Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  Don’t move too quickly. One neat little baby step at a time.

  The door opened, revealing a widening rectangle of pearl-colored light. Frigid air followed, and the beads of sweat along Paul’s forehead froze. He could see the snowy ground on the other side of that door and, beyond, a dark veil of pines. He looked up and could see that the trinkets hanging from the joists were little wooden crosses made from twigs, so many crosses of various sizes, hanging like cured meats in a deli. A figure appeared in the doorway. It was a man, and he entered the cabin and shut the door behind him.

  He stood there, a black silhouette. Staring at Paul.

  “You’re awake,” the man said. “I thought so. Good. Good.”

  “Where—” Paul began, but his throat clamped shut on the rest of the sentence. His mouth was parched, his tongue swollen. The simple utterance of that single word felt like razor blades were slicing down the length of his esophagus. He began to cough, which hurt even more than speaking.

  The man lit a Coleman lantern that was hanging from a low ceiling joist. The room brightened, and the canopy of hanging crosses trembled like living things.

  Paul’s coughing fit having subsided, he swiped at the nonexistent tears he imagined were burning down his cheeks and stared at the figure, who now stood within the glow of the lantern.

  The figure’s hair was long and damp, with dark black ringlets curling across his forehead and near the corners of his eyes. His beard was thick and black, too, and climbed up the man’s cheekbones. He was dressed in a heavy coat with a fur collar, and there was a rifle propped against one shoulder. Despite the unfamiliarity of all those elements, Paul had no trouble recognizing the man who stood before him.

  “Danny,” he managed, ignoring the agony in his throat now. “Danny.” He struggled to his feet, but the world seemed to want to shake him off into space, and he nearly lost his footing.

  “Don’t try to get up,” Danny said, rushing to his side. He set the rifle on the floor and slipped an arm around Paul’s chest, arresting his downward momentum just as Paul’s legs gave out. Danny pulled him back toward the makeshift bed and helped him sit back down. Before letting him go, Danny’s one-armed embrace tightened in a tenuous squeeze . . . and then Danny kissed the top of Paul’s head. He was already stepping away and picking up the rifle before Paul realized what had just happened.

  “How—” Paul began, but then winced at the pain in his throat.

  “Don’t talk right now, either,” Danny said. He hung the rifle on the wall, then slipped through the shadows toward the rear of the cabin. In the commingled light of the stove and the lantern, Paul was able to inventory more details of his surroundings—an ax leaning against the wall in one shaded corner; a plaid bedroll laid out on the floor against the far wall; a six-shot revolver resting on a flattened pillow. Other items revealed themselves to him more slowly, their presence less disconcerting—some pots and pans and an old coffee percolator; several pairs of heavy boots lined up beneath the row of coats hanging on the opposite wall; a few paperback novels assembled in tidy little stacks on the floor; various animal furs nailed to the walls, some so large that Paul wondered if they’d once belonged to bears; more clothing hanging from wall pegs with other clothes overflowing from a wooden box. The potbellied stove had a multi-elbowed stovepipe extending from it, which ran straight up through the vaulted ceiling. He saw that the bed he was on was just a collection of wooden boxes covered in yellow egg-crate foam.

  “Where are we?” Paul rasped. His saliva felt like steel wool going down his throat.

  “I said don’t talk,” Danny called back from the shadows. He was moving items around back there, although Paul couldn’t see what they were. “You’re safe. That’s all that matters right now. But when I found you two days ago, you were burning up with a fever. Dehydrated and hypothermic, too. You were talking nonsense and probably delirious. My God, I thought I was imagining things, seeing you stumble out of the woods like that. I still can’t believe it.”

  Memories filtered back to him. He remembered breaking in to someone’s house. He remembered chasing some figure through the woods and getting lost. He remembered a sky that changed color, and that a pennant of light coursed like a river through the heavens—light so beautiful that his eyes had had difficulty seeing it. He recalled a sleek black figure crouched high in a tree, its mouth rimmed with shark’s teeth and eyes like supernovas. But after that, his memory failed him.

  “You were too weak to walk,” Danny continued, “and I knew I couldn’t carry you. But we were close enough to the cabin for me to come back here, get the sledge, and load you up. You passed out as I pulled you here through the snow. Do you remember any of it?”

  Paul shook his head. But then he realized that Danny couldn’t see him, so he murmured, “No.” His throat felt like it was lined with rebar.

  Danny advanced into the firelight. He was holding a tin cup, which he handed to Paul. “Drink it. You’re still dehydrated.” He slapped a frigid hand to Paul’s sweaty forehead and added, “You’ve still got a fever, too.”

  Paul gulped down half the water, then gagged.

  “Go slow, bro,” Danny said. “You’re parched.”

  Paul cleared his throat, then brought the cup back up to his lips. He sipped it now. This time, it was like heaven going down.

  “You’ve been in and out of consciousness for two days,” Danny said. He went over to the wooden crate overflowing with clothes and began rifling through it. “I kept feeding you water by sticking a damp rag in your mouth so you wouldn’t choke. Powdering Tylenol tablets, too, and rubbing the powder against the insides of your cheeks to get the fever down. Shit would be a lot easier if I had an IV and a saline drip, but this ain’t Johns Hopkins, huh?”

  “Two days,” Paul mused. The water had made his throat feel somewhat better, but his headache was still jackhammering away at him. He couldn’t stop shivering, either, despite the extra layers Danny had dressed him in while he’d been unconscious. There was a blanket made of animal furs at his feet, which he grabbed and pulled up over his thighs.

  “It’s just lucky I found you when I did,” Danny said. He ceased rummaging through the wooden box and peered at Paul from over one fur-lined shoulder. It was as if something had just occurred to him, something important that he’d missed until now. But he said no more about it.

  Paul raised one shoulder. His muscles were sore and tight. He felt like he’d just had the shit kicked out of him.

  From the wooden crate, Danny pulled out a backpack that looked large enough to haul around a set of golf clubs. He unzipped one of the compartments and upended the backpack, dumping random items onto the warped floorboards of the cabin—one of which was a pill bottle that Danny scooped up and carried over to Paul. He shook two tablets into his hand.

  “Aspirin,” he said.

  Paul took them, put them in his mouth, and swallowed them with some difficulty. Even with the water as a lubricant, they felt like two large stones bullying their way down his throat.

  “We’ll just have to keep you hydrated,” Danny said, taking Paul’s cup and refilling it from a dented aluminum teapot. “It’s the best we can do.”

  Paul took the cup from him but remained staring at his brother. Danny stared back, his head cocked, that broad smile now replaced with a melancholic half grin. He leaned in and planted another kiss on Paul’s sweat-slickened forehead while squeezing the back of Paul’s neck. Then he dragged over one of the wooden crates and sat down on it.

  “I thought you were dead,” Paul rasped. It hurt his throat, but he could feel a frenzy of anger welling up inside him. “It’s been over a year. I thought you’d died out here. I filed police reports; I talked to investigators. I dropped everything and flew out here because I thought . . . I mean, I just. . . .Christ, I don’t . . . I don’t even know where to begin. It’s been over a year.”

  “Don’t get excited. Please, Paul. You just need to rest right now.”

  Paul cla
pped a hand over his eyes. He felt the sob ratchet its way up through his chest and spring from his throat on a hot expulsion of air. He was too dehydrated for tears, but the emotion was all there, and it shook him. Hurt him. The hand holding the tin cup trembled until the cup clanged to the floor. He didn’t know how long he sat like that, digging his fingernails into the burning flesh of his face and smelling his own rank breath while Danny watched him, but when he stopped and looked up, he felt drained.

  Danny was smiling at him, and nodding his shaggy head. But his own eyes were glassy.

  “I can’t believe you’re alive,” Paul said. “Holy shit, Danny, I can’t believe it . . .”

  “And I can’t believe you’re here,” Danny countered. “Seriously, Paul. I don’t believe it. It’s almost frightening that you’re here. You have no idea.”

  “What’s going on here, Dan?”

  Danny stood up from the crate. “I’m sorry, man. You should rest. No talking. We’ll have plenty of time to talk when you’re feeling better. When you’re stronger.” He went over and took the rifle down from the wall brackets.

  “Where are you going?” Paul asked.

  “Out. Just for a bit. I’ll be back.”

  “Where exactly are we, Danny?”

  “We’re up in the foothills.”

  “Whose cabin is this?”

  “Mine, now.”

  “How’d you get it?”

  “That’s a story for later. You need your rest.”

  “Have you been out here for the past year? What are you doing out here? Are you in some kind of trouble? Tell me.” His mind raced along with his heartbeat.

  Danny didn’t answer right away. Paul could see his lips twitching behind his beard. He could see the slight narrowing of his eyes, too. Despite the distance that had grown between them over the past year—both actual and spiritual—Paul knew his brother well enough to know that whatever he was about to say wasn’t going to answer his question.

  “Important work,” Danny said. “I’m doing important work.” Then he smiled. “Let’s leave it at that for now, all right? Tomorrow’s another day. And you need your rest.” He doused the hanging lantern, dropping the room back into a coma-like blackness, with only the simmering orange coals in the stove for illumination.

  Danny slipped the rifle’s shoulder strap over an arm as he moved toward the door. “You stay put, okay? You’re too sick to get up and wander around. No more going outside. I mean that—no matter what you hear or think you hear, you stay inside this cabin. There’s a bedpan on the floor at the foot of your bed, in case you gotta pee. But I’m guessing you’re as dry as a desert right now.”

  “How far are we from town?” Paul asked.

  “Town? You mean the Hand? Far enough. Not really sure. Haven’t thought about it in a while.”

  The Hand, Paul thought, and shivered. It was as if Danny had been . . . what? Indoctrinated? All of a sudden, he felt more than just uncomfortable. He felt extremely vulnerable—almost infantile in his helplessness. Far enough. Not really sure. Haven’t thought about it in a while. He didn’t like that answer, either.

  “You know, it’s funny,” Danny said. “You spent your whole life taking care of me, Paul. And now I’m taking care of you.” It looked like he smiled again, but his face was masked in shadows and Paul couldn’t be sure. “I think it’s good that you’re here, Paul.”

  “Are we the only people out here?”

  Again, there was a slight hesitation before Danny answered. “Let’s hope so,” he said, then walked out into the night. The door was tugged closed, and bits of dust and dirt showered down from the ceiling. The crosses swung and spun around on their strings like party decorations. There were dozens of them.

  Paul stared at the closed cabin door for several minutes after Danny left. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do—get up and look around the cabin or maybe even crack open the cabin door and see if he could catch a glimpse of Danny doing whatever it was he was doing—but before he could arrive at a decision, his eyelids began sagging and that aching in his head was ushering him toward some black, dreamless void. He wasn’t sure whether he should welcome it or fight it.

  Far enough. Not really sure . . .

  He closed his eyes and reclined on the mattress of egg-crate foam. He worked the fur blanket up over his body with one clumsy hand, tugging the hide right up under his chin. It helped a little, but the shivers refused to leave. His body shuddered like a dying engine. The wall he was lying against was covered in animal furs, but he could still feel the cold outside, pressed up against the boards of the cabin like some large, black predator eager to get at him. In fact, he imagined he could hear it moving around out there, separated by maybe two inches of wood, scrounging in the snow and snorting hot breath into the cold night air.

  No matter what you hear or think you hear, you stay inside this cabin . . .

  He might freeze to death if he fell asleep, he realized, but he was also too exhausted to care.

  It won’t matter, because this is a dream. I’m not with Danny in some cabin in the woods. Yes, this is just a dream. Or another hallucination. Maybe I’m still out there in the woods, freezing beneath a layer of fresh snow, and these are my last dying thoughts before my soul is shuttled off to that great teachers’ lounge in the sky.

  But that tugging at his navel was there, telling him this wasn’t a dream, and that he wasn’t dead. Erin Sharma’s Manipura. Call it what you liked, the thing spoke. And just before Paul was ushered off to sleep, it whispered to him that perhaps—just perhaps—those hadn’t been aspirin Danny had given him, but something much stronger. Something that would knock him out. Something that would keep him here, unconscious, until Danny returned.

  What are you doing out here, Danny?

  Important work. Now, go to sleep, Paul. Tomorrow’s another day. Let’s hope you live to see it.

  27

  According to the ABI’s database, the last known address for Gwendolyn Rhobean was the house in Chena Hills where her husband had murdered her son and then committed suicide nine years earlier. Jill Ryerson doubted the woman still lived there, but she drove the sixty miles to the remote little town nonetheless. She still had a slight fever and could have used one more day in bed, but she found that she couldn’t get the Rhobean case out of her mind. The inexplicable similarities between the Rhobean and Mallory cases haunted her—decapitations and bloody symbols smeared on walls.

  A 2011 census listed Chena Hills’s population at fifty-one people. It had a grocery store, a gas station, and a collection of drinking establishments with names like the Pissing Mongrel and the Dutch Oven. Men in heavy winter coats sat on benches outside the gas station, smoking cigarettes.

  When she arrived at the Rhobean house, she realized that her assumption was correct—Gwendolyn Rhobean no longer lived there. In fact, no one lived there. The quaint single-family home had fallen into disrepair, with a section of its roof having caved in and its doors and windows boarded up. The whole thing was covered in so much spray-painted graffiti that it looked like a subway station wall.

  She got out of the car and walked up to the porch anyway. Someone had sprayed the phrase DEVIL HOUSE across the boards that had been nailed over the front door. Broken bottles and empty beer cans littered the front stoop. Sensing that someone was watching her, she turned around and saw an elderly woman standing on the porch of the house across the street, staring at her.

  Ryerson went around to the side of the house. A fence surrounded the property, but a good number of the staves had fallen away, so that she was able to squeeze through and gain access to the backyard. There was an overturned picnic table dusted with snow, a concrete birdbath tipped on its side, and a population of garden gnomes scattered about the overgrown yard. The blazing red face of the devil, complete with horns and a black goatee, had been painted across the rear of the house. Below that, someone had spray painted the phrase BURN IN HELL, MUTHAFUCKA!

  The place had become a ref
uge for the homeless or bored teenagers—probably both. The house’s foundation had been turned into a graveyard for discarded beer bottles and boxes of condoms. The rear door of the house looked like it had been pried open on more than one occasion, and she could see that it wasn’t seated properly against the jamb, although two-by-fours had been hammered across the frame. She approached one of the garden gnomes, only to realize that it wasn’t a gnome at all, but a child’s doll half-buried in the ground, its eyes missing from its plastic skull.

  She looked around for the woodshed, but didn’t find it. She wondered whether Gwendolyn Rhobean or maybe even the police had had it removed after the incident. But then she saw what had become of it—a wooden palette with a single wall still rising from it intact, tucked in the far corner of the yard and overrun by a complex system of brown vines and holly. A pile of wooden planks were stacked against the fence beside it, while others lay in a heap on the lawn. She approached what remained of the thing, for some reason ashamed of the conspicuous footprints she left behind her in the thin layer of snow.

  Much like the house itself, the upright boards were covered in graffiti. She made out various song lyrics, crude cartoons, foul language, and even a variety of symbols, though nothing that had been left behind by Dennis Rhobean. This was the work of teenagers, coming to the local haunted house to drink beer and tell ghost stories about the man who went mad and murdered his own son. Indeed, there were several more empty beer bottles scattered about the area.

  An icy wind blew her hair out of her eyes. Ryerson shivered. Despite the rabbit’s foot she kept on her key chain, she wasn’t a superstitious person. Yet standing here in this yard, she felt a cold finger of unease prod against the small of her back. Suddenly, she just wanted to get back home and crawl into bed.