This was crazy, he knew. All other residents of Pike Hollow, as if by unspoken consent, were locked in their houses, shutters closed, lights extinguished. And here he was, heading out toward Desolation Mountain. Well, okay, not exactly toward Desolation Mountain, but a lot closer to it than he’d like to be.
It was all the fault of his aunt Gertrude, who lived in an old Airstream trailer out in the woods about eight miles west of Pike Hollow. She had no car, and she relied on Sam to bring her canned foodstuffs, cash her welfare checks, bring her pitiful mail from the PO box, fill her propane tank—and, most particularly, keep her well stocked with the cheap plastic 1.75-liter bottles of vodka that she subsisted on. Gertrude Randowsky was the most raging of all alcoholics Sam had ever known, and it had only gotten worse once her husband died and could no longer keep her in check. She’d run out of the stuff again, and it was only the threat of her towering rage that had coaxed Sam to get Fred at the Hideaway to give him half a dozen bottles and head out to the trailer.
Buster was whining more loudly now. Well, Sam could hardly blame him.
He passed the old Blakeney compound—a narrow lane to the left, heavily overgrown, dark and unoccupied state trooper car barely visible in the moonlight—with trepidation. That bitch Gertrude. She wasn’t even his own aunt, she was the aunt of his late wife…and yet here he was, bowing and scraping to her every whim like a damn lackey. One of these days, he thought grimly as he rounded first one bend, and then another, those bottles of Olde Petersburg Vodka would do her in—and, although he’d never say it out loud, that day couldn’t come soon enough, and he could then devote all his off-hours to making caddis fly lures and fishing for the elusive brook trout….
Wham. Shit, what was that—a blowout? Oh God, this was the last place he wanted to have to change a tire.
He slowed the Honda, then crept forward gingerly. The right front end was shimmying like crazy, all right. He stopped and turned off the engine, leaving the headlights on, thinking. He had three options: get out and swap the tire for a spare; try driving home on the rim; or just abandon the car and walk back.
He immediately discarded the last option. No way was he walking back to Pike Hollow past the Blakeneys—not during a full moon, and with the state trooper who was supposed to be surveilling it off having dinner or something. And driving on a rim seemed almost as bad an option, incurring expenses he could ill afford to pay. With a sigh, he reached for the glove compartment, opened it, pulled out the flashlight he kept inside, and—reluctantly—opened the driver’s door.
Swallowing painfully, he stood by the door, looking around, senses on full alert, ready to jump back in and lock the door if anything seemed amiss. There was a break in the trees overhead and the moon was in view, almost comically large, the pellucid night sky allowing a veil of pale yellow to fall over his surroundings. There was no wind, and the numberless trees that surrounded him were standing, almost as if at attention, awaiting something.
Leaving the driver’s door open, he switched on the light and walked around the hood, glanced left and right again, then knelt to inspect the tire. To his relief, it seemed to be all right after all—it was just stuck in a huge rut that ran along the shoulder of the cracked highway. He must have drifted into it without noticing.
He stood up. Time to get this damn-fool errand over with and hurry home.
But just as he began to make his way back around the hood, something short and hairy shot between his legs, whimpering, heading into the darkness away from the car. Buster. He’d jumped out of the front seat while Sam had been inspecting the tire and run off.
“Well, if that don’t beat all…” Buster wasn’t Rin Tin Tin, but he had plenty of pluck, and it wasn’t like him to run away—and it sure as hell wasn’t like him to desert his master. Something must have scared him—scared him enough to make him forget all his normal instincts.
It had not gone unnoticed by Sam that Buster had run into the woods in the opposite direction from the Blakeney compound.
“Buster!” he called, beginning to walk in the direction the dog had run, toward the dark wall of trees. “Bus—”
Suddenly he stopped in mid-call. Some instinct told him to be silent—silent as the grave.
He turned off his flashlight. Now there were only the headlights of the car and the glow from the open door.
At first he noticed nothing unusual. But then he became aware of a strange smell—more of a stink, really: musky, rank.
This was followed by a noise unlike anything Sam had ever heard before: something between the menacing snarl of a feral wolf and the guttural, angry grunt of a bull moose. And it sounded close.
Sam Wiggins had lived in Pike Hollow his entire life. He’d grown up on stories of strange things in the deep woods like other children grew up on Mother Goose and Peter Rabbit. Over the years, he’d come to accept them as gospel—in some form or another—and taken steps to avoid them. And so he had managed never before to come face-to-face with the actual sound, or smell, of evil. There was a long moment when he stood, paralyzed with surprise and fear. He felt a warm gush as his bladder let go.
The stench grew stronger: fetid, sour, goatish. There was a crackling in the brush near the side of the road. And then he heard that sound again. It was husky and ravenous: ravenous for blood and the rending of flesh.
Suddenly, a hundred things seemed to happen at once. Sam abruptly found his feet again and dashed around the front of the car, literally diving inside as a loud crashing burst from the nearby bracken; at the last possible moment he reached back and pulled the door closed, punching the lock as he did so; his flashlight, falling to the floor of the passenger seat, rolled backward and he saw something outside the window that, temporarily, drove all rational thought from his mind. Neighing in terror and dismay, he cringed back, windmilling with his legs, while the thing outside beat on his car with unimaginable fury. And then the light seemed to grow in intensity; the roaring sound suddenly mingled with another; his car shook once again under the violent assault—and then Sam slumped over the center column of the Civic, fainting, as merciful oblivion overtook him.
25
It took Logan longer than expected to reach Pike Hollow. Unlike on his earlier sorties, this time there was some traffic on the road—a ramshackle old truck with wood-framed sides, apparently hauling a variety of mechanical trash—and it seemed incapable of going faster than thirty miles an hour. Logan was unable to pass on the dark, twisty roads. To his relief, it continued down the main highway at the junction with 3A, and—turning onto the secondary road—he was able to make up some time. Even so it was almost nine as he neared the hamlet.