Her hand touched something wet and sticky.
Mattie let out a startled cry. C.P. clicked on the flashlight again and pointed it toward her.
“What is it?” he said.
The flashlight beam bobbed around her head and shoulders. She pointed at the table. “Something. There.”
C.P. approached the table, angling the light down. Mattie screamed again and stumbled backward, banging into one of the dining table chairs.
The creature had left something for them when it crashed through the window.
“That’s a heart,” C.P. said. He sounded sick. “A human heart?”
Neither of them said what they both were thinking. There were only two people the heart could belong to—Griffin or William.
And Griffin had been screaming, screaming in agony, until he’d suddenly stopped.
But I won’t stop hoping that it was William, Mattie thought. It could be him. It might be. He’s not standing outside the window demanding that I open up the door so maybe the creature cut his heart out with those razor claws and oh I hope it’s him I really do.
“Why would it do that?” C.P. said. “Why? It doesn’t make any damned sense.”
“It’s . . . a . . . warning,” Mattie said. “Another . . . one.”
“Animals don’t act like this,” C.P. said. “They eat what they kill. They don’t take their kills apart and sort them into component pieces.”
The flashlight beam was steady on the heart, like C.P. couldn’t stop looking at it.
“I thought it was weird when we were in the cave. Weird, but fascinating. I guess it’s only fascinating when you’re not the one being sorted into those component pieces.”
His voice sounded strange and distant, like he was drifting away from everything—Mattie, the cabin, the heart.
Mattie didn’t think. She grabbed the heart and threw it out the window. They heard a wet splat against the snow.
For a moment Mattie thought there would be a response from outside—that the creature would rush to the window again, or that William would emerge from the woods. But there was nothing—only the sway of the trees and the cold wind and the press of night all around.
“What did you do that for?” C.P. said.
He was angry, swinging the flashlight toward Mattie’s face, but for the first time she felt relieved to hear his anger. It meant he was himself again. She’d been frightened by the distance in his voice, the feeling that he was floating away and leaving her behind. She couldn’t do everything on her own. She needed him.
“We . . . don’t . . . need . . . that,” she said.
She wanted to explain more—explain that it wouldn’t help him or Griffin to keep the heart, that it would only frighten and upset them more to have it in the room with them—but her voice wouldn’t let her say the words. Her throat hurt terribly now, almost worse than it had when William was strangling her.
C.P. didn’t respond, only stood there, and she didn’t know what he was thinking. This was, in some ways, more disconcerting than his anger. In the brief period she’d known him, C.P. had always made his feelings clear from moment to moment.
Mattie found the matches for the candles. There were several in metal stands on the mantel over the fire, and she lit these first. C.P. stayed where he was, not watching her, not appearing to see anything at all. After his initial burst of anger he seemed to have faded out again, his mind gone someplace where he didn’t have to think about his friend having his heart removed by a monster.
He’s gone away to a place where he’s safe, where he doesn’t have to think about it. I recognize the signs.
Mattie had used this tactic herself many times, so she wouldn’t have to feel what William was doing to her. The trouble was that she couldn’t stay where her mind brought her. She always had to come back to the present world and the pain William left behind. When C.P. came back, his friend would still be gone and they would still be trapped in the cabin and there would still be a monster outside the door.
There was no wood to cover the window so Mattie took one of her thick quilts and folded it up. She used a chair to climb onto the worktable, knelt in front of the window and then carefully tucked the quilt into the frame, wrapping part of the top edge around the curtain rod so it would stay in place. Some of the draft still leaked around the edges, but at least the cold wasn’t pouring into the room. More importantly, the empty eye of the window was covered again. The monster （monsters?） couldn’t see inside.