Ahead, the murmur grows just slightly; a man’s voice, low and sure. She stops.
A thin spool of light spills from the changing-room door, open only an inch or two in the darkness. At the frame, there’s a figure crouched low. But it’s too small to be Dan, or even Justin. Someone quiet and compact, no bigger than Maeve herself.
Sadie.
The girl hovers there, something cradled in her arm. Something black.
Maeve stays frozen. The murmur grows stronger, and she realizes it’s not Sadie who is speaking; rather, Sadie is listening to whoever is in that room. Watching them.
More than one voice for sure, a man’s and a woman’s. Sadie reaches out and prods the door, the lightest touch, and it yawns another inch. Maeve can just make out Anna’s voice now, warm and low. There’s a bang and then a stifled laugh, and a figure cuts into the light. Tall, bare-shouldered, his cropped hair almost black against his skin.
Dan.
From inside, a hand slaps the door shut, and the hall is newly dark.
Sadie suddenly pushes up to stand and Maeve leaps away, back around the corner so as not to be seen. She turns and pretends to fuss with the door to the spa. Holding her breath.
A moment later, Sadie comes around the turn herself, head down. Seeing Maeve, she halts, and the two women stare at each other. Sadie’s face gaunt and young, defensive.
Maeve steps back. Maybe this is somehow not what it seems.
A fleeting moment of fear, or shock, passes through Sadie’s eyes—and then she recovers, glancing briskly over her shoulder before brushing past Maeve, as though on her way to finish some official task.
“The spa is closed at this time of night,” she says. Her voice is all business, a harsh whisper. As though it’s Maeve who should not be there in the dark.
Alone now, Maeve comes up the stairs, then takes a long, wary look down her own hall before leaving the stairwell. The corridor is lit by a few regularly spaced sconces. There is no one else around.
What could Sadie be playing at? Maeve lingers in the silence, trying to recall her own emotions, her mindset when she was twenty-three. Jealousy, ambition, insecurity—nothing fits. What Dan does with Anna is no business of Sadie’s. Maeve can’t think of how skulking around in the dark, peeping in doorways, would serve her.
Unless—is it possible she was there not for herself but for Karo? To check up on another employee?
It’s all a little more than Maeve bargained for when she signed up for this retreat. So much for a relaxing soak. Maeve lets it go, glad to be going to bed alone. She’s tired, and she wants another good workday tomorrow, as good or better than today. Best to focus on herself.
She’s relieved to find her door still properly latched this time. Before turning off the light, she digs out her phone and turns it over in her hand. No new voice mail, but her mother has sent a photograph, meant to be a salve, Maeve thinks, or, more likely, a negation of the tearful message from earlier in the evening. In the picture, Talia and Rudy are hard at work, decorating cookies with Popsicle sticks, Talia with blue and pink and white icing streaking the tips of her hair, Rudy with his tongue out in concentration.
She’s sorry that they are not here. That there’s no way to do both at once. She misses the heat of their bodies cuddling in next to her, the smell of their skin. As love goes, she feels this one physically. It hurts like hunger.
She takes a breath, plugs in the phone, and puts it facedown on the nightstand.
But you don’t miss the guilt, she reminds herself. It’s true: she doesn’t miss the harsher feelings, when she just wants them to leave her alone, give her some space. Fuck off for a bit so she can be Maeve again.
Outside, the blizzard has only gained momentum; there’s a slam as the wind buffets the window glass. She turns out the light and lies there, listening to the rhythm of her own breath, her muscles tired and sore.
She can still picture Sadie, crouched low. Watching.
Maeve gets up in the dark and peers through the peephole at the vacant hall. She unlocks the door, then locks it again. Listening for the dead bolt to catch.
When it comes this time, she can see it.
Its dark fur. Maeve is sure she must be awake. First, the smell of it, wetness and musk, a bog smell, a sex smell, washing in like a heavy wave. And then it’s already there, coming at the window. She can see the blackness in its eyes.
The pressure in the room hurts her head. Maeve tries to pull up in bed, to stand, but she’s so tired. Her shoulders burn. Her muscles won’t work; her bones won’t support her. She is weeping with the effort. If she doesn’t get up, she will never get home to Rudy and Talia. She has to get home to save them. The bear is coming for them too—
The dead bolt moves in the latch.
Her door bursts open; a rush of wind pins her down. The little photo strip flutters against her mirror, then flies away. Maeve finds herself pressed flat, trapped, and the bear, the bear is right outside her window, coming at her with the sound of a train.
There’s an explosion of shattering glass and then it’s on her, its long claws slicing her skin.
Maeve pushes up, gasping for breath.
She’s leapt out of bed in her sleep. Disoriented, she looks around. There’s a swirl of white at the window, but the glass is intact. To the other side, the door is closed and locked, just as she left it. The photo strip tucked safe in the mirror frame.
Her arm stings and Maeve sees that she is bleeding; she knocked into the bedside lamp, breaking it on her way down. The jagged edge of a shard of china is still lodged in her skin. She takes hold of it with two fingers and pulls it out, and the room spins.
For a moment she thinks she will vomit, and she bends her head to her knees.
In the bathroom, she stands over the sink, mopping at her arm with a wet facecloth, then she rinses and squeezes it out and presses it to her forehead instead. She takes a drink and looks at herself.
So. That’s the dream.
The bathroom light, a soft white over the mirror, flickers a little. She looks pale. She looks like an old-time movie star, harrowed and lit from above.
Then the light blinks out.
Instinctively, Maeve reaches over and toggles the switch. When nothing happens, she gropes her way back to the bedside. The clock radio stares at her blankly; she pushes at the buttons but no numbers come up. On the far side of the bed there is another lamp, but it doesn’t work, either. She reaches for her phone: 3:15.
It must be the snow; a wire is down somewhere. She tosses the phone onto the bed and climbs in, but her arm stings, and she can’t sleep without knowing what’s going on. She rifles through her backpack in the dark for a bandage. What do they call these snow events now? Snowmageddon. Snowpocalypse. She bandages her arm, then sits under the blankets and pulls her knees in to her chest to wait. Every five minutes or so, she leans over and tries the bedside lamp again, but the more time passes, the more she starts to worry. She turns the phone off to save battery life, pulls on a pair of dance tights and a hoodie, and picks her way down to the lobby.
Maybe, by some miracle, there is power down there. At best, Maeve can make herself a cup of tea in the kitchen. At the very least, she can do some stretching by moonlight, maybe a little barre exercise. As long as she’s awake, she might as well be working.
But when she swings the stairwell door open, they are all there, shadows in the dark—Anna, Dan, Justin. Maeve almost jumps. Karo, standing to one side, strikes a match and then carries it around the room, lighting candles.
“I—” Maeve is unsure of what to say.
“Woke you up too, huh?” Anna is sitting huddled in an armchair, knees drawn up to her chin.
“The bear?” Maeve says, remembering Anna’s story about the spring session, how everyone woke one night with the same dream.
But instead of nodding, Anna frowns, then sits up taller. “Oh, wait, now, that’s cool—” she starts.
“Anna,” Dan says, giving her a look.
He turns to Maeve. “We just had a bit of a jolt.” He gets up to help distribute the candles now that there’s some light. “Because of the sound. It woke everyone.”
“What sound?” Maeve says. Part of her wonders if she is still dreaming.
“There’s been an avalanche,” Karo says. Her voice is clipped, controlled. “Somewhere off the eastern ridge. Nothing to worry about. But very loud.” She glares at Anna. “That’s all.”
“But what were you dreaming about?” Anna is persistent. “I have to know.”
On the couch, Justin wraps his robe a little tighter around himself and sinks into its hood, petulant. “When I say I’m dreaming about bears, you never want to know the details—”
Maeve stays on Karo, trying to make sense of what she just said. An avalanche? Her head hurts. The dream already feels far away. “I mean,” she says to Anna, “yeah, a bear. I think so. I don’t know; it’s already cloudy.”
Sadie, by the window, traces her finger down the glass, cutting a path through the condensation.
“Anna always needs everything to be magical,” she says. “Like some fun fairy tale.”
Maeve startles to see her there, remembering, all at once, finding her crouched in the dark earlier the same night. Anna’s voice, her soft moan from beyond the door. Did that really happen? She tries to put herself back there, but it feels a million miles away.
Just another dream? A stress dream. It seems a little too gothic to be anything else.
There’s a weird silence, cut only when the back door swings open and Sim walks into the room, snow clinging to his jeans and boots. Dan steps up to him.
“Where the hell have you been?”
As the door closes, Sim moves in so Maeve can feel the cold on him.
“The elk are moving down the valley,” he says. He turns to Maeve specifically. “You can hear it. They’re running away.”
She cannot seem to break his stare. She’s still standing there, held in place, when the ground starts to move.
The sound rushes in louder than any train, louder than anything in her dream.
“Everybody get down!”
She can hear Dan’s voice, but barely, yelling over the noise—he reaches for Karo to steady her, then pushes her into a chair. It’s possible that Anna begins to scream. Sim grabs for the desk. Outside, Maeve can hear the crack and groan of the forest coming apart. She drops to her knees, covers her head: earthquake training.
But it’s not an earthquake. It’s the western ridge, the very nearest tip, collapsing down the slope to where forest meets road.
Closing them in.
Day 4
NO ONE LEAVES the room again until it’s light.
For safety, Dan insists. But dawn is hours away. In the meantime, the temperature in the building begins to drop, and Maeve is itching to get back to her room to see if her cell phone works. In her confusion, she left it behind. Anna sits on one end of the couch, a blanket around her shoulders, staring out the window. Karo surreptitiously checks her own phone but says nothing.
Unable to keep still, Dan hauls new wood in from the pile outside the door, then stacks it into another pile near the fireplace, repeating a list of assurances as he works: There’s a generator in an outbuilding. The fact that it hasn’t kicked in automatically is troubling, but not a disaster—he’s not sure which areas of the center are considered priority. It’s possible the lights are on somewhere else.
“What do you mean, you’re not sure?” Sadie starts toward the fireplace. “Isn’t it your job to know? Isn’t it your job to be sure?”
Sim, his wet boots and coat now lying in a heap on the floor, shakes his head.
“I didn’t see any lights out there—”
Dan interrupts him sharply. “You wouldn’t know where to look.” He steps over to loom above Sadie, standing barefoot in her pajamas by the fire. “And, yeah, it’s my job. There’s a manual generator on-site in a shed by the western pass trail. It just needs someone to switch it on. If you keep calm and stay quiet, I’ll handle it.”
Maeve glances up, startled by his tone. But Karo just moves across the room to Sadie’s side, fluid and even.
“Once it’s light, we’ll tour the property and see where the damage is.” Karo’s voice is meant to reassure, but her cheeks are pink with tension. “Regardless, it won’t be more than a few hours before crews get up here and get us back to normal.”
The message is starting to stink of dogma: If you keep saying it, it must be true. Maeve feels more worried rather than less. On the couch, Justin recites a mantra of his own, cut with sarcasm but no less anxious:
“What are the chances? No one on-site? Staff all home for the weekend? What are the chances?”
It’s almost eight in the morning before the darkness lifts enough for Dan to declare them safe to leave. Back in her room, Maeve turns on her phone; it lights up in her hands, but there’s no service. Wi-Fi dead, cellular dead. The photo her mother sent the day before is still there, but there’s no way to reach her children now, no way to make up for being AWOL when Talia called. She switches it off again in frustration and goes to grab a few extra items of clothing out of her bag. It may be cold for a while, a day for layers. Better to have her boots and coat too.
But as she rifles through the zipper compartment of her suitcase for fresh panties, something sharp jabs her hand. She unfolds a bralette to find some kind of—what? a carving? a claw?—nestled in among her lacy things. It must be a claw—curving out from a pale stub of bone, the hook itself is a mottled brown-black and half as long as her own hand.
The thing is not hers; she’s never seen it before.
Her stomach flips. She remembers her dream, the bear’s long claw. She glances at the bandage on her arm, then moves slowly to the bed and sits down. No dream-creature hid this in her suitcase. A person did. Someone here at the retreat—someone who broke into her room.
She runs the pad of her thumb along the claw’s blade edge, then sets it on the bedside table where she can keep an eye on it while she dresses.
She’s downstairs and building up the fire again when Sim comes into the lobby. Maeve rises, pulls the claw from her jacket and holds it out.
“Yours?” she says.
“What makes you think that?”
“Is it yours,” Maeve says again. The thing’s appearance, in with her panties, makes it feel like some kind of taunt. When he doesn’t take it from her, she steps closer. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Don’t know. What is it?”
“You broke into my room.”
He shakes his head, confused. “Wishful thinking, Maeve.”
She’s still standing, her palm outstretched, the claw pointed toward him. “Take it,” she says.
“It’s not mine.”
“Take it. I don’t want it.”
He clasps his hands behind his back. Quizzical but game to play along.
“Don’t be childish,” she says just as Karo and Anna walk in.
“What’s going on?” Karo looks more herself again, even under all her layers. Like a model for a chalet-wear catalog. Maeve lets her hand drop. The whole thing feels dumb.
“Nothing,” she says. “I—I found something in my room. I thought it might belong to Mr. Nielssen here.”
Sim raises his hands, hold-up-style. “Mr. Nielssen denies responsibility.”
“What is it?” Anna steps up, and Maeve opens her fist to reveal the bear claw. Anna raises an eyebrow and plucks it out of her hand.
There’s a noise from the other side of the lobby and then the cool click of Sadie’s boots as she crosses from the office to where they are standing. She has the satisfied look of a kid who’s arrived just in time to see her sibling catch hell; Maeve realizes she’s been watching the whole time.
“It’s nothing,” Maeve says again, turning to Karo specifically. She’s suddenly embarrassed to be making a fuss—like she’s the childish one. If Sim won’t own up, she doesn’t want to stand here arguing abo
ut it. She holds her hand out to Anna for the claw. “I found my door unlocked yesterday evening and it gave me a turn. That’s all.”
“Maybe it’s a talisman,” Anna says, setting the thing back in Maeve’s palm. “Where’d you find it?”
Maeve glances at Sim, then slides the claw into her coat pocket without answering.
“Dan and I are going to take a tour around the property,” Karo says, looking each of them in the eye in turn. “Down to the main gate. See if we can fire up the generator or find out what’s going on.” She adjusts the scarf at her neck and fastens her top coat button. “There may already be a crew there working, for all we know. Sadie will stay here in the office to keep an eye on things in case the phone line comes back.” She nods to Sadie, who had been buttoning her coat. Now she begins to neatly unbutton it again. “What is everyone else doing? I think I’d prefer it if we all stay within range of each other while this is ongoing.”
Maeve bristles. What exactly does within range mean?
Anna says that without light or power, there’s not much she can do. There are a few books in the archive she’s been meaning to look over—historical accounts of men who went missing, survivors stalked by a giant bear or haunted by terrible dreams—but she can bring them back here and sit by the hearth.
“Cozy,” Maeve says. The last thing she wants to do is return to that dream; she blinks it away. Turning to Karo instead, matter-of-fact: “I’m going to the studio for the day.”
Karo tilts her chin, surprised. Sim does not seem to hear; he is bent over the fire, adjusting the logs.
“I might as well,” Maeve goes on. “You said it yourself, there’s probably a crew already working on the power lines. It’s not snowing right now, and I’m only here a few days.”
What she doesn’t say is that working will distract her, will give her a focus, something to keep her grounded. She can already feel her anxiety spiraling up, her cell phone tugging at her back pocket. If she’s not working—physically working—she knows she’ll end up sitting by the fire, obsessively switching the phone on and off, on and off, driving herself into a panic.
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