CHAPTER 12

Not even human. Tiny, ancient. Both ears perfectly round and cupped, sticking straight out from the sides of its head like two halves of a china teacup. Large black eyes, a bulblike forehead, chinless — spying in on Lyon with an idiot’s grin.

Nature is supposed to prevent something like that from being born. When something that monstrous forms in the womb, nature is supposed to ensure it is aborted before it can be carried to term. What Lyon saw at the kitchen window — something like that is not supposed to live.

After he gets over the initial shock, Lyon scrambles to his feet, stumbling backward, reversing so hard into the kitchen stove that it rears up on its back two legs, Lyon’s eyes flashed open and his heart full of such terror that it feels as if it’s trying to escape his chest, having already crawled up into the base of his throat, cowering there as it pounds out its fear.

Lyon wishes he had a gun. Yes, this New York liberal who has broadcast commentaries in support of restrictions on the purchase and ownership of handguns, now he wants a big ugly pistol in his hand — or an automatic assault rifle, something that fires the most powerful and deadly projectiles ever manufactured, and Lyon wouldn’t care if the weapon was unregistered, stolen, serial number filed off, used in heinous crimes, inappropriate for hunting, the more of a man-killer the better. He would sign a lifetime membership to the NRA and appear in their magazine ads and tithe to them ten percent of his income, do anything right now to have in his hand a big goddamn loaded gun.

Unarmed, he waits for that face to appear again in the window. Maybe it’s Quinndell.

No, that face does not belong to a doctor, not even one who butchers babies.

It’s the hunter, that little man Lyon caught in his headlights, the one holding the rifle — which means that the dog is out there with him.

Lyon waits.

Nothing happens, no face at the window, no sound from the porch, nothing.

He picks up a sturdy wooden kitchen chair and advances carefully toward the door, trying to convince himself he shouldn’t be afraid of someone so small. Lyon himself is six one, two hundred pounds, though nearly twenty of those pounds is carried in a gut he’s put on in the past five years. Still, he is broad-shouldered and strong, has been since high school, a man whose size and strength has always made him confident around other men, unintimidated. I’m twice the size of that little creature out there, he tells himself.

Except he’s got a gun and a dog.

But Lyon has to do something, he can’t simply wait for the creature to keep popping up at windows.

Holding the chair in front of him, Lyon makes his way to the door. He looks out into the clearing in front of the cabin and, yes, there it is, standing a hundred feet from the cabin, just standing there looking back at Lyon. No gun, no dog.

“What do you want!” Lyon hollers through the door. “What’re you doing here!”

No response.

He’s retarded, Lyon decides. Just some local retard who gets his jollies peeping in windows.

Lyon unlocks and opens the door. “Hey there, listen to me! I want you off this property!”

Illuminated eerily by moonlight, the little figure stands unmoving like a statue from a horror film, awaiting animation.

Bringing the chair with him, Lyon steps out onto the porch. “All right, if you don’t leave I’m going to come out there and break this fucking chair over your head!”

Back across the clearing comes a tiny but resolute voice, “I tink not.”

Lyon is trying to figure out what the hell that means when he once again senses eyes on him. Looking down he sees that the dog — huge, black — has been sitting there the entire time, right here on the porch, just to the other side of the door, sitting and looking at him.

It’s the same dog that was up at the car window, staring at Lyon the way it’s staring at him now, a steady and urgent stare, waiting for something, for a response from Lyon, for an answer to some question those dark almond eyes are asking.

Lyon eases the chair between himself and the dog, although the chair affords little comfort because the dog — some kind of cross between wolf and German shepherd and hound from hell — looks as if it could easily rip the chair apart and then turn those jaws on Lyon. The horror he feels is not only that the dog will kill him but that it will actually consume his flesh.

In his peripheral vision, Lyon sees the little man moving, turning from the cabin and heading for the woods at the edge of the clearing.

“Hey, what about your —”

But Lyon is interrupted by a low, rumbling growl that seems to vibrate the porch’s floorboards. And when Lyon finally manages a quick glance at the clearing, he sees that the little man is already gone.

Now what?

Lyon takes one hand off the chair, reaching around behind him to find the door handle, opening the door, easing backward into the cabin — and all this time the dog doesn’t move, doesn’t avert its eyes from Lyon’s. No one, not mother or lover, has ever looked at Lyon with such intensity, such intimacy: no one has ever looked at him as a meal.

Once inside the cabin, the door locked behind him, Lyon turns into the kitchen to confront another horror, to see in the soft yellow light of the kerosene lamp that the woman’s right hand, which he had uncuffed, has moved, her right arm lying now completely across her bare stomach, her fingertips grasping the leather restraint that still holds her other wrist. Although the woman is rigidly still, is once again comatose, it’s obvious what she was trying to do, trying to escape.