Part 4

I couldn't tell if Tommy heard me, the commotion in the woods became so loud. I clutched the knife in a white-knuckle grip and kept shouting. Then the boy appeared, stumbling pell-mell out of a bewildering tangle of silvery gloom. He pitched himself headlong into the gully. Behind him the tops of trees whipped back and forth, as something giant shoved its way between them.

But the thing that emerged from the shadows a moment later wasn't the gigantic spider I'd braced myself for. It stood upright on two thick legs. Thorns covered its body.

The gully flooded with an overwhelming rotten egg reek.

Tommy tripped and landed on all fours. I yelled for him to get up. Then the thing chasing him stepped down into the gully, and I lost any ability to think coherently.

Spikes of bone protruded at every joint from a hide like layers on layers of burn scars. The pulpy mound of its head spilled over its chest and shoulders in a cascade of sucking mouths and writhing eyes. Spined organs that had to be genitalia jutted from its abdomen like tusks.

A spike of nausea and terror hammered me between the eyes. I shrieked something, I don't remember what. Tommy shrieked too, and scrambled to his feet.

Repulsive as the demon was, something rang false about it, a hint that what I was seeing wasn't real, that it wasn't a monster so much as a costume, or a suit of armor. Somehow I knew this, and the thought held me fast, as did Tommy's wide, terrified eyes. But whatever hid inside it, the thing was a murder machine, and I was just flesh.

I screamed for Tommy to move. Then they were both running toward me, the creature just yards behind its prey.

Tommy bowled into me as the demon's spike-studded fist descended. I stuck my arm out through the hole in the world and slashed blindly with the knife.

A sledgehammer kissed me.

A howl split the night.

Then I landed on my back in the wet earth, panting, with Tommy's warm weight on top of me. Nearby, a muffled voice groaned in pain.

I put an arm around Tommy's shoulders and hauled us both to our feet. As I did so, someone put a hand to my back and helped me up. With a cry I turned, holding out the knife, and found myself face to face with Herman Crabbe. The wash of illumination from the flashlight he carried amplified his ugliness tenfold.

"Whoa, there, tiger," he said, as his flashlight beam found the blade.

I backed away, keeping the knife between myself and Crabbe, my other arm cradled protectively around the shivering boy. Tommy pressed his face against my stomach. His clothes were wet, and he reeked of sweat and urine.

The muffled voice groaned again, then coughed. Crabbe turned his flashlight in the direction of the noise. "You did quite a number on him, tiger," Crabbe said. "I'm impressed."

The hole in reality still remained, but had thinned to a wispy blue outline. Beyond it, a man lay on the ground, wearing jeans and a torn flannel shirt. At first I thought he had the palest face I'd ever seen, but then I realized he wore a papier mâché mask, painted white.

Gertrude Crabbe stood over him, pressing the business end of a shotgun against his chest.

The man's shirt was shredded down the side. The flesh revealed there bled from a series of deep, parallel gouges. Claw marks.

I held up my knife in wonder. The blade was clean. Despite that little boy cuddled against me, I said a few choice words, several in a string.

Panther, my grandmother always called me.

And then, as if not focusing on it somehow made it easier to see, a scene unfolding in shadow-forms edged onto my awareness.

Before me, the thorned demon lay twitching on the ground. Huge though it was, it was dwarfed by the tremendous spider crouched over it. Clearly female, its grotesquely swollen abdomen blurred the moon. With its forelegs, it was winding, winding, binding the monster beneath it in a tight cocoon.

"It's like she says," said Gertrude's husband. "It's amazing, how perfect we are for each other."

He aimed his flashlight at me again. "Looks like you took his prey away, and a good thing, too." He laughed, a harsh, alien sound. "You get that boy back up to the store. Clean him up, put some blankets on him. Give him some water, make sure it's in small sips, maybe a candy bar if he can hold it down. When we catch up to you, we'll drive you both into town."

Had the Crabbes been watching as my face-off with Tommy’Äôs abductor went down? They must have. What would have happened had I lost the face-off? The balance of events seemed too delicate to disturb. I didn't dare ask. Instead I tilted my head toward the man on the ground. "What about him? He's bleeding pretty bad."

Herman's lips peeled back in a toothy grin. "We'll take care of him. You go on."

I was still trembling with revelation. "How am I going to find my way in the dark?"

Though his face was hidden, I think he was smiling. "I think you'll find that you can see just fine."

I didn't see fit to argue. I glanced back once as I carried Tommy up the trail. The demon, still twitching, was almost completely encased in Gertrude's cocoon.

I'm still amazed I made it up that hill, carrying that child. My mind reeling the whole way.

The pieces fit now, at least as well as I would ever understand them. The man who I had . . . slashed . . . was something like yet unlike the Crabbes, a self-made monster who had turned Angel's Leap into his stalking grounds. He had stolen Tommy into shadow with the worst of intentions, but his quarry had escaped. A terrified boy, snatched out of the world, but still resourceful enough to stay out of this demon's clutches for what time he had left to him.

I was both chilled and completely unsurprised when the Crabbes arrived at the shop without their captive in tow. They made no mention of him, and I chose not to ask as to his whereabouts. They had retrieved my gear from the shelter, though. I thanked them. Gertrude Crabbe fussed over Tommy while Herman readied the Jeep. He indicated I should follow him.

As the engine warmed up, he put a hand on my shoulder and leaned close, so that I was staring right at his crooked teeth, ghoulishly lit by the Jeep's headlights. His acrid breath assailed me as he spoke.

"We're going to drop you off a block down from the dispatch center. You go in, tell them you found the boy wandering in the woods. Don't mention us, and don't mention anyone else. Tommy won't remember anything different than what you say. Gertrude's made sure of that."

Given everything I had been through that day, I had no problem swallowing the idea that Gertrude Crabbe could hoodoo a boy's memory. I nodded.

A question burned in the back of my mind and it escaped before I could stop it. "Why didn't you stop this? You could have ended all these terrible things a long time ago."

He stared at me, his face a horror mask. "You know that ain't our nature. We don't seek. We wait." He shuffled closer, raised his hand with the malformed fingers to make a pinching gesture. "A little lasts us a long time."

Then he patted me on the shoulder. "The old blood's gotten thinned out, but it still shows itself in all sorts of strange ways. Some of us know from the moment we come out of the womb, what we've got, what it means." His too wide eyes caught mine, as he grinned in manner that I can only describe as mischievous. "Some of us have to learn all that the hard way."

All four of us rode down the logging trail, Herman driving, me in the passenger seat, Gertrude in the back with Tommy, who, amazingly, was asleep. Herman's eyes never left the patch of light cut out of the darkness by the jeep's headlamps, but when he spoke it was as if he was looking at me, his bulbous eyes staring into mine.

"You know, tiger," Mr. Crabbe said, "you're all right. When you come back down the this way, feel free to stop in. We'd love to have you by."

"I'll keep that in mind," I said.

I never have taken the Crabbes up on their offer.

But I did keep my word. I followed instructions and kept my mouth shut. I didn't stay around to witness Tommy's reunion with his family. The accolades that could have been mine, plaques, newspaper stories, television crews, would have drawn too much attention. I wanted nothing to do with that.

By the afternoon of the next day, I'd abandoned my hike. Showered, shaved, gotten a haircut. I was nestled uncomfortably in the back of a bus, heading Pennsylvania way, intending to drop in on my friends a little sooner than expected — but maybe not too soon. From there, I didn't know. I just knew, I still didn't want to go home.

As the road rolled by and the world rolled into night, I saw things moving in the twilight, and in the dark. Creatures in the fields, or clinging to branches or sheer rock walls, lumbering or scuttling through the midnight streets of the scattered towns that clung for their lives to the highway.

But I didn't pay near enough attention as I should, because I peered at them through the memory of my grandmother's eyes, the night she jerked me by the collar of my pajama top from the haunted cabin that she allowed to linger on in the woods above her farm. I still didn't know what was in there, what shades she lived with in that lonely valley.

But now I could remember, how I turned at the sound of whimpering between the rotted wooden slats, and she took my chin in her hand, and made me look at her, at her dark face and her startling blue eyes that practically glowed in the moonlight. The shadows formed a shape about her, something massive and terrifying and full of flowing, feline grace.

You leave those ghosts alone, little cub, she said. You come away. You've hurt them enough.

...continue on to a peek at Follow the Wounded One...