Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
The cavern split in three directions, but he instinctively discounted the upward trail, which seemed too narrow for the monster to fit.
That left two passageways forking right and left, both at a sharp downward slope.
Remembering how they had heard Tasha in the faraway tree, Johnny chose the path he guessed was closest to the tree, with the widest width.
In the fringes while he trained his light on the ground ahead, his eyes swept the antechamber for streaks of blood near him. Nothing yet, thank God.
But strands of white fur carpeted the ground. Yes, this was the place.
He was invading the monster’s den.
Johnny’s pace slowed as he reminded himself that he couldn’t walk ahead of his light.
The monster could be fifteen feet in front of him and he wouldn’t know—hell, ten feet.
He nearly stumbled into a wall when the tunnel unexpectedly curved.
Up close, this wall looked ravaged, the basalt streaked with shadowed columns.
He walked close to the wall as if the pitted, uneven floor might drop away.
After he rounded the bend, he raised his light to try to see where he had emerged. He sensed a growing expanse around him, so perhaps the cavern widened.
Beside him, his light revealed a cairn of stacked bones.
A cry scuttled in Johnny’s throat as he jumped away, but he bit it back.
The bones were loosely assembled in a pyramid, but a tangled one.
The bones looked old, more brown than white.
Bloodstained instead of bleached. The lower bones were too large to be human; rib bones too wide and arched.
The tiny bones at the top might be from rabbits, foxes, and squirrels.
“Jesus… Oh, Jesus…” Johnny whispered, midway between blasphemy and prayer.
He raised his light, and ghostly images of identical piles floated into his weak beam, spaced neatly apart despite the internal disarray, as if they had been stacked by a child. Everywhere his light ventured, bones appeared.
A bone room.
Tasha’s with me in the bone room, Johnny.
Johnny realized he was holding his breath, trying not to smell the bones. The cold disguised the smell at first, but his nose clotted with the pockets of rotting meat that had not been fully stripped away. This chamber was soaked in the smell of decay.
He could not count how many piles of bones surrounded him, most of them still hidden in darkness, but every step brought a new stack to light—some of them spilling apart with loose bones at his feet, some much taller than the rest; eerie monuments.
What the hell was this thing? Was this a single monster’s work, or a pack of them?
And then the unthinkable question: Were Tasha’s bones here too? Imani’s?
Johnny swung his flashlight to the opposite wall on the left, and a human skull stared back at him with emptied eye sockets. Stripped clean of everything except its teeth.
A single gold tooth gleamed in the back of the jaw, glimmering in his light. That would not have been enough to make his heart wither if he hadn’t seen the glint behind the bone pile, against the rough wall.
His memory had erased the silver buckle, but he remembered it now after nearly fifty years: a bear’s head.
The last time he had seen this buckle, it had been bound to a leather strap around the base of Uncle Ricky’s black cowboy hat.
The lump of fabric nestling the buckle was unrecognizable now, washed of its black color, more red-brown, the suede misshapen and collapsed. But there was no mistaking it.
Johnny shined his light back toward the skull crowning the pile, imagining the gold tooth when Uncle Ricky had grinned at him.
He lowered the light and saw more bones that might be human.
A rib cage. Two crossed, thick bones that might be femurs.
Tangled inside the bone pile, rags of fabric might have been a shirt once.
And what might have been a single hiking boot.
The bone pile was Uncle Ricky’s memorial.
Johnny gasped in the thick, condensed air.
He’d been holding his breath again. He coughed in lieu of a sob.
His mother probably would have sacrificed a year of her too-short life to learn where Uncle Ricky had vanished—and the answer was this?
Posed in a macabre display this close to the lodge in this boneyard?
It was senseless. Infuriating. Heartbreaking.
Johnny’s horror deepened when he realized that his beam might next illuminate the bloodied corpses of Tasha and Imani, not yet dissembled entirely to bone.
Each new revelation in his cone of light sped his heart and weakened his legs, as if all of his blood flow were charging to his brain instead as he saw evidence of countless unlucky deer, elk, and rodents.
And hikers or hunters. A zippered backpack lay at the heart of one of the bone piles; it had been red once, now faded and dirtied.
Johnny stared at the backpack in frozen terror for nearly half a minute before he realized it had been here too long to be Imani’s—not fifty years, but at least a couple. But whose was it…?
Johnny reached to grab one of the backpack’s straps, and the tower of bones tumbled down with a racket of clattering and clicking, some of the bones brittle enough to break when they landed at his feet like raining dominoes, a sound that filled the cavern. Shit.
Johnny let go of the backpack and stepped away, his rifle readied again. He couldn’t be hypnotized by the bones and lost lives in this chamber, not unless he wanted to join them.
But now that he had revealed his position, he had no reason to stay quiet.
“Imani?” he called, his voice soft, far from a shout. “Are you here?”
A last bone rattled down, making him jump. Precious, damnable silence came next.
Then Johnny thought he heard a distant rumble winding through the corridors. It could almost be the sound of a vehicle revving its low engine, but it sounded more like…
Growling, he realized. Every instinct told him to run.
A distant voice came next from everywhere around him: “Johnny! Sharise! Watch out!”
Tasha! The sound of her voice made Johnny stagger with joy.
Tasha was alive! He hadn’t known how much he believed she was dead until he heard her voice, a miracle on this day of damnation.
He wanted to call back to ask about Imani, but Tasha’s warning compelled silence.
She might have risked her own life to warn him, and foolishness would dishonor that risk.
Johnny hated to sweep his light away from the bones lining the walls—in the dark, they seemed to shift and glower—but his gut told him that Tasha hadn’t called out with a general advisory.
The monster was about to attack him, and the monster moved fast. He had to try to light its routes of possible attack with this tepid glow.
He thought he saw the vague outline of a fork in front of him.
He would only have a chance if he saw the monster coming.
As it turned out, Johnny would hear the monster before he saw it.
The brittle stones on the floor of the cavern betrayed its racing approach with a swishing noise not much different than its sound in the snow, only more jagged than soft. It moved with such speed and purpose that debris popped and cracked against the walls as it approached.
But his ears tricked him in these tunnels, so Johnny found himself spinning in different directions to try to guess where it would emerge. Panic ate away at his rationality; he turned to look behind him although he had not crossed its path before the bone room.
With his light leading his muzzle, Johnny jerked his rifle from side to side. Everywhere he looked, he was surrounded by soupy gray and imaginary motion in the dark.
Johnny’s shaky finger tightened on the trigger. He was on the verge of firing a warning shot when he realized he didn’t know what the impact of gunfire would be in this cavern. Could he trigger a collapse? Would he shoot Tasha or Imani in the dark?
“Come on!” Johnny yelled.
He sounded like a man ready to kill, but he felt more like a man about to die.
As if the monster obeyed commands, he felt its large bulk enter the space, its motion jerking to a sudden stop, almost like one of his children skidding on a snowboard.
Finally, his light distinguished the monster’s shadowed white coat.
It was standing upright like a snake only a dozen feet from him.
This spectacle was nothing like the miniature monster he’d seen in his grandmother’s window—as tall and wide as a grizzly, directly in his path. Standing between Johnny and his family.
For an instant, neither of them moved. Johnny heard only his panting breath and smelled his own perspiration mingled with the blanket of musk from the monster.
The monster emitted loud, long sniffing noises. It was smelling him too.
The monster’s terrifying, unnatural chittering clogged Johnny’s ears.
This was the jumbo version of the sound he thought he’d heard from that tree when he tracked this monster when he was fourteen.
Now the sound quaked his bones. With a yell, he raised his gun—he would take a chance with the sound of gunfire.
He had no other defense except to shoot it.
Bright light strobed from the tunnel behind the monster, silhouetting its terrifying form. The footsteps Johnny heard approaching behind it were human. Small.
“Daddy, no!” a voice shouted. “Don’t shoot it!”
Dear God.
The voice was Imani’s.
Imani had stumbled once while she ran, scraping her ungloved hands bloody on the rough floor of the cavern—but otherwise, she had never run so fast. Every time she was sure she had lost Beast’s path toward her father, one of her glow sticks had appeared to show her the way back toward the cavern entrance. Back toward Daddy.
The whole time she ran, she’d been plagued by visions.
Her father chomped in half by vicious teeth.
Beast lying dead from a rifle shot, it secrets forever gone.