Running With the Demon

by Terry Brooks

  Then a drop of rain fell squarely on her nose, cold and wet against her skin. She blinked in surprise, and suddenly the feeders were all around her, and she was so terrified that she could feel her fear writhing inside her like a living thing.

  And, just as suddenly, they were gone again. It happened so fast that she wasn’t sure if it was real or if she had imagined it. In the blink of an eye, they had appeared. In another blink, they had gone. How could they move so quickly? What would make them do so?

  She saw Wraith then, standing a few feet away, a dark shape in the deepening gray, so still he might have been carved from stone. She didn’t know his name then, or what he was, or where he had come from. She stared at him, unable to look away, riveted by the sight of him. She thought he was the biggest creature she had ever seen this close up, bigger even, it seemed to her at that moment, than the horses she had petted once on a visit to the Lehman farm. He appeared to be some sort of dog, immense and fierce-looking and as immovable as the massive shade trees that grew in her backyard. He was brindle in color; his muzzle and head bore tiger-stripe markings and his body hair bristled like a porcupine’s quills. Oddly enough, she was not frightened by him. She would always remember that. She was awestruck, but she was not frightened. Not in the way she was of the feeders. He was there, she realized, without quite being sure why, to protect her from them.

  Then he disappeared, and she was alone. He simply faded away, as if composed of smoke scattered by a sudden gust of wind. She stared into the space he had occupied, wondering at him. The park stretched away before her, silent and empty in the failing light. Then the rain began to fall in earnest, and she made a dash for the house.

  She saw Wraith often after that, possibly because she was looking for him, possibly because he had decided to reveal himself. She still didn’t know what he was, and neither did anyone else. Pick told her later that he was some sort of crossbreed, a mix of dog and wolf. But really, since he was created from and held together by magic, his genetic origins didn’t make any difference. Whatever he was, he was probably the only one of his kind. Pick confirmed her impression that he was there to protect her. Matter of fact, he advised rather solemnly, Wraith had been shadowing her since the first time she had come into the park, still a baby in her stroller. She wondered at first how she could have missed seeing him, but then discovered that she had missed seeing a lot of other things as well, and it didn’t seem so odd.

  When she finally told her grandmother about Wraith, her grandmother’s response was strange. She didn’t question what Nest was telling her. She didn’t suggest that Nest might be mistaken or confused. She went all still for a moment, her eyes assumed a distant look, and her thin, old hands tightened about the mittens she was knitting.

  “Did you see anything else?” she asked softly.

  “No,” said Nest, wondering suddenly if there was something she should have seen.

  “He just appeared, this dog did? The feeders came close to you, and the dog appeared?” Gran’s eyes were sharp and bright.

  “Yes. That first time. Now I just see him following me sometimes, watching me. He doesn’t come too close. He always stays back. But the feeders are afraid of him. I can tell.”

  Her grandmother was silent.

  “Do you know what he is?” Nest pressed anxiously.

  Her grandmother held her gaze. “Perhaps.”

  “Is he there to protect me?”

  “I think we have to find that out.”

  Nest frowned. “Who sent him, Gran?”

  But her grandmother only shook her head and turned away. “I don’t know,” she answered, but the way she said it made Nest think that maybe she did.

  For a long time, Nest was the only one who saw the dog. Sometimes her grandmother would come into the park with her, but the dog did not show himself on those occasions.

  Then one day, for no reason that Nest could ever determine, he appeared out of a cluster of spruce at twilight while the old woman and her granddaughter walked through the west-end play area toward the cliffs. Her grandmother froze, holding on to the little girl’s hand tightly.

  “Gran?” Nest said uncertainly.

  “Wait here for me, Nest,” her grandmother replied. “Don’t move.”

  The old woman walked up to the big animal and knelt before him. It was growing dark, and it was hard to see clearly, but it seemed to Nest as if her grandmother was speaking to the beast. It was very quiet, and she could almost hear the old woman’s words. She remained standing for a while, but then she grew tired and sat down on the grass to wait. There was no one else around. Stars began to appear in the sky and shadows to swallow the last of the fading light. Her grandmother and the dog were staring at each other, locked in a strange, silent communication that went on for a very long time.

  Finally her grandmother rose and came back to her. The strange dog watched for a moment, then slowly melted back into the shadows.

  “It’s all right, Nest,” her grandmother whispered in a thin, weary voice, taking her hand once more. “His name is Wraith. He is here to protect you.”

  She never spoke of the meeting again.

  As Nest wriggled her way through the hedgerow at the back of her yard, she paused for a moment at the edge of the rutted dirt service road that ran parallel to the south boundary of the lot and recalled anew how Sinnissippi Park had appeared to her that first time. So long ago, she thought, and smiled at the memory. The park had seemed much bigger then, a vast, sprawling, mysterious world of secrets waiting to be discovered and adventures begging to be lived. At night, sometimes, when she was abroad with Pick, she still felt as she had when she was five, and the park, with its dark woods and gloomy ravines, with its murky sloughs and massive cliffs, seemed as large and unfathomable as it had then.

  But now, in the harsh light of the July midday, the sun blazing down out of another cloudless sky, the heat a faint shimmer rising off the burned-out flats, the park seemed small and constrained. The ball fields lay just beyond the service road, their parched diamonds turned dusty and hardened and dry, their grassy outfields gray-tipped and spiky. There were four altogether, two close and two across the way east. Farther on, a cluster of hardwoods and spruce shaded a play area for small children, replete with swings and monkey bars and teeter-totters and painted animals on heavy springs set in concrete that you could climb aboard and ride.

  The entrance to the park was to Nest’s immediate right, and the blacktop road leading into the park ran under the crossbar toward the river before splitting off in two directions. If you went right, you traveled to the turnaround and the cliffs, where the previous night she had rescued Bennett Scott. Beyond the turnaround, separated from the park by a high chain-link fence that any kid over the age of seven who was worth his salt could climb, was Riverside Cemetery, rolling, tree-shaded, and sublimely peaceful. The cemetery was where her mother was buried. If you turned left off the blacktop, you either looped down under a bridge to the riverbank at the bottom of the cliffs, where a few picnic tables were situated, or you continued on some distance to the east end of the park where a large, sheltered pavilion, a toboggan slide, a playground, and the deep woods waited. The toboggan slide ran all the way from the heights beyond the parking lot to the reedy depths of the bayou. A good run in deep winter would take you out across the ice all the way to the embankment that supported the railroad tracks running east to Chicago and west to the plains. Stretching a run to the embankment was every toboggan rider’s goal. Nest had done it three times. There were large brick-chimney and smaller iron hibachi-style cooking stations and wooden picnic tables all over the park, so that any number of church outings or family reunions could be carried on at one time. Farther east, back in the deep woods, there were nature trails that ran from the Woodland Heights subdivision where Robert Heppler lived down to the banks of the Rock River. There were trees that were well over two hundred years old. Some of the oaks and elms and shagbark hickories rose over a hundred feet, and the pa
rk was filled with dark, mysterious places that whispered of things you couldn’t see, but could only imagine and secretly wish for.

  The park was old, Nest knew. It had never been anything but a park. Before it was officially titled and protected by state law, it had been an untamed stretch of virgin timber. No one had lived there since the time of the Indians. Except, of course, the feeders.

  She took it all in for a moment, embracing it with her senses, reclaiming it for herself as she did each time she returned, familiar ground that belonged to her. She felt that about the park—that through her peculiar and endemic familiarity with its myriad creatures, its secretive places, its changeless look and feel, and its oddly compelling solitude, it was hers. She felt this way whenever she stepped into the park, as if she were fulfilling a purpose in her life, as if she knew that here, of all places in the world, she belonged.

  Of course, Pick had more than a little to do with that, having enlisted her years ago as his human partner in the care and upkeep of the park’s magic.

  She walked across the service road, kicking idly at the dirt with her running shoes, moving onto the heat-crisped grasses of the ball diamond, intent on taking the shortcut across the park to Cass Minter’s house on Spring Drive. The others were probably already there: Robert, Brianna, and Jared. She would be the last to arrive, late as usual. But it was summer, and it really didn’t matter if she was late. The days stretched on, and time lost meaning. Today they were going fishing down by the old boat launch below the dam, just off the east end of the park. Bass, bluegill, perch, and sunfish, you could still catch them all, if not so easily as once. You didn’t eat them, of course. Rock River wasn’t clean enough for that, not the way it had been when her grandfather was a boy. But the fishing was fun, and it was as good a way as any to spend an afternoon.

  She was skipping off behind the backstop of the closest ball field when she heard a voice call out.

  “Nest! Wait up!”

  Turning awkward and flushed the moment she realized who it was, she watched Jared Scott come loping up the service road from the park entry. She glanced down at her Grunge Lives T-shirt and her running shorts, at the stupid way they hung on her, at the flatness of her chest and the leanness of her legs and arms, and she wished for the thousandth time that she looked more like Brianna. She was angry at herself for thinking like that, then for feeling so bizarre over a boy, and then because there he was, right in front of her, smiling and waving and looking at her in that strange way of his.

  “Hey, Nest,” he greeted.

  “Hey, Jared.” She looked quickly away.

  They fell into step beside each other, moving along the third-base line of the diamond, both of them looking at their feet. Jared wore old jeans, a faded gray T-shirt, and tennis shoes with no socks. Nothing fit quite right, but Nest thought he looked pretty cute anyway.

  “You get any sleep last night?” he asked after a minute.

  He was just about her height (oh, all right, he was an inch or so shorter, maybe), with dark blond hair cut short, eyes so blue they were startling, a stoic smile that suggested both familiarity and long-suffering indulgence with life’s vicissitudes, and a penchant for clearing his throat before speaking that betrayed his nervousness at making conversation. She didn’t know why she liked him. She hadn’t felt this way about him a year ago. A year ago, she had thought he was weird. She still wasn’t sure what had happened to change things.

  She shrugged. “I slept a little.”

  He cleared his throat. “Well, no thanks to me, I guess. You saved my bacon, bringing Bennett home.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Big time. I didn’t know what to do. I spaced, and the next thing I knew, she was outta there. I didn’t know where she’d gone.”

  “Well, she’s pretty little, so—”

  “I messed up.” He was having trouble getting the words out. “I should have locked the door or something, because the attacks can—”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she interrupted heatedly. Her eyes flicked to his, then away again. “Your mom shouldn’t be leaving you alone to baby-sit those kids. She knows what can happen.”

  He was silent a moment. “She doesn’t have any money for a sitter.”

  Oh, but she does have money to go out drinking at the bars, I suppose, Nest wanted to say, but didn’t. “Your mom needs to get a life,” she said instead.

  “Yeah, I guess. George sure doesn’t give her much of one.”

  “George Paulsen doesn’t know how.” Nest spit deliberately. “Do you know what he did with Bennett’s kitten?”

  Jared looked at her. “Spook? What do you mean? Bennett didn’t say anything about it to me.”

  Nest nodded. “Well, she did to me. She said George took Spook away somewhere ’cause he doesn’t like cats. You don’t know anything about it?”

  “No. Spook?”

  “She was probably scared to tell you. I wouldn’t put it past that creep to threaten her not to say anything.” She looked off into the park. “I told her I’d help find Spook. But I don’t know where to look.”

  Jared shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “Me, either. But I’ll look, too.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe this.”

  They crossed the park toward the woods that bordered the houses leading to Cass Minter’s, lost in their separate thoughts, breathing in the heat and the dryness and watching the dust rise beneath their feet in small clouds.

  “Maybe your mom will think twice before she goes out with him again, once she learns about Spook,” Nest said after a minute.

  “Maybe.”

  “Does she know about last night?”

  He hesitated, then shook his head. “No. I didn’t want to tell her. Bennett didn’t say anything either.”

  They walked on in silence to the beginning of the woods and started through the trees toward the houses and the road. From somewhere ahead came the excited shriek of a child, followed by laughter. They could hear the sound of a sprinkler running. Whisk, whisk, whisk. It triggered memories of times already lost to them, gone with childhood’s brief innocence.

  Nest spoke to Jared Scott without looking at him. “I don’t blame you. You know, for not telling your mom. I wouldn’t have told her either.”

  Jared nodded. His hands slipped deeper into his pockets.

  She gripped his arm impulsively. “Next time she leaves you alone to baby-sit, give me a call. I’ll come over and help.”

  “Okay,” he agreed, giving her a sideways smile.

  But she knew just from the way he said it that he wouldn’t.

  CHAPTER 6

  Nest and her friends spent the long, slow, lazy hours of the hot July afternoon fishing. They laughed and joked, swapped gossip and told lies, drank six-packs of pop kept cool at the end of a cord in the waters of the Rock River, and gnawed contentedly on twists of red licorice.

  Beyond the shelter of the park, away from the breezes that wafted off the river, the temperature rose above one hundred and stayed there. The blue dome of the cloudless sky turned hazy with reflected light, and the heat seemed to press down upon the homes and businesses of Hopewell with the intention of flattening them. Downtown, the digital signboard on the exterior brick wall of the First National Bank read 103°, and the concrete of the streets and sidewalks baked and steamed in the white glare. Within their airconditioned offices, men and women began planning their Friday-afternoon escapes, trying to think of ways they could cool down the blast-furnace interiors of their automobiles long enough to survive the drive home.

  On the picket lines at the entrances to MidCon Steel’s five shuttered plants, the union workers hunkered down in lawn chairs under makeshift canopies and drank iced tea and beer from large Styrofoam coolers, hot and weary and discouraged, angry at the intransigence of their collective fate, thinking dark thoughts and feeling the threads of their lives slip slowly away.

  In the cool, dark confines of Scrubby’s Bar, at the west edge of town just off L
incoln Highway, Derry Howe sat alone at one end of the serving counter, nursing a beer and mumbling unintelligibly of his plans for MidCon to a creature that no one else could see.

  It was nearing five o’clock, the sun sinking west and the dinner hour approaching, when Nest and her friends gathered up their fishing gear and the last few cans of pop and made their way back through the park. They climbed from the old boat launch (abandoned now since Riverside had bought the land and closed the road leading in), gained the heights of the cemetery, and followed the fence line back along the bluff face to where the cliffs dropped away and the park began. They wormed their way through a gap in the chain-link, Jared and Robert spreading the jagged edges wide for the girls, followed the turnaround past the Indian mounds, and angled through the trees and the playgrounds toward the ball diamonds. The heat lingered even with the sun’s slow westward descent, a sullen, brooding presence at the edges of the shade. In the darker stretches of the spruce and pine, where the boughs grew thick and the shadows never faded, amber eyes as flat and hard as stone peered out in cold appraisal. Nest, who alone could see them, was reminded of the increasing boldness of the feeders and was troubled anew by what it meant.

  Robert Heppler took a deep drink from his can of Coke, then belched loudly at Brianna Brown and said with supreme insincerity, “Sorry.”

  Brianna pulled a face. She was small and pretty with delicate features and thick, wavy dark hair. “You’re disgusting, Robert!”

  “Hey, it’s a natural function of the body.” Robert tried his best to look put-upon. Short and wiry, with a mischievous face, a shock of unruly white-blond hair, Robert eventually aggravated everyone he came in contact with—particularly Brianna Brown.

  “There is nothing natural about anything you do!” Brianna snapped irritably, although there wasn’t quite enough force behind the retort to cause any of the others to be concerned. The feud between Robert and Brianna was long-standing. It had become a condition of their lives. No one thought much about it anymore, except where the occasional flare-up exacerbated feelings so thoroughly that no one could get any peace. That had happened only once of late, early in the summer, when Robert had managed to hide a red fizzie in the lining of Brianna’s swimsuit just before she went into the pool at Lawrence Park. Mortified beyond any expression of outrage at the resulting red stain, Brianna would have killed Robert if she could have gotten her hands on him. As it was, she hadn’t said a word to him for almost two weeks afterward, not until he apologized in front of everyone and admitted he had behaved in a stupid and childish manner—and even that seemed to please Robert in some bizarre way that probably not even he could fathom.