Another unintelligible sound,
almost female, floated across the thick fog, again from the east and closer
than the last time we heard the mysterious noise. “That’s not Kat,” Abbie said,
her voice weak and tired. Abbie was tough, but I could see in the tight lines
of her elfin face that this stressful Halloween night atop Kill Devil Hill was
more than she’d signed up for.
I dumped an armload of wood
onto the campfire, and it blazed up a little. “No, I think not,” I said. “I’m
afraid that something in the fog intercepted your friend when she unwisely left
the relative safety of our camp. You and I should be okay though. A good fire
and a ring of salt will keep the devil himself at bay, even on All Hallows’ Eve.”
Abbie walked to the edge of
the salt barrier and looked out across the thick sea of dense fog that
stretched from the top of the cyclopean hill to the dark wood line of the overgrown
forest far in the distance. “What’s out there?” Abbie asked.
I stirred the crackling fire
with a thin pine stick and thought about how best to answer her question. “I’m
not sure,” I said. “Some of these things don’t even have names. My guess it’s very
old – ancient, aboriginal – older than Claiborne for sure, maybe older than the
Alabama River itself. Who knows?”
She continued to stand on the
edge of the salt ring and looked towards the source of the cryptic sound. I
heard tiny grains of white salt crunching beneath the thin soles of her hiking
shoes. “Then what do we do?” she asked.
“We wait it out,” I said.
“The sun will eventually rise, and we should be okay then. We’ll hike out when
the sun gets up and burns this fog off. We might get lucky and find Kat safe
and sound on the way back to the Jeep.”
I turned my back to the young
woman, knelt and warmed my shivering hands in front of the small, juddering
fire. An ominous ruffle of clothes behind me, like the warbled snap of a
dry-rotted window blind, caused me to look back at Abbie. I turned in time to
see her whuff hard against the ground as her feet were pulled out from under
her by something hidden behind her in the swirling fog.
A second later, she was gone,
pulled feet-first into the indifferent fog. A few pathetic pebbles skittered in
her wake. It happened so fast that she hadn’t even had time to scream.
“Up jumped the Devil!” I
exclaimed, stunned and all alone on the isolated hilltop. Like a pistol shot, a
pine knot popped in the fire behind me, breaking the shocked silence of the
still night.
On instinct, I drew my
Beretta and dashed to the lonely edge of the circle. I peered into the eerie fog
and only saw chaotic swirls of thick mist beneath the eldritch moonlight.
A faint, enigmatic sound, like a guttural gibber, came from about fifty
yards away, but was cut short.
I ran to my canvas rucksack
and pulled out what remained of the rock salt. I returned quickly to where Abbie
had been pulled into the murky fog and then carefully squared-away the broken salt
barrier. A faint, noxious whiff of mephitic brimstone, almost like rotten eggs,
hung in the odiferous air.
With the enchanted barrier
repaired, I returned to my weathered pack and dug out an old roll of butcher’s
twine. With a crude clove-hitch knot, I tied the free end of thick cotton twine
around the base of a derelict pine stump and gave it a few rough tugs to make
sure it would hold. I let the twine play out behind me as I made my way back to
the edge of the desolate hilltop.
I stared once more into the
endless fog, took a deep breath, raised my handgun and stepped down the side of
the rugged hill in a shooter’s crouch. Come hell or high water, I aimed to put
an end to the lurking thing that had stalked us since sundown.
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