clawed at the air, and the black-ringed tail swished back and forth
furiously across the oak floor. Gagging, the coon dropped off its
haunches, flopped on its side. It twitched convulsively, sides heaving
as it struggled to breathe. Abruptly blood bubbled from its nostrils
and trickled from its ears. After one final spasm that rattled its
claws against the floor again, it lay still, silent.
Dead.
“Dear Jesus,” Eduardo said, and put one trembling hand to his brow to
blot away the sudden dew of perspiration that had sprung up along his
hairline.
The dead raccoon didn’t seem as large as either of the sentinels he’d
seen outside, and he didn’t think that it looked smaller merely because
death had diminished it. He was pretty sure it was a third individual,
perhaps younger than the other two, or maybe they were males, and this
was a female.
He remembered leaving the kitchen door open when he’d walked around the
house to see if the front and back sentries were the same animal. The
screen door had been closed. But it was light, just a narrow pine
frame and screen. The raccoon might have been able to pry it open wide
enough to insinuate its snout, its head, and then its body, sneaking
into the house before he’d returned to close the inner door.
Where had it hidden in the house when he’d been passing the late
afternoon in the rocking chair? What had it been up to while he was
cooking dinner?
He went to the window at the sink. Because he had eaten early and
because the summer sunset was late, twilight had not yet arrived, so he
could clearly see the masked observer. It was in the backyard, sitting
on its hindquarters, dutifully watching the house.
Stepping carefully around the pitiful creature on the floor, Eduardo
went down the hall, unlocked the front door, and stepped outside to see
if the other sentry was still in place. It was not in the front yard,
where he’d left it, but on the porch, a few feet from the door. It was
lying on its side, blood pooled in the one ear that he could see, blood
at its nostrils, eyes wide and glazed.
Eduardo raised his attention from the coon to the lower woods at the
bottom of the meadow. The declining sun, balanced on the peaks of the
mountains in the west, threw slanting orange beams between the trunks
of those trees but was incapable of dispelling the stubborn shadows.
By the time he returned to the kitchen and looked out the window again,
the backyard coon was running frantically in circles. When he went out
onto the porch, he could hear it squealing in pain. Within seconds it
fell, tumbled. It lay with its sides heaving for a moment, and then it
was motionless.
He looked uphill, past the dead raccoon on the grass, to the woods that
flanked the fieldstone house where he had lived when he’d been the
caretaker.
The darkness among those trees was deeper than in the lower forest
because the westering sun illuminated only their highest boughs as it
slid slowly behind the Rockies.
Something was in the woods.
Eduardo didn’t think the raccoons’ strange behavior resulted from
rabies or, in fact, from an illness of any kind. Something was …
controlling them.
Maybe the means by which that control was exerted had proved so
physically taxing to the animals that it had resulted in their sudden,
spasmodic deaths.
Or maybe the entity in the woods had purposefully killed them to
exhibit the extent of its control, to impress Eduardo with its power,
and to suggest that it might be able to waste him as easily as it had
destroyed the raccoons.
He felt he was being watched–and not just through the eyes of other
raccoons.
The bare peaks of the highest mountains loomed like a tidal wave of
granite.
The orange sun slowly submerged into that sea of stone.
A steadily inkier darkness rose under the evergreen boughs, but Eduardo
didn’t think that even the blackest condition in nature could match the
darkness in the heart of the watcher in the woods–if, in fact, it had