Page 53 of Mazywood

Everyone groaned, but Johnny barely heard their complaints because his mind was filing through what he’d seen when he came out of the bedroom. As he got close to the kitchen, in the faint stove light underneath the swinging doors… the scant shadow of something bulky had moved across the floor with surprising fluidity. Not walking—more like gliding. The shadowy movement had stopped Johnny in his tracks, and he’d stood frozen in the hallway while he wrestled with identifying what he’d seen. It had to be a bear, he told himself.

When he’d shouted, “Hey, bear!” he’d heard it bump against a chair before he walked through the kitchen’s swinging doors. But by the time he shined his flashlight toward the noise, all he caught was the back door trembling after something flung it aside to flee into the night.

Just like when he was thirteen, it was gone before he could see it.

While Tasha, Imani, and Sharise chided him for leaving it unlocked, Johnny stood at the kitchen door and stared past the curtains at the snow, which was flurrying so hard now that a white void lay beyond the porch steps. The weak porch light only illuminated the closest clumps driving down. In Johnny’s imagination, the snow animated as a narrow snout, tail, and claws—similar to the creature he thought he’d seen when he was younger, but big enough to cast the shadow he’d glimpsed moving across the kitchen. So much bigger.

Johnny’s heart clogged his throat, making it hard to catch a good breath. His palms clasping the rifle too tightly were clammy and cold. He tried to dismiss his fear as adrenaline, but everything inside of him screamed that he needed to convince his family to pack up and leave. It wouldn’t be hard after an encounter with wildlife. But even if he wanted to risk driving at night, he didn’t dare drive in such heavy snow. Visibility would be shit. Worse than shit.

“Do you see it?” Johnny finally realized that Tasha had asked him a question. Probably two or three times.

Johnny yanked the window’s curtain closed and turned around with what he hoped was a smile. “Just snow out there. It’s gone.”

The three of them studied him with scrutiny. Now that they had finished their nervous joking, Sharise looked scared, hugging herself.

“Let’s just all go back to bed…” Johnny said, although he knew he wouldn’t be getting any more sleep. He would sit up in the kitchen the rest of the night to see if it—whatever it was—might come back. To see how it had gotten inside. For the first time, he related to the characters in his Frat House movies who kept quiet about phenomena they were sole witnesses to: He didn’t want to turn his own delusion to panic. There was no point in confessing that it might not have been a bear, especially if he didn’t have any suggestions about what it was. The stress of returning to Bear Creek Lodge might have caused him to hallucinate, and he didn’t want to drag his family into his personal breakdown. Tonight was hard enough on them already.

“Dad…” Sharise began, uncertain. “I need to tell you about something we saw outside…” Johnny saw his daughter’s lips moving and heard her words, but her mouth and voice looked out of sync as a memory surged: Uncle Ricky, do any animals hunt under the snow?

Imani slapped Sharise’s shoulder with the back of her hand. “Hey.”

“What are you talking about?” Tasha said. “What did you see?”

Before Sharise could go on, the kitchen lights flickered out and spat back on with a loud crackle and hum. They all looked up as if they could diagnose whatever had caused the light to waver. The long fluorescent bulbs were more yellow than white. Dimming. As they watched, the bulbs flickered off and on again. The snow was coming down so hard that it pattered the rooftop.

Damn it to hell. They might lose power in the storm.

“You said this place has a generator, right?” Tasha said. “Because I think—”

The kitchen lights died. Darkness fell upon the house.

Eighteen

THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN being yanked from sleep by an unknown intruder in the middle of the night was being forced outside during heavy snowfall to figure out a motherfucking generator, Johnny thought. The whole night felt like Mazelle Washington’s curse on him, just when he’d started to embrace ownership of her lodge. (You think you’re gonna wish me dead and then fuck in my bed, you puny little rat bastard?)

As he climbed down the back steps, frost pelting his face, Johnny wanted to scream his frustration into the snow-shitting sky. But Tasha and the girls were calm, the only blessing tonight, so he would have to keep his howls bottled in his head. His heartbeat had barely slowed since he heard the first crash in the kitchen, waking him from a dream he suspected was about the room where he’d been sleeping. He might have dreamed he was in the sickbed, where he had last seen Mazelle.

Johnny was carrying the single gas can he had from the garage and a heavy-duty flashlight that illuminated the backyard like a lighthouse, its beam piercing through the snowfall to the sagging cabin twenty yards from the back porch. The rifle was slung across his shoulder, a precaution. He scanned the trees and piles of snow, fooled by the motion of snowfall at first. Satisfied, he turned to the large tarp between the kitchen and dining room windows. The tarp was beneath an awning, so it was only half-covered with snow.

He unveiled a five-thousand-watt black generator, as good as new. Hollman had convinced him to make the investment during his refurbishing project (sure—what was an extra grand two years ago?), but Johnny had never learned how to use it. YouTube was his go-to for research, but with no signal he would have to rely on common sense.

The Briggs & Stratton generator looked like a car engine, but it stood tall on wheels like a barbecue grill—and he wasn’t a master of either. The one-gallon gas can he’d brought felt puny when he assessed the size of the generator’s obvious gas tank on top. Please don’t let this thing be empty, he thought. The only thing he remembered Hollman telling him was that a generator this size might burn up a gallon of gas an hour, depending on how much power they used. In retrospect, even bringing three gallons might not have lasted them the night running the heat.

His flashlight was almost too bright for him to make out the position of the fuel gauge on the tank, but he was relieved to see that it was almost halfway full. How long was that? How many gallons did this tank hold? Maybe the manual was in a drawer somewhere in the lodge—knowing Hollman, he had organized the manuals for potential renters—but it didn’t matter now, since Johnny only had one more gallon to add to the tank. It would have to do.

The cold had numbed Johnny’s ears as soon as he stepped outside, but now his earlobes burned. This weather reminded him of why he’d never wanted to live in the Midwest after one year of college in Iowa, when his ears, nose, and toes were quick to burn if the temperature dipped below thirty degrees. He guessed it was closer to twenty-five degrees on the mountain now, and if he didn’t get the generator on, his family would spend an uncomfortable night huddled by a fireplace. They might need to do that anyway. Johnny had hated that feeling in the hallway, helpless to protect his children because they were so far from him. And his worry that he might get startled and shoot one of them, like Tasha warned him. He never wanted that feeling again, so he would convince them to stay in one room, generator or no generator.

Something had been in the house, and it might come back.

Johnny’s heart quickened when he thought about the large shadow sliding across the kitchen floor, but he forced himself to focus on the generator. He remembered from an old chemistry lesson that gasoline didn’t freeze unless the cold was extreme, so he uncapped the fuel tank and poured in what was left of the supply he had bought in McCloud. He had wanted to give Imani an earful when he realized she’d left most of the gas behind, but it had been his responsibility, or Tasha’s, to check after her. That felt like a worry from a year ago.

While Johnny poured gas from his can into the tank, which was challenging without a nozzle he’d forgotten to bring with him, a crack sounded from one of the treetops over the cabins, startling Johnny so much that he spilled a precious stream. He was lucky he didn’t drop the can. Snow sprayed from above as a limb fell… unless it was an animal jumping from a tree.

He swung his flashlight toward the sound, trying to confirm that a branch had fallen. Nothing was moving, and plenty of fallen branches lay near those cabins. Did bears climb trees? His mind felt blocked until he knocked loose a memory, as if his inner thirteen-year-old whispered an obvious school lesson in his ear: Bears hibernate. It was December.

Whatever it was, it probably wasn’t a bear. Childhood fantasies aside, was a mountain lion stalking him? Or something worse?

“Fuck… fuck… fuck…” Johnny whispered.