Her eyes were watering in the wind. Then she smelled an odor that was like humus but much stronger, as though its presence were heavier than the wind, as though it were ubiquitous and had settled into the stone and the tree trunks and the ground and the pine needles that carpeted the slope. Some people said that was what a griz smelled like. A griz stank of the deer it killed and buried by its den in the autumn and the deer it ate and defecated after it awoke in the spring. It stank of rut and the excrement it slept in, the blood that had dried on its muzzle, the fish it had swatted out of a stream and devoured, guts and all. The odor she smelled now was all these things and so thick she thought she might swoon.
“Are you there?” she said into the wind.
Her chest rose and fell as she waited for a response. She closed her eyes and opened them. Nothing is out there, she told herself.
Hi, baby doll. You’ve been kicking some serious ass, haven’t you? a voice said.
Her breath caught in her throat.
You’re more like me than you think. Remember how their eyes beg? You can do anything you want with them. You have power that no one else of the earth has.
“I’m nothing like you, you motherfucker,” she said.
Sticks and stones.
“Where are you?”
Inside your head. In your thoughts. In all the secret places you try to hide who you really are. You can never get to me unless you kill yourself.
“You don’t know me.”
You’re not a person, Gretchen. You’re a condition. You enjoy killing. It’s like an orgasm or your first experience with China white. Once you taste of forbidden fruit, the addiction never goes away.
“You’re not there.”
Keep telling yourself that, little girl.
“Show me your face.”
This time there was no answer. She was sweating inside her clothes. She approached the mouth of the cave, then stopped and tried to breathe as slowly as possible. She stepped in front of the opening, the flashlight shining inside, the Airweight pointed straight out in front of her. She could see the scorch marks of a fire on the walls and the ceiling, and the fresh droppings of bats and pack rats on the ledges and in the ash, but no sign of human habitation. The odor inside the overhang made her think of a dead incinerator in winter.
She backed out of the cave, into the wind, and clicked off the flashlight. “If you’re Asa Surrette, give me a sign,” she said.
She counted off five seconds, then ten, then twenty. She felt as though someone had looped a piece of baling wire around her head and inserted a stick in it and was twisting it tighter and tighter.
“I’m stronger than you,” she said. “So is Alafair and so is Albert Hollister and so is my father. You murder children.”
The moon was high enough to light the tips of the trees, and she began to walk farther up the logging road, her eyes on the parklike slope of the hill. She thought she saw an animal running through the timber, just below the crest, its black fur threaded with silver. Its shoulders and forequarters were sinuous and heavily muscled, and it thudded solidly against the earth when it jumped over a broken tree, never interrupting its stride or momentum.
Was it the wolf Albert had seen? If it was, it had shown no interest in her. She put away her flashlight and turned in a circle, pointing the Airweight in front of her. The voice had gone from inside her head, if that was where it had come from. The only sounds she heard now were the wind coursing through the canopy and a pinecone or two toppling down the hillside.
Had she become delusional? Weren’t voices among the first indicators of schizophrenia? Or was her conscience taunting her? Was the Gretchen whom Albert spoke of nothing more than an invention, a cosmetic alter ego that allowed her to remain functional while she continued to shed the blood of others and take secret delight in it?
She turned and began to descend the hill. A pebble or tiny pinecone struck the brim of her hat. She looked back up the slope just as a second object, no larger than the first, struck her cheek.
Thirty yards up the hill, she saw the shape of a man on a deer trail. He was standing stock-still, like a jogger who had paused to rest in his ascent. She could not make out his face in the dark. She pulled her hat down on her brow and lowered her face so it would not reflect light, then began walking slowly up the road, to a place where a deer trail intersected it and she could climb to the crest without taking her eyes off the man, who had not moved.
She walked ten yards up the slope, breathing through her nose, trying to ignore the hammering of her heart. Then she heard rather than saw the figure break for higher ground, running hard, tree branches slashing against his body, a body that was flesh and blood and not that of a lamia or a specter.
She began running up the trail after him. He went around a corner and zigzagged through the trees, heading north, toward the far end of the valley, at the same time gaining elevation until he was almost to the crest of the ridge.
If he reached the top of the ridge, he would silhouette against the sky and she would have a clear shot at him. But what if the voice she had heard was imaginary? What if the running man was one of the homeless who sometimes wandered in from the two-lane?
The air was thinner and colder and suffused with smoke that hung in the trees and burned her lungs. The deer trail became serpentine, dropping through a gully and winding through brush as coarse as wire. He was standing at the head of the trail, looking back. Then she saw him break for the crest and stop again and turn and spread his arms against the sky, as though creating a mockery of a crucified man.
She ran faster, heedless of the sharp rocks and broken branches on the trail, her eyes locked on the man.
A snowshoe rabbit burst from the undergrowth and darted in front of her, triggering a spring-loaded saw-toothed steel bear trap that had been staked down with a chain and pin in the middle of the trail. The jaws of the trap sprang with such tension that the trap seemed to rise from the ground, virtually severing the rabbit’s hind legs. Gretchen was crying when she reached down and tried to free it from the trap.