Page 151 of Mazywood

A last bone rattled down, making him jump. Precious, damnable silence came next.

Then Johnny thought he heard a distant rumble winding through the corridors. It could almost be the sound of a vehicle revving its low engine, but it sounded more like…

Growling, he realized. Every instinct told him to run.

A distant voice came next from everywhere around him: “Johnny! Sharise! Watch out!”

Tasha! The sound of her voice made Johnny stagger with joy. Tasha was alive! He hadn’t known how much he believed she was dead until he heard her voice, a miracle on this day of damnation. He wanted to call back to ask about Imani, but Tasha’s warning compelled silence. She might have risked her own life to warn him, and foolishness would dishonor that risk.

Johnny hated to sweep his light away from the bones lining the walls—in the dark, they seemed to shift and glower—but his gut told him that Tasha hadn’t called out with a general advisory. The monster was about to attack him, and the monster moved fast. He had to try to light its routes of possible attack with this tepid glow. He thought he saw the vague outline of a fork in front of him. He would only have a chance if he saw the monster coming.

As it turned out, Johnny would hear the monster before he saw it.

The brittle stones on the floor of the cavern betrayed its racing approach with a swishing noise not much different than its sound in the snow, only more jagged than soft. It moved with such speed and purpose that debris popped and cracked against the walls as it approached.

But his ears tricked him in these tunnels, so Johnny found himself spinning in different directions to try to guess where it would emerge. Panic ate away at his rationality; he turned to look behind him although he had not crossed its path before the bone room.

With his light leading his muzzle, Johnny jerked his rifle from side to side. Everywhere he looked, he was surrounded by soupy gray and imaginary motion in the dark.

Johnny’s shaky finger tightened on the trigger. He was on the verge of firing a warning shot when he realized he didn’t know what the impact of gunfire would be in this cavern. Could he trigger a collapse? Would he shoot Tasha or Imani in the dark?

“Come on!” Johnny yelled.

He sounded like a man ready to kill, but he felt more like a man about to die.

As if the monster obeyed commands, he felt its large bulk enter the space, its motion jerking to a sudden stop, almost like one of his children skidding on a snowboard.

Finally, his light distinguished the monster’s shadowed white coat. It was standing upright like a snake only a dozen feet from him. This spectacle was nothing like the miniature monster he’d seen in his grandmother’s window—as tall and wide as a grizzly, directly in his path. Standing between Johnny and his family.

For an instant, neither of them moved. Johnny heard only his panting breath and smelled his own perspiration mingled with the blanket of musk from the monster.

The monster emitted loud, long sniffing noises. It was smelling him too.

The monster’s terrifying, unnatural chittering clogged Johnny’s ears. This was the jumbo version of the sound he thought he’d heard from that tree when he tracked this monster when he was fourteen. Now the sound quaked his bones. With a yell, he raised his gun—he would take a chance with the sound of gunfire. He had no other defense except to shoot it.

Bright light strobed from the tunnel behind the monster, silhouetting its terrifying form. The footsteps Johnny heard approaching behind it were human. Small.

“Daddy, no!” a voice shouted. “Don’t shoot it!”

Dear God.

The voice was Imani’s.

Imani had stumbled once while she ran, scraping her ungloved hands bloody on the rough floor of the cavern—but otherwise, she had never run so fast. Every time she was sure she had lost Beast’s path toward her father, one of her glow sticks had appeared to show her the way back toward the cavern entrance. Back toward Daddy.

The whole time she ran, she’d been plagued by visions.

Her father chomped in half by vicious teeth.

Beast lying dead from a rifle shot, it secrets forever gone.

How could she save them both? Or either of them? Imani had shed tears the entire time she ran, grieved by her impossible wish to prevent their confrontation.

She wasn’t surprised that her journey ended here, in this chamber full of bones. Daddy and Beast were frozen exactly how she had imagined them, the instant before tragedy. Beast’s angry growl had chilled her, so she was grateful that it wasn’t eating him already.

Was it because he was trespassing? Was it because Daddy had disturbed the bones? Imani had arrived in time to see their clash, and her first thought was Shoot him, Daddy! No matter how entranced she was by Beast, she could not stand by and watch it kill her father. She’d raised her spear, ready to blindly strike at Beast to defend him.

And then… she heard the chittering. Compared to Beast’s growl, it was soft. Soothing. Imani wondered why she hadn’t realized the difference in the sounds before: Beast had never growled at her, even when it was chasing her and Sharise to the tree. What if it had never meant to hurt them? What if it had meant to bring them to Mom all along?