Bonechiller

  The night is dead quiet. No wind, no rustle of tree branches. Nothing but the thud of my pulse in my eardrums. The shadow has melted into the dark again.

  I look at the wall of the ditch. How fast can I climb it? And what’s going to be waiting for me up there when I get out?

  But I have to try. Or I’m dead meat.

  I push up on my elbows, about to make my move.

  Then the light is blocked out by a huge form leaping into the ditch.

  The ground shudders under me when it lands.

  What I’m seeing can’t be real.

  It’s on all fours—but its shape is almost human. The thick trunks of its arms rise to hugely muscled shoulders. There’s a torso and rib cage wide as a horse’s, ending in legs that are flexing now, ready to pounce.

  The air is electric. Every hair on my body is standing straight.

  What gives it even more of a human look is its bald skin. No fur. Ghost-pale, like something that’s never seen the sun.

  It moves toward me. I scramble backward on my butt, scratching my palms on the branches and trash frozen in the mud.

  With one step the beast closes the distance.

  I freeze, propped on my elbows, staring up at its head looming over me.

  Not human, but some twisted freak-show nightmare. The face is deformed, like a reflection in a warped mirror, with the nose pinched tight into two long slits, and the mouth stretched so wide its edges touch the flattened bony curves of the ears. There’s a broad hump of a forehead, and jutting brows above the eyes.

  And the eyes. Nowhere near human. They gleam silver in the weak light from the road above. Like perfect round mirrors, they bulge from under the brows, the size of softballs in that huge white head.

  My gut twists, the breath shivering out of me.

  It sniffs at me, steam trailing from the nostril slits, then rises up on its back legs to its full height.

  As it towers over me, its wide mouth opens with a roar that flattens me. Just when I think my eardrums are going to rupture, it cuts off.

  Holding my hands up, I press my spine deeper into the muck.

  The beast falls back down on all fours, making the ground quake.

  This is not happening. Not real.

  It lowers its head, and I see reflections of myself in those silver eyes, tiny as an insect.

  That mouth gapes open. And I see the teeth.

  Gleaming rows of eight-inch teeth, like long, thin blades. Those vicious jaws stretch farther apart, showing more, row after row of curved white blades reaching all the way down into its throat.

  My arms are frozen in place, hands held up to shield me. Can’t shut my eyes. Can’t even blink.

  A tongue emerges from the mass of teeth, like an albino eel. It stretches all the way out of the mouth and hangs above me. On its tip is what looks like a scorpion’s stinger.

  In a whipping blur the tongue stabs the back of my hand with that stinger, so deep it feels like it’s going to come right through my palm.

  A jolt of pain shoots up my arm and into my chest, a hundred icy needles jabbing into my heart.

  I see a blinding flash of white light.

  Then deepest black.

  My eyes open on nothing. I blink them wide, straining to see. I try moving my head, wincing as a jolt of pain pierces my skull.

  But past the pain, I see something now. The sliver of a crescent moon hangs above me, white as a tooth. I make out walls of earth on both sides of me, stretching up a good eight feet.

  A grave! I’m in a grave, waiting to be buried. I’m dead!

  I hyperventilate puffs of steam into the night air. Then my breath catches in my throat.

  Wait! I’m still breathing. The frosty air smells like dead leaves and dirt.

  Slow and aching, I sit up. I see more light now, shining down from the post on the road.

  In a rush, everything comes back.

  I crawl onto my knees and do a quick scan of the ditch. I’m alone. Somehow I manage to get to my feet.

  I brace myself with a few deep breaths, then stumble over to the wall of the ditch. I search the shadows for a handhold, find a cluster of roots and climb up. I heave myself over the edge of the ditch and roll onto the ground.

  Getting onto my feet, I peer into the night till I find the marina lights through the trees. Then I lurch into a jog.

  I don’t look left or right, and definitely not back. My shoes crack through iced puddles. The uneven ground tries to trip me up.

  There’s the house. So close.

  Thirty feet. Twenty.

  I can sense that thing behind me, insanely quick and huge. Reaching out to claw my back and swat my legs out from under me.

  Ten feet.

  I lunge at the back door and twist the knob with my frozen fingers. Thank god nobody locks their doors around here.

  Slamming it shut with my shoulder, I turn the dead bolt.

  Can’t believe it. I’m still breathing.

  There’s a window beside the door. I pull back the drapes and peer out into the dark, leaning away from the glass, half expecting that beast to crash through.

  But the night is empty. At least that’s what my eyes tell me.

  Only, I know better.

  FIVE

  Sleep. The big eraser.

  Cutting off one day from the next. Making yesterday history. Giving you enough distance to shake your head and say: What was I thinking?

  Last night was a really bad dream, a psychotic nightmare. Judging by the headache hammering my skull to the beat of my heart, I might even have a concussion.

  My memories are broken in pieces. What’s real, and what’s hallucination?

  I’ve been lying in bed here trying to glue the pieces back together. I keep getting these crazy images flashing in my head, of this massive, albino-skinned thing. Of silver, mirrored eyes. And teeth. Endless rows of bladelike teeth.

  These images are scattered like shrapnel in my head. Jagged pieces that won’t fit together in any sane way.

  I cracked my head pretty bad—that I’m sure of. The rest must be delusions caused by head trauma.

  I must have looked like an escaped mental patient racing down the road last night, wild and breathless. Chased by some stray dog I hallucinated into a freak-show monster from hell.

  Blame it on the concussion, or just the weirdness of the night—the death-defying joyride, the overdose of exhaust fumes, the fire, the kiss.

  Right. The kiss. I didn’t imagine that too, did I?

  Swinging out of bed, I set my feet on the frigid floor and shiver. The furnace in this place is moody, some nights sweating you out from under the covers, other times leaving you to freeze. I put my hand on the radiator. Man, you could make ice cubes on this thing.

  Parting the drapes, I find my window frosted over, leaving only a small clear patch in the center. The lake looks grim in the gray morning light, with snow devils chased across its frozen surface by the wind.

  I’m about to turn away and steal another half hour of sleep when I see a figure in a parka walking along one of the wooden docks, past boats hibernating under their tarps, locked in the ice. The wind pushes back the parka hood and I recognize the orange wool cap underneath.

  What a lunatic! Sun’s barely up and Dad’s out there in the polar chill. He’s a borderline insomniac, can’t sleep more than a couple hours a night, since—

  Since Mom died.

  No! Not going to think about that.

  I stand with one foot on top of the other to minimize contact with the hardwood ice rink of my room. I’d love to slip back under the sheets and find the sweet spot, the little hollow of leftover body heat. But if I crawl back in now, I ain’t coming out till spring.

  Before hitting the bathroom, I have to kick away the doorstop I wedged under my door last night to keep out demon dogs and other delusions. I couldn’t get to sleep until I’d checked the window latch a half dozen times and even looked in the closet to make sure it was unoccupied.

/>   I shake my head at my insanity, but the ache inside my skull flares up. Take it slow.

  Shuffling down the hall, I decide it must have been some overgrown stray dog. A Great Dane on steroids. Or maybe a moose. I hear they still wander into town sometimes, in the winter months when good grass is hard to find. Do moose growl? Chased by a moose—I have to laugh at that.

  Skipping a shower—takes too long for the water to heat up—I scrub most of the debris off my teeth and squint into the mirror to make sure I still have a reflection. Feeling like one of the undead this morning.

  Last night I checked myself out for bite marks, blood or claw tracks. Any physical proof of my hallucination. But all I had were minor scratches on my palms from crawling out of the ditch.

  In one of those nightmare flashes, a snakelike tongue lashes out and stabs me in the back of my hand with some kind of stinger. But the only mark I find there is a tiny blue dot, like I got jabbed by a pen. I’ve got freckles scarier than that.

  Dad’s back by the time I drag myself to the kitchen.

  “Hey, Danny,” he says, tossing his cap on the table. “Feeling better?”

  “Better than what?”

  “You seemed kind of shaky last night.”

  Dad was crashed on the couch watching TV when I got in. I was shivering so bad all I could manage was to stutter one-word answers to where I’d been, what I’d been up to. “Nowhere. Nothing. ’Night.”

  “Ten below will do that to you.” In the light of day I feel stupid about my mad dash.

  He goes over and opens the fridge. Dad’s side of the family is what they call Black Irish, meaning the black hair and dark eyes. He’s a big guy, played linebacker on his high school football team. Wish I’d gotten more of his muscle and less of Mom’s delicate bird bones. I’ve got her pale skin too, her blond hair, snub nose and blue eyes.

  “Eggs?” he asks.

  “Sure. Scrambled.” Like my brains.

  I grab a Coke from the fridge. Caffeine—quick!

  The smells of eggs and melting cheese fill the kitchen.

  When I head off for school, he’ll be back out checking stuff, fixing things that don’t need fixing. Now that it’s December, there isn’t much action at the marina. Just patching up the walkway on the main dock, tying down the tarps covering the boats, renting out the occasional snowmobile or ice-fishing hut. But he’ll keep himself busy so he won’t think about anything deeper than the weather, what’s for dinner and the hockey game on TV tonight.

  “It’s gonna hit twenty below,” he tells me. “With the wind chill.”

  “Another day in paradise.” I glance at the frosted window over the sink.

  Dad hands me my plate. “There’s a game on tonight. Leafs are playing.”

  “Sounds good,” I mumble around my eggs.

  No way I want to be out again after dark. Only problem is the sun sets just after four, when school lets out. And night falls fast around here with no city lights to hold it back. Maybe I can bum a ride off Pike.

  “Forgot to tell you,” Dad says, tossing some slices of rye into the toaster. “Your aunt Karen called when you were out last night.”

  “What she want?”

  “You know.” Dad shrugs, watching the toaster with his back to me. “To talk.”

  “So did you? Talk?” I already know the answer.

  He waits for the toast to pop up. “I wasn’t in a talking kind of mood.”

  Dad never is, when it comes to Mom’s sister.

  “Anyway,” he says. “You should give her a call.”

  I push my eggs around on my plate. Talking to Aunt Karen kills me. She looks so much like Mom it hurts. On the phone, her voice even sounds like Mom’s. It screws with my brain, and my heart.

  Maybe it does the same for Dad.

  I’m thinking too much. Quit that!

  The toast pops up, and so do I, leaving my plate in the sink.

  “Gotta go.”

  I escape before we start showing emotions. Not something we do real well.

  I go get dressed, grab my gloves and my pack. I’m walking back through the kitchen when I hear a car pull up outside.

  Dad peeks through the clear patch on the frosted window over the sink, then ducks his head down. “What’s she doing here?”

  “Who?”

  “I think she saw me.” Dad stays clear of the windows.

  “Who?”

  “That woman from the Red and White.”

  Andrea. She runs the Red and White grocery store, the only one in Harvest Cove. Dad’s been driving all the way to Barrie for supplies just to keep clear of her.

  It started last month when Andrea was bagging up our stuff.

  “You staying the winter?” she asked. “I thought maybe you guys were just summer folks.”

  “No,” Dad grunted. “We’re staying on.”

  “Deer-hunting season starts up soon. Or are you sticking around for the ice fishing?”

  She was taking her time with the bagging, doing some fishing of her own. Dad wasn’t taking the bait, though.

  So I jumped in. “We’re caretaking at the marina over the winter.”

  Dad looked at me like I’d just betrayed a national secret.

  Andrea paused in her packing. “Oh, right. Ray Mitchell’s place. First frost hits and he’s on a plane to Florida.”

  Dad nodded reluctantly. “Guess so.”

  “Well, you need anything special, I’ll order it in. Is it just the two of you?”

  Dad looked cornered.

  “Just the two of us,” I said.

  Then Dad was heading for the door.

  “Be seeing you,” she called after us.

  And she has been seeing us ever since, popping by for any reason she can make up. She’s pretty enough, maybe a little on the heavy side, with long dark hair and nice laugh lines around her eyes.

  Now there’s a knock at the door downstairs.

  “I’m not here,” Dad tells me.

  “What if she saw you?” I try to swallow back a smile.

  Dad winces. “Just say, um … tell her …” He looks at me for help.

  I shrug. “I got nothing.”

  “Thanks! Thanks a lot.”

  I start down the stairs. “Come on,” I call back. “She’s harmless.”

  “Yeah, right.” But he follows me down to the front door.

  I open it, letting in an icy gust. Andrea looks way too bright-eyed for this early in the morning. She’s got a warm smile and is holding a bag from the Red and White.

  “Hey there, Danny. Where’s your hat?”

  “Don’t think I need one.” I hate getting my hair all staticky and standing up. Gotta look slick for Ash.

  “You know, you lose eighty percent of your body heat through your head,” she says.

  “Good to know.” I step out. “See you later.”

  I glance back at Dad with a “good luck” look. Walking away, I hear an awkward silence before Dad says:

  “So, what brings you out?”

  Whatever brought her, I’ll hear about later. I abandon Dad to the torture of small talk with a friendly local.

  In the blue light of morning, Harvest Cove looks innocent and harmless.

  Not a soul in sight. No monsters either.

  Looking down, I see my shoe prints in last night’s snow. I follow them back down the marina turnoff, scanning the ground for any sign of my beast. But all I find are tire treads and my own marks.

  I walk up to the light-post where I huddled last night.

  From here the landscape stretches out flat for miles, the sun glaring off the snow. Only the caws of crows in the bare trees break the silence.

  I can pick out the tracks I made running up to the post in a blind panic, crisscrossed by a few new tire treads.

  Nothing more. No monster tracks.

  I stare into the big ditch behind the post. That’s a deep drop. Lucky I didn’t break anything. Except my brain!

  From up here, it’s hard to see
much. I think I can spot where I fell and skidded to the bottom. The snow cover is scraped away, showing the stiff brown muck beneath.

  Can’t see any sign, print or track of anything but me.

  Should I take a closer look?

  Turning in the intersection, I do a quick three-sixty, packed snow crunching underfoot. The roads stretch out, running through fields of unbroken powder, a lone car in the distance.

  I have to know. How much of last night was real?

  So I go around the side, where I climbed out of my moonlit grave not ten hours ago. I use the same roots I grabbed on to then to get down now, my backpack swinging on my shoulder.

  I recognize the tread of my sneakers pressed in the snow, and follow them to the cleared patch where I fell. The ground is like concrete. If my skull collided with this, you can’t blame my poor brain for freaking.

  I glance up at the sound of a car whipping past on the road above.

  Maybe it was a car that hit me last night, knocked me airborne and down into the ditch. It was so fast. I don’t remember hearing a motor or seeing headlights. But I was in a blind panic. Who knows?

  If there was a struggle here, you’d expect the ground to be torn up. Or something.

  Enough! Let’s go.

  But then I see it.

  About four feet from the cleared patch where I fell there are some marks in the snow. I crouch for a closer look.

  There’s a row of holes stabbed through the light snow into the frozen mud underneath. They almost look like they were made with an ice pick. I count eight of them, curved in an upside-down U shape, cleanly jabbed into the powder.

  Claw marks? Eight of them means, what, eight toes? That can’t be right.

  Behind these holes, the snow has been pressed down to an icy crust by something heavier than me. The impression stretches long and wide. Pacing it off with my own size-ten sneakers, I could fit more than two of them inside this—this what? Pawprint? Footprint?

  What am I seeing here?

  Who knows? But what I do know is I wasn’t totally out of my mind last night. There was some kind of animal down here with me.

  I find another track. Identical to the first, this one is set on the other side of where I was laid out.