“Okay.” Pete sounded hearty but not quite convinced. “And drive over and see us one of these evenings. It don’t do a guy no good to be sitting off here by himself all the time.”
Hogan gave his promise. He might, in fact, have been thinking about Julia a good deal. But mostly his mind remained preoccupied with Greenface—and he wasn’t touching his store of whiskey these nights. The crisis might come at any time; when it did, he intended to be as ready for it as he could be. Shotgun and deer rifle were loaded and close at hand. The road to town was swamped and impassable now, but as soon as he could use it again, he was going to lay in a stock of dynamite.
Meanwhile, the storm continued day and night, with only occasional brief lulls. Hogan couldn’t quite remember finally how long it had been going on; he slept fitfully at night, and a growing bone-deep fatigue gradually blurred the days. But it certainly was as long and bad a wet blow as he’d ever got stuck in. The lake water rolled over the main dock with every wave, and the small dock down near the end cabins had been taken clean away. Trees were down within the confines of the camp, and the ground everywhere was littered with branches.
While this lasted, he didn’t expect Greenface to put in an appearance. It, too, was weathering the storm, concealed somewhere in the dense forests along the lake front, in as much shelter as a thing of that size could find, its great head nodding and pulsing slowly as it waited.
* * *
By the eighth morning, the storm was ebbing out. In mid-afternoon the wind veered around to the south; shortly before sunset the cloud banks began to dissolve while mists steamed from the lake surface. A few hours earlier, Hogan had worked the car out on the road to see if he could make it to town. After a quarter of a mile, he turned back. The farther stretches of the road were a morass of mud, barricaded here and there by fallen trees. It would be days before anyone could get through.
Near sunset, he went out with an ax and hauled in a number of dead birches from a windfall over the hill to the south of the lodge. He felt chilled and heavy all through, unwilling to exert himself; but his firewood was running low and had to be replenished. As he came back to the lodge dragging the last of the birches, he was startled into a burst of sweat by a pale, featureless face that stared at him out of the evening sky between the trees. The moon had grown nearly full in the week it was hidden from sight; and Hogan remembered then that Greenface was able to walk in the light of the full moon.
He cast an anxious look overhead. The clouds were melting toward the horizon in every direction; it probably would be an exceptionally clear night. He stacked the birch logs to dry in the cellar and piled the wood he had on hand beside the fireplace in the lodge’s main room. Then he brewed up the last of his coffee and drank it black. A degree of alertness returned to him.
Afterwards he went about, closing the shutters over every window except those facing the south meadow. The tall cottonwoods on the other three sides of the house should afford a protective screen, but the meadow would be flooded with moonlight. He tried to calculate the time the moon should set, and decided it didn’t matter—he’d watch till it had set and then sleep.
He pulled an armchair up to an open window, from where, across the sill, he controlled the whole expanse of open ground over which Greenface could approach. The rifle lay on the table beside him; the shotgun, in which he had more faith, lay across his knees. Open shell boxes and the flashlight were within reach on the table.
* * ** * *
With the coming of night, all but the brightest of stars were dimmed in the gray gleaming sky. The moon itself stood out of Hogan’s sight above the lodge roof, but he could look across the meadow as far as the machine shed and the icehouse.
He got up twice to replenish the fire which made a warm, reassuring glow on his left side. The second time, he considered replacing the armchair with something less comfortable. The effect of the coffee had begun to wear off; he was becoming thoroughly drowsy. Occasionally, a ripple of apprehension brought him bolt upright, pulses hammering; but the meadow always appeared quiet and unchanged and the night alive only with familiar, heartening sounds: the crickets, a single whippoorwill, and now and then the dark wail of a loon from the outer lake.
Each time, fear wore itself out again; and then, even thinking of Julia, it was hard to stay awake. She was in his mind tonight with almost physical vividness, sitting opposite him at the kitchen table, raking back her unruly hair while she leafed through the mail-order catalogues; or diving off the float he’d anchored beyond the dock, a bathing cap tight around her head and the chin strap framing her beautiful stubborn little face like a picture.
Beautiful but terribly stubborn, Hogan thought, nodding drowsily. Like one evening, when they’d quarreled again and she hid among the empty cabins at the north end of the camp. She wouldn’t answer when Hogan began looking for her, and by the time he discovered her, he was worried and angry. So he came walking through the half-dark toward her without a word; and that was one time Julia got a little scared of him. “Now wait, Hogan!” she cried breathlessly. “Listen, Hogan—”
He sat up with a jerky start, her voice still ringing in his mind.
The empty moonlit meadow lay like a great silver carpet before him, infinitely peaceful; even the shrilling of the tireless crickets was withdrawn in the distance. He must have slept for some while, for the shadow of the house formed an inky black square on the ground immediately below the window. The moon was sinking.
Hogan sighed, shifted the gun on his knees, and immediately grew still again. There’d been something . . . and then he heard it clearly: a faint scratching on the outside of the bolted door behind him, and afterwards a long, breathless whimper like the gasp of a creature that has no strength to cry out.
Hogan moistened his lips and sat very quiet. In the next instant, the hair at the back of his neck rose hideously of its own accord.
“Hogan . . . Hogan . . . oh, please! Hogan!”
The toneless cry might have come out of the shadowy room behind him, or over miles of space, but there was no mistaking that voice. Hogan tried to say something, and his lips wouldn’t move. His hands lay cold and paralyzed on the shotgun.
“Hogan . . . please! Hogan!”
He heard the chair go over with a dim crash behind him. He was moving toward the door in a blundering, dreamlike rush, and then struggling with numb fingers against the stubborn resistance of the bolt.
* * *
“That awful thing! That awful thing! Standing there in the meadow! I thought it was a . . . tree! I’m not crazy, am I, Hogan?”
The jerky, panicky whispering went on and on, until he stopped it with his mouth on hers and felt her relax in his arms. He’d bolted the door behind them, picked Julia up and carried her to the fireplace couch. But when he tried to put her on it, she clung to him hard, and he settled down with her, instead.
“Easy! Easy!” He murmured the words. “You’re not crazy . . . and we’d better not make much noise. How’d you get here? The road’s—”
“By boat. I had to find out.” Her voice was steadier. She stared up at his face, eyes huge and dark, jerked her head very slightly in the direction of the door. “Was that what—”
“Yes, the same thing. It’s a lot bigger now.” Greenface must be standing somewhere near the edge of the cottonwoods if she’d seen it in the meadow as she came up from the dock. He went on talking quickly, quietly, explaining it all. Now Julia was here, there was no question of trying to stop the thing with buckshot or rifle slugs. That idea had been some kind of suicidal craziness. But they could get away from it, if they were careful to keep to the shadows.
The look of nightmare grew again in Julia’s eyes as she listened, fingers digging painfully into his shoulder. “Hogan,” she interrupted, “it’s so big—big as the trees, a lot of them!”
He frowned at her uncomprehendingly a moment. Then, as she watched him, Julia’s expression changed. He knew it mirrored the change in his own face.