Chapter Twenty-Nine
Twenty-Nine
“WELL, AIN’T THIS SOME BULLSHIT?” Uncle Ricky said.
Johnny had been dreaming. A nightmare. Some kind of otherworldly creature had taken Tasha, and he was lost in the snow. The worst dream of his life. Johnny opened his eyes, relieved to flee to light and wakefulness.
Uncle Ricky was squatting over him in his black cowboy hat, a stub of a joint pinned between his lips.
He pinched the roach to take a drag. It took two full seconds for Johnny to remember that his uncle Ricky had died while he was in college, and that this wasn’t the first time he had seen him today.
Uncle Ricky had disappeared in these woods.
Johnny was sitting against a thin pine trunk. He must have fallen asleep. (You mean passed out?) A blur of woods and driving snow all around.
When he blinked, Uncle Ricky’s form stayed fixed. Glaring at him.
“Fuck,” Johnny said. Despite this persistent phantom’s presence, he knew he wasn’t dreaming.
Worse than that, he might be dying. His left arm throbbed, and he felt like a log was pinning his chest. His raised knees knocked together as he tremored.
Now he vaguely remembered that he had felt an overwhelming need to close his eyes for five minutes and give his shivering limbs a rest. Sweet, sweet rest.
“Fuck’s the right word, all right,” Uncle Ricky said. “As in, ‘What the fuck are you doing sitting on your ass?’ ”
Johnny’s body shivered enough to clack his teeth. He didn’t answer.
“You ain’t the only one who’s cold out here,” Uncle Ricky said. “You think those babies ain’t cold too? They’re waiting on you and you’re out here chilling.”
Chilling. “Is that suh-supposed to be funny?”
“No, it’s not suh-suh-supposed to be funny,” Uncle Ricky said, mocking his shivering.
“Leave me alone!” Johnny tried to shout, but his voice was hoarse.
Uncle Ricky shrugged. “Suit yourself. Thought you were tryin’ to do something today.
” He straightened to his full height, which seemed giant now, just like when Johnny was younger.
He was at least six foot three. Before Mazelle hurt his knee, he’d been a rare Black high school quarterback in the 1960s.
After flicking his roach into the snow, he turned and started to walk deeper into the pine grove, beneath the snow-drooping branches.
Johnny’s sudden wave of panic at abandonment made him scramble to his feet. Uncle Ricky was the only help he had. The snowfall was so heavy, or he had been unconscious for so long, that his own tracks were gone.
“Wait!” he called after Uncle Ricky. “Which way?”
Uncle Ricky turned to look at him over his shoulder. “Just didn’t want you to freeze to death, boy!” he called. He raised one hand to wave at him. “You know where they went.”
“No!” Johnny said, stumbling to move toward him in his snowshoes. The waving hand. “I don’t know! And just tell me why! Why is that monster out here? Why did she feed it?”
“You ain’t figured that out yet?” Uncle Ricky said.
Oddly, his hand was still raised, frozen in his farewell wave.
“Looked at that burn on your arm lately? She was the monster, Johnny. It was like lookin’ in a mirror, maybe.
Grandmother told me she was the sweetest child you ever did see, but not by the time Hollywood was done with her.
Said she wished she’d never taken Mother to her very first screen test in Florida, said Mother would have been better off that way.
Mother sure never was sweet to us, huh? The only thing she could be sweet to was runnin’ wild in these woods.
” Uncle Ricky winked at him, a bitter leer. “Literally eatin’ her young.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I brought my family here.”
“I’m sorry, son, but it was a secret,” Uncle Ricky said. “I tried to keep you away from it. Guess it was all Mother had left.”
Uncle Ricky’s voice was softer too. Fading.
“Where’s Tasha? Where can I find her?”
“Tasha’s with me in the bone room, Johnny.”
His voice was light snowfall.
Horror jittered through Johnny. “What does that mean?” he called, although he had a good goddamn idea.
Tears stabbed the corners of his eyes. He tugged his stubborn snowshoes ahead for one step, and another, trying to reach Uncle Ricky’s waving hand.
When a gust of flurrying snowflakes cleared and Johnny blinked vision back to his good eye, Uncle Ricky wasn’t there anymore.
The waving hand was a purple glove posed in the tree.
Imani’s glove.
Johnny gave such a harsh exhalation of relief that his shoulders hunched as he reached to touch the glove.
Was it real, or was he only imagining it like he kept imagining his uncle?
He tugged the glove from the branch. The label from a black marker inside read IMANI W.
in Tasha’s precise block handwriting. Imani often lost track of her belongings, so Tasha had labeled almost everything she owned.
The glove sat like a portal to his old life in his palms.
Imani had left her glove as a marker. For him.
Uncle Ricky had led him to the glove after he collapsed only yards away.
Gooseflesh rolled across his skin as he wondered if Uncle Ricky was only a hallucination.
Uncle Ricky had saved him from the tree well, and now the glove too?
Johnny had never believed in ghosts, but he had never believed in monsters either. Until today.
“Thank you, Uncle Ricky,” Johnny whispered as he clung to the glove, willing his voice across time. The only answer was a light thunk as a branch near him released its burden of snow.
As he turned to try to see signs of Imani’s tracks, his snowshoe caught on something solid, with a sharp, shiny green corner.
A large hardcover book! He leaned over to pick it up, and gooseflesh bloomed again.
Soothing green waves and a Windsurfer on the cover.
He knew this book well from hours of forcing Imani to let him help her with her math homework.
California Mathematics: Concepts, Skills, and Problem Solving: Grade 7.
Johnny heard his own mad laughter as he hugged the book they both loathed.
He brought the cold cover to his lips and kissed it. He flipped through the book’s pages to smell traces of the true world outside, not this nightmare prison in the woods. Unless he was imagining it (And let’s face it, you probably are), the book smelled like Tootsie Rolls. Imani’s favorite candy.
And still no blood anywhere in sight.
“Thank you…” Johnny whispered again, grateful to a ghost, or God, or both.
He hadn’t lost the trail. He might be close now. His mouth ached to call for them.
(But when did they start shooting?)
Johnny tossed the textbook aside, remembering vigilance. He shoved Imani’s glove in his back pocket and held his ski pole defensively, sharp point first.
Remnants of the trail were preserved in the grove, both boot prints and snowboard tracks.
The boot prints were pointing in the opposite direction, heading back uphill.
Right here, they had decided to take off their snowboards and turn toward home, probably when it started snowing.
Could they be at home? Hope flooded Johnny.
Could a day that had begun with such mindless evil take such a good turn?
But why had they fired the rifle twice? Johnny didn’t see the monster’s trail here, although he saw traces of his own snowshoe tracks leading to the tree where he had collapsed. He was passing himself, and his daughters, like they were specters haunting this spot.
He followed his daughters’ boot prints, hoping they would continue all the way back to the lodge.
The tracks winked out of sight in clearings, covered by snowfall, but he saw the trajectory well enough to keep sight of them without having to backtrack.
As soon as he thought he might have lost their tracks, evidence of their passage emerged under a tree’s expansive branches.
(Though he kept far away from any possible tree wells and hoped they had too.)
But the boot prints’ uphill motion stopped abruptly. Sharise and Imani had paced in confusion here, unsure and frenzied. And the snowboard tracks began again, veering in a different direction, back downhill. Why?
A rutted snow disturbance ahead of Johnny showed him why.
The monster had been here. They ran right into it.
The snowboard and monster tracks converged downhill.
The monster chased them. Johnny’s ribs squeezed his chest tightly enough to make him groan, but he couldn’t help quickening his pace as if the pursuit were happening before his eyes.
Whispered, unintelligible promises and entreaties spilled from his mouth with every step.
He knew how fast that monster moved. He knew his daughters could not have matched its speed even on snowboards, especially with such level ground. They would have had to…
The tracks stopped. Johnny saw the snowboard trail swoop back, a snapshot of the instant they decided to stop running. He imagined himself in their place, turning to face the creature with the rifle…
A pale pock in a pine trunk twenty yards away stared back at him, evidence of a rifle shot. Here. This was where they had fired.
Johnny stared down and saw glimmering in the web of his snowshoes. He stepped back and picked up a spent rifle shell. “Good girl, Imani. Good girl.” The second casing might have been buried, but he had heard the second shot. And then what?
The snowboard tracks continued downhill… but the monster’s trail hared off, heaps of displaced snow veering far wide of the snowboards’ ruts. The rifle shots had scared it off, at least temporarily. Johnny’s chest loosened. Relief helped him breathe again.
“You didn’t like that, huh, you sonofoabitch?” Johnny said, rejoicing.