Chapter Thirty-Nine
Thirty-Nine
JOHNNY WAS RELIEVED WHEN IMANI said she didn’t need to be carried.
Her frame was small for her age, but after this endless morning, her weight overpowered his tired muscles.
Still, he had cherished the feeling of her weight in his arms, reminding him of the unlikely day she had been born.
Their miracle child. Imani. Faith. Their new baby would need a grand name too.
The cavern seemed to have stabilized after he fired his rifle, but he thought he heard whispers and grumbling following them in the walls while Imani led him on the route toward Tasha.
If he had taken the time to examine the wall closely, he might have seen some of the spreading micro-thin fissures.
But they both understood they needed to move fast.
Imani had set down glow sticks to help her retrace her path, and Johnny marveled anew at his children’s strength and ingenuity under pressure. He wished his family had never faced a tiny portion of this test, but the unforeseen discovery of their fortitude exhilarated him.
And Sharise was getting help. She wasn’t lost or hurt. He had to believe that. As he traversed the dark caverns with Imani, he imagined Sharise in her UCLA blue climbing up the ridge steps to the lodge. He imagined her starting the Jeep’s engine, the Jeep purring with ease.
Sand sifted next to Johnny’s ear, sliding from the wall. He laid his hand across the stone to make sure it wasn’t trembling. “How much farther?” he asked Imani.
The answer came in Tasha’s hidden voice, only slightly raised: “Johnny? Imani?”
In this narrower passageway, her voice didn’t bounce as much. The final glow stick lying close to the wall showed them how close they were.
“Here!” Imani said, and she ran ahead, forgetting that she carried the strongest light.
He rounded the corner… and there Tasha sat, as if in a spotlight from Imani’s powerful glare. She looked like a bird atop a nest in this compact nook, sitting on a mattress of twigs, brush, and fabrics. She stared, her face slack as if she could not believe the sight of them.
And he didn’t blame her.
How was it possible? Johnny had experienced her death twice today—once on the road, and once when they heard her shrieks inside the tree.
He could barely believe the sight of her either.
Her hair was slightly mussed and she was wearing a ragged green scrap over Mazelle’s robe to keep warm, but just like Imani, she didn’t look like she’d been snatched away by that monster.
She looked like it was a regular day. Except for the new lines near her eyes—her pain.
Tasha outstretched her arms, ready to receive them as they both raced to hug her.
Johnny kissed her dry lips and massaged her scalp through her hair, savoring every living piece of her he had thought was gone. He inhaled the scent of her.
“What happened?” Tasha whispered. “Where’s Sharise?”
“She’s fine. She went to get help,” Johnny said.
“But what about—”
“It’s dead, Tasha. I shot it.”
Johnny couldn’t help the pride that quavered his voice.
The skinny kid who hadn’t wanted to shoot a rabbit—and had chickened out when he might have shot the creature when it was small—had felled the giant by remembering Uncle Ricky’s lessons.
And he’d killed it in one shot, no less.
He had not failed his family, either the living or the ancestors.
Tasha sank against him, sighing with gratitude. Then she reached for Imani’s hand and held on tight. Johnny heard her whisper to their daughter, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.”
The anguish still carved on Imani’s face made Johnny’s mouth go dry. He had assumed she was in shock when she stood so close to that creature before he shot it, but now it was obvious that she had been trying to save its life, a version of Stockholm syndrome. Or was it more?
Again, the wall seemed to whisper its distress. He might have imagined it, but today had taught him not to ignore anything, even if it didn’t seem real. “We need to get out,” he said. “That shot was loud, and this place might collapse…”
With Johnny on one side and Imani on the other, Tasha brought herself to her feet. He was worried about the injury to her foot, but he would have time to tend to her outside.
“Wait,” Tasha said after her first hops over the debris bed. “Imani, grab that pile of newspapers.”
“For your book?” Imani asked while she picked up the stack of laminated pages. Aside from a few clipped responses to her father, this was the most Imani had spoken since the bone room.
“It’s history,” Tasha said.
“What history?” Johnny asked.
Tasha showed him one of the shiny newspaper sheets: a story about his grandmother and her dog. The lamination had held up, but the page itself was yellowed and withered from time, dated from 1928. A hundred years old, he marveled. And it was here, of all places.
Johnny felt a smile lift his cheeks. Well, damn.
Her pet must have figured out how to smuggle some of her belongings out of the lodge.
He felt a jolt of sadness that he had been forced to take that creature’s life.
It had been capable of memorializing—both here and in the bone room. That wasn’t normal animal behavior.
It had been a monster, yes, but also so much more.
Johnny hadn’t heard everything Imani said before he pulled the trigger—not with his heart clamoring in his ears and echoes flying like sonic missiles—and most of what he’d heard hadn’t made sense.
But the plastic water bottles he’d last seen on the kitchen counter at the lodge were now right in front of him on this creature’s nest, which made him remember Imani’s exact words: It brought us water.
Johnny felt goose bumps across his back that finally had nothing to do with fear or cold.
Hollman had mentioned that small things at the lodge might have gone missing—he was particularly saddened by the loss of a custom green evening gown Mazelle Washington had worn the day she met the great Lena Horne.
He’d remembered Mazelle showing it off to him as a boy.
That was one of the few happy stories about Mazelle Washington that Mom had told him, and now he felt certain that same gown was draped over Tasha, grimy and tattered, with only a faint green glimmer across the beaded low collar to signal its iconic past.
Johnny’s eyes stung with his wish that he could have loved his pioneering grandmother and her remarkable creature instead of being forced to see them as monsters.
“History,” he agreed, his voice breaking.
And he kissed Tasha.
It took them more than twenty minutes to help Tasha hop to the cavern’s entrance, another five to help her navigate the unstable ascent to climb outside.
The elation of their reunion was shredded by her agony when she accidentally bumped her foot against the rocks.
She didn’t feel like she was crying, but her eyes watered the whole way.
Crawling over the rocks with her left foot raised helped her make it up to the gap, but she’d still managed to hit her foot at the end, when she shifted too fast in her eagerness to climb out.
Outside, the cold air froze her tears as soon as it touched her.
The cavern had felt cold, but it was at least ten degrees colder outside, with a slight wind because of their height.
It might not even be thirty degrees out here.
She would need that emergency blanket from Imani again.
Tasha scooted as far as she dared to the rim of the ledge, and the distance down made her swoon.
She felt nearly as endangered here as she had in the cavern.
She scanned the snowy landscape: the creek, the open snow, the single dead tree barely visible inside the mist. More distant pine stands.
She didn’t recognize anything. She’d expected to see the lodge somewhere in the distance, but this was wilderness.
In the snow below, a solitary pair of boot prints showed where Sharise had walked on her journey back toward home. It would not be a small journey. Please let her be okay.
“How far did you chase me?” Tasha asked.
Imani shrugged. “A mile?”
“More than that,” Johnny said. “Closer to a couple.”
The beauty of the snowscape couldn’t keep Tasha’s hands from shaking. Isolated images of the day winked in her memories. And the pain! Her foot was screaming. To fight the pain, she tried to remember everything she was grateful for.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” she said. “Or anyone. I thought I would lose the baby. I thought I would never see the sky again. I thought I would disappear.”
Johnny squeezed her hands with palms colder than hers. “Not on our watch.” He slid his hand to her stomach, and she pressed her hands over his. Their baby was safe. He had survived. They both felt the same gratitude, too big for words. But no words were necessary.
“How long should we wait?” Imani asked, tossing a stone over the cliff.
“We have to give her a couple hours,” Johnny said. “She might not be at the lodge yet. I can try to find another way down… but I think it’s best to wait. For now. I could have broken my neck climbing up here.”
Seeing how high he had climbed to find her and Imani, Tasha felt such a wave of love for Johnny that she could only squeeze his hands to the rhythm of her heart.
“I can get wood from inside and build a fire,” Imani said.
“I know you can,” Johnny said, “but let’s stay out here. We’ll play it safe from now on.”
Tasha permitted Johnny to look at her injury, but only if Imani promised to keep her face turned. When he pulled the last of the sweater away from her foot, it felt like he lifted her skin up with it. She shrieked while he clucked and soothed her.
“Imani, hand me that kit,” Johnny said. “And… some water.”
Johnny and Imani shared another look. Tasha understood Imani’s sharply disapproving eyes as she handed her father a bottle of water from her backpack. She remembered where that water had come from.
“Is it bad?” Tasha asked.
“It’s not too bad,” he said, but he was a damn liar. He looked sick to his stomach.
Tasha screamed while he washed her wound. The alcohol was an inferno. Her foot kept wailing after he had wrapped it. No relief. She swallowed two more pills from Imani’s kit, not sure how much she had taken, or even what. She wanted to swallow them all.
She and Imani would have a long talk about Not A Bear one day soon. Johnny too. They would never forget the pain, but they couldn’t pretend away the rest. Johnny’s family already had too much history of pretending.
“I wonder what it was.” Imani was the first to say it, but she didn’t look in Johnny’s direction. The confrontation had sounded chaotic from a distance, but Tasha had heard her daughter beg for the creature’s life.
Johnny’s head sagged. He didn’t answer.
“I don’t know,” Tasha said. “They’ll have to study it.”
“I wonder if it killed a lot of people,” Imani said.
“At least a few,” Johnny said. “My uncle was in there. I recognized this on his hat.”
He unzipped his jacket pocket and pulled out a tarnished silver buckle he’d saved from his uncle’s remains. The bear’s head. Imani held out her hand, so Johnny let her run her fingers over the grooves of the bear’s sharp teeth.
“Baby, I’m so sorry,” Tasha told Johnny. “I know you always wondered about him.”
Imani scooted closer to her father. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said. “Maybe he was scared. Maybe he didn’t really want to.”
Johnny nodded, but his glazed eyes were not forgiving.
Tasha ached for them both, hoping she could be the bridge between her husband and daughter.
She might be the only one who understood that caution and enchantment could coexist. She would never forget that a fearsome creature had brought her water when she was thirsty, and maybe tried to warm her up when she was cold.
Was its love for Mazelle why it had died today?
But she would have shot it too. Just in case.
Thirty minutes later, a loud cracking sound and tremors on the ledge signaled that the cavern was caving in behind them.
The gap coughed out a puff of dust with a rotten smell, as if the entire cavern were a corpse.
Tasha huddled with Imani and Johnny, afraid their ledge might break away too.
She felt more afraid of tumbling to her death than she had in the dark.
But the ledge held them safely aloft even while it shook. And then the shaking stopped.
Imani, with her superb sense of hearing, was the first to notice the chop-chop-chop sound of an approaching helicopter.
When Johnny and Tasha heard it too, they all cheered and waved their arms at the red and white bird soaring over the pine stand.
As the helicopter circled the cliff, they yelled until they were hoarse.
Between her compass, remnants of their tracks, and a dose of luck, Sharise had hiked back to Bear Creek Lodge within forty minutes.
The Jeep had started without complaints, and she had followed the hand-posted road signs back to Route 89, and eventually to McCloud.
There, she stopped at the first business she saw, the Gas N Go.
The woman at the counter, Sue, remembered Sharise’s family from their shopping trip when they had left two gas cans behind.
(She had stored them, expecting them to drive back.)
She hadn’t even blinked when Sharise hysterically described the animal that had abducted her mother and sister as a monster.
It was Mount Shasta, after all. And Mazelle Washington’s property.
And anyone who’d lived near Mount Shasta or Bear Creek Lodge long enough knew that extraordinary things happened sometimes.
Just like Gracetown, some places courted the extraordinary.
Sue had called the sheriff personally, since she was her sister-in-law, and the Bell 206 JetRanger had been in the air within minutes.
And Sharise, wearing a helmet and strapped in tight, was on board to point out the hollow tree and the cliff beyond from the sky.
When she saw Imani and her parents waving like a family of tiny dolls below, she shrieked with joy.
It was such a pure and complete joy that Sharise would live the rest of her life knowing that she should never lose faith.
Just like her sister.