Near the Bone by Christina Henry (ebook reader color screen txt) 📗

But the place she saw in her mind’s eye wasn’t the spare two-room cabin where she’d lived for the last twelve years. It was the place she always dreamed about, the place William said didn’t exist.

Heather, she thought. The two of them holding hands and spinning across the carpet and laughing to the music, a woman wailing, “Just like a white-winged dove sings a song . . .”

Mattie heard William suck in his breath, felt the growing tension that emanated from him. She realized then that everything had gone quiet, just like the previous day, and right after that they’d found the huge strange pool of blood.

The birds had fled.

All the little creatures are still and huddled and so are we. I wish I could fly away like a bird instead of crouching behind a boulder like a scared little mouse waiting for the swipe of a cat’s paw.

William curled his finger around the rifle’s trigger. Mattie listened hard. She thought there might be something approaching, but it wasn’t anywhere near as large as the creature. It sounded like it was picking its way carefully along the trail, trying to be as silent as possible.

She heard the twitter of sparrows then, and whispered, “It’s gone. The crea— the bear, I mean. Whatever’s down there, it’s something else.”

“Quiet,” William said.

A moment later, a man emerged from the trees.

Mattie stared at the stranger as William cursed under his breath. He paused for a moment, seemed to come to a decision. Then he said in a low tone, “Don’t talk to him. Don’t you say one blessed word or you’ll pay for it later.”

He put the rifle on his shoulder and stood up. William strode down the slope toward the man, who hadn’t appeared to notice them yet. The stranger had paused in the meadow, crouching down with a small black box near his face.

The box was familiar to Mattie, but she couldn’t remember quite why. The word was on the tip of her tongue.

A camera, she thought. He’s taking a photograph.

She remembered having a camera herself, an old-fashioned one that belonged to her mother. When you pressed a button, the photo would come right out and you wouldn’t have to take it to the photo lab for processing.

She remembered standing next to Heather, both of them shouting, “Cheese!” and making silly faces while Mom took photo after photo.

She remembered taping those photos to the wall of her bedroom, deliberately tilting them this way and that so that the overall effect was a huge jumbled collage.

As they approached the man, Mattie felt her stomach roil, watery nausea clogging her throat. It had been many years since she’d seen any person other than William, and part of her recoiled from the contact. She wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. That had been her mother’s rule, and it was William’s, too.

The stranger’s clothes also made her feel uneasy, for while they were completely different from her own, they were also somehow familiar—part of the echoing memory that had been pounding in the back of her mind since the day before.

He wore a bright coat with blocks of color on it—blue and orange, and it was made of a very shiny material. A windbreaker, she thought. I used to have one, but it was red. Heather’s was bright pink, like a glowing raspberry.

Aside from the windbreaker he wore gray pants with many pockets and brown leather boots with pine-colored laces. The stranger carried a very full pack on his back, the same bright orange as his jacket, with a bedroll (no, a sleeping bag) tied to it. As they got closer, Mattie saw he wore fingerless gloves with a mitten top buttoned back.

Every part of his appearance sparked something in her—curiosity, a memory, an unfixed kind of longing. She glanced up at William and hoped he wouldn’t see any of these things on her face. They would only make him angry.

The man appeared to hear them approach, for he dropped the camera back to his chest (where it was attached by a strap), glanced around, then stood, smiling. His teeth seemed very white and even. Mattie self-consciously pressed her lips closed in reply. She was missing a tooth from her lower jaw—it had gotten infected and William had to pull it out.

She shuddered, remembered the way William had strapped her head to a board with his leather belt so she wouldn’t move, remembered the horrible wrenching as the tooth pulled free of the gum, the blood gushing everywhere. The rest of her bottom teeth had moved around as a result of the empty space, some of them tilting crookedly like broken tombstones.

“Hello there!” the stranger called, waving.

Mattie felt she ought to wave back, but William had told her not to speak and she was certain waving counted as speaking.

William didn’t wave back, either, nor did he call out a response. He marched toward the strange man, so brightly colored against the faded meadow. The stranger’s smile wobbled, then receded as it became apparent that William was not approaching for a friendly chat.

Mattie struggled along just behind William, still feeling sick and dizzy, but she could tell the expression on his face just by the set of his shoulders and the stiffness in his walk. His eyes would be fixed in a cold glare, his lips compressed, a muscle in his jaw ticking like a bomb.

The stranger took a quarter step backward as William stopped a few feet away from him. Mattie came to a halt near William’s left elbow, half of her body hidden behind her husband. She saw the stranger throw an uneasy glance at the rifle held loosely in William’s arm.

“What are you doing here?” William barked.

The stranger had brown eyes, and now they flared in annoyance. Mattie expected him to yell at William, to respond to William’s aggression with some of his own, but the stranger only said, “It’s public land,” in a tone that was mildness itself.

“It’s public land, yes,” William said, “but it’s