Prowlers.
Whenever he had closed his eyes he had seen Molly Hatcher's eyes. Jack Dwyer's anger and sadness. He had recalled the way they had looked at the sheriff, as if he were the criminal and not the other way around.
Prowlers couldn't be real. Alan knew that. Sure, at the age of seven, he had believed in them wholeheartedly. Even imagined he had seen one of them out his parents' basement window, loping through the woods one night. But they weren't real. Like Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster, they were modern myths.
And yet . . . the savagery of the murders, the strength of the killers, the things these kids said and did, the guns, their appearance at the library . . . the only way Alan could truly make sense of all of it was if he did the one thing he could not possibly imagine doing.
Believe.
Now he found himself in an impossible place, trapped between knowing it could not be true, and beginning to believe that it might be. The question had kept him awake, the image of Molly spinning, untouched by the blood of the dead girl had haunted him until he had gotten up from bed, dressed, and driven back out to the library.
What the hell are you doing, Alan?
It was a fine, warm July night, but he was cold as he trekked up through the woods. The flashlight beam was strong and wide before him, and he easily found the place he and the sheriff had diverged from the path upon hearing the sound of gunfire up the mountain.
What are you doing?
Investigating, he told himself. I'm investigating. Yet it was ironic, Alan thought, that he was up here at all, traipsing around the woods at one o'clock in the morning in search of some evidence that Molly and Jack's story was true.
If he did not believe in it at all, he would never have come.
But if he truly did believe them . . . he would never have come, would never have had the courage to return to the forest around Buckton.
Now, as he pushed through the trees and the night sounds of the woods came to him, Alan found himself believing more and more and wondering if he should not go home, go back. Return again in the morning, when his imagination might not be so likely to run away with death and legends. In his present state of mind, filled with fear and wonder and curiosity, he was just as likely to see a windigo or some wood sprites as to find evidence that Prowlers existed.
It was more than fifteen minutes of brisk walking later, through trees and underbrush, that he emerged into the same clearing. He would never have been able to find it again, save that there were still trails in the woods, though not commonly used by hikers or teenagers these days. Both brands of forest-wanderers tended to stick more to the path most traveled.
It would have been much simpler to drive up there. The coroner's truck had made the trip up to the ruins of the old Bartleby place with only some damage to the shocks and suspension. Alan could have taken his cruiser over that same overgrown terrain. But that was not how the kids had done it, and he wanted to try to follow their trail as best he could.
There had been no dead monsters in the woods.
In an odd sort of way, he found that disappointing.
In the clearing, he first made his way to the ruins from which they had retrieved the girl's body. There was blood soaked into the ground there in the circle of police tape, but that would tell him nothing. The flashlight beam shone like a searchlight down upon the area around where her body had been discovered.
His breath caught in his throat.
There, upon a pile of shattered brick, was a tuft of fur.
Could be nothing. Just an animal. Any animal, really.
Mind struggling not to leap to conclusions, despite the dark influence of the night and the dread that began to build within him, Alan made a circuit of the clearing. Molly and Jack had said they had killed one of the Prowlers just at the edge of the clearing.
Alan smiled. Of course they had not admitted to owning the guns, but the implication was there that they had shot the creatures.
The flashlight beam cut a wide swath across the grass and brush, but there was nothing there. Three-quarters of the way around the clearing, and he had found nothing. Alan had begun to feel the tight knot of tension in his chest unraveling.
He did not know what was really going on around here, but to think it could be some kind of monsters was just . . .
"Ridiculous," he said aloud.
But his voice cracked and sounded absurd even to him. For in midthought, he had stumbled upon something. The flashlight beam caught a splash of something on the ground. Only a dozen feet from the place he had come into the clearing there was a broken tree branch, and beside it, a dark pool of blood soaking into the ground and the brush.
There was reddish fur there as well, little tufts of it on the grass.
Alan closed his eyes a moment, but when he opened them, though his flashlight beam wavered in his hand, the evidence was still there. Something had been killed on this spot. Something with fur. Something large, judging by the way the brush had been crushed beneath its weight.
Something glittered in the light and he bent to poke through the brush. He retrieved a shell casing from a shotgun.
Up this close, the blood was a deep crimson. Alan reached out to dip a finger into it. He raised it to his nose and inhaled, hoping it would
