Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  Paul said nothing. The greasy marmot meat was turning over in his stomach, feeling like a lump of sod.

  “That night when I shot the man who looked like me—who looked like you—there was a moment when the beast almost overtook me.” Danny leaned forward on his knees, his eyes bright. “It was looking at me through the trees, and then for one split second, my perspective shifted. All of a sudden I was standing where it was standing . . . or at least seeing through the thing’s eyes, because I was staring at myself again, only this time it was my real self, the one holding the gun and looking terrified. But then a second later I was back in my own body again. That’s when I knew what it was and what it was trying to do. So I pulled the trigger and brought it down. After that, I could see things for what they really were.” He leaned back down on his buttocks. “Maybe you will, too.”

  “Maybe,” Paul said, incapable of continuing this conversation. He wanted to crawl into a fetal ball and hide in some dark corner. I’m getting you out of here today, Danny, whether you like it or not. Not another day longer.

  After they ate, Danny cleaned up while Paul soaked his left foot in another pail of warm water. The swelling had gone down, but the two smallest toes of his left foot remained a disconcerting purple, and they ached whenever he put pressure on them.

  After Danny put out the fire outside, he came into the cabin and took his rifle down from the wall. He glanced at Paul, who sat on the edge of his egg-crate bed reading one of the paperback romance novels, his left foot soaking in the pail of water. Paul stared back. “What?” he said.

  Danny didn’t respond. But then he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Nothing. Enjoy your book. I won’t be long.”

  When he left, Paul set the book down but didn’t get up right away. He thought about that connection that had seemingly always existed between them, a near-clairvoyance that, if he were to believe such a thing, caused Danny to write down Henry James story titles and Paul to sketch out eye shapes in chalk on the floor of his classroom.

  Danny is not reading my mind. We have no supernatural bond. I’m just paranoid.

  Yet for some reason the old dog-bite scar along his left arm began to itch. He scratched at it and stared at the countless crosses that hung like bunting from the rafters. His heart was beating a mile a minute.

  He climbed down off the egg-crate bed, dried his foot, then pulled on two pairs of socks and some boots. An extra shirt from the clothes box and a Marlboro Man coat from a peg on the wall. He realized he was sweating as he hurried around the place, dressing quickly and staving off full-fledged panic.

  Take some supplies, just in case. You don’t know how far from town you are.

  He snatched a backpack from the closet with the animal-hide fur over the doorway and proceeded to fill it with extra pairs of socks, the first-aid kit, a box of matches and one of the smaller Coleman lanterns, gloves and knit caps, two extra pairs of boots. He zippered the backpack closed, then slipped his arms through the shoulder straps. It shouldn’t have felt as heavy as it did, but he figured he’d lost about fifteen or more pounds out here over the past week, and much of his muscle mass had atrophied.

  Will you even be able to make it back to town? What if it’s five miles? Ten?

  There was no way they were ten miles from civilization. He wouldn’t have made it this far to begin with.

  Quit stalling.

  The plastic containers of lighter fluid were lined up on the shelf at the rear of the cabin. On the shelf below was a tin of Coleman lantern fluid. He took the lantern fluid and sprayed it in shimmery ribbons across the floor. Then he doused the walls, too, and the pile of clothes in the wooden clothes box. He soaked the stack of paperback bodice-rippers, as well, before the container ran dry. He tossed the canister aside, then worked his way through each of the containers of lighter fluid. He sprayed the ceiling joists and the countless wooden crosses that hung from them. He soaked the yellow mattress of egg-crate foam and the wooden boxes underneath. He drenched the furs that hung on the walls for insulation. When he was done, he tossed the empty bottles aside. He was breathing heavily, having overexerted himself. Too many deep breaths and the pungent odor of the lighter fluid stung his nostrils.

  Do it and get out.

  He grabbed a box of wooden matches as he backed out the cabin door. The early morning was still as dark as night, and there was a parade of stars overhead, but daylight would prevail soon enough, giving them light by which to see for their trek back to civilization.

  Go! the voice shouted in his head.

  He backed out of the cabin, struck the wooden match against the flint strip on the side of the box. A ball of yellow flame blossomed at the head of the match. He stared at it for a second before tossing it into the open doorway of the cabin. An instant later, a dorsal fin of flame shot up from the floorboards and raced toward the rear of the cabin. Fiery tributaries branched off from the main artery, trailing up the walls and across the ceiling. The wooden box of clothes went up like dry tinder. Wooden crosses dropped from the rafters as their strings snapped. Framed in the center of the doorway was the potbellied stove, like a squat, black martyr.

  Paul backed away from the cabin, unable to take his eyes off of it. Flames licked out between the boards and shot like fiery fingers through the knotholes in the wood. The crosses flanking the door went up, and it was almost as if the whole thing had been choreographed. A black column of smoke billowed up into the sky, obscuring that parade of stars and blotting out the three-quarter moon.

  There was a cracking, grinding sound, as one wall of the cabin collapsed. A ball of fire belched into the air as the roof slid down and onto the snow. Several wooden crosses that formed the Cross Corral went up, as well.

  When Paul turned around, he saw Danny standing among the trees, staring at the conflagration. Danny’s eyes met his, and instead of the rage Paul expected to find there, he saw only a deepening terror that made him feel very cold.

  “What did you do?” Danny shouted. He came through the woods but froze midway across the clearing, his body gilded in firelight. The look on his face was one of abject horror.

  “Danny—”

  “What did you do?” Danny cried. It came out almost as a plea.

  “Come,” Paul said, holding out a hand to his brother. “Let’s leave here.”

  But Danny wasn’t looking at him; he was watching the crosses burn. Several had already fallen over and were burning in the snow while others were nothing but smoldering black ash.

  Paul went to him, the weight of the backpack on his shoulders causing his muscles to strain. He gripped Danny by the forearms and shook him. Over the roar of the fire, he said, “I won’t leave you. Come with me and we’ll get through this togeth—”

  But the look on Danny’s face killed the words in Paul’s mouth.

  Paul turned around just as a strong wind bowed the trees. Branches snapped and clouds of snow rolled out into the clearing. A resounding wail, mournful as a ghost’s lament, was borne on the wind.

  Danny placed a hand against Paul’s chest. “Stay right behind me,” he said. He was staring into the forest.

  Paul looked but could see nothing. It was too dark and the wind was blowing too hard now, icy torrents coming down from the White Mountains. Paul’s heart slammed in his chest.

  Danny raised the rifle and scanned the tree line, his exhalations crystallizing in the air. Their shadows were stretched out on the snow in front of them, long and distorted by the firelight at their backs; Paul watched them merge, then separate again as Danny crossed in front of him, the rifle scanning the black cusp of forest.

  That ungodly wail again . . . and then something came flying around the side of the burning cabin, trailing a streamer of flame. Danny whirled around and peeled off two shots, the rifle cracks echoing through the forest. Something fell to the snow.

  Danny reached back and grabbed a fistful of Paul’s shirt before advancing toward the thing. Their shadows walked alongside them now, long-le
gged boogeymen striding across the snow. The burning cabin created a black chasm of shadow in the nearby ravine. At the edge of the ravine, the thing that had come around the side of the cabin lay in a heap of snow. It looked alive in the dancing flames.

  It was the sheep skeleton. The branch that it had been hanging from was on fire.

  Danny’s fist was still clutching at Paul’s shirt like a heavy stone pressed against his chest. Paul hardly noticed: He was staring at their shadows, and at the way they repositioned themselves in the snow as the fire moved, and how it looked for a moment as if there were more than two shadows there . . .

  Paul’s gaze rose to the tree line. A nebulous black shape crouched in the darkness between the trees, staring at them.

  “Danny—”

  The thing burst into the firelight, a formless black monstrosity with flashing green eyes and a mouth ringed with teeth.

  The thing in the tree! Paul’s mind shrieked. The thing in the tree!

  Danny shoved him out of the way, knocking him off his feet. The wind was punched out of his lungs as he struck the ground, the items in the backpack driving into his spine like shrapnel. He saw Danny with his legs planted wide in the snow as the rifle barked and a flash erupted from the barrel. An instant later, Danny was knocked to the ground as some dark shape collided with him, the rifle sailing off into the darkness.

  Paul crawled through the snow in the direction of the gun as Danny let out a scream. His fingers found the rifle stock, and he was able to drag the weapon into his lap while propping himself into a seated position in the snow.

  He managed to swing the barrel around just as those luminous green eyes filled his field of vision. He pulled the trigger a moment before it felt like he was struck by a locomotive, driving him back down into the snow. Something heavy and hot gashed across his abdomen—knife blades clawing at his guts. A black shroud surrounded him, an impossible weight pinning him down.

  But then the thing was off of him. Paul gasped for air and tried to roll over in the snow while fiery embers rained down around him. He managed to turn his head and saw Danny outlined in firelight. Danny staggered backward, clutching at one arm. His agonized cries sounded like the hiss of a flare gun over the treetops.

  Whatever the thing was, it circled around them and paused before the blazing cabin, an amorphous stain of darkness that glistened like ichor in the firelight, green eyes blazing from a shapeless black skull. It was nothing but a silhouette against the fire, humanoid and animal all at once, great clouds of its breath steaming the air. It focused its shimmering green eyes on Paul.

  “Here!” Danny shouted, waving his arms above his head. “Here!”

  But the thing just stared at Paul.

  Paul looked down and saw the palm of his hand covered in blood. His guts ached . . . but there was another sensation there, too—a tenuous pulsing of his and Danny’s shared umbilicus, their Manipura. He waved his bloodied hand through the air in front of his chest, expecting to feel it strumming there like an electrical cable, but there was nothing except the sensation, the sensation, the sensation—

  —and then Paul was watching himself from Danny’s eyes, seeing himself there in the snow, his face pale and streaked with sharp daggers of blood, his eyes as wide as saucers. It was Danny who spoke, but Paul could feel the words coming out of his brother’s body—“I’m here,” Danny said. “Here.”

  Those terrible green eyes swung in Danny’s direction. The thing ratcheted up on its hind legs, a black devil against the backdrop of the burning cabin. It pivoted its body so that Danny was now in its direct path, its movements grotesquely human. And before he was ejected from Danny’s body and back into his own, Paul could hear the roaring thunder of Danny’s thoughts: I love you.

  The cold rushed back to him, as did the burning sensation across his chest and abdomen, and when he opened his eyes, he found he was back on the snowy ground with a scream lodged in his throat. He rolled onto his side, white-hot agony exploding at the center of his body.

  He looked up just in time to see the thing rush at Danny. Danny could have rolled away, but he didn’t—his legs were planted in the ground and something in his hand glinted with firelight. He ran at the thing and met it halfway—

  “Danny!”

  An inhuman howl rose into the night as Danny and the creature collided, then disappeared over the edge of the ravine.

  Paul tried to scream, but all that came out was an agonized sob. His lungs burned, but he could no longer feel anything below the waist. He glanced down at his stomach and saw that he was bleeding. The thing had sliced through the layers of his clothes and had carved into his belly. He touched a hand to the wound and was astounded to feel just how warm his blood was, soaking through his shirts and spilling down toward the crotch of his pants.

  That’s my Manipura, he thought crazily, his mind unraveling. That’s it right there. Spilling right out of my guts. Good-bye.

  He dropped his head back down in the snow. His vision faded in and out. His heartbeat was like thunder in his skull. He blinked his eyes to fight off the darkness that was clouding them and filling them with smoke. After a time, the only thing he could see was a crack of light bisecting the early morning sky—green and purple, lavender and indigo, a widening curtain of light that was lanced with stars and spread across Paul’s waning field of vision like some holy salvation.

  And the world fell away.

  33

  Valerie Drammell was standing in the middle of the road, waving his arms. It was a frigid morning, and the clouds that had gathered around the distant mountaintops looked like they might be carved from ice.

  Ryerson slowed the cruiser to a stop and rolled down her window.

  “It’s right over here,” Drammell said, pointing to where the Sitka spruce wore their snowy shawls and the crosses rose up into the bone-colored sky. Paul Gallo’s Chevy Tahoe was hidden among the trees off the shoulder of the road and coated in a blanket of fresh snow.

  Ryerson pulled the cruiser behind the Tahoe and got out. She went to the Tahoe and tried the door, but it was locked. She cleared snow off the driver’s side window and peered inside. She could see luggage in the back.

  “How long has it been here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Drammell. “He checked out of the inn maybe a week ago.”

  “And he just went off into the woods?”

  “I have no idea.”

  She glanced around but saw no fresh footprints in the snow.

  “Why would he come here?” Drammell asked. He took a pack of smokes from the liner pocket of his winter coat. He was wearing fingerless gloves, which helped him finagle a cigarette out of the pack and prop it up in the corner of his mouth. “Can’t figure what he might’ve been doing.”

  “I know what he was doing,” Ryerson said.

  Valerie Drammell arched an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

  “He went looking for his brother,” she said.

  “You ain’t planning to go after him, are you?” Drammell asked.

  She removed a business card from her commission book and scribbled Mike McHale’s number on the back of it. “That’s smoke, isn’t it?” she said, nodding toward the horizon.

  Drammell squinted. “Looks it,” he said.

  “What’s out there?”

  “Nothing. Trees.”

  “Something’s burning,” she said, and handed the business card to Drammell. “Go back to your place and call this guy. Tell him where I am, and that I’m requesting K-9s and a helicopter. My cell phone’s not getting a signal out here.”

  Drammell just stared at the business card. When he looked back up at her, he only repeated his question. “You ain’t going out there, are you?”

  “Just a little ways,” she said, pulling on a pair of wool gloves.

  Drammell just stood there.

  “The sooner the better,” she said.

  Drammell tossed his cigarette to the ground, then turned and headed back to his truck, which
was parked in the middle of the road. Ryerson watched him go, then turned her attention back to the woods and that faint finger of smoke on the horizon.

  Just a little ways, she told herself.

  * * *

  She walked for a while, thinking, I’ll just go a little bit farther, each time she considered turning back. Before she knew it, however, she’d been out there for over an hour and was meandering through the narrow passageways and crooked, twisting ravines of the foothills of the White Mountains.

  The sky was a silver band arching over the mountains. She caught sight of a stand of barren trees that rimmed the nearest slope. Beyond that, she saw the drift of black smoke spiraling into the air. She was closer to it than she thought. She hiked.

  What had once been a cabin was now a charred, blackened heap of wooden boards, with sections of a standing wall still ablaze. The whole pile steamed and sent streamers of smoke and fingers of flame into the sky. Ryerson stared at it, struggling to accept its existence here in the middle of nowhere. After a time, she looked down and saw patches of red atop the snow. When she turned and looked across the clearing, she saw a figure lying there on the ground.

  She approached the figure, thinking that whoever it might be was dead. But as she came down on one knee to examine the body, the person rolled over and blinked at her. The man’s face was a pallid blue and there was blood saturating his clothes and along the side of his coat. Large clumps of snow had gathered in his eyelashes.

  And then she recognized him.

  “Paul,” she said. “Paul Gallo.”

  Something akin to a sob erupted from Paul’s lungs. He was clutching something under one arm, and he seemed to be trying to push it over his body in her direction. It was a backpack, damp from the snow and grimy with mud. Paul’s lips—split and caked in dried blood—moved but no sounds came out.

  “Just relax,” she said, taking the backpack from him. “It’s okay. You’re gonna be okay.”

  He held on to the backpack, clutching it in one pale blue fist. He shook it until she looked back down at it.