We must find what we have lost.Perhaps it was a case of “what we have lost.” Not just him, but everyone in this new century. His generation, at least. Writing about the eleven-year-old kids in the summer of 1960 made Dale’s chest ache every time he sat down at the computer—not just because of the nostalgia of that half-lost summer of so long ago, but because of some indefinable sense of loss that made him want to weep.

“Yoo-hoo, dog,” called Dale, opening the door to the chicken coop. He wished that he had brought a flashlight. He stepped into the darkness and then froze as a powerful smell struck him.

Not the smell of decay, thought Dale. Stronger. Coppery. Fresh. He blinked in the dim light, raising the baseball bat like a club.

The smell of blood.

He almost left then, but he had to see. In a minute or two his eyes adapted well enough for him to make out the long, low room of empty roosts and matted straw and splattered walls.

The walls and floor had been splattered with ancient, dried blood the first time he had looked in here. They were splattered with blood now, but even in the dim light he could see that it was fresh blood—wet, dripping, some of it actually running down the rough boards as he watched.

Time to go, thought Dale. He backed out of the chicken coop, setting his back to the wall and raising the bat again. The fog had closed in tighter. The light had failed even more. Dale felt his heart pounding and his ears straining to make out any sound—the soft squelch of mud under boots, the movement of four-legged things. Water dripped from the eaves of the coop. From somewhere to the north there came a loud, strangely familiar rasp of wood on metal. The big barn doors being slid open?

Time to go. Not just back to the farmhouse, but out of here—away from Illinois and its penny-dreadful little mysteries. Back to Montana, or farther east to New Hampshire or Maine. Somewhere else.

No. Here is where we can find what we have lost.The thought made him stop, not just because it had come unbidden and out of context, but because it seemed to have been stated in a mental voice other than his own.

Dale was striding quickly now, trying to keep his boots from being swallowed in the mud, listening hard for something moving behind or ahead of him.

He was almost back to the farmhouse when he saw two huge red eyes glowing at him through the fog.

A second later a car engine started up. Not eyes, taillights.

Dale ran, bat in hand, sure that someone was stealing his truck. The taillights glowed crimson a moment and then shut off as the vehicle drove quickly away through the fog.

Dale slid to a stop on the muddy turnaround area. His Land Cruiser was still where he’d parked it. He beeped the security system. It had been locked. But it seemed to have sunk into the mud. . .

“God damnit,” growled Dale as he stepped closer. All four of the tires were flat. Dale assumed that they had been slashed again.

Dale walked out in front of the house, bat raised to his shoulder and ready to swing. He could hear a truck driving away on County 6, moving much too quickly for the foggy conditions.

There were tracks in the gravel and mud driveway—one pickup truck from the looks of the wheel tracks.

“Not funny, Derek,” yelled Dale into the fog. “Not one bit fucking funny. You assholes are going to jail this time.”

Tracking mud, Dale went into the farmhouse and looked around.

I’ve been here—what—three weeks, and how many dozen times have I had to search this fucking house?He searched it again.

No muddy bootprints except his own. No sign of anything missing or disturbed.

Except the fucking laptop. The ThinkPad was on again, the screen black except for three lines of white letters burning after the C prompt. This time Dale was sure that he had shut the computer off before leaving.

Disgusted, he walked over to flick the power off, not wanting to read another irritatingly cryptic message. But the stanza form of the message made him read, and the content made him pause. This was no High Middle German or Old English—Dale Stewart, Ph.D., even recognized the source. It was from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI, if he remembered correctly. Clare could tell him. She had been auditing the graduate-level Eighteenth-Century Literature seminar the last time he’d taught this poem. Clare remembered everything. But Clare was not around to remind him, and odds were overwhelming that she never would be again.

>For he was speechless, ghastly, wan,

Like him of whom the story ran,

Who spoke the spectre hound in man.

Still disgusted, knowing that he would have to walk a couple of miles in the fog just to get his cell phone to work in order to call the Oak Hill garage to get his truck fixed, furious that he would have to deal with C.J. Congden again, knowing in his heart that these punks were never going to be caught or punished, feeling that the mystery of the blood in the chicken coop had been solved in the all-too-mundane fact of the tire slashings, tired of this hacker bullshit, Dale pushed the OFF button and watched the computer screen wink to a point of light and then die to black.

THIRTEEN

BOY, I hate movies like that.”

“Movies like what?” said Dale. It was late on Thanksgiving Day. Duane’s farmhouse smelled of turkey and stuffing and a dozen other cooking smells. Dale had ended up doing the shopping for the turkey and the wine, but Michelle Staffney had done most of the cooking that day. By early evening, Dale and Michelle had eaten a good portion of the twelve-pound turkey, had drunk a couple of beers before dinner, and were on their second bottle of white wine. They had washed the dishes and returned to the dining room. Dale had lugged all of the ancient learning machines out to a shed, but there had been no dining room table, only the benches on which the machines had sat. Dale had done his best, dragging the benches to the basement, moving the kitchen table into the dining room for the big day, and covering it with an ancient linen tablecloth he had found in the hall closet. Now the sunlight had faded away, but only a couple of lights were on in the house. Music from the console radio wafted up the stairway from the basement.

“You know,” said Michelle, holding her wine glass in both hands. “I hate those formula scary movies. Horror movies. Slasher movies. Whatever.”

Dale frowned. He had been telling her about the events of the past week—the blood in the chicken coop, finding his truck with flattened tires, the other truck driving off in the fog—something he probably wouldn’t have talked about unless he’d had too much wine. “You comparing my life to a slasher movie?” he asked, pretending to be indignant—and actually feeling a bit indignant beneath the friendly buzz of the wine and beer.

Michelle smiled. “No, no. But you know—I always hate that part in the movies where the people know that something scary’s going on but they stay anyway. And then the monster comes out and gets them. You know, like in the old Poltergeist or that mess of a remake of The Haunting or those slasher movies with the guy in the hockey mask or whatever.”

Dale shook his head. “I intended to leave. But I thought that those idiots had slashed my tires again.”

“But they hadn’t.”

“No,” said Dale. “After I hiked all the way to Elm Haven in the fog, called the Oak Hill garage, and waited more than two hours for the guys in the tow truck to show up and drive me back to the farm, we discovered that someone had just let the air out of all the tires.”

“But you thought they’d been slashed again.”