“Hold the phone,” Hubbard said. Seemingly forgetting me, he crept toward the shadowy place. There were gigantic uprooted trees bookending the tenebrous glade, and a great many leafy boughs hanging protectively over it. I couldn’t shake the sensation that what I was looking at was an entrance of some kind. I hadn’t explored this part of the Hollow in months, and when I had, I didn’t remember it looking like this. But now the trees, the branches, the rocks, and the dirt…it all looked somehow…
Arranged.
Yes, it looked like it had been arranged this way. I realized with another ripple of disquiet that Hubbard had halved the distance between us and the dark place, but something prohibited me from calling to him.
“Help us!” a voice behind us shouted. We whirled and discovered Flynn and Wood hustling over a rise. They supported something between them, something that flopped bonelessly.
It was Eric Blades.
But instead of the cool, cocky jerk he’d been earlier today, he now looked like some shell-shocked soldier being dragged to the infirmary. Eric was no longer shrieking in that insane high-pitched voice, but he didn’t seem to be conscious of his surroundings either.
Gently, they laid Eric down on a bed of dead leaves and began examining him.
Hubbard was watching them, a look of bafflement on his face. “Why did you move him?”
Wood and Flynn exchanged a glance.
“You wanna tell him?” Wood asked.
“Not particularly,” Flynn answered.
Wood was peeling back one of Eric’s eyelids. Flynn clutched Eric’s wrist, felt for a pulse. To me, Eric looked like he’d overdosed on drugs, which wouldn’t have surprised me. Other than a sizable rip in the center of his black tank top, he didn’t appear to be injured.
I thought Hubbard would ask his question again, but I realized something else was gnawing at him. He’d half-turned and was again peering into the sunless glade on the eastern side of the clearing.
“Hey, guys, I don’t know...” Hubbard said under his breath.
“What do you make of this?” Flynn asked.
I stepped closer and saw what he and Wood were looking at. After first glimpsing the rip in Eric’s shirt, I’d assumed he’d gotten spooked by something, taken off running, and been raked by an outreaching branch. But upon further inspection I realized it was something worse than that.
The slit in his torso was at least an inch deep. I could see the pinkish white muscle tissue peeking out from the bubbling pool of blood. The gouge was long and gruesome, but somehow it seemed too…well, precise. The word that kept recurring in my head was incision, as crazy as that sounds.
It didn’t occur to me at that point to wonder what had made the incision. That wouldn’t happen for another thirty seconds.
At least I think it was thirty seconds. So much took place afterward that it’s hard for me to measure the way time passed then. I remember Hubbard remaining in the same place instead of joining Flynn and Wood. Almost like the younger cop was standing a post. I remember Eric moaning, his head thrashing weakly on the moist bed of humus, as well as the way Flynn tried to quiet him. I remember Wood frowning over the foot-long gash in Eric’s chest, remember him taking out his cell phone and cursing his lack of a signal.
Most of all I remember the feeling of being watched.
Just as I’d felt earlier that day, when Kurt and the others were terrorizing me, I now experienced the most uncanny sensation of being observed by some alien intelligence, something hostile and—I couldn’t escape the word—hungry.
“Detective Wood?” I said.
Wood pocketed his cell phone in disgust. “What, kid?”
“I think we need to get out of the forest.”
He didn’t look up from Eric Blades. “We’re going to. In just a minute.”
“No, I mean now. We need to leave now.”
Wood looked up at Flynn. “The kid feels it too.”
Flynn gave me a strange, sidelong grin. “It’s like there’s someone else with us, right?”
“That’s why we got out of there,” Wood told me. “We found this kid laid out in an open place. Almost like he’d been put there as bait.”
“It felt like something was going to pounce on us,” Flynn agreed.
I glanced about the forest. The drone of the cicadas, which had been well nigh deafening a few minutes ago, had dwindled to almost nothing. The forest had grown preternaturally silent, as if it was holding its breath in anticipation of some dire event.
Wood had his fingers around Eric’s gash, apparently examining the extent of the damage.
“Can’t we go?” I said.
Wood and Flynn exchanged another of their glances. Flynn said, “Maybe he’s got a point, huh?”
“Uh-huh,” Wood said quietly.
“What say you, Hubbard?” Flynn asked, rising. “You ready to…hey, Hubbard, what are you doing?”
I turned in time to see Hubbard step into the shadowy enclave. Looking at it this time, I couldn’t shake the feeling it had been arranged in just that way to lure people in. I didn’t want to think about who or what had arranged it, but even as Hubbard stepped closer, the shadows overtaking him, I heard Barley’s words recur in my mind.
They call them the Children. They live underground.
Could the overhang toward which Hubbard was creeping be an entrance to some subterranean network?
The Children are huge. Legend says ten feet tall or more. They’re the most fearsome cryptids on the planet.
Hubbard bent closer to the cavelike enclosure. My entire body thrummed with nervous tension.
“Hey, Dane?” Flynn called. “You think you might wanna exercise a little caution over there?”
“I hear something,” Hubbard said, but his voice was distracted, faraway.
They murder, devour, Barley had said, or change you into one of them.
“Hey really, Hubbard. You don’t need to prove your valor to us,” Wood said, taking a step in that direction. “Let’s just get Blades out of here, and then we can sort out what’s really…”
But he trailed off into thunderstruck silence when the figure emerged from the darkness.
It was Pete Blades.
But something was terribly wrong with him. He was staggering like the world’s worst drunk, and what was worse, he was as white as sun-bleached sand.
Hubbard backpedaled.
Flynn and Wood had their weapons out.
“What’s wrong with him?” Flynn asked.
“The hell should I know?” Wood barked. For the first time since I’d met him, Detective Wood looked seriously frightened.
“That your brother?” Flynn asked over his shoulder. I turned and looked at Eric Blades, expecting some sort of answer, but he was lying there with a hideous grin on his face. His eyes were glassy, his gaze upturned to the drab gray sky. As I stared down at him, thunder rattled the whole forest, making all of us jump. Cold raindrops began to pelt us.
Pete Blades took a couple more shambling steps, then stood there teetering on his feet.
Wood’s voice was steady again. Or steadier, at least. “I’m gonna come over there and make sure you’re all right. Just stay where you are and—Hubbard, what the hell’s wrong with you?” Wood shouted.
Because when Pete Blades had stepped past Hubbard, the brawny cop moving out of his way, Hubbard had seen something that had made him yelp like a kicked dog and clap a hand over his mouth in terror. Hubbard was mumbling something into his palm, but it was so fast and garbled that it could have been anything. Clearly, he was spooked beyond all reason, but we could see Pete too, and from our vantage point there was nothing disturbing enough to cause that kind of a reaction.
Then Pete described a slow, awkward turn, and we realized why Hubbard had lost it.
Pete’s back was shredded.
No, shredded isn’t a strong enough word. One of my favorite foods used to be pulled pork sandwiches. I ate them every August at the town fair. By the time you gobble
d down half a sandwich, the meat juice and barbecue sauce always soaked into the bread and made it all squish together in a pink-and-white goulash.
Pete’s back looked like that now.
I’d never eat pulled pork again.
“Mother of God,” Flynn said. Around the clearing, the rain let loose in a freezing torrent. Thunder rumbled through the forest, and somewhere to the northeast lightning bleached the sky.
Flynn lowered his gun and bit one of his knuckles in horror.
But Wood’s instincts took over. He strode over to Pete as the big guy sank to his knees, and did his best to keep him from toppling over. At the same moment Hubbard began a blundering sideways retreat toward the trail. “I’ll radio in, fellas,” he muttered. “They’ll have the paramedics here in no—”
But he never finished.
Because at that moment we saw it emerge from the darkness.
I realized everything Barley had said was true.
The creature rose up as it stalked out of the darkness, its sleek white legs moving with a slithery fluidity. This was the thing, I knew, that Mia and Peach had glimpsed the other night. The leering face. The lambent green eyes. The dripping scimitar teeth.
Only this creature was even worse than they had described.
It rose to its full height, which was at least nine feet, maybe ten. Its slender white arms hung down to its knees, the hands and feet long and bony. The creature had some sparse black strands stringing down from its alabaster pate, but other than that it appeared hairless.
There was blood smeared all over the creature’s grinning mouth.
For the first time I connected the beast standing before us with what had happened to Pete. The exposed shoulder blades, the gristly strings of muscle and glistening purple of his organs. This creature had done that to Pete, had reduced his entire back to ground chuck.
And now it was stalking toward us.
Hubbard noticed our expressions, and maybe on some primitive level he knew what kind of danger he was in even before he turned and beheld the creature towering over him. Whatever the case, he followed our shocked stares and craned his head up to see the hulking figure, and when he did, I saw his big arms suddenly droop, as if all the life had drained out of him. He squared up to the beast, but it wasn’t to confront it—it was so he could back away, straight toward us.
One of the creature’s long arms shot out. Fingers like white, flexible flutes encircled Hubbard’s neck. Then Hubbard was rising off the ground, the creature’s insidious face twisting in delight. Hubbard must’ve weighed two-fifty or more, but he rose higher and higher until his head was actually at a level two or three feet above the creature’s. Without Hubbard’s bulk blocking my sight line, I could see the creature’s entire hideous body. It was humanoid in shape, but it was cadaverously thin. Yet despite this apparent scrawniness, the beast possessed unspeakable strength. Lightning flashed again, illuminating the creature’s corded muscles, its sinews and tendons. Yes, I thought sickly, this beast might look like some sort of upright salamander, but its body was a powder keg of brute power.
It was also, emphatically, male.
Thunder shook the forest, a fierce wind now rocketing through the clearing. The rain assaulted us with sadistic abandon.
Wood and Flynn had been transfixed by the sight of the beast. It was Wood, though, who reacted first.
“Now just…just put him down,” Wood said, bringing his gun up toward the creature.
“You might hit Hubbard,” Flynn said from the corner of his mouth.
“And if I don’t shoot it,” Wood replied, “there isn’t gonna be a Hubbard.”
I was inclined to agree with Wood.
As the two men had spoken, the drumming of Hubbard’s feet had gone from intermittent attempts to kick his captor to a frenetic flailing. I realized with dawning dread that the creature was squeezing Hubbard’s throat.
“I said put him down!” Wood demanded.
The creature brought up a hand, cocked it.
“Wait a minute,” Wood said.
“Oh no,” Flynn muttered.
The creature grinned. It wasn’t until that moment that I understood what true evil looked like.
“Please listen to us,” Wood said.
“If you let him go—” Flynn began.
He never finished because the creature’s open hand swept toward Hubbard’s face. Even above the ungodly rumble of the thunder and the full-throated roar of the rain, I heard the concussion of the creature’s taloned fingers on the muscular man’s face.
Hubbard’s head didn’t come completely off.
But it was close.
What did happen was the front and left side of Hubbard’s throat split open at the blow, and his head sort of unhinged backward. Blood geysered from the ragged throat hole and painted the beast’s satanic features a lurid red.
Wood cursed and Flynn let loose with a yodeling cry of horror. I thought Wood would open up on the creature then, but the creature anticipated him, thrust Hubbard’s limp, dangling body down as a shield between him and Wood’s outstretched gun. Wood fired three times, but Hubbard’s body absorbed two of the slugs. The beast gasped as one shot opened a hole in its side. Its green eyes flashing, the beast stepped toward us, at the same moment giving Hubbard a shake so violent that the cop’s dead body flopped like a rag doll in its grip.
“Help me with him,” Flynn said, and it took me several seconds to realize he was talking to me. Flynn was getting Eric Blades to his feet, and he wanted me to help him.
Now that’s ironic, I reflected. Blades was attacking me a couple hours ago, and now I’m supposed to risk my life for him?
To hell with that.
I began to move toward the trail.
“Will!” Flynn called.
I stopped and looked at him, and in his face I saw more than I wanted to, his expression more eloquent than any words could have been. You’re better than this, Will. Don’t let this kid die just because he made some mistakes. Everyone deserves a chance.
Shit, I thought. He was right.
Wood had set his feet far apart, his face full of resolve now. His arm extended straight out, he fired on the creature again but only hit Hubbard’s broad frame.
Leering, the creature took another step.
“You leave us alone,” Wood said, his voice rising, “or so help me I’ll—”
The creature reached up and ripped Hubbard’s head off his body.
Wood’s mouth formed a shocked O.
Like a big league pitcher, the creature reared back and hurled the severed head at Wood.
¨
Several things happened at once.
The severed head crashed into Wood’s chest.
Wood fired his gun.
A maroon hole opened in the creature’s shoulder
The creature snarled as the slug spun its spidery body sideways.
One more thing must’ve happened at about that moment, though I’m only speculating about it now. One second, Eric was supported between me and Officer Flynn. The next he was gone. I don’t know how it happened, but he was just…gone.
But Eric was the last thing on my mind. I only wanted to survive.
“Let’s drop the motherfucker!” Wood shouted and fired again.
At the second blast of Wood’s gun, Flynn’s trance seemed to break. He brought up his own firearm, squeezed the trigger. The creature’s walkingstick body jolted and jagged with the slugs, but it merely lowered to a knee, as if gathering itself.
“Joe?” Wood said in a tight voice.
“Son of a—” Flynn started to say, then the creature was exploding off the ground, the lightning strobing over the forest, enameling the leaping body with flashes of ghastly silverlight. I thought at first it would continue to rise higher and higher until it simply disappeared into the sky, but the creature was bound by natural laws after all. It came down behind Officer Flynn.
To his credit, Flynn reacted quickly.
It stil
l didn’t save him.
When the creature had leapt into the air, Jim Flynn had tracked it with his handgun, had even fired two rounds as it arced over his head to land, impossibly, on its feet right behind him. Flynn had begun his spin, meaning to blast the creature in the face, but before he could whirl all the way around, the creature’s razor-sharp talons flashed out, and then Flynn’s gun—with his hand still gripping it—tumbled into the brush.
My stomach performed a massive lurch. Please don’t kill Flynn, I thought, knowing how fruitless the wish was.
His eyes as large as tea saucers, Flynn gaped at the spouting stump of his forearm. The flaps of dangling skin reminded me of a blood-soaked mop.
The creature pounced on Flynn, opened its bear-trap jaws.
“No!” Wood bellowed. He’d started forward to intervene when I seized him around the waist and shouted for him to Stop, Stop!
He ground to a halt maybe fifteen feet from where Flynn lay pinned under the creature. “But we can’t…,” he started to say, but he trailed off when he saw what I’d already seen.
The creature’s head was buried in Flynn’s chest. The cop’s eyes already stared sightlessly in death as the creature fed.
“We have to go,” I told Wood, pulling him away.
“Can’t,” he muttered, but he was moving backward with me, in the direction of the trail.
“He’s gone,” I said. “Flynn’s gone. We have to run.”
Wood’s face was ashen, his expression one of benumbed disbelief. But he was a smart man, and he understood very well what was happening. Had we lingered in that clearing a moment longer, the creature would have ripped us to shreds just as he had Pete Blades, Dane Hubbard, and Jim Flynn.
But at that moment, it looked as if the beast was too absorbed in devouring Flynn’s body to pay us any mind. We rushed out of the clearing and broke into a sprint. We quickly put some distance between us and the creature. Within a couple minutes we neared my back yard.
I was badly shaken, but I was also elated to be alive. We had evaded the creature, or at least it seemed we had. Every step we took down that path brought us closer to our salvation. Once in my house, we could barricade ourselves inside, summon the entire Indiana State Police force.
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