Lay Your Armour Down E-Book

Michael Farris Smith

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 298

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A dark Southern tale of desperate souls who've wound up on the road of poor choices, a messianic child with untold powers, and those out hunting her for their own reward, all drawn together by Michael Farris Smith's trademark mournful, spirit-gnawing prose. An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the wood draws her to a campfire with two strange, dangerous men, who are there plotting a crime of as-yet-indeterminate purpose. The two men have a job to do. They are hunting something precious but have only been told: you'll know it when you see it. When they arrive at the place, an abandoned church cellar in the burned-out countryside, they find an answer they never could have predicted. Now, the job feels dubious, one that'll surely bring them to ruin. Yet if they're to go against orders, no step can be undone, and nothing can be taken back. In spare prose, Lay Your Armour Down reduces the epic to its most elemental. It charts the course of several broken people, all outrunning danger's dark fingers, and all brought together for one last chance at redemption.

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Praise for Michael Farris Smith

‘An intoxicating literary stylist’ The New York Times Book Review

‘One of Southern fiction’s leading voices’ Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

‘Smith has been described as one of the leading voices in Southern fiction, but that’s inaccurate; he’s one of the leading voices in contemporary literature’ Mystery Tribune

‘An exceptional storyteller… Smith is building his own Faulkner-esque universe’ Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

‘Finding a Michael Farris Smith novel is like walking alongside a wide, dark river at midnight and finding a hidden weapon in the weeds: gleaming in the night, deadly and dangerous’ Clarion-Ledger

‘Michael Farris Smith is in top form’ New York Journal of Books

‘Michael Farris Smith forcefully demonstrates what a stylist he is’ Orlando Sun-Sentinel

‘Among the masters of Southern Gothic literature’ Bookpage, Starred Review

‘Every once in a while an author comes along who’s in love with art and the written language and image and literary experiment and the complexity of his characters and the great mysteries that lie just on the other side of the physical world, writers like William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. You can add Michael Farris Smith’s name to the list’ James Lee Burke, New York Times bestselling author of Creole Belle and The Tin Roof Blowdown

For my friend Jack, brother in arms

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

– Jean-PaulSartre

NIGHT

1

She moved in the solemn lamplight of the cluttered house like the vague figure of a troubled dream. She shuffled from room to room, opening drawers and closet doors and picking up things and putting them into the grocery sack. No sense or order in the gathering. A random ring and a broken bracelet from a spilled jewelry box. One shoe. A ragged notebook from the bottom of a stack of other ragged notebooks. Two postcards from a longdead sister. A handful of hairclips. A small wooden picture frame that held the rudimentary drawing of an angel that had been created by her child decades before.

She wore a thin housecoat that hung on her aged and slender figure. Her gray hair in a matted mess. She talked to herself as she moved throughout the house. Reminding herself of errands that had been years ago completed and gossiping about people she no longer knew and singing fragments of songs that had once played on the radio during the summer days of her smalltown youth. In doorways she would stop and look into the shadows and touch the tip of her index finger to her chin and hold it there in troubled thought and then she would begin again to fill the sack with the random fragments of time gone by.

At the end of the hallway the closet door was open and the contents overflowed and spilled out onto the floor as if the house was regurgitating its own clutter. The pace of her rambling quickened as she dropped to her knees and began to dig into the closet as if just remembering something essential. Her arms thin and weak but working in a sudden fever as she pushed away dirty towels and newspapers and shoeboxes and she burrowed into the closet. At the bottom of the pile she found a red tin coffee can and she opened the top and felt inside and touched the roll of cash. She kept digging and she pulled out three more coffee cans from beneath the rubble and each one held a roll of cash of various size. A savings hidden away and then forgotten and then remembered again in the swirling winds of her mind. She dropped the rolls of money into the grocery sack with the random gathering. Ran her fingers across her pallid face. Her eyes like deepset windows into a sprawling world. She seemed to gather herself and she let out a great exhale as if arriving at a moment of resignation.

She stood and straightened her housecoat. Stepped out of her slippers and brushed off her ashy feet and then she stepped back into them and she tucked the grocery sack under her arm and she made for the front door. She opened it and the nightwind greeted her and she gazed out into the darkness. A traveler readied for some journey.

A starblown sky above the winding road that led from the house. The road badly patched and bumpy and she stumbled twice but caught herself both times. Cursing the uneven ground in quick insults before returning again to the harried conversations of her lost world. She wandered from the road and into a field where she pushed through the kneehigh grass. Where searching eyes busied with the hunt stopped and stared in the direction of her shuffling and the wind pushed at her wild hair and slushed through the wild grass and on the other side of the field she entered into the woods where the moonglow gave shadows through the trees and where she held out her hands and touched the trunks as she moved through the forest. The dark guardians willing to give her pass. The wind shook leaves from the limbs and they fell around her in swirls of decay as she stepped across the leafstrewn earth. The small crunches of aged and careful steps.

She was not afraid until she was deep into the woods. She stopped and looked around and whatever confused purpose had been there to guide her slipped off into the dark and left her alone. There was wind and there were the calls of the night and between the black treelimbs there were stars and moon. The heavens infinite. She leaned her back against a tree and hugged herself as if suddenly cold and she began to cry.

She cried and began walking again in no direction. Moving through the woods in a confused and careful gait and beginning to call out the names of people who passed through her mind. Names that both meant something and meant nothing. Her father and a woman she once sat next to on an airplane and a pigtailed friend from childhood and the old man who taught her to ride a horse and the boy who sacked her groceries once upon a time. The wind gained strength and the limbs swayed and bent and her hair whipped on her head and she clutched the sack with both hands and called out to anyone who might be listening and she lost a slipper and moved with one bare foot and panicked eyes and a deepening fear that something in the dark was going to devour her. She was lost in head and heart and soul and she stopped and stared up at the moon and she began to question it as if it had the answers to the universe. Who are you and where am I and what are we and the questions continued and carried her as she meandered through the dark. Walking into branches that scratched her face and bits of leaf and limb getting stuck in her hair and she lost her other slipper and she was no longer crying and no longer questioning the moon but now transformed into something ancient and mindless and driven by some preordained task as if she was no longer of grayed flesh and bone but instead a shapeless spirit of the wood that drifted timelessly. She moved through the night in the random pattern of wind and then through the trees she saw the firelight. She fixed her eyes on the flames as she pushed away lowhanging limbs and crunched across the leaves and her mouth moved as if speaking but she was soundless as she came into the clearing.

Two crouching silhouettes next to the fire. Two figures rising when they looked up at the old woman who emerged from the wood. Twigs in her hair and a torn housecoat and bare feet and sticklike legs and the distant gaze. She regarded the dark figures and then she looked again into the starstruck night. At the marblewhite moon. She let her arms fall to her sides in a great release and she spoke in some language they did not understand. She then fell silent and the sack dropped from her hand and spilled onto the ground. A spindle of cash rolled forward and settled in the firelight and there was no judgment among them but for the emptiness in which they all stood.

2

They left the dying fire and walked out of the clearing, the tawny light on their backs and darkness before them. Their car parked on the roadside. A big four-door thing, long as a boat. Two hubcaps missing. The antenna snapped off. Each man lit a cigarette before climbing in and closing doors and then they sat there smoking and staring through the bugsmeared windshield. Something small and brighteyed crossed the road. It stopped and looked at the car and then continued on its journey and disappeared into the brush. Falling leaves swirled in the wind and fell in the moonshine like flakes of rust.

One man sniffed and the other coughed as the car filled with smoke. The driver rolled down the window. He smoked and scratched at his beard before flicking out the cigarette, a little red spray as the butt bounced on the road. The man in the passenger seat smoked more methodically and was still at it when the car cranked and the headlights split the dark. The big car moved in a great lurch and began its descent from the hillside, filling the night with a low rumble.

They drove through the darkness. Past rolling pastures lined by leaning fenceposts held erect by strands of barbed wire. Past gatherings of hardwoods and over skinny bridges with rotted rails where the moon reflected in the wobbled creekwater. The big car cruised around the bends in the road where deer stood backed away and still and waiting and it rolled through desolate four-way stops where there was nothing and no one and they drove on with their redtipped cigarettes across the fallen landscape of the autumn where the fields had turned the color of sand and the stars stabbed the sky in darts of silver.

Neither man spoke.

They emerged from the unmarked country roads and turned onto a two-lane highway. Mailboxes stood on the roadside at the end of gravel driveways and sleeping houses sat quiet and peaceful back in the gloom. Dogs slept on porches and raised their heads to regard the loud thing moving through the night and then returned to slumber as the growl of the engine disappeared. The lights of the world appeared in the fluorescents of gas stations and in flashing red signals and in yellowed street lamps and then disappeared in the rearview mirror as the car followed the highway right through the meager town and entered a new dark.

Thirteen more miles of silence between them and pine trees and the rise and dip of the hills and then as if leaving one country and crossing into another the landscape bottomed out. The car now traveled a flat terrain in a rhythmic glide as if trolling across the serenity of lakewater. Spanish moss hung from treelimbs in gray and gathered clumps and the long and drooping limbs of the willows swayed in the wind and the swamp slurped up against the roadside as if only waiting for the command from some weather god to swallow what was left of the raised earth.

The frame that held the child’s drawing of the angel sat between them on the benchseat. The man in the passenger seat picked it up. Flicked his cigarette lighter and looked at it in the solitary light of the flame. He ran his thumb across an angel wing and then he set the frame back on the seat and gazed out into the night. The driver looked over at him and wanted to ask why he had bothered to bring it along but he only gave a silent look of disgust and his eyes returned to the road.

And then there it was. The allnight truckstop sat in isolation as if it had long ago been misplaced and forgotten. The car bumped across the potholed parking lot and stopped in front of the glass doors of the diner. A handful of cats hunted around a dumpster. Two eighteen-wheelers parked off behind the gas pumps. Darkness closed all around as if this place had been created as a sojourn before some final plummet. The neon sign read open in the front window and bugs danced around in the cottoncandy glow. From behind bent and twisted blinds the lights of the diner cut into the night in awkward slants. The two men sat there and stared until the man in the passenger seat coughed and shifted in his seat.

‘Well. Ain’t you gonna say something?’

The driver grabbed his cigarette pack from the dashboard.

‘About what?’

The driver then looked at himself in the rearview mirror and rubbed at his bloodshot eyes before climbing out of the car. The passenger watched as the bearded man pulled open the door to the diner and disappeared inside.

‘About what,’ he muttered.

He then got out and followed.

3

They sat in a booth against the window. An ashtray between them. Above them a ceiling fan turned slowly and the knocking of kitchen work came from behind a swinging door. A tiredlooking woman with her sleeves rolled above her elbows brought them cups of coffee and then she asked if she could bum a cigarette. The man with the beard held his pack to her and she took one and then she pulled a lighter from her apron pocket and lit the cigarette and said I hope you like breakfast because that’s all we got.

The men nodded. She shuffled away and sat down on a stool at the end of the counter. At the other end of the counter a man in a flannel shirt read a ragged paperback and sipped a beer. The men watched and waited for her to pass the breakfast order on to someone somewhere but she only sat and smoked.

Burdean was the older of the two by nearly twenty years. His beard had begun the transformation from coffeebrown to gray and his eyes wore the lines of an outlier. The skin of his hands and face was fatigued by decades of cigarette smoke and the strike of the sun in the days when he worked on a roofing crew or a construction crew or whatever crew he could find to take him for a few weeks until he had what he thought was enough cash in his pocket to quit and survive for a while. Until he decided that it was too goddamn hot or too goddamn cold or just too goddamn pretty outside to be wasting his time working on any of those crews and the list of things he would do for money grew longer. And those were the things that should be done in the dark. He lifted his cup and sipped and looked at the man who was sharing this strange night with him. His washedblue eyes and the flips in his hair and the fading expression of boyhood still clinging to the edges of the hard world.

‘You might as well stop thinking about it,’ Burdean said.

‘I don’t see how you could say such a thing,’ Keal said.

‘There ain’t no room for conscience in what we’re doing.’

‘We didn’t do what we’re doing. We did something else.’

‘Just the same.’

The waitress got up from the counter and slipped behind the swinging door. Keal stabbed out his cigarette and then bent down the blinds and looked outside.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing.’

He removed his fingers and the blinds slapped back in place. In the kitchen the waitress argued with someone and then there was the clatter of pots and pans and then silence. She returned to the end of the counter and sat picking the polish from her fingernails.

Keal could not be still. He adjusted in his seat. Bumped his knuckles on the table. Rubbed at the stubble on his face. Scratched his ear. Flicked the cigarette lighter. Counted the sugar packets. Bumped his knuckles on the table again.

‘You got to quit it,’ Burdean said.

‘Quit what?’

‘Squirming around like you’re waiting on the verdict.’

‘That’s a funny way to put it.’

‘I ain’t trying to be funny. I’m trying to get you to settle down or you need to go sit somewhere else.’

‘Where you want me to go sit?’

‘Anyfuckingwhere.’

A bell dinged. The waitress got up from the counter and pushed through the swinging door and then returned carrying two plates covered in bacon and eggs and grits. She set the plates down in front of them and then she refilled their coffee. The diner door opened and a man in a cowboy hat whistled at her. The waitress grinned and then she returned the coffeepot to the warmer and she followed the cowboy out into the parking lot.

‘What are we doing here?’ Keal asked.

‘This is where we’re supposed to deliver and I thought maybe there would be somebody sitting around who looks like they could give us a clue as to why there is a light inside that church.’

‘Are we going back out there?’ Keal said.

‘Not tonight.’

‘How come?’

‘They wanted it done before daybreak.’

‘There’s time.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I wish you’d tell me what we’re supposed to be looking for.’

‘I told you already. You got the same information I got. The way it was explained to me is to go around the back of the church house and some doors open and go down into a cellar. Whatever it is we’ll know it when we see it.’

‘That don’t make no sense.’

‘It don’t make no sense why there was a light on inside that abandoned old place either. But it was.’

‘We should go back and see if it’s dark inside again.’

‘I was getting ready to when the ghost came out of the woods.’

‘She wasn’t a ghost.’

‘She will be before long. If she ain’t already fell down a hole.’

‘I still say we should go back.’

‘Hush and eat.’

Burdean picked up his fork and mixed the eggs and grits together. Keal only stared at his food.

He had been plagued by dreams beginning in childhood. Seeing things in his sleep before they happened. A foul ball cracking a windshield at the baseball game. The stumble of the blondheaded gym teacher as she strode across the playground. The leering eyes of the man behind the counter at the gas station as he gave his mother her change. Small moments in the mundane motion of the everyday that he recognized the instant they occurred. Moments he found contentment in when he was able to connect the premonitions to reality and he began to believe that he was in possession of a special gift. That he was privy to some secret. As he grew into a teenager the moments began to occur more often and he believed he could anticipate them. His eyes alive to the movements and colors of the world as if studying fish in a fishbowl. Knowing what someone was going to say before they said it. Seeing what girls were sitting on the tailgate at the river before pulling up beside them. Hearing his mother’s voice before she spoke. An anticipation living inside him as he remained on the watch for the next thing and then feeling a pronounced satisfaction when it appeared.

Then the dreams changed.

The figures grew unrecognizable. Dusky and vague and moving about in shifts of gray. And the landscapes were no longer the places he knew. The trailer he and his mother shared and the pond behind it. The pool hall that let the high school kids come in and sometimes sold them beer. Classrooms and hallways. The deep greens of the backroads in the long light of summer days. The settings of his dreams became alleyways. Empty buildings. Sprawling wastelands of dust and smoke. The clouds rolled like boulders and the wind pushed the black trees and the figures were nameless and faceless and shrouded in shadow and scared the hell out of him and he would wake in the middle of the night with his arms outstretched and shoving at the dark. He did not know why the temper of the dreams had changed or where they came from and his demeanor transformed in the waking hours as he began to fear the creatures of his sleep. Believing that someone or something had emerged from the nightmares and was only waiting for him to walk around the wrong corner at the wrong time and then snatch him into the void.

It was then that the mold appeared and returned his dreams to some notion of reality. And it was the same dream again and again. A bright and cloudless afternoon. He returned from school in his pickup. His mother was at work. He walked across the yard and as he climbed the concrete steps and reached for the trailer door he noticed the specks of purple and green growing around the door frame. Each night and each dream the mold spread a little further. Stretching out from the frame and growing around the windows and reaching toward the roof and as the mold spread he walked slower and slower from his pickup to the trailer. Afraid to reach the door. Afraid to open the door. Believing it had crept inside and not wanting to see it or breathe it and then as the mold covered the entirety of the trailer in the colors of a bruise and as he finally found the courage to open the door the moment was interrupted as he heard the sound of his mother’s car and he looked up to see her coming along the dirt driveway and she waved to him from her open window as she parked and got out and walked toward him and he began to yell at her to get back. Don’t come any further. Stay away just stay away but she ignored him and walked right past him and she opened the door and went inside and closed it behind her.

It was the next day that she had sat with him at the kitchen table and explained that she was sick and that it wasn’t going to last long. He only held her hands and looked into her sinking eyes and said I know. I know. She didn’t ask him how he knew. They only sat together in the quiet.

Burdean took his last bite and then he pointed at Keal’s plate.

‘Aren’t you gonna eat?’

Keal picked up a piece of bacon and bit off the end. The diner door opened and the waitress returned and Burdean lifted his coffee cup and waved it at her. Then he slid from the booth and he took off his coat and laid it over the back of the seat. The waitress came over with the coffeepot and gave them a refill. Burdean asked her where the bathroom was and she pointed at a hallway at the end of the counter and told him to go that way and keep walking.

Keal had turned eighteen the week before he buried her. The sickness had spread quickly and he did what he could to help but when she died she was only a shriveled suggestion of the woman she had been. The woman who worked two and sometimes three jobs and threw the football with him in the yard and took him swimming at the springfed creek where the water was teethchattering cold. She had been lean and strong and she kept in motion and she tanned easily and she taught him to drive a stickshift. The woman he buried was not that. Grayrimmed eyes and sallow cheeks. On the night after she was lowered into the grave he dreamed of a mold that spread across the earth and poisoned the young and the old and it blackened the wildflowers and the kudzu and he woke with a scream and once he gathered himself in the dark and remembered where he was and what had happened and that he was alone in this world he swore to himself in that rattled moment that he would never sleep again.

He tried.

At first he trained himself to go for days with only sporadic napping of thirty or fortyfive minutes. Then he trained himself to go for weeks in the same way. Only sometimes spending a few hours in slumber. There was no way to stop dreaming but the lack of sleep kept him anxious and quicktempered one instant and deadeyed and sluggish the next and he didn’t have the focus to make connections. His life became something of a dream itself. Two sentences behind in conversations. Mindlessly running red lights. Picking up the phone and ordering food and then forgetting where he had ordered it from as he drove toward town. When he experienced something of a premonition he only rubbed at his eyes and then left the room or the bar or wherever he was before the scene played itself out, avoiding the confirmation of what he knew was coming.

And then it would finally hit him, a blanket of exhaustion wrapping him and pulling him into extended periods of deadened sleep. Nineteen hours at a time. Twentyfour hours. Twentyeight hours. He would wake to angry messages from bosses and angry messages from women and he was years into the sleepless experiment when he couldn’t take it anymore and he decided that it had all been a fabrication. None of it was real. He had been a boy with a terrific imagination and then a teenager with a terrific imagination and then a young man with a terrific imagination and each version of himself was full of more shit than the one before. He told himself over and over that there was no such thing as seeing things before they happen and there was no such thing as a bridge between what you dream and what is to come and with all the declaring and all the self-condemnation the dreams stopped. He discovered that when you do not care about the world there is nothing left to unravel.

Burdean returned from the bathroom and plopped down in the booth. He stared at Keal’s plate still covered with eggs and grits and then he tapped out a cigarette and held it between his fingers.

‘If it’ll make you feel better you can give me your half,’ Burdean said.

‘What?’

‘Your two rolls of cash. Blood money you can wash clean as the driven snow. All you need to do is hand it over and that old woman will slip off to wherever your mind needs her to slip off.’

‘I ain’t worried about that old woman no more.’

‘Then quit looking like it.’

Like some hibernating malady it had returned. Keal was now sleeping only two or three hours at a time. The dreamworld had changed, with the reoccurring image of a dark and shifting figure moving with no features or form. The only thing he gathered about the figure was that it was a woman who was lost and searching for something. Something that not even she could understand. He had tried not to think about the dream but it held the same strength as the dream of the cancerous mold that came for his mother and though it had been seventeen years since she had died, when he looked up from the fire and the old woman lurched from the woods he was arrowstruck with the feeling that it was his mother returning to this world in her weak and wraithlike form to say something to him. To give him an instruction or warning or to deliver some insight into the mysteries of the beyond. He had been both stupefied and expectant of her appearance but instead of engaging her as if she was either his mother or some embodiment of her spirit he only stood speechless alongside Burdean as he had taken the old woman’s money.

Keal still pictured Burdean gently gathering the rolls of cash and then the woman kneeling to try to recover the contents of the grocery sack spilled across the ground and her mouth moved in mindless babbling and Keal just watching as Burdean moved around her, looking down at her and his shadow falling across her bony frame until he pulled out his knife and unfolded the blade. And when he reached for the old woman Keal came alive and screamed for Burdean to stop and the sudden sound caused them both to look up at Keal who was moving toward them with his arm reaching for the visitor from the darkness. Burdean paused with the blade pointed at the back of the woman’s head and Keal reached down and slipped his hands under her arms and lifted her to her feet. He tried to talk to her. Tried to find out where she came from or what her name was or what the living hell she was doing out in the middle of the night but her eyes looked everywhere but at him and she spoke in pieces of sentences that had no relation to his questions and Burdean told him to get the hell out of the way. I’ve seen people act crazier than this and then five minutes later they will tell the law clear as day who you are and what they saw you do.

Keal waved away the knife and shook his head at Burdean. Burdean held still as if only waiting for Keal to get clear but Keal took the old woman by the hands and moved her away from Burdean and said I’ll walk her back into the woods if you’ll put that damn thing away. She don’t know the difference between up and down and she sure as shit won’t remember me and you. Burdean folded the blade and tucked it into his pocket. Keal took the old woman by the hand and said I’ll take you home. Come on with me. Her fingers like sticks. Her bare feet dirty and scratched. Wild eyes dancing in the firelight.

When he moved she moved with him. They stepped away from the fire and eased toward the treeline where the light died away and just as they entered the woods Burdean called out. This will haunt you. His voice like some reckoning in the darkness. Keal looked back over his shoulder at the black figure who stood smoking and staring and the image of his own mother disappearing inside the diseased trailer passed into his mind and seized him. This will haunt you. The words soaking through him. The old woman was trying to pull away from him now and her movement returned him to this night and to her journey back to wherever she had come from and he walked with her into the depths of the darkwood until she was talking no more but only humming to herself and he let go of her hand and set her adrift back into the dark.

Burdean lit his cigarette. Keal pushed away the plate and said you can have the rest if you want it. Keal then took a sip of coffee and felt the two rolls of cash in his coat pocket. His half of the unexpected booty. Burdean smacked his lips and would not stop frowning at him and Keal peeked between the blinds again and looked into the parking lot and he imagined the wildhaired woman wandering through the moonstruck night and he imagined the spirits stalking her and he heard her frightened whimpers. He let go of the blinds and he got up from the booth.

‘I’m going to the can,’ he said.

He walked to the end of the counter and down the hallway and toward the bathroom. At the end of the hallway there was another door and he opened it and it led outside.

On a concrete square surrounded by garbage cans there was a skinny young man sitting in a folding chair, wearing a cook’s apron and holding a joint in one hand and a beer in the other. He stared at the space between his feet and he never looked up as Keal stepped past him and snuck around the backside of the diner. When the engine of the big car cranked and the headlights lit the diner Burdean didn’t bother to get up. He only finished his cigarette and then finished Keal’s plate of eggs and grits and then he wiped his mouth and walked to the pay phone that hung in the hallway. He dropped a quarter in and dialed and when the voice on the other end answered it said this better be damn good for you to be calling me this time of night.

‘Mind your tone,’ Burdean said. ‘And get your ass up and come and get me.’

4

She wandered as burdenless as a child. The world not bleak and shadowed but simply the place of being. No need for understanding or reason as she traversed the night in delicate steps as if she were not alone and vulnerable but only crossing through the wooded hills of tolerance and immune to the complexities of time.

She stopped and stared up at the universe through a break in the trees. Small whispers came from her mouth in the clouded breaths of a cool night.

A voice echoed through the woods.

Hey. Hey.

But she was deaf to anything but the voices inside her head.

She did not know she was being observed. She did not know she was being followed. She was unaware of how hunting creatures could move silently through the dark and stalking hours.

5

Keal drove the big car back through the swampland and then it rose up and over the hills and around the bends and drifted through the open spaces of field and sky, ambling through the dark and searching for the clearing where they had built the fire. Where the old woman had appeared and then disappeared.

It all looked the same to Keal. He stopped twice when he believed he had found the spot but there were no remnants of a fire and he drove on. The window rolled down now, trying to smell smoke. Trying to listen for any sound in the night.

He was moments from giving up and returning to Burdean to face the music when he noticed the depressions of tire tracks in the soft ground of the roadside. He stopped. Got out of the car and looked at the tracks in the red glow of the taillights and he recognized the ascension in the road. He hopped back in the car and eased along and in fifty yards he came to the clearing.