The Marrow Thieves

by Cherie Dimaline

  Chi-Boy tossed the Pendleton over the razor wire at the top and scrambled over. He walked his way down about eight feet and then dropped the rest of the way with just the smothered crunch of gravel to mark his arrival. Wab herded the group over to the huge front gates. They waited there as Chi-Boy carefully snapped the glass window in the guard booth and slid it out of its frame. He slipped his long body through the square hole to search out a key or some kind of mechanism that would allow the others in without having to climb.

  “No one is more important than anyone else, French.”

  It was Miig, still standing a few steps back. “No one should be sacrificed for anyone else.”

  I tried to laugh it off, shrugging and starting a stream of “no big deal” sentiments, but he refused to allow it.

  “I’m not joking, boy.” He held my gaze until the smile disappeared from my face and my cheeks began to burn. Only then did he bend to gather up his things and walk over to the rest of the group by the front gates. If they had heard, no one let on.

  I was busy feeling sorry for my unappreciated heroics and myself in general and didn’t see Rose there until she briefly took my hand. There was that electricity again, except this time the hornets had bilious wings because they swarmed, with texture and speed, from my heart down to my groin.

  She pressed the pad of her thumb into the shaking center of my hand, then let it go and walked away. That was all. The smile returned, slightly, in the wake of Miig’s reproach.

  The gates popped open with a metallic screech and we slipped through the small gap rust and atrophy would allow. Chi-Boy waited for me to step through last and then locked the gates back up by hand, then he slid by me in the shadows and made his way to the front, but off to the side so he could scout. I finally looked up when we turned the bend in the driveway and caught my breath.

  I’d spent most of my early life in the crumbling east end of the city, surrounded by urban decay and concrete waste where the skyline looked like a ruined mouth of rotted teeth. That is, except for these last few years out in the bush where we ran and home was a campfire and a canvas tent, not that it was bad. It’s just that neither extreme had prepared me for the Four Winds Resort.

  From the outside it looked like an oversized cottage, all wood and peaks and log pillars holding up odd angles and juts. It rose three storeys with a front entranceway that stretched out the front as a long corridor. We made our way to the doors and waited while Chi-Boy snapped the locks off with the cutters he kept in his roll. Then Tree and Zheegwon pried off the boards and opened the old doors with much effort and squealing of joints. Miig watched the darkness beyond the gates nervously.

  The moon lit the wide front hall in pale ribbons, turning the dust and broken bits of chair and wainscoting and climbing vines from feral houseplants into fairy tale turrets. We walked slowly, out of habit, out of fear, but also, now, out of reverence. This space felt untouched. We could feel the thrum of old activity sliding along the floorboards, caught in the keyholes of closed doors. Everything had been shut tight while so much was still supposed to happen. The intent and plans hadn’t had time to vacate. And here we were now opening the lid of a sealed jar, and all the anticipation of a tomorrow planned a thousand yesterdays ago came skittering to our feet like slick-shelled beetles.

  The lower windows were all boarded up on either side of the hallway, done professionally with sheets of reinforced plywood, backed with crossed two-by-fours. But the skylight arching out over the hallway above showed us the night through glass opaque with greasy animal prints, bird shit, and weather. Still, there were stars, and we passed down the hall two by two, like visiting dignitaries underneath them.

  At the end of the hallway was a dark hole. The glass ceiling and boarded-up walls ended, and whatever lay ahead was covered in silence and blackness. We gathered at the dark opening, waiting to know what to do.

  Once our eyes adjusted we could make out lighter rectangles of grey on the far extremes of the space. That’s where Miig and Chi-Boy went, to the lighter patches in the unknown. I kept my eyes to the right and saw Miig’s hands suddenly dark on the grey. He pulled back what I understood then to be drapes, and swatches of sky diluted the dark with soft moonlight. He passed by a stone mantle set in the wall and repeated the same on the other side. Across the room Chi-Boy also found floor-length windows on either side of a stone-mantled fireplace.

  We took in the room, quickly at first to scan for danger, and then with more care to see everything we could in this space that was not forest or dilapidated barn.

  “Do you think the fireplaces still work?” Wab was almost happy, which was a strange tone coming from her serious face.

  Miig shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We can’t use them. Fire comes with smoke, and this isn’t a low campfire. Those chimneys would push smoke up past the tree line pretty damn quick.”

  The curves of her shoulders slumped, but she said nothing in return.

  “But we can light up all these candles here.” He touched a cream-colored pillar nearly the circumference of RiRi on the mantle. There were more alongside it of various heights and widths. There were even more on the low, round table in front of the fireplace.

  “What’re these?” It was Slopper. He ran his hands along a sheet-covered lump. There were two of them, one on either side of the table.

  “Here.” Chi-Boy yanked the edge of the sheet and a long, sage-hued sofa appeared. Slopper looked skeptical until Chi-Boy sat on it, tested the springs by bouncing a bit, and then lay down with an exaggerated sigh, folding his hands behind his head. Slopper ran around the table and pulled the sheet off the second one, getting tangled pretty good in voluminous folds and coughing from dust. With RiRi’s help he was freed, and the pair bounced and giggled on the sofa’s matched set.

  Miig and Wab were lighting the candles and the room became lighter and smaller, the space more defined. After so much time in the wide-open, I was pleased to be contained. I sat on the edge of a couch and watched this new place illuminate.

  The walls were cedar and the floors covered with carpet in a pattern of autumn leaves caught in a circular wind. Behind us, to the left of the entrance from the glass hallway, was a counter. There was an open space behind it and a wooden plaque hanging on the back wall with letters burned in: “Front Desk.”

  I walked over and around the counter and slid in behind. There was a telephone on the wall, the old kind with the curly cord attached. I picked it up, and its weight shocked me. I couldn’t put it to my ear, the motion too foreign, so I placed it gently back in its metal cradle.

  A stack of impossibly thick yellow books, the edges curling up like fiddleheads, were piled on the floor, leaning up against the wall. I crouched behind the counter and inspected a half wall of cubbyholes. In one was a shallow box of pens monogrammed with the same logo we’d seen on the sign outside the building. In another was a collection of little clips and fasteners of various sizes. In a half dozen others were papers, some written on, others sealed, some with line after line of careful script crossed out with thick colored lines. In a bottom hole was a six-pack of bottled water. I grabbed that and slid it above me, onto the counter.

  “Woohoo, water!” I heard stomping as RiRi and Slopper bounded over to retrieve the precious find. Then the reproach of the others, warning them not to open it yet, to wait, to ration. I laughed to myself imagining Slopper’s cheeks hanging in disappointment.

  Beside the cubbies was a very long, very narrow drawer, as tall as the counter it was set into and only wide enough to accommodate a coin-sized handle.

  “What’s this?” I gave it a good yank, anticipating the resistance of time and atrophy so that when it slid easily open, I fell on my ass, knob still in hand. There was the clatter of metal on metal.

  Miig came forward, bending on a knee. “Keys.” He read the numbered plates, then looked up to the stairs curving up to a second floor
from either side of the great room. “Room keys.”

  We shuffled up the stairs, kicking balls of dust and busted plaster as we went. As was custom, Miig and Chi-Boy took up the vulnerable front and back positions. Everyone but Minerva held a candle. I stood as tall as I could behind Miig, peering over his shoulder ahead and down over the railing into the great room lit on the far side by the remaining candles. I tried to open my eyes as far as I could to be as useful as possible. I was focused, but not so much so that I couldn’t feel Rose reaching for my elbow when we got to the top.

  Wab carried the keys in the cradle she’d made out of the front her sweater and they slid against each other like low metallic groans. We turned towards the dark in front and illuminated a flickering tunnel of doors. Each one was labeled with a small plaque inscribed with a number. Wab walked the line and handed a key to each person. Miig nodded, and Chi-Boy went to the first door on the right side of the hall with the matched key. He put it into the lock, filled his lungs with air so his shoulders rose halfway to his ears, and pushed.

  The suck of air was audible and popped low in my eardrum like a lid being lifted. And when Chi-Boy disappeared into the room, I panicked a bit and crossed the hall to take up the space he’d left in the doorway. Chi-Boy walked the perimeter of the room before setting the candle down on a small round table in front of another empty fireplace, on a much smaller scale than those in the great room. He moved to the bed set against the wall and slowly folded his length on top of the comforter. It was big enough to for six pillows, side by side and stacked three deep. He adjusted the pillows under his head and nuzzled into the skin of the made bed like a child. It made me smile, seeing Chi-Boy, the fierce scout, bending his arms under his head, wiggling his ass to get into the softness with a goofy grin on his face.

  I ran back out to the hallway and down to the door with my number on it. The lock was stiff and I turned it twice before it gave and the door swung in. RiRi was behind me, holding her candle at my elbow. I could feel the pinch of its heat. She gasped into the space — a whole empty, contained space — and followed me in. I threw open the curtains covering the windows on the far wall and illuminated the carpet on the floor. It was a mass of vines and blooms that twisted sinisterly in the flame but sat, docile and domestic, in the moonlight.

  “This place is huge,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Who needs this much space?” she asked.

  “Not sure.” I pulled off my torn boots with the toe of the other stepping on the heel. It felt wrong to tromp around in outside shoes.

  “You didn’t check for snakes first, Frenchie!” She was upset.

  “Sorry, Ri.” I took the candle from her and walked the perimeter of the room, holding it under the small table and dropping to my knees to check under the bed. The corners were choked with dust and it smelled like a whole metropolis of mice had lived and bred there, probably until the cats got wise and moved in before moving on, but no snakes.

  “All clear. No snakes. Just some regular old monsters under the bed, that’s it.”

  “Really?” Rose answered from just inside the door. “I knew we shoulda stopped to grab holy water for the buggers on the way in here.”

  I smiled. I couldn’t help the size of it, either. She made me look stupid when she was around.

  “C’mon, Rose, let’s go into your room next.” RiRi grabbed her by her forearm and spun her out of the room, making Rose’s long dark hair fan out and settle across her shoulders like a shawl.

  We each checked into a room, made ourselves comfortable, and then trudged back down the stairs to grab our gear and bring up the other candles. There was no use risking theft or discovery because of a few pinpoints of light reflected in an abandoned window. It was strange, all of us separated by walls, divided into compartments like bees in a dusty hive, so we kept our doors open. I could hear RiRi laughing and the rhythmic thump of bedsprings as someone jumped. She and Slopper ran up and down the hall a few times before Slopper, wheezing and holding his rounded side, huffed, “All right, enough, jeez. Let’s lay down a bit.”

  Miig paced the hall every hour, always on patrol, and Wab spent a long time in Minerva’s room getting her washed up and ready for bed. Minerva was beside herself with joy. She would have spent the longest in a real bedroom before the hunt began, way more than any of us. I heard her speak in full, lovely sentences from my room across the hall.

  “Where’s my nightie?” she asked.

  “You don’t have a nightie, Minerva. But look, you can change into your summer dress to sleep in tonight.”

  “I need to boil some tea, there. We should have some tea.”

  “We can’t have a fire tonight, Min. How about let’s split one of these waters before bed.”

  “Make sure you close the curtains again, you. If you sleep in that moonlight you’ll wake up blind.”

  “Okay. There, they’re all shut.”

  “No, no. Don’t put out those candles yet. Bring the girls in. I wanna tell yous about the rogarou tonight.”

  I caught my breath. An old-timey story! I heard Wab come to the hallway and whistle a two-note tune, then RiRi and Rose shuffled in. I stayed in my room until they were settled, then crept into the hall and settled by the open door. The rise and fall of Slopper’s soft snore spilled into the space. Tree and Zheegwon had filed into a single room and their door was closed, locking them in together. And there was no flickering coming from either Miig’s or Chi-Boy’s rooms, which meant they were either asleep or on patrol, so I was safe from discovery.

  “This is my grand-mère’s story, told to me when me and my sisters were turning into women. It’s about Rogarou, the dog that haunts the half-breeds but keeps the girls from going on the roads at night where the men travel.

  “‘Down by the river to draw water, I feel eyes on the back of my neck, smell the blood on his tongue even with sweetgrass tight under my arm. I stand and turn fast, already drawing spit against the back of my teeth, hissing like a badger. But no, the Rogarou just watches. Didn’t even blink, him.

  “‘Yes, Rogarou. I know one when I see it. Too big to be a dog, black as pitch, eyes yellow as new ragweed. I try to ignore him; turn my back even. But still, I hear him breathing. Not panting like a real dog, just slow ins and outs like a calm, everyday man. So I turn again, this time raising my arms to make me bigger. My sweetgrass fall all around my feet, I remember. I can smell it real strong, even over his stench. I growl, a throat sound with no gut in it. He looks up at my hands, and then stands up all smooth like smoke in the coldest sky. All air, no wind.

  “‘Yes, now I am intimidated, but no fear. There is no time for that nonsense. He is bigger than old Pitou Magnon, and that man was a giant amongst Christians. What happen next is my old trapline instincts. I still hold that heavy dipper for da water; it is still in my hand, and I bring it across the space between us; now I see him, he’s moved to right here, in front of me. That old dipper, my mother carved that from the birch we stripped out back and gave it to me when Pierre died. She said it was heavy enough to chase off hungry men. But a widow in this settlement has no need. Up till now, it has only been used for water. Till now, when it became the Rogarou beating stick.

  “‘That dipper lands straight on the tender of the beast’s nose. Oh mon Dieu! The noise, the terrible “crack” like a buffalo gun. Then nothing. I see the thing looking straight at me, and then a gash opens up all slow and oozing on the top of its snout. And as the good Lord is my witness, when that first drop of blood lands on its thick chest, he changes. More terrible cracks and tears.

  “‘I watch bones moving under his skin, the fur comes off in clumps. And all the while his insides are moving his outsides like fish spawning in the shallows. Oh, it is sickening; reminds me of lying in childbed. At the end of it, his limbs are too long, but human, and there he stands, a tall, naked man. And he has that hunger there, I see it
same way I sees it in the men sometimes.’”

  “Okay, Minerva, it’s getting late.” Wab, sensing a dark turn in the tale, tried to cut her off. “I need to get RiRi into bed now.”

  “Awww, Wab. I wanna hear the story about the dog some more!” RiRi sounded tired, even through her protest. I heard feet hit the ground as she was made to stand from the bed and marched out the door.

  I crouched to the side as they passed. After a minute, Minerva picked up the tale again, speaking in the heavily accented voice of her grandmother.

  “‘It starts with that violence and ends with that singing in my guts — another kind of violence. He comes as beast and I make him bleed. It started with that dipper, then it was a switch cut from that same birch, then I grew tired of tools. As we become more like man and wife, year after year, I bite him the way I thought he would like to bite me. When I bring the blood, he brings the man. And mother and grand-mère and Catholic are all erased and I am just a woman.

  “‘I’m marked. Talk to the old man there, down at the shore. And he talks about Rogarous. I don’t ask, I think he can just tell. He says they kill, unless met without fear. He says once you are marked, that dog will keep coming back. He says, even when you are on your deathbed, he will come. Every full moon, every year until you’re in the ground. Then he looks for the next one, says he finds it in the family, and marks them the same way. Now I know I am damned, because my sin is my family’s sin. Oh mon Dieu, who in this family deserves such a curse! Who in my own bloodline will have to miss the Jesus in the heavens because of my weakness?’”

  There was a pause.

  “Minerva?” Rose spoke softly.

  Another space.

  “Minerva?”

  She was answered by a peal of crunchy snoring.

  “Good night, Kokum.”