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

rubbed the top of her head. “Just wait here for me until I get back and I’ll tell you all about it.”

There were arms underneath her, someone carrying her with surprising tenderness. She surfaced from sleep just long enough to open one bleary eye.

“William?”

“Don’t you worry now, Mattie girl. I’ve got you,” he said.

He placed her on the bed. She felt him pulling her stockings down but she was too tired to do anything about it.

“A man’s got to have sons, Mattie,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for them.”

•   •   •

There was an astonishing array of gear laid out in the main room of the cabin. Half of the table was taken up with boxes of ammunition, giant knives, brown bottles with warnings and skulls on them, strange round objects that were . . .

Grenades? Are those grenades? Is he hunting the creature or starting a war?

Mattie had never seen a grenade in real life, only on television.

Thinking about television made her stop for a second, because she had only remembered it properly just then. A box with moving pictures inside it, and she and Heather used to watch cartoons and laugh.

Every Saturday morning, and Mom would let us eat cereal with marshmallows in front of the TV.

As soon as she thought “cereal with marshmallows,” she could remember the taste of it. The cereal was like sweet oats, soft and crumbly from being in the milk, and the marshmallows were not like the marshmallows that she ate around a campfire but small and hard and gritty, crunchy underneath her teeth. She liked the strange texture of the marshmallows best and saved them for last, let them float in the milk while she picked around them, scooping up the cereal with the spoon.

Cereal. You remembered a food that you had before. Cereal.

A gun leaned against the wall next to the door, the largest rifle Mattie had ever seen—the barrel seemed enormous. A chipmunk could disappear inside that barrel and never be seen again.

Next to the gun was a giant trap, gleaming silver in the faint morning light. It had huge shiny teeth, the kind that snapped together over an animal’s leg. Mattie shied away from it, not wanting to come too near even though the trap wasn’t set yet.

Her eye felt even worse today than it had the day before, the pouch of fluid larger and harder. She hated not being able to see out of one eye. It gave her the feeling that something was always lurking in the blank space where she used to be able to see.

William’s boots stomped across the porch. She heard him kicking his feet against the side of the cabin to get rid of the snow, then the door opened.

He dropped the load of firewood by the door. “Better get the fire going, Mattie. It’s a cold one out there. Going to have to keep the fire on all day.”

He shut the door again. Mattie knew he was going out to the storehouse to get the eggs for breakfast. She heard him whistling as he did, and she froze in shock.

Whistling? William whistling?

He must have had a very good day in town. Mattie couldn’t recall the last time she heard him whistle, even though he was good at it. He could whistle a tune and it actually sounded like a song, not just a random series of notes.

He stopped whistling a long time ago, when he decided that music tempted the devil close.

She decided not to say anything about it. If she drew attention to it then it would be her fault that he made music and attracted evil to them.

There were still large hot embers in the fireplace. William must have put wood in when he returned home the night before. Mattie stoked up the fire again so it would be ready for cooking. In the meantime, William returned with the eggs, removing his boots at the door.

“Going to catch that demon today, Mattie my girl,” he said as she made the coffee. “It doesn’t stand a chance.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked, going about her usual breakfast chores.

“First thing is to set up that trap on the trail between here and the stream. If it comes down for water and decides to head up this way again, the demon will walk right into it.”

I don’t think so, Mattie thought. The creature seemed too smart to step into a trap, but she didn’t tell William this.

“Then I’m going to take some of those grenades up to the caves and toss ’em inside,” William continued. “If it’s in there when I do, all well and good. If it isn’t, then I’ll have blown up its home base. It won’t have anywhere to hide, and if it doesn’t have anywhere to hide, it will be easier for me to shoot.”

He gestured toward the rifle leaning against the wall. “And that gun, Mattie my girl, is strong enough to take down an elephant. It will take down that demon for sure.”

“What’s the knife for?” Mattie asked, as she placed his food in front of him.

William shrugged. It was such an uncharacteristic gesture that Mattie had to stop herself from staring at him. He really was not acting like himself today.

He’s lighter, freer than he has been in years. He’s more like the old William, the one who used to laugh and play board games with me and Heather.

For what felt like the millionth time her brain came to a halt, caught on a memory that had just surfaced. William used to play board games with her and Heather. She could almost see his hand holding a red gingerbread man, moving it over colored squares on a board and stopping when he reached a candy cane.

This recollection in addition to the one she’d had of her mother standing behind William in the kitchen made her wonder. She wondered just who William was to her, because she had a feeling that he wasn’t just her husband. Something roiled in her