The night was silent again.
Hushed.
Expectant.
She considered returning to the house, where either she could wake her father to
ask him to investigate, or she could go to bed and wait until morning to
investigate the situation herself. But what if it was only a coyote in the
shrubbery? In that case, she was in no danger. Though a hungry coyote would
attack a very young child, it would run from anyone Tracy’s size. Besides, she
was too worried about her noble Goodheart to waste any more time; she had to be
sure that the horse was all right.
Using the flashlight to avoid any more dead cats that might be strewn about, she
headed toward the stable. She had taken only a few steps when she heard the
rustling again and, worse, an eerie growling that was unlike the sound of any
animal she’d ever heard before.
She began to turn, might have run for the house then, but in the stable
Goodheart whinnied shrilly, as if in fear, and kicked at the board walls of his
stall. She pictured a leering psycho going after Goodheart with hideous
instruments of torture. Her concern for her own welfare was not half as strong
as her fear that something terrible would happen to her beloved breeder of
champions, so she sprinted to his rescue.
Poor Goodheart began kicking even more frantically. His hooves slammed
repeatedly against the walls, drummed furiously, and the night seemed to echo
with the thunder of an oncoming storm.
She was still about fifteen yards from the stable when she heard the strange
guttural growling again and realized that something was coming after her,
bearing down on her from behind. She skidded on the damp grass, whirled, and
brought up her flashlight.
Rushing toward her was a creature that had surely escaped from Hell. It let out
a shriek of madness and rage.
In spite of the flashlight, Tracy did not get a clear look at the attacker. The
beam wavered, and the night grew darker as the moon slipped behind a cloud, and
the hateful beast was moving fast, and she was too scared to understand what she
was seeing. Nevertheless, she saw enough to know it was nothing she had ever
seen before. She had an impression of a dark, misshapen head with asymmetrical
depressions and bulges, enormous jaws full of sharp curved teeth, and amber eyes
that blazed in the flashlight beam the way a dog’s or a cat’s eyes will glow in
a car’s headlights.
Tracy screamed.
The attacker shrieked again and leaped at her.
It hit Tracy hard enough to knock the breath clear out of her. The flashlight
flew from her hand, tumbled across the lawn. She fell, and the creature came
down on top of her, and they rolled over and over toward the stable. As they
rolled, she flailed desperately at the thing with her small fists, and she felt
its
claws sinking into the flesh along her right side. Its gaping mouth was at her
face, she felt its hot rank breath washing her over, smelled blood and decay and
worse, and she sensed that it was going for her throat—she thought, I’m dead, oh
God, it’s going to kill me, I’m dead, like the cat—and she would have been dead
in seconds, for sure, if Goodheart, less than fifteen feet away now, had not
kicked out the latched half-door of his stall and bolted straight at them in
panic.
The stallion screamed and reared up on its hind feet when it saw them, as if it
would trample them underfoot.
Tracy’s monstrous attacker shrieked again, though not in rage this time but in
surprise and fear. It released her and flung itself to one side, out from under
the horse.
Goodheart’s hooves slammed into the earth inches from Tracy’s head, and he
reared up again, pawing at the air, screaming, and she knew that in his terror
he might unwittingly trample her skull to mush. She threw herself out from under
him, and also away from the amber-eyed beast, which had disappeared in the
darkness on the other side of the stallion.
Still, Goodheart reared and screamed, and Tracy was screaming as well, and dogs