Hold the Dark: A Novel (6 page)

“And you decided to come here why?”

“To help,” Core told him. “She said wolves had taken children from this village. It’s in the letter. See for yourself. She said no one would help. I came here to help.”

“Wolves did take two kids from here last month. They weren’t found. We came here to try and help these people, but I’m not sure how anybody can help that. You can’t just walk onto the tundra looking for wolves.”

“But no wolf took Bailey Slone,” Core said.

Marium flattened his filter into an ashtray, then stood back from the table. Core did the same.

“We’ll have to get it all figured out.”

“Are the others on their way?” Core asked.

“The others who?”

“The others. The police to find Medora Slone. Shouldn’t there be more men here? Investigators? The TV shows have investigators.”

“Investigators? Mr. Core, things don’t happen here the way they happen anywhere else. And definitely not on TV.”

“No investigators? Just you?”

“For now. You have to understand where you are. We don’t have full membership to the rest of the world. And we mostly like it that way. But let’s take one thing at a time, please.”

“What time is it? Midnight?” His watch was missing from his wrist.

“It’s six o’clock, Mr. Core. You’re not acclimated here. You said it was just dark when you arrived back here today? That was three-thirty, then.”

“That can’t be. I left before dawn. I wasn’t gone for so many hours.” He felt at his left wrist as if he could rub his watch back onto it.

“Dawn is at ten a.m. now, Mr. Core. You’re not acclimated here.”

“My watch is missing. I don’t understand.”

“Apparently a woman is missing too.”

Core sat again. “I tried to talk to these people but they wouldn’t talk to me. Did they tell you anything?”

“Nothing much. Not yet,” Marium said. “We spoke to some outside. As you saw, they don’t talk much to anyone who isn’t one of their own. Let’s go back down to see the boy.”

In the root cellar the men clicked photos of the body on the floor, of the cavity clawed into the earth. The fat one scratched in a notepad; another with a mustache stood before a laptop on a crate. Core pointed, explained how he’d found the boy, that the man called Cheeon had removed him from the hole and unwrapped him from the plastic sheeting.

“He was upright in there?” Marium asked. “Wedged in?”

Core nodded. “Look at his throat,” he said. “She strangled him.”

“Someone did.”

“It was her,” Core said.

“One thing at a time, please, Mr. Core. When you came back here today after your hunt she was gone?”

“She was gone. Look at her bedroom, the back room up there. She packed. Her truck is gone. She’s gone. She must have left me here to find the boy.”

“Left you here to find the boy. Why would she do that, Mr. Core?”

“Why? Are you the police? You tell me why.”

“We’ll find out why. We’ll get everything figured out.”

“Someone has to tell the father,” Core said.

“Vernon Slone is at the war.”

“You know Vernon Slone?”

“If you live around here, you know of Vernon Slone.”

“Someone has to tell him,” Core said.

“Would you mind waiting upstairs please, Mr. Core? I’m sorry to ask that. Would you mind?”

“I put that blanket on him,” he said, and did not move. “I covered him.”

“We’ll take care of this boy,” Marium said. “Don’t you worry. We’ll take good care of this boy.”

Core made to leave.

“And, Mr. Core?” Marium said. “Please just have a seat up there. Please don’t touch anything.”

Core went upstairs to the armchair and sat on his hands.

* * *

Hours later Marium and the men laid Bailey Slone in the bed of a police pickup. They walked cabin to cabin throughout the village, looking for the parents of Medora and Vernon Slone. Core remained by the police truck in the road and watched them, smoking from Marium’s pack, taking sips of whiskey when the cold cut through him. Keeping solemn watch over the boy. Retreating to the Slones’ cabin to feed the fire when he could bear no more cold.

In the back room he looked at the messed bed of Medora Slone, the boy’s tiny bed beside it, on the sheets superheroes faded from washing. He kept rubbing his wrist for the missing watch, kept feeling turned-around without knowing the time.

When Marium finally returned, Core was almost asleep again in the armchair.

“I’m going back to town,” he said. “My guys are staying here. You should follow me back, to a motel there. It’s way too easy to get lost in the night. And more snow’s coming soon. You can’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“It’s better you don’t.”

“But why?” Core said. “These people think I have something to do with this?”

“I didn’t say that. But you can’t stay here.”

“What’d you find?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Her parents? Or the husband’s parents?”

“Nothing yet. Follow me back.”

“No one knows anything?” Core said.

“We’ll know something soon.”

Core started his truck, let the engine warm, saw his breath frozen on the windshield from the day before. For sixty slow miles he stayed trained on the taillights of Marium’s truck, two eyes ashine on a face of unbroken black. He fought to keep his own vehicle from slipping across unplowed roads, fought to stop sleep from slamming onto him. The window half open to let the frozen air slap him awake. The radio loud, an upset singer complaining of heart pain. Hard to tell how close the hills and trees came to the road. Impossible to know if there were humans in that darkness. He remembered nothing of this route from the day before.

At this hour of night he could have no accurate notion of the town. He’d expected some lesser oasis at the center of this dead world but the town seemed barely that. In its sickly fluorescent light the motel beckoned from the road without a sign to welcome. He followed Marium into the parking lot, then went to his driver’s window to cadge a cigarette.

“How long you staying?”

“I don’t know,” Core said. “How long should I?”

“A few days, I’d say. At least. Until we get this figured. You can’t remember anything she said to you about where she might go to?”

“She didn’t say anything to me about leaving. We talked about wolves and we talked about this place. That’s all.”

“You’re sure she did this, but tell me how.”

“With a rope. I don’t know.”

“I don’t mean what’d she do it with. I mean
how
.”

“I’m not prepared for this, Mr. Marium. You have to talk to the people of that village.”

“A tiny old woman came to me when I arrived tonight, as soon as I got out of my truck. She was just standing there. She told me Medora Slone was possessed by a wolf demon. She called it a
tornuaq.
That’s what you get when you talk to the people there.”

“I’m not prepared for this.”

“You see this main road out here?” He pointed with his cigarette. “Our station is at the end of it, on the left down there. Across from the market. Come talk tomorrow please. You should go catch some sleep now.”

But sleep would not come. He stretched on the bed in this dank room, hungry without the energy to eat. And he imagined Medora Slone’s face in the dark above him. He remembered the flesh of her from the night before, her naked form quaking against his own body.

He could name the facts of nature.

A quarter of all lion deaths are the result of infanticide. A male bass will eat his offspring if they don’t swim away in time.

Female swine and rabbits will stifle their young if the young are sick or weak, if resources run low. It’s called “savaging.”

Prairie dogs kill so many of their own young it’s practically a sport for them.

Rats eat their own young if they are hurt or deformed. But they are rats.

Wasps. Sand sharks. Sea lions. Tree swallows.

Those dolphins we so admire for their intelligence: they’ve been recorded ramming calves to death, nose-first, like football players.

Over forty species of primates kill their own young. Our ancestors? Darwin doubted they participated in such barbarity: they weren’t that “perverted,” he wrote. Goodall observed female chimps killing and eating baby chimps.

Thirty percent of infant deaths among certain baboons are the result of infanticide.

Postpartum depression will cause a human mother to murder her child. But scientists have said that most human infanticide is caused by social or economic woe. The mothers are almost always very young. If there’s a choice between children, a boy and a girl? The girl goes.

An Aborigine tribe has been documented killing a child to feed it to another. In the New Guinea Highlands, mothers kill their daughters and then try again for sons. !Kung mothers will walk into the forest with an unwell newborn and then walk back alone.

There is not a culture on earth in which a parent has not killed a child.

What was in Medora Slone’s nature that day when she twisted a rope around the throat of her own boy in a root cellar? Look to the woods, he knew, not the books. The annals of human wisdom fall silent when faced with the feral in us.

On this motel bed at the rim of the world, Core could feel himself forgetting how to know, how to believe.

V
ernon Slone landed in Alaska after dark, not in uniform but in dungarees fitted around combat boots, a baseball cap without a logo, a wool parka from a dead man at the military hospital in Germany. A patch on his neck, another on his shoulder. His sandy mane gone long and a blondish beard of weeks, lips hidden by mustache.

He’d been days in Germany, or a week, he couldn’t know for sure—the pills, blue and pink. Surgery to remove the lead in his shoulder and neck, some of it lodged in bone. Then the unclear flight to a base back home. Kentucky, he was told. News about his boy. News about his wife.

An Army doctor spoke at him.
No one contacted you? Someone was supposed to contact you.
Slone couldn’t bring his face into focus; his voice came as if from underwater.
It’s been two weeks
—He looked at papers in a folder.
It’s been nearly two weeks. You should have been told this.

A shock wave softened by science, by more blue and pink. Another distorted voice from underwater. A woman this time, in civilian clothes. A counselor. Gold crucifix nestled in her jugular notch. She sat in a chair opposite him, at a table in his room, by a window. Her individual words were English, he knew, but her sentences seemed something else altogether. She kept asking if he wanted to pray. Slumped in a chair, Slone looked out the window at the uniforms passing on the walkway. In another minute he was asleep with his forehead on the table.

Pulse felt everywhere in his body, in ears clotted with blood or clogged shut with cotton. Mention of a Purple Heart by a pock-faced officer he’d never seen before. Mention of a ceremony to honor him. Still more pills and the weighted sleep of the sick. He fell into some netherland of shade and vapor where faces are more creature than person, blurred screams stretched across silence. His son’s name in his mouth.

In the sun outside. Someone pushed him in a wheelchair, though there was nothing wrong with his legs and the pain in his shoulder and neck had gone. A redheaded teenager dressed as a candy striper handed him a bundle of yellow roses, still in green cellophane—her breasts too large for her age, a face splattered with freckles, a mouth grotesque with metal, braces refracting sunlight that stung his eyes. She spoke a tongue he didn’t know and nobody explained. He needed to weep but could not find the strength to do it.

Beams of sunlight segmented the room in cryptic patterns, from windows both west and east, it seemed. He could not understand this abeyance of order. Shadows from branches and twigs brushed the wall like bone arms. At evening the lamplight covered the corners in malign misshapes he tried to decode but could not. His son spoke to him in dreams and when he woke he found he’d been sobbing as he slept.

The waking world had an awkward way with time now. Alaskans, he’d been told, had the skewed circadian rhythm of arctic things, tuned in to a half year of dark and ice. In those nebulous corridors between wake and sleep he saw his father, that chapped man, skin like shale, fractured by tobacco and cold. Each time he woke he remembered the facts anew.

Days ago someone had given him printed pages of the news article, black-and-white photos of Medora and Bailey. Photos that were three years old, he saw, partial and faded from the printer’s low ink. Only the top halves of the sentences were visible, so that it seemed as if they were only half true—seemed as if he himself might be in charge of making those sentences whole, of completing the details of this story.

By the time he boarded the plane home he had flushed the blue and pink pills. He was beginning now to emerge from that gauzy lair.

His boyhood compa
n
ion Cheeon met him at the gate. Slone saw him there among the colorful others eager to greet family—six feet tall, half Yup’ik, a fixed expression of grief and resolve. He recognized his drab winter clothes, his boots, the strong tobacco scent of him. Black hair pouring from beneath a camouflaged hunter’s cap. His five-year-old daughter was the second child taken from the village by wolves, but he said nothing of this to Slone.

The men did not speak a word, did not clasp hands or embrace, only met each other’s eyes and nodded. Cheeon took Slone’s duffel bag, then handed him a cigarette and Zippo, a bowie knife in a black leather sheath. Slone moved briskly through the airport with Cheeon beside him keeping pace. Once through the double doors he lit the cigarette, fit the knife into his belt at the small of his back, and looked to Cheeon, who nodded the way to the truck across the road in the parking deck.

The temperature was two degrees now and would drop toward twenty below by dawn. His visible breath and the sharp scent of winter—Vernon Slone knew he was home.

For the eighty minutes it took them to arrive at the town’s morgue the men did not speak. Cheeon drove and smoked and smoked again, his window cracked an inch for vent. The raised white scar jutting from the corner of his mouth told of the autumn morning when fishing on the lake in the valley. Fourteen years old, Slone cast his lure, not looking, and hooked him clean through the mouth. A quick yelp and Cheeon grabbed for the line so Slone wouldn’t cast. Slone snipped off the barb with side cutters and threaded out the hook, holding down his laughter as the blood leaked onto their boots and Cheeon cursed him with his eyes and teeth.