Excerpt: The Mountain Knows Our Names (Current Project)

The old man decided to give up and let the thing kill him.

As he dug Julia’s grave, the past week of terror and sleepless nights crashed down on him. In their seventies, he was amazed they’d made it as long as they had. The mountain soil was hard and stubborn beneath his shovel, and the effort triggered another coughing fit. Thick mucus and blood rattled in his chest as his lungs fought for each breath. You did good, Julia. We kept up as long as we could. He was wheezing.

Golden light spilled across the valley as the sun dipped low, but its touch did not warm. The surrounding woods whispered as wind slid down from the mountains, cooling the sweat on Henry’s neck.

After several pauses to ride out the coughing, Henry finally finished. The grave was shallow, just deep enough that no wild animal, or that damned thing, would be able to get at her. Julia, wrapped in the hand-stitched quilt she’d completed only days before, lay beside the hole.

She’d fought just as hard as any of them had back in Nam, he thought, pride cutting through the exhaustion. Not a soldier, not on paper, but as a Red Cross Donut Dolly she’d walked straight into the same chaos he had. Into the same explosion, same smell of blood and hot metal. They shared the same fears that sat heavy behind the ribs. Then the Red Cross finally admitted that Vietnam was too damn hot for coffee, so the girls started bringing games and stories instead. They could’ve gone home, some did. Most stayed and Julia was one of them. She’d always found a way to bring a little light into the rooms.

Moving slowly, joints burning with arthritis, he lowered himself and dragged her body toward the grave. Once he had her settled gently on the ground, a wave of love and exhaustion knocked him to his knees. He lay down beside her and pulled her against his chest. Softly, he cried. His tears soaked into the cloth covering her face, disappearing into the fabric. Some wild, childish part of him hoped those tears could nourish her somehow, give her just enough life to come back to him.

Here he was, Henry Calloway, an old man curled against the body of his wife in a shallow grave. The strangeness of it, his grief, the quiet of the woods… it all felt so heavy and unreal he wondered how his heart was still beating at all.

A while later, with Julia’s grave covered and the earth tamped flat, Henry let the shovel fall and shuffled back toward the cabin. Their peaceful retreat of more than forty years had become a weapon in the hands of whatever now hunted them. The cabin itself was ordinary, built from reclaimed wood and sheets of metal, settled low in a narrow Appalachian valley. Dense woods pressed in from every side of the clearing, mountains to the northeast rising high enough to trap the last scraps of evening light. Loblolly pine, sweet-gum, poplar, dogwood… he’d known every tree out here by sight once. In summer, the sharp scent of pine filled the air; in autumn, he and Julia would sit together on the porch, him with coffee, her knitting, both of them watching the leaves burn through their colors.

Now the trees only looked like cover. Places for it to hide.

Cool air slid across his thin, papery skin as he walked, and he shivered; not from the cold, but from the memory of his flannel. His favorite one. The one torn off him the night before. He knew he’d see it again before this was over, and the thought offered no comfort at all.

At the porch steps, a memory rose unbidden: decades ago, the two of them tangled together in the warm stillness after making love. Julia had teased that she wanted to be buried with her jewelry, and only her jewelry. They’d laughed at the absurdity of it and he’d fallen for her a little harder. Now, standing alone, the memory pierced straight through him. He looked over his shoulder. The sun, blood-red, was sinking behind the treetops.

I don’t have much longer.

Trying to move quickly, Henry stepped into the cabin and headed for the back bedroom. As he knelt to reach under the bed, a sharp cramp tore through his lower back. For a moment, he seriously considered that he might never stand up again.

Shit. That’d be my luck… eaten while bent over the bed like a bride on her wedding night. The absurdity of the thought, piled on top of everything else, forced a short laugh out of him. It felt good. It gave him a flicker of energy. His hands fumbled in the darkness until his fingers brushed the small cedar box that held Julia’s jewelry. Just as he closed his hand around it, a loud boom echoed from somewhere deep in the woods. A sharp, explosive crack, like a tree bursting under a sudden freeze.[[ This is the creature breaking out of its resting place during the day. Maybe a stack of fallen trees, or maybe it actually goes inside a tree and breaks back out? Who knows, do you??]] He’d heard that back in the seventies on a trip to Alaska. But that’s not right. Trees don’t burst like that down here.

Sounded far away…means it’s close. He’d learned some of the creature’s tricks by now.

Henry bolted out of the cabin and toward the grave. The sun was gone; he’d been moving slower than he liked. As he reached the yard, the metallic rattle of their makeshift alarm carried through the darkness: tin cans filled with marbles, strung around the tree line. Something had tripped them.

Knowing he might already be too late, he pushed through the tall grass and over the flagstones to the grave. He dropped to his knees. He’d made it in time. Frantic, he dug with both hands, scooping away dirt and red clay until the hole was just deep enough. Henry shoved the cedar jewelry box inside and swept the soil back over it. The task was small, foolish, and unbearably serious… proof of just how far his mind had decayed under the strain of the past week. He pitched sideways and fell, landing on his back. Stars spun above him as he wheezed and coughed in sharp, tearing fits, fighting for each breath.

Memories flickered through his mind in uneven flashes: meeting Julia in Vietnam; becoming pen palls after they came home; letters every day through the rest of college on opposite sides of the country. Their wedding. Their honeymoon. Julia giving birth to their first child, Coral, sweating, and screaming like a Viking warrior, radiant even then. Then two more kids, David and Jasper. Watching their grandkids, Brandon and Elizabeth, race through these very woods with pockets full of arrowheads and pine cones. Growing old together. Her hand crushing his the day the doctor pointed out the shadows in his lungs. He’d felt no fear for himself then, only for her. Funny… he was the one they’d given six months to live… and he was the one who’d buried her in the end.

As the stars finally steadied and his breathing eased, he heard it. Bare feet, hard on the ground. Too heavy for their lightness, impossibly fast. Beneath that, the unmistakable flapping of a shirt in the wind.

His shirt.

It was here. It was time.

He didn’t look. Every instinct screamed at him not to. But after a moment, Henry lifted his head anyway. What he saw froze what little breath he had left. A shape wearing his torn flannel, rising out of the darkness on limbs that bent the wrong way, its head cocked too far to be human. Henry thought it smiled, something in the tilt, in the awful stillness of its face. A kind of triumph hung there, unmistakable.

Then the pain hit. Sharp, crushing, blooming through his chest as his heart seized hard, stealing that small amount of breath. As he slipped into darkness, Henry thought he saw something flicker across the creature’s face. A strange tremor… a look of defeat?

“That’s right, you fucker,” Henry rasped, proud to rob it of the ending it wanted.