32

GETTING TIME OFF FROM his university job would not be a problem. Ken Dye simply emailed the department head with his request for a leave of absence due to a personal emergency and that was that. He wasn’t particularly concerned about who the university would find to teach his classes. He knew the school didn’t care about his work, and most of his students probably didn’t give a damn either; it’s not like anyone was majoring in the stuff he taught. Most people treated it like a bad joke.

He threw some clean clothes into a bag which he then tossed into the back seat of his car. Ken figured he would be in Paskagankee for less than a week, probably a lot less if his theory about what was happening up there was correct. He turned his thermostat down to fifty—no point wasting energy, but he didn’t want his pipes to freeze, either—and then sat down at the kitchen table with a pen and a couple of sheets of plain lined paper.

An hour later, Professor Dye carefully folded the letter he had written, slid it into an envelope, addressed it, and placed it on the table. He felt wrung out, exhausted, like he was getting over a bad case of the flu, after putting his words down on paper. He shrugged into his heaviest winter coat, then locked up the little house and walked carefully to his car through the ice and the now rapidly mounting snow for the trip to Paskagankee.

He felt like a man going to the gallows.