by Ronald Malfi
Couldn’t feel his fingertips; couldn’t feel his toes. Could he move them? He couldn’t tell. How long had he slept? There was no way to tell. Was he dead? He didn’t know.
But if he was dead, this was Hell.
He found matches in the galley. Igniting the corner of one of McEwan’s paperback Westerns, he carried it like a torch while traversing the inner deck of the Borealis. The corridor closed in around him, the darkness diluted to a chalky grayness. The walls were overgrown with frost, the corridor a frozen white throat, which, upon bringing the makeshift torch too close, would weep runnels of melting ice like tears onto steel-colored frozen pools on the floor.
Dynamo Joe Darling was now a mummified, dehydrated husk webbed in a gelatinous black tar on the floor of the head.
Charlie walked through the cabins, smelling the disuse and, beneath that, the stronger vein of putrefaction. Had he anything in his stomach, he would have vomited.
He noticed that the ship was no longer rocking. In fact, it seemed unusually calm.
Lastly, he poked back inside Mike Fenty’s old stateroom, still vacant. However, there was a moist, almost breath-smelling condensation to the air in the room. The flames danced off the paperback, already having consumed half the book while managing to fill the overhead with black columns of smoke, and Charlie had to creep farther into the room to make sure he was actually seeing what he thought he was.
The place on the cot where the girl had sat was darker than the rest of the fabric. It was a stellated, tentacled shape, like a cannonball-sized asterisk, that Charlie at first thought was due to water dripping down onto the cot’s fabric from somewhere up above. Dampened, darkened fabric. But when he touched the spot, his fingers came away dry as bone.
Taking a step back, he noticed two similar spots moldering on the floor—where, naturally, the girl’s feet would have been while she sat on the edge of Mike’s cot. It was a darkening of the wood, each one practically foot shaped. As if her flesh, not belonging to this world, was rotting whatever it touched, soiling it, marking it the way a wolf might mark its den.
He crept up to the foredeck and pushed open the double hatch. Shafts of hoary light stung his eyes, though he couldn’t tell what time of the day it was. Or what day it was.
Topside, he crossed over to the bow and looked out upon a vast ice field, its size indeterminable, upon which, at some point during his unconsciousness, the Borealis had run aground. The hull was destroyed, stabbed by countless knives of ice, an explosion of boat pieces sprayed across the snow.
He turned and proceeded toward the pilothouse. Walking was less about moving his legs independently of each other but merely pivoting each foot and twisting at the hips, for this seemed the best way to conserve what warmth hadn’t evacuated his body. At the control room door, he wiped away thick grime from the window and, cupping his hands at either side of his face, peered inside.
Mike was on the floor, his hand still clutching the hilt of the boning knife that he’d used to open his throat. His skin was gray as bird down, his eyes milky pustules overloaded in their sockets.
Shaking, shaking—
Breathing into his hands, he retreated down the steps and noticed something in the snow he hadn’t seen when he’d first looked over the bow.
Footsteps.
She.
And she—
12
Down in the galley he scooped handfuls of cereal off the countertop, which he ate without expression, then ate two slices of wheat bread, which were covered in frost. Afterward, he urinated in the galley’s steal sink—a stream so pungent and yellow it was nearly solid. From his cabin, he retrieved the flare gun then, on second thought, packed the entire first-aid kit in his laundry bag. He pulled tight the laces on the bag and slung it over one shoulder.
There was a flashlight in Mike’s room. It didn’t work but, for some reason, Charlie was confident the farther he got from the trawler the greater the chance the flashlight might start to work. Again he thought of those blackened footprints on the floor of Mike’s stateroom, the tentacled star on the seat of the cot. The girl, he knew, had poisoned the Borealis, and everything on it. Well, almost everything.
While he prepared his gear and changed into warm clothes, he thought of Gabriel. When he was born, on the day Johanna and he had taken him home from the hospital, the infant had been silent as a dormouse. This reddened, squinty-eyed little garden gnome with a tiny, upturned nose and square little pink fists. And the hair on his head! Dark as the pelt of a black bear. They’d been living in Oregon then, in a small cabin backed by redwood trees as formidable as minarets while the front yard opened up on a pebbly gray beach where the cold Pacific waters rushed up to lap against the seawall. He’d been piloting charters back then while sustaining a hunger to get his hands back into the gullets of cod instead of just coolers of Bud. It was what he hoped for that pink, squirming little baby too—a lifetime of doing as opposed to the pursuit of doing. Anyway, he’d get back to the sea, the real sea, in due time. There was the baby. Gabe. Gabriel. The way Johanna, slight in frame and just as beautiful as she’d ever been, nursing the baby in the half-gloom of midday coming in through the cabin’s windows, framing her in some angelic penumbra while she rocked gently in the old rocking chair that had once been her—or his?—grandfather’s…
Back abovedecks, the world was colorless. Snow snowed. The boat’s prow had shriveled and turned black as rotting fruit. There came the steady glug-glug from the hull as the trawler slowly took on more and more water. With a pair of field glasses, Charlie surveyed the expansive strip of ice, miles long, practically its own continent. He could see the girl’s footprints in the snow, soon to be covered over by the fresh fall.
Shouldering his gear, he climbed down the side of the trawler via an overhang of cable. The ice nails in the soles of his boots left pockmarks in the fiberglass hull. Touching down on the ice field, he found the frozen terra firma solid as pavement. Charlie hefted his gear and, without a second thought, pushed forward through the twirling snow. He followed the girl’s footprints until the storm covered them up. Then he continued in their estimated direction, up over frozen buttes, across jagged crevasses and down the throat of winding, bluish canyons through which dense, crystalline fog called “pogonip” hung like spectral gauze. He walked until hunger cramped his stomach and the silver aurora of sun bled away behind the sea, leaving a velvety, star-encrusted firmament in its place.
In the dark and miles from the Borealis, the flashlight came on.
Trudging through the snow, his head down and his stiff-bristled beard glistening with ice crystals, he pursued the ghostly mirage. When he caught a glimpse of her in the pale cast of moonlight, white against a whiter background, he had to question what he was seeing—was it real or only in his mind, a trick of his eyes? Had she ever existed? Had any of them?
Holes everywhere, Bryan’s voice came back to him. You get it, man? The whole goddamn world…
At one point, he collapsed in the snow. Thinking, Mailboxes full of firecrackers. Thinking, Moon-bugs. He managed to roll onto his back and, with some semblance of consciousness, propped himself up against a pillar of ice. Shivering, he pulled his gear into his lap for warmth against the biting, unforgiving wind. However, the seat of his pants soon grew wet and cold, the snow soaking through both pairs of underwear, long johns, his BDUs. His buttocks went numb. Thinking of Gabriel, zigzagging around the yard in Saint Paul, lobbing fistfuls of snow over Dale Carver’s fence. Dale’s German shepherd barked wildly, poking its snout through the quadrangular rings in the fence. He chased the boy around the yard, feinting for him just as the boy pivoted in the snow and darted in the opposite direction. From the trailer’s stoop, Johanna looked on, dressed in a heavy pink bathrobe and rabbit-fur slippers, her arms folded in mock-disapproval across her chest.
Just as his fingers looped into the collar of Gabriel’s parka, he happened to look up and meet Johanna’s eyes. Laughing, shrieking, Gabriel eventually pulled fr
ee and sprinted across the yard. Dale’s dog loped wildly in the snow.
“Why you gonna leave?” he said suddenly to Johanna.
“What are you talking about, Charlie?”
“I know you’re gonna leave.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Charlie.”
“Yes you do.” Gabriel’s laughter faded into blackening ether. “You’re gonna wait for me to go out so I won’t know until I come back home. It’ll give you a good head start.”
“Charlie, please. You don’t know that. You’re dreaming this now and it’s not real. It already happened. That’s how you know. This isn’t real.”
“Don’t go,” he begged her, tears suddenly spilling down his face. He crossed the yard and, before the trailer’s steps, dropped to his knees in the snow. “Please, Jo. Don’t leave. Don’t take him away from me. If you’re unhappy—”
“It’s not about me being unhappy. The boy shouldn’t live like this, Charlie. Look around. This isn’t normal for him. And with you gone half the year—”
“Please, Jo,” he begged. “Please…”
13
And opened his eyes—
He was covered in frost, the back of his coat frozen to the pillar of ice. Likewise, his gear lay frozen to his legs. He had no feeling from the waist down. The snow had let up to a lazy flutter, the large flakes twisting and spiraling in the clear, crisp night air. Overhead, he saw—or imagined he saw—the great bruise-colored northern lights, the aurora borealis, the spirit of the great north. It gleamed like heat lightning.
Over the nearest bluff, a figure appeared. Small, inconsequential. Almost nonexistent. Charlie blinked his eyes and, with much difficulty, managed to bring his gloved hands, hooked now into inflexible talons, up to his face. He scrubbed the ice from his lashes and peered out along the moonlit pass. The figure was descending the bluff, coming toward him.
Charlie’s breathing quickened. He tried to move his legs but couldn’t. Moving anything but his arms—which were weak and practically useless anyway—was impossible.
“Huh…huh…huuuuhhh…” Clouds of vapor wafted before his face before being carried off in the wind.
The figure stood before him now, peering down at his broken, immobile form.
“G-G-Gabriel,” Charlie managed.
The boy was wearing his ski parka and Ninja Turtle earmuffs. Red mittens, yellow books with the bright red buckles.
“Daddy,” said the boy.
“G-G-Guh-Guhhh—”
The boy crossed over to him. Bending down, he peeled Charlie’s pack from his legs, the frost popping and tearing, until he was able to roll the pack down a nearby embankment. Then the boy climbed up into Charlie’s lap, his weight and warmth so real, Charlie could not deny the boy’s existence.
“How d-d-d-did you guh-get— Huh-how…how…”
“Daddy,” the boy said, pressing his face to Charlie’s chest. His small arms found Charlie’s neck, looped around it. “I missed you, Daddy.”
“Oh, pal,” said Charlie, his eyes welling with tears that froze the second they spilled from his eyes. He managed to bring one arm up and encircle the boy with it. Hugged him gently. “I was g-gonna f-f-find you, p-pal,” he told the boy. The nacreous, velvety lights in the sky seemed to brighten, tremble, waver.
“I love you,” the boy told him, his breath warm on his neck. “I love you, Daddy.”
“Was g-g-gonna f-f-find y-y-yuh-y-yuh—”
The boy’s arms tightened around Charlie’s neck. Charlie forced himself to smile, the flesh cracking and splitting and bleeding down his face and chin, and returned the boy’s embrace with his one free arm. He squeezed the boy as tight as he could—
“…find you…”
—while the world around him went white, white.
About the Author
Ronald Malfi is the award-winning author of the novels The Ascent, Snow, Shamrock Alley, Passenger, and several others. Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi's dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres. He currently lives along the Chesapeake Bay where he is at work on his next book.
A predator stalks the frozen woods!
Dead of Winter
© 2011 Brian Moreland
At a fort deep in the Ontario wilderness in 1870, a ghastly predator is attacking colonists and spreading a gruesome plague—his victims turn into ravenous cannibals with an unending hunger for human flesh. Inspector Tom Hatcher has faced a madman before, when he tracked down Montreal’s infamous Cannery Cannibal. But can even he stop the slaughter this time?
In Montreal exorcist Father Xavier visits an asylum where the Cannery Cannibal is imprisoned. But the killer who murdered thirteen women is more than just a madman who craves human meat. He is possessed by a shape-shifting demon. Inspector Hatcher and Father Xavier must unravel a mystery that has spanned centuries and confront a predator that has turned the frozen woods into a killing ground where evil has come to feed.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Dead of Winter:
December 15, 1870
Manitou Outpost
Ontario, Canada
It was the endless snowstorms that ushered in their doom. Each day and night the white tempests whirled around the fort, harrowing the log houses with winter lashings. At the center of the compound, the three-story lodge house creaked and moaned. Father Jacques Baptiste chanted in Latin and threw holy water on the barricaded front door. Above the threshold, a crucifix hung upside down. No matter how much the Jesuit priest prayed, the devil would not release its grip on this godforsaken fort.
Something scraped against the wood outside. Father Jacques peered through the slats of a boarded window. Tree branches clawed violently at the stockade walls. The front gate stood open, exposing them to the savage wilderness. It also provided the only path of escape. If by chance they made it out the gate, which way would they go?
The priest considered their options. Beyond the fort’s perimeter, the dark waters of Makade Lake knocked plates of ice against the shore. Crossing the frozen lake would be a dead man’s walk. Last week two of the trappers fell through the ice. The only way out was through the woods.
Father Jacques shuddered at the thought of leaving the fort. The trappers had fortified the outpost to keep the evil out. They hadn’t counted on the savagery attacking them from within. He prayed for the souls of the men, women, and children lost in the past few weeks. Last autumn the French-speaking colony was twenty strong. Now, in midwinter, they were down to four survivors and not a crumb of food to split between them. How much longer before the beasts within completely took them over?
“Forgive us, oh Lord, for our fall from grace.” Father Jacques sipped the holy water. It burned his throat and stomach like whiskey. “Cast out these evils that prey upon us.”
Behind him the sound of boots approached from the darkness. The priest spun with his lantern, lighting up the gaunt face of a bearded man. Master Pierre Lamothe, the fort’s chief factor, wore a deerskin parka with a bushy fur hood. His eyes were bloodshot. He wheezed.
The priest took a step back. “Are you still with us, Pierre?”
The sick man nodded. “Just dizzy, Father. I’m so damned hungry.”
Father Jacques knew the pains of hunger. Each passing day it pulled his flesh tighter against his ribcage. “We’ll find something to eat soon, I promise. Here, take another sip.” He offered the bottle of holy water.
Pierre took a swig and winced. Seconds later he stumbled back, rubbing his eyes.
“The burning will pass.” Father Jacques grabbed his wrist. “Remember our plan?”
“Yes . . . check on the horses.”
“We must hurry. Now may be our only chance.” They removed the barricade from the door. A long staircase led down from the second floor to the snow-covered ground. “Bless me, Father.” Pierre raised his shotgun and stepped out into the blizzard. He all but disappeared in the white squall. The only parts visible were hi
s hood and the outline of his shoulders. Father Jacques nervously watched the fort grounds. At the surrounding cabins wind howled through shattered windows and broken doors. When Pierre reappeared at the stables, the priest released his breath.
Please let the horses still be alive.
The chief factor pulled a horse out. The poor animal was so thin its hide sunk into its ribs. As Pierre threw a saddle on its back, he raised two fingers, signaling that a second horse was still inside the stable.
Father Jacques closed the door and clasped his hands. “Thank you, oh Lord.”
Someone tugged at his cassock. He looked down to see a small French-Indian girl. Pierre’s daughter Zoé had tousled black hair and large brown eyes that had kept their innocence despite the horrors they’d witnessed these past few weeks. The girl held a tattered Indian doll to her chest. “I’m afraid, Père.”
Father Jacques touched her head and gave the most comforting smile he could conjure. “Don’t worry, Zoé, the angels will protect us. Here, you need to bundle up.” He fastened her fur parka, pulled the hood over her head.
“I want Mama to go with us.”
“I’m sorry, Zoé, but she’s too sick. She would die out there. You, your papa, and I are going to ride out to the nearest fort. Then we’ll send help back for your mother.”
The girl frowned. “Noël says you’re lying!”
Father Jacques glanced down at the Indian doll. One green eye stared back. The other eye was a ragged hole. Since Zoé had stopped eating two weeks ago, she suffered from dementia. She spent most of her days whispering to her doll. Father Jacques wanted to rip its head off. He squeezed his fist. “Noël is just afraid like the rest of us. Now, pray for forgiveness for speaking to me in that manner.”
“Sorry, Père.” Zoé crossed herself and bowed.
“Now, drink.” He gave the girl the last of the holy water. She drank it and winced as if it were castor oil.