Chapter Nine
Nine
FRIDAY
He drove into the snowy woods.
Rory hated driving in snow, especially without chains.
And cell service was spotty out this far, so he was on his own if he got stuck.
This narrow road was mostly plowed, but new snow flurries were spinning in the gray midday light.
He’d heard at the gas station where he stopped to confirm his directions that a recent snowstorm had shut down most of the private roads up here.
Luckily, he was following a promising set of tire tracks.
Maybe someone was up at the lodge he could talk to.
Everyone knew everyone in a town as small as McCloud, but although no locals trusted him enough to tell him the lodge was always empty, they’d hinted that no one would be at home today.
The woman running the gas station had let it slip that the lodge’s property manager came in a couple times a week for her “World’s Biggest Chocolate Chunk Cookies” the size of dinner plates, so Rory had left his number in case she saw the caretaker—Dickie somebody.
But Rory’s days on the cop beat had taught him to verify, verify, verify.
People misremembered. Confabulated. Lied.
And that meant driving up the mountain to knock on the door himself.
The last thing Rory De Santo felt like doing was driving up a mountain.
He’d planned to spend his weekend cutting promos for his podcast and watching the 49ers, with a few naps sandwiched in between.
Naps were a necessary ritual, like he was back in kindergarten.
He felt human for six hours at a time, and then he needed to sleep.
He’d been in bed early when he got the call at ten last night, which he only picked up because he hadn’t seen the name on his caller ID in years.
Lloyd Garrett sounded slurry, maybe after a few shots of liquid courage, but their thirty-minute phone conversation had compelled Rory to drive more than three hours from Sacramento as soon as the sun was up: Look, man, I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s under the snow and it moves FAST, Rory had said.
I’ve never seen anything move like it. I just need to know I’m not crazy.
Ordinarily, Rory wouldn’t have changed his weekend plans over such a vague tip, but Rory had worked with Lloyd Garrett at The Sacramento Bee and he had never shown any unhinged qualities.
But last night, the tremor in Garrett’s voice had crawled under Rory’s skin—and was still vibrating there—so Rory had decided to check it out, just to see.
He had his mic if he needed to record on his phone.
If an experienced hiker like Garrett, cheerless copyeditor extraordinaire, was freaked out by something he’d seen in the woods, the word maybe was hard to deny. Maybe was Rory’s magic word these days.
Maybe he wouldn’t always feel so shit-tired. Maybe he would stop losing weight.
Maybe something inexplicable was hiding underneath the mountain’s snow.
Rory hadn’t expected to come back to Mount Shasta.
He’d already done three episodes of his podcast here, and the frequency of tips from this area felt like a kind of mass psychosis.
But since the mission of Tales of a Yearning Skeptic was to follow the tips in the hope of finding something real, he couldn’t avoid a region with such a long lineage of cultists, shamans, priests, and UFO hunters drawn to the mountain’s otherworldly beauty.
Today Mount Shasta was draped in white from stony peak to valley.
No wonder her beauty made people lose their sense of perspective.
This was where he’d taped his first episode, “Bigfoot Revisited.” Most locals weren’t Bigfooters, to their credit, but he recorded enough claims of “sightings” in these woods and caverns that his maiden episode two years ago had gone viral.
And now he was here chasing another phantom—this one under the snow.
Or… maybe there was something to it. Rory’s heart quickened enough to notice.
His ex had said he was like an atheist trying to believe in God without true faith.
Colon cancer and diabetes were a cocktail of motivation to seek out wonder in the world, since he couldn’t get it up anymore and he was a bad biopsy away from hospice at the ripe age of forty-five.
With his cancer-ridden family that orphaned him in his twenties, he hadn’t expected to live to be an old man—but he’d thought he would at least make it to fifty.
Something dark stood upright against the whiteness on the roadside ahead, around a slight bend.
In a shadow obscuring his sight as he drove, the figure seemed taller than a man, standing on two legs between the trees twenty yards ahead.
When sunlight sliced through the shadows, he saw it was only a deer, an immature buck.
He almost laughed at himself for his hallucination; he was no better than the tipsters who left him deluded voicemails and emails.
Rory slowed, his tires grinding in the snow, before the buck turned and bounded over the snowbank left by the plow, disappearing into the tree line.
He remembered when seeing deer used to make him think of Bambi as a kid, how they seemed almost angelic, and he missed that sense of wonder.
But that was the whole point of this excursion, wasn’t it?
Rory caught himself praying to the God he had rejected in childhood: Please don’t let it be bullshit this one time.
Then Rory turned up his radio’s volume. The driving beat of “The Hand That Feeds” by Nine Inch Nails blared from his Jeep’s speakers, a twisted choir for his new religion.
The bass shook his seat with angry pounding that soothed him like a massage.
Fuck cancer. Fuck a third round of chemo the way his doc suggested.
If Rory was wrong about the possibilities in life, maybe he was wrong about the possibilities in death too.
“Where the hell is this place?” Rory whispered to himself. He was ready to be dazzled.
Garrett had said the lodge was about half a mile past the turnoff to the private road, although he also said he’d been lost when he stumbled upon the site.
Whatever Garrett thought he’d seen in the snow had been behind the lodge, near the top of the property’s private bunny trail.
This area looked more like a nature preserve than a resort, the road getting narrower and the thicket getting denser.
Snowfall quickly covered the tire tracks ahead, which were now so faint he might have imagined them.
Just when Rory was sure he was on the wrong road, he saw an aged wooden sign nailed to a wide fir tree, professionally engraved in script: BEAR CREEK LODGE.
Beneath that, a generic metal sign looked more recent: PRIVATE PROPERTY: KEEP OUT.
No gate stood in the road to stop him. Rory drove on.
The lodge’s driveway was wider than the road, also freshly plowed, so it was as “impossible to miss” as Garrett had promised, a clearing cordoned off by a wooden gate.
The two-story lodge stood thirty yards beyond the gate, bracketed by snow-laden branches of spruce and mountain pine trees at least fifty feet high.
The lodge’s windows were dark and somehow unfriendly, their upstairs shades drawn like two half-lidded eyes.
It reminded Rory of the farmhouse in Misery, more a modest residence than a lodge.
The house might not be more than twenty-five hundred square feet, but it projected breadth despite its faded paint on the wood panels that might once have been barn red, now reduced to streaks of sun-beaten rust and gray.
The wooden sign on the post near the gate had identical script to the one on the road, but offered more information in addition to a profile of a bear’s head: BEAR CREEK LODGE. ESTAB. 1949.
The gate barred his passage. Rory pulled his Jeep up beside a four-foot snowdrift so he wouldn’t block the driveway. He turned off his Jeep. His music died mid-shriek.
“Well, shit.”
Rory didn’t like nosing around on private property, and not only because it wasn’t strictly legal.
Garrett had danced around why he’d been here, and now it was obvious that he’d known he was trespassing.
Garrett had said his nephew had told him about a hidden ski slope for tubing and snowboarding, but if there was a slope here, it wasn’t open to the public.
Rory opened his glove compartment to pull out his pack of clove cigarettes and a lighter.
He’d given up smoking when he was thirty, when Monica got pregnant.
Their son had died after fifteen hours, and subsequently so had their marriage, but Rory had stayed quit until his first round of chemo two years ago.
As consolation, he had given himself the gift of a single clove cigarette—his former love.
That became one or two cigs a day, still holding steady.
By now, he was lying to check No when medical and insurance forms asked if he was a smoker, but he’d been smoking a pack a day before, so it was the spirit of the truth.
And the hooks were in him again: Smoking soothed his nerves so much that he always felt the pangs of desire to light the next one.
And the next. One more uncomfortable burden to add to his fucking list.
Just one today, he promised. Maybe he would quit again on Monday. Like last week. But it was hard to give up a simple pleasure when death was stalking him.
After a couple of pulls, the nicotine flooded Rory with clarity.
He would knock on the door and hope someone was home.
If not, he would quickly tour the property and try to find the spot near the slope where Garrett had gotten spooked.
If he found a trail or anything didn’t look right, he would shoot photos or video and ask permission later.
Then he would get the hell out of here. The property didn’t look like it had security or wildlife cameras, but it might.