Chapter Thirty-Three #2
She needed to hold her bones together and warm her skin.
A thin sweater near her might have been cream-colored once, ground to filthy gray; she tugged it free from branches to cover her foot, wincing as she wrapped it from her toes to her ankle.
She tied the sleeves in a knot as tightly as she could tolerate.
She tried to wiggle her toes and still felt no movement.
Tasha could tell that her foot would hurt more once the cold wore off.
She could lose her foot. Maybe she had lost it already and didn’t know it.
As she searched for other clothing, her light caught a laminated newspaper headline in the gap of a twig’s forked shadow: WHAT HAS LAZY MAZY GONE AND DONE NOW?
The article’s photo, hidden in darkness before she shifted her beam, was a grinning Mazelle Washington as a young woman with a bow in her hair, wearing her Black maid’s uniform and white apron.
The newspaper was faded despite the laminate, but the words and image didn’t vanish after Tasha grabbed the paper to hold it closer to her face. It couldn’t be—yet here it was.
“What the hell…?” she whispered.
The newspaper was dated April 23, 1946, promoting a film called Lazy Mazy Strikes Again that Tasha had never heard of.
She blinked, beginning to doubt her existence again.
Her foot’s pain couldn’t be a dream, but the rest of the day was inexplicable.
She’d been dragged all this way and memorabilia about Mazelle Washington was waiting for her here?
She must be having a nervous breakdown.
Tasha shined the light for other evidence of Mazelle.
In the scrap heap, a gold-tinted woman’s high-heel shoe glinted, the golden tone faded except at the old-fashioned butterfly buckle.
Beside that shoe, she found another laminated newspaper, some of the page too water-stained to read, but she quickly found a headline in the top right corner: LAZY MAZY IS TOPS WITH MOVIEGOERS
“What… the… hell?” Tasha said again.
Was this a haunting like in her grandmother’s stories? Or had she lost her mind?
She studied the evening gown she’d wrapped herself in.
Strapless. Elegant once, now torn and soiled.
The label was too faded to read, but it looked like a designer dress.
Why were Mazelle Washington’s belongings stored in a cavern so far from her lodge?
And who had stored them here? No, not a haunting—a shrine.
“… going for help!” Johnny’s voice drifted from the void.
“Yes—take the girls and get help!” Tasha shouted. She’d hoped they had scrambled away already. But she knew the words to stir him. “Promise me! Promise you’ll take the girls home!”
Johnny had vowed to her once that he would never break a promise. His promises were his religion to him, hearkening back to his old promise that he wouldn’t let the age difference influence their decision to have children. Tasha’s heartbeat drummed in her ear while she waited for Johnny’s response.
“I promise, Tasha!” Clear as a bell, somehow. She hoped she wasn’t only imagining what she’d heard, because it was too late to say anything else now. Too late to be quiet, which she should have done at first. She felt it.
Something was in the cavern with her. Maybe it had been there all along, but it was closer now, rustling through twigs.
Loud chittering echoed everywhere at once. Behind her. In front of her. Above. Below. It sounded like an impossibly long rattlesnake coiling in a ring around her—the last sound she remembered before she’d gone flying out of the car.
“It’s here!” Tasha shrieked. “It’s back in here! Get away and get help! You promised!”
Blended, excited voices came from forever away. Dream voices from her long-ago past.
Tasha’s true world narrowed to the cavern and the feeble reach of her flashlight, strobing against the rough, beige-gray walls in her shaking hand. Her beam caught shadowed gaps in the wall and jutting stones that took on strange shapes in her panic.
The chittering was deafening. How could the creature not be in sight?
“Stay away from me!”
A breath ago, Tasha would have mourned the way her screams were scarring her listening children, but the only child she could nurture now was the one she imagined beneath her palm as she clutched her stomach; a baby boy with curly wisps of hair like her father’s.
“Leave me alone!” Tasha remembered how Johnny had chased away the bear.
No, not a bear. At first it had looked like snow climbing up her window while the car shook like an avalanche was burying it, but when her door opened and those flaps snapped wide and then folded around her, all she could think was, It’s not a bear.
It’s not a bear. It’s not a bear. Not A Bear became its name because no other name suited it.
Not A Bear was back. Not A Bear might have been in the inky folds all along.
Tasha should have whispered instead of shouting and shrieking. (But if she had whispered, her family would not have heard her.) The time for whispers was gone.
“Stay back!” Her shout was so loud, so fierce, that it clawed her tender throat.
The chittering went silent, and she gasped in surprise. Was saving her life that easy?
Tasha sucked in three long breaths to keep from hyperventilating; her body was trying to hoard oxygen.
Enfolded in Not A Bear’s grip, at times her face had been wrapped too tightly against the rough fur of its limb (wing?).
Her terror of suffocation had outweighed every other fear.
She felt her nostrils constrict now, as if in anticipation.
Her flashlight’s beam was so shaky that she didn’t see the pale outline of the creature moving toward her until she heard it gliding over the cavern’s debris, almost whispering across the ground.
Not A Bear reached the fuzzy edges of her light’s ring, enough to show white fur dulled by the dark.
Not A Bear undulating on the ground, gliding toward her.
Not A Bear seemed to float instead of walk.
“Stop it—stay back!”
Tasha scooted away from it on her debris bed until she was pressed to the wall, barely noticing the waves of pain when she bumped her foot.
Here, she heard the faint, frenzied voices of her family and wondered why they hadn’t escaped while they had the chance.
If Not A Bear was with her, it wasn’t with them—unless there was another one.
Did they think screaming her name would help her?
That it gave her comfort to know they had defied her last wishes and they all still might die today?
Not A Bear slithered closer, narrowing the gap between them to only fifteen yards. Ten. Its eyes glowed red in her flashlight.
No staff, stick, or stone near Tasha was thick enough to wield power or stab it in defense.
Instead, she tugged on a natural shelf above her to stagger to her feet, making herself taller as she leaned on her right leg.
She spread out her arms. The sleeves of Mazelle’s red robe fanned out, her own wings.
“Get away!”
Less than ten yards from her, Not A Bear raised itself as if it were mirroring her.
Its long, snakelike torso transformed, arching.
Its winglike flaps snapped open with a gust of warm, foul stink.
The creature was seven feet tall and at least eight feet across with those flaps extended.
It lowered its long snout, teeth glimmering from the corners of its mouth as its silvery eyes leveled with hers.
Its tail lashed back and forth, sweeping aside debris.
A sound like an oversized insect’s whine vibrated from its throat.
Tasha clutched her stomach—her baby boy—with both arms.
“What are you?” she screamed at it as if it could answer. “Stay away from me!”
Her voice was going hoarse. She would not be able to scream again.
Her body trembled so much from combined terror and cold that she could barely stay on her feet, sagging back against the wall as she curled over to protect her midsection, hugging her baby with sobs of regret.
(I’m sorry I was so afraid. I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to protect you. I’m sorry.)
Tasha couldn’t stand to watch Not A Bear’s advance, or to see those teeth again, so she lowered her flashlight beam to her feet, where she was standing on another crumpled newspaper article with Mazelle’s face grinning back at her as Lazy Mazy.
If Tasha weren’t sobbing so hard, she might have been overcome with hysterical laughter.
And why not? It was like looking at herself. Her own face.
I look like Mazelle, she remembered. That fact mattered suddenly—a lot. Deeper comprehension teased Tasha, a mental key to unlocking the mysteries of this terrible day.
But her thoughts melted when the creature came face-to-face with her in one long, impossible swoop of its flaps. She didn’t have time to scream. Reflexively, she raised her flashlight beam, praying she could scare it away with light. But it wasn’t a bat, or a vampire.
Not A Bear had taken her during daylight. It hunted in the sun.
The light revealed so much that Tasha was transported by her curiosity even now, when her right leg was shaking so violently.
Thin, pointed tips teeth-shaped to mangle, not merely to bite.
When she smelled its rank breath, stinking of death, she forced herself to notice how the thick fur was almost spiky up close, not nearly as smooth as it looked from a distance.
When the beast lowered its snout to bring its eyes even with hers, she forced herself to notice how they were silver at the rims the way she would have imagined a werewolf’s, but up close those irises were mostly a deep brown.
The creature’s eyes were oddly discerning.
“Mom?” Imani’s voice wailed from the dark behind her, as small as a gnat.
The creature’s eyes darted toward the sound too.
“Don’t,” Tasha whispered. “Don’t hurt my children.”