Rachael stayed close to Benny and pressed against the trunk of the spruce. The rough bark prickled even through her blouse.
She felt as if they remained frozen there, listening alertly and peering intently into the woods, for at least a quarter of an hour, though she knew it must have been less than a minute. Then, warily, Benny started uphill again, angling slightly to the right to follow a shallow dry wash that was mostly free of brush. She stayed close behind him. Sparse brown grass, crisp as paper, lightly stroked their legs. They had to take care to avoid stepping on some loose stones deposited by last spring's runoff of melting snow, but they made somewhat better progress than they had outside the wash.
The flanking walls of brush presented the only drawback to the easier new route. The growth was thick, some dry and brown, some dark green, and it pressed in at both sides of the shallow wash, with only a few widely separated gaps through which Benny and Rachael could look into the woods beyond. She half expected Eric to leap through the bushes and set upon them. She was encouraged only by the brambles tangled through a lot of the brush and by the wicked thorns she saw on some of the bushes themselves, which might give a would-be attacker second thoughts about striking from that direction.
On the other hand, having already returned from the dead, would Eric be concerned about such minor obstacles as thorns?
They went only ten or fifteen yards, before Benny froze again, half crouching to present a smaller target, and raised the shotgun.
This time, Rachael heard it, too: a clatter of dislodged pebbles.
Reeeeee, reeeeee…
A soft scrape as of shoe leather on stone.
She looked left and right, then up the slope, then down, but she saw no movement associated with the noise.
A whisper of something moving through brush more purposeful than mere wind.
Nothing more.
Ten seconds passed uneventfully.
Twenty.
As Benny scanned the bushes around them, he no longer retained any vestige of that deceptive I'm-just-an-ordinary-everyday-real-estate-salesman look. His pleasant but unexceptional face was now an arresting sight: The intensity of his concentration brought a new sharpness to his brow, cheekbones, and jaws; an instinctive sense of danger and an animal determination to survive were evident in his squint, in the flaring of his nostrils, and in the way his lips pulled back in a humorless, feral grin. He was spring-tense, acutely aware of every nuance of the forest, and just by looking at him, Rachael could tell that he had hair-trigger reflexes. This was the work he had been trained for — hunting and being hunted. His claim to being largely a past-focused man seemed like pretense or self-delusion, for there was no doubt whatsoever that he possessed an uncanny ability to focus entirely and powerfully on the present, which he was doing now.
The cicadas.
The wind in the attic of the forest.
The occasional trilling of a distant bird.
Nothing else.
Thirty seconds.
In these woods, at least, they were supposed to be the hunters, but suddenly they seemed to be the prey, and this reversal of roles frustrated Rachael as much as it frightened her. The need to remain silent was nerve-shredding, for she wanted to curse out loud, shout at Eric, challenge him. She wanted to scream.
Forty seconds.
Cautiously Benny and Rachael began moving uphill again.
They circled the large cabin until they came to the edge of the forest at the rear of it, and every step of the way they were stalked — or believed themselves to be stalked. Six more times, even after they left the dry wash and turned north through the woods, they stopped in response to unnatural sounds. Sometimes the snap of a twig or a not-quite-identifiable scraping noise would be so close to them that it seemed as if their nemesis must be only a few feet away and easily seen, yet they saw nothing.
Finally, forty feet in back of the cabin, just inside the tree line where they were still partially concealed by purple shadows, they crouched behind upthrusting blocks of granite that poked out of the earth like worn and slightly rotted teeth. Benny whispered, “Must be a lot of animals in these woods. That must've been what we heard.”
“What kind of animals?” she whispered.
In a voice so low that Rachael could barely hear it, Benny said, “Squirrels, foxes. This high up… maybe a wolf or two. Can't have been Eric. No way. He's not had the survival or combat training that'd make it possible to be that quiet or to stay hidden so well and so long. If it was Eric, we'd have spotted him. Besides, if it'd been Eric, and if he's as deranged as you think he might be, then he'd have tried to jump us somewhere along the way.”
“Animals,” she said doubtfully.
“Animals.”
With her back against the granite teeth, she looked at the woods through which they had come, studying every pocket of darkness and every peculiar shape.
Animals. Not a single, purposeful stalker. Just the sounds of several animals whose paths they had crossed. Animals.
Then why did she still feel as if something were back there in the woods, watching her, hungering for her?
“Animals,” Benny said. Satisfied with that explanation, he turned from the woods, got up from a squat to a crouch, and peered over the lichen-speckled granite formation, 'examining the rear of Eric's mountain retreat.
Rachael was not convinced that the only source of danger was the cabin, so she rose, leaned one hip and shoulder against the rock, and took a position that allowed her to shift her attention back and forth from the rustic building in front of them to the forest behind.
At the rear of the mountain house, which stood on a wide shelf of land between slopes, a forty-foot-wide area had been cleared to serve as a backyard, and the summer sun fell across the greater part of it. Rye grass had been planted but had grown only in patches, for the soil was stony. Besides, Eric apparently had not installed a sprinkler system, which meant even the patchy grass would be green only for a short while between the melting of the winter snow and the parching summer. Having died a couple of weeks ago, in fact, the grass was now mown to a short, brown, prickly stubble. But flower beds — evidently irrigated by a passive-drip system — ringed the wide stained-wood porch that extended the length of the house; a profusion of yellow, orange, fire-red, wine-red, pink, white, and blue blossoms trembled and swayed and dipped in the gusty breeze — zinnias, geraniums, daisies, baby chrysanthemums, and more.
The cabin was of notched-log-and-mortar construction, but it was not a cheap, unsophisticated structure. The workmanship looked first-rate; Eric must have spent a bundle on the place. It stood upon an elevated foundation of invisibly mortared stones, and it boasted large casement-style French windows, two of which were partway open to facilitate ventilation. A black slate roof discouraged dry-wood moths and the playful squirrels attracted to shake-shingle roofs, and there was even a satellite dish up there to assure good TV reception.
The back door was open even wider than the two casement windows, and, taken with the bright bobbing flowers, that should have given the place a welcoming look. Instead, to Rachael, the open door resembled the gaping lid of a trap, flung wide to disarm the sniffing prey that sought the scented bait.
Of course, they would go in anyway. That was why they had come here: to go in, to find Eric. But she didn't have to like it.