Near the Bone(11)

Which was exactly what Mattie had feared would happen.

William peered around the chamber, moving the candle here and there, completely absorbed in his task. It was apparent he had not heard the monster’s call.

I could bash the back of his head in with one of these bones. I could leave him here and the creature would find him and rend him to bits and make all of those bits part of its collection.

Then the roar came again, and Mattie couldn’t be sure but she thought it was closer, and there was no time for anything she might want to do but hadn’t the courage to actually do.

“William,” she said. “It’s coming.”

“What?” He turned around, blinking in the candlelight, his mind returning from somewhere very far away. Mattie recognized the symptoms.

“I heard it roar,” she said. “Outside. It can only be on its way here.”

“This is my chance,” he said, crossing the chamber in just a few huge steps. He thrust the candle at her and said, “Stay behind me. If you get in my way, you’ll wind up getting shot.”

Then he pushed by her, hurrying toward the exit without waiting for Mattie. She hurried after him, afraid to see what the creature looked like, afraid to see it running at them with an open maw ready to devour.

And it would devour them. William’s flimsy rifle was no match for the thing that made that horrible roar.

They were just at the cave mouth when the cry came once more, long and furious. It echoed strangely around the meadow, reverberated off the rocky cliff so that Mattie couldn’t tell if it was nearby or not. It might break through the trees below them at any moment.

William quickly scouted the immediate area and found a boulder that provided both cover and a view of the tree line below.

“Blow that candle out, idiot girl,” he snarled. “Do you think it won’t smell the fire?”

Do you think it won’t smell us? Mattie thought, but she blew out the candle and crouched low beside him.

They heard branches cracking, the sound of something huge blundering through the trees.

Or traveling through the branches, Mattie thought. Yesterday the creature had seemed to disappear high above them, even if William didn’t believe it.

The noise was tremendous, and the echo made it impossible to tell exactly where it was coming from.

“Just how big is it?” William muttered, training his rifle below.

I don’t care, Mattie thought. I want to go home.

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.