Page 31 of Mazywood

He used the elegant brass bear-head knocker to knock on the door, three steady taps that seemed louder than they should have been. The empty house echoed back at him. He would knock a few more times, but he knew no one was home. The brass bear’s sharp teeth were a dare.

“Looks like I’m on my own,” Rory said. “I’ll take a look through the window to be sure.”

He peered through the closest porch window. A woman moved beyond the half-drawn blinds, not a foot from the window. He stepped back quickly. He was about to apologize when he realized the woman was only a brown mannequin draped in a rose-red fur-lined robe, the hands posed as if making a presentation. Because the arms were raised, the sleeves of the robe fanned down, billowing slightly in an unseen breeze. That was why it had seemed to move.

“Jesus Christ, there’s a dress dummy in the window,” he said. Fear was hard to capture on a recording, so his tremor was a good sound bite. “You should have seen me almost jump out of my skin just now. That’s not weird at all.”

He scanned the darkened space behind the mannequin and saw a white baby grand piano. Fancy. But other than the sofa facing a dead fireplace, nothing else was in sight. On a far wall, he made out what might be framed art, but it was obscured in the dark.

He couldn’t keep putting off what he dreaded most—flagrant trespassing. Like Garrett.

“I’ve done my due diligence, so now I’ll head out back to where that ski trail’s supposed to be,” he said to the recorder. “Let’s hope nobody gets too upset that I’m here.”

He thought about leaving a note on the door in case someone drove up and wondered about his Jeep parked outside the fencing, but he’d left his notebook in the car. He would look around only five more minutes at most, then he’d leave his number and email address on the way out.

That was his plan anyway.

Rory climbed down the porch steps, practicing the careful motion he’d learned since he got sick, when he was more likely to trip. He surveyed the snow-covered ground as he walked toward the side of the house: Fir needles poked up like porcupine quills, but no sign of animal tracks. Or human tracks. Maybe the falling snow had covered any tracks, but Rory felt a gnawing certainty that he’d just laid waste to his day.

Except…

That feeling of being watched sharpened so much that he turned around to look at the house, expecting the door to be wide-open. It wasn’t. But a hiss rose from the direction of the house, a sound like a sliding motion through dead leaves. Maybe it was… something moving on the snow? Or under the snow, like Garrett had said? (Or maybe it was just his mind flailing to find something to justify this visit?) Rory moved away from the sound, not toward it. He didn’t document with his recorder, feeling uneasy and foolish.

Walking slowly, eyes shifting between the snowy ground and the tree trunks around him, he made his way toward the rear of the house, where Garrett had said he would find the ski trail. Ahead, the woods fell away to reveal a sky the color of dirty snow. Again, Garrett was right: The miniature ski slope was impossible to miss.

The property dipped sharply, most of it still heavily wooded, but one centered strip had a stone wall and rusted guard gate, this one padlocked. Below him, the snow trail was dazzling white, bordered by woods on both sides. Vertigo rocked Rory—something else that was worse since he got sick. He tightened his hands on the sturdy railing before quickly yanking them away because of the cold metal’s sting.

A few stands of trees and boulders encroached the pristine trail, but it was solid snow for at least three hundred feet down at a gentle grade, forgiving enough for beginning skiers. A snow tube would go down at a good clip. Instead of a ski lift—which he didn’t know had once been operational until 1965—bare poles blended in with the mature fir trees in a regimented line alongside man-made stone steps built down the length of the backcountry ski trail. Far below, the steps ended beside a large boulder. He hoped like hell he wouldn’t have to climb down.

He didn’t.

This time, he was sure he heard something moving near him. He closed his eyes for a millisecond to better pinpoint the sound: an undulating motion either on top of, or below, the snow. There—he’d heard it to the right of him, near a trio of pines. The sound was strange, but the movement pattern was stranger. His eyes searched for motion and met only stillness.

“Folks…” Rory said into his recorder, his tongue so dry that it stuck to his teeth. “… I hear a sound I can’t identify. I went hiking with my grandfather every summer, so I’ve heard a lot of critters… and this one sounds different. If I’m honest, it feels like something is tracking me. So I’m gonna switch to video in case something really is out here—I want you to see it too. People always say, ‘Where’s the proof?’ If I can, I’m gonna get that proof for you today.”

Back in control of himself, Rory switched to his phone’s video camera, careful to hold it horizontally for the most coverage in his viewfinder. He stared at the tiny screen as if it could reveal hidden objects, slowly panning across the trees directly behind the house. He felt less exposed behind his camera lens.

Rory noticed a dip behind the house where the snow was deeper. He was already in snow up to his ankles, but ten yards behind the house it looked like the snow had not melted in years. As he stared, a spray of snow flew from behind a thick tree trunk, and a large branch cracked like a rib. Something had moved—fast. Whatever it was had found new cover in a blink.

“Shit,” Rory said. The camera’s image blurred as his unsteady hand jerked.

He looked away from his screen back to the fixed reality, hoping his eyes were on the right tree. Nothing moved, but he knew something was there.

A realization pummeled him: Bear Creek Lodge. Moron. He and his grandfather had never come across a grizzly. Or a mountain lion. Just because he’d never heard an animal approach like this one didn’t mean it was a scientific discovery or fodder for his podcast. The reality was, he’d grown up in the Sacramento suburbs and had hiked maybe a dozen times in his life, mostly before he graduated from college. He didn’t know fucksquat about the wild.

Clearly, he’d surprised a bear or some other more mundane but dangerous creature. Rory’s mind raced as he reminded himself of the standard advice for encounters with bears and mountain lions: Don’t run. Don’t run. Don’t run.

“Get back, bear!” he shouted, remembering that advice too. He sounded more alpha than he felt, his voice loud and sure. He glanced around and found a fallen branch near his back left boot, so he chanced leaning back to swoop it up. His shoulder gave a muffled crack because it was heavier than it looked, but Rory’s adrenaline made it feel weightless as he swung the branch like a centurion. “Get back!”

Rory’s answer was an angry growl as loud as his shout—but like no growl he’d ever heard. The exotic sound filled the woods and sky like a nest of cicadas, but with only one distinguishable, almost mechanized, voice.

Whatever it was, it sounded big. Rory’s veins went frigid, flooded with a primal fear of being hunted as old as cavemen. Rory still didn’t see an animal, but that sound told him that whatever it was didn’t give a shit about his alpha games or his big stick. The branch he held out before him like a sword shed snow as his arm trembled.

“What the fuck is that?” Rory said. He had nearly forgotten the video camera he was panning around him as if he were warding the space with its lens.

Don’t run. Don’t run. Don’t run.

Ahead, snow churned up in an arc as if from a snowplow, the hidden creature speeding toward him in a weaving path that felt like a chance. A small chance, anyway. If it had come straight at him, Rory would be caught already.