Midnight is closing time at the Legion Hall.
This was a good night. The best in a long, long time. As we make our way out to the parking lot, the crisp air shivering in our lungs, we’re all flying high.
Ash is pumped with her victory in the ring. Pike’s bragging about beating the Reaper and then getting some girl’s number after. Howie’s staring into space, focused on the mystery monster tracks.
And me? I’m still riding the electric buzz of Ash’s touch. The feel of her heat.
Right now, there’s no past, no future. Nowhere else we need to be. Beneath a clear black sky crowded with stars, the shock of the cold braces us, shouting that we’re alive. Right here and now.
And we’re all feeling—invincible, maybe.
Immortal.
TEN
It always catches me when I’m not expecting it.
I’m getting out of the shower, toweling my hair dry. The mirror is cloudy from the steam. Reaching to wipe a patch clear, I see the marks where Dad has done the same thing earlier. The glass holds the print of his hand where he swiped away the steam.
And just like that, the memories flood back, stopping my hand in midreach.
It was something Mom used to do. She was always the early riser, the first to hit the shower. So when I’d get done with mine later on, sometimes I’d find one of her mirror doodles waiting for me. I’m a heat freak when it comes to showers, so she knew that when I got out I’d find the invisible finger drawings she’d made in the steam on the glass.
She’d draw these stick figures with round lollipop heads. Dumb stuff, but it was our dumb stuff. We had a running thing with a stick figure called Stinkboy. My alter ego. He was the one who got mud on the carpet, left dirty laundry everywhere and was responsible for those foul sneakers. Mom drew the evil stick figure with pointy shark teeth, beady little eyes and wavy stink lines coming off him. Sometimes I’d add another stick figure to the scene, shooting tiny bullets at Stinkboy or stabbing him to death.
Dumb stuff. Our stuff.
I remember that the morning Mom showed the first sign something was wrong, I’d drawn a nuke attack on Stinkboy, surrounding him with little exploding mushroom clouds.
“I think we’ve seen the last of Stinkboy,” Mom said, coming into the kitchen. “No way he can survive that.”
I was nodding off into my cereal but snorted awake at the sound of her voice. “He’s been shot,” I mumbled. “Been stabbed, burned, bombed and decapitated. Still, he comes back. The guy’s immortal.”
Mom was in her usual crazy rush, eating toast and chugging coffee while texting messages on her cell phone. She was a real estate agent, always racing around town showing places. Always with a million things on her mind.
So it was almost funny at first. A slip of the tongue. She’d just downed her second black coffee and set the cup in the sink.
“Toss me the elephant,” she said to me.
“Huh?” I looked up from my cereal.
“Elephant,” she said. “Elephant.”
I just stared at her, frowning. She pointed to something on the table by my elbow. Her keys were lying there.
“These?” I asked. “Your keys?”
“Yeah. Toss them.”
I did, and she caught them without even pausing in her texting. Mom was a master multitasker.
“You said elephant.”
“What’s that, honey?”
“Just now, you said Toss me the elephant.”
She glanced up from her cell, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t get it. What’s that mean?”
“Hey, you tell me. You said it.”
She gave me a look like I was talking crazy. “I think you must have inhaled one of those mushroom clouds meant for Stinkboy.”
We shrugged it off. A slip of the tongue. It was almost forgotten by the time she did it again.
More slips, getting words wrong. Kind of funny at first. Not so funny when the migraines started.
She went in for tests. MRI, CAT scan, EEG.
Aphasia, they called it. Getting words wrong, forgetting the names of things. It was the first symptom, soon followed by the headaches, nausea, clumsiness and disorientation.
Then they found it in the left hemisphere of her brain. The part that controls speech recognition, balance, memory. Mom said the image on the MRI scan made the tumor look kind of like an octopus, with tentacles reaching out, holding on. The biopsy showed it was bad. Its location, up against the brain stem, was worse.
Then the real nightmare started.
All this flashes through my head now as I’m standing here in front of the mirror.
I use the towel to wipe the glass clear, and catch my reflection. My eyes are tearing up, and my heart feels like a fist inside my chest. A surge of panic rises.
No! Not now. Not now.
I shut my eyes tight, leaning on the sink. Forcing myself to breathe slow, I try to erase my thoughts like I swiped away the steam. Get a grip on the panic before it pushes me off the deep end. Takes a minute, but I manage to flatline my emotions. The wave of raw grief falls back.
I’ve almost stopped shaking when there’s a knock at the bathroom door. I jump, opening my eyes on my own startled reflection in the mirror.
“Danny,” Dad says, muffled through the door. “Phone.”
I have to swallow before I can speak.
“Okay. I’m coming.”
I push off from the sink, avoiding eye contact with that mess in the mirror that looks like me.
ELEVEN
“What are you doing, frisking me?” Ash frowns at me over her shoulder.
I’m sitting behind her on the motorbike, trying to find where I can hold on to her without it seeming like I’m trying to feel her up. I wouldn’t mind trying. But she’s driving.
“Here,” she says, taking my bare hands in her gloved ones and fixing my grip just below her chest. “Scoot up closer, or we’re gonna be doing wheelies all the way there.”
It’s Saturday morning, around eleven. Ash called when I was getting out of the shower to see if I wanted to take a ride. I said yeah, but I had to drop by Howie’s first. His call woke me up this morning, out of a deep and thankfully dreamless sleep. He said he’d made some progress on our mystery tracks and I should come over.
I scoot up close, bringing my groin right up against her tailbone. Not a bad place to be. I press in tight. “No helmets?”
Ash shrugs, putting on her badass sunglasses. “You want to live forever? Gotta feel the wind on your face. Feel the speed. Live before you die.”
We tear out of the parking lot behind the marina.
It’s a gray day, smells like snow coming. The fields are covered in a thin layer of powder.
The chains strapped on the tires of her bike bite into the skim of snow and black ice on the road, giving us enough traction so we don’t go sliding into the ditch.
The rattling vibration of the bike, together with the bump and grind of me against Ash as we speed over lumps and potholes, is having a rising effect in my jeans. I have this powerful urge to let my hands roam from where they’re locked just above her navel.
Even if we wipe out, it’ll be worth it. Live before you die, right?
I have to fight to keep from leaning in to taste her neck with my tongue. Right now, the happiest place on earth is inside my pants.
We sputter to a halt in front of Howie’s place. I hop off, taking a few steps away with my back to Ash as she rocks the bike onto its kickstand. The bulge in the front of my jeans is screamingly obvious. I unzip my jacket and let the arctic day soak into me. Next best thing to a cold shower.
Ash goes up the stairs to knock on the door, giving me a few more seconds to deflate.
The door opens on a thin red-haired woman chewing a big wad of gum.
“Hi, Brenda,” Ash says. “We’re here to see Howie.”
“Ashley, honey. Look at your face. Every time you’re over you’ve got some new cuts and bruises. Your mother must get fra
ntic.”
Brenda lets us in and shuts the door against the cold.
“Well, I was never beauty-queen material,” Ash says.
“Don’t say that. You’ve got such lovely bone structure. Don’t you think so, Danny?”
I grin as Ash makes a face. Her right eye is real bloodshot from the gouge last night, the lid swollen.
“Girl’s got great bones.”
I get a knuckle in the ribs from Ash.
Brenda’s a bundle of nervous energy. Maybe it comes from being married to a former drill sergeant who now specializes in defusing bombs. I can see where Howie gets his nerves.
“He’s up in his room. Don’t bother knocking, he won’t hear you with his headphones on.”
We climb the stairs.
Ash pushes me ahead of her. “You check first. Make sure Howie’s not playing with Howie junior.”
I knock. Getting no response, I turn the knob and peek in. Howie’s sitting at his desk, back to the door. Junior is safely out of sight.
“Clear.” I step in.
Howie’s room is like his own messy museum. Books, of course, shelved and piled and avalanched on the floor. The ceiling is wallpapered with a map of the constellations that glows in the dark. A row of dusty mason jars on one shelf holds specimens of just about every kind of fish, frog, crab and snake that lives in or on the shores of the lake. They’re all pickled and pale in their formaldehyde baths. Bowls hold the shells of freshwater clams and snails, a selection of local rocks, and there’s a chipped teacup containing fragments of bird-egg shells.
Watching over this collection from the top shelf is Agent Orange, a stuffed ginger tabby cat. Howie’s childhood pet. It was taxidermied in a lying-down posture, legs folded under, tail curled around with its tip slightly raised as if in midtwitch.
“Howie,” I call, trying to get past his earphones.
He’s leaning toward his computer monitor, which shows split-screen images of all kinds of animal tracks. He doesn’t hear me, so I move over into his field of vision.
Howie jumps, gasping. He pulls off the phones. “Scared me.”
“Sorry, man. I knocked, I yelled. Fired off a warning shot. What are you listening to?”
“Nothing. White noise. It cancels out external sounds up to forty decibels.”
“Man, only you would listen to static.”
“Hey, Howie,” Ash says, coming up behind him.
He jumps again.
“Just me.” She touches his shoulder. “Relax.”
“Damn!” He swivels in his chair. “Is there anybody else here?”
Ash shrugs. “There might be a terrorist sleeper cell in your closet. Or maybe that’s just your collection of blow-up dolls.”
He grins. “Those are for scientific purposes only.”
“Right.” Ash picks up a glass paperweight. It’s got a big black bug frozen inside.
“That’s a skin beetle,” Howie says. “They’ve got a taste for rotting flesh.”
“Yum.”
I squint at the overhead light. It’s insanely bright. “What do you got in there? A thousand-watt bulb? I feel like I’m getting an X-ray just standing here.”
“Oh.” He shrugs. “That’s for my seasonal affective disorder. SAD.”
I give him a raised eyebrow. He’s always got some new quirk.
“It’s from the short winter days,” he says. “No sun. You wake up in the dark every morning. Get home from school in the dark. It’s depressing. The megawatt bulbs are supposed to help. Mimicking sunlight, faking out your brain.”
“Right now, it’s frying my corneas.” I look over his shoulder at the open books beside his keyboard. Biology. Anatomy. And a guide to animal tracks.
“Where’s Pike?” Ash asks.
“He went with my dad to the shooting range on base.”
“When’s Pike going to enlist?” I ask. “Is he, like, counting the days till he turns eighteen?”
“They’ll never take him,” Ash says.
“Why not? The guy’s a military fanatic.”
“He’s also a Section Eight,” she tells me.
“Huh?”
Army kids talk their own language—Bratspeak. Sometimes I only get half of what they’re saying.
“Section Eight,” Howie translates. “A discharge from service for reason of mental defect.”
“That pretty much nails Pike,” I say.
Howie shrugs. Pike might be a Section Eight, but he’s also Howie’s big bro. “Hey, did your dad get those fishing huts out on the lake?”
“We towed a couple out this morning.”
“Great. Me and Pike are going to try for some walleye and crappie. Maybe we’ll come by tonight.”
Ash leans over to look at the computer screen. It shows animal tracks left in mud, sand and snow.
“What this?”
“Research. Something Danny wanted me to check into.” He looks at me. “Does she have clearance?”
“Clearance for what?” Ash shoots me a suspicious glance.
I probably should have come here alone. Explaining the tracks and that nightmare attack to just Howie would be tough enough. He’d get a kick out of the weirdness of it. Ash will just think I’m nuts.
“I found some animal tracks in the ditch by the marina. I was asking Howie if he could ID them.”
“What are you doing hanging out in ditches?” she asks.
I shrug. “Long story.”
“So? I got nowhere to be. How about you, Howie?”
He leans back in his swivel chair. “You tell me why you were crawling around in the ditch, and I’ll show you my findings.”
How much can I tell them?
“Okay. Might sound a little bit crazy.”
“The straitjacket’s on standby,” Ash says.
I wander over to Howie’s collection so I won’t have to see the looks on their faces.
“The other night,” I begin. “You know, after Pike torched Fat Bill’s?”
“Yeah?” Howie grunts.
“Me and Ash were going home, down Cove Road. She took her turnoff, and I went on toward the lake.”
I pick up a fossil of a winged bug.
“On my way to the marina, there was this …” This what? This giant thing with a deformed face and a growl that’ll shake the flesh off your bones?
“There was this big … dog, or wolf. A massive one that chased me for nearly a mile, all the way to the lake. And it was running in the ditches, hiding and playing with me. Only not like throw-me-the-ball playing, more like stalking and hunting before chowing down on me.”
I hold the fossil on my palm, running my thumb over the impression of the long-dead bug. Who’d think such a tiny thing could leave any mark at all?
“The next day I found the tracks it left behind. Took some cell-phone pics and showed them to Howie.”
I set the fossil down and turn to face them. Nothing too crazy about that, right?
“Must have been one of Mangy Mason’s huskies,” Ash says. “They’re harmless.”
“Definitely not a dog.” Howie taps his keyboard and brings up an enlargement of one of my cell shots. “I can’t tell you what it is. But I can tell you it’s not canine or feline, not a wolf, a cougar or a bear. Not an ungulate, of course.”
“Huh?” I say.
“Ungulates are hooved animals. So that rules out elk, deer, moose. I’ve gone through my guides and Net databases of mammal tracks. Nothing’s even close.”
Ash studies the image with those spiky claw marks dug in the snow next to my shoe. “How big is that track?”
“Takes about a size twenty-five shoe,” Howie says. “I think what we have here is somebody screwing around.”
“Screwing how?” I ask.
“Take a look at this.”
He clicks to another page. This one shows a huge footprint set in mud, with a tape measure stretched out beside it. Thirty inches long, and about twenty wide. Shaped like a human foot—five toes, a heel and all th
at. But there’s something almost cartoonish about it, like a kid’s drawing of a foot, with the toe indentations all the same size, and perfectly round.
“This was found in Washington State, near a place called Yakima. Bigfoot country. Tracks like these kept popping up for years on trails and logging roads. Scientists took casts of the tracks and studied them.” Howie pauses, tapping the screen with his finger. “People were saying here’s proof that Bigfoot’s real, living wild out in the forest somewhere.”
He brings up an image of a grinning bearded guy holding a giant foot-sole carved out of wood.
“Then this guy finally admitted to faking them.”
Howie clicks through shots of the guy showing how he made the tracks, strapping the big feet on like snowshoes and clomping through the mud.
“That guy’s got way too much time on his hands,” Ash says.
“So you’re saying my snow prints are fakes?” I ask.
“Gotta be. There’s nothing in the books, on the Net—on the planet—that leaves tracks like those.”
I wish they were fakes. Wish the whole thing was a twisted joke.
“So,” Howie says. “Maybe some local weirdo was trying to get his own hoax started.”
“But there was something out there chasing me,” I say, wanting to tell him more but knowing he’d never buy it.
“Whatever was hunting you,” Howie says, “it didn’t leave those monster tracks. They’re pure make-believe.”
Ash squeezes my arm. “Guess your stalker figured you didn’t have enough meat on the bone.”
I grumble, feeling like an idiot.
“Next time, try to get it to pose for a picture,” Howie says. Real helpful.
“Right. A picture of it ripping my head off.”
This is a dead end. I can’t even write it off as a hallucination, because delusions don’t leave footprints.
“What’s this?” Ash asks, picking up a newspaper page from one of the piles on Howie’s desk.
“That’s from yesterday’s Examiner.”
Beneath a headline that reads “Still Missing,” there’s a grainy gray photo, like it was taken at night. A fuzzy figure, identified as Ray Dyson, exiting a side door of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie. He’s wearing some flimsy hospital pajamas, stepping into the frigid dark barefoot.