left. Farther up the road and on his right was a scattering of small saltbox houses with shrubs sprouting out of the gutters and boards nailed up over the windows. And even farther still, he saw what appeared to be an impromptu landfill—a conglomeration of old washing machines, truck tires, TV antennas, and even an entire discarded swing set lay in a jumbled heap in the overgrown grass, like some beast that had succumbed to the elements and left its skeleton behind. The dirt road curled around a stand of trees, and when he followed it, he saw more run-down houses there, each one like the boxcar of a locomotive, lined up against the road.

  You didn’t arrive in Dread’s Hand, he realized, but rather Dread’s Hand came at you piecemeal, a bit of itself at a time, like someone reluctant to make your acquaintance. Even the peeling wooden sign hammered into a mound of dirt welcoming travelers to the town seemed more like an admonition than a salutation. The r in “Dread” was missing, which made him think of all those crosses along the road on the drive in.

  Unincorporated Mining Village of

  D EAD’S HAND, ALASKA

  SINCE 1906

  “And the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world.”

  I shouldn’t be here, he thought.

  The dirt road did not so much stop as it just sort of dispersed, tendrils of it cutting passageways past clapboard houses, through the surrounding woods and the foothills beyond. Paul continued in a straight line, assuming he’d come across the center of town eventually if he didn’t veer off in any other direction. But when, after several minutes, the road dead-ended at a gravel pit that overlooked a green-gray forest, he realized that there was no center of town. He headed back in the direction he had come and took the first road to branch off the main thoroughfare.

  He passed a feed store, a hardware store—both were dark and looked closed—and a structure that resembled an oversized outhouse around which men in heavy winter coats stood, passing around a flask of something that made their faces ruddy and their eyes glassy. They all glanced over at Paul’s vehicle as he drove by, their faces expressionless, clouds of vapor unspooling from their crooked, bearded mouths. Another man in a chamois coat with wool trim was seated on a bench smoking a long, thin cigar. He watched the Tahoe roll to a stop with the slack-jawed expression of a country dullard.

  Paul rolled down the passenger window and said, “Excuse me.”

  The man just stared at him.

  “Is there a motel in town? Someplace I can stay?”

  The man offered no response; his steely eyes just clung to Paul while one corner of his mouth twitched.

  “Thanks,” Paul said, rolling up the window. “Asshole.”

  He was just about to pull forward when a figure stepped out in front of the SUV. Paul jumped on the brakes and the vehicle bucked, the seat belt locking against his chest.

  “Jesus,” he gasped, unclenching his fingers from the steering wheel.

  The person turned and looked at him, and Paul felt his whole body shudder at the sight. The figure was slight enough to be a child, although Paul couldn’t be sure, because the person was wearing something over their face. It was a mask of sorts, though one crudely fashioned out of some animal’s hide—or so it appeared—with ragged eyeholes cut into the grayish-brown fur.

  They stared at each other through the windshield for several seconds, neither of them moving a muscle. Paul could see the small, wet eyes behind the eyeholes cut into the furry hide. Then the child—for it was a child, Paul was now certain, his mind having pieced together all the aspects of its physical character to arrive at this deduction—ran to the opposite end of the street where he or she joined two other children, both of whom wore similar masks over their faces. On the smallest child, Paul made out a single rabbit ear protruding from the side of the mask and drooping like the whisker of a catfish.

  All three of them examined him from the shoulder of the road before sprinting off behind a nearby house, their sneakers kicking up clods of mud.

  Paul wasn’t as quick to regain his senses. He remained parked there in the middle of the road, his fingers flexing around the steering wheel, his heart break-dancing in his chest. He glanced around, wondering if there were more masked children about to dash out into the road and in front of his vehicle, and that was when he saw the Blue Moose Inn.

  It was no different from the houses that stood at wide intervals along this road, an unassuming whitewashed boxcar with a pane of wavy glass beside a peeling green door. Behind the building was a squat stucco building that he would have guessed was a garage if not for a stone chimney expelling a column of smoke into the overcast sky. Dirty snow was packed against the cinder-block steps of the inn, gray as ash. A plaque over the door said BLUE MOOSE INN—EST. 1940. There was a blinking neon sign in the window that read OPEN.

  Paul pulled the Tahoe up onto the gravelly lot beside the inn and got out. It was even colder up here in the hills than it had been back in Fairbanks, and he zipped up his coat as he walked around the side of the inn, stepping over the ashy mounds of old, blackened snow, and pulled open the front door.

  He entered a cramped, wood-paneled room that reeked of cigare
tte smoke mingled with Pine-Sol disinfectant. An elderly man sat watching TV behind a mahogany desk, his feet propped up on a mini fridge, his back toward the lobby. The dusty black eyes of a taxidermied moose head gazed down at Paul from a wooden plaque fixed to the wall above the television.

  There was a cramped hallway about as accommodating as a mine shaft off to the left, where Paul could make out a morose little coffee station next to a bookshelf laden with dusty hardbound tomes.

  “Hello,” Paul said, approaching the lobby desk.

  The old man seated before the TV craned his head around, revealing a seamed face and hockey-stick sideburns the color of fresh snow. He dropped his boots down off the fridge, then grunted as he hoisted himself out of his folding chair. He had a toothpick crooked into the corner of his mouth, and he was wearing a nylon vest cinched together at the front with frayed lengths of twine. He wore an incongruous smiley-face button pinned over his left breast. The old man’s age was indeterminable.

  “There’s kids outside wearing animal furs on their faces,” Paul said.

  “Who’re you?” the old guy said.

  Paul blinked. “I was just wondering if you had any rooms available,” he said.

  “Rooms?” The man just gaped at him, a cheesy clump of coagulated spittle nestled in the right corner of his mouth, opposite the toothpick. “Only got the one room,” said the man.

  “Is it available?”

  The toothpick rolled from one corner of the old man’s mouth to the other. “Who’re you with, anyway?” the old man asked him. His eyes were rheumy, the sclera yellow. They were the eyes of an ancient tortoise, though somehow less wise and steeped in a haze of confusion.

  “‘With’?” Paul said.

  “You police or newspaper man?” said the old-timer.

  “Oh,” Paul said. “Neither.”

  “Then how come you out this way?”

  “I’m looking for someone. My brother, Danny Gallo. Can I show you a picture of him?”