Bone Hollow

by Kim Ventrella

  “Bone Hollow,” Gabe said, more to himself than to anyone else. Bone chimes, a bone hand, Bone Hollow. All those bones swirled around in his head, making him dizzy, and he gulped down a breath of fresh air, trying to calm himself. No use getting worked up now, seeing as he’d already made his choice.

  He shook his head, feeling a tad more steady, and looked once again at the cottage. In addition to the glowing flowers, the stone walls and thatch roof were lit by dozens of candles of every shape and color. They were propped up on rocks and stumps, flickering away in windowsills and even nestled into the gutters. With the mist and the dark, the shadows they cast reminded him again of being underwater. Like he was back in his imaginary ocean with Gramps at his side, just waiting to see his first fish. That thought eased his mind a little more, and so he didn’t jump when the girl tugged on his sleeve.

  She led him to a rounded green door set in between two windows, just like something out of The Hobbit. The paint was cracked and peeling, but it had a cozy feel, like even the door to this cottage had been well-loved. It was the exact perfect size for the girl to fit through, which in itself was odd, seeing as she was so small. She turned a worn wooden knob in the center and walked inside without another word.

  Gabe paused, but only for a moment. He could no longer hear the voices or the footsteps of his neighbors, though surely they were still out there, searching for him in the woods. He peered at the mist that clung to every inch of the valley, every tree and blade of grass. With the light reflected back on it, it looked almost solid. So maybe the girl was right and nobody could get in. The thought made Gabe feel better, but it also made him shudder. If nobody could come in, did that mean nobody could get out, either? Shaking the idea from his head, he took another deep breath and ducked through the tiny doorway.

  Gabe gasped.

  Wooden flutes hung from the ceiling inside, too, along with dozens of miniature candles suspended with gold string. The cottage smelled of cinnamon and honeysuckle, and nearly every free space was taken up by a stack of colorful quilts. Gabe tried to count them all, but everywhere he looked he found more, piled in corners and tucked away in hidden cubbies. Hadn’t Niko liked to quilt, too? He tried to remember, but it had all been so long ago.

  “Set him down here,” said the girl, spreading out a quilt on the couch; it was navy blue and dotted with gold stars. Gabe tried to imagine Miss Cleo offering the same care to Ollie, but he couldn’t.

  He placed Ollie gently on his side, and seeing him in the light awakened an ache deep in his belly. He didn’t even have room to get angry, that was how pathetic his little dog appeared. His nose was all scrunched up the way a baby’s gets when it’s crying. His moaning had turned into ragged, high-pitched wails that really did sound more like a baby than a dog. He was soaked and muddy, and as Gabe had suspected, his back foot was broken.

  “Where’s your phone?” Gabe said. “We should call a doctor.” Though he wasn’t really sure about that. Ambulances would come any time of night, but what about vets? Besides, how would they ever find them, hidden away in the woods?

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ve got everything we need right here.” She went to a tall cabinet painted in cool, seaside green and took out a roll of gauze and a bag of white powder. She set the two on the old steamer trunk she used as a coffee table and returned a few seconds later with a ceramic bowl filled with water. She moved so slow and serene, Gabe wanted to shake her and tell her to hurry up.

  “You hold his head,” she said, not sounding the least bit panicked. In any other circumstance, Gabe might have taken exception to a stranger touching his dog, but this was a true emergency.

  He knelt down in between the couch and the trunk, cradling Ollie’s head. He kissed his nose and neck and cheeks. Ollie growled when the girl touched his leg, but having Gabe sitting by his side seemed to help. First, the girl wet a washcloth and cleaned off all the blood. She worked so quickly and tenderly; after a moment or two, Ollie hardly noticed she was there.

  Next, she wrapped his back leg loosely in gauze. “You’d better hold on to him for this part,” she said.

  Gabe cringed as she closed both hands over Ollie’s puny foot and pushed the bones back into place. Ollie yelped and growled just a little, but if old Mr. Yeats, the vet, had been the one touching his broken bones, surely he would have snapped. Besides, if he’d broke a bone on Miss Cleo’s watch, she’d have made sure old Yeats put him down once and for all. It was a mean way to remember her, but it was true.

  After that, making the cast was easy, though Gabe would have had no idea how to do it. Not to mention where to get the supplies. First, she added some more gauze for padding, and then she mixed up a plaster solution with the powder and the bowl of water. She found some extra-thick gauze that she cut into strips, dipped into the mixture, and wrapped around Ollie’s back leg.

  When she was finished, it only took a few minutes for the plaster to harden. Ollie sniffed at his new appendage and sneezed. Not once, but two or three times. Even Gabe had to laugh at that.

  “Why don’t I get us some tea?” said the girl, heading into the kitchen like it was just a normal night. Gabe soon heard cups clinking together and water heating up on the stove, as if fitting a cast to some stranger’s dog were an everyday occurrence.

  Feeling a heck of a lot better about his decision to come, Gabe released all the breath he’d been holding in and took a long look around the cottage. The whole thing was one big room glowing with candlelight. There was a living area, dining table, and kitchen all squeezed in snug. An island separated the kitchen from the living room. It was made out of logs, with a big flat stone for the top flecked with green glass.

  “Where are your parents?” Gabe said. Peeking over the back of the couch, he could just get a glimpse of the girl’s head as she added leaves to a sky-blue teapot. She did look a lot like Niko, but now that he thought about it, there were differences, too. Like her cheeks were higher and rounder, and her hair a shade too dark.

  The girl didn’t say anything for a while, and then the kettle started to sing. A moment later, she took a seat on the other side of Ollie, plunking a fancy tea tray down on top of the trunk. The tray was painted with all sorts of amazing decorations, flowers and butterflies and bats with rainbow-colored wings. The cups were fancy, too, with handles shaped like happy snakes and hand-painted scenes of the ocean, complete with whales and sparkly fish. Each cup had a curly initial on the front, applied with metallic gold paint.

  “W?” Gabe said.

  The girl blinked at the letter, biting her bottom lip.

  “Is that the first letter of your name?”

  She looked into Gabe’s eyes, like she was just waiting for him to contradict her. When he didn’t, she said, “I guess it is. W for Wynne.”

  “Oh,” Gabe said, feeling stupid for ever thinking this girl could be his old friend. She did look an awful lot like Niko, though, and he remembered now about the quilts. She’d worked on them every night with her mother. Niko’s parents had moved to Macomb County all the way from Bangladesh a few years before Niko was born. Niko’s mom had joined the local quilting circle as a way of learning English, and it stuck. By the time Gabe knew her, they were bringing their quilts to homeless shelters and nursing homes, and even winning local prizes. He remembered the day she’d taken a sample to school for show-and-tell. It had looked kind of like the one Ollie was sitting on, blue with gold stars.

  “Wynne.” He rolled the name around on his tongue, trying to get a feel for it. A lot of people liked quilts, he supposed, and besides, why on earth would Niko be hiding out in the woods of Macomb County after all these years?

  Wynne poured herself a cup of tea, sipping it quietly and watching him through the curlicues of steam.

  “And your parents? Do they live here, too?”

  Wynne shook her head.

  “And how did you … you know?” Gabe’s heart, if he still had one, beat faster in his chest. The more he looked at Wynne,
the more certain he became. She wasn’t just some stranger living in the woods. She was like him.

  Wynne didn’t answer at first. Instead, she ran her finger along the rim of her cup, observing him with curious eyes. “How did I what?”

  There was no way around it. Gabe would just have to spit it out. He looked at her face again, real close, just to make sure, but there was no doubt about it. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but I was just wondering.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I was wondering how it was you came to be … dead.”

  “Oh, that,” said Wynne, but she looked delighted, her mismatched eyes glittering in the candlelight. “Very clever of you, really. How’d you guess?”

  “Dunno,” Gabe said, by way of being polite, but really it was the dark circles under her eyes and the way her lips and fingertips looked just a little gray at the edges. “So, how’d it happen?”

  “It’s a long story.” Wynne added a sugar cube to her cup. “You sure you want to hear it?”

  “’Course I am,” Gabe said, his hand coming to rest on Ollie’s back. He had a sudden feeling like maybe all this was a dream and any minute he’d wake up and find himself back at the campsite. But then he looked at Ollie’s leg again, and remembered his neighbors pounding through the woods after him, and he knew it wasn’t any kind of dream. A nightmare, maybe, but not the sort you could just go and wake up from.

  “Nothing much to it, really,” she said, tugging on the gold string in her hair. “There was a bug going around, what we used to call influenza.”

  “The flu, you mean?”

  “That’s right. There weren’t any hospitals nearby, at least not for people like us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know,” Wynne said, and then a long strand of hair fell over her shoulder into her tea, and it seemed to surprise her. “Anyway, the important thing is, I was gone a few days later and now here I am.”

  “Just like that?” Gabe said, strangely excited to find someone else like him. A few minutes ago, he was facing a lifetime alone in the woods, just him and his dog, and now all of that had changed. “But you’re still here, like me. You must know why. You’ve gotta tell me.”

  For a moment, Wynne looked tired, like she wanted to say something more but didn’t have the energy to do it. Then, instead of answering him, she nodded to the tray on the old steamer trunk. “You ought to have some food,” she said, her face splitting into a crooked grin. “I’ll have you know, that took all day to cook, so you’d better dig in while it’s still hot.”

  Gabe’s eyes drifted over to the multi-tiered tray piled high with sweets and cakes and chocolate-frosted cookies. There were ladyfingers drizzled with lemony icing and baby-size sandwiches just like Miss Cleo served once a year for the annual Ladies of the Bible luncheon, only these looked much more appetizing. Gabe was trying to decide what to eat first when he remembered about the plastic bag. He’d dropped it somewhere back in all the chaos. Not only that, but a bitter taste filled his mouth as he recalled the ordeal with Miss Cleo’s famous sweet-and-savory biscuits. He couldn’t very well take a bite only to spit it up again in front of Wynne.

  “I think you’ll find it tastes better if you try it,” Wynne said, offering him half a smile. Niko used to smile like that, too, crinkling her nose and the right side of her mouth. Nope, stop being silly, Gabe thought, shaking his head. Niko didn’t live in the middle of the woods, and she certainly wasn’t dead. This had to be somebody else.

  “I’m not really hungry,” Gabe said, which was basically true, but that didn’t mean his stomach wasn’t yearning for a few of those sweets. “Besides, I’ve never met another dead person before. I thought I was the only one. You have to tell me everything. You have to—”

  “Oh, and I almost forgot, something for Ollie,” Wynne interrupted, and she nipped to the kitchen and returned a second later with a boiled egg and two strips of sizzling bacon.

  Ollie perked up right away, snarfling something hilarious, before digging in to his dinner. He ended up getting bits of egg all over Wynne’s nice starry blanket, but she didn’t seem to mind. Besides, Ollie was good at cleaning up after himself, and soon he’d left nothing behind but a few spots dark with slobber. Gabe tried to imagine what would happen if he’d slobbered on anything of Miss Cleo’s. A whupping for the both of them, that’s what, and no two ways about it.

  “You should eat, too,” Wynne said.

  Gabe was trying hard to come up with another excuse when something Wynne had said started to trouble him. Was it his imagination, or had she used Ollie’s name? Only he was near certain she’d never heard him say it.

  He watched her pick up a ladyfinger and take a tiny bite off the end. “I promise you’ll like it,” she said. “This food is extra special. Just for people like us.”

  “What do you mean?” Gabe said, but he thought he knew. “Like food for dead people or something?”

  “Pretty much.” Wynne laughed and handed him a chocolate-frosted cookie.

  Gabe looked it over, top and bottom. “It doesn’t look like dead people food.”

  “Just try it.”

  So he did. “Mmm, oh my gaw.” That cookie tasted better than every sweet Miss Cleo had ever served all rolled into one. The chocolate was rich, like an entire chocolate ocean packed into one tiny bite, and somehow the buttery cookie underneath was still warm.

  “You made these all by yourself?” Gabe said, but Wynne only smiled. His momentary worries about her knowing Ollie’s name forgotten, he licked his fingers and then lifted his teacup to his lips.

  He’d never much cared for tea at Miss Cleo’s, since it always tasted bitter and lemony and not at all sweet, but he was a lot thirstier than he’d realized. He took a single, tentative sip. Soothing liquid spilled over his tongue. It smelled like honey, but it tasted like mint with a hint of something woodsy Gabe couldn’t quite put his finger on. The minute it hit his lips, his whole body tingled with warmth, the good kind, like sitting by the fireplace on a frozen winter night.

  “That’s not half bad,” Gabe said, grinning, and Wynne started piling his plate full of sweets.

  “You’d better eat all of these,” Wynne said, plopping the overflowing plate down on Gabe’s lap. “We’ve got big plans for tomorrow. And Ollie better rest up, too.” In response, Ollie kicked out his leg and snorted in his sleep.

  “Sounds like you’ve been expecting us?” Gabe said, tightening his grip on his teacup, but just a little.

  “You could say that.” Offering her same playful grin, Wynne popped up and took her cup and saucer to the kitchen. Gabe turned around slowly, not knowing what to think, but Wynne didn’t go for a knife or anything nefarious. Instead, she set the dishes gently in the sink and proceeded to stare out the kitchen window for a while, like she was watching something outside that Gabe couldn’t see. When she came back around to where Gabe was sitting, she surprised him once again by kissing him square on the forehead.

  “You can sleep on the couch,” she said, straightening up, as if kissing strange houseguests was the most natural thing in the world. “Plenty of blankets, use whichever you like best.” She patted the stack of quilts piled up on the back of the cushions.

  “What about you?”

  Wynne’s smile widened. It was sad and happy at the same time. “I think I’ll get a little fresh air before I turn in.” She walked over to the door and turned the knob. “Don’t worry about the candles. They’ll go off all by themselves. Oh, and, Gabe, I’m glad you decided to come.” With that, she slipped out the door and disappeared into the mist.

  Gabe had never been much into prayer, on account of Miss Cleo whacking him with her Bible one too many times for falling asleep in church. Praying looked an awful lot like sleeping, so Gabe thought it safest to avoid both. But now, with Ollie snoring away by his side and the candles flickering overhead, he thought praying might not be such a bad idea after all.

  “Dear Lord, if you’re up
there, I’m sorry to say that I’m dead. Of course, you probably knew that already. Thanks for sending Wynne to help Ollie, and me, too, I reckon. Speaking of Ollie, if you could see fit to make his leg heal up fast, I’d sure appreciate it.”

  Gabe squeezed his eyes even tighter, thinking hard what to say next. “I’m guessing there must be a reason why I’m still here, instead of up in the sky sitting on a cloud or whatever it is people usually do when they die.” Gabe bit his lip hard, searching for the right words. “If Gramps and Mama and Daddy are up there with you, I sure would like to see them. It’s been a good long while, and now that I’m dead, I figured that, you know, maybe I’d be visiting with them soon.”

  He sat in silence, as if waiting for an answer, but the only sounds came from the tinkling chimes outside and Ollie’s sweet, honking snores.

  “Well, I guess that’s about all,” Gabe said, hanging on a bit longer in case his answer from heaven was just a second or two delayed. Ollie grumbled and growled in his sleep, the way he sometimes did when he was dreaming about chasing squirrels. “Alright, then. I suppose I’ll be signing off. Thanks again for sending Wynne to help us. Over and out.”

  Gramps had always taught him to end his prayers like he was using a walkie-talkie. That way it’d feel like God was right there listening on the other end. Gabe didn’t know if it worked, but at least it reminded him of Gramps.

  Thinking of Gramps made him sigh, and sighing made him tired, not to mention his night spent running from his former neighbors. He was about ready to call it a night when he spotted something hiding just underneath a stack of chocolate-glazed éclairs. It smelled salty and sugary at the same time. Gabe wiggled his finger underneath to find a single bacon and maple syrup biscuit, just like Miss Cleo’s.

  Gabe didn’t know what to think, but he didn’t have time to ponder, anyway, because Ollie had woken up and started to bark. “Alright, you dang spoiled hound.” He peeled off a chunk of bacon and tossed it to Ollie.