“They were going to send me away. Too much trouble.”
A loud bellow came from behind. The monster spotted them in their hiding place, and they pushed forward, snow flying in their wake, their flapping coats caught in the draft. They left the cover of the trees and climbed the dune. Stretching before them, the canvas flattened into shades of white and gray. Even the waves seemed frozen in place. The smell of salt and fish and seaweed had been drained by the antiseptic cold. Dead quiet, except for their frantic breathing and the whispering snow. The familiar paths to the sea through the maze of granite were obscured, but they had an advantage over the white man. They picked their way around the familiar rocks while it stumbled after them, gaining ground and then faltering, before slipping and landing on all fours, buried face-first in a snowbank. When he saw it fall, Nick ducked behind a large boulder and pulled Jack Peter next to him. They sat and leaned back against the stone.
“Who is that?” Nick asked.
Jack Peter stared at the sea, refusing to answer.
“Did you do this? Did you make the monster?”
“Yes,” he said. “I made it all.” With the edge of his mitten, he tapped his forehead.
“Well, we’re trapped. Between the ocean and that nightmare thing.”
Nick peeked around the edge of the rock to see what was keeping the monster. With a howl and a string of filthy curses, the creature rose from the ground. Scorched by the cold, its skin was mottled red and blue and snow sloughed off its limbs in thick clumps. Scouring the beach with its gaze, it found Nick before he could duck back behind cover. The fiend stepped forward, relentless.
There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape. Caught in the middle of a great nothing, they had no choice but to move toward the sea. The closer they came to the water, the less snow covered the ground, giving way entirely to sand where the waves lapped the shore, and though they could move faster on this bare surface, so, too, could the monster. They waded into the bubbling wash to the tops of their boots and then turned to face it. The monster lurched toward them and stopped just yards away, tottering on its bare feet and swaying in the storm.
*
Fire ran along the edges like quicksilver and ignited the drawings in a flash. Tim watched the papers burn and curl upon themselves and the black ash fly up the chimney like a murder of crows. At first he had not understood why Holly had asked him to destroy their son’s artwork, but he had obeyed without question or complaint. She rarely ordered him to do anything, and it was not until he actually looked at the images that he began to understand her logic. These were no ordinary childish portraits. Jip had drawn the wild man many times and in many variations, even though he had never seen him, and how could he, with the monster outside and the boy inside at all times? Only he and Nick had seen him, and never in such fine detail and execution, as if Jip had been face-to-face with it, as if Jip had been intimately wired into Nick’s mind.
Other disturbing visions populated the pages, none of which Jip could have witnessed. The big white dog appeared in several drawings, even though Tim and Nick were the only ones who had seen it firsthand in the back of the policeman’s car. Some drawings were mysteries—an army of monstrous babies, a woman who resembled Nell Weller but vaguely naked and predatory, a pair of bodies with hangers between their bare shoulder blades, bones of a skeleton littering the shore. Tim hobbled from room to room, finding papers scattered everywhere. He searched the entire upstairs floor and brought a bundle down to the fire, pitching them in batches without bothering to inspect the weird subjects, only to stop, stricken, at one drawing that grabbed his attention: the two boys tangled in a violent knot at the bottom of the sea. He guessed at once where Holly had gone, where the boys might be found, and he hurried to the picture window facing the ocean, praying that he was wrong. Coming to life.
*
On feet red and blistered with frostbite, the monster walked closer, and the boys could see the sorrows on his face. Deep-set in bruised circles, his eyes conveyed a world of woe and regret. His mouth twisted and gaped slightly, and he seemed on the verge of telling them something. A plum-colored welt ringed his neck. His tangled hair and beard were curled and twisted as strands of kelp, and he was painfully thin, his bones could be counted through his sallow skin, and he had a look of long hunger. He lifted his arms from his sides and stretched his bony hands toward the boys, in a gesture both beseeching and threatening.
“What do you want?” Nick cried.