Bonechiller (23 page)

The trailer rests on cement blocks, the last shreds of paint peeling off its siding. Miles from anything.

Just how Mangy Mason likes it.

This morning I told Howie and Ash about my semi-deranged conversation with the guy.

“Mason’s a nut,” Howie said. “But he’s been living in the Cove for longer than anybody. Maybe he knows something. What else do we got?”

“Worth a shot,” Ash agreed. “I’ll come with you and watch your back.”

I said I didn’t want to spook the old guy. From what I hear, Mason never talks to anybody if he can help it.

“I think we bonded,” I told them. “I should go alone.”

Starting down the hill, I see where the cable runs right under the trailer. Howie told me how Mason keeps getting busted for bootlegging electricity off the power lines.

A few years back, the Feds tried to kick him and his trailer off of what they said were public lands. Then Mason turned out to be not so nutty. He claimed “squatter’s rights.”
He’s been living there for fifty years. So the Feds decided to wait him out. The guy is ancient, and walks around in the middle of winter in a T-shirt. He isn’t knocking on death’s door, he’s pounding on it.

I don’t see any sign of him as I approach the maze of garbage surrounding his trailer. Dozens of car tires are stacked in piles, like he’s building a fort. Deceased fridges and stoves huddle under coats of snow, with a weather-eaten couch and recliner nearby to sit and enjoy the view. He’s even got a satellite dish (for decoration?) on the roof. And flapping high above it all is an upside-down Canadian flag on a tilted steel pole. Flying the flag the wrong way up like that is supposed to be a sign of distress. He’s got that right.

I have to watch where I’m stepping to avoid all the yellow stains in the snow from the dogs. The door to the trailer is wide open.

“Hello?” I call in.

The lights are on, and I think I hear the low mumble of a TV.

“Anybody home?”

Three furry white faces appear in the doorway, with three sets of ice-blue eyes studying me. I see the dogs asking themselves—is this food?

“You still breathing?”

I spin around.

Mason has snuck up on me, silent in his ragged sneakers. He’s wearing cracked sunglasses held together with tape, and his half-shredded Budweiser T-shirt. Two more huskies stand with him.

“Still breathing,” I say.

He spits into a nearby drift and climbs the steps into his trailer. “Not for long. You smell ripe.”

I smell ripe? The stink coming off this guy makes my eyes water.

“Can I talk to you a second?” I ask.

There’s a clatter of metal from inside, then the grind of a motor.

“Won’t do any good,” he calls back.

The dogs bump me as they go in.

Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea. But I came this far. “I just wanted to ask you—”

“What?” he snaps. “Get in here or get lost. In or out. I don’t talk through walls.”

I step into the dim interior, where it smells like something was left to rot.

“Lunchtime.” Mason sticks a can of dog food under the mechanical opener. He grabs a hubcap from a teetering stack on the counter and plops the contents onto it, then sets the cap on the floor for his mutts. He does this a few more times, until everybody’s happily gorging themselves. The rotting remains of past meals are shoved against the wall.

He grabs a couple paper plates and cracks two more cans. The dog food glorps out onto the plates.

“So,” he says. “Turkey Delight or Liver Feast?”

It takes me a second to realize he’s offering
me
a choice. “No, I’m good.” I hold back a gag. “I had a few Milk-Bones on the way over.”

That’s supposed to be funny, but he only frowns like
I’m
the unstable one here.

“More for me.” He tosses his sunglasses on the counter and grabs a fork.

Mason sits on a stack of four mattresses that takes up the end of the trailer. A TV rests against the wall at the foot of the bed, like he warms his feet on it at night. CNN is on, covering some war.

“The other day, when we were talking …,” I begin. “You know, about the local wildlife? You said something took your best friend, back when you were a kid. What did you mean by that?”

He chews, watching troops in some bombed-out hellhole.

Is he even listening?

Then he sets his fork down and rolls up the right sleeve of his T-shirt. He bares his biceps and the big faded tattoo of a fancy cross he’s got inked there.

“See that?”

“Yeah. Nice cross.”

“It’s a Celtic cross. A ward, a protection,” he snaps, eyes intense. “I gave myself God’s mark so the Devil couldn’t claim me.”

“Right,” I mutter. We just took a sharp turn into crazy-town.

“Take a close look. Do you see?”

“Yeah, sure.” I glance at it and nod.

“No, you don’t. Look into the eye of the cross.”

I’m getting this creepy feeling, like he’s trying to hypnotize me or something—
Stare at the eye, you’re getting sleepy
 …

But all that’s there in the center is a clear patch of uninked and wrinkly skin. Nothing more than—

In the middle of the
eye
is a small blue dot.

Just like the one on the back of my right hand. Like the one on Howie’s neck.

“You got stung? When?”

He scratches deep in his beard with the fork, then digs into the dog food.

“Fifty, fifty-one years ago.”

His mark looks as fresh as mine.

“But how? I mean, I thought if you got bit then it took you. Like you said it took your friend.”

Mason considers a chunk of Liver Feast on his fork, a distant look in his eyes. Then he fills his face with it.

“Rod McLean,” he mumbles. “We were playing a little night shinny out on the ice, by the light of the moon. I was up a couple goals when his slap shot knocked one of the tin cans we were using for goalposts flying. So he skated off to find the puck, and I got the cans set up again. Then I heard Rod shout. Thought he was just horsing at first. I skated over toward the sound of his voice. And then I saw it.”

He licks his fork clean, remembering.

“The demon had him flat on his back on the ice, holding him there. It looked like something the Devil had bred in his zoo of damned souls. Rod was out cold. Dead, for all I could tell. I held my hockey stick ready to swing when the demon looked my way. Then it was on me.”

Mason holds his arm out, showing his cross and the blue dot in the eye.

“Got me right through my winter coat. Knocked me out. When I came to, Rod was shaking me awake. The demon was gone. Didn’t know why we were still breathing. Rod, he got sick a few days later. Me too, only not as bad.”

“What happened to him? Your friend?”

“Rod got sick. Then he got better, for a while. The doctors thought it was tetanus, or blood poisoning. But they couldn’t explain why he had ice in his veins, why he was so cold but not shivering. They gave him drugs for it, thought he was getting better. But the demon got inside his head. Got in mine too. You know what I’m talking about. The whispers. Voices so close, like somebody’s breathing the words in your ear. But nobody’s there.”

He stares at me for a moment. “Not yet, eh? Soon, you’ll hear them.”

I get this shiver, like a spider crawling down my spine.

“Rod was a tough kid, but he couldn’t take it. And one night, in the middle of a January cold snap, he took off. He shared a room with his little brother. The brother told me later the last thing he heard Rod say was ‘I’m coming. I’m coming.’ Like he was answering someone calling him.”

Mason throws his empty cans onto the pile on the floor.

“And?” I ask.

“And nothing. Storytime’s over.” He stands up. “Get the hell out.”

He waves at me like I’m a mosquito. I start backing out of the trailer. “What about Rod?”

“They never found a trace of him.” Mason hustles his dogs out along with me. “Come on,” he tells them. “We’ve got work to do.”

I step back into the fresh air.

“I don’t get it,” I say as he follows me out into the snow. “You’re still here. You survived. How come?”

His huskies watch him like they’re waiting for the answer with me.

“What did you do?”

“I ran,” he says. “Rod was gone, and I knew where. Knew he wasn’t coming back. When I started hearing the whispers, I knew there was no fighting it. I was next. So, I ran as far as I could. Ended up in Toronto. Far enough. I still had the ice in my veins, still had the
chill
. But the whispers went away. And the dreams.”

Mason looks at the frozen lake, where ghost squalls of windblown snow chase each other.

“Came back here three years later, with the new cross on my arm for protection. Thought maybe I’d imagined it all. But Rod was still gone. And when winter came that year, the dreams came with it. Only not like before. I could feel the demon sniffing around me in the dreams, feel it watching. But something was changed inside me. And it didn’t want me anymore.”

“Why? What changed?”

“I changed. I wasn’t a kid anymore. It only takes them young.”

“Why?” I feel like I’m on the brink of some discovery.

“How the hell do I know? God works in mysterious ways—so does the Devil. All I know is the demon leaves me alone now. I don’t have what it needs. But you do.”

A shiver spider-crawls down my back.

Mason walks away with his dog posse.

“Run while you still can,” he calls back. “Like I did. Before it’s too late.”

There’s no answer on Howie’s cell, or at his home number.

Got to see what he makes of Mason’s story. Maybe with this new info he’ll come up with something.

Back at the marina house, I pace around my room and keep trying his cell. Maybe there’s a tiny bit of hope. Mason found a way to escape his death sentence. So it can be done.

I slouch back in my chair. Ash called me late last night, checking on me. She wanted to brainstorm, figure out a plan. But I was too freaked to focus.

“You never get scared?” I asked her.

She’s always so cool, even after what we saw down in the cave, after she’d seen the beast with her own eyes.

“Sure. But you can’t let it show. Life’s a fight, Danny. You let them see you’re scared, you’ve already lost. You got to eat the fear. Never let them see where it hurts.”

Right there is the whole history of Ash. Why she’s unbeaten.

My phone rings, startling me. The screen says
Unknown Caller
.

“Hello?”

“Danny, it’s Pike.”

“Hey, man. I’ve been trying to get Howie. What’s—”

“I’m calling from the hospital,” Pike says. “It’s Howie. We couldn’t wake him up. Doctor says it’s some kind of coma. They think it might be a relapse, from the hypothermia. But they don’t know what’s really going on. You should see him—his lips have gone blue.”

“I just talked to him on the phone this morning,” I tell Pike. “He didn’t sound so bad.”

“I found him on the floor in his room, unconscious. I couldn’t get him to wake up. Man, I don’t know what to do.”

I’ve never heard Pike sound like this. Helpless. The flicker of hope I was feeling a minute ago has been snuffed out.

“Keep an eye on him,” I say. “In case he tries to run away. You know.”

“Right. I know. I’ll be watching him close. But we gotta think of something.”

“Like what?”

“Like how do we kill that thing?”

This
thing
has been around for a thousand years! How do you kill the unkillable?

“I gotta go,” Pike says. “I’m not letting him out of my sight.” He hangs up.

I stand staring at the phone. We’re screwed! We’re dead!

That thing is so deep inside our heads. It owns us.

Mason told me—I smell ripe. We’re both ripe, me and Howie.

Our time’s up.

Mason’s a nut, but he’s also the only one who ever escaped that thing.
Run
, he said.
While you still can
.

Something tells me it’s too late for Howie.

So, sick with fear, I do the only thing I can.

Sitting on a stump in the trash-strewn field by Highway 11, I watch the sparse traffic speed through this big stretch of nothing toward Toronto. Across the road is the Last Stop Convenience Store. The Greyhound bus stops there twice a day.