By Kevin Novalina
CULLEN GUNNED THE throttle on the Evinrude, lifting the johnboat’s nose high off the murky water. By the spotlight’s beam, he wound through the riverbends, watching through the blizzard the gothic frieze of treetops, black against a paler sky in the morning dark. The snow limned in the foliage like phosphorescent Yuletide tinsel.
Couple hours ago, he snuck out dressed in layers of winterweight hunting camo and hitched his old man’s boat to the dually. He’d never dared take them out alone, but when his dad came home tanked and smelling not like his mom, he said to hell with it. They’d yelled until he passed out and she went to the Quaverly Inn. So, Cullen figured if they could have their escapes, he could too.
But he felt the familial seams busting. The constant booze and women, yelling and destruction. Communication in grunts or silences. He wondered where all this rage had come from. How far it’d go.
His ears stinging, nostrils bristling dry, he squinted in the cold air as the boat rode the chop, water splitting wings of icy spray around the hull. The spotlight offered scant visibility, thick snowflakes roiling in the tapered beam like insects at a streetlight on summer nights. His dad had never taken him anywhere near this far downriver, this deep in the wild, and everything felt foreign. Cryptic. Lore told of a land primeval teeming with game, but its terra incognita shied most superstitious hunters away.
That and the stories.
Legend was these woods were haunted. Where that Chantraine family was supposed to have lived. If you believed the tales, it’s where they were burned alive, one at a time. Son and daughter first. And according to the few elders around when the slaughter would’ve occurred, it’s where the house stood yet, the four charred holes still scorched through the floorboards.
Cullen saw a sycamore deadfall grafted from the bank and eased off the throttle. As he neared, he killed the motor and moved up to the bow. Paddled toward the snag’s crown rattling in the current, tied off, and sat tacking in the wake lapping against the frozen erosion.
Squaring his fedora on his head, he fired on a headlamp, then shouldered the field pack and .3030. Kicked a foothold in the clay terrace and climbed up on roots twisted from the bank failure.
Studying the dark woods in the grainy lamplight, he dusted a rime of snow collaring his puffer jacket like a sherpa. ‘River at your back,’ he whispered, then stepped inside the timberline.
Parched powder creaking undersole, he trekked deep through a winter wonderland incandesced without source. Barren yet lush, garlands of ice foliage blooming from the brush’s dead wickerwork. Gnarled black locusts like raw-boned horribles charred in torsional poses of agony.
At length he found a lodged boulder beneath a pine, its wintermint foliage full enough to hold the fall. Shrugging his gear, he sat on a moss cushion the colour of the stone it furred, listening to the flurry’s feathery whispers.
Nature materialized from the dark, the woodland shaking alive. Limbs cracked, brush rustled. The later it got, the louder.
And colder.
He hooded his jacket and cinched the drawstring, snorkelling his chapped face against the searing winds. From such cold, his mind drifted to the family vacation in Florida a couple years back. Their last great time together. They’d built dilapidated sandcastles on Clearwater Beach. Beneath umbrellas, his mom and dad sipped margaritas, laughed, and kissed, while Cullen watched the sun melt into the horizon watering off to somewhere, anywhere. Lounging in the warm tide, listening to the waves hiss and burst. The salty surf foaming around him, then slipping silver back into the sea.
Now. He pictured his mom at the motel, sobbing. His dad sprawled across the bedroom floor, snoring. He thought it tragic he couldn’t remember the love of what was without recalling the hate of what is.
He blew into cupped hands, shifted a numb glute. Though alone, he sensed presences around him. As if the winds seething in the flora were spectres visible but not. He wondered if the old Chantraine place was real or rumour. In ruins or still standing, four holes baked through a carpet of wildlife dung.
The way he’d heard it, the Chantraines were ‘River Rats’ during Prohibition. But instead of a houseboat, they lived deep in the woods, surviving on what the waters provided. Some claimed to have seen them on the banks mummied in rotten pelts, running trotlines and barrel nets. Others swore they saw them running popskull hooch. Lore made them inbred, ravaged by chancres. Their brains honeycombed from disease.
Story went, they took in a couple drifters roaming the woods one winter night, not knowing these guys were on the lam after killing four folks in a general store over in Novalina. The Chantraines fed them, provided a warm bed.
Then sometime during the witching hour...
Still, other tales claimed the family wasn’t fried like witches. They’d just moved on to more bountiful geography. Lived and died as most did: uneventful.
He’d also heard the whole thing was a myth. A tall tale grown taller by the telling. That the Chantraines never existed at all.
Bracken crackled and Cullen watched through the riflescope a squirrel scamper through a patch of winter galax powdered with top snow, the leathery brown leaves like frosted heart-shaped cookies.
He startled when a murder of crows plumed from a live oak like a burst coal brick, holding the bough’s shape now bare of feathered foliage before merging in a morphing Rorschach, then skirling away, black smoke on the shearing winds.
And atop the adjacent ridge stood a wide racked whitetail.
It’d never made a sound.
Just appeared like an apparition.
Cullen raised, drew the buck into the crosshairs, and fired. Its forelegs buckled, but it exploded full lope down the rise, shoulder to shank, muscle contracting along bone, hooves curling short and kicking long in a fluid glide more air than ground, as it covered the bottom entire in a few gallops, then vanished over the far flank with frozen smoke and the rifle’s concussion in its wake.
Breath ghosting out, Cullen located ‘first blood’ on the ridge’s chine. Dark welts over the landslip.
He looked toward the river, not sure how he’d get a bullbuck back to the boat. ‘Don’t run too long,’ he said, adrenaline fizzing, then turned toward the sound of ripping bush and started after it.
The blast unceasing from the ether, churning around the boy like a shaken snow globe. He scaled a steep rise, piston legs mushing through the ice scree, then rode a hip down the other side, an avalanche of fluff fanning around him.
He tracked a good distance, cutting for sign through gauntlets of mutating icescape. Top snow had ghosted over swaths of trail. But just when it seemed the blood had run cold, he’d spot breadcrumbs of crimson mist on a felled evergreen or snarl of brambles.
After a while, he leaned wheezing, heart swatting breastplate. He emptied the snow that’d packed his bootmouths, casting his feet in ice moulds. Squinted windward and slogged on.
Threading a draw, Cullen crested out to a stand of cane that exploded at his approach. A spectral violence ripping across the tops of the sheathes, splitting the brake with a contrail of powdered frost trailing off like rifle smoke as the poles clattered to silence.
He followed blood strokes through the boscage to where the buck had bedded down. Matted gore already cased in ice, brittle as crimson sugar glass. Such a novice error. If he’d just waited, it would’ve died right here.
He trailed on, shouldering through the thickening canebrake until he shoved hard and burst free, snatching a breath and birch trunk just as he cleared a bank, feet snapping out over a frozen pond on his grip. He dropped ass-to-ledge, his boots slamming the rubbery surface, splintering the grey crust white. He dug his heels into the corrugated ice, but the bank caved, and the sheeting broke into bobbing plates. Coat plumping with water, he clawed at root knuckles, floundered out, and elbowed away. Rose steaming from the torso down, his soaked outerwear already glossing in verglas as if melted to his body.
Across the tarn’s narrow spate, he saw faint bloodspoors spattering a talus of sandstone to where the buck lay in a hardening heap. Where it would remain.
The snowsquall metastasised into a whiteout. Invisible sun in an ashen sky. Cold to crack bone, jelly blood. Using cedar duff as tinder, he tried forging a fire in the lee of a shallow enclave. Icicle fingerbones fumbling through a whole book of matches and failing the flame every one. He dug through the pack for a ferro rod but he’d forgotten it in his haste to leave.
Face scoured raw, he sat clenching and opening his hands to flex the freeze from his fingers. Rose and spun to all points of the compass, his bearings whirling on the dial. An illusion of cerebellum, delusion of inner ear, his surroundings warped like a funhouse mirror. Everything resembled everything else, morphing with every blink. Any thaw seized back, reshaping the landscape. Hollows banked, mounds caved. Accumulation filled or snapped branches, bowing or aligning their tree’s posture. Turning every landmark into a landmark no more.
Each moment, a complete metamorphosis.
Each moment, a whole new world.
His senses searching all, finding naught, he stood frozen between run or remain. ‘Move,’ he growled, picked a point ahead, and did.
Dead vegetation reared around him like raging beasts in the battering winds. With reckless abandon he tore through snags of briars that clawed his face, gutted the down from his jacket. A thorn ripped through the cartilage of an ear, leaving a hoar of frosted blood pearled on the barb.
Knees in ice braces, he hobbled on bulbed stumps of shinbones like hooves over the crimped crust. He fell, rose. Pushed on in various directions before balking and doubling back. At every clearing and crag, ravine and snow dune, the panic deepened.
He reached a limestone prow. Looked out at Mother Nature in monochrome, recognising all and nothing in tandem.
The cold folded him. He shed the rifle and field pack, hollering his voice raw through the howling tempest now lashing him with hail. Above, a horned owl unfolded from the crown of a cottonwood and wheeled out, rocking on its keel before homing to the same limb. Wings tucked, its head spun backward, disced eyes watching Cullen from beneath tufted plumicorns.
He slipped his frozen bootlaces and emptied the slush. Skinned his soggy socks and studied his feet, a frostnip hash mottled with blisters. Swollen slick and purple as raw liver.
Cullen tremored from cold and rage. He was alone and soaked in an arctic nightmare. No one knew his location, and outside a hitched boat, he’d left no trail to track.
‘I’m gonna die out here,’ he said, voice swallowed by the snowburst.
He forced his boots back on. Mouth drawn tight as jerky, he ate palmfuls of granular ice until he seized with brain freeze. Sat kneading his legs against the throb in his thighbones. He imagined his mom foetal by the phone. His dad pacing the driveway, worried for his son. And toys. Minutes, days, months, years. Both wilting with time’s passage as Cullen’s bones lay unclaimed, absorbing forever into the earth’s wheeling crust.
He wondered if his tragedy might reunite them. Through his death, their union survive. A sacrifice of him for the better them.
He smiled. Then wept.
Cullen huddled against a cankered hemlock, its dark roots contorted around him like some demon clawing up from the netherworld. His frozen thermals girdling his ribcradle, he shuddered as if possessed. Face pale, eyelids violet and translucent as a hatchling’s skin. He listened for a passing motor, anything to show him the river’s direction. Back to his dad’s boat waiting to take him from this wintertide Hellscape.
His head lolled with drowsy weight. The notion took him to just drift off, give in to the elements when he heard a child giggle and say: ‘You dead, Freezy Wheezy?’
He opened his eyes, pink with corneal lacerations from the gale.
Before him, a little girl stood shapeless in a coat of matted rodent pelts. Rawhide bound into makeshift pampooties.
‘You ain’t dead!’ she said.
He squinted overhead where the cirrus had tattered, unlocking a prismatic light through the ice casing the crewelwork of bare vegetation. Pillowy snowflakes sifted through the hoarfrost foliage, shuttling down like crystalline leaves.
Forcing his tongue through his lips, he wept again.
She wrapped both hands around one of his and tugged. Wincing, he rose in a cloak of vapor, snow dusting from his lap like confectioner’s sugar.
She yanked his hand, but he stood teetering. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you coming or aintcha?’
On cadaver legs, he hobbled along behind her skip, watching her blonde curls float as they passed through a swale of ragweed thrashing in the gusts. ‘Hey,’ he said, rasping. ‘Do you know where—’
‘Course I do, Silly Billy,’ she said, chuckling again. She pointed down the hill where an ancient live oak stood, its tangled branches spread like a massive Medusa head, the Spanish moss white as hag’s locks curtaining a decrepit shack canted beneath. ‘Home.’
The cabin was cobbled from unhewn shapes and sizes of logs and stone. Birch bark shaking the low-pitched roof. They stepped through a door swinging on dry rotted leather hinges, clapping against its skewed jamb.
Inside, a foul reek. The hovel lush with decay, plush with peat. Scurry and squeak of retreating rodents. Sunlight filtered through the roof and wall chinking, casting an eerie crazing over the lone room.
Humming ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ the little girl skipped into the darkness. ‘Over here, Reindeer.’
‘Where’s your parents?’ Cullen said, the floor spongy underboot.
Backlit by a bed of glowing embers on the hearth, she giggled and sang: ‘Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!’
The wind wrenched the cabin, slamming the door, and startling him.
‘Sit down, why dontcha,’ she said, moving about in the dark.
He eased into a cane chair in fungal shambles, and she appeared from the shadows with a clay mug. ‘Cocoa,’ she said, a front tooth missing. He studied her grimy face, snot crusting each nostril. Still humming, she swung a mouldy blanket around his shoulders, then pirouetted back into the dark.
‘Your parents?’ he said again. The mug cupped in both palms, his fingers palsied like dead spider legs.
‘You ought not wander around alone,’ she said, waddling a log to the firebox. ‘There’s bears out there.’
He sipped, never looking away. The shanty shook again, the bowed planks moaning, the door smacking. He clenched the blanket beneath his quaking chin. ‘What’s your name?’
She teeheed. ‘Wanna hear a story?’ Dropping the firewood on the coals, she coaxed the flames, and the room ignited in guttering light.
His innards seized into ice blocks.
There it was. Four holes burned straight through the floorboards. The splintered edges charred in twisted shapes.
‘One a ponce of the time,’ she said in a musical trill, ‘there was a beautiful princess.’
‘The Chantraine place,’ he said, tranced on the floor. ‘It’s really real.’
A flurry of crackling sparks whorled around her, the flue moaning as it drew. ‘And one day,’ she said, ‘the princess was captured by a mean old dragon and locked in a fiery dungeon.’
‘How?’
‘Soon, a handsome prince arrived at the dragon’s lair to rescue the princess,’ she said, and stepped from silhouette, giggling as a sizzling bubble of flesh pulsated on her cheek. It popped and puttied to the floor in a smouldering hiss. The ends of her hair singed, glowing like bulb wire as it curlicued back to blisters on her broiled pate.
Cullen sat frozen.
‘And he told that dragon,’ she said, now rasping. ‘ “Release the princess, beast, or face the blade of my sword!”’
‘You’re dead.’
Her smile faded. ‘I’m not dead, Sleeepyyy Heeeaaad...’ she said, voice warping like a damaged audiotape, then her lips charred back from a pumpkintoothed rictus, and she disappeared as if ash in a soft breeze.
Throat pipes locked, he peered down at his hands cupping nothing, then back up to find no shack. No darkened living room or fire. No holes in no floor. Not even a mouldy blanket wrapped around him. Just a wasteland tundra that all looked the same under a sunless sky.
Cullen sat huddled between the mangled roots of the cankered hemlock. The world time-lapsing around him. Eyecups tacked shut with crystalline tears, legs sheathed in a molten chrysalis of ice. Above, a nebular spindrift off the wickerwound crowns like neon smoke in the bluish gloaming.
Far away he heard the faint growl of a boat motor, but he didn’t stir. He’d just sit a minute and wait. Rest a little longer, because he knew sometimes boats weren’t boats at all. Sometimes you heard boats like you saw old shacks and little dead girls singing in the woods. With snowflakes big as dove feathers falling pale blue in the moonglow, he’d just hang here and chill in the tropical warmth. Just him and his mom and dad beneath umbrellas, sipping margaritas. Laughing and kissing. Maybe they’d build another crumbling sandcastle. So what if that was a boat, there’d be more. There was always more. There were boats and boats, and he could sail away anytime. Toward the sun melting into the horizon that watered off to somewhere, anywhere. But now, he just wanted to lounge in the warm tide, listen to the waves hiss and burst. Let the salty surf foam around him, then slip silver back into the sea.
Really, it could wait.
He was warm now.
Even the shivering had stopped.
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