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

“Listen, I think we should get out of here. If she is home she’s clearly not welcoming visitors. Besides, there were all those private property signs posted.”

Mattie’s eyes widened. There were private property signs around their cabin? How had she never noticed them? She knew how to read.

William probably doesn’t let you go anywhere near the signs. The signs are only important to keep away people who might drift in this direction, and he’s always made certain that you won’t accidentally encounter anyone. But the whole mountain isn’t private. Griffin and William both said something about the clearing and the caves being public land.

“You said that guy had a gun, right?” C.P. continued. “Anyone who lives alone in the middle of the woods with a bunch of ‘keep out, private property’ signs posted is not going to welcome unexpected visitors. We should move on before he comes home and decides to shoot us on principle.”

“Yeah,” Griffin said.

He still stood very close to the door. His voice was so close that Mattie almost imagined he was inside the room with her.

Maybe I could trust him. Maybe I could. He seems kind. He sounded worried when he talked about me. Maybe . . .

“And the property is marked on the map, so we don’t even have an excuse. Anyway, come and look at these prints in the snow,” C.P. said. “These look a lot like the ones you took pictures of yesterday.”

Mattie heard Griffin move off the porch. She unwound her coiled body and slid her stockinged feet over the floor cautiously, so as not to make a sound. She wanted to see the two men. She wanted to know what they were doing.

She twitched the curtain aside, just a fraction of an inch, just enough to make a slit to peer out between the curtain and the window frame.

The two men were crouched in the center of the clearing inspecting the prints in the snow. They had their backs to the cabin and all she could see were their caps and their large backpacks—Griffin’s orange, C.P.’s blue. Their voices were low and Mattie couldn’t make out what they were saying. Her stranger—Griffin, his name is Griffin—took several photographs with the camera that was still slung around his neck.

Both men stood, their eyes on the ground, and carefully crept around the clearing, stopping occasionally to take more pictures.

Mattie released the curtain and inched back when she realized that they were going to follow the creature’s tracks around the cabin. She didn’t want them to accidentally catch a glimpse of her. They passed within a few feet of the window, and she caught some of their conversation again.

“. . . have to hurry because Jen is going to meet us on the trail in about an hour and we don’t want to miss her,” C.P. said.

She hadn’t seen his face yet, this friend of Griffin’s, just the back of his head covered by a red knit cap with a large fluffy ball at the crown.

I had a hat like that once. Except it wasn’t red. It was blue and white and maroon stripes with a blue puffy ball at the top, and there was a big “A” on the front.

Mattie couldn’t remember what the “A” was for, though. She had a flash of men swooping around on ice, holding sticks in front of them, but she couldn’t quite remember what they were doing or why.

She shook her head. That wasn’t important right now. She had to know what the strange men were doing, and if they had moved on. Mattie had a vague notion of going outside to sweep away the evidence of their prints, and then her own. Then William would never know they had come and she wouldn’t have to face his wrath.

Mattie stepped silently into the bedroom. She knew of old where the boards creaked and how to avoid them. This was practically second nature now, as she never wanted to wake William if she got out of bed in the night. And she didn’t want the two men outside—if they were still there—to know she was inside.

She inched away the curtain and peered out.

Griffin’s camera obscured his face and Mattie saw his finger depressing a button over and over. C.P. was gesturing excitedly at the symbols in the snow, the ones the creature had left the night before, the ones that had convinced William that the creature was a demon come to try him.

Mattie couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, but their intention was very clear. They were interested in the creature, like William was. And they were going to follow its tracks.

No, she thought. They can’t.

If Griffin and C.P. followed the creature from the cabin, then the animal would think that she and William had ignored the warning. The creature would kill Griffin and C.P., and it would come back to the cabin for her and William.

It sounded crazy, even in her head—the idea that an animal could think and reason like a person. And maybe it didn’t think and reason exactly like a person, but it clearly wasn’t simply made up of instinct like every other animal in the woods. Mattie couldn’t let the two men outside risk being sorted into piles like the creature’s other victims.

And I don’t want it to come back for me, either.

But what should she do? Go outside?

No, I had better not. It’s not safe. It’s not just about William, either. I don’t know if I can trust them.

But she couldn’t just allow the strangers to wander blithely into danger.

She stood, irresolute, unable to warn them, unable to force herself to break William’s dictate.

How will you ever run from him if you can’t even do this?

Samantha again. She was very sassy for such a small girl.

“You’ve got a sassy mouth on you.” William’s voice, one of those long ago and far away threads that seeped forward from the back of her mind, followed by a memory of pain—a great swipe of his hand across her face.

Just