Page 29 of Mazywood

“Mom and Dad are the only married people I know who actually like each other,” Imani said. “They laugh all the time. They watch TV together every night. They hold hands. They’re so embarrassing to be around in public. What are you even talking about?” Imani doubted that she would ever want to get married. Boys didn’t make her heart race. Girls didn’t either. But if she ever did marry anyone, boy or girl, she would want to be best friends like Mom and Dad.

“You’re right,” Sharise said. “But not lately. Something has changed, Imani.”

Sharise’s voice trembled so much that Imani felt sorry for her. She tried to make a joke. “If I were you,” Imani said, turning back to her duffel bag, “I’d be more worried about not falling on my ass out in the snow.”

“I hope you’re right,” Sharise said. “I really do.”

“I’m right.”

Imani didn’t want her older sister’s panic attack to ruin her anticipation of the trip, so she was glad when Sharise didn’t try to change the subject back to doom and gloom. Sharise lingered long enough for Imani to forget she was there again. At some point, Imani realized her sister had left the room, closing the door behind her. But Sharise’s worries felt like an evil genie released from a bottle, left behind to punish Imani.

Now she couldn’t stop thinking about everything that could go wrong too.

A lodge in the woods with no Wi-Fi or cell service was a plot in a horror movie.

The lodge would be old and dusty. She would be bored out of her mind at night. She hated to sleep in strange beds. She could break her skull open on the slope. They could have a car accident while they were driving on an icy road in the woods.

And there had been a weird vibe between her parents at dinner. It was weird that they wanted to drop everything and go to her great-grandmother’s lodge out of nowhere, so she and Sharise would miss a day of school instead of waiting for Christmas break in a couple weeks.

Maybe—just maybe—Sharise was the one who was right.

Maybe their family was about to change forever.

Nine

FRIDAY

RORY DE SANTO’S TIRES CHURNED as his Jeep climbed over a snowbank that had spilled across the private road fifteen minutes from the tiny old logging town in the lap of the mountain. Once he had turned off State Route 89, an untamed thicket of pines obscured his view of snow-adorned Mount Shasta north of him, except in brief patches. This road was more red soil than asphalt, so Rory lowered the volume of his radio to concentrate on driving. Only a commercial anyway, a breathless personal injury lawyer promising to fight for his clients “to Hell and beyond,” which didn’t sound appealing. No big loss.

He drove into the snowy woods.

Rory hated driving in snow, especially without chains. And cell service was spotty out this far, so he was on his own if he got stuck. This narrow road was mostly plowed, but new snow flurries were spinning in the gray midday light. He’d heard at the gas station where he stopped to confirm his directions that a recent snowstorm had shut down most of the private roads up here. Luckily, he was following a promising set of tire tracks. Maybe someone was up at the lodge he could talk to. Everyone knew everyone in a town as small as McCloud, but although no locals trusted him enough to tell him the lodge was always empty, they’d hinted that no one would be at home today. The woman running the gas station had let it slip that the lodge’s property manager came in a couple times a week for her “World’s Biggest Chocolate Chunk Cookies” the size of dinner plates, so Rory had left his number in case she saw the caretaker—Dickie somebody. But Rory’s days on the cop beat had taught him to verify, verify, verify. People misremembered. Confabulated. Lied. And that meant driving up the mountain to knock on the door himself.

The last thing Rory De Santo felt like doing was driving up a mountain. He’d planned to spend his weekend cutting promos for his podcast and watching the 49ers, with a few naps sandwiched in between. Naps were a necessary ritual, like he was back in kindergarten. He felt human for six hours at a time, and then he needed to sleep. He’d been in bed early when he got the call at ten last night, which he only picked up because he hadn’t seen the name on his caller ID in years. Lloyd Garrett sounded slurry, maybe after a few shots of liquid courage, but their thirty-minute phone conversation had compelled Rory to drive more than three hours from Sacramento as soon as the sun was up: Look, man, I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s under the snow and it moves FAST, Rory had said. I’ve never seen anything move like it. I just need to know I’m not crazy.

Ordinarily, Rory wouldn’t have changed his weekend plans over such a vague tip, but Rory had worked with Lloyd Garrett at The Sacramento Bee and he had never shown any unhinged qualities. But last night, the tremor in Garrett’s voice had crawled under Rory’s skin—and was still vibrating there—so Rory had decided to check it out, just to see. He had his mic if he needed to record on his phone. If an experienced hiker like Garrett, cheerless copyeditor extraordinaire, was freaked out by something he’d seen in the woods, the word maybe was hard to deny. Maybe was Rory’s magic word these days.

Maybe he wouldn’t always feel so shit-tired. Maybe he would stop losing weight.

Maybe something inexplicable was hiding underneath the mountain’s snow.

Rory hadn’t expected to come back to Mount Shasta. He’d already done three episodes of his podcast here, and the frequency of tips from this area felt like a kind of mass psychosis. But since the mission of Tales of a Yearning Skeptic was to follow the tips in the hope of finding something real, he couldn’t avoid a region with such a long lineage of cultists, shamans, priests, and UFO hunters drawn to the mountain’s otherworldly beauty.

Today Mount Shasta was draped in white from stony peak to valley. No wonder her beauty made people lose their sense of perspective. This was where he’d taped his first episode, “Bigfoot Revisited.” Most locals weren’t Bigfooters, to their credit, but he recorded enough claims of “sightings” in these woods and caverns that his maiden episode two years ago had gone viral. And now he was here chasing another phantom—this one under the snow.

Or… maybe there was something to it. Rory’s heart quickened enough to notice. His ex had said he was like an atheist trying to believe in God without true faith. Colon cancer and diabetes were a cocktail of motivation to seek out wonder in the world, since he couldn’t get it up anymore and he was a bad biopsy away from hospice at the ripe age of forty-five. With his cancer-ridden family that orphaned him in his twenties, he hadn’t expected to live to be an old man—but he’d thought he would at least make it to fifty.

Something dark stood upright against the whiteness on the roadside ahead, around a slight bend. In a shadow obscuring his sight as he drove, the figure seemed taller than a man, standing on two legs between the trees twenty yards ahead. When sunlight sliced through the shadows, he saw it was only a deer, an immature buck. He almost laughed at himself for his hallucination; he was no better than the tipsters who left him deluded voicemails and emails.

Rory slowed, his tires grinding in the snow, before the buck turned and bounded over the snowbank left by the plow, disappearing into the tree line. He remembered when seeing deer used to make him think of Bambi as a kid, how they seemed almost angelic, and he missed that sense of wonder. But that was the whole point of this excursion, wasn’t it?

Rory caught himself praying to the God he had rejected in childhood: Please don’t let it be bullshit this one time. Then Rory turned up his radio’s volume. The driving beat of “The Hand That Feeds” by Nine Inch Nails blared from his Jeep’s speakers, a twisted choir for his new religion. The bass shook his seat with angry pounding that soothed him like a massage. Fuck cancer. Fuck a third round of chemo the way his doc suggested. If Rory was wrong about the possibilities in life, maybe he was wrong about the possibilities in death too.

“Where the hell is this place?” Rory whispered to himself. He was ready to be dazzled.

Garrett had said the lodge was about half a mile past the turnoff to the private road, although he also said he’d been lost when he stumbled upon the site. Whatever Garrett thought he’d seen in the snow had been behind the lodge, near the top of the property’s private bunny trail. This area looked more like a nature preserve than a resort, the road getting narrower and the thicket getting denser. Snowfall quickly covered the tire tracks ahead, which were now so faint he might have imagined them.

Just when Rory was sure he was on the wrong road, he saw an aged wooden sign nailed to a wide fir tree, professionally engraved in script: BEAR CREEK LODGE.