Asimov's Science Fiction

by Penny Publications

  When she was finished, she crept upstairs to stuff the skull and the plastic bag of bones into her backpack. She hid the pack behind her when she went back down. She crossed to the sofa to touch her mother’s shoulder.

  Marla snorted, opened her eyes. “Lacie?”

  “I’m going over to Thea’s now,” Lacie said. She turned down the television before she left.

  Lacie regretted her decision to walk barely five minutes out the door. The wind had stopped; the air was frozen and still. Snow squeaked beneath her boots and a crackle of ice traced every tree branch and fence post. Slung over one shoulder, the backpack bumped against her arm with every step. She heard the crackle of plastic and tap of bones.

  The Macdonalds had lived in the same house since before Thea was born, a flatfaced gray colonial at the end of a dirt road. The reverend was a grim old Calvinist stuck in the wrong century, unsmiling in his devotion to scripture and Sabbath; his congregation had already dwindled to next to nothing by the time Lacie and Thea had become friends. Thea’s mother had died eight or ten years ago, but Lacie couldn’t remember how. Cancer, maybe. Something natural and insidious. Lacie hadn’t gone to that funeral either.

  There was smoke in the chimney, light in the windows, and it wasn’t until Lacie was already ringing the bell that she thought she ought to have called. They were probably having dinner; they might have guests. She should leave, slipping and sliding like a school kid playing a prank, she shouldn’t bother them—the door opened.

  Thea had always been the tallest of them, but in the years since Lacie had seen her she seemed to have become even taller, thinner, stretched from shoulders to fingertips.

  “Lacie,” she said.

  Lacie’s face was numb from the cold and her nose was running. “Hi. Mom said you wanted me to stop by.” She regretted the words instantly; they made it sound like an obligation.

  Thea tucked her gray-streaked hair behind her ear. “We’re just finishing dinner.”

  Lacie stepped back, felt the edge of the step beneath her heel. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. I can come back or—”

  Thea swung the door open wide. The house exhaled warm bread-scented air. “It’s fine. Come on in. Dad and Cait will be happy to see you.”

  “Thanks. I, um. Thanks.” Lacie stomped snow from her boots and stepped inside.

  “You didn’t come to the funeral,” Thea said.

  “I meant to.” The now-familiar stab of guilt was an icicle slipped between Lacie’s ribs. She unwrapped her scarf and set her backpack on the floor. “There was a bad accident. The highway was backed up for hours.”

  Thea’s lips twitched. “Your mom said. Well, you didn’t miss much. It was so cold everybody was just standing there shivering and waiting for the minister to shut up.” She led Lacie into the kitchen and said, “Hey, look who I found.”

  Thea’s Aunt Caitlin wrapped Lacie in a hug, and Reverend Macdonald unfolded from his chair at the head of the table to shake Lacie’s hand. He had aged decades since she had last seen him. His hair was white, his face lined, his jowls sagging. He sat again with a grunt and gestured for Cait and Thea to finish clearing the table. That, at least, hadn’t changed. The reverend had never lifted a finger for housework in his life.

  “You weren’t at the funeral,” said the reverend.

  “Traffic, Dad,” Thea said. “There was an accident.”

  “Are you still teaching?” he asked Lacie.

  “She’s a professor,” Thea said. “Not a teacher.”

  Lacie put her hands on the back of a chair and smiled uncertainly. “It’s the same thing, really.”

  “I’ve often thought that teachers,” the reverend began.

  Lacie braced herself, but whatever the reverend meant to say caught in his throat. He coughed and lifted a liver-spotted hand to his mouth. Cait nudged a glass of water closer to him.

  He blinked twice and looked at Lacie. “You weren’t at the funeral.”

  Lacie glanced at Thea, who shook her head. “Traffic, Dad. It was the storm.”

  Cait draped a dishtowel over the edge of the sink. “We’ll let you girls talk. Let’s go sit by the fire.”

  The reverend looked up at her. “Don’t manage me, Caitie.”

  “I’ll manage you as much as I want. Get up.” Cait helped her brother to his feet with a gentle grip on his elbow and steered him out of the kitchen.

  “Where’s—” Lacie faltered. She couldn’t remember Thea’s daughter’s name. “Abby?”

  “With her dad this weekend. Do you really want to play catch-up about all the boring shit going on in our lives?”

  Thea leaned against the counter and crossed her arms, and Lacie felt the island tilt beneath her feet. She couldn’t see the girl Thea had been in the woman with the gray short hair and loose-fitting red sweater dishwater-damp at the cuffs, but she could see it in that gesture, and time stretched and snapped and—

  And she was again nineteen years old and inviting her friends into the woods for the last time. She had gathered her courage and her savings and art school was home now, and they didn’t know it, but this was the last time they would all be together. For four years they had been asking the woods for evidence, for a sign, for proof that the pile of bones they had stolen away wasn’t an aberration. She wanted to look one more time. Jesse laughed, Thea laughed too, their voices sharp in agreement. Lacie had been so sure they would go with her. She didn’t know Jesse had stopped scouring the woods for remains and Thea had stopped pestering island old timers for stories. When Lacie went into the woods that afternoon, tramping through yellow leaves and dappled sunlight, she went alone.

  She was eighteen at the hot dead end of summer and they were leaving. Thea wanted to put the bones back, but Lacie and Jesse refused, so she suggested a compromise: they would keep the bones as long as they all lived, but no longer. The island had given them this secret, but they could not keep it forever. They said death and sacrifice and rebirth solemnly, as though the words meant anything to them, aching to be older than they were. Death was a skull and a bag of bones. A shaded place in the woods. A secret and a stench.

  Sixteen and the air smelled of cigarette smoke and decay. Plastic bags crinkled. Lacie’s fingers were fat in winter gloves until she stripped them away—how smooth the bones were under her fingertips, how rough the fur. The day before they had gone to the public library to look up how to boil bones clean. Jesse had a camp stove and his mother’s canning pot in the shed. Thea kept saying, “This is so gross, I can’t believe we’re doing this, this is so gross,” until it wasn’t funny anymore.

  Fifteen and Lacie’s breath hurt in her chest and her mouth was dry and she must have been running but she didn’t remember and she said, “In the woods, I found something, it’s in the woods.” She said it to Thea—best friends since a third grade incident with an out-of-control four-square ball and a torn first-day-of-school dress— but Jesse overheard and followed. Lacie forgot, sometimes, that she had never invited him. Once he decided to be their friend it was like he had always been there.

  But she was the one who found it first. She had never forgotten that.

  “No,” Lacie said. “I want to go into the woods.”

  Thea looked at her for a long, long moment.

  “I don’t want it anymore,” Lacie said.

  Still Thea only stared.

  “You said when one of us died we should—”

  “I know what I said.” Thea shook her head and laughed. “I can’t believe you remember all that superstitious bullshit. God, I was a creepy kid. I had forgotten until—well, until last week.” She glanced toward the doorway and lowered her voice. “Did you bring it with you?”

  Lacie nodded.

  Thea pushed away from the counter. “We’re going to need a crowbar or something to get into Jesse’s shed.”

  Thea kept her portion of the bones on the top shelf of the coat closet in a box labeled bones.

  “Cait’s squeamish about de
ad stuff,” she explained when they were outside. She tucked the box under her arm and stuck the head of a hammer into her coat pocket. “I told her it was a bunch of skulls we found in the woods. Sentimental value. And Dad can’t get things off shelves anymore without dropping them on his head.”

  They crunched over empty holiday roads to the house where Jesse had lived his entire life. Thea made quick work of the padlock with her hammer. After a few minutes of dusty searching they found Jesse’s share of the bones in a black garbage bag in the corner, stashed beneath a cobwebbed radial saw. Lacie swung the bag over her shoulder— smaller than she remembered, less weighty—and left Thea to close the door.

  There was a skip of footsteps behind her as Thea jogged to catch up.

  “Aren’t you going to ask? You’ve got to be wondering,” Thea said.

  “Wondering what?”

  “Whether he did it on purpose. Went out into the woods like that.”

  “Do people think that?” Lacie couldn’t decide how surprised she ought to be. People didn’t just walk into the woods to freeze to death. But maybe they did on this island, in these woods. “Was he depressed or something?”

  “I don’t know. We didn’t talk anymore.”

  None of them talked anymore. There had never been a reason for it. The excuses Lacie tried and discarded had never been convincing, not even inside the echo of her own regrets. A call never returned. An email never answered. A plan to meet at the holidays, never followed through. Enough time and distance for Lacie to almost convince herself it was okay to have missed the funeral—almost, if not for that sickly knot burrowed in her gut. We just drifted away, that’s what people said, the way a lifeboat drifts from a ship until the horizon swallows them both.

  They crossed one intersection, turned at another, and the road before them ended at a weathered fence and a ROAD CLOSED sign. Lacie glanced down to place her steps, glanced up again, and the sign didn’t seem to come any closer, then she blinked and they were there.

  Thea climbed the fence and groaned when she dropped to the ground on the other side. “Knees,” she said. “Turns out all that shit about your body falling apart as you get older is true after all.”

  Lacie followed. Thea took a few steps, paused. Her face was framed by a knobby knitted hit and a chunky scarf, her skin pale except for feverish pink spots in her cheeks.

  “I don’t,” she began, and punctuated the fragment with a short laugh. “It’s been a while. I don’t come up here anymore.”

  “It’s this way,” Lacie said.

  North, into the woods.

  Thea had wanted to name the thing in the woods. The third time they went to see it, she brought a stack of library books in her backpack. She claimed a spot on the log and slipped a book from her bag, laid it open on her knees so Lacie couldn’t see the cover. Jesse tried to grab it from her, but Thea batted him away.

  She spent several minutes flipping through the pages and glancing at the remains, eyes down and eyes up, until finally she said, “I don’t think it’s a demon. At least not one of the normal ones.”

  “Duh,” said Jesse. “Because demons aren’t real and all.”

  Before the thing in the woods, Thea would have agreed, and she wouldn’t have stopped there. Demons don’t exist because religion is a lie, a fairy tale, a mass delusion—whatever she could say to make her father angry, not in person but in the imaginary arguments she rehearsed in her head, a habit she had admitted to Lacie only once.

  Jesse didn’t know that about Thea. He was too new to their friendship, and they didn’t know yet they were stuck with him. But Lacie did, and she left a space for Thea’s answer. Thea only scrunched her nose and turned a page.

  “This is real,” Lacie said to fill the silence—so simple, so easy. She wanted to get closer with her sketchpad, wanted to capture how the thing was changing as the weather warmed and decay ate it away from the inside. The scaly green-brown skin was deflating like a balloon and the stench was growing stronger. She didn’t want to throw up and embarrass herself. The decay had a fishy stink to it, tinged with an acrid undertone more like smoke. Nothing that smelled that bad could be imaginary.

  It wasn’t an angel either, or a troll, or a wendigo. Thea didn’t know how to test if it was an alien. It was too much fish and too little flesh. Too much scale and too little fur. Too much horn, too much claw, too few teeth. None of the names Thea tried stuck for long, but she didn’t give up until the summer had passed and the thing had rotted away to a slump of leathery hide over protrusions of bone.

  It was theirs, and it was secret, and they never gave it a name. It would always be the thing in the woods.

  The north end of the island was crisscrossed with halfhearted trails, trampled underbrush, fallen logs rubbed naked of bark. Beneath a thin blanket of snow the land was deceitful, monochrome and smooth. Lacie didn’t see the remains of the stone house until she stumbled over the foundation; less of the wall was standing than she remembered. She felt the cold crawling through the soles of her boots and up her legs, felt the skin of her face growing hard. It was always cold in the woods. Even in the hottest part of the summer there were patches of shadows and chills. It would be dark soon. Marla would be worrying.

  Another ten minutes and she saw the long white slant of a log. It was shorter than it should be and steeper than she remembered, but Thea said, “There it is.” The words shriveled in the frozen air and Lacie saw it too, how the log on which they had spent that entire summer—speculating, pinching their noses, watching—had never been as long or as welcoming as her memory wanted it to be.

  She stepped over the log and lowered the garbage bag to the ground. Thea dropped her box of bones, nudged the lid off with the toe of her boot. They laid the skeleton out piece by piece, a sketch of the creature it had been. Their gloved fingers fumbled the small pieces. Lacie’s boots tramped a ring around the remains like a spell circle, or an impact crater.

  Thea shook out Jesse’s garbage bag with a loud crack, and all that was left was the skull. Lacie unwrapped the blue T-shirt and balled it into her coat pocket. The skull was light in her hands, birdlike and impossibly frail. If she turned it just right, she thought, if she found the perfect angle between wintry twilight and forest shadows, it would disappear entirely from the span between her fingers.

  She set it on the ground, adjusted it twice. She couldn’t remember how the head had been angled when she found it. Jesse had moved it that first day. He had seized one of the horns to get a better look at the creature’s face. Lacie had wanted to shout at him for messing it up, for taking something that had been perfect and terrible and ruining it and he wasn’t even supposed to be there, he wasn’t even invited—but she hadn’t said a word.

  Thea brushed snow from the log and they sat together. The wood trembled as Thea bounced her leg.

  “I don’t think he did,” Thea said. “Come out here to die. On purpose, I mean. I think he just got lost, like an idiot. You know how he was.”

  Jesse at sixteen, the first to get his license, borrowed his cousin’s coughing old Malibu to drive them to Portland on a Friday night and fell asleep on the way home, just as they were crossing the bridge, all of them drifting, drifting, drunk and drifting, until the screech of metal on metal woke them. They stood in a huddle on the island side of the bridge, the tide pulling under their feet and trees reaching toward the wind-cleared sky, and Jesse had said, “It looks like claws,” brushing his fingers over the wound in the car’s flank, his voice high with awe, and the night was bigger than they were and there were shadows moving everywhere.

  They never would have done that before the thing in the woods. Having those bones hidden away had shaken something loose in each of them. Lacie lied to her mother. Thea shouted at her father. Jesse told his cousin the car had been struck while parked on a street. They held their breath, they kept their secrets, they did it again.

  “I know how he used to be,” Lacie said.

  “He was the same person
. As much as anybody ever is.”

  “You think he was looking for something out here?” Again, she didn’t say. A long time had passed since that autumn day when Jesse and Thea had laughed at her for wanting to search the woods one more time.

  “Who knows.” Thea’s leg stopped bouncing, started again. “I don’t know if Dad even remembers him. Yesterday he kept asking me whose funeral we were going to.”

  “Did something happen?”

  “Stroke,” Thea said. “Microstroke, technically, if there’s even a difference. I guess you can have a little bit of a stroke.”

  “When?”

  “September. He was fine one day, then he just started... He tried to put his socks on outside his shoes and kept asking where his shoes were. I laughed. I thought— He looked so annoyed, the same way he used to look when he knew I was lying to him about where we’d been and couldn’t figure out how to lecture me into telling the truth. He was looking at the socks exactly like that. It was—it wasn’t funny at all. I don’t know what I thought.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lacie said. “That must be rough.”

  Thea shrugged; her coat rasped. “He’s getting old. Shit happens. We deal with it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  In the silence that followed Lacie blinked and the evening grew darker. She blinked again and the trees crowded closer. Again, and the brittle white branches were fingers and ribs. Again and she was half rising from the log, panic squeezing her chest, because it was gone, it was gone, it was—the skeleton was the same color as the snow in the failing evening light.

  “So, what?” Thea said. “Are we just going to sit here all night?”

  “You know, we did that once,” Lacie said. “Me and Jesse. We stayed out here all night. You were grounded.”

  “I was always grounded. What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Lacie said.

  They drank warm beer, they talked about the future, they pretended to know the names of the stars. Lacie had thought about taking his hand, didn’t. Thought about kissing him. Didn’t. The island’s deep, deep roots had loosened their grip on her, but there were limits to her newfound courage.