Monster Read online

  It was when they finished that climb and descended a north-facing slope into old-growth forest that the hike turned from a physical competition to something almost . . . profound. This wasn’t common, everyday forest with trees the size of telephone poles all close together and stickery bushes between them. No, this was something out of a Tolkien or Lewis fantasy, a wondrous, otherworldly place where the earth was soft and deep with moss and peat; where tiny white wildflowers twinkled in the green carpet, iridescent bugs with fairy wings flickered in the sunbeams, and every footstep was muffled in the pulverized red bark of a million trees that lived there before. Now, this caught Beck’s fancy. She’d read about this place, even written her own whimsical stories about it when she was a girl. This was where hobbits and elves, fairies and princesses, knights and ogres had their adventures and intrigues, and where all nature of mischievous creatures lived among the snaking, claw-foot roots. This was where—

  “You can eat cattails, did you know that?” Reed still had not run out of things he knew and just had to share. “You can eat the stalk; you can eat the pollen; you can even eat the roots. Of course, they grow in swamps and wetlands, and we’re up a little high for that.” He sounded like a forest ranger on a nature hike, and he was past getting on her nerves.

  She held her peace and concentrated on the coarse, furrowed sides of the huge trees. How old must they be by now? How many centuries had they seen? How many—

  “Hey, a slug. Did you know those are edible? ’Course, they’re supposed to be better if you cook ’em, but you can eat them either way.”

  Enough. “R-reed. You c-can barbecue one and s-serve it with A1 Sauce and I will never eat it. Change the s-subject.”

  “How about grass? Remember that meadow back there? We could have cooked up a kettle of grass stew, maybe even made some tea.”

  “If I recall c-correctly, we have p-pine needles for tea.”

  “Now you’re learning. Hey, you know how to find north and south without a compass?”

  “D-do you ever stop talking?”

  “Beck, we’re supposed to learn all this stuff.”

  “Reed, I am happy with my life, I really am! I have a novel to work on, two paintings, and a stack of research. I could be doing all of that right now and enjoying my life, but nooo, I have to be hoofing out in the middle of nowhere, listening to my back-to-earth husband talk about eating slugs.”

  “One of these days, Beck, you’re gonna wish you knew this stuff.”

  She fully intended to learn it, but she wasn’t about to tell him. She did sneak a look at the slug as she passed by. Ooookay. That settled that.

  Reed held back, which gave her precious time to mellow and enjoy things—well, more than just enjoy. She already understood what Reed had been trying to tell her. There were sights out here she’d never seen, and there were feelings that could only be felt by being here: the solitude, the wonder. The unique song of the woods could only be heard in nature’s kind of quiet. She wanted to capture it, but what camera was capable of conveying the depth of such an image? What words could evoke the emotion? God spoke through His creation, and the message went past the mind, straight to the heart. It was all so—

  “Uh-oh.” Reed stopped, and in her reverie Beck almost ran into him.

  “What?”

  “Is that the cabin?”

  Ahead, the trail meandered downward into a quiet, tree-shaded ravine where an ancient fallen log formed a bridge across a creek. On the other side, the remains of a man-made structure huddled against the slope in what could have been—should have been—a quaint setting. Once it had been a crude but effective shelter built from hand-hewn logs and split shakes, perched on footings of river rock. Once it had a sheltered front porch, a front door, and a window on each side. Once it had been just as Randy Thompson’s survival brochure had described it—“a wilderness retreat well worth the hike.”

  They kept an eye on it as they silently worked their way down the trail, the cabin peeking and hiding, peeking and hiding through the trees. With each new view came more woeful news: The porch roof had collapsed, its support posts snapped in two; just visible under the sagging porch roof, the front door hung crookedly from only one of the two strap hinges; on the shallow creek bank below, the remains of a cot lay ripped and crumpled, the frame splintered like matchsticks.

  At the log bridge, the cabin was in plain sight. Reed rechecked the map and Randy Thompson’s detailed instructions. “This is it. This is the cabin.”

  One window was shattered; the other was torn out, frame and all. Through the window, and on the porch, and on the ground around the cabin lay gutted food containers, shredded wrappers, crumpled cans, spilled flour.

  “Someone’s been here,” said Reed. “Maybe a bear.”

  Beck called, “M-Mr. Thompson! Mr. Thompson!”

  The only answer was the mournful sound of Lost Creek moving under the bridge.

  two

  Reed didn’t like not knowing. He started toward the cabin. “Guess we’d better check it out.”

  “I-I’m n-n-not going i-innnn there!” Beck protested, staying right where she was on the log bridge.

  “Okay, fine.” Reed slipped his backpack off. “Stay here and watch the stuff.”

  He grabbed his digital camera from a side pocket of his pack, snapped some wide shots from the bridge, and then went across to the other side.

  The cop in him was coming out. He stepped carefully, not wanting to contaminate the site with his own disturbances, moving over the rocks, avoiding the softer areas that might reveal footprints. He snapped some more pictures of the litter, the cabin, the torn-out window, the collapsing front porch, the broken cot on the creek bank.

  He ducked under the sagging roof, pushed the broken door out of the way, and took a look inside. The other cot was still here, but splintered like the one outside. Shelves along the back wall were smashed, and the shredded, depleted remnants of the food supplies spilled all over the floor, along with a rusty shovel, most likely the cabin’s “toilet.” A sack of pancake mix had been ruptured, dusting the floor and shelves with a translucent layer of white. At his feet lay an empty bread wrapper, a can of Spam torn open and licked clean, a crinkled and empty package of jerky, a canteen still full of water.

  Beck called, “Is anybody in there?”

  “Yeah. Me.”

  “Very funny!”

  He ducked back outside.

  Beck had ventured close enough to pick up and examine an empty can of beans, its torn edges jagged as if it had been bitten or clawed open.

  “There’s more of that inside,” he told her. “Had to have been a bear. That’s what happens when you leave food around. That’s why you never leave food in your camp. You store it up high, out of reach, away from your campsite.”

  For once she was listening, with no comeback or protest—not with that torn can in her hand.

  “But that makes me think somebody’s been here recently,” Reed said. “The food around here was all fresh stuff, like somebody just brought it.”

  Maybe he shouldn’t have told her that. She sighed, threw up her hands and brought them down with a slap against her legs, twirled in place, scanned the forest all around. “Oh, that’s just g-great! So w-where is he now?”

  “Beck.”

  “Looks like your b-b-big vacation plan just went s-south—”

  “Beck! Come on, now. We’re adults. We’re professional people. We work the problem!”

  Good. That seemed to hit home. Beck breathed a moment, brushed a lock of her reddish-brown hair from her face, and asked him, “So w-what do we do?”

  “We get a grip—”

  “I’ve got a grip! What do we do?”

  Well, this was his moment. He was the stud here, the man with the plan. He drew a breath to buy a little time. “We think things through. Now, we’ve only got an hour of daylight left. We’d better get our camp set up.”

  She cocked her head and looked at him with unbelieving ey
es. “Y-y-you—”

  “Yes. We’re going to camp here. We don’t have time to hike back down.”

  “S-s-s-so w-what if the b-bear comes-comes back?”

  “We’ve got our shovels and there’s a shovel in the cabin. We can bury all this garbage so he doesn’t return, and then we’ll camp somewhere else and hang our food up in a tree far away from where we’re sleeping. No problem. That’s the way campers do it all the time.”

  “S-s-s—” Beck sputtered and spit through her fumbling lips in frustration. “So w-where’s Mr. Thompson—that’s what I want to kn-n-n—”

  “Beck, we’re in the wilderness. The rules are different out here. If we don’t keep ourselves alive, Mr. Thompson isn’t going to matter one way or the other.”

  Beck finally sighed, “Ooo-kay.”

  He led, she followed, and they found a suitable spot farther up the creek, high, dry, and mostly level, encircled by hefty firs and pines. It provided a good view of the cabin below, but was hard to see from below—Beck liked that part. Reed got out a length of rope, and between the two of them, with some shinnying and climbing, they were able to suspend their food containers on a clothesline between two trees a suitable distance from their camp. Other than the food, they didn’t unpack much. Reed spread out a ground cloth, and they unrolled their sleeping bags on it.

  In the ebbing light, Beck changed into jeans and a warmer shirt. Now the cool air moving down the ravine made her glad she’d brought that buckskin jacket. She gladly put it back on.

  Their camp prepared, they sat on their sleeping bags in the deepening dark and munched on cold sandwiches.

  “We’ll stow our sandwich boxes and wrappers up in the Remote Storage Apparatus along with the other rations,” Reed said.

  Beck’s sandwich was cold and soggy. “So much for hot pine needle tea.”

  “Maybe tomorrow.” He snapped a few pictures of her.

  She smiled, a shade of smirk on her lips despite the wad of sandwich still in her cheek. “So I wonder what happened to Mr. Thompson?”

  “The bear wouldn’t have raided the cabin if he’d been here. I’m guessing he went back down to Abney to bring up more supplies.”

  “Well, Mr. Survival wasn’t too smart to leave all that food in the cabin in the first place, am I right?”

  Reed nodded, conceding the point even as it puzzled him. “It sure didn’t work out, did it?”

  Beck swallowed her bite of sandwich before she spoke again. “Maybe he’s planning on coming up with Sing and Cap in the morning.”

  “That’s why we need to sit tight. Stick with the plan.”

  Beck chewed and thought it over. It did make sense. Sometime in the midmorning, Randy Thompson would come up the trail from Abney. Cap and Sing would be right there with him carrying in more supplies. Everything would fall together, and they would all make the best of it. She allowed herself to breathe a little easier. Reed seemed to have a handle on things. Maybe she’d trust him. Maybe.

  She lay back on her sleeping bag, finishing up the last bite of her sandwich. The treetops converged around the circle of darkening sky. The first stars were visible. She had to admit, this part of it was pretty nice.

  It couldn’t have been more than a half hour since they crawled into their sleeping bags that Beck sat up, blinked, stared straight ahead, and saw nothing. She turned her head, felt her eyes moving in their sockets, blinked to be sure her eyes were open.

  Where was she? The darkness was so total, so enveloping, that she had to tell herself she was in the woods, somewhere along Lost Creek, above a torn-up little cabin.

  She couldn’t see the cabin. She couldn’t see the creek or the trail.

  She groped for her flashlight and found it just inside her sleeping bag. Come on, come on, where’s that button?

  It clicked on and almost blinded her.

  Okay. Squinting in the sudden light, she could see the trees encircling their camping spot. She could see a few bushes, ferns, roots, and rocks, stark in the flashlight beam with nothing but bottomless black behind them.

  What happened to that wondrous place she’d seen by day, that enchanting forest where the elves and princesses and heroes had their adventures and intrigues and little bugs with fairy wings floated in the sunbeams?

  Obviously, that was then, and this was night. Suddenly she felt lost. What were the rules now?

  “What are you doing?” Reed’s voice made her jump.

  She settled, breathed, her hand over her heart. “Y-you—” She stopped without saying, scared me. “N-nothing. Just looking around.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  She clicked off the flashlight. Now the darkness was darker than before and she saw nothing but afterimages floating on her retinas.

  Go to sleep, girl, she told herself. This is night. It happens every day. No, every night. Every—what?—sixteen hours or so? No, more like eight hours that start after sixteen hours of daytime. Anyway, it only lasts so long.

  She lay back and closed her eyes.

  Snap.

  She froze, her eyes wide but unseeing. “Did you hear that?”

  Reed didn’t answer. She wanted to nudge him but didn’t.

  There it was again, only more of it: a twig snapping, a bush swishing. Crack! Definitely a stick on the ground breaking.

  Now she did nudge him.

  “What?”

  “There’s s-something out there.”

  Reed propped himself up on an elbow with a sigh of exasperation and listened for at least half a minute. All was silent. He turned as if to chide her, but then—Snap!

  Reed’s stomach wrenched inside him. Brother, now she’s got me worked up. But he couldn’t deny it. He heard it too: something was moving in the deep blackness beyond, somewhere down in the ravine.

  A rustling. Thump! Something heavy and wooden tipped over.

  It’s wildlife, he told himself. “It’s wildlife,” he whispered. “You know, deer, elk, something like that.”

  “A b-b-bear?”

  “Well, it could be the bear. Animals do a lot of foraging at night. There’s nothing weird about it.”

  She insisted, “W-w-what if it’s the b-bear?”

  “He’s after food, remember? If he goes anywhere, it’ll be to the cabin to clean up whatever’s left. He doesn’t even know we’re up here.”

  There was a breathless moment of silence.

  “Oh, shoot,” Reed whispered.

  “What?”

  “I forgot to hang up the sandwich containers. We still have them here.”

  “M-m-maybe he won’t s-smell anything.”

  “Air moves downhill at night. We’re upwind.”

  But then it was quiet, and stayed quiet.

  Reed spoke first. “Guess it’s over.” He lay back down.

  Beck sat up for another moment, then eased back and pulled the sleeping bag up to her chin. She lay on her back, then one side, then the other side.

  Finally, she whispered, “Arrre y-you asleep?”

  “No,” he answered out loud.

  “How you doing?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “M-me too.”

  “You sound nervous.”

  “I’m not.” Silence. “Well, aren’t y-you?”

  “Nope. Not me.”

  “You’re not asleep.”

  He sighed and rustled around. “You woke me up.”

  He was getting to her again. “I’m r-reeeally not afraid. I can handle this just as w-well as you can.”

  Well, he wasn’t afraid, no way. “Beck, you know what? The only creatures out here afraid of the dark are us. All the other animals are out there stomping around in the dark like it’s nothing, and here we are, scared to death—”

  “Oh, w-we’re scared to death?”

  “I’m talking in group talk here. We’re a team, we’re—”

  “Oh, w-we’re a team? Well just-just tell me this: Which t-team has the advantage here? I mean, just who is on whose turf?”
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br />   “The animals don’t mind. They’re just doing what animals do—”

  More noise. Something moving.

  “I th-th-think it’s near the c-cabin,” Beck whispered.

  “The cabin’s that way.”

  “W-what way?”

  “That way.”

  “I can’t see where you’re pointing.”

  “Well, just sit tight and—”

  The sound was nothing like they had ever heard before, and it wasn’t quiet. It was so clear, so loud, that even though Reed knew it was somewhere down in the ravine, it seemed as if it was right there next to them.

  It was like a woman wailing in grief and anguish, weeping over the corpse of a loved one, her cry rising, wavering, holding, then falling off into a hissing sob, then . . . gone. Silence.

  Snap! Crunch. Whatever it was, it was coming up the ravine.

  The woman wept again, her voice quaking, the note rising to a nerve-rending peak and then trailing off.

  Beck saw nothing with her eyes, but her imagination was providing the most horrible images of dismembered witches, transparent banshees, rotting corpses walking about seeking revenge—

  Oh, stop it! she scolded herself.

  Reed fumbled for his flashlight.

  “D-d-don’t-don’t turn that on! She’ll see where we are!”

  Reed’s voice was shaking. “Nothing’s gonna sneak up on me—I mean, I just, I just wanna get a fix on it.”

  Then came a quieter whimper, as if through clenched teeth.

  Reed found the button. Suddenly, shockingly, the beam of his flashlight cut through the darkness, reached as far as the immediate trees, then stretched itself into oblivion in the tangled forest, bringing back only dim images of leaves, dead branches, dancing shadows. Beck didn’t look—she was afraid of what she might see.

  “What if it really is somebody out there?” Reed whispered. “What if they’re in trouble?”

  “Th-th-then w-why don’t they say s-so?”

  Reed hollered, “Hello? Is anybody out there?”

  No answer.