He squinted, peering through the sight.
The deer’s head appeared in the crosshairs.
Matt hesitated.
It was such a magnificent creature — why should he shoot it?
Then, as he gazed at the buck’s uplifted head, he became aware of a strange scent on the morning air: a scent that jerked him out of the brilliant morning light and plunged him back into the depths of last night, when he had wakened in darkness.
The scent grew stronger, and now he heard the voice whispering to him.
Darkness began to close around him, until all he could see was the head of the deer.
The deer, and something beyond…
The darkness deepened.
“No,” Matt whispered.
The shroud of darkness tightened, and now he felt the touch, the same touch he’d felt last night, stroking his arms.
Moving over his hands.
Curling around his fingers.
A shot sounded.
Then another.
And another.
Matt, lost in the darkness, was utterly unaware that the shots echoing through the morning had come from the weapon in his hands…
* * *
“MATT? HEY, MATT!”
Matt jumped at the sound of Eric Holmes’s voice.
“What’s going on?” Eric asked, approaching and cocking his head as he looked at Matt. “You okay? You look — ”
“I’m fine,” Matt said, the words coming quickly. But he wasn’t fine. He felt strange, almost as if he’d been half asleep and Eric’s voice had jerked him out of a dream. But that didn’t make any sense — he was still standing in the same spot as when he caught sight of the deer a few minutes ago, the Browning still in his hands. And you couldn’t sleep standing up.
Could you?
Of course not! So Eric’s voice must have just caught him by surprise. Except nothing looked quite the way that it had a minute ago. The light filtering through the trees was different, and —
And the sun was higher than it had been.
A lot higher!
“You sure you’re okay?” Eric pressed. “I’ve been looking for you for an hour!”
An hour? What was he talking about? It hadn’t been much more than half an hour since he and his dad had crossed the stream and started up the bluff while Eric and his father headed toward the falls and the Arnesons went farther upstream. So it couldn’t be much later than eight-thirty, maybe quarter to nine. Except when he looked down at his watch he saw that Eric was right — it was almost nine-thirty.
But that was nuts! It couldn’t be that late — it was just a minute or so ago that he’d spotted the deer, and raised his rifle and —
There was something playing around the edges of his memory, something he couldn’t quite bring into focus, and now, as he struggled to remember it, it vanished the way the ephemera of the night dissolve in the morning light, erased from the memory as cleanly as if they’d never existed at all.
But it wasn’t night, and he hadn’t been dreaming.
Then what had happened?
Where had the missing time gone?
His thoughts were disrupted by Eric shouting to his father. “I found him, Dad! He’s over here!” Again his eyes fixed on Matt. “How come you didn’t answer me?” he demanded. “We’ve been calling you for half an hour.”
“I–I guess I didn’t hear you,” Matt stammered. But that didn’t make any sense either! What was going on? He tried to force his mind into focus, and went over it all again.
He and his dad had spotted the deer, and he’d circled around. Then he’d heard the deer, and moved toward it so silently that it hadn’t heard him at all. He’d loaded the clip, raised the 30–06 rifle to his shoulder, and drawn a bead on the buck.
And then…
There it was again! Something touching the very edge of his memory, just beyond his grasp! He’d been aiming at the deer — had it in his sight!
But something had happened.
Had he heard something?
Felt something?
Smelled something! That was it! There’d been a strange aroma in the air — the same aroma he’d smelled last night after he’d gone to bed, when —
Suddenly, his skin crawled and he felt a sheen of cold sweat spread over him. He felt sort of dizzy, and —
“Jeez, Matt!” he heard Eric say. “What’s going on with you? How come you didn’t even go look at the buck?”
“G-Go look at him?” Matt stammered. “I thought — I mean, he got away, didn’t he? I had him in my sights for a second, but then — ”
Eric stared at him. “You mean you didn’t shoot him?”
Shoot him? What was Eric talking about? He shook his head.
“Then who did?”
“Maybe my dad — ” Another image flicked through Matt’s mind. While he had the gun trained on the deer, he’d seen something else, beyond the deer. Something like…
A face?
No! It couldn’t have been! Besides, what did it matter? He hadn’t even pulled the trigger!
“We can’t find your dad either,” Eric told him. “Come on — I’ll show you the buck.”
Eric led him toward the thicket in which the deer had been standing, and as they threaded their way through the trees, Matt kept trying to make sense out of it all. But no matter how hard he tried to figure it out, he was still missing almost an hour from the morning.
An hour during which he’d apparently stood absolutely still, holding the Browning in his hands.
Half an hour during which Eric Holmes had been calling him, and he’d heard absolutely nothing.
Half an hour in which…
What?
As he followed Eric through the trees a terrible feeling came over him. It was the same feeling he had when he woke up in the morning from the nightmares that left nothing in their wake except fear, and a feeling of terrible exhaustion, as if he hadn’t been sleeping at all. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he wanted to remember the missing hour. And then, a few yards ahead, he saw it.
The big buck lay on its side at the exact spot where he’d seen it standing earlier. Marty Holmes was crouched over it, and as Eric and Matt approached, he stood up and grinned at Matt. “Good shooting. One clean shot right through the head.”
Matt said nothing. The buck’s eyes were wide open, and as he gazed down at it, Matt had the eerie sensation that the buck was staring back at him.
