Chapter 13
Zach paced, trying to slough off the residue of the recurring nightmare that was the past.
Moonlight shone in white columns through the hut. The fire had dimmed. Zach rested his forehead against the glass of a window, its coolness helping settle him. In the distance loomed Mount Mariah, so pale after the storm that it had a bluish, antiseptic quality.
Zach frowned. Stepped back from the window to better see out of it.
There was something moving in the distance above the tree line, above where the miner’s cabin hid in the forest. A black, wavering form, cast into high relief against the snow by moonlight, headed uphill toward the ridge that rimmed Mariah Bowl.
The monster.
It had to be—what—half a mile away? It was so difficult to assess distance in the mountains even in daylight, let alone to try to guess how far away something moving up a slope in the dark might be.
But Zach comforted himself with the knowledge that it was too far from the hut to carve things away from him, to leave behind bone, stripped muscle, an absence of blood.
The way the thing shifted reminded Zach of the way his own hand’s shadow grew and shrank when he used a flashlight to create a bunny or a duck on the wall to make Bonnie smile.
Its shape was humanlike, yet not. Animallike, yet not.
It bent and swayed, an arm going long, a leg suddenly short.
Three limbs, then five, then none; a columned shadow.
A cape, a wing, extended behind the figure before whipping back.
The distorted, night-traveling unknown stretched to immense proportions, then a moment later metamorphosed into a black marble.
It had to be whatever he’d heard dragging through the snow while he stood frozen with fear in the outhouse.
Zach ducked below the window frame at the sudden realization that he was visible, too, with the firelight at his back.
Squatting on the floor, his mind spun out awful possibilities.
The creature might have seen him outlined in the glass.
If he looked back through the window he could find himself face-to-face with twisted teeth.
But when Zach snuck a cautious look outside, he saw that the thing was continuing its climb.
The longer he watched, the more at ease he felt.
Being inside where it was warm, where fire burned, where Mr. Fantastic lay nearby, allowed Zach to feel protected and curious.
Only babies believed in monsters. There had to be a rational, grown-up explanation.
A person, looking funny because of the distance and the way the moonlight shifted through the clouds. A wandering coyote. A weather balloon? Though he’d heard those last words before, Zach didn’t know what they meant. He pictured a drifting Mylar party balloon, its ribbon tied to a drone.
Up the thing went into thinner air and darker night. It didn’t hug close to the ground the way a four-legged animal would; the way the thing in the trees had.
Could someone be lost?
No. With the hut’s fire lit, anyone lost would have seen its glow, would have headed toward its promise of warmth and safety.
Would be able to see it even now, from up there.
And the hut was a five-hour ski from the trailhead; the trailhead a two-hour drive from town.
No one would start such a trip late enough to reach this point in the middle of the night.
The figure vanished from sight. Instantly, as though plucked off the mountain.
Was it hiding? Or it might have reached the top of the ridge, its silhouette erased against the darkness of the sky—still there, just invisible.
Zach waited, searching for any sign of the fluid figure along the rim of the Bowl above.
The sky resumed spilling huge flakes. The wind redoubled its howling, blowing that snow into an endless white array of crisscrossing fireworks.
Should he wake everyone up? Tell them what he’d seen?
Zach pictured his father’s reaction to any hint of something wrong on this trip, his trip. The long fingers would wrap around Zach’s upper arm, a pop-pop-pop of all-seeing eyes emerging from skin. Zach’s breath tightened and he shook his head no.
And anyway, the thing was gone now. Probably some animal, his imagination filling in the scary parts. He realized he was chewing on the cuticle of his thumb and forced himself to stop. Why should he think that his eyes were more governable than the rest of his body?
Zach lay down, this time choosing a couch that had its tall back between him and the window out to Mount Mariah; a kind of shield against watchful eyes.
He pulled his coat over himself, letting the pocket with the folding knife, the tablets, the compass, the matches, press against him like a good-luck charm.
He hugged Mr. Fantastic. His eyes closed and saw a wandering ghost, drenched white as the storm.
A flesh-hungry, darkened monster. Claws and flies and water and the whitened elk skull, a dirtied diamond earring dangling from its eye socket.
All you can do is hope it leaves you alone.
—
The smell of bacon woke him. Seeing the room filled with the light of an overcast morning, Zach understood he’d had one of those sleeps where time vanishes to a blink.
He startled at finding Pike staring at him from the couch opposite.
“Oh! Uh, hi,” Zach said.
Pike’s drawn face, the familiar squinty, bloodshot look of his light brown eyes, confirmed he’d had far too much to drink the day before.
Steve hummed as he cooked breakfast in the kitchen, his back to them both.
“Were you down here all night?” Pike sounded irritable, as if Zach’s potential restlessness offended him.
“Not really? I came down and it was warm, so I guess I fell asleep.”
“Doesn’t look comfortable.” Pike jutted his chin at Zach’s couch. “You couldn’t’ve slept much.”
Zach shrugged. “It was okay.”
“I slept terribly. Could’ve sworn I heard a window or door banging around.”
Zach stiffened. The dragging claws of an alien. An amorphous creature in the moonlight searching the mountains for marrow and blood and—
But in daylight, the memories of things seen and unseen the night before melded with past nightmares, and all of it took on the sheen of the imagined.
Pike had likely heard Zach slamming the hut’s door behind him after returning from the outhouse. No wonder he seemed annoyed.
“There were a lot of noises with the storm and all.” Zach gestured to the accumulated powder outside, hoping this offering of a different offender would distract Pike from the possibility of Zach himself.
Pike rubbed his knuckles hard against his eyes, a childlike gesture at odds with the muscularity of his thick arms. “Tell you what, I think Dave’s story got to me. Kept thinking about aliens. I even thought I heard something screech out there.”
“Me too!”
At this Pike leaned toward Zach, a posture that Zach realized mirrored his own, equally excited to share in the strangeness.
“What did you hear?” Pike asked.
“An animal, maybe? But I couldn’t tell what.”
“From where?”
Zach gestured toward the snowbound meadow out the hut’s windows. “It sounded like that way, but it was hard to tell.”
“Did you investigate?”
“You mean, go outside to see?”
“Yeah.”
Zach shook his head vehemently. “No way.”
“Smart kid,” Pike said, relaxing back now onto his couch, “because it sounded weird as hell. I was more than happy to stay in bed, too.”
Zach let Pike think the cry had woken him the way it had Pike. It would be humiliating to admit the way he’d fled from the outhouse, then been glued to the windows, eyes searching the meadow below, the slopes above.
Though if Pike had heard the monstrous howl, that meant it had been real. Which would mean the strange figure moving up Mariah, the dragging sounds by the outhouse, might also have been real.
Zach shivered.
“You believe in that aliens and monsters stuff? From Dave’s story?” Zach asked.
“Nah.” At seeing Zach sag, look disappointed, Pike added, “Though, I mean, we don’t, like, know everything. And there’s something about the dark, you know? It makes that stuff seem more real. Makes everything seem scarier.”
Despite Zach’s suspicion that Pike was saying this only out of pity, Pike did look oddly haunted, staring out the windows as if he, too, feared something waited outside.
It all made Zach feel lighter. If an adult like Pike didn’t like the dark, if a man as broad-shouldered and physically imposing as Pike had been bothered enough to bring up what he’d heard, it meant it was normal to be disturbed by a frightening story, to imagine things at night, to do a thing like tremble in the outhouse before sprinting to the hut in fear.
“Who’s that?” Pike pointed at Mr. Fantastic, who had slipped onto the floor sometime overnight. Zach hurriedly secreted the fox in his coat.
“Oh, my, uh, sister—she must’ve hidden him in my bag.”
“That’s sweet.” Pike cocked his head slightly. “You two must miss your mom, huh?”
Zach shrugged, eyes skittering away from Pike’s face to fix on nothingness, on a spot beyond Pike’s shoulder.
“My ex liked her.” Pike slumped back on the couch. “Said she and your mom had a lot in common. Putting up with your dad and all.”
“Oh,” Zach said, fidgeting with the torn spot on his thumb, still looking elsewhere, nothing quite distinct. “Wait, who?”
“Virginia George. Ginny.” Pike made a dismissive, snorting sound. “Though I hope for your dad’s sake that’s all they had in common. Ginny was a piece of work.”
Zach blinked at him, confused. Bram had said Pike had a crush on Ginny. Yet it didn’t sound as though Pike liked Ginny at all.
“Yeah. I mean, I guess they look alike too?” Zach said, remembering Ginny’s blond hair, her smile from behind the reception desk in the little room outside Bram’s office.
“I guess.” Pike rubbed the bridge of his nose as he said, “I know this whole trip’s about the skiing, but honestly the last thing I want to do is hike up another mountain. It’s gonna be an absolute slog in this much snow.” His hand moved to massage a temple as he asked Zach, “Which way’s Mariah?”
Zach pointed.
“Really?” Pike’s eyebrows shot up. “I could’ve sworn it was there.” He thumbed over his shoulder toward the bookcase. “What’s that direction?”
Zach shrugged. “Just like, the woods? Nothing fun.”
“Huh.” Pike scowled at the steep slopes above as the clouds pulled away, a slow lift of a veil. “I got turned around.”
Trepidation rose in Zach’s belly as Pike’s words pushed forward the previous night’s idea that the thing up the mountain might have simply been someone lost, bereft, in need of aid.
Zach crossed his arms over his chest as if that might suppress the unsettling feeling he might have done something wrong.
“Yeah,” he said. “That really can happen easy out here.”