One eye, at least. The other, along with part of his face, had been erased by the shotgun blast. He stumbled away from them, and Jack and Molly were both in such shock at its appearance that neither of them even attempted to shoot it again. Instead, they stood back to back, shotgun barrels scything the darkness as they searched for some sign of the one with red fur.
It was gone.
"We should be dead," Jack whispered.
"Speak for yourself," Molly replied breathlessly.
But Jack knew that was just talk, that she understood as well as he did that if Red had stayed to back up the other two, they would be just two more ghosts in these mountains. Twice in a handful of seconds Jack had gotten lucky with his life on the line. He took a long breath, realizing that he could not count on any more luck tonight, that he might well have used up his entire share for the year.
Things whispered in the trees, maybe bats or owls or other night birds. Maybe chipmunks, skittering off at the sound of the weapons thundering. Maybe just the wind.
Every sound, every tiny noise made Jack twitch. His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath. His eyes darted toward Molly every second or two, and he wondered if she felt the same way he did, if she could read his mind.
Stupid. It was stupid to come up here. They had no place here, a couple of city kids trying to play hero, save a girl's life. They should have let it go.
Then he snarled silently and cursed himself for even allowing the thought into his head. No way could they have turned around and gone home after they had heard that girl screaming.
The barrel of the shotgun wavered in front of him as he turned around, nervous that the huge, red-furred beast who had spoken to them might appear again at any moment.
"Let's go," he told Molly, no longer whispering. No longer worrying about the attention they would draw. The shotgun blasts would have pinpointed their location for anyone who cared to listen.
Ignoring the things that seemed to flit about at the edges of his peripheral vision, Jack pushed his way uphill through the trees. Uphill. That was the way the Prowlers did not want them to go. Of course that was the way they had to go. Molly followed him at a quick pace.
"Keep your eyes open," she said. "He's not gone."
Jack knew it, too. He could almost sense Red somewhere nearby, breathing hard, hating them. Could almost smell the creature.
Branches scratched at his arms but he forged ahead, steadily moving uphill. Something was different about the landscape up there. Jack narrowed his eyes and realized that there was a clearing coming up. Thrusting up from the ground, he could see a dark, straight silhouette against the sky. A moment later he realized it was a crumbling chimney.
Jack stiffened. A chimney. The ruins the ghosts talked about.
"Come on," he said, voice falling into a whisper again. "I think we've found what we've been looking for."
Then a figure appeared out of the trees, just at the edge of the clearing.
On instinct, Jack pulled the trigger. The figure slapped his hands to his gut and stumbled backward, and Jack felt a frigid tendril of fear wrap around his insides as he realized it was a human being.
"What are you shooting at?" Molly hissed quietly behind him.
Jack blinked.
The figure he had shot was still standing. And through it, he could still see the crumbling chimney. Jack rushed forward to find the ghost of Artie Carroll glaring at him angrily.
"Why the hell'd you have to shoot me, man? That was totally not cool," Artie instructed him.
"You're already dead," Jack whispered.
He glanced awkwardly at Molly, who had run into the clearing after him and was swinging the barrel of her shotgun around anxiously. The last thing he wanted to do was have a long conversation with Artie right now.
Artie shook his shoulder-length blond hair out and lifted his chin petulantly. "Yeah, no kidding, Mr. Sensitive. But it's still freaky getting shot at."
"Sorry," Jack said. "But, y'know, maybe now's not the - "
"Yeah, yeah. I know."
The phantom turned to look at Molly, who was still on alert, scanning the clearing, ready to fire. Molly shot a questioning glance at Jack.
"If there are ghosts here," she whispered, "can they tell us if we're alone?"
In Artie's endlessly black eyes, Jack saw that the ghost still loved her. No matter what he said, he probably always would.
"I wish you hadn't brought her up here," Artie said.
"Wasn't up to me," Jack replied, a bit miffed.
Artie smiled. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess you can't really tell her what to do, can you?" Then the smile faltered and the ghost stared at Jack. "Word got to me that you were in trouble."
"Could use some help," Jack admitted.
With a nod, Artie pointed up, above Jack's head, into the trees. "Might want to start by shooting that big bastard up there."
Startled, Jack turned and swung the barrel upward. Red was crouched on a thick branch that jutted out into the clearing, staring down at them. When Jack noticed him, the Prowler roared and leaped out into empty space.
The shotgun cracked, echoing all through the clearing.
Red flailed and then hit the ground face-first, hard. After a moment, the huge Prowler twitched and started to rise. Molly waited until he began to snarl and climb to his feet before blowing out his spine.
"That's my girl," Artie's ghost said admiringly. Then he turned to Jack. "They left this one and a couple of others behind to kill you. Didn't want to, either. There's a lot of death here. It's a special place for them, I think."
"Yeah. So we heard." Jack gazed around the clearing. The foundations of an old estate jutted up from over-grown grass and scrub brush. What remained of a road ran off away from the spot where they now stood. The chimney looked like a strong wind would knock it over.
"Look familiar, Molly?" he asked.
She nodded. "Like you described. Where the cluster of deaths was on the map."
"Not much of a lair," Jack said. "But a meeting place, maybe."
"Sacred," Molly replied. "That's what the thing said. It's sacred."
Artie had begun to drift across the clearing, the mist where his legs ought to have been shimmering as though blown by some invisible, otherworldly wind. Jack wanted to ask him why it was that sometimes his legs seemed fully visible, and other times they were just wisps, but now was not the time.
"We should go, Jack. This girl . . . I don't think we're going to find her. I think they're gone."
Jack glanced over at Artie - who stood in the ruins of the old homestead with his head bowed, looking down sadly at something Jack knew he did not want to see - and he knew.
"They're gone," Jack agreed. "You're right about that. But the girl . . . they didn't bring her."
The light went out of Molly's eyes then. She closed them, took a few tiny breaths, and then shook her head. "How are we going to stop them?" she asked, as though pleading for an answer.
"I don't know," he said softly, and hated himself for not having a better response.
He walked over to where the specter of her boyfriend stood over the dead girl. Jack glanced up and was startled to see almost a mirror image by that chimney.
He and Molly stood side by side. Before him, he saw Artie standing next to the ghost of the murdered girl. He whispered comforting words to her, but Jack could not hear what they said, nor make out the words from the movements of their lips. And he thought that was probably for the best. Maybe it was not his place to know what words would comfort the soul of a dead teenage girl.
The two phantoms moved away from the chimney. Moonlight passed through them both, and the shadows of the trees and the chimney and the swaying brush fell through them. More insubstantial than the shadows and the moonlight, Jack thought. How this girl, now dead, would deal with it, he had no idea.
Phantom tears streamed down her ghostly face.
And yet Jack did not feel the horror of her death, the tragedy of it, the los
s, until he heard Molly's tiny gasp and glanced down to see the ravaged corpse at their feet. The girl's body was torn up, bones snapped and exposed, stomach ripped open and organs strewn about. Teeth had savaged much of her body, parts of the organs were missing.
"Oh, God," Jack whispered.
But it was Molly who really began to pray, whispering in earnest, for the poor girl's soul to pass on without memory of the torture she had endured. Jack glanced away from the dead girl to see that there were tears on Molly's face as well.
"Monsters." She turned her gaze upon Jack. "They really are monsters, aren't they? All along, I've been thinking they're just animals. We hunt them down like we would dangerous bears or wolves, but they're not just some ancient species we never knew about. They're monsters. They're evil."
Jack nodded again as he slung his shotgun over his shoulder. "We - people, I mean - can be evil, but not like this. They know what they're doing, and they love it. It's what they live for."
Molly turned away from the dead girl. "Why didn't they kill us? Why did they just leave us here? The odds were in their favor."
"Maybe they didn't want to lose any others," Jack suggested. "Keep the pack intact, y'know? Maybe they'll just wait for . . ."
"A time when we're not armed. Not ready," Molly finished for him.
Artie appeared suddenly beside him, and Jack started, swearing out loud. "Don't do that!"
"Do what?" Molly asked.
"Sorry," Jack told her quickly. "Just . . . just got spooked, that's all."
He made no attempt to hide the fact that there was still a ghost with them. But he edited his words and actions, almost unconsciously, the way he always did when that ghost was Artie.
"Maybe they had other things in mind for you," the specter suggested.
The words were ominous. Jack glanced around for the dead girl's ghost, but she was gone. His gaze came to rest on Artie again, but he could not look for long at those eternal eyes.
"What are you - "
"You don't have time to run," the ghost said. "Just wipe your prints off the guns and toss them. You're about to have company."
Jack's mouth hung agape for a second or two. Then Artie told him he should hurry. With a muttered curse, Jack turned to Molly.
"Someone's coming," he said as he pulled off his shirt. "We've gotta wipe down the guns and get rid of them."
Even as Jack started to do just that with his shotgun, Molly was shaking her head.
"But . . . we could just run."
"He said we don't have time. Too much noise. They'd catch us," Jack told her. His voice had dropped to a whisper. They had no way of knowing how close the newcomers were.
Molly did not ask who "he" was.
Jack used both hands to fling the shotgun into the brush on the other side of the chimney, then lifted the pistol and clip out and did the same thing. Molly used the bottom of her long shirt to clean her prints off the shotgun, then dropped it at her feet. Jack picked it up, using his shirt, and tossed it for her.
Molly had just pulled out her pistol and belt-clip when a flashlight beam caught them both where they stood.
"Police!" shouted a voice. "Throw down the weapon and both of you put your hands up."
Jack's heart sank. It was the sheriff. They stood over the ravaged corpse of a teenaged girl. Molly had a gun in her hand. She tossed it away as Sheriff Tackett and Deputy Vance approached across the clearing. Jack and Molly both put their hands up.
The body, he thought. A tiny sigh of relief escaped him. They had a dead Prowler on their hands, and another in the woods. Two or three more down by the school. No way could the sheriff think they were involved in any of this.
Then Jack glanced over at the edge of the clearing where they had left the dead body of the massive, red-furred Prowler, and his heart went cold and silent.
He stopped breathing.
The monstrous corpse was gone.
CHAPTER 11
The Buckton police station was a stone and mortar affair with a bit more flair than many of its 1940s contemporaries. The town hall, with which the police station shared a parking lot, was a much larger structure that made the junior building appear to be a carriage house in comparison. It was small-town America at its finest, with a memorial to locals lost in America's wars right in the center of a small green island between the buildings.
Any other night, with the stars shining above and a few lights still burning in both buildings, Molly would have thought it was quaint.
But she was not in the mood for quaint.
Unlike so many of the kids in her Dorchester neighborhood, and even some of the students she had gone to Catholic school with, Molly Hatcher had never been handcuffed before. She had never been arrested until now. A twisted, sarcastic voice insinuated itself into the back of her head. At least you did it up big, the voice said. Molly knew it was her own sub-conscious, trying to make light of her situation. But she wasn't going for it. Suspicion of murder; possession and discharge of unlicensed firearms. Nothing light about their predicament at all.
And the only weapon they had at their disposal was the truth.
Molly and Jack had remained silent on the short ride back to downtown Buckton and the police station. Their eyes met several times, but Molly found that her throat was dry and did not think she could speak even if she had any idea what to say. They rode in the back of the sheriff 's car, and the man's eyes almost burned in the rearview mirror, with the flash of streetlights strobing across the windows, reflecting into the interior of the car.
Deputy Vance had followed in his own car, and that gave Molly the tiniest spark of hope. Though he seemed a bit odd, and possibly not very bright, she liked Deputy Vance.
The sheriff, on the other hand . . . she was not even certain he was human.
As soon as the two patrol cars came to a halt in the parking lot, Molly and Jack were hustled into the station as though there might be reporters lurking around, ready to ask questions. Or, she thought, even some sort of co-conspirators waiting to break them free. She only wished she had some co-conspirators.
In the movies and on television, the police always split up the suspects to question them separately, see if their stories could be shaken. Molly figured Sheriff Tackett didn't watch much TV because he marched them right down the hall on the first floor to the back of the building with the pure anger of his physical presence alone.
Molly was first through the door. The room was about fourteen feet square with bars on the windows and a long wooden table in the middle with five metal chairs around it. The table itself had been defaced over the course of years by pens, pencils, pocket knives and markers - even a few burns from lighters - so that it now looked like the average truck-stop bathroom wall.
"Sit down," the sheriff ordered. The first words he had spoken since getting them into the car.
Jack bristled at the instruction. Molly watched as he turned on the two officers. Vance laid a hand on his nightstick, but there was a frown on his face that said he didn't understand any of this. Molly thought that was good. If he did not understand, maybe he would be willing to listen. Tackett, though, was another story.
When Jack stood up to him, the sheriff only smiled thinly, like he wanted Jack to do something stupid.
"Hey," Molly said, voice soft, cracking from lack of use.
Jack glanced at her, then sighed. "You gonna take these cuffs off ?" he asked the sheriff.
Tackett hesitated a moment, then nodded for Vance to release them. The deputy's keys rattled as he unlocked the handcuffs.
"Have a seat," the sheriff instructed.
The metal chairs scraped on the linoleum floor as they sat down.
The window beyond the metal bars was open and a sweet summer-night breeze blew into the room. Tackett turned and pulled the door shut, closing all four of them in the room together, and the wind died. It became still in the room, and Molly could almost feel, almost smell, the tension. Deputy Vance leaned against a wall, his arms cr
ossed.
Sheriff Tackett was a man past his prime, his gut protruding over his gun belt, his mustache hiding his upper lip in a drape of steel gray, his hair receding. But despite that outward appearance, he fixed them in a piercing gaze as though his eyes might leak acid at any moment.
With a sudden movement that made Molly flinch, Tackett pulled out a metal chair and sat down in it. He slumped a little, but regarded them with cruel indifference. Jack did not flinch. He just waited.
"So, you're tourists?" Tackett asked.
Jack sighed and glanced at Molly. He shrugged slightly, as if to tell her it did not matter what they said.
"Yes," Molly replied. Her eyes ticked toward Deputy Vance, who gazed at her with open curiosity.
Tackett grunted. "Tourists. But you knew Kenny Oberst was dead before anyone else. Except maybe Kenny. You're up in the woods, loaded for bear - "
"Those guns weren't ours," Molly interrupted. "Those others you picked up, I don't know where they came from. But the one I was holding when you came into the clearing? I had just found it on the ground and picked it up."
Deputy Vance stepped away from the wall. He walked across the small room scratching his head, but he did not look at anyone, only at the bars across the window.
"We heard shots. A lot of them. That's what drew us to you," the deputy said. "No one else was in that clearing except you and the dead girl. But let's set her aside for a second. What do you think we'll find when we tow in your vehicle and search through it?"
Jack glared at him, turned his head to stretch his neck muscles. Molly heard a pop from his neck and shivered.
"We get a phone call, right?" Jack asked.
"Right," the sheriff replied. His smile was nasty. "But not just yet."
"I want a lawyer," Molly said quickly.
"Don't we all?" Tackett replied. "You'll get one. But first we're just chatting a little. You two don't mind, right? I mean, you're just tourists. You didn't do anything.
Didn't fire any guns. Didn't murder Ned Meredith and his daughter."
Jack crossed his arms and glared at the sheriff. It was a contest. Neither of them was going to give an inch. Molly turned to look at Deputy Vance again, and she could sense him sizing her up. He was not as dim as she had thought. In fact, she was beginning to think he was a lot smarter than anyone would guess, and a lot better at his job. That might be their one hope.
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