Hold the Dark: A Novel by William Giraldi Read Free Book Online

his bared hands beginning to numb. Where were his gloves? He’d left them in the root cellar by the corpse of the boy.
    “You knew this morning,” he said. “You knew. When we spoke this morning. You knew what she did to the boy.”
    She only stared.
    “You knew,” he said.
    “What can an old woman know?”
    “How could you not say something?”
    Above them a makeshift streetlamp throbbed with weakened light, fangs of ice hanging from its shade. The old woman smelled of wood smoke and something foul.
    “Go back,” she said. “Leave this village to the devils. Leave us be.”
    Core thought to grab her arm, to lead her to the Slones’ cabin to see the boy, to make her understand. But she turned, and on a shoveled path through snow she wobbled behind her hut and dissolved into darkness.
    He remained beneath the lamp wearing the one-piece caribou suit and boots that belonged to Vernon Slone. More villagers hurried past him, some saying words he did not know. A snow machine screamed by, its one headlamp coning into the black. He could smell its gasoline fumes in the cold. He tried to follow but his legs wouldn’t work and he sat in the road hearing himself breathe. Beguiled by this climate. Terrified of the facts he’d found and fearing already that he could not explain them.
    When he reached the Slones’ cabin he wedged through the villagers amassed at the door. The whispers he heard had no tone he could name and he wondered if they were accusations against him. In the root cellar, Cheeon had taken the boy from his tomb, untangled the cellophane from him, laid him on the earth floor. He and others were kneeling by the body, afraid, Core thought, to look at one another. A washed-out bruise coursed across the boy’s throat and Core knew then he’d been strangled.
    In the stagnant cold of that cramped space he heard himself say, “Where is she?”
    When no one responded, he asked again, “Where is Medora Slone?”
    Cheeon turned to him but would not answer. A brailled scar made a backslash from the corner of his mouth. His black hair was gripped at the nape by a length of clothesline rope. Core could not say what spoke in this man’s face—it seemed some mix of boredom and rage. Cheeon said words in Yup’ik to the teen kneeling beside him, then took his rifle from the top of a crate and elbowed past others on the steps. Some remained kneeling by the body but then they too went.
    Alone again with the boy, Core felt a kind of vertigo from the sight of him. Children are full of questions but they do not question their own being, are not troubled by their own living. Like animals, they cannot conceive of their mortality. Living seems to them the most natural state of things. But infants, he remembered, were repelled by the elderly, howled in the arms of the olden, as if they could sense, could smell the elderly’s proximity to decay.
    Core saw a woolen blanket inside a crate and used it to cover the boy. He remained there by him for many minutes, attempting to remember prayers he’d discarded long before this night.
    Upstairs in the front room of the cabin again, he waited for someone to speak to him. Perhaps to comfort him. But the villagers only whispered among themselves. Most were Yup’ik, some were white, some mixed. All regarded him with an anxiety that felt both personal and old. Their clothing clashed; one woman wore animal-hide pants and a red jacket with the embossed name of a football team. Core somehow understood that police had been summoned from town, an hour’s drive, longer in this snow and dark.
    He looked to the whiskey on the shelf, then drank to let it tamp the dread in him. Where were the cigarettes Medora Slone had given him last night? He sank into the same armchair he’d sat in when he arrived the night before. Still no one would speak to him.
    He’d never had trouble comprehending how people are what they are. If you live long enough, he knew, you see that the natural world matches the