Bonechiller

  We turn and see Pike slouched in a chair behind the door. Guarding Howie, like always. He looks wiped out. Been on watch all night. He stands now and jerks a thumb toward the door, kicking us out.

  Pike follows us into the hall. “Howie keeps waking up. Crying out. Nightmares, I guess. He just got back to sleep.”

  “But he’s going to be okay, right?” Ash asks.

  “That’s what they tell us,” Pike says. “My mother just went home to get him some clothes. Dad had to head out to the base.” He tries to fight back a yawn. “Man, I need some caffeine.”

  “There’s a cafeteria downstairs,” Ash says.

  “I’ll keep an eye on Howie,” I tell him.

  “Yeah? Stay in the room. Don’t leave him alone.”

  “Okay. Don’t worry.”

  “I’ll just run down, then. But don’t wake him up.”

  “I won’t.”

  He stretches his back. “Later we gotta talk, Danny.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  Ash takes Pike to the cafeteria as I ease the door shut and step quietly over to Howie’s bed. Even in this low light he looks pale.

  A bare foot sticks out from the blankets. I reach to cover it up.

  “Danny?”

  I flinch at his voice, scratchy, barely a whisper. Howie’s eyes are open, focused on me. They’ve got this glazed, feverish look.

  “Thought you were sleeping.”

  He shakes his head limply on the pillow.

  “Can’t sleep. When I close my eyes I keep seeing …”

  I wait for him to finish, but he just lies there. The pile of blankets rises and falls slightly with his shallow breathing.

  “You were there?” he finally says. “Last night?”

  “Yeah. Me and Pike heard you yell. And we ran out to get you.”

  “Did you see it?”

  In the winter light his face is ghost white. His eyes are wide but unfocused. He’s seeing last night.

  My throat has gone dry. I have to swallow before I can speak. “See what?”

  “That thing. With the teeth.”

  I lean against the bed to keep my knees from folding on me. I didn’t want to hear that—really didn’t want to hear that!

  I open my mouth to say something like: You’re still in shock, you were seeing things.

  But I know better.

  “We heard it. But it was out of sight by the time we got to you.”

  “It was huge,” he says. “Bigger than anything I ever …” He trails off, shaking his head. “It had these paws, the size of them … and the claws …”

  His breathing’s starting to get ragged, scratching in his throat.

  “Howie, you gotta rest. Take it easy.”

  But he’s not listening. “Those tracks you showed me. That thing, that’s what made them. It’s real.”

  “Don’t think about that now. You’re safe here.”

  “You said it chased you that night. Did you see it?”

  I nod, tugging down a blanket to cover his foot.

  “Come over here,” he mutters, fumbling with the sheets pulled up to his neck.

  I walk around to the head of the bed. “You need something? Water?”

  He stops fooling with the sheets and falls back exhausted. Even his eyes seem a paler shade of brown.

  “Look,” he mumbles. “On my neck.”

  “You finally get someone to give you a hickey?”

  I was hoping to make him smile or bring some pink back into his cheeks.

  “Right here.” He touches the left side of his neck. “Do you see anything?”

  My stomach goes cold.

  A pinprick blue dot, as if someone stabbed him there with a pen.

  I start hyperventilating, hit by a surge of panic. I have to sit on the edge of his bed to keep from falling. Closing my eyes only makes it worse.

  “That’s where it … bit me.” Howie feels the spot on his neck. “What’s there? What’s it look like?”

  Reluctantly, I hold the back of my right hand close enough for him to see and point out the small blue mark.

  “Looks like that.”

  FIFTEEN

  I have to get out of here.

  Hospitals are poison to me. Every sound, sight and smell brings back bad memories.

  By the time Pike and Ash return, Howie’s out for the count. He could barely keep his eyes open as I sketched out my own encounter with the beast. Finally, his eyelids drooped shut.

  Pike takes his post by the bed, with a tall coffee and a fistful of candy bars. We leave him thumbing through old copies of Sports Illustrated.

  “Want to hit the cafeteria?” Ash asks as we walk down the hall.

  I’m finding it hard to breathe this hospital stink. It’s making me nauseous. “Can we just get out of here?”

  But before I make it to the elevators, my stomach starts to heave. I can’t wait for the elevator. Gotta get out. Now!

  I clamp my jaws, push through the door to the stairwell and race down the stairs. My guts are trying to turn inside out. Down two flights I hit the exit door hard and stumble out onto the snowy parking lot.

  Cold fresh air. My freakout dies off fast with the wind in my face.

  Behind me, the door bangs open. “You gonna puke?”

  “Sorry,” I say. “Kind of lost it there.”

  She gives me a moment to get a grip, pulling on her leather gloves and zipping up.

  “You want to ride back to the Cove, or what?”

  I shake my head. “I need to stick around town a couple hours. So I can talk to Howie when he wakes up. Maybe we can walk around? Find someplace?”

  So we walk for a couple blocks, silently, with Ash shooting side glances at me like I might jump into traffic or something.

  “So what was that?” she says, finally. “Back there.”

  “Just a little temporary insanity.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  I shake my head, but I start talking anyway.

  Before I can stop myself, I’m telling her about Mom. It all comes spilling out. Mom getting sick, all the tests, and the doctors who couldn’t do squat to help her. But they kept finding new ways to hurt her. Useless treatments, burning her with beam radiation. Implanting radioactive seeds into the tumor.

  “Always wanted a garden,” Mom joked when we got her home, her head wrapped in a turban of bandages. “Just not one growing out of my head.”

  Even under that torture she could still joke. She was so brave. And I was a coward.

  It got so I was scared to come home from school, because of what I might find. But I was scared not to rush home too, in case she needed me.

  Sometimes I’d look at her and see a stranger looking back. She’d forget my name. Her brain would short-circuit, and she’d swear and scream these horrible things at me—words I’d never heard her use before. We were losing her. And she was losing herself.

  It felt like it took forever, but really the cancer was quick. It came out of nowhere and ripped her away from us.

  I tell Ash everything. I can’t quit till she hears it all.

  Finally, when there’s nothing left, I stop walking. The pavement underfoot has given way to gravel. We’ve gone from one end of Barrie to the other, with me talking nonstop.

  “Sorry,” I say. “For someone who hates to talk about it, I can’t seem to shut up.”

  I’m not even feeling the wind, but Ash is hunched against the cold, rubbing her gloved hands together. For the first time since I’ve known her, she’s speechless. Can’t blame her.

  Then she throws her arm over my shoulder and pulls me in close. “Come here and give me some heat.”

  We turn and head back into town.

  We grab some pizza, and Ash does the talking now. No heartbreak or emotional trauma. Just blunt-force trauma. Boxing injuries and broken bones, stitches and scars.

  She describes the different grades of concussions you can get, from first to third.

  “Now a t
hird-grade concussion, that’s some serious brain scrambling,” she says. “I got one of those from a wicked uppercut to the chin. So they tell me, anyway. ’Cause that shot knocked a couple days out of my memory banks.”

  I wouldn’t mind a little amnesia.

  After the pizza, we stroll through the mall, deafened by Christmas carols. I give Dad a call. He wanted to know how Howie’s doing.

  Then we make our way back to the hospital.

  Before he finally gave in to exhaustion and fell asleep, me and Howie decided we had to tell somebody what was going on. What we saw, what happened to us. But who? Not the cops, no way. We’d end up in the psych ward. So I said let’s try our stories out on some friendlies first. Pike and Ash. See how they take it.

  As we jump slush puddles crossing the street to the hospital, Ash tells me what it’s like trying to breathe with a broken rib.

  “Is there any part of you that hasn’t been broken or cut or dislocated?” I ask.

  “My nose is still in one piece. And all my good bits are still intact. Show you some time.”

  Before I can think of a comeback, she pushes through the hospital doors. I’m left stumbling after her. Even when she’s not knocking me out, she leaves me punch-drunk.

  We catch the elevator up to the third floor and run into Howie’s mom in the hallway. She looks tired.

  “Hi, guys. I’m just on my way out for a cigarette break. Howie woke up a little while ago. He’s getting some color back. Don’t wear him out.”

  “We won’t,” Ash says.

  Howie’s lights are on, and he’s sitting up in bed with a food tray in his lap.

  “Hey, Howie,” Ash says. “Back from the dead?”

  “Halfway back.” He gives her a weak smile.

  Pike’s slouched in his chair, blinking bloodshot eyes at us.

  “Thawed out yet?” Ash grabs another chair and drags it over by the bed. “You look like crap. And so does that meal. What’s the brown stuff?”

  Howie pokes at it with a plastic fork, like it might poke him back. “It’s either mud or gravy. I’m guessing mud.”

  “Here.” I toss him the Kit Kat bar I picked up for our little sugar junkie.

  His eyes show a glimmer of life. “Real food. Pike, can you flush this stuff? The smell’s making me nauseous.”

  Pike takes the tray and digs in. “Mmmm. Roadkill.”

  “So, how long you in for?” Ash asks.

  Howie breaks off a finger of his Kit Kat and runs it under his nose like a fine cigar. He sighs and takes a bite.

  “Just till tomorrow. They want to keep me for observation. Make sure I don’t relapse into shock.”

  “So what’s the story?” Ash says. “What happened last night? You go for a polar bear swim?”

  Howie looks over to me for help.

  “You want me to go first?” I ask him.

  He nods, carefully breaking off another chocolate finger.

  “Go first with what?” Pike glances back and forth between us. “What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on is pretty crazy. Just warning you up front. Ash, I told you part of the story the other day. But I gave you the censored version.” I suck in a deep breath. “Okay. So, here goes. Flashback with me to the night Pike did his pyro act on Fat Bill’s.”

  Starting there, I take them through my run home after I parted ways with Ash. I wander around the room, not meeting anybody’s eyes. I describe the beast, knowing how delusional it sounds. But I rush ahead before I can chicken out. And when I end with me reaching the house after the attack in the ditch, I’m near breathless.

  “I don’t get it,” Pike says. “What’s the punch line?”

  “No punch line. No joke.”

  He sets the tray down on the bedside table. “What the hell were you smoking that night? And where can I get some?”

  I look over to Ash, but her eyes give nothing away. “What’s this got to do with Howie going through the ice?”

  I gesture to Howie, passing it over to him.

  “I, uh …” Howie scratches at the mark on his neck. “I saw it too. I mean, the thing that went after Danny. That’s what attacked me on the ice.”

  Howie gets a little twitchy with all eyes on him. He ran through it with me briefly before, when we were swapping stories, but now he’s choking up.

  “Go from the beginning,” I nudge him. “From when Pike left you in the hut and came up to the house for coffee.”

  “Right. Yeah. I stayed to watch the lines. We were doing pretty good. The fish were biting.”

  He tells his story slow, like he’s trying to delay the nasty parts. Even safe, and surrounded by the three of us in the light of day, he gets shaky as he relives it.

  After Pike left, Howie was sitting on the little wooden bench built into the hut, listening to “Hockey Night in Canada” on his radio.

  He was staring at the black hole cut in the ice near his feet when he felt the bump.

  “I thought somebody’d skidded their snowmobile into the hut. The whole thing shook with a thud. Then I thought maybe Pike was screwing with me.”

  So Howie started for the door to peek out. From the corner of his eye he caught sight of something jumping up out of the fishing hole. For a split second he thought it was a fish.

  But then he saw the size of it, and it was no fish. In the light from the lantern hanging from the ceiling, he didn’t know what he was looking at. Until it moved. And he saw the claws digging into the ice. Then he realized the thing was attached to something below the surface. It was some kind of enormous paw.

  “Bigger than a polar bear’s. Way bigger.” He holds his hands about three feet apart. “And no fur on it. Just this pale white hide.”

  Howie backed out of range of those claws as they raked into the ice, leaving deep grooves. He was frozen watching, scared and fascinated at the same time, knowing whatever was attached to that thing wasn’t going to fit through his fishing hole. He figured out too late what it was trying to do. Make a bigger hole.

  Then the ice gave. A chunk the size of the door to the hut fell through, sending out cracks across the frozen floor. Howie jumped up on the bench, watching his fish bucket and rods sink into the water after the hunk of ice and the disappearing paw.

  Huddling on the bench, Howie searched for a path to the door on the frozen rim that still held up along the walls of the shack.

  But before he could try, there was a spray of water as something emerged from the black water, breaking through more of the ice. Not just a paw this time but a massive head surfaced inside the hut.

  Howie’s description of it is too good. My legs get shaky.

  Howie stutters big-time now, remembering.

  That’s when he screamed the first time. Me and Pike heard it in the kitchen at the house.

  In the hut, Howie was so fixed on those eyes he barely caught sight of the paw shooting up from the dark water. He jumped out of the way as it landed on the bench beside him, and he kept going along the rim of ice, then hit the door and crashed out.

  Howie got about ten feet away when the ice behind him exploded, knocking him to his knees. The cracked surface slanted under him. He slid backward.

  He screamed the second time. Just before he went under.

  Howie shivers as he tells it, even buried under all his blankets in this overheated room.

  As the lake swallowed him, he threw his arms out, splashing in the blackness, searching for solid ice. The cold knocked the wind out of him.

  Then something bumped his legs under the surface. Struggling wildly, Howie managed to get his elbows up and heave himself out of the lake, rolling away from the open water.

  He crawled, and was pushing himself to his feet when the ice shook under him. Looking back, he saw something huge and pale burst upward, spraying water into the air.

  Howie turned and ran for the dock. The ladder was in sight, leading up to the house and safety.

  But his legs were knocked out from behind. He rolled ont
o his back and saw that thing looming over him.

  What happened was like with me and the beast down in the ditch. It let out a roar. The tongue stabbed him.

  Then it was lights-out for Howie. Nothing more till he came to in the hospital.

  He sags back on his pillow, forehead shiny with sweat.

  The room is dead quiet. Pike rubs his hand over his Mohawk, frowning at his brother. Ash looks from Howie to me, her face unreadable.

  “Sounds like a Windigo story,” she says, finally.

  “A what?” Pike grumbles.

  “Kind of an Indian ghost story. Windigos are demon spirits that roam the wilderness, eating up lost souls.” She widens her eyes at us. “Spooky stuff. My Dad used to tell me about them.”

  “But they’re not real?” Pike asks.

  “Well, no. It’s just stories. I mean, come on.”

  “What are they supposed to look like?” Howie says.

  “Big, ugly things. Bulging eyes. Lots of long, nasty teeth. They have a chunk of ice for a heart. And when they shout, they grow taller than the trees.”

  “Right,” Pike grunts.

  “You heard it,” I say to him. “Remember that growling in the dark, and the roar.”

  “Could have been a wolf—a bear? Hell, I don’t know.”

  Howie’s head turns on the pillow, eyes on his brother.

  Pike shrugs. “It’s not that I’m not believing you, bro. It’s only … this is some insane stuff.”

  If it was just me and my ditch story, Pike could dismiss it. But he trusts his brother. And Howie’s the only one on the planet who believes in Pike, who knows him as more than the nut everybody else sees.

  “I don’t know, guys.” Ash gives us a look like the show’s over, now let’s get a grip. “Where’s your proof?”

  “Our stories back each other up,” I say.

  “Don’t mean squat. Come on. They brought Howie in unconscious, in hypothermic shock. He still looks out of it. And you say you hit your head and blacked out in the ditch. Maybe you got a concussion. Definitely not thinking straight.”

  “Yeah, I hit my head and everything. But me and Howie saw the same thing. I mean, two people can’t have the same hallucination, right?”

  “If there’s some big, nasty monster hunting out there,” she says. “And it had you guys cornered, then why didn’t it just chow down on you? Why are you still breathing?”