WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

He realized the coyotes and the insects had all fallen silent. Only the wind

still had a voice.

Frowning, he turned to look at the dark forest that encircled the small clearing

in which his cabin stood.

Something growled.

Wes squinted at the night-swaddled woods, which suddenly seemed less well

illuminated by the moon than they had been a moment ago.

The growling was deep and angry. Not like anything he had heard out there before

in ten years of nights alone.

Wes was curious, even concerned, but not afraid. He stood very still, listening.

A minute ticked by, and he heard nothing further.

He finished closing the lean-to doors, pegged the latch, and picked up the hod

full of cordwood.

Growling again. Then silence. Then the sound of dry brush and leaves crackling,

crunching, snapping underfoot.

Judging by the sound, it was about thirty yards away. Just a bit west of the

outhouse. Back in the forest.

The thing grumbled again, louder this time. Closer, too. Not more than twenty

yards away now.

He could still not see the source of the sound. The deserter moon continued to

hide behind a narrow filigree band of clouds.

Listening to the thick, guttural, yet ululant growling, Wes was suddenly uneasy.

For the first time in ten years as a resident of Holy Jim, he felt he was in

danger. Carrying the hod, he headed quickly toward the back of the cabin and the

kitchen door.

The rustling of displaced brush grew louder. The creature in the woods was

moving faster than before. Hell, it was running.

Wes ran, too.

The growling escalated into hard, vicious snarls: an eerie mix of sounds that

seemed one part dog, part pig, part cougar, part human, and one part something

else altogether. It was almost at his heels.

As he sprinted around the corner of the cabin, Wes swung the hod and threw it

toward where he judged the animal to be. He heard the cordwood flying loose and

slamming to the ground, heard the metal hod clanging end Over end, but the

snarling only grew closer and louder, so he knew he had missed.

He hurried up the three back steps, threw open the kitchen door, stepped inside,

and slammed the door behind him. He slipped the latch bolt in place,

a security measure he had not used in nine years, not since he had grown

accustomed to the peacefulness of the canyon.

He went through the cabin to the front door and latched it, too. He was

Surprised by the intensity of the fear that had overcome him. Even if a hostile

animal was out there—perhaps a crazed bear that had come down from the

mountains—it could not open doors and follow him into the cabin. There was no

need to engage the locks, yet he felt better for having done so. He was

operating on instinct, and he was a good enough outdoorsman to know that

instincts ought to be trusted even when they resulted in seemingly irrational

behavior.

Okay, so he was safe. No animal could open a door. Certainly, a bear couldn’t,

and it was most likely a bear.

But it hadn’t sounded like a bear. That’s what had Wes Dalberg so spooked:

it had not sounded like anything that could possibly be roaming those woods. He

was familiar with his animal neighbors, knew all the howls, cries, and other

noises they made.

The only light in the front room was from the fireplace, and it did not dispel

the shadows in the corners. Phantoms of reflected firelight cavorted across the

walls. For the first time, Wes would have welcomed electricity.

He owned a Remington 12-gauge shotgun with which he hunted small game to

supplement his diet of store-bought foods. It was on a rack in the kitchen. He

considered getting it down and loading it, but now that he was safely behind

locked doors, he was beginning to be embarrassed about having panicked. Like a

greenhorn, for God’s sake. Like some lardass suburbanite shrieking at the sight

of a fieldmouse. If he had just shouted and clapped his hands, he would most

likely have frightened off the thing in the brush. Even if his reaction could be

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