It wasn’t the actual running that concerned her the most. She could do that, even if her leg went numb and she was forced to drag it along behind her. It was her mind that she was worried about-the thoughts that kept coming and going in her head-some times so real that she wondered if she were already blacking out and didn’t even know it.
She gritted her teeth and pushed forward. She could still sense Cyclops behind her, although the last few times she’d risked slowing down to look, all she’d seen was an empty highway.
Swift clouds moved across the night sky like silent boxcars. She could smell the vinegary scent of rain moving off the ocean, feel the drop in air pressure. She thought she heard dogs barking and wondered if she was hallucinating.
Not much further up the highway, she remembered to take a shortcut locals often used to get to Traitor-a series of long and sometimes steep switchbacks that eventually led down to a railroad track far below. There were many drop offs you had to be careful of but once you reached the tracks, the rest was an easy distance into town. When she was younger and a lot more foolish she’d taken the trail many times at night with only the moon lighting her way. Tonight the moon wasn’t going to be much help. Whatever light did make it down to her now was too weak. But she still had the flashlight she’d found on the boat. And the.38 she’d taken from the sheriff.
Stepping cautiously down the slippery trail, she thought about the railroad tracks far below. As kids, she and her friends used them often in the summer to pick blackberries, although their parents warned them to keep away. She’d grown up hearing the same stories as everyone else. Of crazy hobos lurching down the tracks, looking to hurt someone. Neither she nor her friends ever encountered anyone like that but sometimes they’d find empty liquor bottles and once James said he watched a crow fly off with a bloody finger someone must have suffered the loss of while hopping a train or getting into a knife fight.
In the spring she’d come down with her friends and pick wildflowers before the berries ripened, set pennies on the rail to see what the train would do to them. James once put a quarter on the rail and after the train flattened it he took it home and drilled a hole in it and made a necklace. Later his father had found out and given him hell for wasting money so he’d given it to Ann. Her mother had seen her wearing it and asked her about it, teased her about James being sweet on her. It must have been only a few days before she disappeared…
Everything went dark.
She could still feel her heart thumping in her throat. The ocean hadn’t stopped roaring and her leg felt like a bloody stump, but she knew that by all logically sane accounts it was not.
She knocked the flashlight against her palm. It flickered and went out, then sparked again before finding a steady but yellowish beam that gradually died.
And then she heard the dogs again. Close.
Chapter 56
Until her eyes adjusted, Ann saw nothing but shadow layered over shadow. She stared west, beyond a clearing in the trees. If she concentrated she could see the ocean as a dark band, and above it a faded red thread of sunset.
As the dogs howling got louder she stepped off the trail and began pulling herself blindly through the wet undergrowth. She came to a tunnel of salal and passed through it onto a worn deer path of hardened clay that followed a narrow ridge. On either side sharp cliffs plunged down to roaring surf. When she reached the end of the path she recognized an old fire ring and lichen-spotted boulders where she and James would sometimes sit up all night and talk until dawn. If the sky remained clear you could see the faint yellow glow of towns up and down the coast.
How long had it been since she’d come here? After she and James returned from Portland, they’d never made it back. They’d try to make plans but something else would always come up and they continued to put it off until one day it became a kind of cynical joke between them, a sign that their relationship had been forever changed.
Shadows shot from the entrance of the salal tunnel and coalesced in front of her. The dog’s barking deafened her. Cyclops emerged from the tunnel last and unfolded into an impossibly tall and horrifying figure. As he advanced toward her, the dog-shadow spread apart like a pool of crude oil. His gutting knife glowed as if harvest moonlight were striking it.
“I’m running out of time. It’s going to be daylight in a few hours and I’ve got a train to catch… How’s the leg by the way?”