Bonechiller (17 page)

It’s real late. The deep dark dead of night. I’m fighting sleep, pacing my room, scared of what’s waiting in my dreams. I’ve got so much caffeine pumping through my veins my heart’s banging off my ribs like a caged animal.

Dinner at Ash’s place was weird. But not bad weird. Being with Ash and her mom and dad, I saw how they fit together. The way they move around each other, the little touches. How they fill in the spaces between the other’s words, finishing their thoughts. Making fun, inside jokes, speaking in their own code.

Sitting with them after dinner, it hit me—this used to be mine. Me, mom and dad. We had this.

There’s a line from a poem we read in class, something like: “When people die, worlds die with them.”

I shake my head, trying to lose this feeling.

When I got back from Ash’s, I found a bright red envelope on the kitchen table. Obviously a Christmas card. From Aunt Karen, Mom’s kid sister.

“Came this morning,” Dad said, sipping his beer.

He was crashed on the couch watching some Clint Eastwood Western. They’re all pretty much the same—man with no name rides into town, kills bad guys, rides out. He lives nowhere, owns nothing, always on the move. Sounds familiar.

Dad was doing his trick where he rolls a bottle cap over his knuckles, like you do with a quarter. Back and forth, as a gunfight blazed on TV.

I turned the envelope over and over. Finally, I tore it open. A Christmas card. Harmless enough. But something slipped out, falling on the floor in front of the couch. We both looked down.

A photo. My heart skipped a beat. Dad stopped rolling the cap. For a moment, neither of us moved. Then Dad picked it up.

A summer snapshot of a day at the beach back in Toronto. I remember it so clear, like I just stepped off that beach a minute ago. Me and Mom are taking turns diving off Dad’s broad shoulders into the cool water of Lake Ontario. He’s standing neck-deep, letting us use him as a platform.

It’s Mom’s turn. The camera catches her laughing hysterically, balancing on Dad’s shoulders. All eyes are on her. You can see the back of my head as I dog-paddle nearby. Dad’s got his hands on her calves, keeping her steady. He’s looking up at her perched there. She’s shiny wet in the bright sun and squinting against the dazzle off the water. His mouth is open, telling her to—

“Jump,” Dad mumbled to the photo, caught in the same
time warp as me. The ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

Dad held the photo tight, bending it.

Then I noticed a spot of red on his other hand, a drop of blood trickling from his closed fist.

“Dad. Your hand.”

Took a second before he saw the blood. As he opened his fist, I saw where the bottle cap had bitten into his palm.

I grabbed a box of tissues and handed him a wad, taking the picture from him. I slipped it into my pocket, out of sight.

While Dad soaked the blood up, I got him a fresh beer and me a Coke. We watched the rest of the movie, even though I knew how it was going to end. We didn’t talk much. Just sat there, getting through the night together.

Now, I put the photo with some others I keep buried in a drawer. I only take them out when I get scared I’m going to forget something about her. Something small but key. I can’t look at them too long.

On the back of the beach shot, Aunt Karen’s written:
Here’s a piece of summer to keep you warm this Christmas
.

I pace over to the window. The glass is frosted with a thin skin of ice. I lean in close to steam the window with my breath, to melt the frosting so I can see out. And as the ice crystals dissolve under my breath, I forget where I am.

I remember breathing on another window, forever ago.

It’s spring, and Mom sits by the living-room window of our apartment in Toronto, looking out at the new leaves on the
trees. So new they’re still unfolding from their buds. The window is shut tight. Mom goes from sweating to shivers so quick I can’t keep up, piling blankets on, taking them away.

She’s right up close to the glass now, breathing on it. Her exhale breaks into a racking cough that makes me cringe.

“Danny?” she says in a voice like a croak.

I go to her. “You cold? I’ll get you your comforter, fresh from the dryer.”

Mom likes the blankets just out of the dryer, all heated up. We’re doing laundry every day. Mom can’t keep anything down and messes up her sheets, pajamas and things. “Not cold,” she whispers. “The glass. Fog it up for me, Danny Boy.”

“Ah.” I smile, realizing what she wants.

I lean over beside her and steam a patch of the window with my breath. Mom draws in the mist with her finger. She’s kind of slow, so I keep fogging it back up. When she’s done, she leans back to consider her masterpiece.

There are two small stick figures, side by side, holding hands. One is Stinkboy, my alter ego, with his pointy teeth and squiggly stink lines rising off him. With him is a longhaired version, with matching smell squiggles.

“Who’s that with Stinkboy?” I ask. “He got a date?”

The doodle is starting to fade so I exhale, bringing it back to life.

“That’s the other me.” Mom’s pale lips curve in the tiniest of grins. “Stinkgirl. They’re made for each other.”

She squeezes her eyes shut with a shiver.

“Cold,” she whispers.

“I’ll get the comforter. Be right back.”

I rush down the hall and grab it. When I get back, Mom’s leaning her head on the window.

“Here.” I lay the cover gently in her lap. “Nice and toasty.”

Her cheek has wiped off some of the fading doodle. Reaching to pull her away and set her back into her chair, I sense something’s different. She feels … 
empty
somehow.

“Mom?”

I take her hand and press my fingers against the inside of her cool, frail wrist. I feel for the smallest flutter, the faintest beat. I wait and wait.

“Mom?”

So quick. In the half minute it took me to get her comforter. She was just speaking to me. She said my name. I can still hear her saying it.

Kneeling on the floor, I don’t want to do anything or call anyone, don’t want to leave her side. I lay my head down in her lap.

It’s warm, from the comforter. But also, I need to believe, warm from her.

Now my breath on the icy glass has melted the white frost so I can see out into the night.

I back up and collapse on the bed, suddenly too weak to stand.

It’s so dumb. Me and Dad have spent all this time running away from anything or anyplace that would remind us.
Most of our stuff is in some storage locker in Toronto. But the danger isn’t in the old stuff or the familiar places. It’s inside our heads. And there are a million triggers that’ll bring it all back.

Fog it up for me, Danny Boy
.

And all our running brought us here. Somewhere to hide. Somewhere safe.

Right!

TWENTY

“So, what did you come up with?” I ask, sitting down beside Ash on the foot of Howie’s bed.

Pike drove us over here after school, saying Howie needed to show us his latest discoveries. He’s been home three days now, getting an early start on Christmas break. Now we’re all off till the new year. If we make it to the new year.

I don’t think Howie’s even left the house since he got back from the hospital. He’s spending all his time researching online.

“I’ve got tons of stuff to show you.” Howie rummages through his desk. Books piled five deep, papers scattered.

“What happened to that megawatt X-ray lighting you had in here?” Ash asks. “It’s kind of dim now. I thought you needed it for your seasonal disorder thingy.”

“Seasonal affective disorder.” He shuffles through the piles. “Guess I’m cured. Can’t take the light anymore. It hurts my eyes. Another symptom.”

Even though I got a head start, getting bit a few days before Howie, this “infection” is hitting him harder. He’s always like that, catching every cold, flu, strep throat and pinkeye in the county. Somebody gets the sniffles at school, Howie gets pneumonia.

He swivels around in his chair, a bunch of pages in his lap. “This will blow your mind. Remember all those missing-persons articles I downloaded? I kept digging and found even more. But here’s the thing—there’s a pattern.”

“What kind of pattern?” I ask.

“Get this. They all involve victims between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. And all of them went missing in the winter months.”

I think back to the pages he printed off for me. I’d noticed they were all teenagers. But the winter thing slipped by me.

“So?” Ash says. “Maybe they ran away from this armpit of a town. Winter’s a bitch up here. Can you blame them?”

“We’re not talking runaways. These guys just
vanish—
like off the face of the earth. They never come back. Never heard from again.”

“Okay. So where you going with this?” I ask.

“I’ve got a theory. The thing that attacked us got them too. Infected them, or whatever you want to call it. Let them go. And then, for some reason, they gave themselves up to it. Most of these articles talk about the missing kids just walking off in the night, in the middle of winter. Like Ray Dyson did. Not taking anything with them, not putting on shoes or jackets or nothing. And then
poof
, they’re gone.”

Everybody’s quiet.

I’m not liking Howie’s theory. “What else you got?”

“I think this
beast
—like you call it—only comes out in the winter. That’s when it hunts, right? I think maybe it needs the cold.”

Pike sits on a corner of the desk, rubbing his Mohawk, listening close.

Howie keeps going. “But the disappearances don’t happen every winter. I think that’s part of why nobody’s made the connection before. They only happen in the coldest winters, years apart sometimes. Look, I made up a graph to prove my theory,” he says, bright-eyed.

I have to hold back a smile. Only Howie could get excited over a graph. “Let’s see.”

It looks like something from a textbook. He must have whipped it up on the computer. It shows a squiggly line with spikes running from left to right, kind of like the readout on a heart monitor.

“Help me out,” I say. “What am I looking at?”

He leans in to point.

“This shows the number of local missing teenagers over the past sixty years, as far back as the records went. See how the numbers spike some years and flatline in others?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“The spikes happen in those years with the coldest winters. The flatlines are when the winters were warmer than average.”

I notice a change in the more recent years near the end of the graph. The gaps between the spikes are bigger, with longer stretches of flatline. Like a slowing heartbeat.

I point this out to him. “You think maybe the beast is slowing down?”

Howie shakes his head. “I think it’s more likely because the last twenty years have been the warmest in centuries. Global warming. Easy winters.”

“Easy?” Pike nods toward the open window with the polar breeze blowing in. “This place could use a little global warming.”

“But compared to how it used to be,” Howie says. “There’s been more early thaws. Thinner ice. A couple years ago the lake didn’t even freeze over completely. A century ago they used to harvest ice blocks till the end of March. Now you can’t even skate out there past February most years.”

“But this winter’s different,” I say.

“It’s a bad one. Just how the
beast
likes it. And because it’s had to wait so long between cold snaps, it’s built up a hunger. Usually only a couple kids go missing in the bad winters. But this one—first Ray, now you and me. I think maybe it’s starving.”

“Feeding frenzy,” Pike says.

“But if it’s in a
frenzy
, or whatever,” I say, “why did it let us go?”

Howie shakes his head. “Still working on that.”

I study the graph, the line tracking the missing teenagers looking like heartbeats. When really, it’s not tracking life but death.

“Where does it go, then?” Ash says. “When it’s not winter.”

Howie shrugs. “Could be, it holes up somewhere to sleep through the warmer stretches. Like a reverse hibernation, waiting for the temperature to drop low enough for it to come out. But that’s a guess. This”—he taps the graph—“is no guess. This is proof something’s going on.”

Ash gets up and stretches her back with a groan. “I don’t know, Howie. All I see is a squiggly line on a page. What’s the rest of this stuff?”

She glances at the pile of paper he’s set down beside the keyboard.

“Research. I’ve been looking into something called cryptozoology.”

“That’s not a word,” I say. “You made it up.”

“No way. Cryptozoology. It’s real. It’s the study of mythic or hidden creatures. Like the Yeti, or Sasquatch.”

I give him a look. Howie’s gone off the deep end. “You’re talking about Bigfoot? I thought we were being serious here.”

“I’m dead serious.” He pulls a page out of the pile and hands it to me. “I found this on one of those sites.”

The printout is grainy, showing a crude drawing made on some rock surface. But the image stops me cold.