Page 150 of Mazywood

Slowly, with his right hand on the rifle’s trigger while he balanced his light against the barrel with his left, Johnny walked away from the gap’s maternal light.

The cavern split in three directions, but he instinctively discounted the upward trail, which seemed too narrow for the monster to fit. That left two passageways forking right and left, both at a sharp downward slope. Remembering how they had heard Tasha in the faraway tree, Johnny chose the path he guessed was closest to the tree, with the widest width.

In the fringes while he trained his light on the ground ahead, his eyes swept the antechamber for streaks of blood near him. Nothing yet, thank God.

But strands of white fur carpeted the ground. Yes, this was the place.

He was invading the monster’s den.

Johnny’s pace slowed as he reminded himself that he couldn’t walk ahead of his light. The monster could be fifteen feet in front of him and he wouldn’t know—hell, ten feet. He nearly stumbled into a wall when the tunnel unexpectedly curved. Up close, this wall looked ravaged, the basalt streaked with shadowed columns. He walked close to the wall as if the pitted, uneven floor might drop away.

After he rounded the bend, he raised his light to try to see where he had emerged. He sensed a growing expanse around him, so perhaps the cavern widened.

Beside him, his light revealed a cairn of stacked bones.

A cry scuttled in Johnny’s throat as he jumped away, but he bit it back. The bones were loosely assembled in a pyramid, but a tangled one. The bones looked old, more brown than white. Bloodstained instead of bleached. The lower bones were too large to be human; rib bones too wide and arched. The tiny bones at the top might be from rabbits, foxes, and squirrels.

“Jesus… Oh, Jesus…” Johnny whispered, midway between blasphemy and prayer.

He raised his light, and ghostly images of identical piles floated into his weak beam, spaced neatly apart despite the internal disarray, as if they had been stacked by a child. Everywhere his light ventured, bones appeared.

A bone room.

Tasha’s with me in the bone room, Johnny.

Johnny realized he was holding his breath, trying not to smell the bones. The cold disguised the smell at first, but his nose clotted with the pockets of rotting meat that had not been fully stripped away. This chamber was soaked in the smell of decay.

He could not count how many piles of bones surrounded him, most of them still hidden in darkness, but every step brought a new stack to light—some of them spilling apart with loose bones at his feet, some much taller than the rest; eerie monuments.

What the hell was this thing? Was this a single monster’s work, or a pack of them?

And then the unthinkable question: Were Tasha’s bones here too? Imani’s?

Johnny swung his flashlight to the opposite wall on the left, and a human skull stared back at him with emptied eye sockets. Stripped clean of everything except its teeth.

A single gold tooth gleamed in the back of the jaw, glimmering in his light. That would not have been enough to make his heart wither if he hadn’t seen the glint behind the bone pile, against the rough wall.

His memory had erased the silver buckle, but he remembered it now after nearly fifty years: a bear’s head. The last time he had seen this buckle, it had been bound to a leather strap around the base of Uncle Ricky’s black cowboy hat. The lump of fabric nestling the buckle was unrecognizable now, washed of its black color, more red-brown, the suede misshapen and collapsed. But there was no mistaking it.

Johnny shined his light back toward the skull crowning the pile, imagining the gold tooth when Uncle Ricky had grinned at him. He lowered the light and saw more bones that might be human. A rib cage. Two crossed, thick bones that might be femurs. Tangled inside the bone pile, rags of fabric might have been a shirt once. And what might have been a single hiking boot.

The bone pile was Uncle Ricky’s memorial.

Johnny gasped in the thick, condensed air. He’d been holding his breath again. He coughed in lieu of a sob. His mother probably would have sacrificed a year of her too-short life to learn where Uncle Ricky had vanished—and the answer was this? Posed in a macabre display this close to the lodge in this boneyard?

It was senseless. Infuriating. Heartbreaking.

Johnny’s horror deepened when he realized that his beam might next illuminate the bloodied corpses of Tasha and Imani, not yet dissembled entirely to bone. Each new revelation in his cone of light sped his heart and weakened his legs, as if all of his blood flow were charging to his brain instead as he saw evidence of countless unlucky deer, elk, and rodents.

And hikers or hunters. A zippered backpack lay at the heart of one of the bone piles; it had been red once, now faded and dirtied. Johnny stared at the backpack in frozen terror for nearly half a minute before he realized it had been here too long to be Imani’s—not fifty years, but at least a couple. But whose was it…?

Johnny reached to grab one of the backpack’s straps, and the tower of bones tumbled down with a racket of clattering and clicking, some of the bones brittle enough to break when they landed at his feet like raining dominoes, a sound that filled the cavern. Shit.

Johnny let go of the backpack and stepped away, his rifle readied again. He couldn’t be hypnotized by the bones and lost lives in this chamber, not unless he wanted to join them.

But now that he had revealed his position, he had no reason to stay quiet.

“Imani?” he called, his voice soft, far from a shout. “Are you here?”