Dead Bait 2

by Steve Alten

  I was ten years old at the time and it was a real tragedy.

  I knew Gina on account my ma used her as a babysitter for us kids when she was off working at the linen mill, midnights, in Edgewater after my old man got hit by the Chicago-Northwestern special delivery and they had to take his remains off the tracks in bags and buckets. Gina was great and we all loved her.

  Then she went through the ice.

  And we all knew and hated the asshole responsible. When he ate the gun not a year later, nobody shed a tear.

  Back in ‘fifty-three, Bones, and his brother Stipp—who brewed his own whiskey and lost an eye in a knife fight—lived together in a tar paper shack on Swanson Creek out in the Big Piney Woods. No electricity. They were good with engines, those boys, good with poaching, bad with holding jobs and keeping out of jail. What Gina had been doing with a guy like Bones was anyone’s guess, but truth be told she always did have a wild streak in her and a true lack of judgment.

  Anyway, after that business, people started disappearing out on Spider Lake in those dark months between December’s first real freeze and April’s true thaw. I knew of five men myself that vanished before 1960. They said sometimes they didn’t disappear completely, maybe leaving a little—or a lot—of blood behind, but never anything else. Maybe that was fiction. I don’t know. The sheriff went through a cursory investigation every time, but never turned up anything. And the surviving widows or mothers or fathers knew better than to push him on it. They got real good at making up stories about how their missing kin had skipped town for one reason or another. And sometimes, hearing them tell it, it seemed like they almost believed their own lies. Maybe they needed to so they could sleep at night. But it was always there in their eyes—a haunted, terrified look that spoke volumes.

  Bottom line: after a time locals knew better than to go out on the Spider at dead winter when the shadows grew long. When people turned up missing out there it was usually out-of-towners like our fine Mr. Modek and his brother.

  “We can’t just sit here!” Modek said, piping up again.

  “We ain’t gonna,” I said, grabbing a flashlight.

  Dutch pulled on his hat with the ear flaps. “Blizzard’s kicking up its heels and it’s dark out there. Let’s go see what this is about.”

  Modek’s shack was maybe two hundred feet away and it should have been a quick little jog, but the blizzard had descended with full fury, snow flying in white raging sheets. The wind was whipping and throwing drift around in twisting snow-devils and scooping up a fine scrim of ice particles that bit into our exposed faces like steel needles. The beam of my light made it maybe ten feet before reflecting back at us.

  Dutch in the lead, we leaned into the blow, fighting against it. Now and again, the wind would lift and you could see all the shadowy boxes of ice shacks spread around on the frozen crust of Spider Lake, then it would come roaring back at near-whiteout conditions and visibility would be down to eight or ten feet at the outside.

  I was getting hit by pains in my stomach again and I did everything I could so no one would notice.

  My belly had been acting up for weeks by then and sometimes the pain got so bad, so deep, it would put me down to my knees and squeeze the tears from my eyes. I passed blood near every morning and now and again I’d spit up a clot in the dead of night, a coppery-tasting foul wad that would leave me shaking. Time to go to the doc? Oh, certainly. But like all old men, I put it off, unwilling to face the coming pall of the grave, hoping to keep it at arm’s length as long as possible, wanting to know one more warm wheat-grassed July and one last bloom of September color before I turned toes up. To the old, you see, docs are undertakers and nothing more.

  I walked with Modek next to me, so close we were practically holding hands. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so frightened in my life and the closer we got to the shack the more certain I was that there was a good reason for it.

  Before she passed, my Gloria liked to tell me that I was not the most sensitive of individuals, but that night my sensitivity, my empathy, was alive and electric inside me. I was feeling the black depths of Modek’s trauma right to my marrow, but I was feeling more than that. Something else I couldn’t quite put a finger on, something dark and hungry gathering around us, circling like slat-thin wolves.

  “Why are we doing this?” Modek said to me. “Shouldn’t…shouldn’t we just go get the sheriff or state police? Let them handle this?”

  “Let’s just take a look,” I said.

  The shack suddenly appeared out of the gloom and to a man, we stopped dead there in the snow and wind, staring at it like it was an open casket. I panned it with my light. The wind had piled drifts up around it, the door slamming back and forth against its frame.

  Modek was wired tight, ready to bolt. I was ready to do the same, truth be told. As I watched the door banging open and closed, I was very much aware of a feeling at the back of my neck that had absolutely nothing to do with the cold pushing down into the single digits. The storm was howling around us like some primal beast, the wind and whipping snow creating weird jumping shadows over the ice.

  Dutch took hold of the door.

  In the beam of the flashlight I clearly saw five ragged ruts torn into it like the trails of claws.

  It was a little two-man shack, cramped benches to either side, holes augered through the ice, a little gas stove. Not much bigger than your average outhouse, truth be told. Just your ordinary ice shack… except it looked like it had been dipped in red ink.

  Blood was sprayed up the walls in frozen spirals and hanging from the ceiling in red icicles. The ice was stained crimson, a clotted sea of blood and bits of tissue and iced flesh. What might have been an ear was frosted right to the wall in a trail of ichor.

  That was all bad enough, but worse was written in there on the wall in bloody letters in a childlike scrawl:

  BONES

  BONES

  BONES

  “Jesus,” Dutch said, pulling away from the doorway.

  Modek was having trouble breathing, just gasping for air. “What does that mean?” he asked. “What the hell does that mean?”

  But neither Dutch or I answered him. We just stood around, not looking at each other. Shadows were spreading over the ice like long, reaching fingers.

  I leaned against the shack because I had a sudden need of something solid behind me as my belly began to roll with fingers of pain. Like rivers branching into creeks and streams, it spread out from my lower belly and reached up into my chest in a tightening basket of agony, red-hot and sharp. It brought tears to my eyes.

  “You okay, Fife?” Dutch asked me and I nodded.

  Modek and his brother had come out on the ice in a shiny new Polaris snowmobile. It was parked out behind the shack. The hood had been nearly torn off. The engine looked like somebody had taken a sledgehammer after it… coils and hoses were hanging out like spilled guts, dark fluids gushed into the snow.

  “My sled!” Modek cried. “Look what they did to my sled!”

  “Mr. Modek—” I started to say.

  But he shoved me aside and hooked Dutch’s arm, started shouting, “WHAT THE HELL IS THIS ALL ABOUT? YOU FUCKING BOTH KNOW AND I WANT YOU TO TELL ME RIGHT GODDAMN NOW!”

  He was like some wild thing that had finally been un-caged, eyes bright and dangerous, face pulled into a sneer of animal hate. Dutch might have been near on seventy, but he was strong as a bull. He tossed Modek aside and Modek slipped on the ice and went down on his ass. In his frustration and anger, he began to shake and make a pathetic whimpering sound.

  I helped him to his feet and before I could stop myself, I was telling him what I figured he had a right to know. “It’s a ghost, Mr. Modek,” I said, my chest pinching tight. “That’s what this is about. There’s a ghost out here. Some years ago a woman went through the ice and never found her way back out. Part of her is still down there. It comes out during the winter months after dark.”

  “A ghost,” he said like
it was a word he had never expected to use. “A ghost.”

  “I know how it sounds but it’s the best I can do,” I told him. “Whatever it is… maybe all the bad things we leave behind us when we die unexpectedly… it’s still down there. And it’s filled with hate.”

  He backed away from me, uttering a bitter, sarcastic laugh. “A ghost? You’re a goddamn nutcase, you know that? You ought to be committed. Both of you ought to be committed.”

  Dutch turned away from him and led me off into the storm. “Well, you tried. Leave it at that.”

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Modek said behind us.

  “We’re going back to the shack,” Dutch said. “You can do any goddamn thing you want, Modek. It’s no sweat off my ass.”

  “But these other shacks… shouldn’t we get some help—”

  “Nobody in ‘em. Not after dark.”

  Modek fell in behind us as we began the slow—and for old men like us painful—crawl back to Dutch’s shack. He was ranting and raving, threatening lawsuits and police intervention and you name it, but he stuck close to us like a babe frightened to be separated from its mother.

  Dutch and I kept our yaps shut. All we cared about at that moment was reaching the safety of the shack before that wind got too far deep inside us and frosted us white, seized up our old carcasses and planted ‘em deep in the drift like a couple stringy chops on ice. We needed warmth. We need a cup of something hot. The wind continued to blow and the snow was not light and fluffy like you see on Christmas cards and TV shows, but fine and biting and abrasive, driven by that wind so it scratched your face raw… what you could feel of your face, that was, in that godawful cold sweeping down from the big lake.

  I steered a path for us with my light, but in those near-whiteout conditions we were going more by instinct than anything else. The sky was a boiling maelstrom of white threaded with pink like it gets when the worst storms blow and you could not truly see any dividing line between it and the ice itself. Drifts were forever forming, disintegrating, and building back up like frozen white waves. Our tracks were already nearly gone.

  We marched along, each of us feeling the cold in our hearts and much of that had to do with the damnably bleak situation we were in. I knew Dutch was thinking about his pick-up truck, wondering if it had been gotten to as well. Because if it had, we were trapped, you see.

  Spider Lake sat out in federal forest land, five miles from the nearest town which was Cobton. Nothing but a Boy Scout camp on the eastern shore, a few fishing lodges and summer cabins. At five miles long and nearly four in width, it was sizeable for an inland lake but just a puddle compared to the big lake of Superior. We were a good mile and a half out on it in a blizzard. If we had to walk for shore, I figured they’d find us curled up in a snowdrift come morning. My joints would never hold up, not with the wind biting at them.

  It seemed that after a time the flashlight weighed about as much as a cinder block. My back was aching, my knees feeling hot and numb, legs cold and stiff, belly rumbling with a distant memory of pain. The wind never stopped, of course. If anything it got meaner, blowing with an angry screeching at times and a low, mournful howling at others. I began to think I was hearing voices on it… whispering voices calling out to me, calling my name, beckoning me off into the storm.

  The wind gets funny in a blizzard, though, and you can imagine all kinds of things.

  We weren’t far from the shack, I figured, when out of the storm came something that was no wind: a high-pitched, weird braying that came and went, each time getting closer and closer until it was so loud that it was nearly ear-splitting.

  “What the hell is that?” Modek said. “Is it… is it some kind of animal?”

  I didn’t answer because I’d already told him what was out there and because I could not seem to find my voice. We had stopped and maybe that wasn’t such a hot idea, but in the storm we couldn’t be sure where that awful noise was coming from and, believe me, we weren’t comfortable with that. The snow blew heavy around us, sheets of drift spraying us white. In the glow of the flashlight Dutch was looking at me with bright, glistening eyes, his facial muscles frozen in a grim half-smile as if they would not relax.

  We listened to that braying voice cutting through the storm, every time inches closer, the very tone of it shrieking and inhuman like the cry of baboons.

  “Dutch,” I said. “I think it’s—”

  “Shhh!”

  He was listening for something and then I was too and it was like being out in the woods in autumn, listening for the tread of game only this time we were the game. I heard a soft crunching of footsteps coming through the snow in our direction. They were slow and methodical but definitely coming out of the storm at us.

  And then Modek screamed, “I SEE IT! IT’S OVER THERE! I SEE IT!”

  I don’t know what he saw, but I put the flashlight in that direction and I saw a shape… a distorted shape like a moving sack pulling back into the shadows. It had eyes. Bright yellow eyes.

  The terror inside me was hot and cutting, filling my chest with live wires. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything but wait for it to find me.

  “Enough,” Dutch said. “C’mon! Let’s go! Move it! We have to get back to the shack…”

  The braying was gone and we no longer heard the footfalls. There was only a hushed, waiting silence out there. Even the wind had gone quiet as if it, too, was listening. We started marching again and we hadn’t gone very far at all when a voice came out of the shadows. It was a woman’s voice: darkly sweet and cold as the ice we stood on, scratching like rats in narrow walls. “Bones?” it said. “Bones… are you there?”

  My heart about stopped. I wheeled around with the light, not sure what I was going to see. The snow blew around us and we were in whiteout conditions. Whatever was out there could have been ten feet away and we wouldn’t have seen it.

  “Bones?”

  The voice was behind us.

  “Bones?”

  It was in front of us.

  “Bones?”

  To the left, to the right, coming at us from every direction with a cold hissing sibilance that nearly put me to my knees. Modek was making a whimpering sound and Dutch was aiming his shotgun in every which direction only there was nothing to shoot at, only a voice that drew in closer and closer and then—

  I think Modek screamed. It was a high, girlish sound of absolute fright. Dutch said something… and then… and then I heard a flapping sort of sound like sheets on a line or the high shrouds of a schooner in a good blow and a white, blurred, long-armed shape came wheeling, drifting out of the blizzard. I saw a waxen, moon-pallid face like that of a bleached, fish-chewed corpse rising from the deeps. And long talons like those of a beast streaking right at Dutch’s face. He cried out as they ripped across his eyes, blinding him as they slit deep and scraped across the bone beneath.

  Then he was down on his knees, gripping his face, blood spraying in the snow and it came again:

  “Bones? Bones?”

  That evil, distorted thing came out of the darkness so fast I couldn’t properly track it with my eyes. When it again pulled back, Dutch’s throat was torn open and his face was nearly peeled from the skull below. When I threw off Modek, clinging to me like a squalling brat, Dutch was dead, his blood staining the snow red. Sprays of it were scattered in every direction and I saw a trail of it leading off into the darkness.

  I heard a shrill, hysterical cackling that faded off into the dark belly of the storm.

  I grabbed Modek who was blubbering like a spoiled kid, dragging him through the snow with a strength I had not felt in my old bones in many years. I pulled him along, making for the shack and hoping beyond hope we were still moving in its direction and not towards some dead thing waiting out in the storm for us. The wind rose and fell in cycles with jangling, discordant notes like some far-off calliope gone somber and hollow.

  The shack.

  Not far, not far at all and my instinctive
, internal pilot told me we were closing in on it. The wind was doing everything it could to push us back, rising up and blowing snow around us in eddies and whirls. Then, just when I was daring to breathe, a voice came cycling at us out of the blizzard—scratching, shrill, female. It went right up my spine and nestled at the back of my neck like icy pins.

  “Bones… Bones, I’m coming…”

  Female, yes, but not a woman…not really, maybe the twisted anti-human memory of one…the voice of some soulless thing mocking the voice of a woman. I felt a current of electricity go thrumming through my bones.

  I saw eyes coming at us… like open, infected wounds.

  The shack. We were only five feet away and then the voice came again: “Bones… is that you?”

  I threw Modek through the door and he stumbled, knee going down into one of the holes in the ice. I sensed movement behind me, heard that flapping sound again like a blowing sheet, and pulled the door closed. And as I did, mere inches from being shut, something pulled at it from the other side and black, thorny nails slid around the edge tearing into the wood. Then I slammed it shut and threw the latch in place. It wasn’t much in the way of a lock but it was all we had.