“I know, son, I know. I saw. It’s okay. I’m just glad I came to look in on you tonight.” The sheriff leaned toward Lance and examined him with the flashlight. “Come on, son. You need water and you’re burnt to a crisp.”
The sheriff switched off the flashlight and stowed it away. Then, as gently as he could, he pulled Lance to his chest and lifted him off the trailer. Suddenly, Anthony’s words came tearing across the months since they had been said: I think he might like little boys like you. I think he’d like to touch you. For an instant as he felt himself being cradled in the sheriff’s arms, he worried that the man holding him was going to do something terrible to him here in the field in the darkness, with only the moon as a witness. Lance knew he would be helpless to stop him, his arms and legs hung limp and felt as if they’d been filled with Novocain. But instead of putting him on the ground to do unspeakable things to him, the sheriff simply walked at a steady pace across the uneven field. Lance slowly relaxed and felt his eyelids pulled down by an invisible force. He strained to make out the sheriff’s features in the dark, but to no avail, and the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was the moon’s face gazing down at him from the black blanket of the sky.
Part 2
Chapter 4
“It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ardent Falls, Minnesota, August 2012
Lance scrambled down the narrow hallway, his eyes lost in the utter blackness of the house around him. With no real sense of space, he bumped randomly off the walls like a terrified pinball. His bare feet were wet and cold. The next instant he slipped and fell onto his back. In a matter of seconds, his clothing was soaked through to the skin. The chilly water moved around him like a conscious entity trying to hold him down as he attempted to regain his feet. The scraping sound of footsteps froze him in place, and he turned his head back the way he had come.
A single light burned in the kitchen, and although it threw no illumination to where Lance was, it outlined the thing that followed him all too well. It was man-shaped but hunched over grotesquely, its head hanging almost below its rounded shoulders. Hands balled into fists were at its sides, and the right held a pointed protrusion that looked black in the shadow framing it. The thing began to step once again, and Lance noticed that it dragged its toes when it walked.