Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  Paul withdrew a few folded sheets of paper from the inner pocket of his coat. He unfolded the pages and slid them across the table and in front of Valerie Drammell. On these pages were the reproductions of the photos of Danny’s rental vehicle, which had been included in the initial missing persons report.

  “This was Danny’s rental car. The troopers from Fairbanks found it. Were you with them at the time?”

  “No, sir.”

  Paul tapped one of the photos with his middle finger. “This is right outside the town line, isn’t it? I can see the reflection of one of those big crosses in the rear windshield.”

  Drammell pulled the paper closer to him and studied it. After a moment, he nodded. His cheek bulging with food, he said, “Yeah, looks it.”

  “That’s the only road in and out of town, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, no one noticed that big SUV sitting up there in the grass until the police from Fairbanks came up this way?”

  “Maybe someone did but didn’t think nothing of it. Or maybe no one had any reason to leave town in all that time. That old road ain’t exactly the interstate, you know. Remember, Mr. Gallo, we didn’t know your brother was missing until those boys from Fairbanks showed up here. We had no reason to look for a car.”

  This made sense, but Paul still felt some piece of the puzzle was missing. He also felt that Valerie Drammell was being evasive with him.

  “What’s out there?” he asked. “What reason would my brother have for driving out that way, parking his car, and getting out?”

  “Mr. Gallo, you’re asking me questions I can’t answer. There ain’t nothing out there. Not a blessed thing but wilderness. Maybe he was bird-watching. Maybe he wanted to walk some of the old mining trails. Maybe he just stopped to take a piss. You’d know your brother better’n anyone, I’d think. You tell me—what was he doin’ out there?”

  That’s the question, isn’t it? Paul thought. That’s what this whole thing keeps coming back to. What the hell was Danny doing out here in the first place?

  He handed Drammell his cell phone again, this time showing him the last picture he’d received from Danny. The one with Danny in front of the cabin.

  “That him? Because he looks different in this one,” Drammell commented. “Looks . . .” His voice trailed off, and Paul thought he saw the faint lines of concern tighten around his mouth and eyes.

  “What?” Paul said. “What is it?”

  After a moment, Drammell said, “Nothing. Just a brain fart.”

  “That cabin in the background. Do you recognize it?”

  “You seen one cabin, you seen ’em all.”

  Somehow I doubt that, Paul thought. Somehow I think the quiet, reclusive people of Dread’s Hand—or just the Hand, as it’s known— would know one cabin from another just like a mother can tell her twin children apart.

  “There’s a line of crosses standing up in front of the cabin, on either side of that door. See them?”

  Drammell sucked at his lower lip, then said, “It’s a small picture . . .”

  “Come on.” Paul leaned over the table and tapped the cell phone’s screen, enlarging the photo. “You see?”

  “Yes. But so what?”

  “This is the last bit of communication I received from my brother. I want to find that cabin. For all I know, it’s the last place he’d been before he disappeared.”

  “All right,” Drammell said, though his tone was less agreeable.

  “How do I get to the old mining town from here?” Paul asked.

  “Oh.” Drammell’s mouth tightened into a small knot. “Well, it’s a hike, unless you’ve got four-wheel drive. But that don’t look like any of the old shacks out by the mine. Don’t recall any crosses like that on any of those buildings.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “People just don’t go out there no more, is the thing,” Drammell said.

  “Then I guess I won’t be disturbing anyone.”

  “The ground isn’t too sturdy, either. Feel I should warn you.”

  “Is there some reason I can’t go out there, Mr. Drammell? Is it . . . I don’t know . . . private property or something?”

  Drammell shrugged. He seemed bored. “Ain’t private property. Ain’t no one’s property. Not no more.”

  “Then tell me how to get there.”

  “Your brother didn’t disappear up near the mine, Mr. Gallo.”

  “How do you know? Did you look for him there? Because there’s nothing about it in the police report.”

  “There would be no reason for him to go out that way, that’s all,” Drammell said. His voice was calm in the face of Paul’s mounting irritation.

  “How many other people have gone missing from here over the last few years?” Paul asked. “How many hikers have come into town only to disappear without a trace?”

  Drammell had his coffee cup halfway to his mouth when Paul asked the questions. It hovered there now, and Drammell looked unsure whether he wanted to drink it or set it back down on the table.

  “Eight bodies were found buried in those woods, Mr. Drammell,” Paul continued. “My brother wasn’t among them. But those eight people had to come from somewhere. Did they stay here in this town? Who would have seen them? And maybe there were more than eight. Maybe Mallory had a second plot of land somewhere—a second site—where he buried the others. Because my brother has got to be somewhere, Mr. Drammell. Do you understand me? My brother has got to be somewhere.”

  Drammell didn’t respond. After a moment of silence, as Paul felt his aggravation dissipate from his body, Valerie Drammell got up from his chair and ambled over to the lunch counter.

  The son of a bitch is going to pay his bill and walk out on me. Unbelievable. What’s wrong with this place?

  Drammell did pay his bill, but he returned to the table with a Styrofoam container and a to-go cup for his coffee. “Let’s talk about this stuff someplace else,” he said, dumping his half-eaten sandwich into the container.

  “Yeah, all right.”

  Paul got up and went to the counter to pay his own bill. When he handed Tabby his credit card, she shook her head and, in a mousy, almost inaudible voice, said, “Cash.”

  He’d watched Valerie Drammell swipe a credit card just moments ago, but he didn’t feel like arguing with the woman. Instead, he dug a twenty from his wallet and handed it over. By the time she handed him back his change, Valerie Drammell was already standing outside.

  Paul joined him, zipping up his coat.

  “Take a ride with me,” Drammell said, and before Paul could respond, the man was already crossing the road, the soles of his rubber boots leaving deep impressions in the mud. He approached a mud-splattered pickup truck with a decal on the driver’s door that said PUBLIC SAFETY and Drammell’s phone number beneath it. Below that, incongruously, was a skull and crossbones.

  * * *

  “Where are we going?” Paul asked.

  They had left the main road and taken one of the secondary dirt channels that whipped around the snowy hills and stunted trees toward the mountains. Judging by the position of the sun, Paul could tell they were heading northwest. He thought of that story the guy back at Telluride had told him and Luther Parnell, about running into a man somewhere out here who turned out to be a mass murderer, and how that man could have killed him and dumped his body in the woods, where no one would ever find him. Paul didn’t think Valerie Drammell was the type, although this impromptu truck ride through the wooded hillside did not make him feel too warm and toasty.

  If Joseph Mallory never confessed to those murders, those poor souls would have never been found, either.

  “You wanted to go to the mine,” Drammell said. He drove with one hand while trying not to spill his coffee, which he held in the other. Tabby back at the luncheonette had neglected to provide a lid for his to-go cup. “Well, I’m taking you there.”

  They were heading for a dense copse of trees. The road—wh
at still remained of it out this far from the village—ended right at the tree line, and unless this was like a secret passage in a haunted house and that veil of trees was going to part to reveal that the road continued just as they approached it, they were going to crash.

  “Jesus, Drammell. Look out.”

  Unfazed, Drammell spun the steering wheel, a teardrop of coffee spilling over the lip of the cup and onto his knuckles.

  Suddenly, they were on . . . not a road, but a passageway that wove through the trees and up toward the foothills. The pickup thumped and rattled and the assortment of air fresheners that hung from the truck’s rearview mirror swung wildly. Paul braced himself against the dashboard with one hand while his other hand searched for a seat belt that was nonexistent.

  When Paul glimpsed a line of wooden crosses through the trees off to his right, he said, “What’s with the crosses out here, Drammell? They’re beginning to creep me out.”

  “Folks out here tend to be religious,” Drammell said.

  “One or two would have sufficed. These look more like they’re lined up like some kind of boundary.”

  Drammell said nothing.

  They arrived less than five minutes later, Valerie Drammell’s pickup truck cresting a barren plateau, where much of the snow had melted to runoff that drained down into a narrow chasm at the center of the pitched basin. Paul saw the remains of old slapdash wooden shacks, arranged in the rough approximation of a semicircle around the snow-covered clearing. The largest building looked like an old barn, boards missing from its walls like absent teeth in a diseased mouth. There was some sort of silo or chute at the top, where the remains of what looked like a conveyor belt projected out like a tongue. Below that was what looked like a large wooden barrel with a number of staves missing. Beyond the hovels was a sparkling silver creek that shone like jewels in the sun.

  There was no reverence here: Drammell drove right down into the center of the semicircle of buildings, keeping to the right side of the fault line that cut straight down the center of the valley—a concavity in the earth several yards deep and dusted with snow. Even the buildings slouched at angles toward the crevasse in the center of the plateau.

  Drammell pulled up alongside the first in a half circle of shacks and turned off the ignition. “Come on out with me,” he said, popping open his door and stepping out.

  Paul got out, his boots breaking through the hard crust of snow. He could feel the pitch of the ground even where he stood, where the earth tilted toward that jagged fault line at the center of the hilltop. He walked around the front of the pickup truck and followed Valerie Drammell out into the center of the semicircle. There were maybe two dozen shacks out here, including the large barnlike structure, some of them as small as old wooden outhouses. A few were no longer structures at all, only vertical wooden struts climbing toward the overcast sky, their walls reduced to rubble all around them. The structures all faced the gaping hole in the ground, as well as a collection of ancient stone grave markers.

  Drammell stood on the edge of the fault line, sipping his coffee while peering down into the crack in the earth. Paul joined him, gazed down into the cut in the earth, and found himself looking into the mouth of a mine shaft. The mine’s opening was crisscrossed with old two-by-fours that were bolted into place with nails the size of railroad spikes. Leafy vines spooled out from the hole like the tentacular arms of some underwater creature. Beyond the opening and across the face of the plateau, the ground formed a concave chasm, several yards deep in some places, although the snow made it difficult to tell just how deep.

  “This is the village behind the village,” Drammell said. “The ghost village, you could say. The Hand’s alter ego. This place right here is why Dread’s Hand exists today.”

  “How far down does it go?” Paul asked, still peering down into that narrow chasm in the earth. It was maybe a few yards wide but there was something terrible about it, something dangerous. He took an unconscious step back from it.

  “Far enough,” Drammell said. “Twenty-six men died down there when the mine collapsed back in . . . oh, 1916 or thereabouts.” He raised a hand, acknowledging the rows of stone crosses that served as grave markers. Twenty-six of them.

  Paul turned toward the semicircle of run-down shacks that stood within a stone’s throw of them. They looked about as stable as buildings fashioned out of matchsticks, making the patina of fresh snow on their cantilevered roofs appear dangerously heavy. How these buildings had remained standing for one hundred years was a mystery, particularly since they now resided around the rim of a massive sinkhole. If it wasn’t for the snow and for the expanse of coniferous forestry in the background, they might have been structures straight out of an old Technicolor Western.

  “Listen, Gallo, I’m gonna level with you. Folks out here are superstitious. Look around you. Our winters are black, and in the summer it’s just one long stretch of perpetual daylight. People around here don’t have much. They drink and they hunt and they sit around telling ghost stories.”

  Drammell hocked a glob of phlegm onto the ground and continued. “Back at Tabby’s, you asked about how many people had gone missing out here. Answer is, Mr. Gallo, no one really knows. And things like that just tend to fuel their superstition. And now we’ve got Joe Mallory, one of their own, doing what he did. I guess I’m trying to let you see why people might behave a little strangely toward you out here. They’re afraid, is all.”

  “And what exactly are they afraid of?”

  “Oh,” said Drammell, taking a step back from the edge of the fault and scanning the tree-studded horizon. “The forest. The foothills. And what’s in it.”

  “I’m not following you. What do you mean?” Paul asked. He had taken his phone out now and was holding up Danny’s most recent photo, studying the cabin in the background of the picture and comparing it to the ones that stood just a few yards from him now, farther up the slope. None of them possessed that unusual pattern of crosses bracketing their doorways.

  Drammell sipped his coffee and said, “These people think the woods are cursed. That if you go in there, you run the risk of being touched by evil and having your mind turned dark and twisted. And what Joe Mallory had done only confirms the superstition.”

  Paul lowered his phone and glanced back at Drammell from over his shoulder. “They think Joseph Mallory was possessed by some evil spirit, and that’s why he killed those people?”

  “Not just some spirit, Mr. Gallo,” Drammell said. He wiggled a set of fingers at him, as if they were claws. “But the devil himself. ‘Bone white,’ they call it. When a man loses everything inside him that makes him human, and gets taken over by the devil. Possessed.”

  “Well, then, the people of this town are bat-shit crazy,” Paul said, shaking his head.

  He turned away from Drammell and scanned the horizon and the semicircle of shacks again. Then he glanced again at Danny’s selfie on his phone—Danny’s bearded face standing in front of a similar cabin, great twisting vines spiraling off the roof and moss climbing the dark, wooden walls. It looked similar, yes, but Paul didn’t think this cabin matched any of these. There was something . . . earthy . . . about the one in Danny’s photo. Something organic about it that Paul couldn’t put his finger on.

  “I’d be the first to admit the folks around here are a little off the reservation,” Drammell said. “Hikers come out here and go missing, it’s the devil that got ’em. Some stir-crazy mountain man shoots his old lady in the face with a shotgun, or that fella Mallory gets a hankering to go people-hunting up in the hills one day, folks say they’ve gone bone white. They believe this shit, you understand? Even the kids, they wear animal fur masks whenever something bad happens, thinking they’ll trick the devil into thinking they’re forest critters and leave ’em alone. But then you come sniffing around asking about a missing brother, and it’s gonna set them all on edge. And it certainly don’t help that you fellas are twins.”

  “Why does that matter?”
>
  “Because you look just like him. If there’s anyone here in town who recognizes your brother, they’re apt to think you’re him, coming through the woods like a ghost.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “They say that’s how old Mr. Splitfoot gets you. He holds up a mirror image of yourself to confuse your spirit. That’s when he moves in, replacing your soul with evil. There’ve been folks who have claimed to have glimpsed themselves out there in those woods. My daddy told me of a man who shot and killed his mirror-double, but when he went to collect the body, it was a dead sheep. It’s all fairy tales, Mr. Gallo—a myth to make sense of the senselessness of living out here. Something that can explain away the madness and the violence that are byproducts of rampant alcoholism, domestic violence, suicides.”

  Paul was thinking of Peggy Chalmers, the pitiful woman he’d met at the police station who’d been frightened by Danny’s photograph. Had she heard the stories about Dread’s Hand? Had their twinness come across to her as some arcane evil?

  “So, how come you don’t believe this stuff?” he asked Drammell.

  “Shit, Gallo, you think I’ve lived my whole life out here, in this shithole? I was born here and now I’m back, but I’ve been around enough so that I ain’t spent my life in a bubble. But most of these sad bastards, they’ve never left the Hand. Most of these families been here for generations. You raise a baby in a room with no windows, and they’re apt to grow up thinking that there ain’t nothing beyond those four walls. It’s no different out here, ’cept maybe our walls are trees and mountains. I came back to take care of my daddy after he got the cancer. He died some years back now, and I just stayed put. It’s quiet out here and that’s all right by me. But even my old man believed these old ghost stories.”

  “You think the people out here are distrustful enough of strangers to do something to one of them?”