along the dirt lane under the overhanging boughs of an enormous spruce. Stopping
at the truck, the retriever looked back the way they had come.
Behind them, black birds swooped through the cloudless sky, as if engaged in
reconnaissance for some mountain sorcerer. A dark wall of trees loomed like the
ramparts of a sinister castle.
Though the woods were gloomy, the dirt road onto which Travis had stepped was
fully exposed to the sun, baked to a pale brown, mantled in fine, soft dust that
plumed around his boots with each step he took. He was surprised that such a
bright day could have been abruptly filled with an overpowering, palpable sense
of evil.
Studying the forest out of which they had fled, the dog barked for the first
time in half an hour.
“Still coming, isn’t it?” Travis said.
The dog glanced at him and mewled unhappily.
“Yeah,” he said, “I feel it too. Crazy . . . yet I feel it, too. But what the
hell’s out there, boy? Huh? What the hell is it?”
The dog shuddered violently.
Travis’s own fear was amplified every time he saw the dog’s terror manifested.
He put down the tailgate of the truck and said, “Come on. I’ll give you a lift
out of this place.”
The dog sprang into the cargo hold.
Travis slammed the gate shut and went around the side of the truck. As he pulled
open the driver’s door, he thought he glimpsed movement in nearby brush. Not
back toward the forest but at the far side of the dirt road. Over there, a
narrow field was choked with waist-high brown grass as crisp as hay, a few
bristly clumps of mesquite, and some sprawling oleander bushes with roots deep
enough to keep them green. When he stared directly at the field, he saw none of
the movement he thought he had caught from the corner of his eye, but he
suspected that he had not imagined it.
With a renewed sense of urgency, he climbed into the truck and put the revolver
on the seat beside him. He drove away from there as fast as the
washboard lane permitted, and with constant consideration for the four-legged
passenger in the cargo bed.
Twenty minutes later, when he stopped along Santiago Canyon Road, back in the
world of blacktop and civilization, he still felt weak and shaky. But the fear
that lingered was different from that he’d felt in the forest. His heart was no
longer drumming. The cold sweat had dried on his hands and brow. The odd
prickling of nape and scalp was gone—and the memory of it seemed unreal. Now he
was afraid not of some unknown creature but of his own strange behavior. Safely
out of the woods, he could not quite recall the degree of terror that had
gripped him; therefore, his actions seemed irrational.
He pulled on the handbrake and switched off the engine. It was eleven o’clock,
and the flurry of morning traffic had gone; only an occasional car passed on the
rural two-lane blacktop. He sat for a minute, trying to convince himself that he
had acted on instincts that were good, right, and reliable.
He had always taken pride in his unshakable equanimity and hardheaded
pragmatism—in that if in nothing else. He could stay cool in the middle of a
bonfire. He could make hard decisions under pressure and accept the
consequences.
Except—he found it increasingly difficult to believe something strange had
actually been stalking him out there. He wondered if he had misinterpreted the
dog’s behavior and had imagined the movement in the brush merely to give himself
an excuse to turn his mind away from self-pity.
He got out of the truck and stepped back to the side of it, where he came
face-to-face with the retriever, which stood in the cargo bed. It shoved its
burly head toward him and licked his neck, his chin. Though it had snapped and
barked earlier, it was an affectionate dog, and for the first time its
bedraggled condition struck him as having a comical aspect. He tried to hold the
dog back. But it strained forward, nearly clambering over the side of the cargo