Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  It wasn’t. Not really.

  The problem was the goddamn walk-throughs.

  Bristol looked at the big clock face above the sally port door and saw that it was time for his first walk-through of the night. He had been dreading this since his shift started. He was required to do a walk-through of the holding cells every half hour, and that time was now.

  Don’t go, said a small voice in the back of his head. You’re the only one here. Who’s to know whether you check in on the bastard or not?

  Chances were good that he could get away with it, too, but he’d heard too many stories about guys who’d shirked the half-hour walk-through, only to find out later that some inmate had hanged himself in his cell or had asphyxiated themselves in a pool of their own vomit while in the drunk tank. Those officers had lost their jobs. And Lucas Bristol did not want to lose his job.

  He got up from his desk, knocked a few balled-up McDonald’s wrappers into the wastebasket beside his chair, and sauntered down the hall to the Dispatch office. Johnson was there at the boards, trying to get Netflix to load on his laptop. There was an old bumper sticker stuck to the wall above the computer monitors that read, in a drippy ectoplasmic font, WHO YA GONNA CALL?

  “I’m doing the dirty thirty,” Bristol said.

  “Don’t stick your fingers through the bars,” Bill Johnson called back to him, making a chomping sound with his teeth. It was a joke, but Lucas Bristol didn’t find it funny at the moment.

  He went down the hall, unlocked and opened the steel door to Puke Alley . . . then stood there, not crossing the threshold.

  Those woods are haunted by the devil himself, his aunt Lin had told him and his brothers. A man walks in there, he stands a chance of being touched by the devil. And that man, he goes sour. His mind rots. He becomes a vessel for evil, a vehicle for the devil.

  But it was all superstition and make-believe, wasn’t it? Just like what he’d said to Jill Ryerson the other night, when she’d smiled at him and showed him the rabbit’s foot on her key chain. It was all rabbit’s feet, wasn’t it?

  Quit being a sissy. Why has this guy gotten under your skin?

  He took a deep breath, then crossed the threshold. He moved down the corridor, conscious that he was holding his breath. He could hear Mallory moving around in his cell before he saw him—a vague, scuffing sound, like the sole of his single rubber jailhouse shoe sliding across the gritty concrete floor.

  Joseph Mallory was in the third cell down, an indistinct scarecrow shape with a gleaming bald pate wreathed by strands of grimy salt-and-pepper hair. His foot—the one that had given up some toes—had been bandaged by a doctor this afternoon. The bandage was startlingly white beneath the bright bulbs in the hallway. As Lucas Bristol approached the bars of the cell, Mallory lifted his head and stared at the young trooper.

  Bristol felt his bowels clench.

  A long time passed, with neither man saying a word to the other. Bristol knew he could return to the squad room and not have to think about the guy in the cell for another thirty minutes, but mounting fear kept him rooted to the floor, unable to move.

  After a while, Lucas Bristol said, “What happened to you in those woods, old man?”

  For a long time, it seemed the man on the other side of the bars wouldn’t answer. But then Mallory stood—he somehow looked much taller now than he had when he was being ushered in here the other night by Swinton and McHale—and he cleared his throat, gruh-grrrruh!

  Lucas Bristol took a step back from the cell.

  “A terrible thing,” Mallory said, his voice almost . . . snake-like. “I was overcome and forced to do a hard and terrible thing.”

  A man walks in there, he stands a chance of being touched by the devil. And that man, he goes sour. These words shuttled through Lucas Bristol’s brain.

  “You cut off all their heads,” Bristol said. It was as if someone else was speaking through him. He wanted to know the answer to this—it had been haunting him ever since he’d heard about it—but he wouldn’t have thought he’d have the power to speak the words. Was it even a question, or was he just making a statement? The world suddenly seemed fuzzy and indistinct to him, and he found that he wasn’t sure.

  A low, throaty moan escaped Mallory’s lips. As Bristol watched, the man eased himself back down onto the bench, that curtain of greasy hair spilling across his skull-like face.

  Bristol stood staring at the man, his whole body cold despite the heat pumping through the ventilation system. After a time, Mallory lowered his whole body to the bench, resting on his side as if to sleep. But his eyes never closed; his gaze remained on Lucas Bristol.

  He goes sour, Bristol thought.

  A soft susurration came from the cell next to Mallory’s. The front of the cells were barred, but the walls were cinder block, so when Bristol glanced over, he couldn’t see anything or anyone. There was no one else back here, anyway. But still . . . he thought he caught a glimpse of a shadow pulling back from the bars of the adjacent cell.

  Bristol took a step in the direction of the other cell.

  “Don’t look at it,” Mallory said, his voice as guttural as an animal’s growl.

  Bristol looked into the cell just as the light bulb in the ceiling overhead winked out. In the sudden shift of light, he thought he saw a dark shape standing in the corner of what should have been an empty holding cell. But as he stared, and as his eyes acclimated to the change in light, he realized it was only a trick played by the shadows. There was no one there.

  Above his head, the second bulb fizzed, then went dark.

  Lucas Bristol backed out of the hallway, Joseph Mallory’s eyes blazing at him on the other side of his cell bars now.

  “It’s best you don’t come back in here tonight, son,” Mallory said.

  Without saying a word, Bristol returned to the squad room. He was sweating beneath his uniform, his pulse throbbing at his temples. Maybe there was some aspirin in the break room.

  There were—an economy tub of Advil, it turned out. He swallowed three tablets and washed them down with half a cup of lukewarm coffee. Then he returned to his desk. Unnerved by the silence in the squad room, he eventually got up again and went down the hall toward Dispatch. One of the hallway lights overhead blinked out as he passed by it, which caused him to hurry along.

  Johnson was still there, of course, watching a pair of tits jig across the screen of his laptop. Apparently, he’d gotten Netflix to load. Johnson looked up as Bristol lingered there in the doorway.

  “Everything cool?” Johnson asked.

  Bristol opened his mouth, but only managed to make a creaking sound.

  Bill Johnson frowned. “You okay, Luke?”

  Something clicked in the back of his throat and he found his voice. “Yeah. I’m okay. Just got a headache all of a sudden, that’s all.”

  “Wanna watch this movie with me?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Look at these tits. Want me to rewind it?”

  “No, man. No, thanks.”

  He was beginning to calm down now—enough so that he couldn’t remember why he had felt so unnerved just a moment earlier. Had Mallory unraveled him that much? If so, maybe he should be in Soldotna pushing paper . . .

  He returned to his desk, plugged his iPod into a pair of portable speakers, and set it on Shuffle. Big Head Todd & the Monsters came on, singing “It All Comes Down.” Yes, it does, Lucas Bristol thought, briefly closing his eyes and breathing through flared nostrils.

  For the next thirty minutes, he busied himself with paperwork. When he looked up at the clock over the sally port door a half hour later, he saw that it was time to make his rounds again. He’d felt calmer and the Advil had gone to work on his headache, so he wasn’t in any great rush to get up and revisit the holding cell of old Joseph Mallory, Puke Alley’s one and only resident. In fact, the thought of having to see Mallory again caused a cool sweat to slicken the nape of his neck.

  It’s best you don’t come back in h
ere tonight, son.

  Lucas Bristol decided that was a good goddamn idea. He turned his music up while burying his face in his paperwork.

  It would prove to be a bad decision.

  * * *

  Bristol worked the midnight shift, which meant he was done for the day at eight in the morning. Two hours before his relief came in, he dragged himself from his desk and shuffled his heavy feet down the hall toward the men’s room. At one of the urinals, he unleashed a ribbon of piss as yellow as Gatorade. As he shook off the last few drops, he liberated a fart that possessed the range and depth of a bassoon. This made him chuckle to himself as he read the bumper sticker someone—probably Bill Johnson—had stuck to the tiled wall above the urinal: MORE THAN THREE SHAKES IS PLAYING WITH YOURSELF.

  It was 6 A.M. and still pitch black outside the station house windows. Lucas Bristol decided to do the dirty thirty before Swinton came in to relieve him at eight.

  He unlocked the door to the holding cells and crossed down the hallway. The light fixture just outside Mallory’s cell was still out, but the ones farther down the corridor provided sufficient lighting.

  Something was stuck to the bars of Mallory’s cell.

  Bristol slowed his step. When he arrived at Mallory’s cell, last night’s irrational fear was replaced by a much more tangible, much more relatable distress—the fear of losing his job.

  Joseph Mallory was dead. Lucas Bristol did not need to take the man’s pulse or hold a mirror under his nose to know this. At some point during the night, Mallory had unwrapped the gauze bandage from his foot. He had fastened one end of the bandage to one of the bars of his cell, right where the vertical bar met the horizontal one, coming to a T. He had taken the remaining slack and wound it around his neck. And then he had simply let the dead weight of his body drop and hang. Even in his fragile, malnourished state, it was enough weight to do the job. From the crooked angle of Mallory’s head—from the swollen, jellied eyes and the twisted rigor of his lips—Lucas Bristol could tell that the man’s neck had been broken.

  I’m going to lose my job for this, Bristol thought, panic already gripping him around the throat.

  Above him, the dark bulb in the ceiling flared to brightness.

  16

  Paul awoke in the late morning, feeling like he had a hangover despite not having touched a sip of alcohol the night before. The window next to his bed blazed with silver daylight. In the bathroom, he washed his face, brushed his teeth, then examined his nose in the mirror. It looked fine but was still sore from his face-plant the night before.

  In the light of morning, last night’s impromptu escapade into the woods and his subsequent persuasion of Valerie Drammell and Bill Hopewell to do the same should have left him feeling embarrassed. Standing before the windows and gazing out at the snow-covered, forested hillside, it was easy to dismiss last night’s fears. But he didn’t. His only regret was that Drammell had dismissed him, and he still wanted to talk to Drammell about Danny. It would be easier if Drammell wasn’t coming into things already thinking that Paul was out here jumping at shadows.

  Jan Warren probably thought he was a dope, too—some city boy who’d been spooked by the howl of a wolf and some pine boughs whacking against his window in the night. It didn’t help that he’d locked himself out of his room in all the commotion. Thinking of this now, her voice returned to him—the comment she’d made last night as she extended the extra room key to him through the crack in the door: That’s where he buried the bodies.

  He was in the heart of it now. The last known place his brother had been before disappearing . . . and the grave site of eight victims who’d been murdered by a local psychopath named Joseph Mallory. Hallowed ground, indeed.

  * * *

  There was a fire burning in the hearth in the lobby. Merle Warren, the old man who had greeted him the day before, was planted in his lawn chair in front of the television set again, while Jan, his broad-shouldered, masculine-faced daughter, stood behind the registration desk, idly turning the pages of a magazine.

  “Sorry for all the confusion last night,” Paul said, zipping up his coat. He set the spare key on the desktop.

  “I’m just glad Daddy slept through it,” Jan said.

  As if cued by his daughter’s mention of him, the old man worked himself up out of the lawn chair and shuffled out through a doorway at the back of the room.

  “Last night you said that if I kept following that path through the woods, I’d arrive at the place where Joseph Mallory buried his victims. Is that correct?”

  “I don’t recommend going on no hikes,” Jan said.

  Paul took that as confirmation.

  “Last night, Mr. Drammell said you could give me his phone number,” he said. “Or . . . does he have an office in town or something?”

  “If you count hanging around down at the feed store having an office, then sure, he’s got an office.”

  Paul smiled at her. “I’ll just take the number, then.”

  Jan Warren’s left cheek bulged. She looked like she was debating whether or not to help him. Then she reached below the counter and produced a spiral-bound notebook. She flipped it open, thumbed through the pages, then tore a strip off one of the pages. She handed the curling bit of paper to Paul. It had Valerie Drammell’s name and phone number written on it. Then she returned to her magazine. Paul expected it to be an issue of Guns & Ammo or Soldier of Fortune, to complete the cliché, but he was surprised to find that it was an issue of Cosmopolitan.

  “Thank you.” He tucked the slip of paper into his pocket.

  The old man reappeared in the doorway, carrying a thick book in both hands. He was wearing rubber fishing waders, which seemed to hang from his thin frame no different than they would from a clothesline. His feistiness was gone, replaced by a zombielike gait and the glazed, unfocused stare of a dullard.

  “Did you know Joseph Mallory?” Paul asked the woman.

  “Been here my whole life. I know everyone in the village. Ain’t seen Mallory in some time, though.” She had been gazing at her magazine as she spoke, but she looked up and met his eyes now. “Eight bodies. Heads cut clean off, just like they do to them guys in the Middle East. You think your brother got messed up in all of that, you’re better off talking with the police down in Fairbanks instead of wasting your time all the way out here, mister, just like I told you yesterday. Ain’t nothing Val Drammell can do for you.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you.”

  “You mind me asking what you were doing wandering around outside last night, anyway?”

  “I saw someone looking in my window. I went outside and saw footprints, so I followed them. Just what I said to Drammell and that other guy last night.”

  “Daddy,” she called, turning around and staring at the old man, who stood in front of the TV, clutching the thick book to his chest. “Daddy, you been wandering around outside at night, peepin’ in on our guest here?”

  “What?” the old man barked. He didn’t take his eyes from the television.

  “It wasn’t him,” Paul said.

  “Quit botherin’ the guests,” she said to her father anyway.

  The old man turned and faced them, his mouth twisted into a knot. There was stormy confusion in his eyes. With labored steps, he approached the counter and set the book down next to his daughter’s magazine.

  It was a Bible. A single gold cross was embossed on the faux-leather cover.

  “You being reeled in like a catfish, mister,” the old man said to him. “Best take heed.”

  “All right, Daddy,” Jan said to the old man, flapping a meaty hand at him as if he were some pesky insect. She shoved the Bible in Paul’s direction. “He wants you to take this back to your room. Room’s supposed to have one, anyway. It ain’t law, but it’s good, common decency.”

  “Thank you,” he said to the old man.

  Merle Warren stared at him for the length of two heartbeats before turning around and shuffling back to his la
wn chair. It took great effort for him to fold himself back into the chair.

  “One more thing,” Paul said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Where can I get a newspaper and something to eat around here?”

  “Well, Tabby’s is the only place to eat. Just head out on this road and you’ll see it. Little luncheonette. As for newspapers, you’ll either have to go to the post office in the Springs or head east toward the highway.”

  “The Internet on my phone isn’t working, either. The signal keeps going in and out.”

  “That happens.” She licked her thumb and turned a page of her magazine.

  * * *

  He walked across the road, retracing his steps from the night before. There was still snow on the ground, but it had thinned to a shimmery crust. The old church was less ominous in the daylight, a sad, weathered structure leprous with dry rot, its stained-glass windows smudgy with grime. An industrial chain had been wound through the door handles and secured with a padlock. He hadn’t noticed this last night.

  He stepped around the front of the church, passing beneath the lee of the steeple. There was still some snow on the bench here, and the undeniable impression of someone having been sitting there very recently. Strange, though, was the absence of footprints in the snow on the ground in front of the bench.

  He heard a whining sound, and peered around the corner and down the length of the old church. One of the shutters creaked outward, away from the building. There was no wind—not even a slight breeze at the moment—but Paul didn’t think much of it. He walked around the side of the church, his boots crunching through the crust of snow. There was another set of double doors on this side of the building, another chain looped through the handles. But one of the handles was loose and had pulled away from the door.