As I turned to scan the night, I glimpsed movement from the corner of
my eye: the fuzzy impression of a man running in a half crouch, passing
the cottage from east to west, progressing swiftly with long fluid
strides through the last rank of dunes that marked the to of the slope
to the beach, about forty feet away from me.
I swung around, bringing up the Glock. The running man had either gone
to ground or had been a phantom.
Briefly I wondered if it was Pinn. No. Orson would not have been
fearful of Jesse Pinn or of any man like him.
I crossed the porch, descended the three wooden steps, and stood in the
sand, taking a closer look at the surrounding dunes.
Scattered sprays of tall grass undulated in the breeze. Some of the
shore lights shimmered across the lapping waters of the bay. Nothing
else moved.
Like a tattered bandage unraveling from the dry white face of a
mummified pharaoh, a long narrow cloud wound away from the chin of the
moon.
Perhaps the running man was merely a cloud shadow. Perhaps.
But I didn’t think so.
I glanced back toward the open door of the cottage. Orson had
retreated farther from the threshold, deeper into the front room.
For once, he was not at home in the night.
I didn’t feel entirely at home, either.
Stars. Moon. Sand. Grass. And a feeling of being watched.
From the slope that dropped to the beach or from a shallow swale
between dunes, through a screen of grass, someone was watching me. A
gaze can have weight, and this one was coming at me like a series of
waves, not like slow surf but like fully macking double overheads,
hammering at me.
Now the dog wasn’t the only one whose hackles rose.
just when I began to worry that Bobby was taking a mortally long time,
he appeared around the east end of the cottage. As he approached, sand
pluming around his bare feet, he never looked at me but let his gaze
travel ceaselessly from dune to dune.
I said, “Orson haired out.”
“Don’t believe it,” Bobby said.
“Totally haired out. He’s never done that before. He’s pure guts,
that dog.”
“Well, if he did,” Bobby said, “I don’t blame him. Almost haired out
myself.”
“Someone’s out there.”
“More than one.”
“Who?”
Bobby didn’t reply. He adjusted his grip on the shotgun but continued
to hold it at the ready while he studied the surrounding night.
“They’ve been here before,” I guessed.
“Yeah.
“Why? What do they want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who are they?” I asked again.
As before, he didn’t answer.
“Bobby?” I pressed.
A great pale mass, a few hundred feet high, gradually resolved out of
the darkness over the ocean to the west: A fog bank, revealed in lunar
whitewash, extended far to the north and the south.
Whether it came to land or hung offshore all night, the fog pushed a
quieting pressure ahead of it. On silent wings, a formation of
pelicans flew low over the peninsula and vanished across the black
waters of the bay. As the remaining onshore breeze faded, the long
grass drooped and was still, and I could better hear the slow surf
breaking along the bay shore, although the sound was less a rumble than
a lulling hushaby.
From out at the point, a cry as eerie as the call of a loon carved this
deepening silence. An answering cry, equally sharp and chilling, arose
from the dunes nearer the house.
I was reminded of those old Western movies in which the Indians call to
one another in the night, imitating birds and coyotes, to coordinate
their moves immediately before attacking the circled wagons of the
homesteaders.
Bobby fired the shotgun into a nearby mound of sand, startling me so
much that I nearly blew an aortic valve.
When echoes of the crash rebounded from the bay and receded again, when
the last reverberations were absorbed by the vast pillow of fog in the
west, I said, “Why’d You do that?”
Instead of answering me at once, Bobby chambered another shell and
listened to the night.