The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(22)

It's the thing you hear, Trisha, said the cold voice. Its tone was sad on top, unspeakably gleeful underneath. It's coming for you. It's got your scent.

"There is no thing," Trisha said in a desperate, whispery voice that broke into complete silence each time it wavered upward. "Come on, give me a break, there is no thing."

The unreliable moonlight had changed the shapes of the trees, had turned them into bone faces with black eyes. The sound of two branches rubbing together became the clotted croon of a monster. Trisha turned in a clumsy circle, trying to look everywhere at once, her eyes rolling in her muddy face.

It's a special thing, Trisha - the thing that waits for the lost ones. It lets them wander until they're good and scared - because fear makes them taste better, it sweetens the flesh - and then it comes for them. You'll see it. It'll come out of the trees any minute now. A matter of seconds, really. And when you see its face you'll go insane.

If there was anyone to hear you, they'd think you were screaming.

But you'll be laughing, won't you? Because that's what insane people do when their lives are ending, they laugh... and they laugh... and they laugh.

"Stop it, there is no thing, there is no thing in the woods, you stop it!"

She whispered this very fast, and the hand holding the nub of dead branch clutched it tighter and tighter until it broke with a loud report like a starter's gun. The sound made her jump and utter a little scream, but it also steadied her. She knew what it was, after all - just a branch, and one she had broken. She could still break branches, she still had that much control over the world. Sounds were just sounds.

Shadows were just shadows. She could be afraid, she could listen to that stupid traitor of a voice if she wanted to, but there was no (thing special thing) in the woods. There was wildlife, and there was undoubt-edly a spot of the old kill-or-be-killed going on out there at this very second, but there was no crea -  There is.

And there was.

Now, stopping all of her thoughts and holding her breath without realizing it, Trisha knew with a simple cold cer-tainty that there was. There was something. Inside her there were at that moment no voices, only a part of her she didn't understand, a special set of eclipsed nerves that perhaps slept in the world of houses and phones and electric lights and came fully alive only out here in the woods. That part didn't see and couldn't think, but it could feel. Now it felt something in the woods.

"Hello?" she called toward the moonlight-and-bone faces of the trees. "Hello, is someone there?"

In the Castle View motel room Quilla had asked him to share with her, Larry McFarland sat in his pajamas on the edge of one of the twin beds with his arm around his ex-wife's shoulders. Although she wore only the thinnest of cotton nightgowns and he was pretty sure she had nothing on beneath it, and further although he had not had a sexual relationship with anything but his own left hand in well over a year, he felt no lust (no immediate lust, anyway). She was trembling all over. It felt to him as though every muscle in her back were turned inside-out.

"It's nothing," he said. "Just a dream. A nightmare you woke up with and turned into this feeling."

"No," Quilla said, shaking her head so violently that her hair whipped lightly against his cheek. "She's in danger, I feel it. Terrible danger." And she began to cry.

Trisha did not cry, not then. At that moment she was too scared to cry. Something watching her. Something.

"Hello?" she tried again. No response... but it was there and it was on the move now, just beyond the trees at the back of the clearing, moving from left to right. And as her eyes shifted, following nothing but moonlight and a feeling, she heard a branch crack where she was looking. There was a soft exhalation... or was there? Was that perhaps only a stir of wind?

You know better, the cold voice whispered, and of course she did.

"Don't hurt me," Trisha said, and now the tears came.

"Whatever you are, please don't hurt me. I won't try to hurt you, please don't hurt me. I... I'm just a kid."

The strength ran out of her legs and Trisha did not so much fall down as fold up. Still crying and shivering all over with terror, she burrowed back under the fallen tree like the small and defenseless animal that she had become. She con-tinued begging not to be hurt almost without realizing it.

She grabbed her pack and pulled it in front of her face like a shield. Big shuddery spasms wracked her body, and when another branch cracked, closer, she screamed. It wasn't in the clearing, not yet, but almost. Almost.

Was it in the trees? Moving through the interlaced branches of the trees? Something with wings, like a bat?

She peered out between the top of the pack and the curve of the sheltering tree. She saw only tangled branches against the moon-bright sky. There was no creature among them -  at least not that her eyes could pick out - but now the woods had fallen completely silent. No birds called, no bugs hummed in the grass.

It was very close, whatever it was, and it was deciding.

Either it would come and tear her apart, or it would move on. It wasn't a joke and it wasn't a dream. It was death and madness standing or crouching or perhaps perching just beyond the edge of the clearing. It was deciding whether to take her now... or to let her ripen a little while longer.

Trisha lay clutching the pack and holding her breath.

After an eternity, another branch cracked, this one a little further off. Whatever it was, it was moving away.