Bonechiller (5 page)

“Gotta go.”

I escape before we start showing emotions. Not something we do real well.

I go get dressed, grab my gloves and my pack. I’m walking back through the kitchen when I hear a car pull up outside.

Dad peeks through the clear patch on the frosted window over the sink, then ducks his head down. “What’s she doing here?”

“Who?”

“I think she saw me.” Dad stays clear of the windows.

“Who?”

“That woman from the Red and White.”

Andrea. She runs the Red and White grocery store, the only one in Harvest Cove. Dad’s been driving all the way to Barrie for supplies just to keep clear of her.

It started last month when Andrea was bagging up our stuff.

“You staying the winter?” she asked. “I thought maybe you guys were just summer folks.”

“No,” Dad grunted. “We’re staying on.”

“Deer-hunting season starts up soon. Or are you sticking around for the ice fishing?”

She was taking her time with the bagging, doing some fishing of her own. Dad wasn’t taking the bait, though.

So I jumped in. “We’re caretaking at the marina over the winter.”

Dad looked at me like I’d just betrayed a national secret.

Andrea paused in her packing. “Oh, right. Ray Mitchell’s place. First frost hits and he’s on a plane to Florida.”

Dad nodded reluctantly. “Guess so.”

“Well, you need anything special, I’ll order it in. Is it just the two of you?”

Dad looked cornered.

“Just the two of us,” I said.

Then Dad was heading for the door.

“Be seeing you,” she called after us.

And she has been seeing us ever since, popping by for any reason she can make up. She’s pretty enough, maybe a little on the heavy side, with long dark hair and nice laugh lines around her eyes.

Now there’s a knock at the door downstairs.

“I’m not here,” Dad tells me.

“What if she saw you?” I try to swallow back a smile.

Dad winces. “Just say, um … tell her …” He looks at me for help.

I shrug. “I got nothing.”

“Thanks! Thanks a lot.”

I start down the stairs. “Come on,” I call back. “She’s harmless.”

“Yeah, right.” But he follows me down to the front door.

I open it, letting in an icy gust. Andrea looks way too bright-eyed for this early in the morning. She’s got a warm smile and is holding a bag from the Red and White.

“Hey there, Danny. Where’s your hat?”

“Don’t think I need one.” I hate getting my hair all staticky and standing up. Gotta look slick for Ash.

“You know, you lose eighty percent of your body heat through your head,” she says.

“Good to know.” I step out. “See you later.”

I glance back at Dad with a “good luck” look. Walking away, I hear an awkward silence before Dad says:

“So, what brings you out?”

Whatever brought her, I’ll hear about later. I abandon Dad to the torture of small talk with a friendly local.

In the blue light of morning, Harvest Cove looks innocent and harmless.

Not a soul in sight. No monsters either.

Looking down, I see my shoe prints in last night’s snow. I follow them back down the marina turnoff, scanning the ground for any sign of my beast. But all I find are tire treads and my own marks.

I walk up to the light-post where I huddled last night.

From here the landscape stretches out flat for miles, the sun glaring off the snow. Only the caws of crows in the bare trees break the silence.

I can pick out the tracks I made running up to the post in a blind panic, crisscrossed by a few new tire treads.

Nothing more. No monster tracks.

I stare into the big ditch behind the post. That’s a deep drop. Lucky I didn’t break anything. Except my brain!

From up here, it’s hard to see much. I think I can spot where I fell and skidded to the bottom. The snow cover is scraped away, showing the stiff brown muck beneath.

Can’t see any sign, print or track of anything but me.

Should I take a closer look?

Turning in the intersection, I do a quick three-sixty, packed snow crunching underfoot. The roads stretch out,
running through fields of unbroken powder, a lone car in the distance.

I have to know. How much of last night was real?

So I go around the side, where I climbed out of my moonlit grave not ten hours ago. I use the same roots I grabbed on to then to get down now, my backpack swinging on my shoulder.

I recognize the tread of my sneakers pressed in the snow, and follow them to the cleared patch where I fell. The ground is like concrete. If my skull collided with this, you can’t blame my poor brain for freaking.

I glance up at the sound of a car whipping past on the road above.

Maybe it was a car that hit me last night, knocked me airborne and down into the ditch. It was so fast. I don’t remember hearing a motor or seeing headlights. But I was in a blind panic. Who knows?

If there was a struggle here, you’d expect the ground to be torn up. Or
something
.

Enough! Let’s go.

But then I see it.

About four feet from the cleared patch where I fell there are some marks in the snow. I crouch for a closer look.

There’s a row of holes stabbed through the light snow into the frozen mud underneath. They almost look like they were made with an ice pick. I count eight of them, curved in an upside-down U shape, cleanly jabbed into the powder.

Claw marks? Eight of them means, what, eight toes? That can’t be right.

Behind these holes, the snow has been pressed down to an icy crust by something heavier than me. The impression stretches long and wide. Pacing it off with my own size-ten sneakers, I could fit more than two of them inside this—this what? Pawprint? Footprint?

What am I seeing here?

Who knows? But what I do know is I wasn’t totally out of my mind last night. There was some kind of animal down here with me.

I find another track. Identical to the first, this one is set on the other side of where I was laid out.

I get a flash of that thing leaning over me. The gaping mouth. Razor teeth. And a long pale tongue striking out.

Panic works my heart like a speed bag. My breath comes in short gasps. I’m back there again—in the dark.

I hunch over and force myself not to think. Just breathe. A cold sweat runs icicle fingers down my back. Takes a minute before I can get a grip.

Time to go.

But first I pull out my cell phone and take a few quick shots of the tracks, setting my own foot beside them to show how big they are.

I’m a city boy, so I don’t know squat about wildlife. But I can’t imagine any kind of animal leaving tracks like these. Whatever left them was real, though. This was no nightmare.

I pocket my cell and climb the overhanging roots. Back on top, I breathe a little easier.

Already late for school, I start to jog, burning off some adrenaline.

I glance over my shoulder a few times as I head for the turnoff for school. That ghost-itch feeling of being watched by hidden eyes is gone. Still …

But there’s nothing out here except blowing snow under a steel-blue sky. The Big Empty. So big it could swallow you without a trace. So empty, nobody’s going to hear you scream.

My headache throbs to the beat of my feet, snow crunching under my sneakers.

None of this makes sense.

What I need is a bigger brain. And I know where to find one.

Like a name on an old grave, the date carved into the cornerstone of the school has been erased by a century of hard winters.

But the place was made to last, a stubborn redbrick building that has survived everything from fires, to blizzards, to a tornado that touched down where the baseball diamond sits right behind it.

I’m running through the outfield now, making for the back door. Fifteen minutes late.

I throw the door open and step from the chill into the dusty dry heat. I stand there shivering a moment, my ears tingling back to life. Then I climb the stairs to the second floor.

There are only three classrooms in the school, with grades seven through twelve. We’re talking
small
town. So my class has the eleventh and twelfth graders squashed together, all fourteen of us. It makes for kind of a split-personality classroom. It’s
either this or you take the forty-minute drive into Barrie every day.

I make the top of the stairs, and I’m just starting down the hallway when I see the cop outside my classroom, talking quietly with Miss Mercer.

I stop dead. My confusion and panic over what I found in the ditch drop away.

Their backs are turned to me. They haven’t spotted me yet.

This looks bad. Somebody must have seen us last night at the fire, or recognized Pike’s car. We’re in deep crap.

Should I take off? Before they see me.

What good will that do? Then I’ll be the only one missing from class. They’ll put Danny Quinn on Harvest Cove’s Most Wanted.

But come on, I didn’t do anything. Wasn’t even driving. And there’s no way eating a Mr. Big makes you an accessory to arson.

So I start down the hall again. Dead man walking.

They both glance over.

“Sorry I’m late,” I tell Miss Mercer. “You know, the snow.”

A weak excuse, but she just nods. “Take your seat, Danny. We’ll be in in a second.”

Avoiding eye contact with the cop, I slip past into the room.

A low mumble of conversation inside pauses momentarily when I come in. I catch Ash’s gaze first and make a little head gesture toward the door, mouthing “cop.” She gives a tiny nod. Howie’s got his head buried in his arms on the
desktop. I glance at Pike, who sits right behind me. He’s got a crazy smile, like this is funny.

I drop my pack on the floor and plant myself at my desk, staring at the back of Ash’s neck. Everybody’s talking except my row by the window, with Ash in front and Howie bringing up the rear.

Death row. We sit silent, waiting for the verdict.

Miss Mercer walks in with the cop. “This is Officer Baker, with the Ontario Provincial Police. Listen up, now. Officer?”

He looks us over. He’s got wolfman eyebrows—big, black and bushy—giving him a natural scowl. Which he focuses on us.

I hold my breath. He knows! In the sudden quiet, I think I hear Howie sniffling at the back.

“Some of you may already know why I’m here.”

I stare at my desk. Here it comes.

“Raymond Dyson, a student in the tenth-grade class at this school, has gone missing.”

I let my breath out, too stunned to be relieved.

“As you may be aware, he’s been receiving treatment at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie. He’s in pretty rough shape, suffering from some kind of infection. Anyway, he seems to have wandered away from the hospital last night, and we need your help finding him. He may be confused or delirious. Has anybody seen or heard from Raymond in the last twelve hours?”

Nothing from the class.

Then Janey Carlyle sticks up her hand.

“Yes?” asks Officer Baker.

“Okay, I heard he has rabies or something,” she says. “Someone said he got bit by one of Mangy Mason’s dogs.”

Another girl jumps in with “No, it was a raccoon.”

That opens the floodgates.

“I heard it’s West Nile virus.”

“No. It’s Lyme disease. You get it from ticks.”

“It’s a superbug. The kind that resists antibiotics.”

“They had him in quarantine. He’s contagious.”

Baker’s scowl deepens. “Enough! There’s no need to speculate. He’s not contagious. We just need to locate Raymond before he gets himself hurt or frozen to death. Keep your eyes open. You see or hear anything, call the O.P.P., Barrie detachment. The kid’s very sick and needs to be back at the hospital.”

Now he holds up a sheet of paper with a photo of Ray. “I’m sure most of you know what Raymond looks like, but I’m going to leave some flyers. Our number is at the bottom.”

He turns to Miss Mercer, who says: “Thank you, Officer. We’ll definitely keep our eyes open.”

Then the cop leaves and I sag back in my seat.

The teacher pins one of the flyers up on the bulletin board. Ray Dyson. We just call him Raid, after the bug spray. It suits him—that guy’s toxic. A real psycho bully. He makes Pike look sane. Last time I saw Raid was a couple days ago when they took him off to the hospital.

The day he went nuts.

I was sitting at my desk, dozing off as Miss Mercer went on about the retreating glaciers and the end of the Ice Age. Heading into the third week of a killer cold snap, it was looking like the Ice Age was back with a vengeance.

“What the hell’s that?” Pike blurted out.

I snorted awake with the rest of the class.

“Watch your language!” Miss Mercer told him.

Pike was staring out the window.

Right in the middle of the frost-covered baseball diamond, there was a guy standing in his underwear. No socks or shirt. Just briefs and bare skin.

Miss Mercer peered out the window with us. “Good lord.”

Then she made for the door, telling everybody to stay in their seats. Which nobody did, of course.