Hide and Seek

by Jack Ketchum

  We stepped carefully into the room. It was a relief to be able to stand upright. A dozen bluebottle flies rose up to greet us. We swatted at them.

  I bent down for a closer look. I picked up one of the bigger bones.

  Something had been at them. There were teeth marks. Something

  I broke one in my hands. It was old and brittle. I felt a measure of relief at that. It was easy to hope they all went back to the days before Ben and Mary abandoned the house-some sort of burial

  ground for their animals. I didn't want to have to link them with Casey too closely.

  We prowled around for a moment or two. The flies got worse. I was looking for traces of blood. There was something odd near the wall to our right. A pile of sticks and twigs pressed flat, covered with a ratty old moth-eaten tartan blanket, half of that cove red with dried seaweed and scattered with bones. To me it looked planned. Some sort of browse-bed. So there went my burial-ground idea.

  Steven was looking at the bones.

  "I recognize this one," he said. "It's a cat."

  "How do you know?"

  "College biology. And there are birds her too, big ones. Gulls maybe."

  "See any dogs?"

  My feet crushed tiny bones.

  "Maybe. We never took any of those apart. No skulls that I can see.

  No jawbones."

  He sifted through a pile of them near the pool of water. They rattled like pairs of dowels struck together.

  "This could be a dog's. Femur. Could very well be."

  "See any people?"

  In my flashlight beam his face was ashen.

  "No people."

  "I was thinking Ben and Mary."

  "No. No people. Thank god."

  I found a thin line of fresh blood beside the pool opposite him, and then a few more drops a couple of feet away. Smeared, as though she'd been dragging. She was bleeding slowly and steadily.

  In the cave this deep the flies were not just bluebottles anymore.

  They were biting. I felt as harp sting on my cheek, another on my neck. I batted at them to no effect, except to nearly drop the flash light while its beam jittered wildly across the wet gray ceiling and plunged the area just ahead into the darkness.

  That sea red me. didn't want to break any more flashlights.

  I controlled myself after that. I put the beam to the walls of the cavern, following the direction of her blood. Then I saw what I was after. Another hole in the wall, just like the one we'd come through.

  Steven was slapping at them too by now. They were diving at us both like tiny kamikaze pilots, hitting hard. I slapped at one and felt it smear across my forehead. There was the urge to start swinging with both hands, to drop the pitchfork and run. But that was the edge of panic. And it could kill you.

  "Let's get out of here. This way."

  Just beyond the entrance the tunnel opened up to roughly the size of a mine shaft. It was good to be able to stand up, even if you had to stoop a little. A whole lot better than crawling.

  Good also to be able to go two abreast, to feel the security of another body by your side. To know it sported an axe handle that could bring a man down.

  We made good time through there. It was just one long passage with nothing in the distance but rock and more rock as far as you could see.

  It amazed me, this much tunnel. I guessed it started in the seawall and eroded inward. I wondered how many others there were along the coast just like this, maybe even deeper and more extensive.

  You could hide forever in a place like this, if you could stand the cold of winter and found some way to scrounge up food and water.

  It would never grow warm in here. The rock itself would keep it cool throughout the worst of August, and winter would be pure hell. Whoever had Casey was a thick-skinned sonovabitch, if this was the

  As I say, it was easy going for a while, with only one direction to go in, but then things got more complicated. The section of tunnel split in two. You could go left or right, and they were about the same in shape and size.

  We looked for traces of blood on the floor. There weren't any not in either direction. There was no way of telling what that meant for Casey. Maybe the bleeding had stopped because the wound

  Jwasn't that bad. On the other hand, dead people stopped bleeding too.

  It was bad for us, though. It left us with a choice.

  , mm

  In that place you didn't want choices.

  I thought about it for a while.

  "Listen, "I said. "It seems to me that we've been running parallel to the coastline so far, maybe moving a little inland. That sound right to you?"

  "I think so."

  "Then I think we should take the right. Seems to me that access to the beachfront would be important to whoever the hell is in here. That hole in the basement can't be his only exit. I'm thinking a hole in the seawall, something like that."

  "Some way to collect food and water." "Right."

  "Let's try it."

  "I just hope to hell we don't find six more of these. You could get pretty lost in here."

  We had lost the flies by now but we still had the stink. As we moved on, though, I started to feel I had it right, because the air seemed fresher, more redolent of the sea.

  We were moving through short lengths of passageway-five steps in this direction, ten in the next but I had the sense that we were basically moving outward toward the rock face. Inside me all the troops were on red alert, armed and watchful. So were Steven's.

  Both of us amazed me.

  Walking two abreast like that you could feel the pull of tension between us; a strong, supple feeling. Strange. As though we shared the same nervous system, he and I, impulses tugging two sets of muscles, two structures of bone. I hardly knew him, really. But I knew him then. And you could see why friendships are so easy to come by in combat situations, why the loyalties are fierce ones and why you avoid them if you can, because the trauma runs so deep when shell or bullet shatters them forever. I didn't worry for Steven. I worried for us.

  ACK KET CHUM

  We'd reach a corner and wait and listen, holding our flashlights close to the ground. Then we'd throw the beams around the corner and I'd hit the wall opposite us, pitchfork high and ready, while Steve waited to crack somebody's skull with the axe handle.

  I think we got the procedure off cops shows.

  But it felt good and efficient anyway.

  Four times we did this. Each time-nothing.

  I was waiting, hoping to feel it like I'd felt it before -that sense of something out there just out of reach and out of sight. Something big and dangerous waiting for me and ready, just as I was ready for him this time. I had my backup and my long pointed stick. I was ready.

  The hell I was.

  I hit the fifth wall. I was sure we were close now.

  All the beam showed us was another passageway. Empty, silent.

  The corridor was as hort one. Six steps maybe. We got halfway down and then stopped. I don't know why we stopped. Butagain.it was simultaneous. There was a moment there where all we did was look at one another. Eyes like black little beads in our heads.

  And I think we knew.

  Something rough and jagged was happening to my heartbeat. I remember he gave me a little smile. That same curl to the lip as when he was being cute and ironic, only it wasn't that way this time. It was like hello and good-bye all at once.

  Just like that.

  And between those things lay all life, all time, for both of us.

  I turned my light to the ground. The walls loomed with shadows. I stepped into them and threw my beam ahead of me.

  And saw what was happening to Casey.

  I had a brief impression of a large empty room with high rugged ceilings

  Pillars in the soft rock from roof to floor, pulled thin in the middle

  I ike strands of taffy Gleaming, dripping.

  And Casey.

  Propped up against one of them fifteen feet away f
rom us, her bloodied legs spread wide apart, their angle enclosing us within. Her eyes wide, unblinking, flickering like candles in a wind. Seeing her a punch to the solar plexus, a blinding physical shock.

  For a moment I simply reeled.

  It crouched beside her, its long black bony back to us. I could see its head rise and fall with the lunge of backbone and muzzle and hear the snap of teeth as it worried her.

  Her eyes stared through it-through us too-boring back through the tunnel and cellar and house into the woods beyond. At some point she'd put on the army shirt. Now it was torn off completely at the shoulder and dark with blood. There was blood on the blue halter beneath it and more on the cream shorts and across her legs and naked stomach. Her face was very pale.

  The huge black dog lunged out of its crouch and snapped at her, very near her face. A sound like the clap of two heavy sticks of hardwood.

  Her pale blue eyes skittered like trapped birds.

  For a moment we froze there.

  The sheer awesome size of him was riveting.

  I watched the muscles curl and pulse along his back, and he was fascinating as a snake.

  He snapped at her again and tore a flap of sleeve off the army shirt as though it were tissue paper. I saw where it had chewed her, dragged her along by the shoulder. The bare white arm looked useless now.

  New blood began to well up where there was none before along the side of her upper arm.

  He'd taken more than the sleeve.

  And I knew where this particular game was going.

  I acted. The hero moved.

  "Hey!" I said.

  It startled even me. The inanity of it. The hoarse echoing loudnessofit. Hey. Idiotic. But that was what came out. And choked back everything else.

  The dog turned.

  That is, its head did.

  A square black head on a neck as thick as the trunk of a birch tree.

  I've seen other full-grown dogs that were not as big as that skull was.

  I felt suddenly very frail.

  It moved slowly around and stared at us with cloudy black eyes.

  Cataracts, I thought. It's practically blind. An old dog, its black coat flecked with white. And I remembered that among the predators there was nothing more dangerous than the old or sick or blind, because they would hunt anything, even man.

  Its muzzle pulled back into a grin that growled like muted thunder. I saw huge curved incisors longer and broader than my thumb, easily three inches long. I saw rows of smaller sharp teeth between them for gripping and pulling, and behind them the blunt wide molars. A grim, discolored killing machine was what I was looking at. Long gray battle scars across the muzzle.

  I felt its half-blind stare work its way into me like a burrowing worm, leaving me rubber legged, sweating.

  He turned completely.

  It was slow and graceful, belying his age. His torso unfolded like the sluice of a great black whip. In full view he was enormous-easily

  four and a half feet from the tip of the flat black nose to the base of his tail. Standing on his hind legs he'd be seven feet tall, I guessed. As big as a bear.

  Of bastard parentage, I think now. Somethingof the Great Dane about the head. Something of the wolf in the set of the shoulders.

  The pitchfork and axe handle seemed like toys.

  A pair of tin soldiers was what we were.

  No axe handle was going to crack that skull. No ridiculous garden implement was about to pierce that hide. My brain computed the heft and sinew of both of us and compared it with an old sick dog's and we came up looking like sparrows.

  I could see the mad strangeness in those eyes.

  He could crack us like eggs.

  My fear of him was almost superstitious. My voice still echoed in the room.

  And I thought what if there are more of them? Beside me Steven went rigid.

  It stared at us. Head down, eyes rolled high and moving from one of us to the other. Deciding. Black eyes deciding. A casual,

  And I knew we were no surprise to him. Downwind or not, we'd been expected. He was in no hurry. We were not a problem. It was a matter of who to take down first. He could do it at his leisure.

  The animal drooled.

  Pleasure. Anticipation.

  I'd seen enough dogs to know how it would happen. He'd drop the tense, stiff-legged stance in favor of a very loose, very amiable-looking, very doggy trot. The trot would turn quickly into a deadly lunge of teeth and claws and muscle.

  Nice dog. Watch the spume of blood. Good doggy.

  The only way to go was to move before he did.

  I used my smallest voice. "I'm going to move on him," I said.

  It took Steven a while to respond. Then he told me okay and I knew he was as ready as he was going to get.

  I watched the slow drift of the animal's eyes from Steven back to me.

  When they returned to Steve again, that would be the time.

  I'd have to try for the heart. The eyes would ideally be better, or the soft, sensitive nose, but both those targets were too small for me at this distance and I knew how fast and well he'd move them.

  I looked down at the massive bony chest and then back to the eyes. I knew where the tines would have to go. I tensed to put them

  The growl was loud as a buzz saw in that space. The teeth snapped.

  Impatience. Display. And knowledge, too, of what we had in mind. I know that now.

  The eyes held on me. Through the cloudy white lenses I sensed a recognition. Yes, it's me. We've met before. You know me.

  Arrogantly, they shifted.

  I rushed him, arms and legs moving like machines in fine order. No missteps. No faltering. My arms drew back the pitchfork and plunged forward with power and accuracy. I surprised myself. I was good. I was very good.

  And not nearly good enough.

  I was prepared for bone and muscle. There was every bit of me behind it, one hundred seventy pounds. He'd be hard to kill, so it had to be that way there'd be no second try. So I gave it everything. And felt a sickening scrape along his backbone and a tug of resistance at the hip joint of the right hind leg, and then there was nothing but air.

  I fell forward hard, the flashlight skittering out of my hand. I heard it crack and saw it die against one of the vertical columns next to Casey. I still had the pitchfork. I rolled as I fell and hit shoulder-first and kept rolling, over on my back, and pulled the tines up close, expecting to see it looming over me, knowing it would go for the neck.

  But it wasn't there.

  His flashlight beam slid erratically over the ceiling. I looked up and heard the heavy thunk of his axe handle and sighted him in time to watch it bounce off the animal's skull as though it were lightweight plastic.

  I heard him wail as the head came up at him and he tried to hit it a second time and it moved so that he overshot his mark, and saw the jaws clamp down on his arm just above the wrist. His scream went higher, shriller. Beneath it the awful crunch of bone as the jaws ground down and through him and the hand crumbled away, falling off his arm, falling slowly like the limb of a tree under a chain saw.

  I got to my feet.

  Light swung wildly around me as he battered the dog with his flashlight. His bad hand, I thought idiotically. I could see the gout of blood pulsing, pouring off his other wrist, the long slash mark on the animal's back where I'd hit him.

  I ran toward them, off-balance this time, and reached them just as the flashlight flew out of the bandaged hand in a wide arc and the animal moved again. The light guttered out, clattering against stone, and then went on again, its beam playing over the floor to the right of me.

  My second stab at him had been darkness. The pitchfork jarred against solid rock.

  When the light went on again there was just a gurgling sound.

  Steve was facing me, sitting, his back to the wall beside the entranceway. His eyes were rolled up so only the whites showed. His head lolled off to one side. His mouth was open, and something dark spi
lled down across his chin.

  The dog was at his stomach.

  Pulling.

  I froze.

  The dog's haunches tensed as it tugged again.

  He seemed to fold and sigh, his body sliding down the dark wet wall.

  Ismelled urine and feces. In his lap everything turned a ghastly white.