"Incident at Bear Creek Lodge" (2022) by Tananarive Due

Liaguno, Vince A., and Rena Mason. Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2022.

Readers unfamiliar with "Incident at Bear Creek Lodge" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.

In reading so many recent short stories for my Halloween "blog-a-thon" in October, it came home to me how frequently the coming-of-age trope is used in horror fiction. Some of those stories sank under clichés, others rose to the challenge with new pattern-making.

"Incident at Bear Creek Lodge" by Tananarive Due is exemplary: it too rises to the challenge: renewing "coming-of-age" as it explores a twisted family romance.

*   *   *

House of Secrets

Bear Creek Lodge, in the Colorado Rockies, is a repository for many secrets. In its own modest way, it is as full of them as Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu or Bela Slovik's mansion in Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane (1966). To say nothing of Hill House or the Overlook Hotel.

13-year-old Johnny, our narrator-protagonist, locates one and sees hints of others on a post-Christmas visit in 1973. His host is the owner, his grandmother Mazelle Washington. One of Johnny's fellow house guests, retired boxer Joe Louis, toasts her as "one of the greats." Johnny, however, forms a different opinion.

Mazelle Washington is a keeper of secrets. For Johnny this is by the way. Because she is also a monstrous villain: a dangerously manipulative and violent antagonist. This retired Hollywood film comedy star is a calculating performer in all her interactions.

Mazelle's son, Johnny's Uncle Ricky, explains it to him this way: 

[....]  “Listen, you’d better learn it now: People in show business ain’t shit. They’ll disappoint you every time. You hear? That goes for your grandmother, too. She ain’t the peppermint candy and gimme-some-sugar type. But I’m here to look out after you. Don’t you even worry about it.” 

  Looking back, I wonder why I didn’t ask why I needed to be looked out after with Grandmother. Maybe I’d stuffed that question away with my questions about why Mom didn’t want to come too. Or why she and her mother spoke so rarely. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

Mazelle Washington recalls Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard. But an even closer approximation is the gargoyle portrait of Joan Crawford in her daughter's memoir, Mommie Dearest (1978). 

Mazelle won fame portraying "Lazy Mazy," a racist stereotype, in Jim Crow Hollywood. After the civil rights movement smashed Jim Crow, she was pilloried by former fans for the role.

Uncle Ricky again: 

“Listen . . .” he went on, voice assuring. “Some years back, Mother got her feelings hurt by Hollywood and holed up here by herself. For five years, she wouldn’t see nobody. And I mean nobody. If she made it alone, you’ll do fine with all of us here.” 

  “Got her feelings hurt how?”

  “Folks decided she was too old-fashioned, that’s all. Times changed. They treat her like a curse, like she sold her soul. Half the folks who’ll talk to her only have their hand out.”

Later, at Johnny's first face-to-face meeting with Grandmother, the mood quickly slips from anxious to ominous:

“How old are you now?” Grandmother said. “Ten? Eleven?”

  I winced, insulted. “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen! You’re small for your age. Your mother needs to put some meat on your bones. And I’ll bet she coddles you like mad. We’ll have to get to know each other, Johnny. I need to teach you a few things about the world.” 

  Uncle Ricky’s hand landed firmly on my shoulder. It felt like a prompt, so I said, “I’d like that, Grandmother.”

  “I’ll be getting to know him too,” Uncle Ricky said. “Out in the cabin.”

  “No, I don’t want him out with you in that drafty cabin,” Grandmother said, floating away toward her friends gathered on the plush twin sofas near the fireplace. “You stay out there and smoke. He’ll stay in the main house. My old powder room has a bed.” 

  I glanced up at Uncle Ricky. He looked actually scared. But he didn’t say a word.

From there the visit degenerates into a battle of wits. Mazelle attempts to control Johnny as she clearly did her own children. Initially, the aggression is passive:

“Can I please talk to you alone, Grandmother?”

  She took her time turning her head to acknowledge me, and this time she didn’t disguise her simmering eyes. I’d embarrassed her, and she was enraged. I might have been more afraid of her if I hadn’t found her secret. 

  “Have you ever heard the saying that children should be seen and not heard?” Her voice was still sweet, a show for her friends. “You can see the adults here are busy.” 

  “It’s all right, M . . .” the opera singer said, but it didn’t soften Grandmother’s eyes.

  Uncle Ricky tapped on my foot so hard with his boot that it hurt.

  “Some stuff is missing from my room,” I told Grandmother, accusation in my voice. “My tape player my mom gave me for Christmas. And most of my tapes. Can you give them back, please?” After frantic searching, I had learned that my Sly and the Family Stone and Ohio Players were gone too, along with the Jackson Five tape still in my player. 

  “Did your mother buy you those?” Grandmother said. “Has she listened to those lyrics? Those lyrics aren’t for children. Half those band members are out of their minds on drugs. Did she tell you that? None of that so-called music you like is worth a damn. I’ll teach you better. You need to learn about Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Louis Armstrong. That’s music.” 

  I don’t know what Uncle Ricky saw in my face to make him jump up from the table to grab me by the arm, but I couldn’t remember ever being so mad. A stranger had stolen from me, was lecturing me. Was saying I had a bad mother. 

  “I’ll talk to ’im,” Uncle Ricky said, and he pulled me toward the kitchen.

  “You’d better,” Grandmother said with bland menace. “Marching in here like . . .”

  “Just hush,” Uncle Ricky said when I complained about his tight grip. He steered me past the kitchen and out of the door, to the steps. He closed the door carefully behind us, his breath hanging in clouds. “What are you doing? You don’t talk to my mother like that. Ever. No one does.” 

  “Somebody should,” I said, defiant. “She doesn’t have any right to—”

  “She has the right to make up whatever rules she wants in her house, and never forget that. When you go back in, you apologize.” 

  “Why are y’all so scared of her?”

  Uncle Ricky looked away from me, out toward the gate. He and Mom had that in common, at least. Neither of them wanted to talk about Grandmother. 

  “Look . . .” he said, sighing a fog of breath. “We’ll stop at a record store on the way to the airport. I’ll grab you a new player, whatever you want. Cool? Just . . . smile. Get along.” 

  “You mean pretend.”

  “What the hell you think?” he said. “You’re gonna’ spend every goddamn day of your life pretending. Get good at it. She’s doing you a favor. Shit. What do you think this world is?”

That night, while the household sleeps, Johnny screens one of grandmother's old films he found secreted in a cupboard in his room.

Since she’d already set up her projector in the living room, it felt like fate instead of prying. 

  I had to see for myself.

  I moved quietly and made sure the projector volume was turned all the way down before I flicked it on. At first, I threaded the film wrong and it spun with a flapping racket I was sure would wake the whole house, but nobody came out while I fixed it. 

  Lazy Mazy Goes to New York began to play. 

  The film opened with Lazy Mazy dead asleep at a kitchen table, slowly stirring a mixing bowl while she dozed. A white man in too much makeup walked in wearing his work clothes, and I didn’t need the sound on to know he was mad to find her sleeping. Lazy Mazy fell back in her chair and rolled to her feet like a gymnast. The bowl she’d been stirring had ended up on her head somehow, dripping batter on her face. That only made the white man madder, and he spanked her butt while she ran away. 

  I tried to be quiet, but I laughed. Her eyes were so big, nothing like Grandmother’s. The expressions on her face! The way she could contort her body in unexpected ways. Every moment on the big living room screen was a revelation. This was Mom’s mother? My grandmother? 

  I’d been watching the film for maybe ten minutes, laughing louder than I should have, when I realized someone was standing behind me. I felt a presence before I turned around, the same way I had in the snow. I hoped it was the opera singer, or Uncle Ricky. 

  But it was Grandmother, framed in the living room entryway’s blue light from the projector in a fancy robe with her straight hair loose, fanned across her shoulders. She’d been pressing her hair; she was holding a hot comb. Instead of looking at me, she was staring at herself on the screen. 

  “Grandma!” I blurted. “You’re Lazy Mazy! Is that what ‘The Lazy M’ means—”

  That was all I had time to say before her robe’s sleeves fanned out like a night creature’s wings as she swooped toward me.

  “How dare you,” she hissed in my ear before she grabbed my arm with shocking strength. 

  And then I was in the worst pain of my life. I had to look down to realize she’d pressed the hot comb into my upper arm hard, applying more pressure the more I tried to pull away. It wasn’t orange-hot, but it was hot enough to stick to my skin and make me yowl. Hot enough to leave a scar I would carry into adulthood. 

  “Stop! It hurts!” I yelled, and wrenched my arm away.

  She was standing in front of the screen now, the film playing across her face, the ghost of her forty-year-old grin mocking from her forehead while she stared at me with tearful loathing. 

  “I’m sorry,” I said. To this day, I don’t know what I was apologizing for. She was the one who’d hurt me, yes, but I’d hurt her too. Scarred her, too. It was as if I’d dug up a dead body and dragged it in her living room the way our cat brought us dead mice. I saw it in her eyes. 

  I ran as fast as I could to the kitchen door and outside, to the snow.

To console his wounded nephew, Uncle Ricky tells Johnny about his own physical assault:

"One time I was about fourteen and I gave her some lip at the store. When we got home, she pulled a tire iron out of the trunk and whacked my leg good a couple times. I had to stop playing football after that . . . but it kept Uncle Sam off me.” 

  His story was so much worse that I almost felt better. Almost.

  “What about Mom?”

  “I tried to protect her. But when you get home . . . ask.”

  “How can you not hate your mom?” I asked. “She’s the worst person I’ve ever met.”

  Uncle Ricky sucked in a long breath. “I used to,” he said. “I guess your mom still does. But nobody’s born like that, Johnny. One day I realized . . . everything has a price. A burden. So I just started feeling sorry instead. There but for the grace of God. You know?” 

  I didn’t know. And I hoped I never would. As I nursed my arm, I was mad at all of them.

*   *   *

Foreshadows 

"Incident at Bear Creek Lodge" is a carefully composed first person narrative written by Johnny as an adult. Foreshadowings of imminent disaster peppers the story's early pages.

      That’s how I ended up on my first solo airplane ride, which should have been the scariest part of my trip. I was terrified to use the bathroom because the plane was shaking so much. (I tried to focus on my comics, but even Spider-Man can’t fix everything.) When the plane landed, the misty mountain range through my window was so pink and gold and surreal that I wondered if I’d crashed and gone to Heaven….

[....]  As the car crawled past, I made out a tall, rusted insignia discarded against the side of the fence rails, written in fancy script: The Lazy M. I almost asked Uncle Ricky about it, since Mom always called Grandmother’s place Bear Creek Lodge. 

  I wish I had. If I had, the whole incident might never have happened.

*   *   *

Sightings

I was in my own trance, staring beyond the three steps leading to that back door, trying to understand the snow. A small mound rested there, soft and white, not like the grimy snow ground into the road. A few flakes puffed out as if the mound had sneezed. Was it settling? Mr. Ramos, my science teacher, said we should consider the world with a curious mind, so I tried to figure it out without asking Uncle Ricky. I waited two seconds, and the snow puffed again; this time, a dark hole appeared at the center of the mound. Could a cat or small dog be buried there? 

  The snow itself seemed to come to life, shivering flakes free, and then the entire mound moved in a shimmy, undulating away from the porch, snakelike. A twig snapped beneath its motion, or I might have thought I was imagining it. Then the mound fell flat. No cat or dog emerged to explain it. The snow just settled to stillness. 

  I slowed down my heart by telling myself that must be a normal thing, that it was childish to be scared of snow. But I think I knew better even then. 

  Uncle Ricky slapped his palms against the steering wheel, making me jump. “Well?”

  I realized I was holding my breath. My socks were still damp, so my toes felt tingly. I wondered if I’d only dreamed any fun, just as maybe I’d dreamed the dancing, breathing snow.

Next morning, up early before anyone else is awake:

      I tried not to let my sneakers sink too deeply into snow as I walked inside the fence, reveling in the sight of small animal tracks and frozen spider webs and knotted tree trunks shaped like open mouths. At the end of the driveway, I came back to that large metal insignia, The Lazy M, nearly as tall as I was, leaning on the fence. It was now obvious that this had once been posted on the driveway gate, but maybe it had fallen. Maybe that was one more thing Uncle Ricky would need to fix. 

  I didn’t notice the red droplets on the snow just beyond the Lazy M sign until I saw the dead thing. Actually, it was a dead thing’s head.

  I was so startled that I fell backwards, landing on my butt in the snow. But I jumped right back up again to get a better look at the matted fur, open black eye, and bloody mess where its head had once been attached to its now-severed neck. Maybe it was a raccoon, but hardly enough was left to tell, especially to a boy from Liberty City. 

  But I knew it was dead. And I noticed from a pinkish trail in the snow that it had been dragged to that spot. Parts of the trail had been covered by snow and sometimes disappeared, but I kept following until it took me back to the kitchen steps, beside the Caddy. A sound like shifting sand behind me spun me around fast, panting like I’d been running. My eyes looked for movement everywhere, and finally I saw something under the snow slither around a tree trunk, out of my sight except for a few loose flakes spraying away. Fast. I ran to where I thought I’d seen it, but all of the snow was flat again. The one mound I kicked was only a buried tree trunk. 

  I went back to the Caddy. The trail didn’t originate exactly where I thought I’d first seen the snow move, but close enough. I picked up the stick I’d thrown away and scattered the snow beside the steps until I uncovered a blood-soaked center, maybe as big as a car tire. The blood spot was almost purple. 

  The way I stood there staring, I might have been frozen solid. I wasn’t sure myself.

  A thump on the kitchen window made me look up. Grandmother was standing there, her hair covered by a bonnet, which made her seem much older. She cracked open the kitchen door. 

  “Johnny, come inside!” she said. “Get out of that cold without a coat. What’s wrong with you? You’ll catch your death out there.” 

  That was something Mom said a lot too, so now I knew where’s she’d gotten the saying: You’ll catch your death. But that was the first time it sounded real. I threw my stick away and hurried to do as I’d been told. But as I walked back to those kitchen steps, I was sure something was slithering under the snow behind me. On my heels. 

  Tracking me.

Johnny's clearest glimpse of this creature comes when he is hiding out in Uncle Ricky's cabin after grandmother's assault:

       Uncle Ricky went right to sleep on the bottom bunk of the cabin’s bunk bed, but I stared through the curtains toward the house, the kitchen door. I expected her to come after me. 

  About an hour after Uncle Ricky went to sleep, as I’d feared, the kitchen light went on and the door opened with a shaft of light. Instinct made me crouch low in the cabin window. 

  Grandmother was still in her robe, carrying an aluminum tray of food. She looked like she was taking out the trash. But instead, she sat on the frigid steps with the tray on her lap. She looked so sad and alone that I almost felt sorry for her too. Her sob was a barely muffled wail. She could catch her death out there. 

  Grandmother opened the tray and tossed a chicken leg on to the snow. And another.

  The snow near the meat moved . . . and something popped out, showing itself as it shook off a layer of frost. 

  It wasn’t a fox. It wasn’t a dog or a cat. It was white but didn’t seem to have fur, just pale skin cleaved to a frame that looked more like an insect’s than a mammal’s despite a bony tail lashing from side to side. Long, too-sharp teeth chomped at the offered meal, grinding meat and bone alike. I gasped with each snatch of its powerful jaws. 

  The terrible, nameless thing slid closer to Grandmother, ready to keep feeding. But she didn’t run. She didn’t even flinch. As the hideous creature burrowed its snout in the tray in her lap, she let out childish laughter, her cheeks puffed wide with Lazy Mazy’s mindless grin.

*   *   *

Wounds and traumas

Johnny is shocked by his own sensitivity to Mazelle's contradictions, to both her fragility and fury. His mother Sadie has clearly raised him with the resilience to weather such people, skills neither she or Uncle Ricky had at his age. 

The sources of Mazelle's anger are not hard to fathom. Hollywood fame and fortune were ephemeral. When gone, the whipsaw of fortune's reversal added another level of impossible emotional material. Hate, inward-turning and outward-turning, might today be dignified with academic jargon like trauma. But the Greeks understood it more graphically: as a piercing wound. Sophocles added to this: a piercing unhealable wound.¹

In his essay "Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow" (1941), Edmund Wilson notes: 

[....] we must even, I believe, grant Sophocles some special insight into morbid psychology. The tragic themes of all three of the great dramatists—the madnesses, the murders and the incests—may seem to us sufficiently morbid. The hero with an incurable wound was even a stock subject of myth not confined to the Philoctetes legend: there was also the story of Telephus, also wounded and also indispensable, about which both Sophocles and Euripides wrote plays. But there is a difference between the treatment that Sophocles gives to these conventional epic subjects and the treatments of the other writers. Aeschylus is more religious and philosophical; Euripides more romantic and sentimental. Sophocles by comparison is clinical. Arthur Platt, who had a special interest in the scientific aspect of the classics, says that Sophocles was scrupulously up to date in the physical science of his time. He was himself closely associated by tradition with the cult of the healer Asclepius, whose son is to cure Philoctetes….

I do not suggest any 1:1 connection between the plot of the Philoctetes and "Incident at Bear Creek Lodge." But Johnny's skill at emotional detachment, his ability to put himself in another's position – even an enemy's – does recall the acumen of young Neoptolemus. We also need to recall that Sophocles does not treat the wound in the Philoctetes as inheritable. For Tananarive Due,  some wounds are bequeathed. While Mazelle's sufferings may not have marked her body, those she turns to inflict on son Ricky and grandson Johnny do leave permanent outward signs. 

For them, overcoming and detachment serves as the cure at Troy. 

*   *   *

Is the wild snow creature a local forest being? An animal Mazelle has habituated during her years of isolation at the lodge?

I suspect it is a tulpa, a product of Mazelle's time in the post-Hollywood wilderness. Due offers no suggestions in "Incident at Bear Creek Lodge" or its 2023 sequel, "Return to Bear Creek Lodge". In the sequel, however, events suggest that the creature may be the manifestation of a family curse.

As Due produces more episodes in Johnny's education, will we find that he and the creature are secret sharers? That  they are equipped to complete a coming-of-age that is more than simply an individual's self-rescue?

Jay

13 November 2023

1. Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).