Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
TASHA AND JOHNNY HUDDLED OVER Imani’s GoPro camera, their faces close to her miniature video screen.
The lighting was bright and sharp on the footage, so the frozen blood and shredded flesh on the deer’s neck looked close enough to smell and touch.
No wonder Imani had barely taken a bite of her dinner!
The poor animal had been ripped apart. Mangled.
The thick streak of blood across the tree trunk looked unnatural. Ritualistic.
Tasha remembered to suck in a long, slow breath to keep from spinning out. Sharise and Imani had seen this carcass so close to the lodge and hadn’t said anything? Her anger at her daughters helped blunt the deeper fear coiling in her belly, masquerading as nausea.
Tasha felt Johnny’s thrumming chest beside her, as if his heart were trying to wrestle past his rib cage.
His jawline too carved through his cheek.
He’d come back from the generator already looking sick from his ordeal outside, a story he had not yet told her.
When they stared at each other after seeing the ghastly images on the video screen, their faces mirrored what was weighing in their minds.
We made a mistake. We might be in trouble.
Johnny squeezed Tasha’s hand and held on for what felt like a full minute.
Then he pulled his fingers free. He turned to face their daughters, who were side by side on the sofa awaiting a reckoning.
Tasha steepled her fingers in front of her mouth because she didn’t trust the words that might fly out from her simmering fear.
“What time was this?” Johnny asked the girls, his voice so soft that the popping twigs from the fireplace nearly overpowered it. “When you saw it?”
“There’s a time stamp,” Imani said. “You could just look.” She could sound pissy when she didn’t mean to, with her unvarnished approach to communication. Tasha fought another surge of annoyance, but Johnny patiently studied the video screen again.
“It was right before we came in,” Sharise said. “Maybe… three forty-five?”
“I see now,” Johnny said. “Three fifty. And it’s right by the steps up to the lodge?”
They nodded.
Johnny straightened, pacing. He took off his jacket and carefully laid it across the back of the sofa next to the rifle he’d propped up there when he came inside.
Between the fire and the central heat, the room had warmed up fast. Tasha could swear she already had the heightened sense of smell that came with pregnancy, and their nervousness had a sharp, sour smell.
Their collective nerves might be raising the heat too.
“You should have told us,” Johnny said.
Sharise leaned forward to take responsibility. “Dad, I’m sorry, we just—”
“And that’s a conversation for another time,” Johnny said. “I need to tell you what happened when I was outside just now. Something is out there. I think it’s circling the lodge.”
Sharise gasped, clutching Imani’s hand.
“Johnny,” Tasha said, startled that he would say something that frightening to Sharise and Imani without telling her first so they could devise a strategy. She had thought he had stronger emotional control tonight, but now he sounded like he was almost talking to himself.
“I don’t know if it’s the same thing that got into the house,” Johnny went on, ignoring their reactions until they listened, hushed, “and I don’t think it’s a person.
Just like whatever killed that deer, I don’t think it was hunters.
I heard it up in the tree, and it kind of…
slithered down. Then it hid under the snow. Maybe it’s a mountain lion.”
Tasha felt the room dimming when Johnny said the word slithered, only snapping to alertness again when he filled in a picture of what animal might have moved in such a way.
“I don’t know why it’s so bold, if it’s hungry or it’s got rabies or what…” Johnny said. “I don’t know if it might… break a window. Or try to break down a door.”
“What are you talking about?” Imani said. “That would never happen.”
“Why, Imani?” Sharise snapped. “Because it wasn’t on Naked and Afraid?”
“John.” When Tasha called her husband John, she usually got his attention fast. No pet names. No nonsense. “Sidebar.” That was their code for not talking in front of the children. Her entire pregnancy had been a sidebar until tonight.
As if she hadn’t spoken, Johnny went on.
“When I was a kid, I used to think I saw a creature moving in the snow here.” It was a confession, the word creature more alarming than slithered.
“I thought I saw it in my grandmother’s window once.
And when I was outside alone. My uncle Ricky told me it was all in my head.
But it would move under the snow and leave these weird zigzagging patterns instead of regular tracks, not like any animal I knew.
Maybe I did see something back then, except now it’s bigger.
The shadow I saw in the kitchen was the size of a bear, so that’s what I told you.
It was my best guess. But bears hibernate.
And I heard it in the tree outside. Which has me wondering now… ”
Illumination made Imani’s eyes widen with alarm. She’d forgotten that fact about bears. Now Imani, the less anxious one, was scared too.
Tasha shot up to her feet. “John.”
He stopped long enough to look at her. He seemed to morph back into himself, his shoulders relaxing. “But nobody should panic,” he said.
“Uhm… too late?” Sharise said.
“Baby,” Tasha said to Johnny, more gently.
Her carotid artery pulsed with her heartbeat.
She breathed calm into her voice the way she had talked to her grandmother before she died of Alzheimer’s, assuring her that her anxieties had been heard.
“You got spooked outside. I understand: Something’s out there, and it got in here.
And we don’t know what it is. We’re all scared.
But we just have to lock up and stay inside. In the morning, we can go home. Right?”
Imani squirmed with disappointment, but she knew better than to object.
No way in hell was their family staying here a minute longer than necessary.
In retrospect, it felt wildly irresponsible that they had made themselves so vulnerable with no way to summon help.
At night, the lodge felt like an inconsequential stack of planks beneath a dark, endless sky.
Johnny curled his lips sheepishly and combed his hand through his hair. “I sound like I’ve lost it,” he said, just when he sounded like himself again.
“What did it look like, Dad?” Imani asked. “The thing when you were a kid?”
Tasha was worried that Imani would yank Johnny back to his fever, but the manic glint had left his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said. “White fur, like camouflage in the snow. That’s all I remember.
” But Tasha doubted that was all, or he wouldn’t be so afraid, on some level, that it might still be out there almost fifty years later.
That childhood creature lived in his nightmares, maybe as a reaction to the abuse from his grandmother.
“Mountain lions don’t hide under snow,” Imani said glumly. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“Anyway, your mom is right,” Johnny said, raising his eyes to Tasha’s. Grateful that she hadn’t ridiculed him. His voice steadied, more certain. “We just have to get through tonight. Seems like the snow is letting up too. Tomorrow, we’ll be back at home.”
“And thanks to Dad, we have electricity,” Sharise said, trying to raise the mood.
“We’ll stay in this room,” Tasha said. “Imani got a nice fire going, and this sofa folds out into a bed. Someone can take the love seat. We’ll all just sleep here.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Johnny said. He picked up the rifle, slinging its strap across his shoulder. One look at him told her he would not sleep another wink tonight, and she might not either. They didn’t have to talk about keeping watch in front of the kids. That was a given.
“There’s more blankets upstairs,” Sharise said. “And our bags.”
“We’ll go on a supply run upstairs together,” Johnny said. “Shoes, bags. Get everything.”
Everyone started to move toward the hall except Imani, who was staring into the flames. She often was the last to move out of the car, or away from the dinner table, lost in thought.
“Imani?” Tasha said. “Come on. We’re grabbing your stuff upstairs.”
“A bunch of meat rotted in her freezer,” Imani said softly, still staring at the fire.
To Tasha, it felt as if the strange mood that had overwhelmed Johnny had flown to Imani next. Johnny gave Tasha a questioning look, and she could only shrug.
“What’d you say, little bean?” Tasha asked, using her nickname for Imani since she was a fetus.
Imani turned to look at Johnny, her face sober. “There’s a freezer in your grandmother’s garage. I broke the lock and looked in. She had, like, fifty packages of beef from the 1980s. It’s rotten, and it’s all dried up now. Maybe… she was feeding something?”
Tasha was about to tell Imani that she was making a leap a mile long, but Johnny looked at Imani with wide-eyed vindication, as if he’d thought the same thing.
“Show me,” Johnny said.
Tasha managed to stay awake a full hour after Imani and Sharise fell asleep, but by 4 a.m. she had nodded off curled on the love seat, her face glowing in the golden fire’s flame.
She had retrieved Mazelle’s robe to sleep in over gray sweatpants and a sweatshirt, fur nuzzling her face, but Johnny pulled her blanket up to her chin.
Imani and Sharise were already snoring softly beneath a plaid blanket on the queen-size pullout couch.
His family was asleep. Safe. This indescribable feeling was almost worth all the rest. A night that had teemed with chaos was now tamed with unremarkable routine. No more strange noises or bumps in the night. The doors and windows were locked, double- and triple-checked.