"Something Got At Them"

Part 1

I'm in a tiny shack writing this all down. My hands shake and my breath is making the candle in front of me dance. I can see my breath puffing out and rising in the column of heat over the candle. I'm cramped in here, almost touching the little stove between my feet. I keep my boots on. I'm sitting on a stool with yellow fluff coming out of the cushion on one corner.

The shack is practically as big as an outhouse, with chipboard walls and a ceiling with pink insulation hanging down like melted gum, with one window in its door to my left. That window is boarded and I can peak through the grimed glass and the boards to see the darkness. In here with me is a bait bucket full of tackle, broken rods, pliers, augers, and other ice fishing gear. I took the big knife out and keep it handy. It's about thirty below outside, and that's good.

I tell myself it's good as my teeth chatter, as I press my white fingertips to the pen and scribble. If something comes knocking out here it can't be anything worth answering, except with the knife Paul McCausland used for his bait. I'm so tired of looking over my shoulder, I-

Okay, I'll calm down and make it make sense. Basic journalism: who, what, when, where and why. Then how, I guess.

Who: my name is Jack Addison. I'm a carpenter, with nine whole fingers to prove it. I lost the tip of my middle left to a saw making a swing set for my brother's kids five years ago. It's kept me sober since then, mostly. I'm forty-one.

What am I doing? I'm trying to warm my balls in a tiny shed in the middle of nowhere's woods in deep winter, waiting for something to pass over me. It got most of the folks in Prent, but it should miss me out here.

When is it? This is the night of the 5th or the 6th of the New Year. Overcast days blurred together a bit, one dull grey sky. Winter's dead quiet around me right now, though there was a wind rattling the empty trees tonight that just stopped. I had wished for it to stop but now its totally silent and I wish it would start up again. Snow fell heavy just yesterday, which should have covered all my tracks coming here. That should have made me relax, but here I am shaking, and it's not just the cold.

Where: I think the closest a paved road leads to one of the cottages on Lake Lacey, about twenty miles southwest. This shack was Paul McCausland's ice fishing hut, and it got moved sometime in the off-season when the rangers started looking for homemade shacks and his in particular. Paul had an expired license and I think he was dumping his leftover bait somewhere to the point where there was a complaint. Some cottager might have found a mound of grey, unthawed guts clogging up a drain and flooding his property in the spring.

Now it's on-season again for ice fishing, but the shack is still in this nice hiding place, which is in a little dip in the woods. Not sure how Paul got it out here, but it's good and out of sight. I think it's some old pit that they probably dug for mica a hundred years ago - there are a lot of these pits in these parts, and some streams and caves beneath them. Paul went loopy last summer, addressing the question of why his stuff is here and there in these woods. He was planning a retreat from the world, might have had a cave full of guns if he'd had more time. His hidden icefishing shack has this neat little portable stove from his saner days though, which I thank him for. It also has a calendar of naked women that's five years behind, my only company these last four days. I brought my own food, stuffed under my chair but getting lighter.

Why? Okay, here it is: it started with the gut piles, which Harold Lefler told me about.