HE IS JUST A BOY and not much of one at that. Eleven or twelve years old, scrawny and awkward. Uncomfortable in his own skin and never certain that he is where he should be, he is stumbling toward his teenage years with uncertain steps. He spends most of his time with his parents, who are still alive, their presence a constant reassurance in a world where little else is. He is living on the Oregon coast somewhere remote and wild, away from other families, but away, as well, from the things that hunt those families. He knows about these predatory things because his parents have told him about them. Incessantly. He must be cautious. He must think before doing anything. He must never go out alone unless he is in sight of his house. He must carry a weapon everywhere he goes. He hates that part; weapons frighten him. Yet he must remember that danger is never very far away.
“Even here,” his mother tells him, her voice firm and insistent, “you are not safe. There are terrible things hunting you, and you must keep watch for them.”
He does not know what these terrible things are, and his parents are vague when he asks what they look like. They look like lots of things, they tell him. They take many forms. They can be anything and everything. You must not trust your eyes.
He doesn’t know what that means. If he doesn’t trust his eyes, what is he supposed to trust? How is he supposed to tell what these monsters look like if no one can describe them? How is he supposed to protect himself from something so unknowable?
He is very young when his parents first warn him and the dreams begin. The dreams do not come every night, but they come often. Far too often. They are always the same. He is in his house or just outside. He is alone. He is doing something that pleases him—he can never remember what—when he hears an unexpected noise. He turns toward the source, but sees nothing. The noise comes again, from another direction this time. He looks around guardedly, remembering his parents’ warning to be careful. It has been daylight until now, but suddenly it begins to get dark. He calls for his parents, but they do not come. He is no longer in his home or even near it. When he tries to find it, he cannot. When he tries to make his way to safety, he cannot. He cannot move. His lack of confidence in himself paralyzes his muscles. Nothing he does seems to help.
And nothing ever changes what happens next.
As he struggles to find shelter, to find help of any sort, he becomes aware of a hidden presence. He searches for it frantically, trying to protect himself, but he can never quite manage to discover where it is hiding. Even when he is standing out in the open, he can feel it right next to him, but he can never see it. Finally, he breaks free of his immobility. He starts to run—through the rooms of his house, suddenly numerous and enormous, or through trees of a forest if he is outside—seeking escape from the thing he senses shadowing him. He runs until he is exhausted, until he has run as far as he can. But the presence is still there, dark and malevolent and implacable in its efforts to hunt him down. He knows what it is. It is the thing his parents have warned him about. It is the thing he has been told to avoid. But he has failed in his efforts to heed and obey, and now it has found him.
He tries closing his eyes against what he knows is coming, but somehow he cannot manage to do even that. He cannot help himself—he must look. He must see what it is that has hunted him for so long. He must see what it is that his parents have warned him about. He must know the identity of his hunter.
He can feel it looming over him. He can feel it reaching for him.
He opens his eyes and looks around wildly, but there is nothing there. He is more terrified than ever. Sometimes, he cries. Sometimes, he screams. Nothing helps. There is never anything there.
And then his hunter falls on him like a massive black weight, still invisible, still unknown, and he is crushed.
AS THE KLEE LUMBERED TOWARD HIM, Hawk’s childhood nightmares returned in a flood of dark images. Because he no longer knew how much of his childhood was real and how much the creation of the King of the Silver River, he could not be certain if his memories were real. But they felt real, which was enough to give them the substance of reality. Enough, too, to remind him of a truth he had always known, a truth so terrible and so inexorable that he had lived in dread of it his entire life.
If the dreams crossed over from sleeping into waking, his life was over.
He had only an instant to remember all this, come face-to-face with the something he had thought he had left behind—only a moment to come to terms with what it meant. He was backing away, trying to think of what to do, how to escape. The creature was almost on top of him, moving more quickly than should have been possible given its size.
Its massive arms reached for him.
Hawk reacted instinctively. He thrust his prod at it in a futile effort to slow its advance. He jammed the weapon into its spongy chest, amid hair, scales, and debris, and gave it a full charge. But the creature never even flinched. It simply snatched the prod from his hands and tossed it aside.
Hawk had nothing left with which to defend himself save one of the viper-pricks. He had no faith in a tiny needle, no matter how venomous. He knew instinctively that the creature’s mottled, debriscoated body would resist such a weapon, might even prevent it from penetrating.
He backed away some more. The creature was still coming, but its advance was unhurried. Its gimlet eyes were fixed on Hawk, studying him, and something reflected in those eyes revealed what it was thinking. That the boy was trapped. That he could not escape. That it could do whatever it wanted with him.