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hardyimagines · 6 years ago

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Part 5 — Agreement

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This is a wild one but can you do an arranged marriage au with Alfie??? The reader doesn’t really like him at all and she’s suuuuupppeerrr scared of him (cause he’s ya know, a violent gangster). I think it would be nice for the reader to not like him and you can build on them actually falling in love with each other over a period of time? — @wowjeena

Warnings: LITTLE BIT OF SEX

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

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The sky above was bright blue with white clouds drifting past. The sun was blinding and beaming, heating the girl’s skin as she stood beneath its heavy rays. It may have been beautiful outside, but it was still freezing. The sun’s rays felt like a blanket, embracing her as she waited for the yapping dog in the yard to go to the bathroom. Pip, that was his name, had been walking around the grass for the last ten minutes, searching for a place to use the restroom. The girl on the porch had lost her impatience long ago, probably around the time when she’d lost all feeling in her, now, numb feet. “Pip, come on!” She begged softly under her breath, watching intently as the little white animal finally began to sniff in a circle. He halted, squatted, and finally went to the bathroom. A small grin crossed her face as the little mutt instantly darted back toward the warm house. Dipping between her parted legs, he continued to bark as his wet paws slid along the glossy floor.

Cyril lifted his head from the food bowl that was on the floor in front of him at the annoying intrusion. The bits of food he was chomping on were ground down to nothing but mush until he leaned over to gobble down some more. A low growl left the back of the mastiff’s throat as the much smaller pup attempted to take some of Alfie’s pup’s food. “No, pip.” The girl warned quietly, but she made no movement to pick him up. What if he lashed out angrily and started trying to bite her because she pulled him away from the food. It was one thing to open the door and let the animal go to the bathroom, but it was another to pick him up and baby him so that he didn’t eat any of Cyril’s food.

Nobody else was awake yet and as her cold feet moved along the floorboards so she could get another bowl and fill it with some food as well, she hoped someone else would wake in the next five seconds. She really didn’t want him to accidentally get ahold of her finger instead. It was wishful thinking though, to hope someone would come into the kitchen right now. The creaky cabinet opened with a soft tug. She moved several boxes around in hopes of finding some special brand of dog food but there was nothing in sight. She squinted slightly before directing her eyes to Cyril’s bag of dog food. Pip would just have to settle for the cheap stuff. The girl pinched the bag before prying it open and dumping some of the bits into a hole. Pip yelped excitedly before running toward her, tongue flopping out of the side of his mouth, to get to the food. It was unexpected and startled the girl so, by reflex, she dropped the bag and the food scattered along the tile. “Shit-“

In the corner of the room, a soft snort of amusement could be heard, followed by a gruff noise of disapproval. The girl turned sharply in surprise, once more, expecting to find her father stood there, but it was Alfie. His hand was pressed against the countertop as he eyed the scene. “That’s a fucking mess if ive ever seen one.” He muttered, ushering toward the floor where Pip and Cyril were practically fighting to eat more than the other. “Better get them away, yeah, or those fucking dogs are gonna have the worst stomach aches, aren’t they?” He stepped forward and pressed his hand gently against the middle of her back, to nudge her toward the mess. “Go on, dove.” She refused. “Alfie, I can’t.” Her hands smoothly lifted and pressed against his tight chest. Nudging him back gently, she whimpered. “Pip could bite me.. he’s hungry, just wait until he’s finished.”

Alfie sent a look of disbelief toward the girl. Pip, the little rat dog that was walking beneath Cyril to gather more of the food than his little body could hold, was small enough to fit in Alfie’s hand. “That thing there, yeah, is a fucking seed compared to Cyril.” He squinted. “If you, right, can look after a mastiff and sleep in the same bed as one, then you, right, you can approach a little pup like that.” His hand fell away from her back, grazing the length of the silky nightgown before he stepped around her. She watched as he leaned over and smoothly hoisted up the heavy bag of dog food. He set the oversized plastic on the countertop before then hunching over to lift pip. His belly was swollen and he made little whining noises under his breath. “See, now he’s fucking stuffed.”

Cyril, on the other hand, knew better. The mutt was laid on the floor with his paws stretched out and his head resting on the floor. He knew what his limit was and he didn’t push it. The girl lowered herself down on the floor to begin cleaning up the leftover food, but Alfie smoothly hunched over. “No, no, no, get up, right, come here.” A small frown stained her lips and her brows were drawn together in an expression of confusion as she looked toward the man. “Alfie, if I don’t clean up, my parents will get mad at me-“ His hand lifted to her shoulder. “Come here.” He instructed once more, silencing her. The confusion on her face deepened further, but she stepped toward him again, their bodies nearly brushing. He held pip in one arm, his thumb gliding along the puppy’s face and his other hand stroked the bone of her shoulder. He didn’t want to see her on her hands and knees cleaning, Cyril would eventually lick it up.

Extending his arm to give Pip to the girl, he felt her stiffen tensely beneath his touch, but his hand moved around to her back, holding her in place. “Hang on, look, right, he’s not going to hurt you, pet, just like Cyril didn’t.” She squinted. “That one dog did though. You can’t compare every animal I see to your dog, Alfie, he’s well-behaved.” She set her hands on her hips before swallowing tightly when she looked to the white dog in Alfie’s arms. Yes, he was cute. Yes, he made her heart feel full and heavy because she instantly fell in love, but she didn’t want to touch him. Distancing a little bit, the baker slowly hunched over and set the dog on the ground, watching as he immediately curled up. He wouldn’t force his wife to pet Pip, but he didn’t want her to be afraid of every mutt out there. Alfie smiled fondly toward the dog before lifting his gaze to his wife. “Right then, I’m not going to force you to, I just thought it would help.” She shifted slowly. “I appreciate you, I really do.. but it’s hard for me. I don’t want to pet dogs, I can’t tell how they’re feeling or if they’re ready to maul me.” The girl began to turn away, but when Alfie took hold of her hand and spun her back toward him, she melted beneath his gaze. His knuckles lifted to her jaw, lazily tracing her warm skin before he leaned in and brushed his nose against her own. “Right, pet, you can just fucking pet Cyril, mh?” The touch was foreign as he rubbed her jaw, but it was very welcomed. She’d kissed him goodnight, so now it was only fair for him to kiss her goodmorning.

The moment was ruined though at the sound of the girl’s mother, complaining under her breath about the stench of dog food and the lack of already-made coffee. Agnes didn’t know her daughter was here because Edgar hadn’t mentioned it, so when she turned the corner in her robe, mumbling under her breath in disapproval, she gasped loudly at the sight of Y/N, pressed against Alfie. “What on earth-“ Agnes whispered before directing her gaze to the pebbles of food and then the large mutt sprawled out on his back. “Y/N?” She stuttered to get the name out. “What are you doing here?” She ushered toward the dog. “And what’s that thing!?” Cyril, in comparison to Pip, was a beast. The girl withdrew herself slowly from Alfie’s arms, her lips burning from want. All she’d felt was his hot breaths wafting over her lips. Whimpering at the loss of the kiss that had almost happened, she looked toward her mother in confusion. “That’s Cyril, our dog.” Agnes lifted her gaze to the child.

“What’s he doing rolling around on my floor! He sheds, look at the filth!” She cried out, hurriedly moving toward the pantry in the corner to retrieve some sort of something to clean up the dog hair that was spreading. Her daughter rolled her eyes briefly before moving toward Cyril. “Come here.” The girl cooed before pointing toward the space beside Alfie’s knees. “Go, sit.” Y/N instructed. Agnes grumbled in disappointment before moving around the table. “Why is there dog food all over the place- why haven’t you cleaned it up?”

Alfie was growing rather agitated by the neverending questions. He noted the way his wife stepped forward to help, but his fingers circled her arm, dragging her back and into his chest. Agnes was perfectly capable of cleaning up the accident and he wasn’t going to stand around and watch his girl do it all. His fingers ran along her side, rubbing it lazily before he decided to speak up. “We were in a bit of fucking trouble last night, yeah, needed a fucking place to say and Edgar was kind enough to point us to a room. And I told her not to clean up that fucking stuff, right, yeah I did, because it was an accident, innit, yeah Agnes looked at Alfie beneath her lengthy eyelashes, studying him briefly before she resumed her task of cleaning. “Trouble?” The woman spoke up, as if asking for clarification. Alfie wouldn’t give her any. “To put it simply.” He nodded before looking down at his wife again. “But, we don’t want to be a bother, so we’ll be on our way.” The man leaned over to ruffle Cyril’s head before grunting. “Outside.” He ordered the mutt, smirking to himself when the animal rushed off.

Agnes stood. “Oh, you don’t have to go.” She tried. “I mean, you can if you’d like, but don’t feel pressured to.” She whispered, studying the man. Alfie grumbled lowly. Seeing this woman face to face and knowing that she used her daughter as a way to make money made him sick. He really was tempted to knock some sense into her, but he remained still, expression calm. Had they not scammed him, he wouldn’t have married a girl perfectly fit for him. “We do, actually, I’ve got business to tend to.” Alfie muttered. “We just needed a place to stay the night. Edgar helped us, now we’ll go.” Before Agnes could say much else, Alfie moved around the white table in the center of the room, heading directly past Agnes without so much as a farewell. His wife clutched on to his sleeve, not falling behind even a little bit. She kept up with his quick stride, allowing him to lead her out of the house and toward the vehicle. Cyril was sitting beside the back door, waiting for it to be opened so he could climb in.

“Alfie?” The girl spoke up when they were alone outside. She stared at his expression, lips twitching as the man yanked the back door open to let the pup into the car. “Alfie?” She tried again. Why did he look so upset? The man shot a look toward the girl, one of warning. “Get in the car.” He said firmly before lifting himself into the driver seat. She scrambled into the passenger side before tilting her head when he cranked the car and pulled out of the driveway. The wheels on the car rode over the gravel before meeting the smooth pavement. She studied him. His brows were furrowed in a hard stare and his hands were tapping against the steering wheel. “What’s wrong?” She whispered quietly, afraid to be at the other end of his anger. She’d seen him lash out before on workers and she really didn’t want to be on the receiving end.

He didn’t even look toward her when she spoke so she clenched her jaw. Reaching over, she gripped his arm. “Alfie?” The muscles in his jaw clenched. It was visible, even beneath the hair that blanketed his skin. She sighed in annoyance when she was once again ignored. “Bastard.” His lips twitched at the insult. Licking his lips, he turned down an unfamiliar road and stopped the car. The girl studied their surroundings before slowly looking toward her husband. He finally turned his head so his emotion infested eyes could study her own. “Do you want this?” He whispered.

A little ball of concern welled up inside her stomach. Studying him with a raised brow, her eyes ran over his features. “Want what?” She whispered, searching for clarification. “This- this marriage.” He looked away then. His words sounded so.. soft. He moved his stare to the straight road ahead before he relaxed. The muscles in his jaw unclenched and his broad shoulders slouched. “Do you want to be married to me?” He asked again. The question took her by immediate surprise. How was she meant to answer that. A week ago, she would’ve said no. No, no, no, and no. But now, as she looked at him, she found that there would definitely be a hole in her heart if she ever lost him. The girl swallowed quietly before moving her hand to the back of her neck. “Alfie, I...” the man silenced her with a mere look. It was a yes or no question, not a detailed answer. “Right, I just need a fucking yes or no.” He uttered.

The car engine was turned off as he rotated in the seat to face her. “Your parents, right, they forced me on you. I should’ve backed off the second I found out, right, I fucking should’ve, but I didn’t.” She studied him as he spoke, watching the way he lifted his fingers so he could mess with his facial hair. “And what?” She asked softly. “Now you’ve changed your mind about wanting to be with me?” The little nerves in her stomach seemed to triple and then spread, as she asked the question, attacking every muscle and bone in her body, weakening her. A throaty chuckle escaped the man’s throat, his stomach rumbling with his laughter as he shook his head in disbelief. “No, pet.” He stated simply before continuing. “The opposite. I, right, I’m falling for you and I want to give you the fucking chance to get out before this ends up being.. too serious. Right, I’ve never had my fucking heartbroken and I don’t ever intend to.” He whispered almost inaudibly. “So this is your way out.”

Her heartbeat was drumming so wildly and loudly, she felt as if she were losing the ability to hear anything else. Alfie Solomons was offering her a way out because he didn’t want to fall in love and then have his heart broken. She’d never do that to him though. Staring at him, so bare and vulnerable, she saw the real Alfie in that moment. In the beginning, yes, she would’ve leaped for the door the second he offered her a way out, but now she knew him. She understood him, maybe not fully, but for the most part. Her small hand lifted to fist in the front of his shirt, fingertips gliding along the cloth before she lifted her other hand to his cheek. It was her turn to instruct him. “Come here.” She whispered breathily, her tone so pleading he couldn’t have said no if he had wanted to. She leaned forward, allowing her forehead to rest against his own as her nose brushed his as well. “I’m not going to ever break your heart, Alfie. So long as you don’t break mine.” Her hand moved to the underside of his chin, cradling it as she lowered her head and pressed her lips against his own. The kiss was soft and slow, neither of them in any rush to deepen it. They really did have plenty of time.

His large hands fell away from the steering wheel so that he could instead cradle her curvy waist. His thumbs traced her hip bones, urging her just a little bit closer. She obliged, though she moved a lot closer. Her leg lifted from the leather seat she was perched on and slid over his lap. She lowered herself down and onto his thighs, situating herself comfortably on top of him. Her mouth was much softer and gentler as it moved against his rougher and quicker one. It was a nice contrast that the pair seemed to enjoy equally. His lips slanted perfectly against her own, kissing, licking, and nipping at her mouth eagerly. She laid her hand on his cheek to slow him down just a little, but before she had the chance, a wave of warmth flooded her and she moaned into his mouth.

She felt at a loss of control when her hips sunk forward and she rubbed herself against him. She was brought back to when he had her on top of his desk, kissing her like he wanted to devour her. And god, she had wanted him to. This was different though, their actions werent spurred by anger, they were slow and initiated solely because of.. well her. She was pushing him to go a little further, but he didn’t do anything until she rubbed herself against him again. Her lips spread upwards, forcing the kiss to break as his mouth was then met with her teeth. He didn’t ask questions when she continued with her little grinds, rubbing herself against him desperately. He had to swallow down several moans and grunts that threatened to leave his lips as she continued with her teasing. Kissing and grinding would only lead to one thing and when she felt the bulge, growing harder and harder by the second, beneath her, she smirked.

Alfie was grateful for the tall buildings, shielding the sun from pouring down on his red cheeks. He couldn’t believe the girl had the bravery to do this in broad daylight, but it only made him like her more. His hand curled around her own and their wedding rings tapped against one another. Within a span of a few seconds, Alfie had rolled the girl over and pressed her back flat against the seat. Kneeling on top of her, his greedy hands moved to her thighs, parting them so he had a nice spot to lay. She was still in her nightgown so the blue fabric slid smoothly out of the way due to her new position. He was dressed. White shirt tucked into his dark brown trousers where a belt hugged his hips. She couldn’t help but smirk at his attire. It would be much more difficult and time consuming for him to rid of his clothing. “Alfie..” Her fingers moved to his chest. Stroking the fastened buttons al the way up to his neck, she undid the top one, freeing a thin amount of skin so she could stroke the curly hairs that poked out of his flesh. “I want you.”

The confidence in her tone and the lust that swam in her gaze made his arms feel weak as he held himself up on top of her. “Not here.” He whispered quietly. He didn’t care about being caught and he didn’t care about being in the car, but he did care that this was the first time the pair of them were going to be intimate and he didn’t want to look back on it and realize how horribly unromantic it was. She deserved a good first time with him. “We’ll go home, yeah, it’ll be much nicer, pet, I promise.” He started to draw back, but the vice she had on his arms halted him. “No, please.. Alfie, this is perfect. I don’t care about going back home.” He stared down at her droopy eyes as she spoke. Licking his lips, his eyes fell away from her to study the alley he had parked in. What if people looked in and saw her. She was his. He’d have to kill someone for ogling his beauty. He rubbed his teeth together before slowly moving his hand to her locks. Stroking them back and out of her face, he nodded gently. “Right, pet, but I’ve got a bad fucking back, so you’ll have to be on top.”

The girls cheeks reddened at his words. He spoke about sex as if it were common, like lunch or a walk in the park. She squirmed beneath him slowly before sitting up so they could switch positions. She’d never been on top before, but she wouldn’t tell him that. Her hand used his shoulder to stablize herself, struggling only briefly to get on top of him. Alfie grumbled lowly, shrugging off his coat so he could rap it around her shoulders. The black material swallowed her whole, but that was good because nobody would get a good view of her. Alfie slumped on his back, hand sliding to her front. He pinched the silky fabric she wore before dragging it up slightly she wasn’t sitting on it. “Right, pet, we can’t exactly fucking strip here, can we?” She flushed once more before moving her hands to his chest. “That’s okay, we‘ll make sure we can next time.” Her fingers pressed into his chest, before her palms joined as well. Nervously moving one of her hands down and to the space in between them, she brushed her pointed finger along his crotch, stroking the bulge that resided there. Alfie wasn’t red anymore. He’d had sex enough times to be confident with every inch of his body. He didn’t really care. If someone found him appealing enough to sleep with him then what was the worry with worrying. Folding his arm beneath his head, his hand slid into her nightgown, thumb grazing her belly. The leather seat clung to her knees as she shifted her weight. Lowering herself down so that she could lift her weight off of him and undo his belt, her mouth skimmed his own. “Were you lying to me before?” He spoke gruffly against her lips. “Lying about what?” She asked almost instantly, fingers smoothly undoing the belt before pushing it to the floor. Her fingers smoothly undid his slacks before she opened the fabric. Alfie hummed softly as she relieved the tight tension caused by the restriction of his trousers. “About having sex.”

She straightened beneath his accusing stare. Shaking her head, she tutted beneath her breath. “As much as I’m sure you’d enjoy taking my virginity, Mr. Solomons, I’m sorry, but I have done this before. Only a few times, so I’m sure you’ll enjoy it more than me, but..” Alfie tilted his head, studying her rosy cheeks and lengthy lashes. “A few times?” He shuffled slowly before speaking again. “With different men?” The girl folded her arms slowly before speaking. “Do you want to screw me or interrogate me?”

The amusement that shone in the man’s eyes made her smile herself. “I’m just curious.” He told her truthfully. His hand snaked up higher and higher beneath her gown, fingers stroking and caressing every inch of her skin. “One man. Three times. I thought I loved him, but he was just using me. The sex didn’t even feel good, I don’t know why I..” She fell silent, lips pursing in thought. “Sorry, forget I said all that, just.. it was just one guy.” Alfie’s eyes darkened as she spoke. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt the sudden urge to absolutely destroy whoever had hurt her. Used her. “That’s alright, pet. Don’t apologize.” The man pushed himself up so he was sitting. “Sex is suppose to feel good, innit. You just fucking picked the wrong person.” Her eyes fell to his chest, studying the curls at the top of his shirt. “And now?” Her eyes lifted to his as she spoke. He tilted his head. His tongue traced his lips before he responded. “Now, I think, right, you’ve picked the right person.”

Her cheeks pushed upwards with her smile and her hands lifted to the sides of his neck, holding him in place. “God, I really hope so.” She whispered. “Strangely enough.. you are the sweetest person I’ve ever met.” Her compliment was enough to make him laugh, but he swallowed it down. He could tell she was being very genuine and despite the fact that he was, in fact, a dangerous gangster, he couldn’t help but focus on the fact that her words were true. How was he the kindest person? He wasn’t kind to begin with. Well.. only to her. The car was quiet then, both of them eyeing the other with a look of hope. They didn’t want to be heartbroken and something told them that they wouldn’t ever have to be. Alfie pulled his hand out from beneath her gown and instead cradled the back of her skull so he could kiss her. This time, the kiss was soft and sweet. There was no lust hanging in the air, it was passion and the beginning of what could only be called love. There was no rush to have sex with him for she realized that they were married and they had all the time in the world. Course, that was foolish thinking, but she was young and naive and it was expected.

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Days passed. Days filled with passionate kisses and deep conversations. They talked about their pasts, revealing secrets to each other that they’d never shared with anyone. Rarely did they spend time apart, even at work. Alfie either wouldn’t let her leave his office or would follow her downstairs to talk her ear off while she tended to the laundry. This was definitely the honeymoon phase. The pair were infatuated with each other, but it didn’t bother anybody.

It was 4 in the afternoon and Alfie was growing more and more tense as the little clock in the corner ticked on, reminding him that no matter how much he hoped to get work done, it wasn’t going to do itself and he definitely had a deadline. His finger lazily messed with the ring on his left hand before he sighed, unable to focus on the work that needed to be completed because he wanted to go downstairs and see his girl. His jaw popped as he opened his mouth before leaning back in his seat to stretch. Just as he was about to stand to go check on the girl, the door opened and she piled into the room. A line of dirt stained her cheek and her dress was filthy. Her hands were no better but when she smiled at him, his attention was focused solely on that. It was so vibrant and heart-warming. He looked away. He wasn’t sure when he had become this loving teddy bear, but he really didn’t like it. He felt so weak.

“Alfie?” The girl spoke up when she was ignored. Laying her hands on her hips, she studied the man in front of her. Nothing had escalated between them apart from the amount of times they kissed a day. The man’s eyes seemed to realize that he was being spoken to though he still hadn’t heard her call his name. “Mh?” He looked to her. “Fucking hell, sorry, pet, my brain, yeah, it’s a bit all over the place today, innit, what’d you say?” The man rose up from his seat before moving around the cluttered desk so he could be closer to you. His arms folded over his chest and when the thin white shirt he wore revealed the muscles that flexed beneath, she lost her train of thought for a moment. Forcing an innocent smile, she looked up to him. “I was coming to see if we could leave a little early today? Go home.. have some dinner?” The question was hesitant and he could feel it radiating off of her. His arms fell from their position across his chest to instead plant into the desk as he leaned back against it. “No more washing to do?” He grunted. The girl smiled in amusement. “No, I finished the laundry a while ago... if you have work to do, Alfie, it’s fine, but could I go ahead and go home? I need a bath and I’m so tired.”

The bearded bloke studied her with an expressionless stare. Though nobody else could read the emotions that floated in his gaze, she sure as hell could. Moving toward him, her hands lifted to his chest, resting there. Alfie swallowed thickly. Imagining the girl at home in the bath while he was stuck at work was not something that sat well with him. “I-“ He stood. “No, pet, I can come home with you, that’s alright. But for future reference you, right, you don’t need to fucking ask me if you can leave.” He planted a kiss to her forehead before moving his hand to her lower back. Reaching over his desk, he grasped a white folded before lifting his coat as well. Folding it over his forearm, he smoothly cleaned the clutter of his desk by pushing it into the top drawer and twisting the lock. Leading the girl out of his office and down the stairs, he looked toward Ollie who was doing all the locking up. “My office too, lad, don’t have the key on me.” Ollie sent a short nod toward Alfie before bidding the couple goodnight as he scurried off to lock the remaining doors. Only one door would be left untouched so the remaining workers would have a way to exit as well in a few hours.

Alfie’s arm hooked around his wife, holding her close to him as the harsh wind did its best to embrace her instead. The walk home went by quickly, but only because Alfie was teasing her about how much of a mess she’d made by doing laundry. She scoffed at the very thought. “This is from fixing your oven. The bakery was unable to run.” She looked up at him and he looked down at her, a glint of pride in his eyes. He leaned down and she leaned up, meeting him in the middle for a soft kiss. She knew that was his way of thanking her. After two more kisses and a slap on her bum, the couple arrived back to their home. She twisted the knob and pushed them thing open, stepping into the warmth. “Pet, you’ve got to start locking this fucking thing, right, remember what happened last time?” The girl arched a brow before turning to face him. “Actually, Alfie, That was your fault. You didn’t lock it when you left.” Alfie pursed his lips at your words before tossing his coat on to the back of the sofa and squinting to remember. He bit his cheek before nodding. “Still,” he lifted a finger. “we both need to remember to lock it then.”

The man stared down at the girl as she began to back up, her fingers slowly lifting to the buttons on her dress. “Yes sir.” She hmphed before turning on her heel. “I’m going to run a bath, so,” she looked over her shoulder as she began to climb the stairs. “Are you coming?” The cocky smile she wore on her lips was enough of an answer. She knew he was. Her footsteps moved a little quicker when he began to step forward and it suddenly felt like a race to get to the bathroom. The girl nudged the door open with her arm before stepping into the cold room. Leaning over so she could fill the tub with the hot water, her fingers returned to their initial position on her dress. When Alfie practically busted through the door, his shirt was halfway undone, both of them close to ridding of their first item of clothing. They did so simultaneously. Slinging her dress to the floor as he tossed his shirt, he got to work on his trousers and she busied herself with removing her undergarments.

The cold air licked at her naked form the second that she stood bare. Alfie followed directly behind her, goosebumps spreading along his skin. He leaned over the tub, hand curling around the faucet so he could turn it off when it was full. “Come on, pet.” The man lifted his leg over the tub so he could step into the water. She followed after him obediently, eager to be submerged. He lowered himself down first so that she could sit in front of him and lean back against him. Their bodies molded together perfectly and within seconds they were both much calmer. His hands laced around her own. Stroking them slowly as he cradled her. It was quiet, apart from the few droplets that fell from the faucet and splashed in the tub. “Alfie.” The girl hummed softly as she adjusted the position of her head on his shoulder. The man gave no actual response apart from a soft hum of acknowledgement. “Now would be the perfect time to touch me.”

Her words caught them both by surprise, but because of his position, he couldn’t see her blush. She craned her neck around so that she could kiss his neck and he looked down at her body, admiring what he could see. He wasn’t shy at all, but he was taken aback. He hadn’t expected her to request that at all, but he wouldn’t say no. “Is that your way of telling me you’re done waiting?” He whispered against her ear before slowly moving his hand to her stomach. Caressing the smooth skin beneath his palm, his hand traced a line from her belly button all the way up to her breasts. He drew sloppy shapes on her skin before drawing another line back down, this time past her belly button. He smiled at the quiver in her breaths as his finger neared the space between her thighs.

“Spread your legs.” He whispered just as lowly again. She obliged without hesitation, thighs resting against the tub as she gave him the advantage and upper hand. Her hands moved to his arms, rubbing them lazily as his hand slid south. His finger traced her inner thighs before slowly sliding toward her slit. The girl shyly turned her head to the side and pushed her face into his neck, letting out a quiet exhale of approval. The man bit his lip before slowly running his digit along the length of her most sensitive area. He wasn’t one to waste time, she learned that very quickly. His finger brushed along her clit once and then once more, drawing a little buck from her hips. He couldn’t hide the smirk that danced across his lips. His free hand moved to her pelvis, holding her securely against him. “Easy, pet, yeah, Ive got you, right?” His finger continued to dance along that bundle of nerves, pressing and rubbing at just the right pace before his finger slid toward her entrance. Her breathing was already audibly ragged and when she spread her thighs even further, he knew she wanted more. Pushing his finger into her slowly, he drew it in and out a few times before moving his other hand down to resume giving attention to her clit. She groaned gratefully before lifting one leg and draping it on the outside of the tub. Curling her toes, she whimpered in enjoyment. “Alfie..” She bit her bottom lip.

He could feel her clenching around his finger as he drew it out and then sunk it directly back in. She groaned out again and he had to adjust his thighs to hold her in place as her body began to slide along the slippery tub. His finger began to move a little quicker, but when she slid down once again, he growled, slowing his pace. “I don’t think..” She smiled lazily before cupping his cheek. “fingering is meant for the bathtub.” She sat up slowly, legs feeling weak and stomach aching from want. “Forget the bath, lets go to the bedroom.” She whispered, already pushing herself up and into a standing position. Alfie watched the water droplets race along her skin before he slowly rose with her. He couldn’t say no to that. She scrambled out of the tub and once again it was another race, but this time, he was chasing after her. She slipped and slid along the slippery hallway before grinning as she came to a stop outside the bedroom door. Shoving the wooden thing open, she froze in place at the sight. Alfie came to an instant halt behind her, his eyes roaming the inside of their bedroom.

The girl’s dresses were thrown all around the room, ripped and unwearable. Frames he owned were shattered and ruined, knick-knacks had been destroyed. The bed looked as if someone had tried to saw it in half because of how much stuffing was slung around the room. Her shaky hands lifted to her lips, brows drawing together in fear. “Alfie..” Her small hand reached for his arm, dragging him in front of her. The couple were stood in absolute shock, both naked and wet, staining the wood floor beneath them with the water that fell from their body. Their bedroom was a wreck and they had no idea who’d done it.. or if the culprit was even gone. Alfie’s eyes scanned the room, eyes dropping to the girl at his side. “Go get your clothes on.” He whispered before pushing her gently back toward the bathroom. She nodded hurriedly before spinning around on her heel. Face to face with her stood a man, twirling a blade in his hand. He shot a devious smirk toward the girl, eyes falling to her body. Instantly cowering away, her hands lifted to shield her body. “A-Alfie.” The man growled lowly before looking over his shoulder to see why she hadn’t gone to the bathroom as he’d said. His dark eyes followed her gaze to the end of the hall where a man stood. He didn’t recognize him. All he could focus on was the fact that his wife was completely naked. Dragging her instantly behind him, he clenched his jaw protectively before pushing her back and into the bedroom. Slamming the door roughly and suddenly, he twisted the lock. This would buy them at least a little bit of time to get dressed. “Now!” He barked. “Find some clothes!” His hand pushed through his hair as he rummaged through his thoughts to try and find out who the hell that man was and what the hell he wanted.

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andya-j · 6 years ago

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Night descended on Interstate-90 as I crossed over into the Badlands. Real raw weather for October. Snow dusted the asphalt and picnic tables of the deserted rest area. The scene was virginal as death. I parked the Chevy under one of the lamp posts that burned at either end of the lot. A metal building with a canted roof sat low and sleek in the center island, most of its windows dark. Against the black backdrop it reminded me of a crypt or monument to travelers and pioneers lost down through the years. Placards were obscured by shadows and could’ve pronounced warnings or curses, could’ve said anything in any language. Reality was pliable tonight. Periodically a semi chugged along the freeway, its running lights tiny and dim. Other than that, this was the Moon. I loosed Minerva and watched her trot around the perimeter of the sodium glow. She raised her graying snout and growled softly at the void that surrounded us, poured from us. Her tracks and the infrequent firefly sparks on the road were the only signs of life for miles. Snow was falling thick, and those small signs wouldn’t last long. It was back to the previous ice age for us, the end for us. I kind-of, sort-of liked the idea that this might be the end, except for the fact sweet, loyal Minerva hadn’t asked for any of it, and my nature—my atavistic shadow—was, as usual, a belligerent sonofabitch. My shadow exhibited the type of nature that causes men to weigh themselves with stones before they jump into the midnight blue, causes them to mix the pills with antifreeze, trade the pistol bullet to the brain for a shotgun barrel in the mouth, just to be on the safe side. My shadow didn’t give a shit about odds, or eventualities, or pain, or certain death. It just wanted to keep shining. So, Minerva pissed in the snow and I ticked off the seconds until the ultimate showdown. My ear was killing tonight, crackling like a busted radio speaker and ringing with good old tinnitus. The sensation was that of an auger boring through membrane and meat. My back and knee ached. I lost the ear to a virus upon contracting pneumonia in Alaska during a long ago Iditarod. The spine and knee got ruined after I fell off a cliff into the Bering Sea and broke just about everything that was breakable. Resilience was my gift, and I’d recovered sufficiently to limp through the remainder of a wasted youth, to fake a hale and hearty demeanor. That shit was surely catching up now at the precipice of the miserable slide into middle age. All those forgotten or ignored wounds blooming in a chorus of ghostly pain, reminders of longstanding debts, reminders that a man can’t always outrun provenance. Sometimes it outruns him. I checked my watch and the numbers blurred. I hadn’t slept in way too long, else I never would’ve pulled over between Bumfuck, Egypt and Timbuktu. Since suicide by passivity was off the table, this was an expression of stubbornness on my part, probably. Grim defiance, or the need to reassert my faith in the logical operations of the universe if but for a moment. What a joke, faith. What a sham, logic. A hunting horn sounded far out there in the darkness beyond the humps and swales and treeless drumlins that went on basically forever, past the vast hungry prairies that had swallowed so many wagon trains. Oh, yes. The horn of the Hunt. Not simply a horn, but one that could easily be imagined as the hollowed relic from a giant, perverted ram with blood-specked foam lathering its muzzle and hellfire beaming from its eyes. A ram that crunched the bones of Saxons for breakfast and brandished a cock the girth of a wagon axle; the kind of brute that tribes sacrificed babies to when crops were bad and mated unfortunate maidens to when the chief needed some special juju on the eve of a war. Its horn was the sort of artifact that stood on end in a petrified coil and would require a brawny Viking raider to lift. Or a demon. That wail stood my hair on end, slapped me awake. It rolled toward the parking lot, swelling like some Medieval air raid klaxon. Snowflakes weren’t melting on my cheeks because all the heat—all the blood—went rushing inward. That erstwhile faith in the natural universe, the rational order of reality, wouldn’t be troubling me again anytime soon. Nope. I whistled for Minerva and she leaped into the truck, riding shotgun. Her hackles were bunched. She barked her fury and terror at the night. Sleep, O blessed sleep, how I longed for thee. No time for that. We had to get gone. The Devil would be there soon. *** Years ago, when I raced sled dogs for a living, I knew a fellow named Steven Graham, a disgraced lit professor from the University of Colorado. He’d gotten shitcanned for reasons opaque to my blue collar sensibilities—something to do with privileging contemporary zombie stories over the works of the Russian masters. His past was shrouded in mystery and, like a lot people, he’d fled to Alaska to reinvent himself. Nobody on the racing circuit cared much about any of that. Graham was charming and charismatic in spades. He drank and swore with the best of us, but he’d also get three sheets to the wind and recite a bit of Beowulf in Olde English, and he knew the bloodlines of huskies from Balto onward. Strap a pair of snowshoes to that lanky greenhorn bastard and he’d leave even the most hardened back country trapper in the proverbial dust. All the girlies adored him, and so did the cameras. Like Cummings said, he was a hell of a handsome man. Too good to be true. Steven Graham got taken by the Hunt while he was running the 1992 Iditarod. That’s the big winter event where men and women hook a bunch of huskies to sleds and race twelve hundred miles across Alaska from Anchorage to Nome. There’s not much to say about it—it’s long and grueling and lonely. You’re always crossing a frozen swamp or mushing up an ice-jammed river or trudging over a mountain. It’s dark and cold and mostly devoid of sound or movement but for one’s own breath and the muted panting of the huskies, the jingle and clink of their traces. Official records have it that Graham, young ex-professor and dilettante adventurer, took a wrong turn out on Norton Sound between Koyuk and Elim and went through the ice into the sea. Ka-sploosh. No trace of him or the dogs was found. The Lieutenant Governor attended the funeral. CNN covered it live. The report was bullshit, of course; I saw what really happened. And because I saw what really happened—because I meddled in the Hunt—there would be hell to pay. *** Broad daylight, maybe an hour prior to sunset, mid March of 1992. All twelve dogs in harness trotted along nicely. The end of the trail in Nome was about two days away. Things hadn’t gone particularly well, and I was cruising for a middle of the pack finish and a long, destitute summer of begging corporate sponsors not to drop my underachieving ass. But damn, what a gorgeous day in the arctic: the snowpack curving around me to the horizon, the sky frozen between apple-green and steely blue, the orange ball of the sun dipping below the Earth. The effect was something out of Fantasia. After days of inadequate sleep I was lulled by the hiss of the sled runners, the rhythmic scrape and slap of dog paws. I dozed at the handlebars and dreamed of Sharon, the warmth of our home, a cup of real coffee, a hot shower, and the down comforter on our bed. When my team passed through a gap in a mile-long pressure ridge that had heaved the Bering ice to an eight-foot tall parapet, the Hunt had taken down Graham on the other side, maybe twenty yards off the main drag. This I discovered when one of Graham’s huskies loped toward me, free of its traces yet still in harness. The poor critter’s head had been lopped at mid-neck and it zig-zagged several strides and then collapsed on the trail. You’d think my own dogs would’ve spooked. Instead, an atavistic switch was tripped in their doggy brains and they surged forward, yapping and howling. Several yards to my right so much blood covered the snow I thought I was hallucinating a sunset dripped onto the ice. The scene confused me for a few seconds as my brain locked down and spun in place. The killing ground was a fucking mess, like there’d been a mass walrus slaughter committed on the spot. Dead huskies were flung about, intestines looped over berms and piled in loose, steaming coils. Graham himself lay spread-eagled across a blue-white slab of ice repurposed as an impromptu sacrificial altar. He was split wide, eyes blank. The Huntsman had most of the guy’s hide off and was tacking it alongside the carcass as one stretches the skin of a beaver or a bear. Clad in a deerstalker hat surmounted by antlers, a blood-drenched mackinaw coat, canvas breeches, and sealskin boots, the Huntsman stood taller than most men even as he hunched to slice Graham with a large knife of flint or obsidian—I wasn’t quite close enough to discern which. Meanwhile, the Huntsman’s wolf pack ranged among the butchered huskies. These wolves were black and gaunt as cadavers; their narrow eyes glinted, reflecting the snow, the changeable heavens. When several of them reared on hind legs to study me, I decided they weren’t wolves at all. Some wore olden leather and caps with splintered nubs of horn; others were garbed in the remnants of military fatigues and camouflage jackets of various styles, gore encrusted and ingrown to the creatures’ hides. They grinned at me and their mouths were . . . very, very wide. Nothing brave in what I did, or at least tried to do. My befuddled intellect was still processing the carnage when I sank the hook and tethered the team, left them baying frantically in the middle of the trail. I wasn’t thinking of a damned thing as I walked stiff-legged toward the Hunt and the in-progress evisceration of my comrade. Most mushers carried firearms on the trail. There were moose to contend with and, frankly, a gun is pretty much just basic equipment in any case. We toted rifles or pistols like folks in the lower forty-eight carry cell phones and wallets. Mine was a .357 I stowed inside my anorak to keep the cylinder from freezing into a solid lump. The revolver was in my hand and it jumped twice. I don’t recall the booms. No sound, only fire. The closest pair of dog men flipped over and a small part of my mind celebrated that at least the fuckers could be hurt. It wasn’t like the legends or the movies; no silver required, lead worked fine. The Huntsman whirled when I was nearly upon him, and Jesus help me I glimpsed his face. That’s probably why my hair went white that year. I squeezed the trigger three more times, emptied the gun and even as the bullets smacked him, I had the sense of shooting into an abyss—absolute hopeless, soul-draining futility. The Huntsman swayed, humungous knife raised. The blade was flint, turns out. Worst part was, Graham blinked and looked right at me and I saw his skinned hand twitch. How he could be alive in that condition was no more or less fantastical than anything else, I suppose. Even so, even so. I still get a sick feeling in my stomach when I recall that image. Apparently, the gods of the north had seen enough. Wind roared around us and everything went white and I was alone. Hurricane-force gusts knocked me off my feet and I barely managed to crawl to the team, almost missed them, in fact. Visibility was maybe six feet. Easily, easily could’ve kept going into the featureless maelstrom until I found the lip at the edge of a bottomless gulf of open water and joined Graham, wherever he’d gone. That storm pinned the dogs and me to Norton Sound for three days. Gusts of seventy knots. Wind chill in excess of negative one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. You wouldn’t understand how cold that is. I can’t describe it. It’s like trying to explain how far away Alpha Centauri is from Earth in highway miles. The brain isn’t equipped. Froze my right hand and foot. Froze my face so that it hardened into a black and blue mask. Froze my dick. Didn’t lose anything important, but man, there are few agonies equal to thawing a frostbitten extremity. I actually managed to cripple across the finish line. Suffering through the aftermath of physical therapy and counseling, the memory of what I’d seen out there was wiped clean from my mind with the efficacy of a kid tipping an Etch A Sketch and giving it a shake. Seven or eight years passed before the horrible event came back to haunt me, and by then it was too late to say anything, too late to be certain whether it had happened or if I’d gone round the bend. *** Snow drifted both lanes and the wind buffeted the Chevy, and goddamn, but I was reliving that blizzard of ‘92. The fuel gauge needle fell into the red and I drove another half an hour, creeping along in four-wheel hi. Radio reception was poor and I’d settled for a static-filled broadcast of ’80s rock. Hall & Oates, The Police, a block of Sade and Blue Oyster Cult, all that music our parents hated when we were bopping along in mullets. “Godzilla�� cut in and out during the drum solo, and a distorted animal growl that had nothing to do with heavy metal issued from the speakers. My name snarled over and over to the metronome of the wipers. A truck stop glittered on the horizon of the next off ramp. Exhausted, frazzled, pissed, and afraid, I pulled alongside the pumps and got fuel. Then I hooked Minerva to a leash and brought her inside with me. She curled at my boots while I drank a quart of awful coffee and ate a New York steak with all the trimmings. The waitress didn’t say anything about my bringing a pit bull to the table. Maybe the folks in Dakota were hip to that sort of thing. Didn’t matter; I’d gotten the little card that proved Minerva was a service dog and of vital importance should I experience an “episode” of depression or mania. Depression had haunted me since my retirement from mushing, and a friend who worked as counselor at the University of Anchorage suggested that I adopt a shelter puppy and train it as a companion animal. The local police had busted a dog-fighting ring and one of the females was pregnant, so Sharon and I eventually picked Minerva from a litter of eleven. A decade later, after my world burned to the ground—career in ashes, wife gone, friends few and far between—Minerva remained steadfast. A man and his dog versus the Outer Dark. I patted her head as we went through the door, and wished that I possessed more of her canine equanimity in the face of the unknown. The diner was doing brisk trade. Two burly truckers in company jumpsuits occupied the next booth, but most of the customers were gathered at the counter so they could watch weather reports on TV. Nothing heartening in the reports, either. The storm would definitely delay me by half a day, possibly more. My ardent hope was that I could just bull through it and be in the clear by the time I crossed Wyoming tomorrow. I also prayed that the pickup would hang together all the way to Lamprey Isle, New York, my destination at the end of the yellow brick road. My plan was to reach the home of an old friend, the eminent crime novelist, Jack Fort. Jack also happened to be a retired English professor. Jack claimed he could help. I had my doubts. The pack and its leader were eternal and relentless. A man could plunk a few, sure. In the end, though, they simply reformed and kept pursuing. The Devil’s smoke demons on the hunt. Be that as it may, I’d decided to go down swinging, and that meant a hell-bent for leather ride into the east. Currently, my worries centered on weather and equipment. The drive from Alaska via the Alcan Highway had been rough, and I suspected the old engine was fixing to give up the ghost. I could say the same thing about my heart, my sanity, my luck. Sure enough. Minerva snarled and bolted from her spot under the table. She crouched beside me, shivering. Foam dribbled from her jaw and her eyes bulged. Graham strolled in, taller and happier than I remembered. Death agreed with some people. He loomed in Technicolor while reality bleached around him. His long black hair was feathered with snowflakes, and the lights hit it just right so he appeared angelic, a movie star pausing for his dramatic close-up. In his right hand, he carried the ivory hunting horn (indeed a ram’s horn, albeit much more modest than its report); in his left he carried a faded cowboy hat with a crimson and black patch on the crown. He wore the Huntsman’s iceberg-white mackinaw, ceremonial flint knife tucked into his belt so the bone handle jutted in a most phallic statement. He ambled over and slid in across from me. I noticed his sealskin boots left maroon smears on the tiles. I also noticed puffs of steam escaping our mouths as the booth cooled like a meat locker. I cocked the .357 and braced it across my thigh. “You must not be heralding the great zombie invasion. Lookin’ great, Steve. Not chalk white or anything. The rot must be on the inside.” He flipped his hair and smirked. His trophy necklace of wedding rings, key fobs, dog tags, driver licenses, and glass eyes clinked and rattled. “Likewise, amigo. You’ve lost weight? Dyed your hair? What?” “This and that—diet, exercise. Fleeing in terror has the bonus effect of getting a man in shape. Divorce, too. My wife used to fatten me up pretty good. Since she split . . . you know. TV dinners and Johnnie Walker. I got it going on, huh?” I gripped Minerva’s collar with my free hand. Her growls were deep and ferocious. She strained to lunge over the table, an eighty pound bowling bowl; rippling muscle and bone crushing jaws and, at the moment, bad intentions. My arm was tired already. Tempting to let my girl fly, but I loved her. “I’m yanking your chain. You look like crap. When’s the last time you slept? There’s a motel a piece up the trail. Why not get room service, watch a porno, drink some booze and fall into peaceful slumber? You won’t even notice when I slip in there and slice your fucking throat ear to ear.” Graham’s smile widened. It was still him, too. Same guy I’d gotten drunk with at Nome saloons. Same perfect teeth, same easy manner, probably sincere. He’d not intimated any malice regarding his intent to skin me alive and eat my beating heart. This was business, mostly. He inclined his head slightly, as if intercepting my thought. “Not so much business as tradition. The Hunt is a sacred rite. I gave you the head start as a courtesy.” He was telling the truth as I understood it from my research of the legends. To witness the Hunt, to interfere with the Hunt, was to become prey. I’d wondered why the emissaries of the Horned One waited so long to come after me, especially considering the magnitude of my transgression. “Well, I reckon that was sporting of you. Twenty years. Plenty of time for Odysseus to screw his way home from the front.” “Yep, and you’re almost there, too,” Graham said. “Crazy ass scene on the ice, huh? Sergio Leone meets John Landis and they do it up right with razors. Man, you were totally Eastwood, six-gun blazing. Wounded the Huntsman in a serious way. Didn’t kill the fucker, though. Don’t flatter yourself on that score. Might be able to smoke the hounds with regular bullets. That shit don’t work so well on the Huntsman. We’re of a higher order. Nah, when that storm hit, some sort of force went through me, electrified me. I tore free of that altar and jumped on the bastard’s back, stuck a hunting knife into his kidney. Still wouldn’t have worked except the forces of darkness were smiling on me. Grooved on my style. The Boss demoted him, awarded me the mantle and the blade, the hounds, more bitches in Hell than you can shake a stick at. I’ve watched you for a while, bro. Watched you lose your woman, your career, your health. You’re an old, grizzled bull. No money, no family, no friends, no future. It’s culling time, baby.” “Shit, you’re doing me a favor! Thanks, pal!” “Come on, don’t be sarcastic. We’re still buds. This is going to be super-duper painful, but no reason to make it personal. Your hide will be but one more tossed atop a mountainous pile beside a chthonic lagoon of blood and the Horned One’s bone throne. The muster roll of the damned is endless, and the next name awaits my attentions.” “Okay, nothing personal. Here’s the deal, since I’m the one with the hand cannon. You hold still and I’ll blow your head off. Take my chances with whomever they send next. No hard feelings.” I debated whether to shoot him under the table or risk raising the gun to aim properly. Graham laughed. “Whoa, chief. This isn’t the place. All these hapless customers, the dishwasher, the waitress, the fry cooks. That sexy waitress. If we turn this into the O-K Corral, the Boss himself will be on the case. The Horned One isn’t a kindly soul. He comes around, everybody gets it in the neck. Them’s the rules, I’m afraid.” A vision splashed across the home cinema of my imagination: every person in the diner strung from the rafters by their living guts, the hounds using the corpses for piñatas and the massive, shadowy bulk of the Horned God flickering fire in the parking lot as he gazed on in infernal joy. Like as not this image was projected by Graham. I glanced out the window and spotted one of the pack, a cadaverous brute in a threadbare parka and snow pants, pissing against the wheel of a semi. In another life he’d been Bukowski or Waits, or a serial killer who rode the rails and shanked fellow hobos, a strangler of coeds, a postman. I knew him for a split second, then not. Other hounds leaped from trailer to trailer, frolicking. Too dark to make out details, except that the figures flitted and fluttered with the lithe, rubbery grace of acrobats. I said, “Tell me, Steve. What would’ve happened to you if I hadn’t interrupted the party? Where would you be tonight?” He shrugged and his movie star teeth dulled to a shade of rotten ivory. “Ah, those are the sort of questions I try to let lie. The Boss frowns on us worrying about stuff above our pay grade.” “Would you have become a hound?” “Sometimes a damned soul gets dragged over to join the Hunt. Only the few, the proud. It’s a rare honor.” Cold clamped on the back of my neck. “And the rest of the slobs who get taken? Where do they go after you’re done with them?” “Not a clue, amigo. Truly an ineffable mystery.” His grin brightened again, so white, so frigid. He put on the cowboy hat. The logo was a red patch with a set of black antlers stitched in the foreground. Sign of the Horned God who was Graham’s master on the Other Side. Minerva’s snarls and growls escalated to full-throated barks as she bristled and lunged. She’d had her fill of Mr. Death and his shark smirk. One of the truckers set down his coffee cup, pointed a thick finger at me, and said, “Hey, asshole. Shut that dog up.” Graham’s eyes went dark, monitors tuned to deep space. A stain formed on the breast of his lily-white mackinaw. Blood dripped from his sleeve and the stink of carrion wafted from his mouth. He rose and turned and his shoulders seemed to broaden. I caught his profile reflected in the window and something was wrong with it, although I couldn’t tell what exactly. He said in a distorted, buzzing voice, “No, you shut your mouth. Or I’ll eat your tongue like a piece of Teriyaki.” The trucker paled and scrambled from his seat and fled the diner without a word. His buddy followed suit. They didn’t grab their coats or pay the tab or anything. Other folks had twisted in their seats to view the commotion. None of them spoke, either. The waitress stood with her ticket book outthrust like a crucifix. Graham said to them, “Hush, folks. Nothing to see here.” And everyone took the hint and went back to his or her business. He nodded and faced me, smile affixed, eyes sort of normal again. “I better get along, li’l doggie. Wanted to say hi. So hi and goodbye. Gonna keep trucking east? Wait, forget I asked. Don’t want to spoil the fun. See you soon, wherever that is.” Yeah, he grinned, but the wintry night was a heap warmer. “Wait,” I said. “You mentioned rules. Be nice to know what they are.” “Sure, there are lots of rules. However, you only need to worry about one of them: run, motherfucker.” *** I never fully recovered from the incident in ‘92; not down deep, not in the way that counts. Nightmares plagued me. Oblique, horror-show recreations as seen through the obfuscating mist of a subconscious in denial. Neither me nor the shrink could make sense of them. He put me on pills and that didn’t help. I sold the team to a Japanese millionaire and moved to the suburbs of Anchorage with Sharon, took a series of crummy labor jobs, and worked on the Great American horror novel in the evenings. She finished grad school and landed a position teaching elementary grade art. Ever fascinated with pulp classics, when the novel appeared to be a dead end I tried my hand at genre short fiction and immediately landed a few sales. By the early aughts I was doing well enough to justify quitting the construction gig and staying home to work on stories full-time. These were supernatural horror stories, fueled by the nightmares I didn’t understand, until it all came crashing in on me one afternoon during a game of winter golf with some buddies down at the beach. I keeled over on the frozen sand and was momentarily transported back to Norton Sound while my friends stood around wringing their hands. Normal folks don’t know what to do around a lunatic writhing on the ground and babbling in tongues. A week on the couch wrapped in an electric blanket and shaking with terror followed. I didn’t level with anyone—not the shrink, not Sharon or my parents, not my friends or writer colleagues. I read a piece on the Wild Hunt in an article concerning world mythology and it was like getting socked in the belly. I finally knew what had happened, if not why. All that was left was to brood. Life went on. We tried for children without success. I have a hunch Sharon left me because I was shooting blanks. Who the fuck knows, though. Much like the Wild Hunt, the Meaning of Life, and where matching socks vanish to, her motives remain a mystery. Things seemed cozy between us; she’d always been sympathetic to my tics and twitches, and I’d tried to be a good and loving husband in return. Obviously, living with a half-crazed author took a greater toll than I’d estimated. Add screams in the night and generally paranoid behavior to the equation . . . One day she came home early, packed her bags, and headed for Italy with a music teacher from her school. Not a single tear in her eye when she said adios to me, either. That was the same week my longtime agent, a lewd, crude alcoholic expat Brit named Stanley Jones, was indicted on numerous federal charges including embezzlement, wire fraud, and illegal alien residence. He and his lover, the obscure English horror writer Samson Marks, absconded to Mexico with my life savings, as well as the nest eggs of several other authors. The scandal made all the industry trade rags, but the cops didn’t seem overly concerned with chasing the duo. I depended on those royalty checks as my physical condition was deteriorating. Cold weather made my bones ache. Some mornings my lumbar seized and it took twenty minutes to crawl out of bed. I hung on for a couple of years, but my situation declined. The publishing climate wasn’t friendly with the recession and such. Foreclosure notices soon arrived in the mailbox. Then, last week, Graham reappeared to put my misery into perspective. Prior to this latter event, Jack Fort theorized that Sharon didn’t run off to Italy because she was dissatisfied with the way things were going at home. Nor was it a coincidence that Jones robbed me blind and left me in the poorhouse. (Jack also employed the crook as an agent, and from what I gathered, the loss of funds contributed to his own divorce.) My friend became convinced dark forces had aligned against me in matters great and small. Later, I told him about the Hunt and what I’d seen on the ice in 1992, how that particular chicken had come home to roost. He wasn’t the least bit surprised. Unflappable Jack Fort; the original drink-boiling-water-and-piss-ice-cubes guy. The night I called him we were both drunk, and when I spilled the story of how Graham had returned from the grave and wanted to mount my head on a trophy room wall in hell, instead of expressing bewilderment or fear for my sanity, Jack just said, “Right. I figured it was something like this. From grad school onward, Graham was headed for trouble, pure and simple. He was asshole buddies with exactly the wrong type of people. Occultism is nothing to fuck with. Anyway, you’re sure it’s the Wild Hunt?” “Graham referred to himself as the Huntsman. So. It happened almost exactly like the legends.” Granted, there were variations on the theme. Each culture has its peculiarities and so focuses on different aspects. Some versions of the Hunt mythology have Odin calling the tune. Under Odin’s yoke, the Hunt is an expression of exuberance and feral joy, a celebration of the primal. Odin’s pack travels a couple of feet off the ground. Any fool that stands in the way gets mowed like grass. See Odin coming, you grab dirt and pray the spectral procession passes overhead and keeps moving on the trail of its quarry. The gang from Alaska seemed darker, crueler, dirtier than the storybook versions; Graham and his troops reeked of sadism and madness. That eldritch psychosis leached from them into me, gathered in effluvial dankness in the back of my throat, lay on my tongue as a foul taint. The important details were plenty consistent—slavering hounds, feral Huntsman, a horned deity overseeing the chase, death and damnation to the prey. Jack asked what happened and I gave him the scoop: “I was hiking along Hatcher Pass to photograph the mountain for research. Heard a god-awful racket in a nearby canyon. Howling, psycho laughter, screams. Some kind of Viking horn. I knew what was happening before I saw the pack on the summit. Knew it in my bones—the legends vary, of course. Still, the basics are damned clear whether it’s the Norwegians, Germans, or Inuit. The pack wasn’t in full chase mode or that would’ve been curtains. They wanted to scare me; makes the kill sweeter. Anyway, I beat feet. Made it to the truck and burned rubber. Graham showed up at the house later in a greasy puff of smoke, chatted with me through the door. He said I had three days to get my shit in order and then he and his boys would be after me for real.” Jack remained quiet for a bit, except to cough a horrible, phlegmy cough—it sounded wet and entrenched as bronchitis or pneumonia. Finally he said, “Well, head east. I might be able to help you. Graham and me knew each other pretty well once upon a time when he was still teaching, and I got some ideas what he was up to after he left Boulder. He was an adventurer, but I doubt he spent all that time in the frozen north for the thrill. Nah, my bet is he was searching for the Hunt and it found him first. Poor silly bastard.” “Thanks, man. Although, I hate to bring this to your doorstep. Interfere in the Hunt and it’s you on the skinning board next.” “Shut up, kid. Tend your knitting and I’ll see to mine.” Big Jack Fort’s nonchalant reaction should’ve startled me, and under different circumstances I might’ve pondered how deep the tentacles of this particular conspiracy went. His advice appealed, though. Sure, the Huntsman wanted me to take to my heels; the chase gave him a boner. Nonetheless, I’d rather present a moving target than hang around the empty house waiting to get snuffed on the toilet or in my sleep. Graham’s flayed body glistening in the arctic twilight was branded into my psyche. “You better step lively,” Jack warned me, in that gravelly voice of his that always sounded the same whether sober or stewed. A big dude, built square, the offspring of Raymond Burr and a grand piano. Likely he was sprawled across his couch in a tee shirt and boxers, bottle of Maker’s Mark in one paw. “Got complications on my end. Can’t talk about them right now. Just haul ass and get here.” I didn’t like the sound of that, nor the sound of his coughing. Despite a weakness for booze, Jack was one of the more stable guys in the business. However, he was a bit older than me and playing the role of estranged husband. Then there was the crap with Jones and dwindling book sales in general. I thought maybe he was cracking. I thought maybe we were both cracking. Later that night I loaded the truck with a few essentials, including my wedding album and a handful of paperbacks I’d acquired at various literary conventions, locked the house, and lit out. In the rearview mirror I saw Graham and three of his hounds as silhouettes on the garage roof, pinprick eyes blazing red as I drove away. It was, as the kids say, game on. *** Rocketing through Indiana, “Slippery People” on the radio, darkness all around, darkness inside. The radio crackled and static erased the Talking Heads and Graham said to me, “Everybody on the lam from the Hunt feels sorry for himself. Thing of it is, amigo, you’re tuned to the wrong tune. You should ask yourself, How did I get here? What have I done?” The pack raced alongside the truck. Hounds and master shimmered like starlight against the velvet backdrop, twisted like funnels of smoke. The Huntsman blew me a kiss and I tromped the accelerator and they fell off the pace. One of the hounds leaped the embankment rail and loped after me, snout pressed to the centerline. It darted into the shadows an instant before being overtaken and smooshed by a tractor trailer. I pushed beyond exhaustion and well into the realm of zombification. The highway was a wormhole between dimensions and Graham occasionally whispered to me through the radio even though I’d hit the kill switch. And what he’d said really worked on me. What had I done to come to this pass? Maybe Sharon left me because I was a sonofabitch. Maybe Jones screwing me over was karma. The Wild Hunt might be a case of the universe getting Even-Steven (pardon the pun) with me. Thank the gods I didn’t have a bottle of liquor handy or else I’d have spent the remainder of the long night totally blitzed and sobbing like a baby over misdeeds real and imagined. Instead, I popped the cap on a bottle of NoDoz and put the hammer down. *** I parked and slept once in a turnout for a couple of hours during the middle of the day when traffic ran thickest. I risked no more than that. The Hunt had its rules regarding the taking of prey in front of too many witnesses, but I didn’t have the balls to challenge those traditions. The Chevy died outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Every gauge went crazy and plumes of steam boiled from the radiator. I got the rig towed to a salvage yard and transferred Minerva and my meager belongings to a compact rental. We were back on the road before breakfast, and late afternoon saw us aboard the ferry from Port Sanger, New York, to Lamprey Isle. What to say about LI West (as Jack referred to it)? Nineteen miles north to south and about half that at its widest, the whole curved into a malformed crescent, the Man in the Moon’s visage peeled from Luna and partially submerged in the Atlantic. Its rocky shore was sculpted by the clash of wind and sea; a forest of pine, maple, and oak spanned the interior. Home of hoot owls and red squirrels; good deer hunting along the secret winding trails, I’d heard. Native burial mounds and mysterious megaliths, I’d also heard. The main population center, Lamprey Township (pop. 2201), nestled in a cove on the southwestern tip of the island. Jack had mentioned that the town had been established as a fishing village in the early nineteenth century; prior to that, smugglers and slavers made it their refuge from privateers and local authorities. A den of illicit gambling and sodomy, I’d heard. Allegedly, the name arose from a vicious species of eels that infested the local waters. Long as a man’s arm, the locals claimed. Lamprey Township was a fog-shrouded settlement hemmed by the cove and spearhead shoals, a picket of evergreens. A gloomy cathedral fortress reared atop a cliff streaked with seagull shit and pocked by cave entrances. Lovers Leap. In town, everybody wore flannel and rain slickers, boots and sock caps. A folding knife and mackinaw crowd. Everything was covered in salt rime, everything tasted of brine. Piloting the rental down Main Street between boardwalks, compartment of the car flushed with soft blue-red lights reflecting from the ocean, I thought this wouldn’t be such a bad place to die. Release my essential salts back into the primordial cradle. Jack’s cabin lay inland at the far end of a dirt spur. Built in the same era as the founding of Lamprey Township, he’d bought it from Katarina Veniti, a paranormal romance author who’d become jaded with all of the tourists and yuppies moving onto “her” island during the last recession. A stone and timber longhouse with ye old-fashioned shingles and moss on the roof surrounded by an acre of sloping yard overgrown with tall, dead grass. An oak had uprooted during a recent windstorm and toppled across the drive. Minerva and I hoofed it the last quarter of a mile. The faceless moon dripped and shone through scudding clouds and a vault of branches. The house sat in darkness except for a light shining from the kitchen window. “Welcome to Kat’s island,” Jack said, and coughed. He reclined in the shadows on a porch swing. Moonlight glinted from the bottle in his hand, the barrel of the pump-action shotgun across his knees. He wore a wool coat, dock-worker’s cap snug over his brow, wool pants, and lace-up hiking boots. When he stood to shake my hand, I realized his clothes hung loose as sails, that he was frail and shaky. “Jesus, man,” I said, shaken at the sight of him. He appeared more of an apparition than the bona fide spirit pursuing me. I understood why he didn’t mind the idea of the Hunt invading his happy home. The man was so emaciated he should’ve been hanging near the blackboard in science class; a hundred pounds lighter since I’d last seen him, easy. He’d shaved his head and beard to gray stubble; his pallid flesh was dry and hot, his eyes sparkled like bits of quartz. He stank of gun oil, smoke, and rotting fruit. “Yeah. The big C. Doc hit me with the bad news this spring. Deathwatch around the Fort. I sent the pets to live with my sister.” He smiled and gestured at the woods. “Just you, me, and the trees. I got nothing better to do than help an old pal in his hour of need.” He led the way inside. The kitchen was cheerily lighted, and we took residence at the dining table where he poured me a glass of whiskey and listened to my recap of the trip from Alaska. “I hope you’ve got a plan,” I said. “Besides blasting them with grandma’s twelve gauge?” He patted the stock of his shotgun where it lay on the table. “We’re going out like a pair of Vikings.” “I’d be more excited if you had a flamethrower, or some grenades.” “Me too. Me too. I got a few sticks of dynamite for fishing and plenty of ammo.” “Dynamite is good. This is going to be full on Hollywood. Fast cars, shirtless women, explosions . . .” “Man, I don’t even know if it’ll detonate. The shit’s been stashed in a leaky box in the cellar for a hundred years. Honestly, my estimation is, we’re hosed. Totally up shit creek. Our sole advantage is prey doesn’t usually fight back. Graham’s powerful, he’s a spirit, or a monster, whatever. But he’s new on the job, right? That may be our ray of sunshine. That, and according to the literature, the Pack doesn’t fancy crossing large bodies of open water. These haunts prefer ice and snow.” Jack coughed into a handkerchief. Belly-ripping, Doc Holliday kind of coughing. He wiped his mouth and had a belt of whiskey. His cheeks were blotched. “Anyway, I brought you here for another reason. This house belonged to a sorcerer once upon a time. Type they used to burn at the stake. An unsavory guy named Ewers Welloc. The Wellocs own most of this island and there’s a hell of a story in that. For now, let me say Ewers was blackest in a family of black sheep. The villagers were scared shitless of him, were convinced he practiced necromancy and other dark arts on the property. Considering the stories Kat told me and some of the funky stuff I’ve found stashed around here, it’s hard to dismiss the villagers claims as superstition.” I could only wonder what he’d unearthed, or Kat before him. Jack bought the place for a dollar and suddenly that factoid assumed ominous significance. “What were you guys up to? You, Kat, and Graham attended college together. Did you form a club?” “A witch coven. I kid, I kid. Wasn’t college . . . We met at the Sugar Tree Hill writers’ retreat. Five days of sun, fun, booze, and hand jobs. There were quite a few young authors there who went on to become quasi-prominent. Many a friendship and enmity are formed at Sugar Tree Hill. The three of us really clicked. Me and Kat were wild, man, wild. Nothing on Graham’s scale, though. He took it way farther. As you can see.” “Yeah.” I sipped my drink. “Me and Graham were pretty tight until he schlepped to Alaska and started in with the sled dogs. Communication tapered off and after a while we fell out of touch. I received a few letters. Guy had the world’s shittiest penmanship; would’ve taken a cryptologist to have deciphered them. I thought he suffered from cabin fever.” “Seemed okay to me,” I said. “Gregarious. Popular. Handsome. He was well-regarded.” “Yeah, yeah . . . The rot was on the inside,” Jack said and I almost spilled my glass. He didn’t notice. “As it happens, my hole card is an ace. Lamprey Isle was settled long before the whites landed. Maybe before the Mohawk, Mohican, Seneca. Nobody knows who these people were, but none of the records are flattering. This mystery tribe left megaliths and cairns on islands and along the coast. A few of those megaliths are in the woods around here. Legend has it that the tribe erected them for use in necromantic rituals. Summon, bind, banish. Like Robert Howard hypothesized in his Conan tales—if the demonic manifests on the mortal plane, it becomes subject to the laws of physics, and cold Hyperborean steel. Howard was onto something.” “Fairy rocks, huh?” I said. The whiskey was hitting me. “Got any problem believing in the Grim Reaper with a hunting knife and a pack of werewolves chasing you from one end of the continent to the other?” I tried again. “So. Fairy rocks.” “Fuckin’ A, boy-o. Fairy rocks. And double aught buckshot.” *** We took shifts at watch until dawn. The Hunt didn’t arrive and so passed a peaceful evening. I slept for three hours; the most I’d had in a week. Jack fried bacon and eggs for breakfast and we drank a pot of black coffee. Afterward he gave me a tour of the house and the immediate grounds. Much of the house gathered dust, exuding the vibe particular to dwellings of bachelors and widowers. Since his wife flew the coop, Jack’s remit had contracted to kitchen, bath, living room. Too close to a tomb for my liking. Tromping around the property with our breath streaming slantwise, he showed me a megalith hidden in the underbrush between a pair of sugar maples. Huge and misshapen beneath layers of slime and moss, the stone cast a shadow over us. It radiated the chill of an ice block. One of several in the vicinity, I soon learned. Jack wasn’t eager to hang around it. “There were lots of animal bones piled in the bushes. You’ll never catch any animals living here. Wasn’t the two decks of Camels I smoked every day since junior high that gave me cancer. It’s these damned things. Near as I can figure, they’re siphons. Let’s pray the effect is magnified upon extra-dimensional beings. Otherwise, Graham will just eat our bullets and spit them back at us.” The megalith frightened me. I imagined it as a huge, predatory insect disguised as a stone, its ethereal rostrum stabbing an artery and sucking my life essence. I wondered if the stones were indigenous, or if the ancient tribes had fashioned them somehow. I’d never know. “Graham’s an occultist. Think he’s dumb enough to walk into a trap?” “Graham ain’t Graham anymore. He’s the Huntsman.” Jack scanned the red-gold horizon and muttered dire predictions of another storm front descending from the west. “Trouble headed this way,” he said and hustled me back to the house. We locked and shuttered everything and took positions in the living room; Jack with his shotgun, me with my pistol and dog. Seated on the leather Italian sofa, bolstered by a pitcher of vodka and lemonade, we watched ancient episodes of The Rockford Files and Ironside and waited. Several minutes past two p.m., the air dimmed to velvety purple and the trees behind the house thrashed and rain spattered the windows. The power died. I whistled a few bars of the Twilight Zone theme, shifted the pistol into my shooting hand. Jack grinned and went to the window and stood there, a blue shadow limned in black. The booze in my tumbler quivered and the horn bellowed, right on top of us. Glass exploded and I was bleeding from the head and both hands that I’d raised to protect my face. Wood splintered and doors caved in all over the house and the hounds rolled into the living room; long, sinuous figures of pure malevolence with ruby-bright eyes, low to the floor and moving fast, teeth, tongues, appetite. I squinted and fired twice from the hip, and a bounding figure jerked short. Minerva pounced, snarling and tearing in frenzy, doggy mind reverting to the swamps and jungles and caves of her ancestors. Jack’s shotgun blazed a stroke of yellow flame and sheared the arm of a fiend who’d scuttled in close. Partially deafened and blinded, I couldn’t keep track of much after that. Squeezed the trigger four more times, popped the speed loader with six fresh slugs, kept firing at shadows that leaped and sprang. The Riders of the Apocalypse and Friends galloped through the house—our own private Armageddon. More glass whirled, and bits of wood and shreds of drapery; a section of ceiling collapsed in a cascade of sparks and rapidly blooming white carnations of drywall dust. Now the gods could watch. Thunder of gunshots, Minerva growling, the damned, yodeling cries of the hounds, and crackling bones, wound around my brain in a knotted spool. I got knocked down in the melee and watched Minerva swing past, lazily flying, paws limp, guts raveling behind her. I’d owned many dogs, but Minerva was my first and only pet, my dearest friend. She was a mewling puppy once more, then inert bone and slack hide, and gone, gone, the last pinprick of my life snuffed. Something was on fire. Oily black smoke seethed through a vertical impact crater where the far wall had stood. Moon, clouds, and smoke boiled there. A couple of fingers were missing from my left hand. Blood pulsed forth: a shiny, crimson bouquet thickening into a lump at the end of my wrist, a wax sculpture from the house of horrors, an object example of Medieval torture. It didn’t hurt. Didn’t feel like anything. My jacket had been sliced, and the flesh beneath it, so that my innards glistened in the cold air. That didn’t hurt either. Instead, I was buoyed by a feral joy. This wouldn’t take much longer by the looks of it. I pulled the jacket closed as best I could and began the laborious process of standing. Almost done, almost home. Jack cursed through a mouthful of dirt. The Huntsman had entered the fray and caught his skull in one splayed hand. He sawed through Jack’s throat with that jagged flint dagger hewn from Stone Age crystal. The Huntsman sawed with so much vigor that Jack’s limbs flopped crazily, a crash test dummy at the moment of impact. Graham let Jack’s carcass thump to the sodden carpet among the savaged bodies of the pack. He pointed at me, him playing the lead man of a rock band shouting out to his audience. Yeah, the gods were with us, and no doubt. “So, we meet again.” He chuckled and licked his lips and wiped the Satan knife against his gory mackinaw. He approached, shuffling like a seal through the smoldering gloom, lighted by an inner radiance that bathed him in a weird, pale glow as cold and alien as the Aurora Borealis. The death-light of Hades, presumably. His eyes were hidden by the brim of his hat, but his smile curved, joyless and cruel. I made it to my feet and scrambled backward over the flaming wreckage of coffee tables and easy chairs, the upended couch, and into the hall. Blood came from me in ropes, in sheets. Graham followed, smiling, smiling. Doorframes buckled as his shoulders brushed them. He swiped the knife in a loose and easy diamond pattern. The knife hissed as it rehearsed my evisceration. I wasn’t worried about that. I was long past worry. Thoughts of vengeance dominated. “You killed my dog.” Blood bubbles plopped from my lips, and that’s never good. Another dose of ferocious, joyful melancholy spurred me onward. I pitched the empty revolver at his head, watched the gun glance aside and spin away. My tears froze to salt on my cheeks. Arctic ice groaned beneath my boots as the sea swelled, yearned toward the moon. The sea drained the warmth from me, taking back what it had given. “You killed your dog, mon frère. You did for our buddy Jack, too. Bringing me and my boys here like this. Don’t beat yourself up. It’s a volunteer army, right?” I turned away, sliding, overbalancing. My legs folded and I slumped before a fallen timber, its charred length licked by small flames. The blood from my ruined hand sizzled and spat. I rubbed my face against the floor, painting myself a war mask of gore and charcoal. By the time he’d crossed the gap between us and seized my hair to flip me onto my back, at the precise moment he sank the blade into my chest, the fuse on the glycerin-wet stick of dynamite was a nub disappearing into its burrow. Graham’s exultant expression changed. “Well, I forgot Jack was a fisherman,” he said. That fucking knife kept traveling, the irresistible force, and I embraced it, and him. The Eternal Footman clapped, once. *** After an eon of vectoring through infinite night, the door to the tilt-a-whirl opened and I plummeted and hit the earth hard enough to raise dust. Mud instead. An angelic choir serenaded me from stage left, beyond a screen of tall trees and fog. Wagner as interpreted by Homer’s sirens. The voices rose and fell, sweetly demanding my blood, the heat of my bones. That sounded fine; I imagined the soft, red lips parted, imagined that they glowed as the Huntsman glowed, but as an expression of erotic passion rather than malice, and I longed to open a vein for them. I came to, paralyzed. Pieces of me lay scattered across the backyard. Probably for the best that I couldn’t turn my neck to properly survey the damage. Graham sprawled across from me, face-down in the wet leaves. Wisps of smoke curled from him. He shuddered violently and lifted his head. Bones and joints snapped into place again. The left eye shimmered with reflections of fire. The right eye was black. Neither were human. He said, “Are you dead? Are you dead? Or are you playing possum? I think you’re mostly dead. It doesn’t matter. Hell is come as you are.” He shook himself and began to crawl in my direction, slithering with a horrible serpent-like elasticity. Mostly dead must’ve meant 99.9 percent dead, because I couldn’t even blink, much less raise a hand to forestall his taking my skull for the mantle, my soul to the bad place. A red haze obscured my vision and the world receded. The sirens in the forest called again, louder yet. Graham hesitated, his glance drawn to the voices that came from many directions now and sang in many languages. Jack staggered from the smoking ruins of the house. He appeared to have been dunked in a vat of blood. He held his shotgun in a death grip. “The bell tolls for you, Stevie,” he said and blew off Graham’s left leg. He racked the slide and blasted Graham’s right leg to smithereens below the kneecap. Graham screamed and whipped around and tried to hamstring his tormentor. Not quite fast enough. Jack proved agile for an old guy with a slit throat. The siren choir screamed in pleasure. Blam! Blam! Graham’s hands went bye-bye. The next slug severed his spine, judging by the ragdoll effect. His body went limp and he screamed, and I’m sure he would’ve happily leaped on Jack and eaten him alive if Jack hadn’t already dismembered him with some fancy shotgun work. Jack said something I didn’t catch. Might’ve uttered a curse in a foreign tongue . . . then stuck the barrel under Graham’s chin and took his head off with the last round. I cheered telepathically. Then I finished dying. The score as the curtains closed was lovely, lovely. *** This time I emerged from eternal night to Minerva kissing my face. I was lying on my back in the kitchen. There was a hole in the ceiling and gray daylight poured through along with steady trickles of water from busted pipes. Jack slouched at the table, which was stacked with various odds and ends. His shoulders were wide and round as boulders and he’d gained back all the weight cancer had stolen. He clutched a bottle of Old Crow and watched me intently. He said, “Stay away from the light, kid. It’s fire and lava.” I spat clotted blood. Finally, I said, “He’s dead?” “Again.” “Singing . . .” I managed. “Oh, yeah. Don’t listen. That’s just the vampire stones. They’re fat on Graham’s energy.” “How’d I get in here?” “I dragged you by your hair.” The world kept solidifying around me, and my senses along with it. Me, Minerva, and Jack being alive didn’t compute. Except, as the cobwebs cleared from my mind, it made a sinister kind of sense. I laid my hand on Minerva’s fur and noticed the red sparks in her eyes, how goddamned long and white her teeth were. “Oh, shit,” I said. “Yeah,” Jack said. He set aside the bottle and shrugged into the Huntsman’s impeccable snow white mackinaw. Perfect fit. Next came the Huntsman’s hat. Different on Jack; broader and of a style I didn’t recognize. The red and black crest was gone. Real antlers in its stead. A shadow crossed his expression and the light in the room gathered in his eyes. “Get up,” he said. And I did. Not a mark on me. I felt quite alive for a dead man. Hideous strength coursed through my limbs. I thought of my philandering ex-wife, her music teacher beau, and hideous thoughts coursed through my mind. I must’ve retained a tiny fragment of humanity because I managed to look away from that vista of terrible and splendorous vengeance. For the moment, at least. I said, “Where now?” Jack leaned on a broad, barbed spear that had replaced his emptied shotgun. “There’s this guy in Mexico I’d like to visit,” he said. He handed me the flint knife and the herald’s horn. “Do the honors, kid.” “Oh, Stanley. It’ll be good to see you again.” I pressed the horn to my lips and winded it, once. The kitchen wall disintegrated and the shockwave traveled swiftly, rippling grass and causing birds to lift in panic from the trees. I imagined Stanley Jones, somewhere far to the south, seated on his veranda, tequila at hand, American newspaper balanced on his rickety knee, ear cocked, straining to divine the origin of dim bellow carried by the wind. Minerva bayed. She gathered her sleek, killing bulk and hurtled across the yard and into the woods. I patted the hilt of the knife and followed her.

Night descended on Interstate-90 as I crossed over into the Badlands. Real raw weather for October. Snow dusted the asphalt and picnic tables of the deserted rest area. The scene was virginal as death. I parked the Chevy under one of the lamp posts that burned at either end of the lot. A metal building with a canted roof sat low and sleek in the center island, most of its windows dark. Against the black backdrop it reminded me of a crypt or monument to travelers and pioneers lost down through the years. Placards were obscured by shadows and could’ve pronounced warnings or curses, could’ve said anything in any language. Reality was pliable tonight. Periodically a semi chugged along the freeway, its running lights tiny and dim. Other than that, this was the Moon. I loosed Minerva and watched her trot around the perimeter of the sodium glow. She raised her graying snout and growled softly at the void that surrounded us, poured from us. Her tracks and the infrequent firefly sparks on the road were the only signs of life for miles. Snow was falling thick, and those small signs wouldn’t last long. It was back to the previous ice age for us, the end for us. I kind-of, sort-of liked the idea that this might be the end, except for the fact sweet, loyal Minerva hadn’t asked for any of it, and my nature—my atavistic shadow—was, as usual, a belligerent sonofabitch. My shadow exhibited the type of nature that causes men to weigh themselves with stones before they jump into the midnight blue, causes them to mix the pills with antifreeze, trade the pistol bullet to the brain for a shotgun barrel in the mouth, just to be on the safe side. My shadow didn’t give a shit about odds, or eventualities, or pain, or certain death. It just wanted to keep shining. So, Minerva pissed in the snow and I ticked off the seconds until the ultimate showdown. My ear was killing tonight, crackling like a busted radio speaker and ringing with good old tinnitus. The sensation was that of an auger boring through membrane and meat. My back and knee ached. I lost the ear to a virus upon contracting pneumonia in Alaska during a long ago Iditarod. The spine and knee got ruined after I fell off a cliff into the Bering Sea and broke just about everything that was breakable. Resilience was my gift, and I’d recovered sufficiently to limp through the remainder of a wasted youth, to fake a hale and hearty demeanor. That shit was surely catching up now at the precipice of the miserable slide into middle age. All those forgotten or ignored wounds blooming in a chorus of ghostly pain, reminders of longstanding debts, reminders that a man can’t always outrun provenance. Sometimes it outruns him. I checked my watch and the numbers blurred. I hadn’t slept in way too long, else I never would’ve pulled over between Bumfuck, Egypt and Timbuktu. Since suicide by passivity was off the table, this was an expression of stubbornness on my part, probably. Grim defiance, or the need to reassert my faith in the logical operations of the universe if but for a moment. What a joke, faith. What a sham, logic. A hunting horn sounded far out there in the darkness beyond the humps and swales and treeless drumlins that went on basically forever, past the vast hungry prairies that had swallowed so many wagon trains. Oh, yes. The horn of the Hunt. Not simply a horn, but one that could easily be imagined as the hollowed relic from a giant, perverted ram with blood-specked foam lathering its muzzle and hellfire beaming from its eyes. A ram that crunched the bones of Saxons for breakfast and brandished a cock the girth of a wagon axle; the kind of brute that tribes sacrificed babies to when crops were bad and mated unfortunate maidens to when the chief needed some special juju on the eve of a war. Its horn was the sort of artifact that stood on end in a petrified coil and would require a brawny Viking raider to lift. Or a demon. That wail stood my hair on end, slapped me awake. It rolled toward the parking lot, swelling like some Medieval air raid klaxon. Snowflakes weren’t melting on my cheeks because all the heat—all the blood—went rushing inward. That erstwhile faith in the natural universe, the rational order of reality, wouldn’t be troubling me again anytime soon. Nope. I whistled for Minerva and she leaped into the truck, riding shotgun. Her hackles were bunched. She barked her fury and terror at the night. Sleep, O blessed sleep, how I longed for thee. No time for that. We had to get gone. The Devil would be there soon. *** Years ago, when I raced sled dogs for a living, I knew a fellow named Steven Graham, a disgraced lit professor from the University of Colorado. He’d gotten shitcanned for reasons opaque to my blue collar sensibilities—something to do with privileging contemporary zombie stories over the works of the Russian masters. His past was shrouded in mystery and, like a lot people, he’d fled to Alaska to reinvent himself. Nobody on the racing circuit cared much about any of that. Graham was charming and charismatic in spades. He drank and swore with the best of us, but he’d also get three sheets to the wind and recite a bit of Beowulf in Olde English, and he knew the bloodlines of huskies from Balto onward. Strap a pair of snowshoes to that lanky greenhorn bastard and he’d leave even the most hardened back country trapper in the proverbial dust. All the girlies adored him, and so did the cameras. Like Cummings said, he was a hell of a handsome man. Too good to be true. Steven Graham got taken by the Hunt while he was running the 1992 Iditarod. That’s the big winter event where men and women hook a bunch of huskies to sleds and race twelve hundred miles across Alaska from Anchorage to Nome. There’s not much to say about it—it’s long and grueling and lonely. You’re always crossing a frozen swamp or mushing up an ice-jammed river or trudging over a mountain. It’s dark and cold and mostly devoid of sound or movement but for one’s own breath and the muted panting of the huskies, the jingle and clink of their traces. Official records have it that Graham, young ex-professor and dilettante adventurer, took a wrong turn out on Norton Sound between Koyuk and Elim and went through the ice into the sea. Ka-sploosh. No trace of him or the dogs was found. The Lieutenant Governor attended the funeral. CNN covered it live. The report was bullshit, of course; I saw what really happened. And because I saw what really happened—because I meddled in the Hunt—there would be hell to pay. *** Broad daylight, maybe an hour prior to sunset, mid March of 1992. All twelve dogs in harness trotted along nicely. The end of the trail in Nome was about two days away. Things hadn’t gone particularly well, and I was cruising for a middle of the pack finish and a long, destitute summer of begging corporate sponsors not to drop my underachieving ass. But damn, what a gorgeous day in the arctic: the snowpack curving around me to the horizon, the sky frozen between apple-green and steely blue, the orange ball of the sun dipping below the Earth. The effect was something out of Fantasia. After days of inadequate sleep I was lulled by the hiss of the sled runners, the rhythmic scrape and slap of dog paws. I dozed at the handlebars and dreamed of Sharon, the warmth of our home, a cup of real coffee, a hot shower, and the down comforter on our bed. When my team passed through a gap in a mile-long pressure ridge that had heaved the Bering ice to an eight-foot tall parapet, the Hunt had taken down Graham on the other side, maybe twenty yards off the main drag. This I discovered when one of Graham’s huskies loped toward me, free of its traces yet still in harness. The poor critter’s head had been lopped at mid-neck and it zig-zagged several strides and then collapsed on the trail. You’d think my own dogs would’ve spooked. Instead, an atavistic switch was tripped in their doggy brains and they surged forward, yapping and howling. Several yards to my right so much blood covered the snow I thought I was hallucinating a sunset dripped onto the ice. The scene confused me for a few seconds as my brain locked down and spun in place. The killing ground was a fucking mess, like there’d been a mass walrus slaughter committed on the spot. Dead huskies were flung about, intestines looped over berms and piled in loose, steaming coils. Graham himself lay spread-eagled across a blue-white slab of ice repurposed as an impromptu sacrificial altar. He was split wide, eyes blank. The Huntsman had most of the guy’s hide off and was tacking it alongside the carcass as one stretches the skin of a beaver or a bear. Clad in a deerstalker hat surmounted by antlers, a blood-drenched mackinaw coat, canvas breeches, and sealskin boots, the Huntsman stood taller than most men even as he hunched to slice Graham with a large knife of flint or obsidian—I wasn’t quite close enough to discern which. Meanwhile, the Huntsman’s wolf pack ranged among the butchered huskies. These wolves were black and gaunt as cadavers; their narrow eyes glinted, reflecting the snow, the changeable heavens. When several of them reared on hind legs to study me, I decided they weren’t wolves at all. Some wore olden leather and caps with splintered nubs of horn; others were garbed in the remnants of military fatigues and camouflage jackets of various styles, gore encrusted and ingrown to the creatures’ hides. They grinned at me and their mouths were . . . very, very wide. Nothing brave in what I did, or at least tried to do. My befuddled intellect was still processing the carnage when I sank the hook and tethered the team, left them baying frantically in the middle of the trail. I wasn’t thinking of a damned thing as I walked stiff-legged toward the Hunt and the in-progress evisceration of my comrade. Most mushers carried firearms on the trail. There were moose to contend with and, frankly, a gun is pretty much just basic equipment in any case. We toted rifles or pistols like folks in the lower forty-eight carry cell phones and wallets. Mine was a .357 I stowed inside my anorak to keep the cylinder from freezing into a solid lump. The revolver was in my hand and it jumped twice. I don’t recall the booms. No sound, only fire. The closest pair of dog men flipped over and a small part of my mind celebrated that at least the fuckers could be hurt. It wasn’t like the legends or the movies; no silver required, lead worked fine. The Huntsman whirled when I was nearly upon him, and Jesus help me I glimpsed his face. That’s probably why my hair went white that year. I squeezed the trigger three more times, emptied the gun and even as the bullets smacked him, I had the sense of shooting into an abyss—absolute hopeless, soul-draining futility. The Huntsman swayed, humungous knife raised. The blade was flint, turns out. Worst part was, Graham blinked and looked right at me and I saw his skinned hand twitch. How he could be alive in that condition was no more or less fantastical than anything else, I suppose. Even so, even so. I still get a sick feeling in my stomach when I recall that image. Apparently, the gods of the north had seen enough. Wind roared around us and everything went white and I was alone. Hurricane-force gusts knocked me off my feet and I barely managed to crawl to the team, almost missed them, in fact. Visibility was maybe six feet. Easily, easily could’ve kept going into the featureless maelstrom until I found the lip at the edge of a bottomless gulf of open water and joined Graham, wherever he’d gone. That storm pinned the dogs and me to Norton Sound for three days. Gusts of seventy knots. Wind chill in excess of negative one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. You wouldn’t understand how cold that is. I can’t describe it. It’s like trying to explain how far away Alpha Centauri is from Earth in highway miles. The brain isn’t equipped. Froze my right hand and foot. Froze my face so that it hardened into a black and blue mask. Froze my dick. Didn’t lose anything important, but man, there are few agonies equal to thawing a frostbitten extremity. I actually managed to cripple across the finish line. Suffering through the aftermath of physical therapy and counseling, the memory of what I’d seen out there was wiped clean from my mind with the efficacy of a kid tipping an Etch A Sketch and giving it a shake. Seven or eight years passed before the horrible event came back to haunt me, and by then it was too late to say anything, too late to be certain whether it had happened or if I’d gone round the bend. *** Snow drifted both lanes and the wind buffeted the Chevy, and goddamn, but I was reliving that blizzard of ‘92. The fuel gauge needle fell into the red and I drove another half an hour, creeping along in four-wheel hi. Radio reception was poor and I’d settled for a static-filled broadcast of ’80s rock. Hall & Oates, The Police, a block of Sade and Blue Oyster Cult, all that music our parents hated when we were bopping along in mullets. “Godzilla” cut in and out during the drum solo, and a distorted animal growl that had nothing to do with heavy metal issued from the speakers. My name snarled over and over to the metronome of the wipers. A truck stop glittered on the horizon of the next off ramp. Exhausted, frazzled, pissed, and afraid, I pulled alongside the pumps and got fuel. Then I hooked Minerva to a leash and brought her inside with me. She curled at my boots while I drank a quart of awful coffee and ate a New York steak with all the trimmings. The waitress didn’t say anything about my bringing a pit bull to the table. Maybe the folks in Dakota were hip to that sort of thing. Didn’t matter; I’d gotten the little card that proved Minerva was a service dog and of vital importance should I experience an “episode” of depression or mania. Depression had haunted me since my retirement from mushing, and a friend who worked as counselor at the University of Anchorage suggested that I adopt a shelter puppy and train it as a companion animal. The local police had busted a dog-fighting ring and one of the females was pregnant, so Sharon and I eventually picked Minerva from a litter of eleven. A decade later, after my world burned to the ground—career in ashes, wife gone, friends few and far between—Minerva remained steadfast. A man and his dog versus the Outer Dark. I patted her head as we went through the door, and wished that I possessed more of her canine equanimity in the face of the unknown. The diner was doing brisk trade. Two burly truckers in company jumpsuits occupied the next booth, but most of the customers were gathered at the counter so they could watch weather reports on TV. Nothing heartening in the reports, either. The storm would definitely delay me by half a day, possibly more. My ardent hope was that I could just bull through it and be in the clear by the time I crossed Wyoming tomorrow. I also prayed that the pickup would hang together all the way to Lamprey Isle, New York, my destination at the end of the yellow brick road. My plan was to reach the home of an old friend, the eminent crime novelist, Jack Fort. Jack also happened to be a retired English professor. Jack claimed he could help. I had my doubts. The pack and its leader were eternal and relentless. A man could plunk a few, sure. In the end, though, they simply reformed and kept pursuing. The Devil’s smoke demons on the hunt. Be that as it may, I’d decided to go down swinging, and that meant a hell-bent for leather ride into the east. Currently, my worries centered on weather and equipment. The drive from Alaska via the Alcan Highway had been rough, and I suspected the old engine was fixing to give up the ghost. I could say the same thing about my heart, my sanity, my luck. Sure enough. Minerva snarled and bolted from her spot under the table. She crouched beside me, shivering. Foam dribbled from her jaw and her eyes bulged. Graham strolled in, taller and happier than I remembered. Death agreed with some people. He loomed in Technicolor while reality bleached around him. His long black hair was feathered with snowflakes, and the lights hit it just right so he appeared angelic, a movie star pausing for his dramatic close-up. In his right hand, he carried the ivory hunting horn (indeed a ram’s horn, albeit much more modest than its report); in his left he carried a faded cowboy hat with a crimson and black patch on the crown. He wore the Huntsman’s iceberg-white mackinaw, ceremonial flint knife tucked into his belt so the bone handle jutted in a most phallic statement. He ambled over and slid in across from me. I noticed his sealskin boots left maroon smears on the tiles. I also noticed puffs of steam escaping our mouths as the booth cooled like a meat locker. I cocked the .357 and braced it across my thigh. “You must not be heralding the great zombie invasion. Lookin’ great, Steve. Not chalk white or anything. The rot must be on the inside.” He flipped his hair and smirked. His trophy necklace of wedding rings, key fobs, dog tags, driver licenses, and glass eyes clinked and rattled. “Likewise, amigo. You’ve lost weight? Dyed your hair? What?” “This and that—diet, exercise. Fleeing in terror has the bonus effect of getting a man in shape. Divorce, too. My wife used to fatten me up pretty good. Since she split . . . you know. TV dinners and Johnnie Walker. I got it going on, huh?” I gripped Minerva’s collar with my free hand. Her growls were deep and ferocious. She strained to lunge over the table, an eighty pound bowling bowl; rippling muscle and bone crushing jaws and, at the moment, bad intentions. My arm was tired already. Tempting to let my girl fly, but I loved her. “I’m yanking your chain. You look like crap. When’s the last time you slept? There’s a motel a piece up the trail. Why not get room service, watch a porno, drink some booze and fall into peaceful slumber? You won’t even notice when I slip in there and slice your fucking throat ear to ear.” Graham’s smile widened. It was still him, too. Same guy I’d gotten drunk with at Nome saloons. Same perfect teeth, same easy manner, probably sincere. He’d not intimated any malice regarding his intent to skin me alive and eat my beating heart. This was business, mostly. He inclined his head slightly, as if intercepting my thought. “Not so much business as tradition. The Hunt is a sacred rite. I gave you the head start as a courtesy.” He was telling the truth as I understood it from my research of the legends. To witness the Hunt, to interfere with the Hunt, was to become prey. I’d wondered why the emissaries of the Horned One waited so long to come after me, especially considering the magnitude of my transgression. “Well, I reckon that was sporting of you. Twenty years. Plenty of time for Odysseus to screw his way home from the front.” “Yep, and you’re almost there, too,” Graham said. “Crazy ass scene on the ice, huh? Sergio Leone meets John Landis and they do it up right with razors. Man, you were totally Eastwood, six-gun blazing. Wounded the Huntsman in a serious way. Didn’t kill the fucker, though. Don’t flatter yourself on that score. Might be able to smoke the hounds with regular bullets. That shit don’t work so well on the Huntsman. We’re of a higher order. Nah, when that storm hit, some sort of force went through me, electrified me. I tore free of that altar and jumped on the bastard’s back, stuck a hunting knife into his kidney. Still wouldn’t have worked except the forces of darkness were smiling on me. Grooved on my style. The Boss demoted him, awarded me the mantle and the blade, the hounds, more bitches in Hell than you can shake a stick at. I’ve watched you for a while, bro. Watched you lose your woman, your career, your health. You’re an old, grizzled bull. No money, no family, no friends, no future. It’s culling time, baby.” “Shit, you’re doing me a favor! Thanks, pal!” “Come on, don’t be sarcastic. We’re still buds. This is going to be super-duper painful, but no reason to make it personal. Your hide will be but one more tossed atop a mountainous pile beside a chthonic lagoon of blood and the Horned One’s bone throne. The muster roll of the damned is endless, and the next name awaits my attentions.” “Okay, nothing personal. Here’s the deal, since I’m the one with the hand cannon. You hold still and I’ll blow your head off. Take my chances with whomever they send next. No hard feelings.” I debated whether to shoot him under the table or risk raising the gun to aim properly. Graham laughed. “Whoa, chief. This isn’t the place. All these hapless customers, the dishwasher, the waitress, the fry cooks. That sexy waitress. If we turn this into the O-K Corral, the Boss himself will be on the case. The Horned One isn’t a kindly soul. He comes around, everybody gets it in the neck. Them’s the rules, I’m afraid.” A vision splashed across the home cinema of my imagination: every person in the diner strung from the rafters by their living guts, the hounds using the corpses for piñatas and the massive, shadowy bulk of the Horned God flickering fire in the parking lot as he gazed on in infernal joy. Like as not this image was projected by Graham. I glanced out the window and spotted one of the pack, a cadaverous brute in a threadbare parka and snow pants, pissing against the wheel of a semi. In another life he’d been Bukowski or Waits, or a serial killer who rode the rails and shanked fellow hobos, a strangler of coeds, a postman. I knew him for a split second, then not. Other hounds leaped from trailer to trailer, frolicking. Too dark to make out details, except that the figures flitted and fluttered with the lithe, rubbery grace of acrobats. I said, “Tell me, Steve. What would’ve happened to you if I hadn’t interrupted the party? Where would you be tonight?” He shrugged and his movie star teeth dulled to a shade of rotten ivory. “Ah, those are the sort of questions I try to let lie. The Boss frowns on us worrying about stuff above our pay grade.” “Would you have become a hound?” “Sometimes a damned soul gets dragged over to join the Hunt. Only the few, the proud. It’s a rare honor.” Cold clamped on the back of my neck. “And the rest of the slobs who get taken? Where do they go after you’re done with them?” “Not a clue, amigo. Truly an ineffable mystery.” His grin brightened again, so white, so frigid. He put on the cowboy hat. The logo was a red patch with a set of black antlers stitched in the foreground. Sign of the Horned God who was Graham’s master on the Other Side. Minerva’s snarls and growls escalated to full-throated barks as she bristled and lunged. She’d had her fill of Mr. Death and his shark smirk. One of the truckers set down his coffee cup, pointed a thick finger at me, and said, “Hey, asshole. Shut that dog up.” Graham’s eyes went dark, monitors tuned to deep space. A stain formed on the breast of his lily-white mackinaw. Blood dripped from his sleeve and the stink of carrion wafted from his mouth. He rose and turned and his shoulders seemed to broaden. I caught his profile reflected in the window and something was wrong with it, although I couldn’t tell what exactly. He said in a distorted, buzzing voice, “No, you shut your mouth. Or I’ll eat your tongue like a piece of Teriyaki.” The trucker paled and scrambled from his seat and fled the diner without a word. His buddy followed suit. They didn’t grab their coats or pay the tab or anything. Other folks had twisted in their seats to view the commotion. None of them spoke, either. The waitress stood with her ticket book outthrust like a crucifix. Graham said to them, “Hush, folks. Nothing to see here.” And everyone took the hint and went back to his or her business. He nodded and faced me, smile affixed, eyes sort of normal again. “I better get along, li’l doggie. Wanted to say hi. So hi and goodbye. Gonna keep trucking east? Wait, forget I asked. Don’t want to spoil the fun. See you soon, wherever that is.” Yeah, he grinned, but the wintry night was a heap warmer. “Wait,” I said. “You mentioned rules. Be nice to know what they are.” “Sure, there are lots of rules. However, you only need to worry about one of them: run, motherfucker.” *** I never fully recovered from the incident in ‘92; not down deep, not in the way that counts. Nightmares plagued me. Oblique, horror-show recreations as seen through the obfuscating mist of a subconscious in denial. Neither me nor the shrink could make sense of them. He put me on pills and that didn’t help. I sold the team to a Japanese millionaire and moved to the suburbs of Anchorage with Sharon, took a series of crummy labor jobs, and worked on the Great American horror novel in the evenings. She finished grad school and landed a position teaching elementary grade art. Ever fascinated with pulp classics, when the novel appeared to be a dead end I tried my hand at genre short fiction and immediately landed a few sales. By the early aughts I was doing well enough to justify quitting the construction gig and staying home to work on stories full-time. These were supernatural horror stories, fueled by the nightmares I didn’t understand, until it all came crashing in on me one afternoon during a game of winter golf with some buddies down at the beach. I keeled over on the frozen sand and was momentarily transported back to Norton Sound while my friends stood around wringing their hands. Normal folks don’t know what to do around a lunatic writhing on the ground and babbling in tongues. A week on the couch wrapped in an electric blanket and shaking with terror followed. I didn’t level with anyone—not the shrink, not Sharon or my parents, not my friends or writer colleagues. I read a piece on the Wild Hunt in an article concerning world mythology and it was like getting socked in the belly. I finally knew what had happened, if not why. All that was left was to brood. Life went on. We tried for children without success. I have a hunch Sharon left me because I was shooting blanks. Who the fuck knows, though. Much like the Wild Hunt, the Meaning of Life, and where matching socks vanish to, her motives remain a mystery. Things seemed cozy between us; she’d always been sympathetic to my tics and twitches, and I’d tried to be a good and loving husband in return. Obviously, living with a half-crazed author took a greater toll than I’d estimated. Add screams in the night and generally paranoid behavior to the equation . . . One day she came home early, packed her bags, and headed for Italy with a music teacher from her school. Not a single tear in her eye when she said adios to me, either. That was the same week my longtime agent, a lewd, crude alcoholic expat Brit named Stanley Jones, was indicted on numerous federal charges including embezzlement, wire fraud, and illegal alien residence. He and his lover, the obscure English horror writer Samson Marks, absconded to Mexico with my life savings, as well as the nest eggs of several other authors. The scandal made all the industry trade rags, but the cops didn’t seem overly concerned with chasing the duo. I depended on those royalty checks as my physical condition was deteriorating. Cold weather made my bones ache. Some mornings my lumbar seized and it took twenty minutes to crawl out of bed. I hung on for a couple of years, but my situation declined. The publishing climate wasn’t friendly with the recession and such. Foreclosure notices soon arrived in the mailbox. Then, last week, Graham reappeared to put my misery into perspective. Prior to this latter event, Jack Fort theorized that Sharon didn’t run off to Italy because she was dissatisfied with the way things were going at home. Nor was it a coincidence that Jones robbed me blind and left me in the poorhouse. (Jack also employed the crook as an agent, and from what I gathered, the loss of funds contributed to his own divorce.) My friend became convinced dark forces had aligned against me in matters great and small. Later, I told him about the Hunt and what I’d seen on the ice in 1992, how that particular chicken had come home to roost. He wasn’t the least bit surprised. Unflappable Jack Fort; the original drink-boiling-water-and-piss-ice-cubes guy. The night I called him we were both drunk, and when I spilled the story of how Graham had returned from the grave and wanted to mount my head on a trophy room wall in hell, instead of expressing bewilderment or fear for my sanity, Jack just said, “Right. I figured it was something like this. From grad school onward, Graham was headed for trouble, pure and simple. He was asshole buddies with exactly the wrong type of people. Occultism is nothing to fuck with. Anyway, you’re sure it’s the Wild Hunt?” “Graham referred to himself as the Huntsman. So. It happened almost exactly like the legends.” Granted, there were variations on the theme. Each culture has its peculiarities and so focuses on different aspects. Some versions of the Hunt mythology have Odin calling the tune. Under Odin’s yoke, the Hunt is an expression of exuberance and feral joy, a celebration of the primal. Odin’s pack travels a couple of feet off the ground. Any fool that stands in the way gets mowed like grass. See Odin coming, you grab dirt and pray the spectral procession passes overhead and keeps moving on the trail of its quarry. The gang from Alaska seemed darker, crueler, dirtier than the storybook versions; Graham and his troops reeked of sadism and madness. That eldritch psychosis leached from them into me, gathered in effluvial dankness in the back of my throat, lay on my tongue as a foul taint. The important details were plenty consistent—slavering hounds, feral Huntsman, a horned deity overseeing the chase, death and damnation to the prey. Jack asked what happened and I gave him the scoop: “I was hiking along Hatcher Pass to photograph the mountain for research. Heard a god-awful racket in a nearby canyon. Howling, psycho laughter, screams. Some kind of Viking horn. I knew what was happening before I saw the pack on the summit. Knew it in my bones—the legends vary, of course. Still, the basics are damned clear whether it’s the Norwegians, Germans, or Inuit. The pack wasn’t in full chase mode or that would’ve been curtains. They wanted to scare me; makes the kill sweeter. Anyway, I beat feet. Made it to the truck and burned rubber. Graham showed up at the house later in a greasy puff of smoke, chatted with me through the door. He said I had three days to get my shit in order and then he and his boys would be after me for real.” Jack remained quiet for a bit, except to cough a horrible, phlegmy cough—it sounded wet and entrenched as bronchitis or pneumonia. Finally he said, “Well, head east. I might be able to help you. Graham and me knew each other pretty well once upon a time when he was still teaching, and I got some ideas what he was up to after he left Boulder. He was an adventurer, but I doubt he spent all that time in the frozen north for the thrill. Nah, my bet is he was searching for the Hunt and it found him first. Poor silly bastard.” “Thanks, man. Although, I hate to bring this to your doorstep. Interfere in the Hunt and it’s you on the skinning board next.” “Shut up, kid. Tend your knitting and I’ll see to mine.” Big Jack Fort’s nonchalant reaction should’ve startled me, and under different circumstances I might’ve pondered how deep the tentacles of this particular conspiracy went. His advice appealed, though. Sure, the Huntsman wanted me to take to my heels; the chase gave him a boner. Nonetheless, I’d rather present a moving target than hang around the empty house waiting to get snuffed on the toilet or in my sleep. Graham’s flayed body glistening in the arctic twilight was branded into my psyche. “You better step lively,” Jack warned me, in that gravelly voice of his that always sounded the same whether sober or stewed. A big dude, built square, the offspring of Raymond Burr and a grand piano. Likely he was sprawled across his couch in a tee shirt and boxers, bottle of Maker’s Mark in one paw. “Got complications on my end. Can’t talk about them right now. Just haul ass and get here.” I didn’t like the sound of that, nor the sound of his coughing. Despite a weakness for booze, Jack was one of the more stable guys in the business. However, he was a bit older than me and playing the role of estranged husband. Then there was the crap with Jones and dwindling book sales in general. I thought maybe he was cracking. I thought maybe we were both cracking. Later that night I loaded the truck with a few essentials, including my wedding album and a handful of paperbacks I’d acquired at various literary conventions, locked the house, and lit out. In the rearview mirror I saw Graham and three of his hounds as silhouettes on the garage roof, pinprick eyes blazing red as I drove away. It was, as the kids say, game on. *** Rocketing through Indiana, “Slippery People” on the radio, darkness all around, darkness inside. The radio crackled and static erased the Talking Heads and Graham said to me, “Everybody on the lam from the Hunt feels sorry for himself. Thing of it is, amigo, you’re tuned to the wrong tune. You should ask yourself, How did I get here? What have I done?” The pack raced alongside the truck. Hounds and master shimmered like starlight against the velvet backdrop, twisted like funnels of smoke. The Huntsman blew me a kiss and I tromped the accelerator and they fell off the pace. One of the hounds leaped the embankment rail and loped after me, snout pressed to the centerline. It darted into the shadows an instant before being overtaken and smooshed by a tractor trailer. I pushed beyond exhaustion and well into the realm of zombification. The highway was a wormhole between dimensions and Graham occasionally whispered to me through the radio even though I’d hit the kill switch. And what he’d said really worked on me. What had I done to come to this pass? Maybe Sharon left me because I was a sonofabitch. Maybe Jones screwing me over was karma. The Wild Hunt might be a case of the universe getting Even-Steven (pardon the pun) with me. Thank the gods I didn’t have a bottle of liquor handy or else I’d have spent the remainder of the long night totally blitzed and sobbing like a baby over misdeeds real and imagined. Instead, I popped the cap on a bottle of NoDoz and put the hammer down. *** I parked and slept once in a turnout for a couple of hours during the middle of the day when traffic ran thickest. I risked no more than that. The Hunt had its rules regarding the taking of prey in front of too many witnesses, but I didn’t have the balls to challenge those traditions. The Chevy died outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Every gauge went crazy and plumes of steam boiled from the radiator. I got the rig towed to a salvage yard and transferred Minerva and my meager belongings to a compact rental. We were back on the road before breakfast, and late afternoon saw us aboard the ferry from Port Sanger, New York, to Lamprey Isle. What to say about LI West (as Jack referred to it)? Nineteen miles north to south and about half that at its widest, the whole curved into a malformed crescent, the Man in the Moon’s visage peeled from Luna and partially submerged in the Atlantic. Its rocky shore was sculpted by the clash of wind and sea; a forest of pine, maple, and oak spanned the interior. Home of hoot owls and red squirrels; good deer hunting along the secret winding trails, I’d heard. Native burial mounds and mysterious megaliths, I’d also heard. The main population center, Lamprey Township (pop. 2201), nestled in a cove on the southwestern tip of the island. Jack had mentioned that the town had been established as a fishing village in the early nineteenth century; prior to that, smugglers and slavers made it their refuge from privateers and local authorities. A den of illicit gambling and sodomy, I’d heard. Allegedly, the name arose from a vicious species of eels that infested the local waters. Long as a man’s arm, the locals claimed. Lamprey Township was a fog-shrouded settlement hemmed by the cove and spearhead shoals, a picket of evergreens. A gloomy cathedral fortress reared atop a cliff streaked with seagull shit and pocked by cave entrances. Lovers Leap. In town, everybody wore flannel and rain slickers, boots and sock caps. A folding knife and mackinaw crowd. Everything was covered in salt rime, everything tasted of brine. Piloting the rental down Main Street between boardwalks, compartment of the car flushed with soft blue-red lights reflecting from the ocean, I thought this wouldn’t be such a bad place to die. Release my essential salts back into the primordial cradle. Jack’s cabin lay inland at the far end of a dirt spur. Built in the same era as the founding of Lamprey Township, he’d bought it from Katarina Veniti, a paranormal romance author who’d become jaded with all of the tourists and yuppies moving onto “her” island during the last recession. A stone and timber longhouse with ye old-fashioned shingles and moss on the roof surrounded by an acre of sloping yard overgrown with tall, dead grass. An oak had uprooted during a recent windstorm and toppled across the drive. Minerva and I hoofed it the last quarter of a mile. The faceless moon dripped and shone through scudding clouds and a vault of branches. The house sat in darkness except for a light shining from the kitchen window. “Welcome to Kat’s island,” Jack said, and coughed. He reclined in the shadows on a porch swing. Moonlight glinted from the bottle in his hand, the barrel of the pump-action shotgun across his knees. He wore a wool coat, dock-worker’s cap snug over his brow, wool pants, and lace-up hiking boots. When he stood to shake my hand, I realized his clothes hung loose as sails, that he was frail and shaky. “Jesus, man,” I said, shaken at the sight of him. He appeared more of an apparition than the bona fide spirit pursuing me. I understood why he didn’t mind the idea of the Hunt invading his happy home. The man was so emaciated he should’ve been hanging near the blackboard in science class; a hundred pounds lighter since I’d last seen him, easy. He’d shaved his head and beard to gray stubble; his pallid flesh was dry and hot, his eyes sparkled like bits of quartz. He stank of gun oil, smoke, and rotting fruit. “Yeah. The big C. Doc hit me with the bad news this spring. Deathwatch around the Fort. I sent the pets to live with my sister.” He smiled and gestured at the woods. “Just you, me, and the trees. I got nothing better to do than help an old pal in his hour of need.” He led the way inside. The kitchen was cheerily lighted, and we took residence at the dining table where he poured me a glass of whiskey and listened to my recap of the trip from Alaska. “I hope you’ve got a plan,” I said. “Besides blasting them with grandma’s twelve gauge?” He patted the stock of his shotgun where it lay on the table. “We’re going out like a pair of Vikings.” “I’d be more excited if you had a flamethrower, or some grenades.” “Me too. Me too. I got a few sticks of dynamite for fishing and plenty of ammo.” “Dynamite is good. This is going to be full on Hollywood. Fast cars, shirtless women, explosions . . .” “Man, I don’t even know if it’ll detonate. The shit’s been stashed in a leaky box in the cellar for a hundred years. Honestly, my estimation is, we’re hosed. Totally up shit creek. Our sole advantage is prey doesn’t usually fight back. Graham’s powerful, he’s a spirit, or a monster, whatever. But he’s new on the job, right? That may be our ray of sunshine. That, and according to the literature, the Pack doesn’t fancy crossing large bodies of open water. These haunts prefer ice and snow.” Jack coughed into a handkerchief. Belly-ripping, Doc Holliday kind of coughing. He wiped his mouth and had a belt of whiskey. His cheeks were blotched. “Anyway, I brought you here for another reason. This house belonged to a sorcerer once upon a time. Type they used to burn at the stake. An unsavory guy named Ewers Welloc. The Wellocs own most of this island and there’s a hell of a story in that. For now, let me say Ewers was blackest in a family of black sheep. The villagers were scared shitless of him, were convinced he practiced necromancy and other dark arts on the property. Considering the stories Kat told me and some of the funky stuff I’ve found stashed around here, it’s hard to dismiss the villagers claims as superstition.” I could only wonder what he’d unearthed, or Kat before him. Jack bought the place for a dollar and suddenly that factoid assumed ominous significance. “What were you guys up to? You, Kat, and Graham attended college together. Did you form a club?” “A witch coven. I kid, I kid. Wasn’t college . . . We met at the Sugar Tree Hill writers’ retreat. Five days of sun, fun, booze, and hand jobs. There were quite a few young authors there who went on to become quasi-prominent. Many a friendship and enmity are formed at Sugar Tree Hill. The three of us really clicked. Me and Kat were wild, man, wild. Nothing on Graham’s scale, though. He took it way farther. As you can see.” “Yeah.” I sipped my drink. “Me and Graham were pretty tight until he schlepped to Alaska and started in with the sled dogs. Communication tapered off and after a while we fell out of touch. I received a few letters. Guy had the world’s shittiest penmanship; would’ve taken a cryptologist to have deciphered them. I thought he suffered from cabin fever.” “Seemed okay to me,” I said. “Gregarious. Popular. Handsome. He was well-regarded.” “Yeah, yeah . . . The rot was on the inside,” Jack said and I almost spilled my glass. He didn’t notice. “As it happens, my hole card is an ace. Lamprey Isle was settled long before the whites landed. Maybe before the Mohawk, Mohican, Seneca. Nobody knows who these people were, but none of the records are flattering. This mystery tribe left megaliths and cairns on islands and along the coast. A few of those megaliths are in the woods around here. Legend has it that the tribe erected them for use in necromantic rituals. Summon, bind, banish. Like Robert Howard hypothesized in his Conan tales—if the demonic manifests on the mortal plane, it becomes subject to the laws of physics, and cold Hyperborean steel. Howard was onto something.” “Fairy rocks, huh?” I said. The whiskey was hitting me. “Got any problem believing in the Grim Reaper with a hunting knife and a pack of werewolves chasing you from one end of the continent to the other?” I tried again. “So. Fairy rocks.” “Fuckin’ A, boy-o. Fairy rocks. And double aught buckshot.” *** We took shifts at watch until dawn. The Hunt didn’t arrive and so passed a peaceful evening. I slept for three hours; the most I’d had in a week. Jack fried bacon and eggs for breakfast and we drank a pot of black coffee. Afterward he gave me a tour of the house and the immediate grounds. Much of the house gathered dust, exuding the vibe particular to dwellings of bachelors and widowers. Since his wife flew the coop, Jack’s remit had contracted to kitchen, bath, living room. Too close to a tomb for my liking. Tromping around the property with our breath streaming slantwise, he showed me a megalith hidden in the underbrush between a pair of sugar maples. Huge and misshapen beneath layers of slime and moss, the stone cast a shadow over us. It radiated the chill of an ice block. One of several in the vicinity, I soon learned. Jack wasn’t eager to hang around it. “There were lots of animal bones piled in the bushes. You’ll never catch any animals living here. Wasn’t the two decks of Camels I smoked every day since junior high that gave me cancer. It’s these damned things. Near as I can figure, they’re siphons. Let’s pray the effect is magnified upon extra-dimensional beings. Otherwise, Graham will just eat our bullets and spit them back at us.” The megalith frightened me. I imagined it as a huge, predatory insect disguised as a stone, its ethereal rostrum stabbing an artery and sucking my life essence. I wondered if the stones were indigenous, or if the ancient tribes had fashioned them somehow. I’d never know. “Graham’s an occultist. Think he’s dumb enough to walk into a trap?” “Graham ain’t Graham anymore. He’s the Huntsman.” Jack scanned the red-gold horizon and muttered dire predictions of another storm front descending from the west. “Trouble headed this way,” he said and hustled me back to the house. We locked and shuttered everything and took positions in the living room; Jack with his shotgun, me with my pistol and dog. Seated on the leather Italian sofa, bolstered by a pitcher of vodka and lemonade, we watched ancient episodes of The Rockford Files and Ironside and waited. Several minutes past two p.m., the air dimmed to velvety purple and the trees behind the house thrashed and rain spattered the windows. The power died. I whistled a few bars of the Twilight Zone theme, shifted the pistol into my shooting hand. Jack grinned and went to the window and stood there, a blue shadow limned in black. The booze in my tumbler quivered and the horn bellowed, right on top of us. Glass exploded and I was bleeding from the head and both hands that I’d raised to protect my face. Wood splintered and doors caved in all over the house and the hounds rolled into the living room; long, sinuous figures of pure malevolence with ruby-bright eyes, low to the floor and moving fast, teeth, tongues, appetite. I squinted and fired twice from the hip, and a bounding figure jerked short. Minerva pounced, snarling and tearing in frenzy, doggy mind reverting to the swamps and jungles and caves of her ancestors. Jack’s shotgun blazed a stroke of yellow flame and sheared the arm of a fiend who’d scuttled in close. Partially deafened and blinded, I couldn’t keep track of much after that. Squeezed the trigger four more times, popped the speed loader with six fresh slugs, kept firing at shadows that leaped and sprang. The Riders of the Apocalypse and Friends galloped through the house—our own private Armageddon. More glass whirled, and bits of wood and shreds of drapery; a section of ceiling collapsed in a cascade of sparks and rapidly blooming white carnations of drywall dust. Now the gods could watch. Thunder of gunshots, Minerva growling, the damned, yodeling cries of the hounds, and crackling bones, wound around my brain in a knotted spool. I got knocked down in the melee and watched Minerva swing past, lazily flying, paws limp, guts raveling behind her. I’d owned many dogs, but Minerva was my first and only pet, my dearest friend. She was a mewling puppy once more, then inert bone and slack hide, and gone, gone, the last pinprick of my life snuffed. Something was on fire. Oily black smoke seethed through a vertical impact crater where the far wall had stood. Moon, clouds, and smoke boiled there. A couple of fingers were missing from my left hand. Blood pulsed forth: a shiny, crimson bouquet thickening into a lump at the end of my wrist, a wax sculpture from the house of horrors, an object example of Medieval torture. It didn’t hurt. Didn’t feel like anything. My jacket had been sliced, and the flesh beneath it, so that my innards glistened in the cold air. That didn’t hurt either. Instead, I was buoyed by a feral joy. This wouldn’t take much longer by the looks of it. I pulled the jacket closed as best I could and began the laborious process of standing. Almost done, almost home. Jack cursed through a mouthful of dirt. The Huntsman had entered the fray and caught his skull in one splayed hand. He sawed through Jack’s throat with that jagged flint dagger hewn from Stone Age crystal. The Huntsman sawed with so much vigor that Jack’s limbs flopped crazily, a crash test dummy at the moment of impact. Graham let Jack’s carcass thump to the sodden carpet among the savaged bodies of the pack. He pointed at me, him playing the lead man of a rock band shouting out to his audience. Yeah, the gods were with us, and no doubt. “So, we meet again.” He chuckled and licked his lips and wiped the Satan knife against his gory mackinaw. He approached, shuffling like a seal through the smoldering gloom, lighted by an inner radiance that bathed him in a weird, pale glow as cold and alien as the Aurora Borealis. The death-light of Hades, presumably. His eyes were hidden by the brim of his hat, but his smile curved, joyless and cruel. I made it to my feet and scrambled backward over the flaming wreckage of coffee tables and easy chairs, the upended couch, and into the hall. Blood came from me in ropes, in sheets. Graham followed, smiling, smiling. Doorframes buckled as his shoulders brushed them. He swiped the knife in a loose and easy diamond pattern. The knife hissed as it rehearsed my evisceration. I wasn’t worried about that. I was long past worry. Thoughts of vengeance dominated. “You killed my dog.” Blood bubbles plopped from my lips, and that’s never good. Another dose of ferocious, joyful melancholy spurred me onward. I pitched the empty revolver at his head, watched the gun glance aside and spin away. My tears froze to salt on my cheeks. Arctic ice groaned beneath my boots as the sea swelled, yearned toward the moon. The sea drained the warmth from me, taking back what it had given. “You killed your dog, mon frère. You did for our buddy Jack, too. Bringing me and my boys here like this. Don’t beat yourself up. It’s a volunteer army, right?” I turned away, sliding, overbalancing. My legs folded and I slumped before a fallen timber, its charred length licked by small flames. The blood from my ruined hand sizzled and spat. I rubbed my face against the floor, painting myself a war mask of gore and charcoal. By the time he’d crossed the gap between us and seized my hair to flip me onto my back, at the precise moment he sank the blade into my chest, the fuse on the glycerin-wet stick of dynamite was a nub disappearing into its burrow. Graham’s exultant expression changed. “Well, I forgot Jack was a fisherman,” he said. That fucking knife kept traveling, the irresistible force, and I embraced it, and him. The Eternal Footman clapped, once. *** After an eon of vectoring through infinite night, the door to the tilt-a-whirl opened and I plummeted and hit the earth hard enough to raise dust. Mud instead. An angelic choir serenaded me from stage left, beyond a screen of tall trees and fog. Wagner as interpreted by Homer’s sirens. The voices rose and fell, sweetly demanding my blood, the heat of my bones. That sounded fine; I imagined the soft, red lips parted, imagined that they glowed as the Huntsman glowed, but as an expression of erotic passion rather than malice, and I longed to open a vein for them. I came to, paralyzed. Pieces of me lay scattered across the backyard. Probably for the best that I couldn’t turn my neck to properly survey the damage. Graham sprawled across from me, face-down in the wet leaves. Wisps of smoke curled from him. He shuddered violently and lifted his head. Bones and joints snapped into place again. The left eye shimmered with reflections of fire. The right eye was black. Neither were human. He said, “Are you dead? Are you dead? Or are you playing possum? I think you’re mostly dead. It doesn’t matter. Hell is come as you are.” He shook himself and began to crawl in my direction, slithering with a horrible serpent-like elasticity. Mostly dead must’ve meant 99.9 percent dead, because I couldn’t even blink, much less raise a hand to forestall his taking my skull for the mantle, my soul to the bad place. A red haze obscured my vision and the world receded. The sirens in the forest called again, louder yet. Graham hesitated, his glance drawn to the voices that came from many directions now and sang in many languages. Jack staggered from the smoking ruins of the house. He appeared to have been dunked in a vat of blood. He held his shotgun in a death grip. “The bell tolls for you, Stevie,” he said and blew off Graham’s left leg. He racked the slide and blasted Graham’s right leg to smithereens below the kneecap. Graham screamed and whipped around and tried to hamstring his tormentor. Not quite fast enough. Jack proved agile for an old guy with a slit throat. The siren choir screamed in pleasure. Blam! Blam! Graham’s hands went bye-bye. The next slug severed his spine, judging by the ragdoll effect. His body went limp and he screamed, and I’m sure he would’ve happily leaped on Jack and eaten him alive if Jack hadn’t already dismembered him with some fancy shotgun work. Jack said something I didn’t catch. Might’ve uttered a curse in a foreign tongue . . . then stuck the barrel under Graham’s chin and took his head off with the last round. I cheered telepathically. Then I finished dying. The score as the curtains closed was lovely, lovely. *** This time I emerged from eternal night to Minerva kissing my face. I was lying on my back in the kitchen. There was a hole in the ceiling and gray daylight poured through along with steady trickles of water from busted pipes. Jack slouched at the table, which was stacked with various odds and ends. His shoulders were wide and round as boulders and he’d gained back all the weight cancer had stolen. He clutched a bottle of Old Crow and watched me intently. He said, “Stay away from the light, kid. It’s fire and lava.” I spat clotted blood. Finally, I said, “He’s dead?” “Again.” “Singing . . .” I managed. “Oh, yeah. Don’t listen. That’s just the vampire stones. They’re fat on Graham’s energy.” “How’d I get in here?” “I dragged you by your hair.” The world kept solidifying around me, and my senses along with it. Me, Minerva, and Jack being alive didn’t compute. Except, as the cobwebs cleared from my mind, it made a sinister kind of sense. I laid my hand on Minerva’s fur and noticed the red sparks in her eyes, how goddamned long and white her teeth were. “Oh, shit,” I said. “Yeah,” Jack said. He set aside the bottle and shrugged into the Huntsman’s impeccable snow white mackinaw. Perfect fit. Next came the Huntsman’s hat. Different on Jack; broader and of a style I didn’t recognize. The red and black crest was gone. Real antlers in its stead. A shadow crossed his expression and the light in the room gathered in his eyes. “Get up,” he said. And I did. Not a mark on me. I felt quite alive for a dead man. Hideous strength coursed through my limbs. I thought of my philandering ex-wife, her music teacher beau, and hideous thoughts coursed through my mind. I must’ve retained a tiny fragment of humanity because I managed to look away from that vista of terrible and splendorous vengeance. For the moment, at least. I said, “Where now?” Jack leaned on a broad, barbed spear that had replaced his emptied shotgun. “There’s this guy in Mexico I’d like to visit,” he said. He handed me the flint knife and the herald’s horn. “Do the honors, kid.” “Oh, Stanley. It’ll be good to see you again.” I pressed the horn to my lips and winded it, once. The kitchen wall disintegrated and the shockwave traveled swiftly, rippling grass and causing birds to lift in panic from the trees. I imagined Stanley Jones, somewhere far to the south, seated on his veranda, tequila at hand, American newspaper balanced on his rickety knee, ear cocked, straining to divine the origin of dim bellow carried by the wind. Minerva bayed. She gathered her sleek, killing bulk and hurtled across the yard and into the woods. I patted the hilt of the knife and followed her.

From Horror photos & videos July 10, 2018 at 08:00PM

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