The Fall of Never(54)

Old Mr. Rand dropped you and ran in one heck of a hurry, Raintree thought, grinning without humor. This is ridiculous. There is no one here.

He bent and scooped up the trap. Something white and plastic was beneath the trap, half-hidden under some leaves. With one hand (the tips of his fingers already starting to go numb), he reached down and brushed the leaves aside. The white, plastic thing was a fork, three of its four tines broken off. Nothing. Garbage.

He found a few more box-traps deeper in the woods and gathered them up before turning around and heading back to the car. He hadn’t expected to find anything, anyway—and now it seemed too evident to him that Rand, that lonely old bastard, could have simply written those initial inside one of his own hunting caps and brought it down to the station. In fact, if he had to bet, he’d say the initialed hunting cap was probably the same exact size as the one the old fool now had perched on his head.

Christ…

He tossed the box-traps in the back of the car and slid back behind the wheel.

“Well?” Rand’s eyes were like saucers.

“Well,” Raintree repeated in his way, “you left those rusted box-traps back there in the woods, Graham, left them all just lying on the ground.”

“Forget the traps, what did you see?”

“I didn’t see anything. Just traps—traps I told you to keep out of these woods, remember?”

“I said forget the traps!” the old man barked. He suddenly became very nervous, his eyes darting along the length of the windshield and out into the night. Great blue veins surfaced and throbbed at his temples. His skin looked tissue paper-thin. “Detective, what did you see?”

Taking a deep breath, slowly counting backwards in his head (this was a calming stunt he’d mastered after several confrontations with the disagreeable Sheriff Bannercon), Raintree said, “Graham, I didn’t see anyone out there. The place is pitch black. And cold. Maybe you saw someone there and maybe you just think you did, but whatever the case, there is no one there now. I promise you.”

Rand’s eyes did not accept the detective’s promise; they continued to dance across the dark scenery beyond the windshield, searching.

“I’ll take you home now,” Raintree said. He threw the car into reverse, executed a two-point turn on the narrow road, and headed back down toward the old man’s house.

When he stopped and turned to look at Rand, he saw the man was shaking violently. “You’re cold?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll warm up inside. Do I need to keep these box-traps?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep them in your yard, Graham, and not scattered throughout North America, all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

The old man collected his traps from the back seat and walked silently up the shadowed walkway toward the front of his square little house. Raintree watched him go. Despite the situation, he harbored a sense of compassion for the old man. He’s lonely, he thought. He can’t help it.

Once Rand had passed through his front door, Raintree turned the sedan around and headed back to town along the dirt road. He tried the heater but, go figure, the darn thing hadn’t worked properly the past three winters, why should it start working now?

In his rearview, he caught a glimpse of the Kellow Compound in the distance. And for some reason, he suddenly felt as though the giant mansion was creeping up on him, that its image in the rearview mirror was a false one, a mock-image reflected only to fool him while the real thing was right now sneaking up on him in the woods—

He saw something dart through a thicket of trees off to his left, causing him to slam on the brakes. The tires growled along the road. He jerked his head in that direction and caught a fleeting human visage disappear into the darkness of the forest.

My sweet God…

It took all of thirty seconds for Raintree to regain composure and snap from his daze. His right hand went for the flashlight that now rested on the passenger seat while his left hand popped open the door. Again, freezing wind blew into the car, mercilessly needling his skin. The air was so bitterly cold, it caused his head to spin. He thought, This is what it is like at the top of a mountain.

He hopped from the car and hustled in the direction of the figure, now completely gone from his sight. He moved the flashlight to his left hand, his right unconsciously sliding to the handgun inside his pancake holster.

“Hello?” he shouted. His voice echoed back on the dry, cold wind. “This is the police. Step out, now.”

He crossed the dirt road and stepped into the woods for the second time that evening, only now his heart was pounding and the beam of the flashlight vibrated ahead of him like a giant epileptic lightning bug. Sweat blossomed on his forehead, immediately freezing in the cold night air.

“Hello?”

Except for his muted footfalls crunching on the dead, frozen earth, the woods were silent. He paused in midstride and swept the surrounding trees with the flashlight.

There was someone out here, all right, someone for certain. Some white figure, just like Graham Rand said…

But the thought of spotting Rand’s naked ghost-man just minutes after convincing Rand himself that no such person existed seemed way too economical. It was impossibly—

A flutter: a materialized image somewhere in the darkness ahead of him. Like flailing arms. He was too slow with the flashlight beam, just barely missing the figure—yet he could hear it now, bounding through the forest. The abecedarian gait of a human being. He’d grown up in these woods and was certain of the sound—the sound of a human being, a man, running through the woods.