When next Reggie went out to see the man in the tree house, he was gone. The interior of the wooden enclosure – so like a small game hunter’s trap blown up to human proportions – was empty save for little bloodstains on the planked floor. In the silence and vacancy it was as if the killer had never been there at all. The sled was parked at the base of the tree like a taxi cab waiting for a patron. Reggie looked about thinking maybe he’d just wandered off for a piss, but the killer was nowhere to be seen.
It had only been an hour or so since their last words.
He waited fifteen minutes.
Then he went back to the house and tried to forget it all.
***
Reggie couldn’t forget it though, and went back periodically to check the tree house. This routine continued through the morning and into the day. His mom, uncommonly permissive of his comings and goings since their confrontation in the car at the cemetery, noticed the frequency with which he left and came back to the house.
She asked him if anything was wrong.
He said he was okay and tried to settle himself.
He watched some television. Got up for a drink and snack during a commercial. Saw the picture the deputy had given his mom the previous day, slid among the pile of junk mail on the kitchen counter, forgotten. Stopping in front of the stack of mail, Reggie shuffled through the rest idly, feigning interest in fast food coupons, an ad for video games, and a public notice from the city warning about rabid wildlife, complete with a larger than necessary picture of a snarling bobcat. Until there was only the photo of the killer on the counter before him.
He picked it up and looked at the profile image of Ivan, the professional killer. The photo was black and white, but the intensity, the silent lethality of the man, came through even in such a grainy picture.
Reggie thought of the man splitting his own father’s head with an axe. He thought of him strangling the deputy and pushing the body over the cliff.
Reggie thought of lying side by side with him, looking at the stars. He thought of the man’s arm around him when Reggie had cried about his own father.
Reggie didn’t know what to think anymore. But he thought of Ivan out there somewhere alone, bleeding, and that didn’t seem right. He didn’t know what was right, but that wasn’t it, his friend out there by himself, maybe dying.
So he went up to his bedroom and pulled his backpack out from the closet. Empty now that school was over, the pack was limp in his hands. He draped it across the chair and looked at it for a time. He waited for evening. Watched more television, read a book, went downstairs and talked idly with his mom for awhile. He tried to act natural, not wanting to raise any further concern or suspicion.
She fell asleep watching reruns of old black-and-white shows. Perhaps that window to the past comforted her. Maybe watching a bumbling deputy test the patience of his sheriff best friend or a gangly first mate bungle the rescue of his fellow castaways provided his mom with an alternative to the way things actually were in their sad, quiet house.
Reggie understood this need and left his mom undisturbed. Creeping on cotton-socked feet, he made it across the living room with a stealthy stride fit for a cat.
He went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator slowly. The suction of it opening made his heart skip a beat. He took out bottles of water and a couple cans of soda. From the cupboards he took out crackers and granola bars. He took a large knife from one of the drawers. He bundled these items up in his shirt just as he’d bundled the First Aid supplies only a couple days ago, and took them back upstairs. Digging the flashlight – purchased by his parents for him in case of power outages – out of the closet, he added it to his gathered supplies. He loaded his backpack and zipped it up.
He took pen and paper from his desk, sat down, and wrote this note:
Mom,
I’m going out for awhile. I might be gone for a bit. Please don’t worry. There’s something I have to do. I’m sorry for being so angry. See you soon. I love you.
Reggie
He left it on his desk where she’d be sure to see it.
Lastly, he stepped lightly to his dresser and opened the top drawer slowly, quietly. Reaching under his socks and underwear, he again retrieved the bundle there. Added it to his pack, pushing it towards the bottom, out of sight.
Then Reggie went to the window and slid it up carefully. The hinges were clean and quiet. Leaning forward, Reggie peered out the window and down. The drop to the yard seemed further from his current perch than it ever had from outside, looking up. Now that he’d made his decision, however, he didn’t want to go back downstairs and run the risk of waking his mom.
Reggie hitched the backpack over his shoulders.
Bending, he ducked under the window and onto the roof. He scooted out over the shingles on his butt, inching closer to the edge with his hands and feet. The drop down couldn’t have been more than seven feet or so, the way the roof slanted down. But it looked like a fall into the Grand Canyon.
He dangled over and let go.
His feet met the lawn hard and he rolled with the fall. The impact was jarring but he got to his feet without injury.
He turned towards the woods and started walking.
It was night, he could think of only one place to start, and it seemed a long, long ways away in the blackness draped across the world.
The forest was a different world at night.
Heavy shadow clung to everything like a growth. Limbs reached out like scratching claws or hung like shrouds, hiding things. The trunks could have been giants’ legs, striding through the dusk and gloom. Night birds warbled sad tunes fit for funereal processions.
Uninvited, his mother’s warnings about bobcats and mountain lions pushed themselves forward rudely in Reggie’s mind. Squatters, too, she’d said. Doing God knows what in the abandoned shacks and cabins scattered throughout the woods. Shuffling around in lightless rooms, peering out through the slats of boarded windows. Waiting for unwary passers-by.
Reggie dug out the flashlight and turned it on.
The beam lighted the world where he pointed it, but it also made him easier to spot for stalking predators. Slavering beasts or bedraggled travellers with rape on the brain would know right where he was.
He turned it off, and the darkness leapt back around him.
Twigs snapped in indeterminable distances about him.
He turned the flashlight back on.
‘Fuck it,’ he said and started walking.
He knew the general direction, but moved mostly by memory. It had only been that very morning, so he was fairly confident he could find his way to where he wanted to go. It wasn’t as if the forest got up and walked about and realigned itself. It was always the same, and all he had to do was take the route they’d taken that morning.
The dark seemed to squeeze in close around him. With every step things crunched underfoot; twigs and dry leaves and small stones. They sounded like bones snapping, and he thought of walking a vast wasteland like in a Mad Max movie, treading upon the remains of people blasted dead and dry by warheads innumerable.
Once, as he walked, a glimmer of something caught his eye, and he turned to face it. Through the dark wall of trees, a glint of moonlight off a reflective surface. Glass or metal. Aware of the dangers of losing his sense of direction in the night, Reggie nonetheless strode towards the dim light.
Soon, he came to the edge of a dip in the ground like a small crater. The soil there was loose and sunk a bit underfoot. Like a dried-out pond, baked empty by the unforgiving desert sun. In the centre of it sat an old car, windows shattered, snaked by weeds and branches.
Skeletal and dead, the car made Reggie feel as if he were in the presence of something malevolent. Or at least best left undisturbed. And so he turned, course corrected, and returned to his previous path through the woods.
At some point he became aware of being followed.
Somewhere about him footfalls padded parallel to his own. Softer and more purposely placed than his, the sound of them carried in the still night air like distant, hushed drumbeats.
He swept the light to one side, saw nothing. Swung it the other way, and saw branches and leaves swaying with the passage of something large. He followed the movement of the thing, the swaying of the shrubbery in its wake. It fell back under the searching light, out of reach of the flashlight beam.
Telling himself animals were wary of people, Reggie pressed on.
He found the dry creek bed by almost falling into it. Like a fissure in the earth it was there before him, shadows hiding the bottom so that it seemed to fall away into forever. A grinning drop into nothingness. But he knew there was a bottom and slid down into it. Small avalanches of grit and dirt rolled with him. Standing, he turned and kept walking, the light showing the way ahead, the twists and turns an earthen maze.
Again, as he followed the bends of the creek he at some point became aware of the padding footfalls, and the whisper-brush of something big displacing the foliage as it passed. Coming from the left, Reggie flashed the light up that way and saw again the lazy swaying of the bushes and low-hanging branches.
Whatever was there was just out of sight behind the growth of the woods. He thought he caught a glimpse of hide – taut, tan, and wide – but he wasn’t sure. He thought there was a brief gleam of light reflected off eyes, but then they blinked away as if they’d never been there at all.
Living in Arizona all his short years, Reggie knew the basics of safety when encountering wildlife. Rangers sometimes visited the schools on Career Days. Make noise, they said. Make yourself as big and intimidating as possible. Don’t panic and run. Wild animals were cautious of humans, and would usually retreat. The behaviours and things of people – clothes, gadgets, cars – confused them and, unless provoked, they kept their distance.
Yet Reggie also knew animals like raccoons or bears that developed the habit of nosing in human refuse for easy meals – or the stupid people that fed them – were more difficult to deal with. An animal that had discovered a routine of effortless food was hard to chase away, and was even more dangerous because of their familiarity, and lack of fear, of people.
But usually noise, big and intimidating, and don’t panic was the way to go.
Reggie bent and with the aid of the flashlight found a couple large, fist-sized rocks. He set his backpack down and took out the knife just in case. At first glance the blade had seemed large and wicked-looking when he’d taken it from the kitchen. Now it looked small and pathetic to his eyes. He yelled a ‘Hey!’ that came out a croak, and tried again.
‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey! Get out of here!’ he bellowed and jumped up and down, waving his arms. He stomped his feet and clapped his hands together. He threw the rocks into the forest where he’d seen the moving branches and the flash of eyes. ‘Get out of here! Go away!’
Reggie heard the impact of the stones. He heard something low and rumbling. It was a warning sound, deep and throaty. It sounded like rolling thunder. The vibrations of its decibels almost tangible in the air.
A fear deep and heavy went through his body. His stomach did little flops then curled up in a tight little ball. His legs felt weak. A shiver went through his frame like an electric charge.
The rumble out there and the slow drumbeat padding of the heavy footfalls provided a cadence for the thumping of his heart.
It came near the treeline again, drawing closer rather than retreating. The eyes flashed a bright yellow, like captured fire. Parts of it were clearly seen this time – a dirty tan hide rippling with muscle, canvas-thick.
Nothing could be that large, Reggie thought in immobilized fear.
The rustling of the woods again. Patches of it seen through the trees; the thunder-rumble of it; the pushing aside of the forest growth. But mostly the eyes, afire, glowing golden like spectral orbs.
Trembling, Reggie knelt, found more stones.
He threw them weakly in its direction. The first disappeared, swallowed by the thick woods. The second struck the enshadowed stalker and bounced off ineffectually.
‘Get out of here,’ he muttered. ‘Go away,’ he whispered, the words like a prayer.
And it drew away again, but slowly, casually, as if mocking him. The impossible beast slunk away, the woods moving around it. The eyes faded into the darkness and blinked out. The rumble of its low roar likewise diminished, moving away like the thunder of a passing storm. The weighty slaps of its gargantuan footfalls faded.
Gathering himself, fighting back the tears of terror, Reggie started down the creek bed road again, further into the woods, the night, the darkness.
The drop where they’d rolled the body off was infinite at night. It made Reggie think of the beach vacation he and his parents had taken a few years back. The photos of which he’d looked at earlier that very day. His dad had rented a boat and they’d cruised a couple miles off the Pacific coast. Setting anchor in the early evening, they’d eaten dinner in the calm waters. At night all the ocean turned black, and with the dark sky above it was as if the world had been erased.
Staring down the cliff face, that’s what it was like: looking down into an ocean of blackness. Reggie wondered what it would be like to fall down into such a void. It seemed you’d fall forever. And would you even know you were falling? If you could see nothing, neither height nor depth, would there be any sensation at all? Or just the endless black all around?
He thought of the dead man down there.
Or was he dead? In that emptiness, that swallowing darkness, who was to say?
Maybe the dead got up and roamed in such blackness. Without the light of the world maybe different rules applied. Maybe the deputy crawled around down there, lost, confused, groping for something solid, something to pull himself back to the land of the living. Maybe he knew Reggie was up here, watching, and he was pulling himself up, up, slowly, and at the top he’d pull himself over, snatch onto Reggie, and pull him back down with him, clinging, back down into the void.
Reggie moved cautiously back from the precipice.
He saw the note on the ground by the light of the flashlight, the paper weighted down by a rock. Had it been there before? He hadn’t seen it, but that didn’t mean anything. His attention had been on the approach to the cliff.
It was startling; the note there, white in the night, as if deposited by a phantom hand. Cautiously, he approached it. Wary, he bent, picked it up, read it.
If you’ve come this far, I think you’ll come a bit farther. Though I would be remiss not to suggest otherwise. My world doesn’t have to be yours. It shouldn’t be. But head west if you choose to continue. Come to the high rock, and we’ll talk.
There was no signature, but Reggie knew who it was from.
And he knew the high rock as well. It was there, seen from where he stood. The great finger of darkness crooked against the greater night, beckoning. A tower of stone out of the woods like a rampart.
One could see it from almost anywhere in town.
From his perch atop the cliff, the giant stone finger still stretched higher than Reggie. Looming over the treetops below, the vertical spire poked from the earth like the vestige of a buried kingdom. All he had to do was keep walking towards it, and there was no chance he’d miss it. He could see where the cliff face gradually eased downward, and met the forest floor below.
Turning away from the stone tower, so far and yet so near, shoving the note into his pocket, Reggie started to walk again, empty space dangerously close to one side and deep forest to the other, like a vise squeezing tight.
***
There was a clearing about the ash tree from which the body swung. As if the rest of the world had stepped back in regard of the sombre dead. Under the beam of the flashlight the leaves about the tall, broad tree seemed fire-red, brilliant in the night.
At first Reggie couldn’t make out what it was that hung from the branches. The rope about it stretching from the bough creaked in the evening breeze. Gashes in the hide revealed the raw muscle and flesh beneath, making identification difficult.
He stepped closer until he was almost under it.
Looking up he could discern the droopy ears, the long snout. The hound’s eyes flashed in the light but were otherwise dead. Strung up by the hindquarters, its final gaze was directed at the earth below.
From somewhere about Reggie came the deep rumble again, as if on cue. Whatever had been following him would be attracted by the scent of the pooled, dried blood beneath the swinging canine’s corpse. The padding footfalls slapped their approach upon the forest floor in an anticipatory rhythm. The rustle of the creature’s passing issued a frictional, serpentine hiss.
Reggie cast the flashlight’s beam around him, scanning the edges of the clearing. He waited for it to appear. He trembled at the thought of its approach.
But the footfalls faded again. The thunder-rumble of the monstrous purring drifted away and then was gone as well.
He spotlit the hound again. No beast did that, he knew. The dog had died by human hands and been strung up as a sign, a marker, and maybe as a warning.
The dead dog’s eyes no longer seemed to be staring at the ground. Now they were watching him. And one paw seemed bent and crooked, pointing southwest, back into the woods, and the tower above it all, drawing nearer.
A distance ahead of him shone other lights in the woods. So as not to attract their attention, Reggie turned off his and crouched, watched their progress. The lights blinked in and out of existence as they moved behind things – trees, bushes – and reappeared. They bobbed and swerved and jumped in little dances of movement, like fairies. There were three of them, in no specific formation with each other, bobbing, weaving, jerking about.
He thought of the police on the highway two days ago, spread throughout the fields, searching.
He thought of the body at the bottom of the cliff behind him, eternally waving.
He thought of the hung hound he’d just passed, swaying.
Were they closing in on Ivan? Did they know he was out here?
Wouldn’t the police have sent more than just three men, though? Wouldn’t there have been something more organized, say a methodic grid search like you saw in movies? A helicopter buzzing above with a spotlight and night vision scope?
As he watched, the lights before him blinked out, either by design or distance. Reggie counted to himself, waiting a time before doing anything, then he flipped his light back on and continued forward.
A dead man at the bottom of a cliff; a huge beast stalking the woods; a hung dog; phantom lights; all seemed pieces of something in play. It seemed a design or pattern that he should be seeing, if only he looked hard enough.
Something was happening. Something he was a part of and had to see through to the end. Part of Reggie knew that was foolish. He was a kid, and out here in the woods were some sort of animal, police, and a killer. All three dangerous in their own ways.
He shouldn’t be here. He should be back in bed, fast asleep. Or staying up late and playing video games or watching movies with naked women, like other guys his age did.
And yet the stone finger beckoned, spurring him onward.
Westward, the wind in the trees seemed to whisper in a ghostly murmur, adding its opinion to that of the beckoning stone. Westward.
Reggie listened to this persuasive voice, and moving one foot in front of the other, one step at a time, he started walking again, heading in the general direction of the phantom lights.
***
Somewhere in the forest night someone was singing.
The lilting notes were soft and yet unmistakable. The voice rose and fell, rose and fell, so at first Reggie was certain that it wasn’t very far away at all, and then he could only just hear it and thought it must be carried from a vast distance. The song was unknown, the words indistinct, and sometimes it seemed to blend with the nighttime winds so that he couldn’t tell what was nature and what was human.
Whether man or woman, that too he couldn’t figure. In the snippets he caught as the voice rose, it seemed deep enough for a man, yet gentle enough for a woman. There came to his mind a scene of an old man on a porch front, rocking in an old rickety chair, bellowing notes as the day crawled by. He also saw an old spinster before a strong hearth fire, humming away the endless days.
The direction was indeterminate as well. The voice seemed to come from all directions and nowhere in particular at the same time. He tried standing still, cocking his head this way and that to pinpoint the source, with no luck.
Again there was the sense of something he should be seeing, understanding. The dead, dog and human; the stalking beast; the beckoning stone; the dancing lights; the ghostly singer; all seemed not merely random and separate events on a nondescript Arizona night. Surrounded by shadows and the whisper of the woods, it was easy to think something might be watching him. Unseen, standing just outside his view, this presence was watching, weighing things, and awaiting an outcome.
Waiting on Reggie.
And then the singing stopped. One last note, words heard yet not understood, carried to one last crescendo and then cut off. Ended as quickly as it had begun, leaving Reggie straining to hear nothing. He waited for a time, in case it should start up again.
When it didn’t, he kept on walking.
***
By his watch Reggie had been walking hardly an hour since leaving home, when he stopped to sit and rest. He slung the backpack off his shoulders and unzipped it. Pulling out one of the bottles of water, he uncapped it, took a couple swallows, and put it back. He sat with his back against a pine, the flashlight between his feet lighting the ground in front of him.
Not for the first time, he thought about turning around and going home. He wondered what he was doing out here in the first place. He wondered why it bothered him so much that Ivan had left. In the dark and silence, he wondered many things, each thought brief and fleeting before being replaced by another.
What would his mom think when she woke and found him gone? What if, while looking for him, she wandered over to the tree house, went up the ladder, and saw all the blood? Would she think something had happened to him? Would she call the police? Once contacted, would the police have some way of knowing that one of their own had been by the house earlier? What then?
Much of what had happened in the past couple days came whirling back to Reggie in a torrent of confusion. The appearance of the killer out of the woods. The fight with Johnny Witte. His mom slapping him. Holding Ivan’s gun, squeezing the trigger, and watching the bottles disappear. Kneeling before his dad’s gravestone. So many images, sounds, smells, fighting for centre stage in his mind.
All Reggie knew for certain was that when he’d climbed the tree house earlier in the day and had seen it empty, he’d also felt empty.
Something had been happening between him and the killer. What it was, he wasn’t sure. They’d both said they were friends, and Reggie thought they were, to a degree. But that wasn’t all there was to it.
Reggie knew that like himself, Ivan hadn’t spoken to anyone about anything important in a long time. What the man did for a living didn’t give him the luxury of friends. Then they’d come upon each other, talked of things, and it had felt right. They’d listened to each other and there was no judgement, no condemnation.
The times Reggie and his mom had spoken about things since his father’s death there’d been a hesitancy, an underlying worry about what could be said. What would she think if he said what was really on his mind? And no doubt she’d held back as well, reluctant to give voice to the quiet, insistent murmurings in her own head.
Certain thoughts just weren’t supposed to be spoken aloud.
But that’s not how it’d been between Reggie and Ivan.
They’d said anything and everything that came to mind. The other had listened and there’d been an exchange of things beyond words and thoughts. That was it, Reggie thought. That sounded right. The two of them had made an exchange, bartering like patrons at a market.
But unlike the mall or a grocery store, there’d been no credit cards or receipts passing from one to the other as a register beeped and tallied their trade. Instead, it was something intangible, unseen, but wholly necessary despite its ethereal nature.
Then Ivan had left.
And all Reggie knew was that it wasn’t done yet, this thing between them. He had to go after his friend, the killer. There was something else yet to be done, and if it wasn’t done there’d be an incompleteness, an unfinished part of him that he’d carry forever.
Much like the hole in him his dad had left.
He didn’t know if he could live with two of those holes. Gnawing on the inside of him, ready to swallow him entirely. So he’d followed Ivan into this other world of deep forest and deeper night. But he was small and it was large, and Reggie felt inadequate and terrified by his smallness.
He’d undertaken something too big for himself.
He was in the unknown. All was mystery. He didn’t know what lay ahead.
At home, in his dull pain, he’d known what each day held.
Now it was all new, and it was frightening.
He got up and looked through the canopy of trees above him. The stone finger blocked out some of the stars, defining itself against the further blackness. It beckoned, and Reggie followed.
He saw the campfire from a distance. He heard the singing coming from it. He approached with caution, each step slow and deliberate. As he drew closer, he could discern three shapes around it. The red and orange tongues of the flames lit the faces but nothing else, so that there seemed disembodied heads afloat and singing. Perhaps of previous lives and old regrets.
He crawled to the edge of the light, peering in from the darkness.
The figures were bundled in coats or blankets or both, mummy-wrapped for warmth. Their singing was slow and deep and melodic. Reggie had never heard the tune, wasn’t sure he could repeat it, but he liked it. He smelled coffee and cocoa and felt the heat of the fire. It crackled and made little sounds like sharp handclaps.
He inched closer, stopping behind a pine and bush.
One of the figures raised a hand and the singing stopped.
‘Come on out,’ it called in a man’s voice. ‘We can hear you out there.’
Reggie froze. His heart skipped a beat. He thought about running. He thought about staying still. Maybe they were bluffing. Maybe they’d heard something else, not him.
‘You, behind the tree,’ the man said. ‘Come on out.’
Which left only two options: run, or go to them.
He thought about vagrants, the squatters his mom had warned him about. He thought about child raping hillbillies. He thought about backwoodsmen, grizzled, gruff, half savage. He thought about hunters, maybe not hunting deer but something else.
These were all shitty options, and he knew it would be best to avoid them all. And the best way to do that was to avoid people until he got to where he was going. Until he got to Ivan.
Yet his goal was beyond them. He had to pass through or around their camp to continue on his way. Or he could turn around.
Which wasn’t really an option at all.
Reggie got up, dusted himself off, and strode into the firelight.
The three spectral heads turned to watch him, their attached bodies coalescing out of the night as he drew closer to the light of the camp, but none of them rose. The one that had spoken gestured to an open spot near the fire, across from them, and Reggie took it. He sat down cross-legged and felt like an Indian in a sweat lodge, maybe, starting a vision quest. He saw the tent behind them, like a little black pyramid in the night, the front flap open and waving a bit, a come-hither motion, and Reggie thought about being dragged in there, stripped, violated.
The three men sat side by side across from him, the fire between them, like a shadowy tribunal. What he was being judged for he didn’t know, but the judgment – and the sentence to be carried – were nightmarish possibilities in his imagination.
‘You’re kind of young to be out here alone,’ said the one on the left, even in his bundle of blankets slightly smaller than the other two.
‘Maybe we ought to call his parents,’ said the one on the right, wide and large. ‘Or take him home.’
‘I think he’s just old enough to make his own decisions,’ said the one in the middle, the one who’d called him out from behind the tree. ‘Isn’t that right?’ he asked, directing the question at Reggie.
Reggie didn’t answer. He thought about the butcher’s knife in his backpack. He both wanted to hold it, and yet thought it entirely inadequate if these three should turn out to be the redneck child rapists his mom had warned him about.
‘What’re you doing out here?’ asked the small one, his face blurry over and through the fire. Through the distortion of the fire, he could have been a demon shaping a human face over its true hellish visage.
‘What are you doing out here?’ Reggie asked, knowing he shouldn’t be talking to adults like that. Especially if they were inbred adults anxious for molestation.
‘We’re camping,’ said the large one. His voice was deeper than the other two, and his lips smacked with certain consonants, so that he seemed hungry and slavering. Reggie thought again about the tent and being dragged in there, but instead of rape this time he thought of cannibals.
‘I’m camping too,’ Reggie said.
‘Where’s your family?’ asked the one in the middle, his voice rich and smooth, so that Reggie knew this had been the singer whose song had drifted ghost-like through the woods.
‘They’re back a ways,’ he said with a nod of his head, indicating where he’d come from. The lie was weak even to his own ears.
‘Won’t they be worried if they find you gone?’ said the singer.
Reggie didn’t respond.
‘Where are you really going?’ the singer prodded, his tone insistent yet not unfriendly. He reminded Reggie of a long-suffering teacher at school, pressing a student for the truth about the spitball that had just smacked the blackboard.
Reggie still didn’t say anything. He wasn’t a good liar, and thought it better to keep his mouth shut.
‘There’s animals out there,’ said the smaller one. ‘Mountain lions. Rattlers. It’s dangerous being out here alone. Never know what might find you.’
Reggie thought about the beast that pushed through the forest. The deep rumble of its low roar. The firm slaps of its footfalls.
‘People can get hurt out here,’ said the large one.
Reggie thought about the man at the bottom of the cliff. The hound strung up and slashed ribbon-like.
‘We really shouldn’t let you wander about,’ said the one in the middle, the singer, who only moments ago had said Reggie seemed old enough to make his own decisions. ‘We’re out here hunting someone,’ he added, this second statement not seeming to logically follow the first, and yet somehow it did at the same time. ‘There’s someone dangerous out there,’ he said, and turned his head a little each way, as if listening for that dangerous somebody.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ said the smaller one. ‘It’s been in the paper and on the local stations. There’s a criminal out here. Escaped from the police. Real dangerous sort. Killed lots of people.’
Reggie’s heart beat faster. He thought they must be able to hear it, how fast it slammed against his chest.
‘The police are strapped for manpower out here,’ said the larger, hungry man. ‘We’re doing our civic duty, helping out.’
‘Plus there’s a reward,’ said the singer, ‘for any information leading to his arrest.’
A posse, Reggie thought. He’d seen enough westerns to know how that turned out, when a group of vigilantes went out in search of the outlaw. Usually lots of bullets and bodies were involved.
He wanted away from these men. But he didn’t know how to do so without raising their suspicion. He didn’t know if they’d even let him leave.
‘You haven’t seen anything strange?’ the middle one asked, leaning a bit towards the fire, towards Reggie. The man had a bushy mustache that wriggled like a live thing when he spoke.
Reggie shook his head.
‘No strangers around town?’ he asked, mustache quivering caterpillar-like.
Reggie shook his head.
‘No one acting suspicious?’ he pressed.
Reggie shook no again.
The man leaned back. He took a deep breath, the sound of it going in and blowing out like a dying wind.
‘We really should get you back to your family,’ he said. ‘Would you like some hot chocolate?’ the man asked, gesturing with a pale hand appearing out of his blanket at the pot over the fire.
Reggie nodded, though there was nothing he wanted less than to drink anything from these three. He thought of poison, or some drug that would knock him out, and waking up in the trunk of a car or in a shallow grave, buried alive.
The smaller posse member leaned forward, used tongs to take the pot from the fire, and produced a mug. The splash and swirl of the liquid into the mug could be heard, like the current of a small stream. He stood and leaned around the fire to offer Reggie the mug.
Reggie had the urge to flee from the nearness of the man, but fought it down. He took the mug and held it on his knee. They all looked at him over the fire, and he slowly lifted the mug and took a sip. It was hot and delicious.
He waited to feel weak and dizzy. He waited for his limbs to slacken and grow heavy. He waited for his vision to go blurry. Nothing happened and after several seconds he took another sip, and another.
‘Thank you,’ he muttered.
‘Maybe you should stay the night,’ said the one in the middle. ‘And bright and early we’ll walk you back to your family.’
Reggie had no way to answer that to save his lie. He had only the truth, and he thought that might work for now.
‘I’m out here alone,’ he told them. ‘I live a couple miles back that way,’ he said, gesturing again behind him with a nod of his head. ‘I’m looking for the killer too.’
Across from him, the spectral heads nodded knowingly.
‘The reward?’ the middle one asked.
Reggie nodded, suddenly finding that a bending of the truth was the easiest of lies.
‘Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money,’ the man said, still nodding his head. ‘How’d you plan on taking him back if you find him?’
Reggie slung his backpack off and unzipped it. He reached inside and pulled out the butcher’s knife. He knew for such a task it looked pathetic, something a child would think of. An assessment he now counted on.
‘Your heart’s in the right place,’ said the fattest of the camping trio. ‘But you’d need something a bit more than that to get a cold-blooded killer to go back with you.’
‘That’s why we brought these,’ his smaller companion said, and as deftly as he’d produced the mug from his bundled form, he brought out a shotgun from behind him. The weapon was large and sparkled darkly in the night.
‘If he’s out here,’ said the singing man, ‘we aim to find him.’
Reggie put the knife away, set his backpack aside.
‘It’s a task for adults,’ said the singer, ‘not for children, however brave they might be. Do you understand me?’
‘I’m not a kid,’ Reggie said, feeling like a kid for having to say that. ‘I’m almost fifteen.’
But he nodded. He was still looking at the smaller man’s shotgun, held across his lap. He took another swallow of the hot cocoa and looked back at the fire.
‘We have an extra sleeping bag,’ said the singer. ‘Sleep here tonight and tomorrow morning we’ll walk you home. You’re not afraid of the dark, are you? It can get pretty dark out here. Especially when the fire goes out.’
Reggie shook his head, but as he finished his hot chocolate and spread out the offered sleeping bag, he looked cautiously at the edge of the woods around the clearing. He thought of the beast out there, roaming around in the shadows, perhaps even circling them. Wondered if he should tell the three-man posse about it.
Instead, crawling into the sleeping bag and stretching out, he pretended to sleep, his mind’s eye on the shotgun and what he could do with it.