I was startled to see a third flashlight beam appear at the far corner of the house. Then a fourth. Then a fifth.
A sixth.
I had no clue as to who these new searchers might be or where they could have come from so quickly. They spread out to form a line and advanced purposefully across the yard, across the patio, past the swimming pool, toward the rose garden, probing with the flashlights, menacing figures as featureless as demons in a dream.
7
The faceless pursuers and the thwarting mazes that trouble us in sleep were now reality.
The gardens stepped in five broad terraces down a hillside. In spite of these plateaus and the gentleness of the slopes between them, I was gathering too much speed as I descended, and I was afraid that I would stumble, fall, and break a leg.
Rising on all sides, the arbors and fanciful trellises began to resemble gutted ruins. In the lower levels, they were overgrown with thorny trailers that clawed the lattice and seemed to writhe with animal life as I fled past them.
The night had fallen into a waking nightmare.
My heart pounded so fiercely that the stars reeled.
I felt as though the vault of the sky were sliding toward me, gaining momentum like an avalanche.
Plunging to the end of the gardens, I sensed as much as saw the looming wrought-iron fence: seven feet high, its glossy black paint glimmering with moonlight. I dug my heels into the soft earth and braked, jarring against the sturdy pickets but not hard enough to hurt myself.
I hadn’t made much noise, either. The spear-point verticals were solidly welded to the horizontal rails; instead of clattering from my impact, the fence briefly thrummed.
I sagged against the ironwork.
A bitter taste plagued me. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t spit.
My right temple stung. I raised a hand to my face. Three thorns prickled my skin. I plucked them out.
During my flight downhill, I must have been lashed by a trailing rose brier, although I didn’t recall encountering it.
Maybe because I was breathing harder and faster, the sweet fragrance of roses became too sweet, sharpened into a half-rotten stench. I could smell my sunscreen again, too, almost as strongly as when it had been freshly applied — but with a sour taint now — because my perspiration had revitalized the scent of the lotion.
I was overcome by the absurd yet unshakable conviction that the six searchers could sniff me out, as though they were hounds. I was safe for the moment only because I was downwind of them.
Clutching the fence, out of which the thrumming had passed into my hands and bones, I glanced uphill. The search party was moving from the highest terrace to the second.
Six scythes of light slashed through the roses. Portions of the lattice structures, when briefly backlit and distorted by those bright sweeping swords, loomed like the bones of slain dragons.
The gardens presented the searchers with more possible hiding places to probe than did the open lawn above. Yet they were moving faster than before.
I scaled the fence and swung over the top, wary of snaring my jacket or a leg of my jeans on the spear-point pickets. Beyond lay open land: shadowed vales, steadily rising ranks of moonlit hills, widely scattered and barely discernible black oaks.
The wild grass, lush from the recent winter rains, was knee-high when I dropped into it from the fence. I could smell the green juice bursting from the blades crushed beneath my shoes.
Certain that Sandy and his associates would survey the entire perimeter of the property, I bounded downhill, away from the funeral home. I was eager to get beyond the reach of their flashlights before they arrived at the fence.
I was heading farther from town, which wasn’t good. I wouldn’t find help in the wilderness. Every step eastward was a step into isolation, and in isolation I was as vulnerable as anyone, more vulnerable than most.
Some luck was with me because of the season. If the searing heat of summer had already been upon us, the high grass would have been as golden as wheat and as dry as paper. My progress would have been marked by a swath of trampled stalks.
I was hopeful that the still-verdant meadow would be resilient enough to spring shut behind me, for the most part concealing the fact that I had passed this way. Nevertheless, an observant searcher would most likely be able to track me.
Approximately two hundred feet beyond the fence, at the bottom of the slope, the meadow gave way to denser brush. A barrier of tough, five-foot-high prairie cordgrass was mixed with what might have been goatsbeard and massive clumps of aureola.
I hurriedly pushed through this growth into a ten-foot-wide natural drainage swale. Little grew here because an epoch of storm runoff had exposed a spine of bedrock under the hills. With no rain in over two weeks, this rocky course was dry.
I paused to catch my breath. Leaning back into the brush, I parted the tall cordgrass to see how far down into the rose gardens the searchers had descended.
Four of them were already climbing the fence. Their flashlight beams slashed at the sky, stuttered across the pickets, and stabbed randomly at the ground as they clambered up and over the iron.
They were unnervingly quick and agile.
Were all of them, like Sandy Kirk, carrying weapons?
Considering their animal-keen instinct, speed, and persistence, perhaps they wouldn’t need weapons. If they caught me, maybe they would tear me apart with their hands.
I wondered if they would take my eyes.
The drainage channel — and the wider declivity in which it lay — ran uphill to the northeast and downhill to the southwest. As I was already at the extreme northeast end of town, I could find no help if I went uphill.
I headed southwest, following the brush-flanked swale, intending to return to well-populated territory as quickly as possible.
In the shallowly cupped channel ahead of me, the moon-burnished bedrock glowed softly like the milky ice on a winter pond, dwindling into obscurity. The embracing curtains of high, silvery cordgrass appeared to be stiff with frost.
Suppressing all fear of falling on loose stones or of snapping an ankle in a natural borehole, I gave myself to the night, allowing the darkness to push me as wind pushes a sailing ship. I sprinted down the gradual slope with no sensation of feet striking ground, as though I actually were
Within two hundred yards, I came to a place where hills folded into one another, resulting in a branching of the hollow. With barely any decrease in speed, I chose the right-hand course because it would lead more directly back into Moonlight Bay.
I had gone only a short distance past that intersection when I saw lights approaching. A hundred yards ahead, the hollow turned out of sight to the left, around a sweeping curve of grassy hillside. The source of the questing beams lay beyond that bend, but I could see that they must be flashlights.
None of the men from the funeral home could have gotten out of the rose gardens and ahead of me so quickly. These were additional searchers.
They were attempting to trap me in a pincer maneuver. I felt as though I were being pursued by an army, by platoons that had sprung sorcerously from the ground itself.
I came to a complete halt.
I considered stepping off the bare rock, into concealment behind the man-high prairie grass and other dense brush that still bracketed the drainage swale. No matter how little I disturbed this vegetation, however, I was nearly certain to leave signs of my passage that would be obvious to these trackers. They would burst through the brush and capture me or gun me down as I scrambled up the open hillside.
