Old Shuck, the giant hound, leapt toward me. His green eyes flashed,
and I could see the white of his hellishly large teeth. In less than a second,
he would be on top of me.
Claiborne Police Sgt. Bill Friemann had removed my Beretta’s
magazine. My only hope was that he’d left a round in the chamber. I had just
enough time to point it at the hound and squeeze the trigger.
The steel firing pin snapped in the empty chamber. An
instant later the mysterious stranger’s oversized hound slammed into me.
Instinctively, I raised my left arm to protect my throat as the hound’s
momentum carried us to the ground. I slammed down hard, and hot air whooshed
out of my lungs.
The heavy hound sailed a few feet beyond me and hit a tree at
the edge of the dark clearing. A shower of damp drops rained down from the
moss-covered branches overhead. Tears welled in my eyes as I struggled for
breath.
Adrenaline dumped into my veins, and grim luck was on my
side in that moment. I rolled hard to my right across the sour pile of clothes
left behind by the dead police officer. I saw the butt of his service revolver
in the crepuscular glow of the fireflies and yanked it from its leather holster.
I looked up in time to see the hound recover and brace to
spring in my direction. The dog was huge, but his size and weird, green eyes
made him an easy target. I snapped the revolver up, looked down the length of
its barrel and fired round after round in his direction. If it can bleed, it
can die, I told myself.
The sound of the handgun echoed through the dense forest fog,
and the hound yowled in surprised fury more than in pain. I jumped to my feet
and threw the gun at him. The smell of eldritch brimstone filled the air.
I took two steps to my right in the darkness and fell over
the missing professor’s wooden cane. Earlier, I’d used this same cane to strike
the horrific stranger and loose his lantern full of fireflies. I could hear the
stranger somewhere in the foggy darkness, fighting to recapture his escaped,
scattered fireflies.
I came down hard in the damp leaves and fell atop my old
backpack. I felt for the zipper to the main compartment and ripped it open. The
pack was full of all sorts of ghost-hunting gear, but my hopes rested on one
item in particular.
A half-second later, the spectral hound was on me again. It
sank its monstrous teeth into the thick leather boot on my left foot and shook
me hard. I somehow held on to the pack, and my fingers closed on the mystic item
I wanted.
I pulled the glass bottle of holy water from the bag and
brought it down hard on the hound’s green eyes. It shattered like a wet bomb
and cut my hand badly. Pain shot up my arm, but the ghoulish dog let loose of
my boot as smoke issued from its wounded, ruined face. How many stitches would
I need later?
I jumped to my feet and looked wildly for the first available
weapon of opportunity. It was in that moment that the sound of hollow, eerie
laughter reached my ears. I spun to see the dreaded stranger, about 20 feet
away, his black stovepipe hat atop his head, adjusting his ancient lantern with
his claw-like hands, no doubt in an effort to send me to my doom.
(All rights reserved. This
story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are
products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely
coincidental.)
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