That’s what they’re calling it. A dog. But Juniper knows better. It’s not a dog. It’s a hound.
He hurries them along as best he can, monitoring them in the bathroom, trying to shush them in the halls, promising to talk again first thing in the morning. And then, at last, he is alone. People think he’s crazy to run The Weary Traveler without a twenty-four-hour staff. He hires out janitorial and he brings in cooks and counselors during the day, but otherwise he’s on his own. He has to be—for moments like this.
He clenches his jaw until his teeth ache. Paces an uncertain circle in the lounge. Off one of the tables he picks up a chess piece—a black knight—and fidgets with it absently, twirling it, tossing it up and down to catch, squeezing it so tightly it bites his palm.
Inside the shelter everything is dark except for the glow of the cross hanging above the reception desk. Outside the rain slows to a drizzle and then surges again. Lightning strikes nearby and for an instant the night vanishes, replaced by a blue-white ghostland diamonded with a million raindrops that appear frozen in the air.
The security, lighting, and temperature at The Weary Traveler are controlled by a software system linked to Juniper’s smartphone and the tablet mounted near the entry. At nine o’clock the front door locks, the bolt sliding into place with a shunk he can hear from the lounge. This is followed by a whirring gust as the heater ramps up, nudging the temperature to seventy degrees.
The window darkens with the shape of a hooded figure walking past. He turns into the alcove out front and tests the door with a hard rattle. At first Juniper believes this to be one more client—someone hoping to escape the storm—but then the crow squawks and clacks the glass impatiently with its beak.
Juniper goes to the door and taps the tablet mounted there. The screen lights up and he punches in his security code and opens the Nest app and overrides the locks. Lump slumps inside. Water glistens and dribbles from the folds of his makeshift poncho, a collection of many torn garbage bags. A black cowl of plastic surrounds his face, but he pulls it back now. His face appears like something that grew out of a rotten log. Gray and bumpy, almost fungal. But Juniper doesn’t turn away.
Instead he leans in. And listens to what Lump has to tell him. While he speaks, the crow takes a short flight around the room before returning to its master. It fluffs its feathers, casting off the raindrops that jewel them.
“You’re sure?” Juniper says. “A red right hand?”
Lump nods and draws up his hood. “I thought you should know,” he says before ripping open the door and heading once more into the night. “Demons walk among us.”
?
Then the power goes out for the second time that night. The lightning recedes at the same time the lights sputter off, on, ebbing to a brownish dusk, then full dark. The ceiling fan in the lounge slows its rotation. The light of the blue cross fades. The heater gives a dying gasp. The whole building seems to momentarily shrink.
He waits for everything to buzz back to life, and when that doesn’t happen, he snaps on a Maglite fetched from the reception desk. He has a generator out back, but that can wait. He shouldn’t put this off any longer. He goes first to the kitchen, past the big-basined sink, the industrial-sized oven, to the open stretch of counter where he keeps the knives. They dangle from a magnetized strip screwed into the wall. He pulls down the biggest one, a butcher knife, with a snick. Iron or silver would be better, but steel will have to do.
His fingers gnarl around it. His hands are big, meaty, but blood can slip the strongest grip. He opens the supply cabinet and balances the Maglite on a shelf and pulls down a roll of duct tape and picks at it, peeling away a strip to stick to the knife’s hilt. He then wraps his hand several times over, until it is silver-mittened. He bites the tape, tears it off the roll, pats it in place. The blade points at the floor, his arm a scythe. He gashes the air experimentally. Good enough.
Without the heater whirring and the fridge droning, everything seems terribly quiet. Except for the throb and lap of the rain. The dark is broken by the occasional lightning flash, and the silence punctuated by the mutter of thunder. His shoes, still wet from his time outside, squeak as he makes his way toward the walk-in freezer at the far end of the kitchen.
He reaches for the handle, then stops his hand. He leans his head against the door, mashing his cheek up against the stainless steel. It’s cold, echoey, like an arctic seashell. Maybe he hears something, or maybe not. The night plays tricks on your senses. He changes his grip on the Maglite, so that it will double as a club, then takes a deep breath.
The Maglite concentrates into an orange eye when he reaches again for the handle—and then he springs the latch and pulls back the door, and the light opens up into a yellow funnel that illuminates the floor of the freezer.
Empty. Except for a tub of ice cream fallen off a shelf. The warm air crashes up against the cold and steam swirls, obscuring the dark even further. He steps forward, raising the hand that grips the knife. In the back corner, beyond a crate, two eyes catch the light and spark like candle flames.
He might cry out, but the sound is lost against the snarl of the hound. The steam whirls when it leaps, its body missiling through the air. It knocks its paws into his chest. He falls flat on his back, unaware of any distance traveled. One instant his breastbone is battered, the next moment his back slams the floor. The Maglite goes clattering off, wheeling the air with shadows.
He holds up his free hand just in time to brace its neck. He cannot see much of anything. Just flashes of teeth, tongue, eyes, paws. In its breath he smells death. The hot, paralyzing reek of carrion. Its jaws clack together, gnashing the air, then close around his arm, shaking it, piercing and tearing the flesh.
Lightning might as well have struck him. The interface between his brain and his body feels sputtery as though his nerves have grown frayed. The past few seconds he has been demanding his right arm into action—to slash, damn it, stab—but only now does it respond, arcing through the air, plunging into the hound’s neck, and then again, clacking against its ribs, and then again again again, until at last the thing goes still. It collapses its weight onto him, soaking him with blood he knows runs black.
He rolls the hound off. The knife scrapes the floor when he gets on his hands and knees. He tries to settle his pulse. He reaches for the counter. He pulls himself into a crouch. Then a standing position.
The pain hasn’t arrived yet, but he knows his arm is in bad shape, in need of stitches, maybe even a cast. He retrieves the Maglite. He runs some cold water over the wound while he chews away the tape binding his hand and frees the knife. Then he burrows around for the vodka he keeps at the rear of the spice cabinet. He splashes the wound before wrapping it in a flour-sack cloth and then with a quarter roll of cellophane.