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Whoever the hand belonged to was inhumanly strong.
With a flick of a mighty wrist, Pete found himself back down on the ground. His light rolled away, tipping off the side of the road and into a shallow ditch. He cringed then, and cowered, embracing the oversized bag and trying to stuff the detector and shovel back into place.
“Leave me alone,” he whimpered. “Leave me alone!”
Leave us alone.
Not exactly an echo that time, the three words were tossed back at him. The speaker, or whisperer, stood tremendously tall over Pete’s crouching form. Between the hour and the fog, Pete couldn’t make out any details save the glimmering eyes that shone like an animal’s.
The brute was huge and wide, and his form seemed unstable or uncertain. As Pete stared, he thought that the reason might be a long jacket or cape hanging down around the thing’s shoulders. It was hard to tell.
Leave us alone, it repeated. Go, and do not return.
“What…what are you?”
Green Eyes—for what else could Pete call it?—leaned down closer, stepping within an arm’s reach.
I am the Sentry. And I know what you are.
The voice was so strange and so darkly soft that Pete wasn’t certain how he was hearing it. It might have been breathed, it was so quiet; but it may have been growled, it was so thick.
You will not dig here. You will let them rest. Come to this place again, and I will kill you.
Though he was relieved to infer that no killing would take place on this particular occasion, Pete was still on the asphalt, hiding behind his bag.
“Why?” he asked, but Green Eyes had turned, and the smoldering eyes were no longer to be seen—just the mighty creature’s retreating shoulders, heaving in time to his footsteps as he slipped through the shadows.
You know why. It’s the old pact.
12
Visiting Unannounced
I had plenty of time to kill before Benny’d be off work, so on a whim I wandered back to Greyfriar’s to get coffee and a newspaper. I’d need to go back up the mountain to nab one of Dave’s cameras, but I had eight hours to run that errand; so I picked a quiet corner, back down the brick-lined hall towards the roasting room, and there I called Malachi.
I wanted to ask him for a few details on his friend in the Bend, Kitty. He’d said she had been rambling about “the Hairy Man” and had been moved over to solitary. If I could get in and talk to her, she might be able to tell me more about the Bend’s elusive visitor.
I didn’t know how it worked there. I wondered if you could just walk up and ask to see a patient or if it was more like jail, where you need to be on an approved list and can only show up at certain times.
Malachi could have told me, but the one time I wanted to talk to him, he wasn’t home.
I hung up and fiddled with my phone. Like Lu always said, it never hurt to ask—but I didn’t even know this woman’s last name. And the more I thought about it, the less certain I was that I knew her proper first name either. Who names a kid “Kitty,” anyway? I hoped for her sake that it was a nickname.
I pulled my mini-notebook out of my bag and flipped it open on the marble-top bistro table beside my coffee cup.
What did I know about the woman, anyway? She’d killed her sister’s kids. Two kids? I went ahead and wrote that down, though I wasn’t positive I’d remembered correctly. Her name or nickname was Kitty. She’d been remanded to Moccasin Bend, presumably for life. This probably meant that the crime had taken place in Tennessee somewhere.
Was this enough to turn up a news story if I ran an Internet search?
Possibly. But possibly not.
My coffee needed refreshing, so I went over to the air pots and selected the shade-grown Nicaraguan. Beside the swiveling plastic condiments tray, someone had abandoned a local free magazine.
I picked it up and took it back to my table, idly flipping through it while I sipped at the South American brew.
Page three hosted an article I couldn’t skip, a page of accumulated anecdotes about the battlefield. Sensationalistic or not, I decided I could write up my trash reading to research. Most of the stories were a paragraph or less, and many of them involved silly showdowns or outrageous chases.
Four of them I paid attention to. I recognized the themes, and they had an understated ring of truth. Quiet ghosts, pointing arms. All in all, not terribly informative. The quick tales told me nothing I didn’t already know. The ghosts wanted to communicate, but they weren’t sure how to go about doing so. Well, we’d see if we could help them with that problem tonight.
