Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  Paul set down his coffee and cobbler, got up from the bed, and crossed over to the peeling section of wallpaper. He pinched the unfurled corner between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a good tug. Given the warm air that he’d had pumping nonstop from the heating unit since his arrival, the glue unstuck without protest and the section of wallpaper came away in a complete sheet.

  “Jesus Christ . . .”

  Someone had carved the same phrase over and over again into the wood paneling, in varying sizes. Paul ran his fingers across one of the carvings, as if to touch it, to feel it, would quash any disbelief he might have upon making such a discovery.

  You Should Not be here

  Over and over again. Carved in elongated, spidery capital letters.

  You Should Not be here

  You Should Not be here

  You Should Not be here

  He went to the next wall and proceeded to pull all the decorations away from it—the crucifixes, the animal heads, the tapestry of the Virgin Mary, all of it. Once the wall was bare, he urgently stripped each section of wallpaper from the paneling, exposing an entire collage of that same unsettling phrase.

  Shaking, Paul sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the walls that surrounded him. After a time, he shut his eyes. His whole body was trembling.

  Was this you, Danny? Was this some warning you’d left behind for me to find? And if so, how did you know I’d come out here looking for you?

  But, of course, Danny would know what he would do. They were one and the same, weren’t they? Always had been since childhood. Since birth.

  Which begged the next question: Why did Danny feel the need to warn him in the first place? What terrible thing was encroaching upon him?

  You should not be here, Danny whispered in his ear.

  “Too late,” Paul said to the empty room.

  It would be another long night in the Hand.

  20

  Hopewell’s Garage was an old barn that had been converted to accommodate a hydraulic lift, a wall of automotive tools and accessories, and two bored-looking young men in coveralls with grease on their faces. There were about six or seven junkers around the property—the carcasses of ancient automobiles that no longer resembled any known make or model—and several oil drums filled with discarded mechanical innards. A muscular dog was chained to a post, and as Paul approached the barn, it began barking and salivating all over the place. Paul, who’d maintained an unease around dogs ever since he’d been bitten by one when he was a child, steered a wide berth around the creature.

  It was a quarter after ten in the morning, and the sun was a dim bulb beyond the distant trees. Last night, he’d been unable to sleep after the discovery he’d made beneath the wallpaper. He’d paced the room, made repeated phone calls to Jill Ryerson’s desk, then hung up in frustration when the call went to voice mail. After a while, he’d forced himself to take a shower, then, trembling, he crawled into bed. The few times he actually fell asleep, he was soon jarred awake by either some terrible nightmare or by the sound of the wind blowing through the trees outside the window. At one point, he dragged the nightstand in front of the door, in case old Merle Warren decided to return for an encore performance. It had been around five in the morning before exhaustion dragged him into unconsciousness, and he’d slept undisturbed till the first bands of sunlight slid through the slats on the shuttered window.

  He didn’t feel right. Something was off, and it wasn’t just his internal clock trying to adjust to the time difference out here. It wasn’t just the fleeting hours of daylight bookended by the lengthening periods of darkness. He couldn’t get settled, couldn’t relax. He felt like Danny’s shadow . . . or like Danny himself, doomed to repeat the actions that had caused his brother’s disappearance the year before. It was crazy, but he felt caught in some echo, some loop. That he was his brother and his brother was him.

  The prospect of eating breakfast at the luncheonette that morning had made him uncomfortable, so he opted to go down to the feed store and grab a chicken salad sandwich from a vending machine. And even that hasty exercise caused a look of suspicion bordering on distrust to wash across the proprietor’s face. Paul had gotten his sandwich and a cup of coffee, set a ten-dollar bill on the counter, and hurried out the door.

  Now Paul peered into the garage bay and squinted into the gloom. One of the young men in coveralls looked up and said, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Bill Hopewell.”

  “Around back.” The guy jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

  Bill Hopewell was behind the barn, his head and shoulders buried beneath the hood of a 1962 Ford Thunderbird.

  “Mr. Hopewell,” Paul said.

  Bill Hopewell held up one grease-streaked finger as he finished fiddling with something beneath the hood of the car. When he extracted himself from beneath the hood, he wore an irritated expression. Behind him, Paul could see his tow truck parked beneath the shade of the barn.

  Wiping his hands on a dirty rag, Hopewell said, “Gallo, ain’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Having car trouble?”

  “Having trouble,” Paul said. “Not necessarily with my car. I’m out here looking for my brother. He went miss—”

  “I know the story,” Hopewell said, cutting him off. “Pretty much everyone around town knows the story. What do you want from me?”

  Paul extended a stapled packet of papers toward the mechanic. “Those are some pictures of my brother’s rental car. Oldsmobile Bravada. Aquamarine. You recognize it?”

  Bill Hopewell twisted his mouth as if he was chewing on something. After a long silence, he handed the pages back to Paul. “Not sure.”

  “I heard you towed that vehicle from the Blue Moose sometime last year.”

  “All right,” Hopewell said.

  “I’d really appreciate a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from you.”

  “Let’s settle for a ‘maybe,’” Hopewell said. He folded his arms and leaned against the Thunderbird.

  “Is there some reason you don’t want to be straight with me? You say everyone in town knows why I’m here, but no one’s willing to cut me any slack. No one’s willing to help me out.”

  “Ain’t nothing no one can do for you,” he said. “Or your brother.”

  “No,” Paul said. “I want you to tell me what the hell is going on around here. You towed my brother’s car and dumped it along the road outside of town. I want to know why.”

  “Because it’s my job, Gallo.” Hopewell extended a hand toward the tow truck. “The car was abandoned in the Moose’s lot. I got it out of there. I didn’t know who the hell it belonged to.”

  “And dumped it on the side of the road outside of town?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to tow the thing all the way back to Fairbanks, was I?”

  “What happened to my brother?”

  “I don’t know,” Hopewell said. His gaze was hard. “Nobody knows. He vanished, Gallo. Disappeared. You’re getting so messed up, you’re out here suggesting I did something to him? Is that it? You here accusing me of doing something to your brother?”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police that you’d towed the car?”

  “Because the police never spoke to me. Had they, I would have told them.”

  “When did you do it?”

  “What?”

  “Tow the car to the road and leave it there?”

  “I don’t know, man. What do you want from me, huh?”

  “Because I doubt you towed it straight from the Blue Moose’s lot and out to the road on the same day. I think maybe you towed it here first. My guess is you figured on keeping it for parts, like some of those other cars out there. I think maybe you didn’t tow it out to the road until you heard that a couple of state troopers were coming up from Fairbanks to investigate my brother’s disappearance.”

  “What the fuck difference does it make? You with the rental car police?”

  “It makes a difference
because you’re covering something up.”

  “Listen to me,” Hopewell said, advancing toward him. He slung the greasy rag over one shoulder and, jabbing a finger at Paul’s face, said, “I don’t know what happened to your brother. All I know is that SUV sat outside the Moose for two weeks and no one knew who it belonged to, so I hauled it away. Maybe I was gonna sell the parts, maybe I wasn’t. You wanna get pissy about the details, let’s get pissy. But it ain’t gonna help you find your brother. I don’t know what happened to him. Never fucking laid eyes on him. Okay?”

  “You can tell that to the police when I call them,” Paul said.

  Hopewell laughed. “Call whoever the fuck you want,” he said, then turned and peered down at the Thunderbird’s engine block.

  “I think my brother was here,” Paul said. “I think he stayed at the Blue Moose, and everyone here knows he did. But then something happened to him, and now everyone’s conspiring to cover it up. You’re all trying to erase him.”

  “You’ve got some imagination,” Hopewell said.

  “Last night,” Paul said, “you didn’t want to go up into those woods.”

  “It was freezing,” Hopewell countered, not looking at him.

  “No. No, you didn’t want to go up there. Why? What were you so afraid of?”

  Hopewell glanced over at him, his jaw firm. “You don’t belong here, Gallo. Your brother didn’t belong here, either. His SUV was parked there for two weeks when I towed it, okay? He disappeared and never came back. But I’m telling you, I had nothing to do with it. He just wandered off, man. He just vanished. My advice to you is to get back in your vehicle and get the hell out of this town.”

  “You’re all crazy,” Paul said. “This whole goddamn town. You’re all fucking insane.”

  Hopewell disappeared under the hood of the Thunderbird.

  Paul walked back around to the front of the barn. He could feel his anger rising off of him like steam. He would get no help from the people of Dread’s Hand. There was only one place left to go where he stood a slim chance of finding some answer to Danny’s disappearance, and he’d go there now. It was the only thing left to do.

  As he climbed into the Tahoe, the dog tied to the post barked at him with manic agitation. Paul blared the Tahoe’s horn at the mangy thing as he drove away.

  21

  Paul drove across town to Durham Road. It had begin to snow again, and the snowflakes made wet asterisks on the windshield. The looming black trees swaying in the pale daylight seemed to beckon him, their spruced boughs weighty and tinged with the silvery breath of frost. Wind scattered the snow like confetti.

  He was a jangle of nerves. His body felt hot and feverish, yet there was a pit of ice at the core of his being that would not thaw. At one point, he glanced up at the rearview mirror, wondering whether Danny’s reflection would be there, sitting in the backseat. That ball of ice rolled over in his belly, buoyant on a sea of stomach acid.

  Up ahead, he saw the bent sign for Durham Road. Paul took the turn and crawled up into the forested hills. Even at this time of day, no one was out, no one was stirring. The Durham Road tract houses looked like they had been evacuated.

  He stopped when he came to the place along the hill where Drammell had pointed yesterday. There was no house here, but the trees stepped aside to create a passageway. It was a dirt road and it wound farther up into the hills. Paul took it.

  What minimal daylight there was in the sky was obscured. The Tahoe carved through a deepening mist that clung to the ground. The deeper he went, the more the trees encroached upon the dirt roadway; pine boughs slapped against the Tahoe’s windshield and hoary branches clawed at the roof.

  Just as he began to wonder whether he had taken the wrong road after all, the trees parted and Joseph Mallory’s house appeared before him. A black abandoned relic, it stood silently in the middle of the woods, unwieldy tree limbs intersecting over the roof as if in an embrace. Police tape was garlanded across the cement porch where it rippled, bullied by the wind. Paul saw moss-covered siding and rail posts twisted out of shape by both time and the elements. The front door was closed, but it was askew in its frame, strips of yellow police tape running together to form an X across it.

  Paul climbed out of the Tahoe, his boots crunching through a crust of snow. It was much colder up here than it had been back in town. His fever-hot skin felt as if it might crack like ice.

  He went up the concrete porch steps and crossed a soggy wooden plank toward the front door. In a sudden gust of wind, the police tape made a thwap! sound against the door.

  Are you in here, Danny? Have you left some clue behind?

  Paul kicked in the door.

  It swung open without protest, bands of police tape fluttering to the ground like parade streamers. A black maw was revealed to him. He thought of the old abandoned house on Euclid Street in the neighborhood where he’d grown up. At Danny’s insistence, they had broken in to that house when they were eleven years old, and had gone down into that cellar. What they hadn’t known was that there was a thing down there, and the thing had sprung out of the shadows at them. Danny had fled up the stairs while Paul had been bit on the arm. It had been a stray dog, and it had run away, much as Danny had, while Paul sat alone in that cold, dark cellar, crying and holding his injured arm.

  Some things don’t change, he thought now.

  Paul went into the black.

  * * *

  The smell struck him first—the unmistakable stench of death, heady and assaultive. Something had died in this house.

  The lights didn’t work, so he took out his cell phone and activated the flashlight app. A thin white beam of light washed along the narrow corridor. The walls were a collage of framed photos behind cracked and broken glass, crooked and caked in gray dust. Cobwebs hung like tassels from the ceiling.

  It was a short hallway that led to a small living area. The flashlight app’s insufficient beam could only illuminate small puzzle pieces of the room, one section at a time. He saw a soggy couch shoved against a mold-blackened wall, one armrest furry with mildew and sprouting a cluster of tiny white mushrooms. There were water stains on the floor and palettes of plaster missing from the ceiling. A toppled wooden chair and an empty bookcase, its shelves slanting at broken angles. There was a door there that could have been a closet or could have opened up to the back of the house, a half-dozen handprints stamped across its dust-laden surface. When the flashlight beam struck the windows along the far wall, the light was not reflected in the glass, but instead reduced to a dull cataract of illumination. The windowpanes had been lathered in black paint.

  He crossed into the room, the floorboards creaking beneath his boots. It was only a few degrees warmer in here than it was outside, and his breath rained down like a mist. He ran the flashlight beam along the walls and saw the parade of crosses smeared there in a dark, coppery brown. It looked like dried blood. There were symbols among the crosses, too. One symbol was a crude spiral, and it reminded Paul of the curling horn of a ram. Another looked like two crosses placed next to each other so that it resembled a capital H. He followed the line of crosses down a second hallway that Paul supposed led to the rear of the house. They formed a straight line at eye level before the artist—the madman—lost momentum midway down the wall, curving the line of crosses in an arc toward the floor. Errant streaks of dried muck were splattered all over the peeling, mossy Sheetrock and there were bloodstains on the hardwood floor.

  He peered into a dank, foul-smelling bathroom with black water simmering in the toilet and a shower stall so heavily coated with mildew that it looked like something that had grown out of the earth. There was no shower curtain, but a spiderweb extended from one side of the shower stall to the other. The web glistened like gossamer in the glow of the cell phone’s flashlight.

  He stared down and saw what looked like a trapdoor inserted into the planks of the hallway floor, a metal ring inlaid in the door.

  Jesus.

  His firs
t instinct was to not open it. This was followed by the very strong urge to get the hell out of there.

  He bent down and tugged on the metal ring. The trapdoor screeched open, revealing a perfect square of infinite black space below. The smell of death wafted up out of the hole, so pungent that it caused Paul’s eyes to water.

  He cast the beam of light down into the hole.

  I’m going down there, Danny had said back at the house on Euclid Street, peering down into the cellar, when they were eleven years old.

  “So am I,” Paul whispered now, as if his brother was standing right next to him, speaking to him, listening to him. His headache was in full force now.

  The narrow beam of light illuminated only a small section of dirt floor at the bottom of a set of rickety wooden steps. He took a deep breath in an attempt to ease his nerves . . . and his stomach threatened to revolt at the stench, moist and thick, roiling up out of the hole.

  He took the steps slowly, skeptical about their ability to support his weight. But he made it to the bottom without incident, and found himself in a dank, underground pit that looked disconcertingly like a grave.

  There was nothing down here. It looked like Mallory had dug this hole himself, had perhaps used it as a root cellar . . . or maybe for more nefarious purposes. The wall opposite the stairs was shored up with cinder blocks and there were more crosses painted on them. However, these were not arranged in as slapdash a fashion as they had been upstairs. In fact, these seemed perfectly centered on the cinder-block wall, a pattern of three crosses on either side of another symbol—the strange eye with the slashed pupil.