She points. And he sees her pointing. His head cocks as he studies her curiously. The dark shawl seems to flare red at the edges. Only then does he move, nudging between two tables, departing the dining area, heading for the door.
“Huh,” her mother says. “Well, he’s gone now.”
Hannah tries to focus on something else, the menu. She splits it open. She can’t shut her eyes, can’t stop seeing, unless she powers off the device. She’s tempted to now, but it was more than what she saw—it was what she felt when she looked at the wolf. Cold, and vulnerable, as if a knife were pressed to her neck.
“Hannah?” her mother says.
“It’s nothing. I’m just getting used to seeing, I guess.” It was just a man. A man in a mask. Dressed up like all the rest of them. Nothing to worry about.
The waiter returns with their drinks. “Any interest in some appetizers? Or are we holding out until the other guest arrives?”
“I think we can order,” her mother says.
To be blind is to be habitual. To set the water glass in a precise location, meal after meal, so that when she reaches for it, her fingers don’t fumble it to the floor. To try on clothes for her mother or her aunt, to learn which tops go with which pants or skirts, to hang them in the closet at four-inch intervals so that she can count the hangers right to left and find what she’s looking for without delay. There is always something springing out of the dark otherwise, surprising, injuring, humiliating her. If a drawer is left open, it will bruise her hip. If a chair isn’t pushed under the table completely, its leg will catch her foot and she’ll tumble. If the knives aren’t placed down in the dishwasher, she’ll stab her hand when she empties it. A place for everything and everything in its place, her mother often says. Routines define Hannah, and they’ve come to define her mother as well. Her mother guessed Lela would somehow screw up this celebration. That the prediction has come true grimly satisfies her somehow. Hannah hates this. Hates the depressingly rutted patterns of their life. So when the waiter turns to her and she orders the Wiener schnitzel instead of her standard bockwurst, when her mother stares at her a moment in surprise and says, “Are you sure?” she says, with biting certainty, “Yes.”
?
An hour later, when the waiter brings them their dessert, an apple strudel and Bavarian cream, he tells them about the goat heads. Carved wooden goat heads hidden in the forest behind the restaurant. If you find one, you win a prize. “Free meals, free river cruises, free movie passes, free tickets to go see the Trailblazers. All sorts of things.”
Hannah finishes the strudel before she tells her mother she wants to do it.
“Are you sure?” her mother says, in the same unsettled voice as before, as if she hardly recognizes her own daughter.
“I’m sure.”
“I’ll come with you,” her mother says. “We’ll do it together.”
“No.” Hannah wipes her mouth and drops her napkin on her plate. “I want to go alone.”
It feels right and wrong to say. The kind of scary she can deal with. Her mother opens her mouth to protest, then pinches her lips together and sighs through her nose and nods. “If it will make you happy.”
?
Hannah makes her way outside, where the clouds have thickened along with the shadows among the trees. The music from the band and the laughter from the beer garden fade as she whispers through the grass and then crunches through the pine needles, entering the forest. She touches trees as she passes them, palming the rough bark, and she wobbles her feet over roots and rocks. She kneels now and then to part the branches of a bush, to comb aside fern fronds. She covers ten feet of ground, then twenty, not rushing.
She feels it before she sees it, the goat head, tucked into a decayed stump. She peels back a damp clump of moss to reveal the sculpture, the size of a pool ball and made from dark polished wood, horned with slanted eyes and sharp teeth.
Her smile fails when she hears footsteps behind her. “I told you I was fine,” she says. “I don’t need your help. See?”
She holds up the goat head to the figure, and only then does he come into focus. The man from the restaurant. The one dressed as a wolf. He stands in a clump of sword ferns. The black aura surrounds him as though he carries the night like a shawl.
“Your aunt is Lela Falcon?” His voice is accented. His eyes are lost to the shadows inside the mask. The teeth of the snout seem to grin.
“How do you know that? Who are you?”
He says nothing, and she drops the goat head with a thud as the wolf starts toward her.
Chapter 12
THE WEARY TRAVELER has a basement. Concrete floor, whitewashed walls stained green and black with mold. A few bare light bulbs. At the bottom of the staircase lean two scabby bicycles Mike Juniper loans out to his clients. The furnace squats in one corner. Next to it are bins packed with Christmas and Easter decorations. The far side of the room—farthest from the staircase—Juniper uses as a makeshift gym with a bench press and dumbbells, a pull-up bar bolted to the studs of the open ceiling.
Here, against the wall, hangs a life-size crucifix that Juniper bought at a church garage sale. Jesus’s body is sunken-bellied and crowned with thorns, roughly carved from the same wood as the cross. It is hideous. Meant to disgust and terrify. Which is why he put it here. To keep people away.
Juniper stands before it now with a Coke can and a plate stacked with sandwiches, grapes, a chocolate bar. He reaches out and the nail that pierces Christ’s right hand depresses with a click. The wall gives way, swinging back—to reveal a stone passage. It curls downward, twenty steps altogether, lit by a bare bulb that fights the dark. The staircase ends at a locked iron door. Next to it a tablet is anchored. The passcode—1318—the chapter and verse in the book of Revelation where the number of the beast is mentioned. The screen becomes a pulsing red, like a heartbeat, as it awaits the next key.
The same sort of system that controls so many phones controls the shelter. The lighting, the heating and cooling, the smoke alarms and locks and general security, are all tied in to a controlling intelligence. Its voice is a mellow baritone. “Hello, Mike Juniper.”
“Hello, Shelter.”
The voice recognition activates and the tablet screen goes green. A deadbolt shucks from its sleeve. He pushes through the unlocked door.