The footprints and drag marks led to a small barn that sat off to one side of the house, across a snow-covered pasture. I turned and looked down the way we’d come. Two tiny lights were all I could see of Uncle Thordy’s farm.
“We better keep quiet,” Michael said, looking around, the axe in his hand.
“And out of sight,” I added, switching off the flashlight. The moon cast a silvery glint over everything. Michael led. I followed silently behind him, keeping a good, strong grip on the spear.
The barn seemed even older than Uncle Thordy’s, a low, flat building with a door in the center, barely big enough to fit a horse through. One side of the building was partially collapsed. We passed through a broken wooden fence and stopped. The barn shifted, making it creak like it was on the edge of collapse.
“The tracks go in here,” Michael said and slowly pulled the door open. We stood back for a moment, not wanting to enter the pitch blackness. I flicked on the flashlight, checked as far as I could see, and took the first step inside.
The place was empty. I took another cautious step and Michael followed me in.
The air smelled old, musty. The straw on the floor had turned gray with age. I swept the flashlight around, lighting up different corners of the barn. A large roof beam had collapsed, so the ceiling at the far side of the barn sagged nearly to the floor. The remains of a stall stuck out of one wall. At one time it might have held a cow, but there was no sign of any animals anymore.
Nothing had been kept in here for years. I swung the light around again. My cheeks tingled and I worried it might be frostbite.
“Where is he?” Michael whispered.
Then my light caught a gray cloth lying in the far corner. “Michael, what’s that?”
We ran to it, ducking under the roof beam. It was another piece of Mordur’s sweater. Beside it, opened like someone had been interrupted having lunch, were three cloth bags, each bursting with livers and hearts, laid out like a sacrifice.
“Do they ever stink,” Michael said, holding his hand over his nose. “You could smell them from a mile away.”
“Uhhhn,” someone moaned. “Whazzhapp—”
Above us, the beams creaked. Slowly we raised our heads.