Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
FIVE MINUTES LATER—OR AN HOUR
LEFT FOOT. RIGHT FOOT. LEFT foot. Right foot.
Johnny staggered in the unfamiliar wooden snowshoes, shadowing his daughters’ trails with inelegant stomps down the hill. He tried not to think about the other trail he was following—Tasha’s trail. Her journey with that monster was too terrible to ponder.
Johnny’s right shoulder was sore from lifting his ski pole to pull it out of the snow and plunge it back in before his next step, and he wished he’d brought both poles instead of only one for better balance.
Too often, he felt himself rocking. The snowshoes prevented his feet from sinking, but powdery clumps bled through the webbing, making each step a labor.
He had learned to bend his knees as he walked, since the terrain was uneven and he’d gotten a nasty jolt to his right knee—not the one that was already sore, luckily—when he stomped down too hard with his leg straight.
Still, Uncle Ricky had been right. (Do you hear how you sound right now?) Without the snowshoes, he would have been finished before he started.
Johnny still battled occasional dizziness that vanished for a couple of minutes and then returned with surprising power, freezing him in place while he tried to let it pass.
But he had made his way past the bottom of Mazelle’s modest ski trail and the boulder where Imani and Sharise reported they had found a deer’s head to the pine woodland beyond Mazelle’s property.
The thicket was dense, and Johnny was impressed at how well Sharise and Imani had maneuvered past the trees on their snowboards.
Ahead, he saw a deviation in their trail.
The snowboard lines crossed, and a large swath of snow was disturbed.
Had they been attacked? His nerves were already electrified, but since there was no blood his mind headed off his panic with a simple explanation: One of them had fallen, probably Sharise. And then she’d gotten right back up.
“See?” Johnny said aloud, pointing his ski pole toward the gap in the pines closest to him, where the trail continued undisturbed. “They’re fine. They’re gonna be fine.”
Only now, assessing the grounds around him instead of the path below, did he remember exactly where he was.
Landmarks were useless because trees looked alike to him, and the last time he’d been in this woodland was nearly fifty years ago.
Back then, he had snow-tubed down to the bottom of the ski trail and walked north into the pines with the Winchester, following the path of this monster’s smaller forebear.
But how had he known, even then? Something had seemed wrong as soon as he saw the pile of snow beside Mazelle’s kitchen porch.
Maybe he was a city boy, but he’d clocked the odd swishing pattern in the snow that Uncle Ricky had pretended he couldn’t see while he pointed out meaningless rabbit tracks.
Sure, Uncle Ricky eventually told him something might be out here, and maybe he’d have to go get rid of it once his mother died.
He had said that, hadn’t he? Don’t go out looking for something you ain’t ready to find, he’d said.
But Johnny had gone out looking. The faintest glimpse of that creature in miniature had told him how unnatural it was—so unnatural that he’d eventually convinced himself that it couldn’t be real.
But during that last childhood trip to Bear Creek Lodge, he had decided he would shoot it.
He’d never wanted to shoot rabbits, but that thing?
That creature had made him feel like a hunter; not one who hunted rabbits to escape the monotony of Christmas leftovers like Uncle Ricky, but one who stalked the monsters that attacked in the dark.
The last time Johnny had talked to his actual uncle Ricky—not his ghost or hallucination or whatever the fuck—was at his high school graduation four years after Mazelle died.
Johnny had huddled under the brim of his uncle Ricky’s cowboy hat to ask him outright about their “secret” in the woods (meaning had he shot it yet, or had it eaten anyone, the typical stuff you ask about a monster at your grandmother’s house).
Uncle Ricky had just laughed and said if he’d claimed to have any “secrets,” he must have been stoned.
So, back to the bullshit. Uncle Ricky never owned either his confession about how he and Johnny’s mother had wished they could euthanize Mazelle out of love, not hate, or the monster’s tracks he had pretended away in the snow.
And here Johnny was—back in this goddamn snow.
Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot.
Another current of dizziness rocked him— “John Richard Washington!” he shouted, as if he could call himself to attention—
—But it doesn’t work, because he has the rifle and he is fourteen years old, the winter Mom dragged him back here, wading in snow so high that it’s soaking his jeans because he doesn’t have snowshoes.
But he has the rifle and he is hunting the monster.
The shadows are long because it’s nearly dark.
In fact, it is dark. So dark. And cold. And he is so damn tired.
“I said get your ass up.”
Johnny opened his eyes and saw only white. He blinked. “Am I dead?” he whispered.
No one answered. He heard Uncle Ricky at the fringes of his recall, a faint echo that made him shake his head so he could return to the land of the living.
Was his face on fire? The right side of his face was lying against the snow.
Johnny sat up, frost falling from his skin and clothes.
The burning sensation only increased when he pressed his glove to his right cheek, his skin crackling to life after going numb.
How long had he fainted? Five minutes, or…
The pine trunks rocked into perspective. He was in the woods. He was looking for Sharise and Imani. He was following…
Johnny scanned the smooth snow around him, and he couldn’t stanch his panic. The only visible tracks were behind him, from his oversized snowshoes. The forest floor around him looked untouched after last night’s snow. Before he fainted, he had wandered from their trail!
“No… No… Shit…” The cold had calcified his joints, so Johnny was as stiff as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz when he leaned on the nearest tree trunk to bring himself back to his feet with a groan.
He hadn’t counted on fainting from time to time and losing his way.
Worse, it was darker now. The gray clouds bulged overhead, muting the daylight and hiding the mountain’s peak.
It would snow soon—he could feel it. And if he lost that trail…
Did he dare call out for them? He would have been screaming for them all along if he hadn’t had a trail to follow, but calling for them was risky.
Having a trail made it easier to believe the monster was out there somewhere far ahead of him, not hidden in the snow nearby.
If he called out and his children answered him, they would all be that much easier to track.
Without a trail, he didn’t know where the monster and his children were now.
Johnny sucked in a long breath, a gasp in slow motion. The frigid air sharpened his mind. His presence out here with nothing but a knife in its sheath and a ski pole felt like a death wish more than a rescue. He wouldn’t be able to run in these snowshoes.
Johnny remembered that he still had his cell phone in his jacket pocket and pulled it out to check for a signal, but his phone showed the same blank line. Still no service. Shit.
Since he didn’t have room for more panic, Johnny decided to look for the trail.
He probably hadn’t wandered off too far.
These trees looked like any other trees, their branches loaded with snow.
He backtracked on his own trail, five steps, six steps, seven steps, trying to fight a feeling of rising hopelessness.
Uphill walking was harder. He exhaled loudly with each step, the sound of a weary old man—the sound of a man who might die out here.
People died of heart attacks over less every day.
Despite the cold, new perspiration sprang to Johnny’s forehead and dripped into his good eye. Blurry whiteness again.
As soon as his sight faltered, a wall of whiteness brushed across Johnny’s face, striking at him hard enough to sting.
He cried out and swung his ski pole to bat away at what had felt like a tentacle and long snout.
The ski pole caught on something, and yanked from his hand.
Johnny raised his arms to protect his face and neck from teeth.
He couldn’t run, and he didn’t have time to grab and unsheathe the knife. Adrenaline surged through him, and he stumbled backward, nearly leaping despite his snowshoes. But the monster moved so fast—
When no pain came, Johnny realized the monster had never been there.
A branch must have struck his face, and the rest had been his imagination.
He wiped his vision clear—carefully, so, so carefully—and sure enough, he was near the base of a large pine tree with long lower branches like reaching arms. His ski pole was caught on a branch close to him.
Johnny tried to stop breathing in gulps that made him see spots again. He tugged his ski pole clear of the branch and steadied himself on it.
“It was just a tree,” he said to himself, because he needed to hear it. “You’re okay.”
As he assured himself, he noticed ruts in the snow curving not far right of him, just beyond the tree. The trail! He lunged toward it, ducking under the branch he’d tussled with in order to reach it in fewer steps. “Thank fucking God—”
The blasphemy had barely left Johnny’s lips before the world fell away.