Page 128 of Mazywood

“Scout?” he coughed, half forgetting he wasn’t in his dream.

Even as Jerry called out hopefully for a dog that probably had been dead for nearly thirty years, his legs kept up their awkward running. The gate was still yards away, but it was closer with every step.

Whatever it was kept pace with him, racing forward, doubling back. He saw white chunks fly when it moved and realized it was buried in the shadowy snow. The shaft of bright sunlight splaying across the driveway ahead appeared like a sanctuary, promising warmth.

Jerry’s arms pumped as he forgot his pain and focused on making it to the sun.

Something flung itself from the snow into his path, shaking itself steady. At first he did see Scout, or at least a dog who looked just like him, but when he blinked, he realized the white-furred creature in front of him wasn’t a dog.

It preened by outstretching its nearly translucent bat-like arms, yawning its mouth open like a swamp alligator displaying vicious teeth—two rows, not one, nearly too many teeth for its mouth. The bigger teeth looked like daggers three inches long. A nightmare creature.

Jerry screamed, a full-throated sound he had never made in his life. He nearly couldn’t avoid falling into the thing, but he was so repelled by its claws and teeth that he willed his legs to change direction to try to get around it. Somehow, he stayed on his feet.

He had no more theories or a plan. His feet blindly stomped into snow as he ran. His chest was caving, choking his breath. He sobbed at the prospect of those teeth touching his skin, panic nearly overtaking him.

Still, rational thought prevailed: Whatever this thing was, it was only the size of a dog! Jerry tugged at a dead branch dangling above him, pulling twice to yank it loose and test its weight in his hand. The creature was gliding across the snow toward him with its arms folded flat like a seal, reinventing its form. But the teeth in that wide-open mouth were the same.

“Fuck you!” Jerry screamed as he swung the branch. With his adrenaline surging, he swung too wide, too hard. His arc missed the creature, and the weight of the branch carried him off balance.

He heard his right ankle snap and thought, What was that?—and saw that his foot was separated from his ankle’s bloody stump. He gaped at the muddy sole of his shoe clenched in the creature’s mouth (Not your shoe, your FOOT), and then the gale of pain blotted his thoughts.

Jerry shrieked. Without a right foot to balance him, he fell against a tree trunk, hitting his head so hard that the crack echoed in the grove.

In the end, it wasn’t his heart or Scout that killed Jerry Lorenzo—it was the tree.

But watching it unfold through her picture window like a movie screen, Mazelle had never been so proud.

The Bone Room

Thirty-Three

PRESENT DAY

DARKNESS.

The dark was so thick that Tasha couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed. She fanned her face, lightly touching her eyelids, revisiting herself. As a child, she had imagined Hell as the fires foretold in the stories, but that felt foolish now. Hell was the cold, unrelenting dark.

She shrieked for help; to feel her own existence, to stanch her Unbecoming. The sound of her voice mocked her in fragmented echoes, distant and distorted. But the need to hear herself was more irrepressible than her fear of teeth, claws, and fur, or more of the endless dragging that had jolted and dizzied her so much that she nearly choked on her own vomit.

No, not dragging—she could not have survived that. Her skin rarely had touched the snow while she was swaddled. She had kicked out her left foot once when she felt the movement slow, instinct driving her to try to break from the tight cocoon, but she had screamed from the pain of the hard world outside, instantly drawing her damaged foot back inside. Beyond the cocoon lay solid trees and stones and biting cold. Finally, the motion had rocked her silent when she could scream no more. Then the blackness was everything.

Unseen twigs crunched beneath Tasha when she moved. Her left foot stabbed her with vicious complaints, but she didn’t shriek again despite pain that felt like bones carving through her skin. She slid her hand beneath the band of her sweatpants, past her underwear, across her thin thatch of hair to probe herself for blood between her legs. Year after year, trying to conceive Imani, she had lived in fear of waking to blood in her underwear. Or on the tissue. Or in the toilet. Blood was the gatekeeper between life and death, joy and tragedy.

She didn’t feel blood or moisture. When she raised her finger to her nose to sniff it, to taste it, she detected dirt and perspiration, but no coppery tang. Barely any scent in this cold. She had not lost the baby from the shock of her passage.

She might be in this pit of unseeing and silence, but she was real—and her baby was inside her. Ethereal grace broke her terror with a single, faraway voice.

“Mom?”

The first time she heard the voice, Tasha assumed it was a lie; her imagination granting her embryo speech, not just a cherub’s face.

But the next voice, though barely more than an echo, was strong enough to carve through the pitch like human touch. “We’re here! Tasha, we’re right here!”

“Johnny?” she called back.

How could this be? She heard all three of them—Johnny, Imani, and Sharise—in a flurry of celebration. (Too loud, she thought. Don’t be so loud.) Were they somewhere enfolded in this darkness too? Her biggest terror during each twist and turn of her long journey had been that no one would find her. But her solace had been believing the rest of her family was safely away.

“Tasha—tell me anything you…” Johnny’s next words were too faint, lost, until his voice strengthened again. “… where you are!”