Page 130 of Mazywood

The newspaper was dated April 23, 1946, promoting a film called Lazy Mazy Strikes Again that Tasha had never heard of. She blinked, beginning to doubt her existence again. Her foot’s pain couldn’t be a dream, but the rest of the day was inexplicable. She’d been dragged all this way and memorabilia about Mazelle Washington was waiting for her here?

She must be having a nervous breakdown.

Tasha shined the light for other evidence of Mazelle. In the scrap heap, a gold-tinted woman’s high-heel shoe glinted, the golden tone faded except at the old-fashioned butterfly buckle. Beside that shoe, she found another laminated newspaper, some of the page too water-stained to read, but she quickly found a headline in the top right corner: LAZY MAZY IS TOPS WITH MOVIEGOERS

“What… the… hell?” Tasha said again.

Was this a haunting like in her grandmother’s stories? Or had she lost her mind?

She studied the evening gown she’d wrapped herself in. Strapless. Elegant once, now torn and soiled. The label was too faded to read, but it looked like a designer dress. Why were Mazelle Washington’s belongings stored in a cavern so far from her lodge? And who had stored them here? No, not a haunting—a shrine.

“… going for help!” Johnny’s voice drifted from the void.

“Yes—take the girls and get help!” Tasha shouted. She’d hoped they had scrambled away already. But she knew the words to stir him. “Promise me! Promise you’ll take the girls home!”

Johnny had vowed to her once that he would never break a promise. His promises were his religion to him, hearkening back to his old promise that he wouldn’t let the age difference influence their decision to have children. Tasha’s heartbeat drummed in her ear while she waited for Johnny’s response.

“I promise, Tasha!” Clear as a bell, somehow. She hoped she wasn’t only imagining what she’d heard, because it was too late to say anything else now. Too late to be quiet, which she should have done at first. She felt it.

Something was in the cavern with her. Maybe it had been there all along, but it was closer now, rustling through twigs.

Loud chittering echoed everywhere at once. Behind her. In front of her. Above. Below. It sounded like an impossibly long rattlesnake coiling in a ring around her—the last sound she remembered before she’d gone flying out of the car.

“It’s here!” Tasha shrieked. “It’s back in here! Get away and get help! You promised!”

Blended, excited voices came from forever away. Dream voices from her long-ago past.

Tasha’s true world narrowed to the cavern and the feeble reach of her flashlight, strobing against the rough, beige-gray walls in her shaking hand. Her beam caught shadowed gaps in the wall and jutting stones that took on strange shapes in her panic.

The chittering was deafening. How could the creature not be in sight?

“Stay away from me!”

A breath ago, Tasha would have mourned the way her screams were scarring her listening children, but the only child she could nurture now was the one she imagined beneath her palm as she clutched her stomach; a baby boy with curly wisps of hair like her father’s.

“Leave me alone!” Tasha remembered how Johnny had chased away the bear.

No, not a bear. At first it had looked like snow climbing up her window while the car shook like an avalanche was burying it, but when her door opened and those flaps snapped wide and then folded around her, all she could think was, It’s not a bear. It’s not a bear. It’s not a bear. Not A Bear became its name because no other name suited it.

Not A Bear was back. Not A Bear might have been in the inky folds all along.

Tasha should have whispered instead of shouting and shrieking. (But if she had whispered, her family would not have heard her.) The time for whispers was gone.

“Stay back!” Her shout was so loud, so fierce, that it clawed her tender throat.

The chittering went silent, and she gasped in surprise. Was saving her life that easy?

Tasha sucked in three long breaths to keep from hyperventilating; her body was trying to hoard oxygen. Enfolded in Not A Bear’s grip, at times her face had been wrapped too tightly against the rough fur of its limb (wing?). Her terror of suffocation had outweighed every other fear. She felt her nostrils constrict now, as if in anticipation.

Her flashlight’s beam was so shaky that she didn’t see the pale outline of the creature moving toward her until she heard it gliding over the cavern’s debris, almost whispering across the ground. Not A Bear reached the fuzzy edges of her light’s ring, enough to show white fur dulled by the dark. Not A Bear undulating on the ground, gliding toward her.

Not A Bear seemed to float instead of walk.

“Stop it—stay back!”

Tasha scooted away from it on her debris bed until she was pressed to the wall, barely noticing the waves of pain when she bumped her foot. Here, she heard the faint, frenzied voices of her family and wondered why they hadn’t escaped while they had the chance. If Not A Bear was with her, it wasn’t with them—unless there was another one. Did they think screaming her name would help her? That it gave her comfort to know they had defied her last wishes and they all still might die today?

Not A Bear slithered closer, narrowing the gap between them to only fifteen yards. Ten. Its eyes glowed red in her flashlight.