Bear Country
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Today’s story is, “Bear Country,” the fourth in Kindling’s first ever short story collection, Lights Out. Inspired by folk horror and mythology, this collection of short stories will explore the unknown, the consequences of touching the forbidden, and the mysteries that lurk in the dark, unexplored places of the world.
Inspired by my early exposure to horror, dark sci-fi and dark fantasy through anthologies and collections such as, Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, The Illustrated Man, The Twilight Zone, and Tales From the Crypt.
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David Peregrine had just emerged from his study, the bad news still clinging like dirt to sweat, when he rounded the corner and heard his wife Linda yell for him from the living room.
“David, get over here and look at this!”
Ov-ah and he-ah. He sighed. Today was going to be a doozy. She had moved to Colorado from her native Boston over twenty years earlier, and on most days her accent had faded enough to avoid detection. But when she got emotional, the vowels lengthened. Her lips hung and exaggerated the middle of words before cutting the end off short, an ah instead of an ar. The change was subtle, but enough to set the hairs on his arms at attention.
He tried to move faster, but the pain was worse today. It felt harder to put on a brave face than before the phone call, and he wondered if he should have just let things be. What did knowing do, anyway, when the weight of it seemed to feed the little growing things inside him? The words I’m sorry Mr. Peregrine, had given it teeth, and he could feel them sinking in hard, tearing at his flesh gone feeble in the light of his mortality.
He reached her then, and stared out the window.
“Shit,” he said, looking at the scene, and she hit him lightly on the shoulder.
“David, watch your language.”
He sipped his coffee. It was on the verge of lukewarm. Outside the window and littered across the dirt road and the neighbor’s yard were mounds of trash. Moldy coffee grounds and wads of paper interspersed by grocery bags that looked to be leaking dark brown ooze into the rocky gravel. It wasn’t just one or even two bags’ worth. David thought he must be looking at a couple of months—maybe even a year’s worth—of garbage.
“Now we know why the path stunk all summer. Thought it was a dead deer in the woods somewhere.”
De-ah and whe-ah. Oof.
She looked at him like she could read his thoughts.
“Well, whaddya want me to do about it?” he said, and gulped the nearly-cold coffee down. It went down bitter, more like medicine than a pick-me-up.
“I want you to tell Rodney that he needs to do something about him!”
“Linda—”
“David, I’ve held my peace ever since that guy moved in here. His wife died, and I get that. So I let the little things go. But now, this?”
“Linda, he hasn’t even been around since Thanksgiving.”
“Exactly. And now we’ve got animals breaking in and dragging—” she looked at the scene in front of them disgusted, “—this! All over our mountain!”
This was a phrase she used often: our mountain. It wasn’t really. It belonged to an HOA. But living up here at the end of a winding dirt road that couldn’t be reached in heavy snows made it feel like theirs. Patrick was the only close neighbor, and beyond were hundreds of acres of national forest.
He sighed, wishing he had gotten out of bed first this morning. Had he woken up at his usual time, he would have been able to avoid all this. He saw himself in the never-to-be-past, in his jacket and work gloves, picking up the trash and stuffing it into heavy duty black bags. Wandering back to his garage to grab a drill to put the door back on. Keeping things quiet the way he was good at. Keeping the peace—
“David!”
“Alright, alright. I’ll call him.”
Rodney answered the second time on the first ring. David bit his lip after saying hello and hearing the forced cheeriness in Rod’s voice on the other line. He was getting known for making trouble. Thanks to Linda. He pushed that thought away.
“What can I do for you, Dave?”
“Yeah Rod, I’ll make this quick. Linda woke up this morning and noticed something odd at Patrick’s house.”
Rodney was waiting for him to go on. His throat felt tight and a little phlegmy. He cleared it and turned so that he couldn’t see Linda. She was straining to listen, but more than that, she was monitoring him. Making sure he didn’t downplay the seriousness of what had happened here.
“Looks like a bear broke into his downstairs entrance,” David continued. “The door is hanging off the hinges, and there’s piles of trash dragged all over the road. Looks like he’s been hoarding it or something.”
“He hasn’t been around for—gosh. I don’t know. Six months?”
“Longer. Linda and I haven’t seen him since Thanksgiving. Must mean that all that garbage was locked up in there for a long time. Might explain the stink Linda brought up at the board meeting a couple of months ago.”
“Right. The dead deer scandal,” Rodney said and chuckled. David could feel his face going hot, but whether from embarrassment or anger he didn’t know.
“What’s he saying?” Linda whispered, and he waved his hand to shush her.
“Welp, I can get the forestry committee on it,” Rodney said. “They have the equipment to help clean up.”
“Thanks Rod. I would really appreciate that.”
“Uh huh. Let Linda know we’ll be up before the day’s through.”
He thanked him again and ended the call.
“Well?” Linda asked.
“He’s gonna take care of it.”
“He better!”
Bett-ah. His heart started to pound in his ears. He was getting a headache.
He woke to a knock on the door, then voices as Linda talked excitedly and a man—had to be Rodney—answered in short affirmatives. His head felt better, but the pain in his gut was even worse than this morning. He would need ibuprofen to get through the rest of this day. Linda was already worked up, and that alertness could easily spill over into knowing. She had a way of doing that, figuring things out about him before he did.
He went to the bathroom and popped three, then a fourth red pill into his mouth. He ran the faucet and swallowed them down. His face in the mirror looked sallow and fallen. Too many nights without sleep. He heard footsteps coming down the hall just as he was opening the door. Linda’s head was already in the doorway.
“Rod’s here.”
The accent had cut down a notch or two. She must have calmed at the first sign of help.
“Tell him I’ll be right there. Just getting my socks on.”
She waited. “You feeling alright?”
There it was. That concern. The edge of knowing. He smiled without his teeth and nodded. “Oh yeah. Just a little groggy is all.”
She nodded back and turned to let him get ready. He knew that she knew something wasn’t okay.
Rod was waiting in the entryway, hands in his jeans pockets, a patient smile. There was a reason people in the neighborhood went to him with their problems. He was good at dealing with people, especially difficult people. Linda never seemed to notice the tension in that practiced grin, the cords that stood out just slightly in his neck. When he saw David, they relaxed. He was relieved.
“I’m sure you saw the damage.”
Rodney nodded, and took a step towards the hall David was walking down.
“Got a group of neighbors to come help. They’re all shocked that Pat had this in his house all this time.”
David nodded. “Hard to imagine him leaving such a gorgeous place in that condition.”
“The grief must have got to him.”
They all looked at their feet quietly and nodded, until Linda broke the silence with an offer of coffee or tea.
“No thanks,” said Rodney, but David nodded to her, and she hurried to the kitchen to get the pot on.
“I’ll be out in a jiff. Got to get my boots on and find my work gloves.”
Rodney walked to the door, and paused. “That’s a nice pic! You both look so young here.” It was their wedding picture, framed in dark wood, and engraved with the words, ‘Not without me.’ “What’s it mean?”
“That’s what Davie said when I told him I was moving away from home,” Linda’s back was to them, her hands busy dumping coffee grounds into a fresh filter. “I was trying to break up with him. We were done with high school, and I wanted to be anywhere but in my hometown. I never got to the breaking up part. He just looked at me and said, ‘Not without me.’ We’ve been together ever since.”
Rodney whistled, then nodded and went outside. When the door closed, David let out a sigh of pain. It was dull now thanks to the pills, but if what Google had told him was true, it wouldn’t be long before he would need the real stuff to knock this out. And that meant more doctors and prescriptions. Leaving the house would always bring an inquiry from Linda. It would be hard to keep it from her.
And then there was the question of after he was gone. He pictured her here, alone on the road in the middle of winter. Nothing but the television and her phone to keep her company.
“Davie, here’s your coffee.”
Caw-fee. That one never changed.
The old house across the road sat empty for years, the vacation home of a Texas couple that David had only met once, two years after he and Linda had moved in. Nice, salt-of-the-earth people, but too busy with properties dotting the Western United States to make it out here much. There were caretakers and repairmen in the warmer months, but come winter, the place would be locked up and winterized. Linda had said more than once that she didn’t like to see the place empty and staring the way it did. Sometimes she swore she saw shadows moving through the windows, against the background of dark house. David was glad not to have company.
He didn’t want neighbors and the inevitable conflict that would come with it. Linda would find something to complain about. The way they kept their yard, the flowers they did or didn’t plant, a paint color or fence choice that she would take up with the board. He loved her, but she couldn’t help herself. When the news of new neighbors had come a couple of years earlier, Linda had been ecstatic. David’s mood turned dark. He had listened to her as she readied a welcome basket, baked bread and cookies, and stuffed the thing with local honey and jam samplers.
“Don’t you think it’ll be great Davie? We can play cards and watch the Super Bowl!”
He didn’t want to do any of those things, but he told her that yes, it would be great. Very nice indeed. On the day Patrick and Gloria Robinson arrived, David and Linda had gone over to greet them. Gloria was a surprisingly beautiful woman, with dark hair halfway down her back and bright pink nail polish that Linda noticed immediately, and with disdain.
“I don’t know if she’ll fit in well here dressed like that.”
David had nodded. He had been married long enough to understand the problem. Gloria was dressed to the nines. Heels and tight white jeans that showed every curve, a red top that was low cut enough for a little cleavage to peek through. Linda had crossed her arms, the basket drooping, heavier at the sight of them.
They had welcomed them, and the Robinsons had been polite enough, but only that. There were tight, pursed smiles, and limp handshakes and cold replies. From that first meeting, David gathered that Patrick worked from home running some business that had taken off. Doing what, he didn’t know, and Patrick seemed reticent to tell. For her part, Gloria barely smiled. She stared at Patrick before answering questions, and in his eyes David and Linda could see something that made them anxious to get on with their day and pretend none of it had ever happened.
“Well, that was weird,” was Linda’s curt observation on the way home, and David had nodded and found himself wishing that they had avoided the visit altogether.
It was only a few months later that Gloria stopped leaving the house. She didn’t walk or tend to her small flower beds. By Halloween, Linda’s worry over her absence had grown obsessive. She was convinced something bad had happened.
“He leaves the house every other day! Drives up and down this mountain, hauling bags at all hours. And where is Gloria?”
David heard the news a few days after Thanksgiving. Patrick had already packed up his things, and quietly left the neighborhood behind him. Gloria, he learned, had passed in late October. From what, no one knew, and no one wanted to ask.
“Well, that is just awful, and no wonder he left. Must have driven him crazy living up here in this big house, all alone.”
David had agreed with her. The thought of spending your days in these silent woods, no company to speak of except the song birds and an occasional fox or deer. These mountains were beautiful, but they were lonesome.
He thought of that now as he followed Rodney to the road. Linda would be watching from the window, excited at the burst of activity.
“Smells god awful, David. I know I made a joke about Linda’s dead deer problem, but she wasn’t kidding. This is bad.”
David saw Rodney pull his shirt over his nose as they reached the end of his driveway. He waited, curious to see how bad it was. In early spring the weather had turned unseasonably warm, and a rotting smell overtook the little path Linda liked to walk in the morning. She was convinced there was a deer, and for a few days she waited for the smell to dissipate. Animals took care of death in the forest. That was the way of it.
But after a couple of weeks, and with the smell lingering, she had taken it to the board. Rodney had just been elected president, and was overwhelmed with the sudden responsibility. Linda’s yammering in those meetings did little to move him. He always smiled politely, but David could tell he thought she was a nut. It hurt him. He loved Linda, but deep down, he knew she was a little nutty. She could never let things go, could never stop worrying. It made it hard to go through life with her sometimes, and he kept her at the edge of himself, choosing to bear some of life’s heaviest burdens alone rather than involve her and add the inevitable hand wringing.
The stench hit him just as he crossed the end of his driveway. He cut his breath short and stopped. The smell was beyond bad. It was unbearable. He coughed deep and felt his stomach hitch a little before pulling his shirt up over his nose. It didn’t do much. He mouth-breathed and pushed on.
“We got shovels and buckets. Figured we’d get it in there and then bag all of it up.”
Rodney started coughing, and David looked at the other neighbors who had gathered to lend a hand. Their mouths were turned down, eyes screaming that they wanted to be anywhere but here. He was glad Linda had stayed inside. The last thing they needed was her ranting while they scooped the puddles of garbage into the orange buckets. He slipped his work gloves on and headed toward the pile of tools.
They worked that way for a while, scooping and dumping, a steady rhythm of metal on rock followed by the hollow, wet plop of oozing refuse against hard plastic. The sun was sinking, and David knew that soon they would have to go home. The back door to Patrick’s house hung cockeyed on a single hinge, the view into the windowless downstairs revealing only black.
Like the inside of a tomb.
David and Rodney hung the door the best they could, deciding to come back in the light and survey the damage.
“I’m not sure if Pat will respond, but he still pays his dues every month,” Rodney said.
“If that bear tore anything up he’ll need to get a hold of insurance.”
“If?” Rodney asked and looked David over. “You didn’t go in?”
“Nope. Wanted to wait for the head honcho before I made any moves.” David said this with a smile, and thought of the terrible, radiating pain he had felt that morning when Linda first called him to look.
“Hm. Well, we’ll come up tomorrow and peek, see if we can let him know what he’s in for.”
“Poor Pat.”
The few lingering do-gooders went home. Linda had just turned the porch light on. She was watching David from the kitchen window. He was achy and tired, but he made sure to walk without limping, and even smiled up at her when he got to the drive. Seeing her there with the light behind her, he remembered Linda at twenty-two, and the smile wasn’t forced anymore. She was a nut alright, but he loved her.
“Davie?”
He jumped a little. He was sitting in his blue chair, staring at the dark mountains. The TV was off.
“Yeah?”
“Everything okay?”
“Ah yeah. Just tired from today is all.”
She nodded. “Want something hot, to take the chill off?”
He noticed for the first time that he was trembling, but it wasn’t from cold.
“Sure. Yeah.”
She turned and went to make it, and he called after her. “Linda? I’m going to my study.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I got a few bills that need paid.”
“Thought you were tired.”
“I am, but I won’t be able to sleep until I see to it.” She let him tell her this lie, and when he took the cup of tea from her hands and looked at her, he knew that the jig was up. It was a matter of time before she asked him the real questions, and when she did, he knew he would have to lie to her.
His office was stale from disuse. The desk was covered in a thin layer of dust. He sat down and looked through the opened blinds, letting the heat from the mug seep into his hands. The dread was coming. He had joined the cancer crowd, just like his mother and father, but they had lingered for a while, kept alive with chemo pumps and radiation sessions. His was too far along for that. Not that the doctors had told him so, but the statistics were bad. Too bad to justify drawing the thing out.
That was part of his keeping things from Linda. If she found out, he knew she would only hear the rosy-colored picture. She would demand the kitchen sink, and he would oblige because he loved her too much to tell her the truth: that if this was how it was gonna end, he wanted it to go quick. Nature wasn’t much good at that. It usually took an act of God to give you a decent death. He hadn’t decided the how, but he wanted to get out the why.
He pulled out a piece of paper, and started to write his note.
Dear Linda,
If you’re reading this—
He had just scribbled out the words when he heard a crashing sound outside. He stood and waited, trying to peer over his desktop and into the yard. The house lights flicked on, illuminating the driveway and wild bits of prairie grass, but the dirt road was still cloaked in darkness. Another sound, this time louder, came from across the way. Patrick’s house.
“The damn bear,” he said, and made his way to the door. Linda was standing with her hand at the knob when he got there.
“Davie,” was all she managed, and then he was past her. “What are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna scare him.”
“Scare him? By yourself?”
“Who else, Linda? Are you gonna do it?” He was yelling, and as soon as the words were out, he regretted them. Her face was ashamed like a child. No, it said, she wouldn’t be doing it. She would wait for him to act, just like she always did. Wait, and hope for the best.
“Be careful,” was all she managed.
David softened, and went to her. He hugged her to himself, kissed her on the cheek, and then left the house armed with nothing but a flashlight.
The night air was chilly, and he walked down his drive without turning on the flashlight. He was taking it in, what could be his last night on earth. The pain in his abdomen was so faint now it could have been anything, and he took each step pretending that he wasn’t terminal, that he would have a thousand more autumn evenings to spend with Linda, curled in a blanket against the dark cold of approaching winter.
The warm yellow light from his porch was fading and by the time he reached the road, it was hard to make out the pitted ground beneath him. He waited, breathing in sharp and quick, alert to the dark cavern of nothing. It had its own substance, that dark wild. It was a presence you felt. You invited it in when you stepped into it, outside of the safety of your home.
He waited until his eyes adjusted, keeping his breaths calm and composed. If Linda was out here, she would have heard it, that little hitch at the end, the fear of the unknown. But where they differed was in the action. Thinking of her warm in the house, he stepped onto the gravel.
His footsteps rang out into the hollow night like they were echoing, loud and blasphemous against the sacred quiet. Every once in a while he stopped and listened, but the rush of his heart in his ears was too loud against that oppressive quiet. Nothing moved. Until he heard the crash again.
He was only fifty or so feet from Patrick’s house when he heard a bang come from inside. He fumbled the flashlight in his pocket, feeling for the on-switch. His hands were shaking, and the white light went on with an eerie bouncing effect. The normally beautiful house looked haunted.
“Calm down, boyo,” he said to himself, before he took a deep breath and shined the beam toward the downstairs door. It was gone, a cave mouth in its place, open like a grave for a coffin.
His body was numb with adrenaline, the relentless pain silenced by the immediacy of now. For a man that wants to die quick, you sure want to live. That thought made him chuckle. His hand steadied, and he called out, “Hey Bear!” in the way he had been taught by neighbors and friends when he and Linda had first bought the house.
Nothing. He squinted into the dark and moved closer. He knew he shouldn’t go in. Cornering a wild animal was never a good idea, and black bears were skittish creatures. If you gave them a path of escape, nine times out of ten they would take it. Hell, more than that. But block their only chance at safety? You were in for a fight.
He hadn’t ever seen Patrick’s downstairs, had only peeked in through the sliver of front door when they had first moved in. By the time Gloria had died and he disappeared, they had stopped bothering even to wave at each other. How had she died? And why didn’t anyone seem to know?
Did she die in the house?
He didn’t know why that thought had forced its way into the forefront now, and not before. He had been too busy to think such morbid thoughts. Tragedy had always formed some invisible fence for him that he didn’t cross with people. He figured most people were like him—better off without the what, or why of the thing. What good did those answers do anyway?
Still, standing here in the dark, peering into the place where she may have last drawn breath…
He would go in. If the bear was still in there, he could make it out in time. Hell, the thing would probably run right past him anyway, so long as he stayed clear of the exit.
And if not?
“That’s one way to do it.”
Linda wouldn’t have her letter, but maybe that was for the best. His words would only give her something to vex over. Even if he said she shouldn’t, she would worry, imagine all the things she could have done to change things.
He heard a strange shuffling and pictured the bear on the move, combing through trails of rotting garbage for nutrients. Anything to live to see another spring.
“You’ll have to do it for the both of us,” said David, and he slipped through the doorway, into the dark.
The house was hollow, empty except for the piles of rot around him. He thought of the story of Jonah, that great creaking whale belly, and thought he heard the sound of phantom water dripping. He took another couple of steps and his shoe hit something wet and cold. He stopped, waited, held his breath to avoid catching a whiff. He knew the smell of the place was enough to knock him out.
He opened his eyes and looked down, considering before finally shining the light on his feet. It was a cross between coffee grounds and brown sludge, something you would expect to find in a pond or wandering the ditches of his childhood hometown. He stepped back and it clung. His stomach lurched a little, and he had to close his eyes to keep from heaving. He walked on, listening carefully for the bear, light aimed at the floor to avoid stepping in the piles of rot.
There was no furniture. The floor and walls were unfinished concrete. In the corner, carpet and pad that had been torn up were rolled haphazardly and piled. He stopped in the center of the room and took the place in for the first time. He tried to imagine Patrick and his wife here, in the cold, unfeeling room.
There it was again, the dripping. David tuned all of his senses in to try and see where it was coming from. The sound was coming from his right, and he followed it. Only a few feet away, he saw a drain covered in the too-big grainy bits of sludge. The white light of his flashlight gleamed off something pink, only a fleck, but noticeable in the bleak dark.
He went to it, curious but cautious. It was vibrant against the sewage melt around him, but he couldn’t tell what it was. He knelt down to get a better look. Something thin and white lay underneath it, set there like a pencil that had fallen off a desk mid-test.
“Oh, God.” The realization hit him all at once, and he stood and backed away, body electric with fear. He breathed in, and the stench had a heaviness in his throat that sent him coughing deep and long.
When he came up, his eyes stung with hot tears. Doubt and a sick curiosity pulled at him, and he made his way back, this time hovering over it to get a bird’s eye view. The reality was unmistakable. It was bone, and a single, painted fingernail.
Human.
Upstairs, something—maybe a glass—shattered. He could picture shards glittering on the kitchen tile against his flashlight beam. He went to the stairwell and began to climb. The beige carpet was stained, with bits of remains strewn across and soaked in places. His lips quivered and his hands shook. The bear had vanished from his mind. He followed the sounds to see what else he would find.
Who else.
The kitchen was to the right of the stairwell. From where he stood he could see that the fridge had been opened, the door torn off, the contents knocked over and strewn across the floor. He felt for a light switch, hoping to do away with the strobing effect of the bouncing white flashlight beam, across bare walls and ceilings. He flicked it, but nothing happened. The electricity had been turned off. He breathed through his nose and found the smell was better up here, more like spoiled vegetables and less like the rot of dead things.
Dead people.
He would have to do this work with his flashlight. David surveyed the ground as he walked to the kitchen. The same piles of brown slush were all over the hardwood. Some spots seemed fresh, piled too thick to dry, but others would have to be scraped up, if they could be cleaned at all. His mind jumped to crime scene teams and industrial laundries, the logistics of removing blood and tissue from carpet and walls. When had this place first started to smell? Months ago. And it wasn’t because of garbage.
He moved past the kitchen, seeing only food scraps and broken cabinets, and went to a second set of stairs that likely led to the upstairs bedrooms. There would be a master bedroom where Patrick had laid with his wife before—
A clambering downstairs interrupted his thoughts and sent him jogging up the last few steps. The bedroom door on the right was open, and he snuck in to avoid being seen, then peeked his head back around the corner. A large black shadow sat at the bottom of the stairs, blocking his only means of escape. His heart raced, and he gripped the flashlight hard before yelling, “Hey Bear!” as loud as he could manage. His voice sounded hoarse and alien in his ears.
He peeked again, and saw that it had climbed the first few steps. He slammed the door, fumbling for a lock. There wasn’t one. He could hear the faintest sound of the bear making its way slowly towards him, sniffing as it went. His eyes darted, searching the room for anything that could be used as a weapon, and finding nothing. He ran to a nightstand, one of two standing on either side of a bare king-sized mattress on the floor. David pulled each drawer out, and tossed them aside. They were empty.
He shined his light to the other stand, just as he heard the claws scrape against the hollow door. A dozen more hits, and they would be face to face. David’s philosophies on quick deaths from earlier in the night had vanished, replaced by a pulsing desire to live. The flashlight beam stopped when it reached the other side of the mattress. There was a large, spreading stain, the color of coffee. When he walked around to the other side, he could see that the liquid had dripped down onto the floor and pooled there.
So he did kill her.
She had bled out in her own bedroom, and Patrick hadn’t even bothered to clean up after the crime. The door shook with another loud hit, and the sound of wood breaking and splintering set David’s teeth on edge. He opened the top drawer of the second night stand. Again, nothing. He threw it to the ground. The second drawer was empty as well, and he tossed it across the room, but the third had weight to it when he pulled. A folded cloth was there, something bulky hidden within it. He pulled at the corners of fabric and lifted, stepping back as a large hunting knife clattered to the floor. The blade was stained dark with blood.
Her blood.
An enormous crunch of wood snapped him awake, as the bear’s paw broke through the top panel of the door. David grabbed the knife, holding it in one shaky hand, the flashlight in the other, both aimed at the monster that now roared in frustration on the other side.
“Hey Bear!” he screamed it now, and another clawed paw broke through, wood splintering, clattering to the floor. The bear tried to force its head through the new hole, then growled and hit the door again.
The bear head was otherworldly, taken from the pages of some mythical fairytale meant to scare children away from the woods. It had to be male, the biggest black bear David had ever seen. If he lived to tell the story, he would guess it was 500 pounds. Its teeth showed, hot breath rising and then disappearing in the black. It swiped again, pushed through, and this time its whole head fit. It pushed, and gnashed its teeth at the stabbing bits of door that were the only thing between the beast and its prey.
David was stuck there, armed but frozen in the worst terror he had ever felt in his life. His bladder let go, and he closed his eyes for a second, waiting for the creature to come and end him. An act of God.
“Davie?”
His eyes snapped open, and the bear was still and listening. Its head had disappeared to the other side of the door.
“Davie, you in here?”
He-ah. Oh, God. It was Linda.
“No!” he yelled, as the bear tore away from the broken door. David ran, flung the door open, and followed behind the lumbering beast, the hunter now the hunted. By the first landing he could see Linda in the living room, just beyond the top of the stairs that he had climbed. She had entered the same way he did, trusting his path. Now she stood with her arms crossed, looking for him.
The bear was between them, and for a moment, he could see Linda seeing, realizing what was going to happen before it did, and in that split second of frozen time, her eyes met his, and she smiled. A single sound, something like, “Oop,” escaped her mouth, like she had dropped some small, precious item in the kitchen sink. Then her eyes widened in surprise.
The bear was on her and tearing in a second. David leaped forward and pounded with the knife, over and over again. The bear cried out, and stood on its hind legs.
“Hey Bear!” David screamed, the sound of his voice echoing against the high white ceilings. The bear’s eyes were wild and afraid. David moved between the beast and Linda, daring the thing to come back and try again. “Get out!”
He would always remember how quiet and graceful it was in the leaving, its enormous body running down the stairs and disappearing into the dark. David let out all of his breath, and his arms, suddenly devoid of strength, hung at his sides. The whole house was dark except for a round white moon carved into the floor by his feet.
“Linda,” he turned and knelt down next to her, dropping the knife by her head and cradling her in his arms.
“Davie,” she smiled up at him, and he laughed a little, tears forming at the corner of his eyes. She reached her hand up and touched his face. “I wanted to help.”
Blood pooled in the outlines of her teeth, and she coughed. He leaned into her touch, breathing her in.
“Why?”
She wasn’t looking at him anymore, but through him, as if some other world was opening before her. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”
He kissed her wrist and held his lips there. Her pulse was light as the flutter of moth wings, and then, it was no more. He didn’t know how much time had passed, when he finally reached out, and closed her eyes.
The police came before the sun was up. David watched the flash of cameras as a crime scene team documented and searched the house for evidence. He answered questions from his porch steps, an emergency blanket wrapped around his shoulders as the sky turned indigo, then red. A hunting team from Wildlife Services was there by eight, and the bear, wounded and slow, was located and shot dead by noon. It was in its own den.
The remains of Patrick’s wife and what looked to be others, were found littered amongst deer bones and berry-filled scat. She had been dead a long time. The others? That would take months to sort out. A detective would be back some time that afternoon if David wanted to get some sleep. There would be questions, and if he thought of anything, would he give the department a call?
He agreed to everything, and thanked them for a break. The pain had returned with a vengeance, roaring through his abdomen and into his back. He went to his office and drew the shades before plopping down heavily in his swivel chair. It groaned and squeaked a little before settling. He closed his eyes, and breathed in the quiet of the house. When he opened them, his letter was there, the words stale and anemic in light of the night’s events.
There, just under his opening line—If you’re reading this— a small heart in red ink, and the words scrawled in Linda’s pretty handwriting: Not without me.
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