There was a sound outside like a great rushing wind, swirling around the tent as if they were caught in a tornado. The canvas wall bulged inward, then shuddered and rippled. Outside, the rush continued, and he could feel vibrations in the ground beneath him and remembered the night in Coombs’ Gulch when it had seemed every animal suddenly came awake and stampeded through the darkness. Suddenly it seemed like time was repeating itself over and over – a different situation, but the same nonetheless. It all kept coming back. Michael slowly chambered a round in his rifle. The tumult swirled outside. The tent shook.
Then Jonathan felt hands – small, but immensely powerful and cold. He turned his head toward the tent wall beside him, which glowed in the moonlight. Two palms and ten small fingers pressed through the canvas harder and harder, reaching inward for him. Beneath the sound of the swirling force that rushed through the grass, a whisper came, slight and high-pitched, childish and achingly familiar – “Daddy.”
Conner and Michael tried to stop him as he rushed for the opening of the tent. They pleaded in desperate whispers, but Jonathan felt something deep in his core pulling him outside, something he could not deny, something that did not know fear or trepidation. It moved inside him, twisted like a worm impaled on a hook. They pulled at his arms, but he thrashed against them.
Jonathan fell out into the darkness, onto his hands and knees, the long grass brushing against his face, slowing his movements like water, and he screamed Jacob’s name into the night like an insane man might cry out at a hallucination.
But all was silent and still. There was no wind. There was no noise or stampede of animals. He was alone in the night, only his own frenzied breath falling into the air. He scrambled to his feet and ran around the tent, searching and screaming, but there was nothing. The distant moon cast a ghostly pallor. The field seemed to stretch on forever. The grass shone and sparkled with frost in the pale light. Jonathan’s voice died in the distance.
Then Michael and Conner were outside with their rifles raised. Jonathan stopped, like a man suddenly waking from a dream, returning to the mundane world. They waited in silence, breath exhaled in clouds of mist, cold overtaking their bodies.
“What the hell happened?” Conner said.
“It was him,” Jonathan said. He struggled for breath. “It was Jacob; I heard him. He was here. He spoke to me.”
Far off in the field was a deep, throaty chuff and heavy footsteps through the grass. Michael raised the flashlight, but it did not reach far enough into the night. They listened as it moved east, back toward the Gulch, slouching at a slow, heavy pace down the slope of the meadow. A vixen scream went up from deep within the valley and reverberated in the air. It sounded more human than animal now. Jonathan felt cold hands close around his heart. There was no air. He could not catch his breath.
“I don’t know what that is,” Michael said.
He took the flashlight and searched the field around the tent for tracks, but the sea of grass was undisturbed; it swayed lightly in the cold breeze, whispering, as it had for a thousand years.
“We didn’t just dream that, did we?” Conner said.
“I can’t tell anymore,” Michael said.
Somewhere in the depths of the Gulch, the high-pitched scream rose again, shocking and anguished, full of fear and longing.
Chapter Eighteen
The man from the woods was outside the window again last night. Jacob had watched him walking stiff-legged along the edge of their backyard in the darkness, stopping and staring at the window where Jacob sat on his bed and watched. Then he would turn and continue his strange walk and disappear back into the darkness, just like the past few nights. Jacob was never able to truly see his face. Somehow it looked familiar, and Jacob combed through his memory of adults – neighbors, friends of Mommy’s and Daddy’s, parents of other kids at school, teachers – but he couldn’t find that face anywhere. It looked different, almost broken, like when he had knocked over a ceramic stein on the bookshelf and he and his mother tried to piece it back together with glue before Daddy returned home and became angry.
Maybe it was some kind of monster. Normally he would be scared, but monsters didn’t walk like people. Monsters were large, fanged, multi-legged things that stalked in the darkness, in closets and under beds. This was just a man – one he thought he recognized – walking along the woods.
When he first began to see the man several days ago, he told his mother. “Did you have another bad dream, honey?” she said and kneeled down so that she was eye level with him.
Jacob was told he had bad dreams at night, but he couldn’t remember them. He would just suddenly wake, sometimes in another room, usually with his mother and father standing over him with tired eyes, looking worried or possibly annoyed. Sometimes, he would wake to his father yelling at him, telling him to snap out of it, but Jacob wasn’t sure what he was supposed to snap out of. It was like being transported by magic to another room in the middle of the night. His face would be wet with tears, his body would be shaking, and he would be terrified, but he didn’t know why. He couldn’t remember anything after lying down in his bed and falling asleep. But then he would be awake, and all the night was disturbed and it was his fault. His body and his brain were doing things he couldn’t control and didn’t remember. But he knew they were scary things. He woke with the terror inside him. He
