Drip. Drip. Drip.
He was wrong.
No one was there. The drip, drip, drip of water vanished, as if he had never heard it at all. His intruder was somehow a ghost.
Stride didn’t understand. He’d been so sure of his instincts, but the living room was hot, dark, and empty, and there had been no time for anyone to escape. At first, he assumed it was his imagination playing tricks on him. Then he knelt down and put his fingers on the floor, and they came away wet.
He glanced over his head. A leak from the unfinished attic?
No. The ceiling was dry.
He shut the bedroom door behind him as quietly as he could. When he turned on the living room lights, there they were. Footprints. Wet footprints, making a trail away from the bedroom door past the red leather furniture, beckoning him. He followed. The footprints led him to the dining room, glistening on the hardwood floor. Then to the kitchen. Then to the screened rear porch, where the air was damp and thick.
“This way.”
Stride heard someone’s voice, but it wasn’t a voice he recognized. Or did he? There was something familiar about it.
A voice from a long time ago.
“This way,” the man said again.
Stride went through the screen door and let it bang shut behind him. The door led into the small backyard that scraped along the slope of the sand dunes behind which, hidden from view like a vast beast, was Lake Superior. Nearly every day of his life, he went through that door, climbed the sandy trail, and hiked to the ribbon of beach where the waves lapped at his boots. He would stand there, soaking in the view of the huge blue lake, which constantly changed its moods like a beautiful woman. The skyline of Duluth clung to the steep hillside three miles away.
And yet that wasn’t where he was now.
He went through the door and found himself in a completely different place. Looking back, he saw that his house was gone.
Instead, he now stood on a cliff of black granite, sixty feet over a raging river. The fullness of the summer forest surrounded him. He knew this place well; it was called the Deeps, where Amity Creek stampeded along Seven Bridges Road like a wild mustang, swirling in whirlpools and sucking tree limbs into its current before spitting them out in the cold water of Lake Superior. From this cliff, you could take a running leap into the water and swim in the black pool below. He’d done it himself dozens of times as a teenager. He and his best friend, Steve Garske, would shout, jump, fly through the air, crash into the water, and fight the undertow back to the surface. Over and over.
But sometimes, when the rains were heavy, the Deeps caught a body and didn’t give it back.
Sometimes the flooded river held a body down and fed it to the lake.
Stride stared into the rapids, which boomed like deep rolls of thunder and erupted in silver waterfalls. He was right on the cliff’s edge, where the spray made the stone slippery.
“Don’t fall,” a voice said.
Stride turned around.
“Don’t fall. They’ll never find you.”
A man stood behind him. He was short, no more than five foot six, with a skinny build. He had thinning black hair and wide, staring eyes that looked like the mask of a raccoon. His skin was pale. His hair and clothes were soaking wet. He’d been diving into the swollen creek.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Stride heard the noise in his head again, somehow louder than the violence of the river below him. But it wasn’t water he heard. The man on the cliff had a bullet hole in the middle of his high forehead, a perfectly circular black-ringed wound that seeped a ribbon of blood down the man’s nose, around his pale lips, and onto his chin, where it dripped onto the stone like chamber music.
Blood. That was what he’d heard all along. Blood.
Stride’s right hand felt heavy. He lifted it and saw that a gun was in his hand, a wisp of smoke trailing from the barrel, a burnt smell in the air. He’d shot this man in the head. The wound was right there in his forehead, but the man still had his eyes open, still had a strange smile on his lips.
“You’re dead,” Stride told the man.
The smile on the man’s face widened and turned into a mocking, cruel laugh that went on and on.
“You have to be dead,” Stride insisted. “I shot you.”
