Suddenly, with his eyes still firmly shut, he visualized Asmador, with the head of a vulture and the body of a man, loping through the forest, getting closer, closer…
Hearing someone moaning pitifully, Skip was nearly overcome with compassion. Somebody help him, he thought. Won’t somebody
4
It didn’t take long for Pender to grow bored with the chanting. Nor could he shake the mounting sense of dread that came with sitting in an open clearing, surrounded by a dark forest, hearing God knows what all rustling in the underbrush. He felt like a sacrificial goat tethered to a stake, listening for the tiger’s approach.
Opening his eyes to peek around the circle, he saw that everyone else had their eyes firmly closed, even Skip, whose eyelids were twitching like a dreaming dog’s. He remembered an old joke about the moribund shopkeeper whose family had all gathered around his deathbed.
Special Agent E. L. Goddamn Pender, that’s who, he told himself, climbing to his feet. Glancing downward while dusting off the seat of his slacks, he experienced a peculiar sort of Alice-in-Wonderland effect. His Hush Puppies appeared to be much smaller and farther away looking than he was accustomed to, as if his legs had grown absurdly elongated.
It only lasted a second; when he looked again, his lower extremities had resumed their customary proportions. But something still wasn’t right. Time, or his memory, started missing beats, skipping like an old vinyl record. He had no memory, for instance, of leaving the circle or crossing the clearing. But here he was, hiding behind a tree at the edge of the woods.
Then out of the confusion, a burst of clarity.
No, if he’d been smart enough to escape capture thus far, Mesker would certainly be smart enough to cut off the trail long before he came into sight of the clearing, then circle around and approach the clearing from clover-No, cover! From cover. They don’t even rhyme, those words.
Pender’s mind wandered back to 1952 Cortland, he and his gang playing soldiers in the woods, wearing plastic G.I. helmets and gunning down Japs with their Daisy rifles.
A crackling in the brush wrenched Pender back to the present.
Looking around, he realized suddenly that he could no longer see the clearing. Everywhere he looked, every direction he turned, three hundred and sixty degrees of trees, trees, and more trees, stretching outward to infinity. Pender held his breath, listening, and heard the forest-or was it the universe? — breathing all around him, expanding with every inhale, shrinking with every exhale. When he looked down again, his feet were so tiny and far away he could hardly see them.
And that’s when it occurred to him that he’d been drugged, involuntarily dosed with LSD. Suddenly he was afraid, more afraid than he’d ever been, except for when he’d nearly blinded himself with a firecracker when he was a kid. This was worse, though, because not only was he afraid, he was afraid of
Which meant what? That Stahl had played him like a Stradivarius. Don’t eat the crouton? Ha! The crouton was a straw man, a red herring. A red straw herring man. Because the LSD was in the grape or the water-that was the
5
The humans are gone. But they haven’t passed him on his way up from the parking lot. Therefore, Asmador reasons, they must have gone in the other direction. And when he hunkers down outside the two-story building and squints up the dirt road, he notices that the surface is scuffed with sneaker and sandal prints, all pointing uphill. And cutting vertically down the center of the road are two lines of tire tracks too thick for bicycles but too close together for an automobile-they must have been left by the golf cart he’d seen Pender driving earlier.
Confident that he’ll be able to hear or scent the humans long before they hear or scent him, Asmador makes no attempt to conceal his presence as he follows their trail up into the forest, his stiflingly hot night-camo jumpsuit unzipped to the waist. Occasionally he practices reaching behind his back, drawing an arrow from the quiver, nocking it, and drawing the bowstring back to his cheek in one slick, effortless motion, without slowing his pace.
He never lets a practice arrow fly, however, because based on the number of footprints he’d seen before the road narrowed and the tracks went single file, there appear to be a whole herd of humans shuffling along ahead of him. If they stay all bunched up, he realizes, he may have need of every arrow in his quiver. But oh, how happy the vultures would be-Asmador hasn’t entirely forgotten about the vultures.
In fact, he is finding it increasingly easy to concentrate his mind as the day progresses. He hasn’t seen a demon all afternoon, and although things are still kind of squirmy out on the edge of his vision, as if the tree limbs were hung with writhing snakes and worms, when he swivels his head to look directly at them, they turn back into ordinary trees just as meekly as you please.
The first indication that he’s caught up to the humans is a glimpse of blue-and-yellow fabric winking into view on the far side of a meander in the path. Asmador ducks behind a tree, peers around the trunk, and recognizes the striped circus tent canopy of Pender’s abandoned golf cart.
The key, conveniently enough, is in the ignition. As Asmador slips it into one of the jumpsuit’s many pockets, his ears pick up the eerie, inhuman sound of humans chanting. It seems to be coming from the direction in which the arrow-shaped wooden sign is pointing.
But instead of following the sound of the chanting, Asmador edges past the cart and continues up the main trail, hoping that, as the path climbs, it will lead him to a vantage point from which he can look down upon the humans and, in the remaining daylight, work out the best way to hunt them down and pick them off later, when it’s dark.
6
Feeling a tender hand stroking his forehead, Skip opened his eyes and found himself lying on his back with his head in Anna’s lap, posing for the Pieta. But when she smiled down at him, light streaming around her round, light brown face, he realized this wasn’t Anna, who was dead, but Juana, who was alive. Only there wasn’t really any
